Nightsong. V.J. Banis
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!