by Anna Elliott
He made no move to come any closer, but I still stayed within a few steps of the door and kept my gaze on him, watching the way he shifted his weight.
“Unless you actually were the one to shoot Lord Lynley, I want the same thing you do: to find Alice Gordon.” Holmes might eschew guesswork in detecting, but I was reasonably sure that my supposition this time was correct. “Is that why you sent the snakes to His Lordship? Because you were hoping to frighten him into telling you what he knows about Alice’s disappearance?”
The impassive mask of Kai-chen’s face seemed to crack, all of a sudden. “I have been at—what is your English saying?—at my wits’ end! Alice is gone. But no one will speak to me. No one will tell me anything.”
“Did Lord and Lady Lynley not approve of your relationship with Alice?”
“They did not. Although that is perhaps not so unusual.” Bitterness sharpened Kai-chen’s tone. “I do not believe you could find a single human being within the entire parish boundaries of Shellingford who would approve of a Chinese man courting an English girl.” He smiled without humor. “It is ironic. Had Alice taken up with an English farmer who beat her daily, none of her neighbors would have raised an eyebrow, much less dared to interfere. Yet we must meet in secret for fear of threats and attacks, merely because my eyes are shaped differently from theirs. Alice was afraid to even let Lady Lynley suspect our relationship, for fear that she would lose her position.”
“Was she happy in her job with Lady Lynley?”
Kai-chen’s chin jutted forward.
When I was at boarding school, one of my classmates had been the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to the United States. I remembered from meeting her parents that the motion was the equivalent of a shrug.
“It was a job,” Kai-chen said. “She did not enjoy being at the beck and call of Lady Lynley, who can be unreasonable as well as tyrannical. But she had found no other jobs available to her in this area.”
I was silent, deciding how best to phrase the next question. “I’m sorry to ask this, but would she have told you if she had found another job?”
“She would.” Kai-chen’s answer came instantly, without hesitation. “We love each other, Alice and I. You wonder whether fear of public censure led Alice to run away—to break things off with me. But you do not know her. She would never have done such a thing. We plan to be married, as soon as we have saved enough money between us. Planned.” A twist of pain darkened his face. “Something has happened to her. I know it.”
I studied his face. I didn’t think he was lying.
Although that didn’t necessarily signify. The aphorism about love being blind had been coined for a reason, and just because he believed Alice was brave enough to defy public convention by marrying him didn’t necessarily mean that she would have gone through with it.
On the other hand, the Lady Lynley’s of the world couldn’t and probably would never believe that I would be happy married to Jack and I’d never cared even a little.
“How did you and Alice meet?” I asked.
“Alice was concerned for her mistress. She wished to help her overcome her addiction. We began substituting tonics with a lower and lower portion of the laudanum, so that her system might be gradually purged from the drug.”
“Was Lord Lynley aware of what you were doing?”
Something hard flickered briefly at the back of Kai-chen’s eyes. Anger? Contempt? It was gone too quickly for me to be sure. “I do not think that Lord Lynley was aware of very much beyond the running of his estate, the drainage of his ditches—and perhaps the balance of his bank accounts. Alice was trying to help her mistress to become free of the drug. But now—” His voice cracked, and his hands clenched on the edge of the table.
“But now Alice has gone missing,” I finished for him. “And Lord Lynley is dead.”
“I did not kill him!” Kai-chen burst out. “Why would I have killed him, when I still know nothing of where Alice is or what may have happened to her?”
“You think that Lord Lynley hurt her—or frightened her into running away?”
“I do not know.” Kai-chen’s voice trembled briefly. “I was at the warehouse last night. Since Lord Lynley would not speak to me, I had hoped to go through the papers there, searching for something—anything—that might give a hint of what had happened to Alice. But then I smelled smoke, and when I let myself in through the rear entrance, I found the place on fire. The rest you know.”
I watched his face. “So you were never in the office? You didn’t see Lord Lynley’s body?”
“Until you spoke to me outside, I had no idea that His Lordship was inside the warehouse, much less dead.” Kai-chen swallowed, frowning. “You still have not told me who you are or what you are doing in Shellingford. You surely are not with the police?”
“Not officially. But I did come here to investigate Alice’s disappearance.”
Kai-chen’s gaze rested on me, and then his lips quirked up in a momentary twist of a smile. “You still do not trust me.”
“Probably about as much as you trust me. For example, you haven’t yet mentioned that you suspected Lord Lynley of smuggling opium in on his ships. Or that right now, your employer Mr. Ming is currently listening to every word of our conversation from the other side of that doorway.” I gestured to the beaded curtain.
36. TEA WITH MR. MING
LUCY
Kai-chen drew back, his expression shocked.
“The beads were swaying when we came in—which could have just been from you coming through. But they’ve clicked together twice so far while we were talking.”
Kai-chen started to shake his head. “I do not—”
“Calm yourself, Kai-chen.” The hanging curtain of beads parted, and a man’s slender figure stepped through.
Mr. Ming was small, his back bowed, his narrow shoulders bent with age. His hair was gray and pulled into a long braid that hung down his back. Unlike Kai-chen, he wore wide-legged black silk trousers and a black brocade tunic, embroidered with what looked like gold thread.
“I am Ming Donghai.” His voice was soft, cultured, with an oddly dry quality that somehow made me think of ancient parchment, so fragile that it would crumble at the slightest touch. He faced me, bowing slightly. “I apologize for not making my presence known from the beginning.”
As he spoke, he stepped further into the light filtering through the windows and raised his head.
The glimpse I’d already had of his face had led me to brace myself, but I still had to swallow a sharply indrawn breath.
His face was twisted by thick, ropy scars that obscured nearly the whole of one cheek, making his left eye droop and turning the corner of his lip down. From the way he held his left arm bent, pulled protectively in to his body, I would guess that it was disfigured, possibly even crippled.
“I have discovered that in general it is more prudent to stay out of sight and allow Kai-chen to do the speaking for me.” Mr. Ming’s voice was level, but his black eyes were hard. “I find it preferable to women and children screaming about monsters and running away.”
“Shakespeare said that one may smile, and smile and be a villain. But then he also made Richard II as monstrous in appearance as possible.” I shrugged. “In my experience, that’s roughly accurate. Beautiful or ugly, most people have about a fifty percent chance of turning out to be evil.”
Beneath the scars, something about Mr. Ming’s steady, impassive expression suggested that very little could shock or surprise him. But at that, his brows hitched up a degree.
“Remarkable,” he murmured.
He turned to Kai-chen. “You have been remiss in not offering our guest any refreshment. Bring tea, please.”
Kai-chen bowed, answering in a flood of rising and falling Chinese before hurrying to the back of the shop.
Mr. Ming’s brocaded robes caught the light as he stepped forward. He wore rope-soled sandals, and yet his footsteps made almost no noise at all. He studied me a momen
t, his head tilted a little to the side.
“You are not English, I believe?”
“My father is English, my mother is Italian, and I was brought up in America. I am whatever that makes me.”
“Ah, America.” With an almost mercurial change of expression, Mr. Ming’s scarred face brightened, the undamaged side of his mouth lifting in a sudden, beaming smile. “I have never been to that country, but I like what I have heard of it very much. A land of opportunity, where all may strive with equal chance for a better life. Is this not so? ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”
“Well, theoretically.” You could probably find every bit as much wretchedness, poverty, prejudice and general misery in New York City as you could in London.
Mr. Ming sighed. “Ah yes. The reality so often fails to live up to the ideal. Still, ideals are a fine thing to have. Despite everything, I hold to that belief.”
He moved forward, folding his legs under him and seating himself opposite me at the low table with the flexible ease of a much younger man.
He stretched out his good hand in invitation, his face splitting in another wide smile. “Please. Be seated.”
I hesitated, then took the cushion opposite his, curling my legs under me.
“You have questions you wish to ask?” Mr. Ming asked.
“I do. If you don’t mind.”
“Certainly, certainly!” Mr. Ming waved his good hand in an expansive gesture, still beaming. He looked like a scarred, older version of a laughing buddha statue I had once seen. “So long as you do not expect me to answer them if I do not choose to do so.”
Right. I studied the man in front of me, considering my first question.
“You are in the business of curing people of their addiction to laudanum and other opiates?”
Kai-chen reappeared, carrying a bamboo tea tray which he set down on the table in front of us. The teapot and cups were porcelain, and like everything else in the shop, exquisitely made. The teapot had been painted with the design of a red and gold dragon, the handle made to look like the swirl of the dragon’s tail. The dragon’s eyes—inlaid gleaming enamel—peered at me from the lid of the pot.
“Ah. In order to fully answer that, one must go back many years in time,” Mr. Ming said. “You are perhaps familiar with the conflicts known as … I believe you may call them the China Wars? Or possibly the Opium Wars?”
“Only slightly.” I did remember them being more or less a textbook illustration of the maxim that might makes right.
Mr. Ming picked up the teapot and poured a thin stream of pale-amber-colored tea into my cup. “It was the Portuguese who first entered the business of bringing Opium from India into China, to sell. In 1729 so many of the populace were addicted that it became a tremendous drain, a cancer on our society. The emperor outlawed both the sale and the smoking of opium, but it did not end there.”
Mr. Ming now spoke with a dry, emotionless precision that would have rivaled Holmes’s capacity for sterile narration.
“You must understand that the British trade relationship with China was unequal in the extreme. Our emperors—the Quing dynasty—believed that our country provided everything that we needed; we had no need to import goods from the British. What use have we for British woolens, when we create the finest silks? And yet the English were obsessed with our tea. They could not import it fast enough or in enough quantities to satisfy the demand. So the British were importing more and more of our goods—and because they could not trade for them, they were forced to pay in silver. Then at last, someone in Britain had the ingenious idea to use opium in order to open the Chinese market and allow the balance of trade to tip in their favor. Because, of course, the opium supply comes from an English colony—that is to say, India.” Mr. Ming paused to take a sip of his tea. “The English merchants and traders who came to China even went so far as to offer free samples, in an effort to create as many addicts as possible, and thus generate a demand for their filthy trade.”
The full facts were even worse than I remembered.
Reading my expression, Mr. Ming gave me another of his sudden wide smiles. “Yes. It is terrible, as so much of history is. But do not grieve yourself. On the other side of suffering comes wisdom, which is the cause of true and lasting joy.” He stopped to pour more tea, first into my cup then into his own. “As I was saying, we have an expression in my country. Kǒu mì fù jiàn, which means ‘mouth of honey, heart of daggers.’ That describes the British who came to our shores. My own father became an addict. He would not eat, he would not rise to see to his business or the education of his sons. He was fit for nothing but to sit in the sun and smoke his opium pipe. He died a skeleton of a man. Our family estates were lost. I was impressed into the army. We Chinese wished to stop the flow of this poisoned drug into our country. Britain’s merchants wished the trade to continue. There was, as I say, a great deal of money to be made. So Britain and her allies eventually went to war—twice—to force the drug upon us, to force us to sign treaties that would allow their trade to go on. That is how I came by the burns, the scars of which you see.” He gestured to the disfigured side of his face.
I watched his expression as he spoke. I would have expected anger or grief—or some sign that he was stoically expressing either outrage or pain.
But Mr. Ming was smiling as though he were describing a particularly pleasant birthday memory from childhood, involving ice cream and frosted cakes.
He tilted his head on one side. “You doubt that I can speak of it so easily?”
He was also nearly as adept as Holmes at deducing people’s thoughts from their expressions.
I chose my words carefully. “I think that if I were you, it would take a very great deal of joyful wisdom to make up for a story like that.”
“Ah, you lo-fan—you Americans.” Mr. Ming made a scolding gesture with one finger, like a benevolent grandfather chastising a wayward child. “So bound by the chains of the quantifiable—weights and measures and inches. So unwilling to be ruled by anything other than your own reason and logic.”
If I were actually ruled by my own reason and logic, I wouldn’t be here on my own, talking to a man I suspected of murder.
I gave Mr. Ming a polite smile. “Perhaps. But I do know enough Chinese to know that lo-fan doesn’t mean ‘Americans.’ It’s an insult—roughly the equivalent of ‘barbarians.’”
Mr. Ming tipped back his head and laughed with what sounded like genuine amusement. “We have another saying—a story, rather. A great philosopher lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves. While they were building the fire, this teacher heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said, ‘Observe that large stone over there. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?’ One of the monks replied, ‘Everything is an objectification of mind; therefore, the stone also is inside my mind.’ ‘Your head must feel very heavy,’ observed the teacher, ‘if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind.’”
I studied him, considering my next question.
I had in the course of my investigations with Holmes met people of all types and from all walks of life, from street prostitutes to royalty, and almost everything in between. I couldn’t, though, recall ever having so little an idea of what to make of someone as I had with Mr. Ming.
“And now that you have begun a crusade of curing opium addiction in others, you are being targeted for intimidation by those who promote its import?” I finally asked.
Mr. Ming’s smile didn’t falter, but his gaze registered surprise.
“At least three panes of glass in the windows in this shop have been broken and replaced in the last three months,” I said. “You can tell by the glazing—it’s a lighter color than the older panes.”
Mr. Ming brought his hands together and gave a bow, inclining just his head. “Remarkable!
Yes, truly remarkable.” His good eye crinkled at the edge. “You are very observant. What you say is true. In addition to this tea house, I run a clinic not far from here, where I attempt to help those who have become addict. Without wishing to sound … what is the word? Ah, yes, grandiose. Without wishing to sound grandiose, it is my calling: to fight with my utmost devotion and dedication to see that no more lives are ruined, as so many of my countrymen’s lives were taken by the drug. However, all good deeds come with a cost. As the British found, the business of opium trade is an immensely profitable one. Anyone who threatens to diminish those profits inevitably becomes a target—whether one is an entire nation or a single, poor individual.”
“But you don’t know who is responsible for harassing you?”
Mr. Ming lifted his teacup in his good hand, his expression serene. “We do not.”
I waited, but he said nothing more.
I looked from Kai-chen to Mr. Ming. “It is possible, isn’t it, that Alice Gordon might have been hurt or kidnapped as another effort at intimidation?”
I saw Kai-chen’s hands clench at his sides, but he remained silent.
Mr. Ming studied me before speaking almost gently. “You are intelligent, as well as observant. It is possible. But if the girl Alice had been harmed—or even kidnapped—as a means of intimidation, then surely we would have received some message to that effect. And no message has come.”
I glanced at Kai-chen, but though his hands were still balled in fists, his shoulders slumped with defeat. “Mr. Ming is right. No such message has come.”
Mr. Ming studied me again. “You have another question you wish to ask, I think.”
If he gave me a straight answer, it would be a first for this conversation, but I still said, “Did you know or suspect that Lord Lynley was using your shared importing business to bring opium into this country?”
Mr. Ming took a long moment before speaking. Then at last he gave me another serene smile. “When I was a boy, I learned an ancient story about a silkworm and a spider, both of whom spun silk. One day the spider said to the silkworm, ‘I admit that your silk is of a superior quality to that of mine. Yet you use that same silk to spin yourself a beautiful cocoon, then live inside it, falsely believing yourself to be a king. In your little cocoon you wait until the women who weave silk put you in boiling hot water to kill you, and then unwind the threads of your silk cocoon, strand by strand. What a shame, though you have the ability to create such beauty, then die because of it. Is this not stupid?’ Then the silkworm, considering what the spider had said, answered, ‘We spin silk so that people can weave beautiful brocades which endure for years to come. Look at you spiders; all your efforts at weaving are to create a trap allowing you to catch and eat flies. And for their deaths, you have no regrets.’”
