My Beautiful Enemy

by Thomas, Sherry

  You are a fool, too, she had told him.

  Yes, I know.

  He didn’t know. He didn’t know at all.

  “Sir?”

  He turned. It was the serving girl she had taken to “bed.”

  “Your friend asked that this be returned to you, sir.”

  This was the package of tea, as evidenced by the Parsi newspaper from four months ago.

  “Thank you,” he managed to say. “How much do I owe for your . . . hospitality?”

  “Your friend has already paid very handsomely for the wine and the sweets.”

  Of course she would have, the beautiful bastard.

  But something felt different about the tea package. He made sure he was alone before he peeked inside. The velvet pouch. And it did not feel lighter in his hand, but slightly heavier than he remembered.

  Nestled among the uncut gems he had brought, a round bead of green jade, from the tassel of her sword. And next to it, several dried flowers—snow chrysanthemum from the Kunlun Mountains, grown at an altitude of ten thousand feet above sea level.

  She had not robbed him after all.

  Except of his heart.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Lady

  London

  1891

  Mr. Lochby, the private investigator, had excellent news. He had easily found information on Master Gordon, who, he informed Catherine, had indeed been a gentleman, a member of an old landowning family of Devonshire—the cadet branch, but all the same, very, very respectable stock.

  Young Herbert Gordon had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge—Trinity College, to be exact. After that, he had lived the life of a man about town. He displayed an interest in the Far East, since his father had spent some time there, but it was the interest of a dilettante, nothing terribly serious. Most of his time was spent doing what pleased himself.

  And then, in October of 1873, he left England abruptly, never to return except upon his death.

  Some of this Catherine knew, some she had guessed, but still, there was so much more she did not know. As a child, she had defined the adults in her life by their roles and never sought to learn about them as individuals until it was too late: She had no knowledge of her mother’s upbringing in a scholarly household, just as little of her amah’s girlhood under the eaves of the legendary Abode of the Shadowless Goddesses, and only slightly more of Master Gordon’s youth, for all her eagerness to hear of everything there was to know about the outside world.

  Before she left England, she would rectify her ignorance about Master Gordon. But for now, despite her hunger for every last detail of his life, she must remember her purpose: She needed to find out what happened to the jade tablet that had been in his possession.

  “This is investigative work of very fine caliber, Mr. Lochby,” she said.

  Mr. Lochby preened a little, stroking his mustache. “My pleasure to provide the services I have promised.”

  “Would you mind telling me if you were able to locate any of his surviving family members?”

  “Unfortunately, no. He did have a sister elder to him, but she passed away two years ago.”

  This was not what Catherine wanted to hear. “Did his will name any particularly close friends?”

  “Mr. Gordon never made a will.”

  “What?” Her exclamation hung in the air, a half octave too loud.

  “I inquired at the Principal Probate Registry and was told that there is none on record,” said Mr. Lochby.

  “I see.” She did her best to keep the dismay out of her voice. In an almost casual tone, she asked, “Out of curiosity, to whom does a man’s possession go when he leaves no will?”

  “I am no solicitor, but I would say his closest of kin, which in this case would be his sister.”

  “Who is also dead.”

  “True, but I do have the address of Mr. Cromwell, the Gordons’ solicitor, if you should care to speak to him about Mr. Gordon’s and Miss Gordon’s estates.”

  Catherine’s heart leaped, all her earlier distress gone. The solicitor would have far more information to offer her. But more important, he must have known Master Gordon in the old days—the first such person she would come across in all her years.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, again trying to keep her voice even. “I would very much like to speak to the solicitor.”

  She left Mr. Lochby’s office with Mr. Cromwell’s address in hand. The latter’s office was not very far away. She would have walked to conserve her limited funds, but rain came down quite insistently, and she had learned from bitter experience that even one as nimble as she could not keep the hem of her dress completely safe from all the splashes caused by horses, carriage wheels, and other pedestrians.

  She had not seen a clear sky since she’d disembarked in Southampton. Rain, always rain, pausing only to let a round of fog roll in and out, before coming down again, a state of permanent sogginess. Such weather was common enough in the south of China—reams of poetry celebrated the beauty of spring rain—but for a city as northerly as the uppermost reaches of Manchuria, it felt all wrong.

  And now, because of the rain, her moldy-smelling hansom cab was stuck in a traffic logjam. She stared out of the water-blurred window, imagining this Mr. Cromwell, hoping he would have something to tell her about Master Gordon beyond what the latter’s signature looked like.

  Her heart seized: A stylish couple came down the sidewalk, the woman in a violet mantle and the man in a black cloak with upturned collars. But they turned out to be strangers Catherine had never seen before, not Leighton Atwood and his fiancée.

  Catherine had been good. She had not gone back to his house or tried in any other way to insinuate herself into his presence. Instead she had been busy looking for a serviceable flat at a respectable address that catered to single women—and then busy fitting out the flat so that it would be presentable when Mrs. Reynolds came to call.

  But what she really wanted was for him to see her place.

  For years she’d assumed that he’d left her because all his promises had been lies. Now she wondered whether his decision hadn’t been in part prompted by his belief that it would be impossible for a nomad girl to fit into the life of an English man of property. But there were entire swaths of her life that he could not have remotely guessed at, the long years confined behind high walls, the sea of etiquette through which she swam daily, the elaborate pretense she was capable of putting on, to appear the most docile and ladylike of creatures.

  She would have had not a bit of trouble negotiating the relatively uncomplicated English rules of politesse.

  And she wanted him to understand this and regret his choice.

  She sighed. Why did she persist in assuming that their unexpected reunion was a matter of earth-shattering significance to him, simply because it was the case for her? He had left her years ago. Without a backward glance. Her reappearance was an inconvenience, probably a minor irritant—nothing else.

  Rain fell and fell. The hansom cab barely moved. With another sigh, Catherine got out, paid the cabbie, and sloshed in the direction of the sidewalk.

  Mr. Cromwell was a small man with almost entirely white hair and a warm twinkle to his eyes—Catherine liked him instantly. Once she explained who she was and her purpose for visiting him, he tasked his secretary to hang her coat near the fire, and welcomed her into his dark-paneled, thickly carpeted office.

  “Miserable weather, is it not?” he asked cheerfully.

  “Indeed it is. I am beginning to believe that it never stops raining in England.”

  It was Master Gordon who had first told her that whereas Chinese chitchat often led with mealtimes, English small talk tended to revolve around precipitation.

  “Ah, but you must have greater faith, Miss Blade,” the solicitor admonished her gently. “The sky will eventually clear. And our summers are all the more glorious for how much we must yearn for them.”

  Catherine smiled a little. “I see you are a philosopher a
s well, sir.”

  This quite pleased Mr. Cromwell. “Oh, I imagine any old lawyer must have done a fair bit of pondering upon the nature of life and humanity. But do let us proceed now to the purpose of your visit. You said you would like to know more about Mr. Herbert Gordon.”

  “He was a beloved friend and I was looking forward to reading his will. Not because I expected there to be anything for me but because I hoped the will would tell me the names of those he held dear, people I could call on to reminisce about him.”

  Mr. Cromwell nodded sympathetically. “And you found that he left no will.”

  “Is that not a bit rare?”

  “Not as rare as you’d think, given how easy it is to make and execute wills in this country. For a relatively young man like Mr. Gordon, with no dependents, no complicated holdings, and no expectations that he would come into a great fortune, not having a will might be more common.”

  “So whatever belongings of his would simply have gone to his sister, his closest of kin.”

  “Not very much of what belonged to him came back from China: a trunk of books and letters and a trunk of clothing.”

  “And his remains, of course.”

  “His ashes have been scattered, according to the late Miss Gordon.”

  “He was cremated?” She had seen his body delivered to the British Legation, but she herself had left Peking the following day, for the long journey to Chinese Turkestan. “But cremations are not performed in China.”

  “Except by Buddhist monks,” said Mr. Cromwell. “The legation staff took his remains to a Buddhist temple, from what I understand.”

  This was most unexpected. But she was only surprised, not dismayed. There was something dramatic and final about cremations—the soul had already departed, no need for the body to remain behind. “You wouldn’t happen to know where his ashes were scattered, would you, Mr. Cromwell?”

  “I’m afraid I do not. Miss Jane Gordon mentioned it in passing and I did not inquire in detail.”

  And there went Catherine’s nascent hope of perhaps taking a handful of that soil to keep as a memento.

  She had to think for a moment before she could remember where they were before the conversation veered off to cremations: Master Gordon’s belongings, which she had packed in a daze the morning after he died, trying desperately to hold herself together.

  “You mentioned a trunk of books and letters and a trunk of clothes, sir. But surely those could not be the entirety of his worldly possessions.”

  “He did have a house in London. But about two years after he left England, I received instructions from him to transfer the house and its contents into the possession of one Mrs. Robert Delany.”

  At last, the name of someone Master Gordon had treasured and esteemed above all others. Catherine forced herself to remain still, to not leap up from her chair in sheer excitement. “Would you happen to know how Master Gordon knew this Mrs. Delany and where I can find her?”

  Mr. Cromwell shook his head. “I’m afraid all I can tell you is that she is an Englishwoman who married an American and lives in San Francisco.”

  San Francisco was an ocean and a continent away. But with steamers and trains, an ocean and a continent could be crossed in a matter of weeks. In no time at all, she could be sitting in Mrs. Delany’s sitting room, listening to the latter tell her all about Master Gordon.

  Except Master Gordon had left England in 1873, which meant the gift of his house and its contents had been made in 1875. But Catherine had seen the jade tablet in his possession as late as 1877, so it had not gone to Mrs. Delany with everything else.

  At least not then.

  And Catherine, as much as she wanted to, could not simply jump on the next steamer out of Southampton, not until she could reasonably claim to have exhausted any and all leads in England.

  But she could write Mrs. Delany. Or, if she allowed herself to be a little reckless with her budget, she could even cable Mrs. Delany, in hope of a faster response.

  “Do you have Mrs. Delany’s address, Mr. Cromwell?”

  Mr. Cromwell wrote Mrs. Delany’s address on a crisp sheet of stationery and handed it to Catherine. “I did not know Mr. Gordon very well outside of my capacity as his solicitor—and I regret it. May I tell you something about him?”

  “Of course,” said Catherine, who was just about to inquire whether Mr. Cromwell had any anecdotes to relate. “Please.”

  “Twenty years ago, I lost my daughter Julia to illness.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  “As am I to this day, but life goes on,” said Mr. Cromwell quietly, with neither awkwardness nor feigned nonchalance. “We were all devastated. But Julia’s twin sister, Portia, then eight years old, was absolutely inconsolable.

  “One day, a package came for her in the post, a package that contained two books, a puzzle, a pair of opera glasses, a model train set, two ostrich plumes, stamps and coins from all over world, and several miniature paintings meant for a doll’s house. A note in the package, addressed to Portia, said that the sender had heard that she was having a difficult time without her sister and hoped that the contents of the package would offer some distraction. It also said that there would be one package a month for the next two years.

  “And so twenty-four packages came, each filled with a variety of interesting and often unexpected items. Sometimes there would be seashells and geodes, sometimes a whole book of pressed flowers, and once there was even a necklace made of shark’s teeth, which fascinated Portia to no end.

  “The packages helped Portia immensely—they helped all of us immensely.” Mr. Cromwell’s voice caught. He exhaled slowly. “But it was not until after Mr. Gordon had passed away that we learned he had been the one to send all the packages, he who had never met either one of my daughters but had felt moved to do something when he learned of Portia’s grief.”

  Catherine’s eyes prickled with tears. “That sounds like him. He was the kindest man I have ever met.”

  “You are fortunate to have met him,” said Mr. Cromwell with tremendous sincerity. “Portia would have dearly loved to.”

  Catherine gazed upon Mr. Cromwell. There was still a hint of sadness in his eyes, but the twinkle was back—despite the loss of a beloved child, Mr. Cromwell remained a man who found much to enjoy in life.

  Could she hope for a fraction of his joie de vivre someday?

  He accompanied her out of his office to the reception room. They shook hands warmly.

  “Look forward to your summer, Miss Blade,” said Mr. Cromwell. “And trust that it will come.”

  Mrs. Reynolds approved of the elaborate music box Leighton had chosen for Annabel. “Yes, Captain, I do believe she would quite enjoy it.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Reynolds. In that case, I will take it back to the shop and have the spring mechanism replaced.” He rose. “Let me not take up any more of your time.”

  Mrs. Reynolds hesitated—as he had hoped. “Captain, would you mind if I asked for a favor?”

  “Please, go ahead.”

  “I have arranged to call on Miss Blade this afternoon. It is the staff’s half day, so I am without a coachman, which I didn’t think would matter much as I could always take a hansom cab or walk. But this fog . . .”

  This fog was spectacular even for London, thick enough to scoop with one’s hands, with the bouquet of an overripe Stilton that had fallen into a sludge pond.

  Leighton inclined his head. “I will be glad to put my carriage at your disposal, ma’am.”

  Twenty minutes later, they were walking up a considerable number of flights of stairs. The fog was such that from the street it had been impossible to assess the height of the building. But it would seem that the block of flats was at least six stories tall, and Miss Blade had taken a flat at the very top.

  Mrs. Reynolds huffed as she staggered up the last flight, her fingers digging into Leighton’s arm. “Ah, there it is, at last. I daresay Miss Blade would have no trouble keeping her figure sve
lte if she but went out and came back once or twice a day.”

  Before they had walked halfway down the corridor, Miss Blade’s door opened. The expression of the quiet, shadowlike woman who stood waiting altered only a little as she took him in: She would have already known, from the sound of their footsteps, that a man had come with Mrs. Reynolds; the only question in her mind would have been whether Mrs. Reynolds had brought Marland or himself.

  “Captain Atwood was kind enough to ferry me over on this rather horrible day, Miss Blade,” explained Mrs. Reynolds. “And I could not possibly allow him to remain in the carriage while I enjoyed myself up here.”

  Leighton had known for approximately twenty-four hours that Mrs. Reynolds would call on her while Annabel and Mrs. Chase attended Edwin Madison’s indoor birthday picnic. He had not meant to do anything with that knowledge until the fog rolled in. Now here he was, about to walk into the dwelling, however temporary, of the one who, to him at least, always belonged under a wide-open sky.

  “No, no, of course not,” said Miss Blade graciously. “I am delighted to see you both. Do please come in.”

  The redolence of incense wafted toward him. He had never cared for incense, with its heavy, cloying smell. But the incense she used produced a much lighter fragrance, one that reminded him, more than anything else, of the scent of Chinese ink.

  She herself was dressed very simply in an afternoon gown of light grey. He would not have thought of it, but the color suited her well and lent her an air of unmistakable refinement.

  She led them into the flat’s vestibule.

  There were items of appropriate furnishing in the vestibule, but all he saw was a curtain made of strings of ceramic beads that took the place of a door that separated the vestibule from the parlor.

  We had a curtain made of beads, she had once told him, in those long-ago days.

  He swept aside the curtain for the ladies to pass, the beads sliding along his palm. They were cloisonné enamel, blue and white. As he let go, the strings of beads swung back and forth, striking one another with soft, melodic pings.