My Beautiful Enemy (2 page)

There was no light in the corridor—the electricity had been cut off. She braced her feet apart, held on to the doorknob, and listened, diving beneath the unholy lashing of the waves, 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 have been—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 staterooms. At the two ends of the cross-corridor 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 was not all right. She 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—and likely the weapon with which she had been assaulted.

The ship plunged. Catherine leaped and stayed Mrs. Reynolds before the latter’s 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 and 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 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. Illuminating a drenched Mrs. Chase, nightgown clinging to her ripe flesh, abdomen balanced on the rail, body flexed like a bow—as if she were an aerialist in midflight. Her arms flailed, her eyes screwed shut, her mouth issued gargles of incoherent terror.

A more distant flash of 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.

Lin.

A numb shock singed every last one of her nerve endings, so that she was cold and burning at once.

The man should be dead. He had been beheaded years ago, hadn’t he? She wiped the rain from her eyes. But he was still there, the murderer of her child. He was still there.

Sometimes she could no longer recall her infant daughter’s exact features, but always she remembered the warmth of holding the baby close—the awe that she should have been given such a wonderful child. Until she was sobbing over the baby’s lifeless body, with nothing in her heart but despair and hatred.

A dagger from her vambrace hissed through the air, the sound of its flight lost in the thunder that rent 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 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 ship began 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. She ducked one and deflected another from the back of Mrs. Chase’s head with the blade of a knife.

She 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.

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 a long scrap of dressing gown around her head. “Don’t worry about
Mrs. Chase. She’ll 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 it. 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 steamer 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 should have been beyond her. It came loose as his feet left the deck. She screamed and heaved it 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, over the rail of 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 flash of lightning split the sky, he had disappeared.

She began to laugh wildly—vengeance was hers.

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

England

1891

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 gaslight, fabled fogs, and smoky gentlemen’s clubs where fates of nations were decided between leisurely 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 Master Gordon’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 had never been 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, 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 Mrs. Reynolds.

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

In any case, she had not come to make a home for herself in England. Her task was to retrieve a pair of small jade tablets and deliver them to Da-ren, Manchu prince of the first rank, uncle to the Ch’ing emperor, and her stepfather.

The jade tablets, three in all, were said to contain clues to the location of a legendary treasure. Da-ren was in possession of one of the tablets, but the other two had been taken out of China following the First Opium War.

“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 illegitimate daughter of a Chinese courtesan and an English adventurer who had died before she was born.

She’d been a burden to her mother, a source of anxiety 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 Da-ren, the true father figure in her life, the man who’d brought her mother to Peking and given the latter 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, yet another attempt to win his approval?

Someday, she used to think, someday he would invite her to take a seat in his presence, and she would know for certain that she wasn’t simply an obligation her mother had left him with. But that someday kept receding and he was no longer a young man. She tried not to imagine the very great likelihood that on his deathbed he would glance at her and sigh with a mixture of exasperation and disappointment.

On the rail platform, a handsomely attired trio advanced, 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.