Читать книгу Nightsong - V.J. Banis - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

Lydia was surprised when her father handed her a brown wrapped package somewhat later; with everything else that had occurred, she had forgotten that it was her birthday.

“Oh, Papa, it’s beautiful,” she cried, unwrapping the package to reveal a golden locket. Inside was a likeness of her father, taken only a few years before, and so lifelike, with his stern expression and his eyes seeming to see right into her heart. Peter MacNair had looked at her like that in the bamboo grove.

Her heart sank as she remembered her father’s admonition not to speak to the trader in the future. It was unfair. Of course, she had known that the two weren’t on very good terms. Her parents had gone to see MacNair soon after he had arrived.

The meeting had not gone well; they had returned out of sorts, and her father had pronounced the Scotch-American “not a Godfearing sort.” And though she could not know all the circumstances, Lydia had an idea that this had something to do with the singsong girls she had observed going in and out of the trader’s house with awesome regularity.

A sudden forceful knocking at the door interrupted Lydia’s reverie.

“It’s that mandarin,” Sarah said, glancing from one of the windows.

“Lydia, go to your room,” Reverend Holt ordered.

Lydia hastened to obey, though once in her room she glued her eye to the crack of the door to watch the proceedings. She saw her mother usher Ke Loo, the mandarin prince, into the front room, where her father waited.

It was rare for missionaries to meet the mandarins, though they could occasionally be seen traveling through the cities in sedan chairs borne by servants, with attendants marching before them striking gongs to warn the people that a great man approached, and others bearing boards upon which the prince’s titles were inscribed.

The first time Ke Loo had appeared, unannounced, at their door, Lydia had been appropriately awed and dazzled by the elegance of his silk robe, elaborately embroidered with dragons front and back.

“Your daughter is old,” Ke Loo had informed Reverend Holt, though at that time she had been only fifteen. “She should marry. I have need of a wife. I will marry her.”

To Lydia, eavesdropping that time as well, it had been thrilling and certainly flattering, but she had been relieved when her father had haughtily rejected the proposal. For all of his obvious wealth and importance, Ke Loo had a cruel face, with hooded, leering eyes and a thin, austere mouth.

He had left in a pompous flurry, but Lydia had been right in thinking that the mandarin was not accustomed to having his demands refused, for he had come now to make them again.

“Daughter should be married,” Ke Loo was saying in the next room. “I will marry her.”

“My daughter will marry when and where we choose,” her father said, his tone angry, for he was no more accustomed than Ke Loo to having his opinions challenged.

The mandarin gave him a smile that had nothing of pleasure or friendship in it. “Is not a good time for foreign devils in China,” he said.

“Are you threatening me?” Papa said, jumping from his chair. “I’ll talk to Colonel Wu—”

“Colonel Wu most busy now,” Ke Loo said, unmoved by the show of anger. “The cholera, it strikes everywhere, soldiers must help bury the dead.”

“This is outrageous! I won’t be....” He stopped; to Lydia’s horror she saw her father suddenly sway to and fro. He steadied himself with a hand on the back of a chair. In an instant, Sarah was at his side.

“Papa,” Lydia cried, forgetting propriety and dashing from her hiding place. Ke Loo’s eyes widened in shock at the breach of etiquette; a maiden ought to remain chastely hidden from the eyes of her suitor. That did not prevent him, however, from greedily feasting his eyes on her, particularly upon the red gold of her hair, so unlike the hair of a Chinese maiden, and the pale smoothness of her skin, like the petal of a lotus flower.

It had been the merest chance that had brought her to his attention. He had been stopping only briefly in this city, on his way from Peking to his native city of Kalgan, in the shadow of the Great Wall, and he had happened to glance from the curtains of his sedan chair, to see what at first he had thought a mere vision.

He had made up his mind at once that he must have her, this strange pale girl whose hair burned like the first hot flames of a new-laid fire. And have her he would. He was unused to being refused what he wanted, and he could not understand these foreign parents, with a daughter already past the marriage age and unclaimed, who would not reach agreement with him. He was determined.

“I’m all right,” the reverend was assuring his wife and daughter, but Lydia had discovered that his skin was hot to the touch. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave us now,” he said, addressing the Chinese prince.

“I will come another time,” Ke Loo said, bowing from the waist.

“You’ll only be wasting your time.”

Ke Loo made no reply, but smiled his mysterious smile, and with a final nod turned and went out. In a moment they heard him shouting to his bearers as they started off along the twisting street.

“Joshua, you should rest,” Sarah said.

“I’m fine, I say,” the reverend insisted, glowering at the door through which the mandarin had disappeared. After a moment he gave a sigh, and turned his attention to the two women.

“I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you,” he said. “I’ve decided it’s time we traveled down to the coast, to Shanghai. We’ll get our things ready tonight, and start out in the morning.”

“The natives,” Sarah started to say.

“It’s got nothing to do with that nonsense,” he said, a trifle too emphatically. “There are things I need, some books I ordered, for one. And I rather thought you’d both welcome a change of scene. Of course, if you’d rather stay here....”

“No,” Sarah said quickly. “No, we’ll be ready in the morning.”

“We’ll leave at dawn, then,” he said. “Might as well get an early start.” He went out of the room. It seemed to Lydia that his gait was a trifle unsteady.

* * * * * * *

They did not leave at dawn, however. Hours before that, Lydia was awakened by her mother.

“Your father’s been taken ill,” she said, shaking Lydia from her sleep.

“Is it—is it the cholera?”

“I’m afraid so.”

What followed was like a nightmare that seemed to go on and on without end. For three days Reverend Holt’s condition worsened, while his wife and daughter ministered to him as best they could, and listened in dread to every sound from without. They could not know what turn outside events had taken.

Sarah dismissed the servants, fearful that one of them might let it be known that the master was dying, so the two women were left unprotected. Women did not count for much in China, and it was not unlikely that someone might try to take advantage, particularly in view of the anti-white uproar sweeping the country.

To add to their fears, Ke Loo returned once more to press his suit.

“My husband is away at the moment,” Sarah said. The reverend had the misfortune to utter a low moan just then. Ke Loo’s eyes slid in the direction of the bedroom.

“One of the servants,” Sarah said, alarmed.

Ke Loo left, but Sarah was certain he would return. It was horrible; she hadn’t an ounce of courage of her own. She had always journeyed without question or hesitation anywhere her husband had chosen to go, but in doing so she had only relied upon her utter confidence in him and upon his own lack of fear. To travel with him into the interior of China had seemed no more alarming than any of a dozen other trips they had taken, without any harm befalling them.

To be left in China on her own was terrifying beyond belief. If only they were in Shanghai, or Hong Kong, somewhere where there were other Americans or English; but she had no idea even how to arrange their transport to one of those places. Her husband had never allowed her to trouble herself with such matters. She spoke not a word of Chinese, though Lydia had learned a smattering of the language. At any rate, it was unthinkable that two women could travel across the Chinese mainland without a man’s escort. Yet they surely could not stay here, either.

Joshua Holt died on the third day of his illness. Lydia came into the room to find her mother weeping softly. Her father’s eyes, looking ghastly in his pale, sunken face, stared unseeingly upward. Though it filled her with horror, Lydia forced herself to close his eyes.

“What shall we do?” she asked her mother. Sarah shook her head helplessly.

I shall have to be strong, Lydia thought suddenly, for both of us.

It was a new idea to her, and in a way more frightening than all the rest that had happened, or was still threatening to happen. Never before in her life had she really needed to be strong, for there had always been her beloved father to rely upon. Now, though, every instinct told her that it was on her shoulders, and not her mother’s trembling ones, that her father’s mantle of responsibility must fall.

“We shall go to the Cabots,” she said aloud; the Cabots were the missionary couple who lived in Mei Fu, thirty miles away. “We’ll wait until night, and travel by darkness.”

Her mother meekly accepted her authority, and at Lydia’s direction began to pack their bags. It did not apparently occur to her to ponder the one question that most worried her daughter: what if the Cabots had already left that city?

They were packed and ready to go by the time darkness fell, but Sarah would not leave without burying her husband.

“We can’t just leave him here like that,” she insisted. “Suppose they came in a mob, there’s no telling what they might do to him.”

“Yes, of course, you’re right,” Lydia said, though her common sense urged her to flee without any delay. “It will have to be in the garden, then. We’d better find something for digging.”

The moon had not yet risen and the air was hot and heavy with dampness, threatening a storm. They found a pair of hoes, but no shovel.

“Under the plum tree, I think,” Lydia said, indicating the straggly tree at the far corner of the enclosure. “It stays damp there. The ground will be softer.”

The ground was indeed soft under the tree. Even so, it was hard work. Within minutes Lydia’s clothes were clinging wetly to her. She had vowed that she would not think of the purpose of their labors, but it was impossible to judge the size of the pit they were scratching from the earth without considering what was to go into it.

The stillness of the night was broken by a distant sound of shouting. The two women stopped their work, cocking their heads, as a single cry of terror, like the soprano in a mass, soared high and clear above the others, ending abruptly.

“Bandits,” Lydia said, straining at the silence that had rushed back over them; or was that a footstep beyond the garden wall? Had someone whispered, or was it only the restless birds in the branches above them?

“Someone being slaughtered,” Sarah said.

Lydia shuddered, trying to think of something to say, as her father would have done, to break the tension, and all too aware of her own inadequacy.

Sarah’s hoe slipped from her fingers and dropped with a soft thunk to the ground. “I can’t do any more,” she gasped, swaying slightly.

Lydia steadied her with an arm about her shoulders. “It will do,” she said.

It would have to do, or they would be too exhausted to travel, and go they must, for she was convinced that the longer they stayed here, the greater their danger, two women, alone and unprotected, in an alien and increasingly unfriendly land.

First, however, they must finish the grim task at hand. They went into the house. Almost at once, Sarah sank weakly onto one of the hard wooden chairs.

“I can’t get my breath,” she said.

Lydia came to her and wiped her brow; her mother’s face was burning to the touch. The cholera? But if her mother died....Lydia felt a fresh spasm of fear.

“You rest here,” she said.

She went into the bedroom alone. The shutters were open and she closed them before lighting the oil lamp. In its flickering light her father’s lifeless face had a waxen, unearthly look. Lydia knelt by the bed, meaning to pray, but her heart was gripped with fear and the words would not come. Finally, despairing, she got up again.

She put her hands under his arms, averting her face, and tugged at him. Though he had been lean, he had stood more than six feet tall, and now he would not budge.

“I’ll help,” Sarah said unexpectedly, coming into the room.

“You should be resting.”

“You’ll never move him alone,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. She took hold of her dead husband’s feet and motioned for Lydia to lift his shoulders at the same time.

It was done at last, the earth scraped back into place, the restless birds clucking a benediction. The moon had risen, then vanished behind a bank of clouds, and thunder rumbled in the distance as they started back to the house, breathless from their exertions. They had just reached the door when Sarah again swayed dizzily. This time she would have fallen had Lydia not moved quickly to her side.

“I’ll be all right,” Sarah insisted, though her limbs would not support her.

“Here,” Lydia said, leading her to the cot in the other bedroom.

“We must go,” Sarah protested feebly, too weak to resist being put on the bed.

“In a few minutes,” Lydia said. “You rest while I get everything ready.”

Almost at once Sarah’s eyes fluttered closed. Lydia stared anxiously down at her. Surely her fever was worse, and she was so weak already, how would she ever manage to travel thirty miles over the hills and rice fields?

Their bags were sitting on the hard-packed dirt floor in her parents’ bedroom. They were too much, Lydia decided. She would pack just the essentials into one small valise that she could carry herself. Later, if the uproar should die down—and that was possible; her father had told her that there had been outbreaks of anti-white sentiment before, but they had lasted only briefly—then they could come back for their other belongings.

Beyond that, her plans were necessarily vague. Her mother had a brother, Richard Whitley, in San Francisco. Once they traveled safely to Shanghai, surely they could book passage on a ship there. Brother and sister were not close, but he could hardly refuse to help them, could he?

She began emptying the freshly packed bags onto the floor, tossing things hither and thither. Her nerves were stretched taut and she gave a start at a sound from outside; this time she was certain she heard footsteps in the street. She held her breath, listening. The smoke from the lamp had begun to sting her eyes so that she saw through a veil of tears. She was holding the locket Papa had given her, and it slipped from her trembling fingers, falling open. Her father’s likeness gazed up at her, his eyes seeming to reproach her.

A sob caught in Lydia’s throat and she buried her face in her hands. It was hopeless. What could she do, a mere girl?

Another sound from outside brought her sharply back to reality. Yes, there was someone there. She jumped up and ran into the front room of the house, staring wide-eyed at the door. She heard voices and more footsteps, then suddenly an imperious rapping.

She held her breath. Who could it be? The Chinese hordes, come to kill them? Or someone to rescue them perhaps, the Cabots, or even the authorities?

The rapping came again, louder, more insistent than before. Lydia could neither speak nor move. Her heart pounding, she watched the door being tested gingerly at first, then shoved abruptly inward. Ke Loo came into the room, stopping when he saw her.

Lydia stared as if mesmerized. Ke Loo’s glance went around the room, and came back to her.

“I wish to speak to the father,” he informed her arrogantly. His expression as he regarded her was a contradiction. It was plain that he disapproved of being met by a mere female, for in a proper Chinese home they would remain out of sight when a visitor was present. At the same time, there was an unmistakable glint of pleasure in his eyes as he scrutinized her more boldly than politely.

“He—he’s busy,” she replied. “He’s writing a sermon.”

Ke Loo’s eyes flicked from one end of the room to the other. There was not a sound in the house.

“The mother, then,” he said, taking a step further into the room. “I will speak to her.”

“She’s busy also.” Lydia’s heart was pounding and she could barely trust her voice to speak.

Ke Loo came still closer. His lips contorted into a mockery of a smile. “You are alone?” he asked.

“No,” she said, a note of hysteria giving the lie to her denial. His grin widened.

“The father, he is ill?”

“No, he’s busy, I tell you.”

“In China,” he said, his voice as sleek and sinuous as the snake who lived in the little garden, “we honor the widow. I have much wealth. I am cousin to Dragon Empress. You and honored mother could live as queens.”

He spoke as if he knew Papa was dead. His eyes held hers for a moment. They went to her hair, and she realized for the first time that he had probably never seen hair that color before. It seemed to fascinate him. She had let it hang loose, and now he put out one hand, taking the long curls in his fingers, fondling their silky luxuriance.

“No,” she cried suddenly, jerking her hair from his hand. “I won’t marry you, I won’t.”

His nostrils flared angrily, and again his eyes darted about the room. “Where are the parents?” he demanded.

“They’re both indisposed,” she said, fighting a wave of hysteria. “You must go, please.”

She gestured toward the door. For a moment he hesitated, studying her as if reading the meaning of her actions. Then, without a further word, he whirled about and, silk robe rustling, went out the door. She ran to it, watching as he entered his sedan chair, the curtains falling to conceal him from view. His bearers, so thin and frail looking that she wondered how they could manage the weight, hoisted the poles onto their callused shoulders and set off at once with the peculiar jogging motion they used.

She slammed the door shut and ran into the room where her mother was sleeping. “Oh, Mama, Mama, wake up,” she cried, shaking her mother’s shoulders. “We’ve got to leave right away.”

Though Sarah opened her eyes, she seemed to focus them with difficulty, and her skin was burning to the touch.

“Lydia? What...?”

“It’s Ke Loo, Mama, he’s been here, and he’ll come back, I know he will. He knows about Papa, I don’t know how, but he does, he knows we’re alone. Oh, Mama, we’ve got to leave right away.”

“Ke Loo, the mandarin?” Sarah’s fever-wracked brain wrestled with this information. After a moment she struggled to sit up. “Yes, yes, you’re right, we must go. He won’t rest until he’s carried you off. Help me.”

With Lydia’s help she managed to get to her feet, though she swayed unsteadily. Lydia left her a moment and ran to get dark cloaks for both of them.

“The bags,” Sarah said, seeing them on the floor, their contents scattered about the room.

“There isn’t time, we’ll send for them later,” Lydia said. “Hurry.”

She paused just long enough to extinguish the oil lamps, plunging the house into darkness. Outside the moon had vanished again behind the clouds and the rain that had been threatening had begun to fall. Staying to the shadows, the two women stole from the house.

“Not this way,” Sarah said, hesitating. “The gate’s over here.”

“We won’t be able to go there,” Lydia said. “You’re not well enough to travel so far. We’ll go to Mr. MacNair’s.”

“The Scotsman?” Sarah came to an abrupt halt. “But we can’t. He’s not a God-fearing man. And all those Chinese girls...it won’t do.”

“It will have to do, Mama,” Lydia insisted, urging her along. “He’s white, and a man, at least. He can’t refuse to help us, I know he can’t.”

Sarah came, but reluctantly. “Your father didn’t like him at all. He’d be shocked to know we went there,” she said.

Father can’t help us now, Lydia thought, but did not say it aloud. They ran across the roughly paved street.

They had gone only a few yards when the sound of running footsteps brought them up short. “Someone’s coming,” Lydia said. “In here, quick.”

She thrust her mother into the deeper shadows of a doorway. They huddled together, watching the way they had come. Already Lydia’s cloak was soaked through from the rain and she could feel her mother trembling through her clothes.

Ke Loo’s sedan chair materialized out of the rain. This time he came with several attendants, burly-looking coolies wearing, despite the storm, nothing more than loin cloths, their hair in long pigtails down their backs. Two of them, Lydia saw, carried large sacks flung over their shoulders. The procession came to a halt outside the house she and her mother had just quitted.

For a moment Ke Loo leaned from the sedan chair, conferring with the two coolies. Then he disappeared within the curtains, and the two ran stealthily toward the dark house.

Lydia shuddered. They had left not a moment too soon. Ke Loo had come back, clearly intending to take them by force. He had known somehow that Papa was dead. He had guessed the truth, that mother and daughter were without masculine protection. In China, that meant they were at the mercy of a man such as himself.

“We mustn’t stay here,” she whispered, urging her mother from the doorway. She had seen everything she needed to see, and to remain where they were was to invite discovery. When Ke Loo learned they were gone, he was certain to look for them.

An alley led from the street a few doors down, and in a moment more it had swallowed them up. As they vanished into its gloom, Lydia heard an angry shout from the direction of their house.

Though it was only a few streets to Peter MacNair’s house, it seemed to take an eternity to reach there. At any minute Lydia expected to hear the sounds of pursuit. She hurried her mother along as quickly as she could, but Sarah was by now barely able to walk. Lydia was half supporting, half carrying her by the time they arrived, stumbling and staggering through the rain.

Lydia felt a surge of relief when she saw the dim light filtering through a shuttered window. She had been afraid to contemplate the possibility that he might not be there, and there would have been no place else for them to turn.

Of course, they still did not know what kind of welcome to expect, but though she would never have said so to her mother, she could not help being glad that, if they had to flee, circumstances had forced them to come here. It was as if heaven were granting the secret wish that she had made, that the Scotsman would somehow take notice of her, instead of ignoring her as he had done before.

He’ll see now that I’m no child, she thought, without at all considering the full import of the idea.

“You wait here,” she said, guiding her mother to the shelter of a gateway. “I’ll be right back.”

She was grateful that her mother was too weak to argue. She was sure it would only alarm Mr. MacNair to find a sick woman on his doorstep, without a moment to be prepared for the event. And if it crossed her mind that this way she would have a moment or two of his undivided attention, she steadfastly refused to recognize that thought as she ran up the path and tapped, rather timidly, at his door.

To her surprise the door swung open almost at once upon what she thought at first to be an empty room, before she realized that whoever had opened it had stepped behind it as he did so. As a result, neither of them could, for the moment, see the other.

“About time you got here,” a masculine voice said from behind the door. “Get inside, before I get my death of pneumonia.”

Speechless, Lydia stepped obediently into the house. As the door started to swing shut after her, the male voice added, “And get those clothes off right quick. I’ve had my fill of waiting.”

Lydia gave a horrified gasp and whirled about.

“Damnation,” Peter MacNair swore, his mouth dropping open in astonishment.

His surprise, however, was nothing compared to Lydia’s, for the closing of the door had revealed the handsome Scotsman behind it, and he was as naked as the day he was born!