The Luckiest Lady In London (25 page)

1891

O
n a storm-whipped sea, some prayed, some puked. Catherine Blade wedged herself between the bed and the bulkhead of her stateroom and went on with her breathing exercises, ignoring the fifty-foot swells of the North Atlantic and the teetering of the steamship.

A muffled shriek, faint but entirely unexpected, nearly caused her pooled chi to scatter. Really, she’d expected more reserve from members of the British upper class.

Then something else. A blunt sound, as if generated by a kick to the back of the neck. She checked for the box of matches she carried inside her blouse.

There was no light in the corridor—the electricity had been cut off. She braced her feet apart, held on to the door-knob, and listened, diving beneath the unholy lashing of the sea, the heroic, if desperate, roar of the ship’s engines, and the fearful moans in staterooms all along the corridor—the abundant dinner from earlier now tossing in stomachs as turbulent as the sea.

The shriek came again, all but lost in the howl of the storm. It came from the outside this time, farther fore along the port promenade.

She walked on soft, cloth-soled shoes that made no sounds. The air in the passage was colder and damper than it ought to be—someone had opened a door to the outside. She suspected a domestic squabble. The English were a stern people in outward appearance, but they did not lack for passion and injudiciousness in private.

A cross-corridor interrupted the rows of first-class state-rooms. At the two ends were doors leading onto the promenade. She stopped at the scent of blood.

“Who’s there?”

“Help . . .”

She recognized the voice, though she’d never heard it so weak. “Mrs. Reynolds, are you all right?”

The light of a match showed that Mrs. Reynolds bled from her head. Blood smeared her face and her white dressing gown. Next to her on the carpet sprawled a large, leather-bound Bible, likely her own: the weapon of assault.

The ship plunged. Mrs. Reynolds’s body slid on the carpet. Catherine leaped and stayed her before her temple slammed into the bulkhead. She gripped Mrs. Reynolds’s wrist. The older woman’s skin was cold and clammy, but her pulse was strong enough—she was in no immediate danger of bleeding to death.

“Althea . . . outside . . . save her . . .”

Althea was Mrs. Reynolds’s sister, Mrs. Chase. Mrs. Chase could rot.

“Let’s stop your bleeding,” she said to Mrs. Reynolds, ripping a strip of silk from the latter’s dressing gown.

“No!” Mrs. Reynolds pushed away the makeshift bandage. “Please . . . Althea first.”

Catherine sighed. She would comply—that was what came
of a lifetime of deference to one’s elders. “Hold this,” she said, pressing the matchbox and the strip of silk into Mrs. Reynolds’s hands.

She was soaked the moment she stepped outside. The ship slanted up. She grabbed on to a handrail. A blue-white streak of lightning tore across the black sky, illuminating needles of rain that pummeled the ankle-deep water sloshing along the walkway. It illuminated a drenched Mrs. Chase, dressing gown clinging to her ripe flesh, abdomen balanced on the rail, body flexed like a bow—as if she were an aerialist in mid-flight. Her arms flailed, her eyes screwed shut, her mouth issued gargles of incoherent terror.

A more distant lightning briefly revealed the silhouette of a man standing behind Mrs. Chase, holding on to her feet. Then the heavens erupted in pale fire. Thunderbolts spiked and interwove, a chandelier of the gods that would set the entire ocean ablaze. And she saw the man’s face.

What had the Ancients said?
You can wear out soles of iron in your search, and you would come upon your quarry when you least expect
.

The murderer of her child.

A dagger from Catherine’s vambrace hissed through the air, the sound of its flight lost in the thunder that rended her ears. But he heard. He jerked his head back at the last possible second, the knife barely missing his nose.

Darkness. The ship listed sharply starboard. Mrs. Chase’s copious flesh hit the deck with a thud and a splash. Catherine threw herself down as two sleeve arrows, one for each of her eyes, shot past her.

The steamer crested a swell and plunged into the hollow between waves. She allowed herself to slide forward on the smooth planks of the walkway. A weak lightning at the edge of the horizon offered a fleeting glow, enough for her to see his outline.

She pushed off the deck and, borrowing the ship’s own downward momentum, leaped toward him, one knife in each hand. He threw a large object at her—she couldn’t see, but it had to be Mrs. Chase, there was nothing else of comparable size nearby.

She flipped the knives around in her palms and caught Mrs. Chase, staggering backward—the woman was the weight of a prize pig and the ship had begun its laborious climb up another huge swell.

She set Mrs. Chase down and let the small river on deck wash them both toward the door. She had to get Mrs. Chase out of the way to kill him properly.

More sleeve arrows skimmed the air currents. Fortunately for her, his sleeves were sodden and the arrows arrived without their usual vicious abruptness. She ducked one and deflected another from the back of Mrs. Chase’s head with the blade of a knife.

Catherine kicked open the door. Sending both of her knives his way to buy a little time, she dragged Mrs. Chase’s inert, uncooperative body inside. A match flared before Mrs. Reynolds’s face, a stark chiaroscuro of anxious eyes and bloodied cheeks. As Catherine set Mrs. Chase down on the wet carpet, Mrs. Reynolds, who should have stayed in her corner, docilely suffering, found the strength to get up, push the door shut, and bolt it.

“No!” shouted Catherine.

He wanted to kill her almost as much as she wanted to kill him. One of them would die this night. She preferred to fight outside, where there were no helpless women underfoot.

Almost immediately the door thudded. Mrs. Reynolds yelped and dropped the match, which fizzled on the sodden carpet. Catherine grabbed the matchbox from her, lit another one, stuck it in Mrs. Reynolds’s hand, and wrapped the long scrap of dressing gown around her head. “Don’t worry about
Mrs. Chase. She will have bumps and bruises, but she’ll be all right.”

Mrs. Reynolds gripped Catherine’s hand. “Thank you. Thank you for saving her.”

The match burned out. Another heavy thump came at the door. The mooring of the dead bolt must be tearing loose from the bulkhead. She tried to pull away from Mrs. Reynolds but the latter would not let go of her. “I cannot allow you to put yourself in danger for us again, Miss Blade. We will pray and throw ourselves on God’s mercy.”

Crack. Thump. Crack
.

Impatiently, she stabbed her index finger into the back of Mrs. Reynolds’s wrist. The woman’s fingers fell slack. Catherine rushed forward and kicked the door. It was in such a poor state now that it could be forced out as well as in.

As she drew back to gather momentum, he rammed the door once more. A flash of lightning lit the crooked edges of the door—it was already hanging loose.

She slammed her entire body into the door. Her skeleton jarred as if she had thrown herself at a careening carriage. The door gave outward, enough of an opening that she slipped through.

His poisoned palm slashed down at her. She ducked, and too late realized it had been a ruse, that he’d always meant to hit her from the other side. She screamed, the pain like a red-hot brand searing into her skin.

The ship plunged bow first. She used its motion to get away from him. A section of handrail flew at her. She smashed herself against the bulkhead, barely avoiding it.

The ship rose to meet a new, nauseatingly high wave. She slipped, stopping herself with the door, stressing its one remaining hinge. He surprised her by skating aft quite some distance, his motion a smooth, long glide through water.

Then, as the ship dove down, he ran toward her. She
recognized it as the prelude to a monstrous leap. On flat ground, she’d do the same, running toward him, springing, meeting him in midair. But she’d be running uphill now, and against the torrent of water on deck. She’d never generate enough momentum to counter him properly.

In desperation, she wrenched at the door with a strength that surprised her. It came loose as his feet left the deck. She screamed and heaved the door at him.

The door met him flat on at the height of his trajectory, nearly twelve feet up in the air, and knocked him sideways. He went over the rail, past the deck below, and plunged into the sea. The door ricocheted into the bulkhead, bounced on the rail, and finally it, too, hit the roiling waters.

The steamer tilted precariously. She stumbled aft, grasping for a handrail. By the time the vessel crested the wave and another lightning bolt split the sky, he had disappeared.

She began to laugh wildly—vengeance was hers.

Then her laughter turned to a violent fit of coughing. She clutched at her chest and vomited black blood into the black night.

F
or someone who had lived her entire life thousands of miles away, Catherine Blade knew a great deal about London.

By memory she could produce a map of its thoroughfares and landmarks, from Hyde Park in the west to the City of London in the east, Highgate in the north to Greenwich in the south. On this map, she could pinpoint the locations of fashionable squares and shops, good places for picnics and rowing, even churches where everyone who was anyone went to get married.

The London of formal dinners and grand balls. The London of great public parks in spring and men in gleaming riding boots galloping along Rotten Row toward the rising sun. The London of gaslights, fabled fogs, and smoky gentlemen’s clubs where fates of nations were decided between nonchalant sips of whiskey and genteel flipping of
The Times
.

The London of an English exile’s wistful memory of his gilded youth.

Those memories had molded her expectations once, in distant days when she’d believed that England could be her answer, her freedom. When she’d painstakingly made her way through Herb’s copy of
Pride and Prejudice
, amazed at the audacity and independence of English womenfolk, the liberty and openness of their lives.

She’d given up on those dreams years ago. Still, London disappointed. What she had seen of it thus far was sensationally ugly, like a kitchen that was never cleaned. Soot coated every surface. The grime on the exterior walls of houses and shops ran in streaks, where rain, unable to wash off the encrusted filth under windowsills, rearranged it in such a way as to recall the tear-smudged face of a dirty child.

“I wouldn’t judge London just yet,” said kindly Dr. Rigby, whom she’d “met” in Shanghai three months ago, before the start of her journey.

She smiled at him. It was not London she judged, by the foolishness of her own heart. That after so much disappointment, she still hoped—and thus doomed herself to even more disappointment.

“There they are,” cried Mrs. Chase. “Annabel and the Atwood boys.”

It was impossible to know Mrs. Chase for more than five minutes—and Catherine had known her five weeks, ever since Bombay—without hearing about her beautiful daughter Miss Chase, engaged to the most superior Captain Atwood.

Such boastfulness was alien to Catherine, both in its delivery—did Mrs. Chase not fear that her wanton pride would invoke the ill will of Fate?—and in its very existence.

Parental pride in a mere girl was something Catherine had never experienced firsthand.

At her birth, there had been a tub of water on hand—to drown her, in case she turned out to be a girl. In the end, neither her mother nor her amah had been able to go
through with it, and she’d lived, the daughter of a Chinese courtesan and the English adventurer who’d abandoned her.

She’d been a burden to her mother, a source of worry and, sometimes, anguish. She’d never heard a word of praise from her amah, the woman responsible for her secret training in the martial arts. And the true father figure in her life, the Manchu prince who’d brought her mother to Peking and given her a life of security and luxury—Catherine had no idea what he thought of her.

And that was why she was in England, wasn’t it, one last attempt to win Da-ren’s approval?

On the rail platform, a handsomely dressed trio advanced toward them, a young woman in a violet mantle flanked by a pair of tall men in long black overcoats. Catherine’s attention was drawn to the man on the young woman’s left. He had an interesting walk. To the undisciplined eye, his gait would seem as natural as those of his companions. But Catherine had spent her entire life in the study of muscular movements and she had no doubt that he was concealing an infirmity in his left leg—the strain in his back and arms all part of a mindful effort to not favor that particular limb.

He spoke to the young woman and a strange curiosity made Catherine listen, her ears filtering away the rumble of the engines, the drumming of the rain on the rafters, the clamor of the crowd.

“. . . you must not believe everything Benedict says, Annabel,” he said. His head was turned toward the others, the brim of his hat and the high collar of his greatcoat obscuring much of his profile. “My stay on the subcontinent was marked by nothing so much as uneventfulness. The most excitement I had was in trying to keep a friend out of trouble when he fell in love with a superior’s wife.”

She shivered. The timbre of that quiet voice was like the caress of a ghost. No, she was imagining things. He was dead.
A pile of bones in the Taklamakan Desert, bleached and picked clean.

The other man was adamant. “Then explain why your letters came only in spurts? Where were you all those months when we hadn’t the least news of you?”

Miss Chase, however, was more interested in the love triangle. “Oh, how tragic. Whatever happened to your friend? Was he heartbroken?”

“Of course he was heartbroken,” said the man who refused to limp. “A man always convinces himself that there is something unique and special about his affections when he fancies the wrong woman.”

Catherine shivered again. An Englishman who’d spent time in India, whose brother suspected that he’d been farther afield than Darjeeling, and who had a lingering injury to his left leg—no, it couldn’t be. She had to have been a more capable killer than that.

“You wouldn’t be speaking from experience, would you, Leighton?” said Miss Chase, a note of flirtation in her voice.

“Only in the sense that every woman before you was a wrong woman,” answered the man who must be her fiancé, the most superior Captain Atwood.

A shrill whistle blew. Catherine lost the conversation. Mrs. Reynolds reminded her that she was to entirely comply with Mrs. Reynolds’s desire to put her up at the Brown Hotel. Catherine suspected that Mrs. Reynolds, out of gratitude, planned to find Catherine a respectable husband. A tall task: She herself had never come across a man willing to marry a woman capable of killing him with her bare hands—and easily, too.

Except
him
.

Until he changed his mind, that was.

The welcome party was upon them. Greetings erupted, along with eager embraces. Miss Chase’s fiancé stood only a
few feet away. Catherine looked toward him, her heart beating fast without a shred of reason.

He had a face that was almost ridiculously beautiful, exactly the kind of progeny one visualized—but didn’t usually get—when an extremely lovely woman married an equally handsome man. A face that would have been considered too pretty were it not for a long scar on his jaw. And there was something hard-edged and cynical about the otherwise amiable smile he directed at his future mother-in-law, who fussed over him as if he were her own firstborn son.

Catherine had never seen this man before.

Of course. What was she thinking? That the lover who had betrayed her, and whom she had punished in turn, would be miraculously alive after all these years?

Then he glanced at her and she gazed into the green eyes from her nightmares.

If shock were a physical force like typhoons or earthquakes, Waterloo station would be nothing but rubble and broken glass. When remorse had come, impaling her soul like a device of torture, she’d gone looking for him, barely sleeping and eating, until she’d come across his horse for sale in Kashgar.

It had been found wandering on the caravan route, without a rider. She had collapsed on the ground, overcome by the absolute irreversibility of her action.

But he wasn’t dead. He was alive, staring at her with the same shock, a shock that was slowly giving way to anger.

Somebody was saying something to her. “. . . Lieutenant Atwood. Lieutenant Atwood, Miss Blade. This is Miss Blade’s very first trip to England. She has lived her entire life in the Far East. Lieutenant Atwood is on home leave from Hong Kong, where he is serving with the garrison.”

Benedict Atwood was several years younger than Catherine, a jollier, brawnier version of his brother. “Please tell me that I
did not overlook your society while I was in Hong Kong, Miss Blade,” he said. “I would be devastated.”

She made herself smile, in a properly amused manner. “No need for premature devastation, Lieutenant. I rarely ventured into Hong Kong. Most of my life has been spent in the north of China.”

“And may I present Captain Atwood?” Mrs. Reynolds went on with the introductions. “Captain Atwood, Miss Blade.”

Leighton Atwood bowed. Leighton Atwood—a real name, after all these years. There was no more of either shock or anger in his eyes, eyes as chilling as water under ice. “Welcome to England, Miss Blade.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Words creaked past her dry throat.

Then she was being introduced to Annabel Chase. Miss Chase was young and remarkably pretty. Wide eyes, sweet nose, soft pink cheeks, with a head full of shiny golden curls and a palm as plain as a newborn chick.

“Welcome to England, Miss Blade, I do hope you will like it here,” Miss Chase said warmly. Then she laughed in good-natured mirth. “Though at this time of the year I always long for Italy myself.”

Something gnawed at the periphery of Catherine’s heart. After a disoriented moment she realized it as a corrosive jealousy. Miss Chase was not only beautiful, but wholesome and adorable.

Every woman before you was a wrong woman
.

Of course. A woman such as Catherine was always the wrong woman, anywhere in the world.

“Thank you,” she said. “It has been a remarkable experience already, my first day in England.”

C
atherine could not stop looking at her erstwhile lover. She glanced out of the corner of her eyes, or from below the sweep of her lashes. She pretended to examine
the interior of the private dining room at Brown Hotel: the crimson-and-saffron wallpaper, the moss-green curtains, the large painting above the fireplace—two young women in white stolas frolicking against a dizzyingly blue sea that reminded her of Heavenly Lake in the Tian Shan Mountains—and then she would dip her gaze and let it skim over him.

His hair was cut short, no hint of the curls through which she’d once run her hands. The lobes of his ears still showed indentations of piercings, but the gold hoops he’d worn were long gone. And the deep tan that had fooled her so completely as to his origins had disappeared, too—he was quite pale; pallid, almost.

He did not return her scrutiny, except once, when his brother seated himself next to her. He had glanced at her sharply then, a hard, swift stare that made her feel as if someone had pushed her head underwater.

“Tell us about your life in China, Miss Blade,” said Benedict Atwood. “And what finally brought you home to England?”

“My mother died when I was very young.” At least this part was true. Her next few sentences would be well-rehearsed lies. “I lived with my father at various localities in China, until he passed away several years ago. I suppose some would call him idiosyncratic—he did not seek the company of other English expatriates and rarely spoke of his life before China.”

Leighton Atwood did not roll his eyes, but the twist of his lips was eloquent enough.

She made herself continue. “Sometimes I, too, wonder why I didn’t venture out of China sooner—I’d always wished to see England and in China I would always remain a foreigner. But the familiar does have a powerful hold. And part of me was afraid to find out that perhaps in England, too, I would always be a foreigner.”

There was the faintest movement to his left brow. She
could not interpret whether it expressed further scorn or something else.

“But that is nonsense!” exclaimed Benedict Atwood. “You are home now. And we shall all of us endeavor to make you
feel
at home, too.”

She smiled at the young man. He looked to be the sort who was easily impressed and easily delighted. But his sincerity was genuine enough. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“I quite agree with Lieutenant Atwood,” declared Miss Chase. “I think it’s marvelous that you have come. You must not hesitate to let me know if there is anything I can do to help you become better settled.”

The girl was so fresh, so unsullied, a lovely, innocent Snow White—with Catherine very close to becoming the fading, malicious Queen. When she smiled this time, her face felt as if it were made of stone. “Thank you, Miss Chase. You are too kind.”

“Now would you believe me, Miss Blade, when I tell you that you would meet with a most unambiguous welcome?” said Dr. Rigby.

She glanced at Leighton Atwood. He was all languid, indeed, lethargic elegance, if such a thing existed. What happened to the young man who rode the length and breadth of East Turkestan, slept under the stars, and hunted her suppers?

“I understand that you and Miss Blade”—did she detect a slight hesitation, the space of a heartbeat, before he said her name?—“met in Shanghai, Dr. Rigby.”

“We certainly did,” Dr. Rigby replied.

“Oh, how did you meet?” asked Miss Chase, greatly interested.

“Outside the ticket agent’s at Mortimer
hong
. Miss Blade saved me from losing my wallet.”

Mrs. Chase wore a look of smug satisfaction. Miss Chase started. Now it was out in the open: Catherine had not been
introduced to Dr. Rigby by a known third party; therefore what everyone knew of her was only what she chose to tell them. Leighton Atwood looked meaningfully at his brother.

“It sounds like a wonderful coincidence,” Benedict Atwood said in oblivious cheerfulness.

“It was a stroke of luck for the rest of us, too,” said Mrs. Reynolds firmly. “Miss Blade kept us alive when we were set upon at sea.”

“Set upon?” exclaimed Miss Chase. “Surely not by pirates?”

“Only the most awful Chinaman,” answered Mrs. Chase. “Oh darling, forgive us for not telling you sooner. It was a terrible ordeal. We thought we’d spare you the knowledge of it, if we could.”

That said, Mrs. Chase launched into a luridly detailed account: her first glimpse of the insolent Chinaman, his aggressive interest in her, her virtuous attempt to avoid his distressing attention, and her last-resort plea to the captain to cast him ashore.