My Beautiful Enemy

by Thomas, Sherry

  “Your other things are still in my town house. You can retrieve them, but I would advise against it. Better go directly to Dover and get on the first ferry to Calais. You can stay in England and reason with the British agents, but they would prefer to err on the side of caution and hold you in custody until they are absolutely sure you pose no threat—and I don’t think you want that.”

  “What about you? If they come and I’ve already left, won’t they suspect you of being in league with me?”

  He smiled. “But you overpowered me, as you overpowered the Centipede.”

  “What about the Chases? What would they say?”

  “I will have a chat with Mrs.Chase—I do not believe she would wish her indiscretion with the Centipede to become known to our agents. And as for Miss Chase . . .” His expression hardened. “She will cooperate with my wishes.”

  Catherine placed a hand on his arm. “Don’t be harsh to her. She loves you.”

  “She finds me agreeable, and my income even more agreeable. But let’s speak no more of her.” His eyes were gentle again as he looked upon Catherine. “Deliver the jade tablets to your stepfather. When things calm down here, I will come and find you. Now tell me your name.”

  Eight years ago, he had asked for her name. Then she had demurred, because there had been too many things she had held back from his knowledge. But now she could tell him everything, least of all her name.

  “Bai Ying-hua,” she said. “Ying is the word for England, and Hua for China—but you can call me Ying-ying.”

  She had not been addressed as such in years, perhaps not since Amah passed away. But when she had imagined her Persian, miraculously alive, coming to find her, this was the name he’d always used for her. Ying-ying. Ying-ying.

  “Ying-ying,” echoed the miraculously alive Leighton Atwood. “Am I pronouncing it correctly?”

  She rubbed her thumb along his jaw. “You are saying it exactly right.”

  He pressed her palm to his lips. “And where do you live, Ying-ying?”

  “Ask for me at Prince Fei’s residence in Peking. They will know where to direct you.”

  He kissed her. “I will be there as soon as I can.”

  “I know you will.” She laid a hand over his heart. “I know you will.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Treasure

  China

  1891

  Da-ren kowtowed before the spirit plaques of his ancestors, great conquerors and august emperors of yore. Ying-ying kowtowed, too, knocking her head on the floor until her forehead hurt. Silently, she beseeched Da-ren’s ancestors to bless their search.

  Da-ren touched down his forehead yet one more time. She watched his movement. He was stiffer than she remembered. His queue, so lustrous and thick in the years of her childhood, had turned white and sparse. She ached deep inside. No one escaped time’s ravage, not even Da-ren.

  He got up with some difficulty. He had been suffering from joint pains in the last several years. But despite his physical discomforts, he appeared to be in high spirits, his eyes bright and keen, his shoulders squared and confident.

  They had left Peking ten days after her arrival. Fortunately they had been able to locate a Tibetan lama in Peking who had spent years studying Pali, as well as a scholar of ancient Chinese who specialized in how the pronunciation of words had shifted over the centuries. With the help of the two experts, they had been able to decipher the entire message.

  Ning-hsia Province. Ho-lan Mountains. Round Top Peak. Western Slope. Use heart in your search.

  And they had been on the road since, finally arriving, dust bathed, at the nearest town to Round Top Peak the previous night. Da-ren, never particularly pious or superstitious, had forbidden his retinue of guards from drinking and carousing, and had sent them to all the temples and shrines in the surrounding areas.

  As a further sign of respect, he had everyone dismount at the bottom of Round Top Peak and proceed on foot. The early September sun was still hot, though once above the denuded lower slopes, groves of elms, pines, and sophoras offered them some shade.

  The hill was not particularly picturesque: no steep ravines, cliffs, or waterfalls to break the monotony of a steady climb. Neither did it host any major temples. Except for a few woodcutters and hunters, they did not come across any people.

  Da-ren’s optimism was buoyed by the place’s relative isolation. “On the western side at the top?” he stopped and asked, when they were three fourths of the way up.

  He knew as well as she what the jade tablets stated. “Yes, sir,” she answered. “On the western side.”

  “We are almost there,” he said.

  She could hardly speak. And the sedate pace Da-ren set was far too slow for her. She wanted to rush forward and arrive at the peak this very second.

  He stopped again, this time to catch his breath. Every sign of his old age pained her. She wanted him to forever remain the invincible figure he had been in her childhood, the confident, authoritative man who walked across an elegant courtyard to where her mother awaited him, with Ying-ying peering out at him from her window, bursting with admiration and longing.

  He waved aside the two guards who came forward to help him but accepted her offer of a good stick. They continued, zigzagging and spiraling up to the top of the hill, a circular, flat peak that looked rather like a crumpled top hat.

  Da-ren and Ying-ying inspected the weathered monolith, on the west-facing side, on all the sides. They found cracks, crevices and fissures, some seemingly more than a wingspan deep but none wide enough for her to fit through, even sideways.

  She poked long sticks inside the fissures. Once a snake slithered out. Another time a pika scampered, annoyed to have been disturbed. The sticks did not come back with ropes of pearls. Nor did they activate any marvelous ancient mechanism that split open the hilltop to reveal a hollowed cave below, stuffed with gold ingots.

  Da-ren’s countenance darkened. “What are you doing standing around?” He frowned at the guards. “Spread out. Look carefully!”

  “Look for anything out of the ordinary,” Ying-ying added.

  They had yet to tell anyone else what they sought.

  The guards found nothing. Lunchtime came and went. They ate the food they had brought and continued searching. Ying-ying tore her sleeves and scraped her elbows, but she could unearth nothing that had the remotest value. Still she went on, pulling out every blade of grass, overturning every rock, digging holes in the flinty soil alongside the guards, anything, anything at all, to keep at bay the rising sense of futility and defeat.

  “Stop. We’ll leave now,” Da-ren ordered, late in the afternoon.

  Ying-ying lowered her head. The day after Mother had died, Da-ren had sat in her rooms for endless hours, refusing both food and tea. When he’d finally emerged, he had looked exactly as he did now, in a daze, overwhelmed yet still disbelieving, not knowing what to do with himself.

  They trudged down the way they came, the guards glancing at one another, deflated, bewildered, and still puzzled. The restoration of China had never been Ying-ying’s ambition, yet Da-ren’s sorrow enveloped her. She felt her heart scraping the bottom of her stomach, an unrelenting heaviness that threatened to drag her whole body to the ground.

  She looked back at the top of the hill. They were some one hundred feet down from the summit, at the spot where they had first had an unobstructed view of it. As her gaze traveled lower, she saw something in a vine-covered face of rock that she had not noticed when she passed it on the way up, all her attention drawn up toward the unusual peak.

  The rock face was some ten paces from the path, obscured not only by thick vines but also by shrubs and a few straggly trees. But now that she saw bits and pieces of characters incised into the rock, she couldn’t understand how she had overlooked it the first time.

  “Da-ren, look. Look!” She pointed and shouted, unable to contain her excitement. “And it faces the west.”

  He did not see. She ran to the ro
ck face and tore away armfuls of wrist-thick creepers. “Look! It’s the Heart Sutra. Remember what the jade tablets said. ‘Search with your heart.’ ”

  The guards rushed over and cleared the vines, exposing a huge tablet of rock, inscribed with the entirety of the Heart Sutra. At its bottom, a four-inch-thick, eight-foot-tall slab of stone bearing an image that was a close replica of the goddess found on the jade tablets.

  Da-ren briefly closed his eyes. “Move the slab,” he commanded.

  Ying-ying anticipated a great deal of difficulty. But the guards pushed aside the slab with surprising ease, revealing a dark tunnel behind. Everyone took a few steps back, waiting for Da-ren to enter.

  “Make torches,” he said, thinking ahead as always.

  Torches were made. He bade Ying-ying to take one. “Light the way for me.”

  Firelight flickered on the walls of the tunnel, illuminating more lines of Buddhist texts chiseled into the stone. The air was stale but not malodorous, the scent that of rock, soil, and a millennium of stillness. Ying-ying advanced carefully, trying to peer into the darkness ahead. Her heart thumped. Was there really a great treasure? Could Da-ren’s dream come true, after all?

  The cave opened.

  But there were gold statues of Buddha, no life-size jade bodhisattvas. Not even a mundane stash of silver ingots. There were only stacks upon stacks of stone tablets, each the size of a small tabletop.

  High up on the walls, there were thousands of tiny alcoves, each containing a stone statuette of a seated Buddha. Beneath the alcoves, thick as swarms of bees, were chiseled characters.

  Most were sutras. But the text at the center of the far wall of the cave gave its story. Much of the tale was as Da-ren had told her long ago, of the monks’ fear of imperial persecution and their decision to put their greatest treasure into hiding.

  Except, she now realized, their greatest treasure was not any worldly wealth, but the words of Dharma. The monks had chiseled the entire known Buddhist canon into stone, set the stone tablets in a safe location, and left clues in the jade tablets for posterity to find, so that the teachings would never perish.

  To be mistaken a second time should have been a crueler blow. But somehow, Ying-ying’s disappointment paled next to her amazement. She shook her head, mostly in incredulity—that anyone should take all this trouble, years and years of thankless labor, to preserve something that had never come close to extinction.

  She glanced surreptitiously at Da-ren. He walked slowly amid the stacks of stone tablets, his face grim. “What a waste,” he spat contemptuously. “All this work, all for naught. Do you not think it the height of stupidity?”

  His anger took her aback, until she realized he wasn’t speaking so much of the futility of the monks’ work as his own. All the shame and humiliation of watching China become ever more impotent, the frustrations of being a man ahead of his time, the fruitless struggles against the obdurate Old Guard. And now, the one sole hope he had nursed, that he had clung to beyond reason, lay in shards at his feet.

  She fell to one knee. “I do not think their work was in vain, sir.”

  She had never been a religious person, but the monks’ undertaking moved her deeply. Just as Da-ren moved her with his selfless advocacy for reform and modernization. “They did all they could against the threats of their time. There will come a day when their valor is remembered and commended.”

  “And what good will it be to them, to their ghosts?” Da-ren asked bitterly.

  “None.” She could give him only brutal honesty. “Those who plant trees for others do not ask to sit under the shade.”

  Da-ren stood without speaking for the time of an incense stick. Ying-ying’s knee throbbed from the cold that seeped up from the ground. But she dared not move.

  At last he sighed. “Your mother would have known how to comfort me. But you . . .”

  He did not finish. “We will leave now.”

  They took fourteen days to return to the capital. Ying-ying winced as she dismounted—she was no longer accustomed to riding day in and day out. She had to put a hand on one of the stone griffins that guarded Da-ren’s residence to climb up the few shallow steps leading up to the red-and-gold gate. On stiff legs she made her way to the middle hall, so that Da-ren could dismiss her until he needed her again.

  The middle hall, like the rest of Da-ren’s residence, had not been kept up quite as it should have been—for years Da-ren had been digging into his own coffer to supplement his official budget. It was still imposing, but austere to a point of almost bareness. There were two chairs and a table on a slightly raised dais in the front of the room, two rows of lesser chairs along the sides, a large painted wooden screen, and not much else.

  Still in his travel clothes, Da-ren arrived and took his seat at the front, the majordomo following closely in his wake to serve tea and refreshments. Ying-ying stood a little straighter and bent her head a little lower.

  “Sit,” Da-ren said.

  Ying-ying made no move. She was certain she had heard wrong.

  “Do you need an old man to ask you twice to sit?”

  She raised her head. “Me, Da-ren?”

  “Is there anyone else here?” he said impatiently.

  She eyed the chairs lined up on either side of the hall and gingerly set her bottom at the edge of the chair farthest away from Da-ren.

  “What is this? Now I must shout to be heard.”

  She moved one chair up. Da-ren sighed and signaled at the majordomo. The majordomo brought to her a cup of tea and a tray of candied apricots and candied papayas.

  She jumped up. The majordomo himself, serving her.

  “Sit!” Da-ren thundered. “Do you not know how to sit?”

  She didn’t. Not before him. She had stood, she had knelt, she had never sat down.

  Now Da-ren called for distilled spirits. And when the majordomo had brought the decanter, Da-ren rose from his seat, walked to Ying-ying, and poured for her himself.

  She had never known such honors. She came out of her seat again and sank to one knee, completely flustered. “I am sure I do not deserve such privilege, Da-ren.”

  He raised her from the floor with his own hands.

  “You deserve much more than I have given you,” he said gently. “When you were young, I had hoped to keep you from the outside world, from all danger and cruelty, as your mother wished she could have been protected. But not for you the sheltered life; you were meant to test your wings against the height and the breadth of the sky.

  “I have watched you fall—too many times to count, it seems at times. But always you take flight again.” He set a hand on her shoulder, the barest of sheen of tears in his eyes. “Would that I had a son like you. Your mother might have known how to comfort me. But you know how to put the fight back into an old man’s soul.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The Last Line of the Note

  Ying-ying was more than a little drunk when she left Da-ren’s residence. She had a good head for liquor, and she hadn’t really imbibed that much—they had partaken of a meal together and had spent most of the time reminiscing about her mother—so she suspected she was simply intoxicated by, well, by being someone to the man she had always wished were her father.

  Usually she departed Da-ren’s residence on horseback. This time, Da-ren sent her home in a fine palanquin like the one Mother used to ride, accompanied by a small cavalcade of footmen.

  Would that I had a son like you.

  She had waited her entire life to hear those words. How proud her mother would have been, if only she could have been there. For the first part of the journey home Ying-ying had to stuff her handkerchief into her mouth, so the sedan carriers wouldn’t hear her laughing and laughing. Then the tears came, falling unchecked.

  Would that I had been a better daughter to you.

  It was dusk when she arrived home, a few flame-colored clouds crisscrossing the edge of the sky. Before she dismissed Da-ren’s servants, she gave each one a fla
sk of fine spirits and a handful of coins. They left delighted, full of praise for Bai Gu-niang’s generosity and good wishes for her health and well-being. To the pair of slightly elderly servants who looked after the property, she was equally lavish with gifts, thanking them for having taken good care of her home during her long absence.

  The typical Peking residence was a courtyard surrounded by buildings on all four sides. But Ying-ying’s childhood home was a suite of three such courtyards, its spaciousness and luxury a token of Da-ren’s utmost regard for her mother, his beloved concubine.

  When Mother had lived, there had been songbirds in cages beneath the eaves. She had also kept dozens of fancy goldfish in large, glazed crocks in the courtyards. The goldfish had been each as large as Ying-ying’s hand, their tales fine as gossamer, their scales gleaming like dearly held dreams.

  Now there were no more songbirds or goldfish—Ying-ying was away too often and too long. Besides, she didn’t have much interest in such elegant pursuits—she was embarrassingly uncultured, as she had told Leighton.

  Where was he now? Had he left England yet? Was he on a steamer sailing over rough seas at this very moment?

  Sometimes a dark doubt would slip into her mind. He had broken his promise to her before. What if he had gone ahead and married Miss Chase?

  She walked into Mother’s rooms in the innermost courtyard and lit three sticks of incense before her spirit plaque. The one she had taken to England had been a copy. This one was much more elaborate. Da-ren still came regularly to offer sticks of incense, and sit or walk in her suite of rooms while the incense burned.

  Bring him to me safely, she asked her mother’s spirit.

  Unlike her mother, she didn’t need a man to protect her. But she wanted Leighton by her side. She wanted to take him to sweep their daughter’s grave, see the rooms where Master Gordon had lived, and revisit Chinese Turkestan, retracing their route from the edge of the desert to the Heavenly Mountains.