My Beautiful Enemy

by Thomas, Sherry

  He pulled a few weeds from the edge of the tombstone. “When did you realize that I wasn’t a Persian gem dealer?”

  She exhaled. “I didn’t know you weren’t Persian until I met you at Waterloo station. As for when I learned you weren’t a gem dealer—I found the map hidden in your saddlebag the evening before you left. “

  He looked up sharply. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  She shrugged and looked away, at the lovely panoramic view that the dead in this most considerately situated resting place would never again enjoy. “Why say anything? I chose to not turn you in as a spy.”

  He rose slowly to his feet. “The morning we were supposed to leave, I came across Ch’ing soldiers looking for you, for a girl who might be dressed as a man. They were seeking one of their own.”

  She stared at him: He had also never said anything. “Of course they were seeking one of their own. My stepfather was the governor of Ili.”

  “I thought you were an agent of the Ch’ing. I thought I could not possibly bring you back to India with me, not when I had the safety of colleagues to consider. Not when we were all acting on behalf of the British Raj.”

  You can’t come with me because of what I am. And what you are. It simply cannot be. Nothing can come of this.

  Now she finally understood what he had meant. “You were mistaken. I was not an agent for the state. I never have been. I have only ever acted at my stepfather’s behest, and he was—and is—hardly in favor at court.”

  They fell silent. In the games that empires played, no one counted losses such as theirs.

  “But you said you came back for me,” she heard herself speak. “Did our incompatible allegiances no longer matter then?”

  He walked a few steps to a smooth-barked tree in full bloom and set his hand against the trunk. “I thought if I could find you again, we could run away to someplace like Hawaii, too far for the other Ch’ing agents to come after you.”

  Hawaii, where the air was perfumed. Where his brother had stood weeping on the dock, as the steamer from Shanghai at last pulled into port. “And you? The British would have just let you go?”

  A breeze fluttered. Tiny pink blossoms fell upon his shoulders. “I’m a man of property. Gentlemen are not expected to spy for the country, in any case.”

  She bit the inside of her lip. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Why do you want me to think that there could be a future for us?

  He looked at her. She gazed back and saw neither the fearless young Persian nor the wary, wounded Englishman, but simply a man who had never forgotten her, not for a moment.

  They both turned at the same time—someone was coming. He walked to the edge of the cemetery.

  “Leighton, there you are,” came Miss Chase’s voice. “Ponds thought you might be here. Trust a good butler to know everything.”

  “Annabel,” he said, almost curtly, “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”

  “Mother and I were quite ready to get out of London after the ball—I hope you don’t mind our being a day early.” Miss Chase was all smiles. “How do you do, Miss Blade? Mr. Marland Atwood told my aunt that he had invited you, and she remained behind in London specifically so she could be sure to bring you along—but here you are.”

  Catherine smiled back. “Actually I came in search of the final resting place of a friend of mine. As it turned out, he was a close friend of the Atwood family and his ashes are scattered here. Captain Atwood was kind enough to show me the exact spot.”

  “Oh, what a nice coincidence. Now that you are here, do please stay for a few days.”

  Strangely enough, there seemed nothing insincere about her desire for Catherine to remain.

  “It is beautiful here,” she replied. “But I didn’t pack anything for a stay.”

  “That will present no difficulties at all—I packed too many things. You can wear my dresses—my maid will see to it.”

  The conversation continued in that vein for a while, with Miss Chase pressing Catherine to remain and Catherine cautiously demurring, until Catherine said, “Since you insist, Miss Chase, I will, as I’m already here.”

  And she didn’t need Miss Chase’s dresses; Leighton had a supply of his mother’s clothes that suited Catherine just fine.

  At her acceptance, Miss Chase’s smile faltered briefly, before she began to speak effusively of all the fun games they could play after dinner.

  They started for the house, Miss Chase with her hand on Leighton’s arm, Catherine walking a few steps to the side. At some point, they needed to climb over a low wall. He helped Miss Chase over. When he came back to lend a hand to Catherine, he said, his voice barely audible, “She and her mother have been told.”

  Rather than sit for hours at the same table with Miss Chase and Mrs. Chase, Catherine pleaded a headache and asked for a tray to be sent up to her room. And then, with everyone else at dinner, she slipped out to the cottage, where she could be sure of remaining undisturbed, to administer to herself the antidote that would counter the poison from Lin’s palm.

  The antidote went down like a swallow of flames. Within a half hour she felt the thick, cold knot at her side warming, the poison becoming neutralized. She settled into a long set of breathing exercises, nudging matters along, encouraging the healing of any chi paths that had been blocked.

  When she opened her eyes, Leighton stood by the mantel, watching her.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  He stoked the fire that she had built to make sure that the parlor of the cottage remained warm. “Twenty minutes or so.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight. I went to check on you in your room, since I thought this might be what you were doing this evening. And when I saw that you weren’t there, it followed you had to be here.”

  She smiled at him. He almost smiled back, but then his gaze slipped lower and turned taut. She realized that she had on only her chemise, her stockings, and her petticoats, with the petticoats pushed up almost to midthigh by her cross-legged pose—a rather scandalous state of dishabille.

  Not that he hadn’t seen her in less, but it had been many years.

  Too long.

  He was still in his dinner attire. And if she were to remove that perfectly fitted jacket—and the waistcoat and the snow-white shirt underneath—would she see the same wide, strong shoulders she remembered so well? He had been beautifully sinewed from all those months on horseback, the corded arms, the hard abdomen, the—

  “Would you like me to step into the next room so you can dress or would you prefer a blanket?” he asked, his voice just perceptibly strained.

  “The blanket, for now.” She didn’t want him to go anywhere.

  He spread open a blanket that he must have found elsewhere in the cottage and draped it around her, carefully—or so it felt—not touching her as he did so. “I brought you some food, since you didn’t seem to have taken anything from the plate that was sent up to your room.”

  She had been in too much of a hurry to come to the cottage. “Thank you for always remembering my stomach.”

  This time he did smile slightly. “My pleasure.”

  He moved about as she ate, fetching water from the small kitchen, putting a kettle in the grate, picking up her clothes from where she had tossed them rather carelessly. She was reminded of the first morning she’d awakened in their cave; he’d also kept himself busy for a good long time while she devoured the food he’d brought. Then she simply thought that he was the kind who couldn’t sit still as long as there remained any chores to be done; now she understood that it was his way of keeping nerves at bay.

  When she was finished with her supper and had accepted a cup of tea, he sat down at the table and brought out a stack of paper from his pocket, sheets upon sheets of rubbings. She recognized them as those of the marks on the edges of the jade tablets.

  She flashed him a look of mock severity. “And here I thought you came only to
see me.”

  “I came only to see you,” he answered quietly. “But I thought you might like to start on deciphering the clues from the jade tablets. If the treasure still exists, then the sooner you learn of its location, the better.”

  Considerate as ever, her lover. “Thank you, I would like that. Do you have a pair of scissors?”

  He found a pair. She cut the rubbings and assembled them. The physical cipher was a simple one: It was as if someone had taken a vertical line of characters, sliced each line in three from top to bottom, and etched each third onto the edges of one jade tablet.

  “What do they say?” he asked, looking impressed.

  “They are gibberish. Or rather, individually they are perfectly legitimate Chinese characters, but together they make no sense at all.”

  He glanced at her. “Why are you not more disappointed?”

  Perceptive as ever, her lover. “The tablet in my stepfather’s hand is the middle panel of the three. With the strokes and shapes visible on the edges of that tablet, one can reasonably guess at the full characters, provided one has some familiarity with classical calligraphy.”

  “As you do.”

  She cleared her throat, a little flustered at being thought of as knowledgeable in that particular arena. “I am embarrassingly uncultured, compared to my mother. But she was a wonderful calligrapher, so just by growing up in her household, some of it rubbed off on me.”

  “I am still shocked that you are not actually illiterate,” he said dryly.

  She chortled. He was as capable of tickling her mirth as ever, her lover.

  He watched her, his features softening with the hint of a smile. “If you already know what characters are likely to be seen on the edges of the jade tablets, when all three are put together, why did you still make the trip?”

  “Because we couldn’t make sense of them. And my stepfather thought that perhaps, if we had all three of them together, we could glean something more.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Probably not. But he wants them so I came here to find them.”

  “I’m glad he wants them,” said Leighton, his eyes on the strips of characters.

  Because that had brought them back together. And even if she had never met Mrs. Reynolds and Mrs. Chase in Bombay, in her search she would still have come across Mrs. Delany’s name, and would have still been led to him.

  Fate, it seemed, was determined that they not miss each other this time.

  She was almost about to reach out and touch his hair when he asked, “Can you read the characters aloud for me?”

  Sighing inwardly, she said. “Of course.”

  His brow furrowed as he listened to her. “I wonder if this might be a foreign language being rendered phonetically in Chinese.”

  The possibility had never occurred to her. Like everything else in China, the practice of Buddhism was in a state of decline and decay. Many monks joined temples not because they were men of faith but because they could not succeed at any other endeavor. Their spiritual practice consisted of reciting the sutras by rote and burning a great deal of incense—precious little piety and nothing at all of scholarship.

  But it hadn’t always been like that. During the Tang Dynasty, when the jade tablets had been made, the monks had been both devoted and erudite. And there had been great enlightened masters from central Asia, Persia, and India who had made the arduous journey into China to help translate the Buddhist canon into Chinese.

  If one took the historical context into consideration, then Leighton’s suggestion made a great deal sense. Of course some sort of code must have been used; and of course the monks would have wanted that code to be understood only by other learned monks.

  She gripped the edge of the table, excited for the first time about the possibility of the treasure. “You mean, something like Sanskrit?”

  “I was thinking of Pali, which is the language of many of the earliest Buddhist texts that still exist today.”

  She had never heard of the language. “And what I read sounded like Pali?”

  “Alas, not quite.”

  She looked at the characters on the table before her, sorted into four lines, each representing one side of the combined tablets. She rearranged the order of the lines and read them out again. He jotted down the sounds on a piece of paper. “Does Chinese have no consonant clusters?”

  “Like the ‘cl’ at the beginning of ‘clusters’? No. We also do not have consonant sounds at the end of a syllable, unless they are those of ‘n’ or ‘ng.’”

  “Then it is ill suited to phonetically representing an alphabetic language,” he said.

  “But it is absolutely tremendous for poetry. English poems, no matter how well metered and rhymed, always look—and sound—messy when you are accustomed to the elegance of Chinese poetry.”

  He smiled. “Thus speaks the abominably uncultured brute.”

  She smiled back at him. “That’s right. And if you don’t agree with me, you can argue with my fist.”

  Something warm and wonderful bloomed in her heart. For a moment, it was as if no time had passed at all, and nothing stood between them.

  He took a strand of hair that had fallen loose from her chignon between his fingers. The gesture shocked her, not because his self-control seemed to have snapped, but the exact opposite—it felt like a deliberate choice on his part.

  He let go of her hair. “I have cabled Mrs. Reynolds to let her know that you are already here. As soon as she arrives tomorrow, I intend to speak to Miss Chase about ending our engagement—Mrs. Chase is useless, but I hope that Mrs. Reynolds would be a source of comfort to her niece.”

  For a long second, she was capable of neither thought nor movement. Then her hand was on his shoulder, her other hand curved around his cheek. But he stopped her when she would have kissed him.

  “Let’s wait a day,” he said, his eyes again that impossible clarity she remembered so well. “I am still engaged. And I would like to come to you only when I am a free man.”

  She smoothed his brow, her hand shaking only a little. Sometimes hopeless hopes did come true. He had returned to her, just as she had dreamed in her bleakest hours. “Yes, I can wait.”

  What was a few more hours after all these years?

  He took her hand in his and kissed her on her forehead. “I will look after you, for as long as we both live. And there will never be anyone else but you.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Yuan-jiang

  Leighton woke up early, went down to the library, and pulled a half dozen dictionaries and treatises of the Pali language from the shelves. The presence of the jade tablet in his life had instilled in him a deep interest in the history and the propagation of the teachings of the Buddha. And during his years in India, he had learned both Sanskrit and Pali to better educate himself on the subject.

  With the dictionaries open before him, he kept trying to pronounce the sequence of sounds that he’d recorded the night before in a more fluid manner, all the while wondering whether the language the Chinese characters were approximating was actually Sanskrit or Parsi.

  A knock came on the door. Ponds, his butler, entered with a cup of tea and the early post. Leighton looked through the letters absently, until his attention was caught by one from Professor Wade of Cambridge University. He had sent the rubbings he had made of the spirit plaques to the sinologist for translation. The professor had returned the rubbings, along with his detailed annotations.

  The first three plaques each had a heading—Compassionate Mother, Beneficent Master, Noble Friend—followed by a name. The fourth plaque, the one he had found in her trunk, read only, The Nameless Beloved.

  He traced his fingers over the beautiful pictograms that he could not yet read but whose shapes would now forever be imprinted on his mind. The Nameless Beloved.

  It was only as an afterthought that he went on to the next sheet, the annotation for the fifth spirit plaque, the one he couldn’t quite guess whom for.
/>   Immediately he reeled. Cherished Daughter, it read.

  Cherished Daughter Bai Yuan-jiang. Bai, wrote Professor Wade, is the family name. Yuan-jiang together means “far territory,” most likely referencing Sinkiang, also known as Chinese Turkestan.

  The words shook before his eyes. Or were those his hands shaking?

  A child. He’d had a child. A child he had never seen and would never meet.

  He was the father of a girl who had drawn her last breath before he’d even learned of her existence.

  The mother of his child, still in her nightgown, was already up, a cup of hot cocoa in her hand. She smiled at him. “You sounded like a herd of water buffalo coming down the passage.”

  Her smile disappeared the moment she perceived his distress. “What’s the matter?” she asked as he shut the door.

  He almost couldn’t speak for his grief—and hers. How long had she carried this loss? How many years had she mourned, with no one to share her sorrow? “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me that we had a child?”

  The cup of hot cocoa clattered on its saucer. Slowly she set it aside, her expression a careful blankness. “How did you know?”

  “The words on your spirit plaques. I had them translated. The translations came this morning.”

  She was silent for several seconds. Then she shrugged. “What would have been the point of saying anything? She is no more.”

  He gripped the door handle behind him. “I know she is no more. But she was my child and I want to know everything about her.”

  Her face seemed to have turned to stone. “She lived for all of two weeks. There is hardly anything to tell.”

  Two weeks. So little time. His throat constricted. “Was she happy?”

  A tear rolled down her exquisite face, shattering her stoic façade. “Yes, she was a happy baby. Very beautiful.” Her voice caught and she swallowed. “She nursed well and slept well and loved the sound of the stone mill in the courtyard, grinding fresh flour for Chinese New Year.”

  A premonition chilled him. She had described a healthy, vigorous child. One who’d had no reason to perish at two weeks of age. “How did she die?”