by KJ Charles
“Nor do I,” said Crane. “So I suggest you go practise your extortion on somebody who gives a monkey’s balls for what you have to say. Get out. And give my regards to Merrick when you see him.”
“Merrick?”
“You know. Merrick. My manservant.”
“Why would I see Merrick?” said Rackham blankly.
“Well, perhaps you won’t. But some night soon, in a dark alley, or near a nice deep ditch, or in the back room of some opium den, I expect he’ll see you. In fact, I’m sure of it. Now fuck off, and shut the door behind you.”
Rackham had gone a liverish colour, as well he might—Crane’s henchman had been notorious in even the darkest back ways of Shanghai. He tried to say something; Crane hand-waved irritably and went back to his desk. After a few seconds Rackham managed, “You’ve got three days to change your mind. You give me my money by Friday, or I go to the Council and the police. And if I see Merrick, I’ll, I’ll…”
“You’ll soil your trousers and beg for mercy.” Crane picked up a bill and turned his attention to it. “But don’t worry. I’ll tell him to make sure you don’t see him coming.”
Rackham muttered something and stormed out. Crane waited a few seconds, heard the door slam, took a very deep breath.
He had never been blackmailed before. He had been expelled from three schools and thrown out of the country at the age of seventeen for his unlawful tastes, but that had been part of his war against his father, and he had fought it openly. And since then he had lived in China, where the laws of man and God were sublimely uninterested in who he shared his bed with. Eight months back in England hadn’t instilled the constant sense of fear and persecution and terror of exposure that might have led him to bow to Rackham’s demands.
He had considered the problem before he returned to England, of course, and had determined before his ship even reached Portsmouth that, if he ever faced arrest, he would bribe anyone necessary, post bail and be on the next ship back to China. It would be effortless, he would feel no shame in running, and frankly, he would be glad to go home.
That had been before Stephen. Irresistible, astonishing, intriguing, fiercely independent Stephen, with his implacable sense of justice, and so very many enemies.
He could not, in conscience, run and leave Stephen alone. He had a responsibility there.
Crane frowned, considering how bad this might be. Stephen was wary and cautious, as most men’s men were in this country, but he had said he wasn’t at risk. He had said that he preferred, like any sensible man, to avoid trouble, but the Practitioners’ Council turned a blind eye to nonmagical peccadilloes and eccentric private lives that hurt nobody. He had said he could use his powers to prevent any difficulty with mundane law.
Unfortunately, as Crane was well aware, Stephen was a fluent and unrepentant liar. He would have lied about danger to himself with no compunction, and Rackham clearly felt he had enough to serve as a serious threat.
Stephen needed to know about this, and quickly.
Crane scrawled a neutrally worded summons and put Stephen’s address on it, a room in a small boarding house north of Aldgate. He had never set foot there himself, probably never would, for fear of discovery, but he couldn’t imagine a note would bring Stephen’s life crashing down around his ears, and if it might, then that just made the Rackham situation all the more urgent. He had no other way to get in touch with his elusive lover, and so he put the whole business firmly to the back of his mind, locked up, and headed out to find a hansom and some distraction.
Merrick would be in Limehouse, most likely, and if he wasn’t then Chinese friends would be, but Crane would have to trawl the pubs and gambling dens to track anyone down and, alone and too well dressed, that was not a risk he was prepared to take. Most of his English friends were school or social acquaintances and would doubtless be entertaining themselves at the sort of elegant evening event he abhorred, so, for the lack of anything better to do, he headed off for the Far Eastern Mercantile club, known as the Traders.
Chapter Two
The Traders was frequented by travellers, businessmen, a smattering of explorers and scholars: anyone who had travelled further East than India and wanted to talk about it. It was not busy, but there was a small group of old China hands that he knew, so Crane joined them, pulling up a deep leather armchair to savour a very decent whisky and listen to “Town” Cryer’s latest news.
Town, whose real first name Crane had long forgotten, finished an account of a piece of triple dealing involving Macau import-export law to a general murmur of approbation, and turned to Crane, who contributed an amusing anecdote about his purchase of a minority holding in Sheng’s.
“Oh, jolly good, Vaudrey!” said Shaycott, a Java man. “Crane, I mean. You always tell a good story. You should come more often, we haven’t seen you here in an age.”
“I’ve been cursed busy with family matters.” Crane acknowledged the sympathetic nods. “What news, Town? Bring me up to date.”
“Well,” said Town thoughtfully. “I suppose you heard about Merton?”
Crane’s lip lifted in a twitch of distaste. “What about him? Got on a boat, I hope?”
“His last voyage.” Shaycott intoned the words. “Dead, just last week.”
A youngish, tanned fellow, slightly the worse for drink, murmured, “Oh, dear, poor chap. I, er, should we…?” He started to raise his glass.
“I’m not drinking to Merton,” said Humphris flatly. He was another Shanghai trader, one of the few Crane liked rather than tolerated through habit.
“I’ll drink to his passing,” Crane added. “Accident, or did an outraged parent finally catch up with him?”
“Accident, cleaning his gun.” Town gave a meaningful cough.
“Not just a swine but a coward.” Humphris spoke contemptuously, and then looked at Crane with sudden horror, very obviously recalling that his father and brother had both killed themselves. “Good God, Vaudrey, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Not at all.” Crane waved it away. “And in any case, I agree with you.”
“Still, I beg your pardon.” Humphris cast about for a change of subject. “Oh, have you heard about Willetts? You know, the copra dealer. Did you see in the papers?”
“No, what?”
“Murdered.”
“Good God.” Crane sat up. “Are you serious? Is there an arrest?”
“No, none. He was found in Poplar, by the river. Stabbed, apparently. A footpad.”
“The devil. Poor fellow.”
“Willetts and Merton, within a fortnight.” Shaycott kept up the portentous tone.
“Yes, the subscription book here is going to start looking thin at this rate,” Crane agreed heartlessly, and Town added, “The Curse of the Traders.”
“Don’t joke about that, you fellows. I’ve heard some things in my time—” Shaycott ignored the susurrus of irritation this kind of remark always produced, and launched into a tale. It was one of the deceased Willetts’ stories, a lengthy yarn involving rats the size of dogs, but Crane had heard it several times before and found Shaycott dull even telling the best of tales. He drifted off into a reverie, wondering whether Stephen might be curled up in his bed when he returned home, and what he would do if he was. His attention was only recalled when Humphris waved a copy of The Times in his face.
“Look sharp, Vaudrey! I was asking if you’ve seen this? The Engagements column?”
“Oddly enough, I haven’t read it today. Are we to wish you happy, Monk?”
“Monk” Humphris, who was as confirmed a bachelor as Crane, although in his case because of a natural preference for celibacy, made a rude gesture. “Not me, you fool. Leonora Hart is getting married.”
“The devil she is!”
“Oh, you hadn’t heard?” said Town. “I had wind of it some time back. The chap’s smitten, b
y all accounts.”
Crane grabbed the newspaper and scrutinised it. “Eadweard Blaydon? How do you even say that?”
“It’s pronounced Edward. Politician. Member of Parliament. He’s a reformer. Rooting out corruption. End the sale of honours and the benefits of clergy and the pernicious practices of bribery. An honest mandarin.”
There was a dubious murmur at that, unsurprisingly, since most of those present regarded bribery as something between a handy tool and a form of tax, and none of them had high opinions of mandarins, of whatever nationality.
“Do you think she’s told him about Hart?” an unpopular man named Peyton remarked snidely. “If there was an official in Shanghai he didn’t bribe, I never met him.”
“Hart was no fool,” Crane said. “Blaydon will have a job on his hands to match up.”
“Is that why Mrs. Hart hasn’t remarried? Hart’s glorious memory?” Peyton’s voice was sneering. “Because I heard there was some sort of scandal with some Singapore man. Town, do you know—”
“Tom and Leonora Hart were two of the best friends I’ve ever had,” Crane interrupted, locking eyes with Peyton. “Hart saved my skin more than once. His death devastated Leo. If she is able to marry again, I’m damned glad for her, and if any of you feel the urge to spread spiteful fishwives’ gossip about her or Tom, I suggest you resist it.” Peyton went red. “Leo is perfectly capable of defending her own honour,” Crane went on, loudly enough that the other conversations in the room were suspended, “and I’m sure Blaydon can and will do so for her as well, but just to be clear, I will take any offensive comments about Leonora Hart as a direct personal affront, and I will make the speaker eat his words, at the end of my boot if need be.”
“I’ll back you up on that,” Monk Humphris said.
“Sir, I don’t like your tone to my uncle.” The young man stood as he spoke, slightly too violently.
“And I don’t like your uncle’s tone, so it evens out,” Crane replied, and stood too, staring down at the young man for a couple of deliberately intimidating seconds, before going over to pour himself another whisky from the tantalus. This allowed Monk and the others time to persuade the young man to sit down and be quiet. The words “disgraceful” and “lawless” were audible in Peyton’s nasal voice; “quite right”, “bad man to cross” and “that vicious brute Merrick” came from the others. Judging that a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of his capabilities to put the young spark off, Crane strolled back to his chair, deciding that he’d find out what the hell Leo was playing at in the morning.
Stephen lay naked, arms spread wide, the Magpie Lord’s ring glowing on his finger, illuminating the fingers that curled like claws. He writhed and twisted, uttering incoherent pleas for mercy as his silky cock jutted hard from the reddish curls at his groin.
“Please, my lord, please,” Stephen was sobbing, as Crane positioned himself at the entrance to the small sinewy body.
“Please what?” Crane demanded, nudging the tip of his cock against Stephen’s arse. “Please what?”
Stephen howled out, arching his back, thrusting himself towards Crane. “Please, my lord!”
Crane pushed his shoulders down hard. “One more chance, pretty boy.”
“Make me yours,” said Stephen. “Make me fly. Make the magpies fly.”
“You will fly.” Now he was thrusting in the dark heat of Stephen’s body, watching the birds flutter on his lover’s skin, the black and white flickering over his amber eyes. The seven tattoos were silently flapping and shrieking, and magpies were rising all around them in a storm of wings and cawing as the feathers spread wide from Stephen’s extended arms. “Fly,” he said again, and came hard and hot as the magpies screamed.
He woke up thrashing in a tangle of sheets and an empty bed, sweating, momentarily bewildered, and with an unmistakeable sticky wetness on his belly.
“Fuck,” he muttered aloud and let his head drop back onto the hot pillow as he tried to shake off the dream.
It had only been a few days, damn it. Nocturnal emissions seemed hardly appropriate at his advanced age. And he was beginning to lose patience with the bloody magpies.
Crane, though without magical talent of his own, was the last descendant of the Magpie Lord, a hugely powerful sorcerer, and in some way he didn’t understand he—his blood, his body—acted as a conduit between his ancestor’s power and Stephen’s talent. One of the more bizarre side effects of this was that Crane’s seven tattoos of magpies took on independent life when he and Stephen fucked, flying and hopping across both men’s skin. One had even decided it preferred Stephen and had taken up residence on his back, leaving Crane with the frankly unsettling experience of looking in a mirror and seeing plain unmarked skin where a tattoo used to be, and Stephen the equally disturbing gift of a tattoo that he’d never had inked. Crane could live without the damned birds invading his imaginary love life as well.
He touched a hand to his shoulder, where the defecting tattoo had once spread its wings, uttered a curse on magpies, dreams and absent lovers, shifted into a less sticky patch of sheet, and went back to sleep.
Chapter Three
The next day, there was no word from Stephen by eleven, which was when Crane called on Leonora Hart.
Leo Callas had been a coltish fifteen-year-old when he’d first met her, nearly two decades ago. Her father had been a trader, her mother long dead. She had run wild in the Shanghai streets, trading halls and merchant palaces all her life, and could curse in English, Spanish and Shanghainese with as much fluency as any of the young men around her. At seventeen she had abruptly blossomed into beauty and, armed with her father’s fat purse, had been set to go to London and become a Success. Instead, to everyone’s astonishment except Lucien Vaudrey’s, she had at eighteen eloped with Tom Hart, a silk trader of forty-two years, dubious reputation, and no appeal at all to her father.
Lucien Vaudrey had been unsurprised because she had confided her elopement plans to him, and in fact he and Merrick had taken on the slightly unconventional groomsmen roles of overpowering the gatekeepers at the Callas compound to let Leo out that night.
He had played his part without hesitation, because Tom had been kind to him in a life that had been very bare of kindness, and because he was twenty-two and barely expected to last to twenty-three. By the time he was old enough that he might have regretted his role in such an obviously disastrous match, it had become clear that Tom and Leonora were two halves of a soul.
Tom Hart had died some eight years ago, of a heart attack. Leonora had been almost deranged with grief, starving herself, drinking too much, acting in a way that shocked even the least shockable.
There was no trace of that wild, crazed widow now, any more than of the tomboyish girl. Leonora Hart was a very lovely woman at thirty-four. She was tall and curvaceous, with rich black hair and striking brown eyes, high cheekbones, and skin dark enough to seem exotic without raising too many whispers about mixed parentage. She was wearing silk in a shade of dull orange that was a perfect foil for her autumnal eyes, beautiful, elegant, sophisticated. She looked wildly out of place in the conventionally overdecorated drawing room of her aunt’s house, where she had been staying for the last two months.
“Leo, darling, you look magnificent,” said Crane, sweeping her hand to his lips.
She pulled him into a hug. “You rotten aristo. First you become a peer, now you’re playing the gentleman. What’s next, Lady Crane and some chicks?”
“Good God, don’t say such things. Anyway, isn’t it you who’s nesting? Why did I not know about this?”
“Oh sweet heaven.” Leonora rolled her eyes. “I suppose you’ve seen The Times. I could have shaken Eadweard.”
“But you are engaged?”
“Yes. Well—we are, but it wasn’t supposed to come out yet.”
“Why on earth not?”
Leonora gestured to
a pair of chairs and sat. She leaned in to him, and he mimicked her, knowing that the English cousins she lived with were far too respectable for her liking. He wasn’t surprised when Leonora spoke in Shanghainese.
“I like Eadweard very much. I want to marry him. I really do.” Leonora knitted her fingers together. “You understand why I married Jan Ahl, don’t you?”
“Because it was exactly a year after Tom died, and you’d been drunk for the best part of a week, and in bed with Ahl for much of that, and marrying him was one alternative to killing yourself, although not the best one.”
“I love you for your kindness, Lucien,” Leo said wryly. “But you do understand. Because you knew Tom, and you knew what we had, and you know how I grew up, and how things are back home. It’s not like that here.”
“That it isn’t.”
“And Eadweard’s not like Tom,” Leonora went on. “I don’t suppose I could love him if he was. He’s—he’s righteous. Do you know what I mean? He doesn’t lie. He has high standards and lives by them. He would never let me down, never do a dishonest thing.”
“You’re right. He’s not like Tom.”
“No.” Leo grinned reminiscently. “Tom was the most lawless man I ever knew. He always said he never let a friend down—”
“But sometimes people didn’t know they weren’t friends any more until it was too late.”
“Hah! Yes. And, I loved Tom, but I’m older now and I’ve been alone for so long and…Eadweard’s a truly good man, and I respect that. I don’t suppose you know what I mean about righteousness, but—”
“An honesty that’s basically untouchable. Someone who will break before he bows. There’s a sort of purity to it. Yes, I know the appeal.”
“Well,” Leo said. “That’s the problem.”
“Blaydon does know about Hart, doesn’t he?”