.
the Reverend.
"Sir?" he whispered.
The Reverend's eye twitched, and his lips pursed ever so slightly.
"The robbers seem to have tossed something onto the ground before leaving," Ahcho said.
The Reverend opened one eye. "Spectacles, please."
Ahcho set down the item, found the glasses, placed them on the Reverend's nose, and carefully bent the soft metal wires around his ears. He dreaded the moment the object came into focus.
"What is it?" the Reverend asked.
Ahcho peeled back the corners of the cloth. "A human skull, sir. It appears to be that of a child."
The Reverend flinched at the word but then asked, "You say you found it on the ground?"
"At the base of the cottage steps where the boy— God protect him— was taken."
The Reverend took the small round thing into his hands and held it up before his eyes, where it glistened in the lamplight. Ahcho could not help but notice that it appeared delicate and refined, like a porcelain vase, although also quietly menacing, like a snake curled upon a sun-drenched rock.
The Reverend's face darkened, and his features shifted. They became tight and firm, all softness draining away. His eyes betrayed little, but Ahcho could sense a realization coming over him like a fog rolling over a mountainside in the morning. It was the same realization that Ahcho had arrived at some hours earlier.
"Dear God," the Reverend said. Then he looked into Ahcho's face and asked in a halting voice, "What have I done?"
Ahcho started to reach for his master's arm to comfort him but stopped with his hand in midair. He swallowed and waited for words to come forth, but none did. The two men looked at one another and understood something of which they could not speak.
Ahcho wondered if he should have simply tossed the skull into the desert grasses and not shown it to the Reverend. But with some consternation, he realized that he still had enough of the old superstitions in him to believe that ignoring it could bring the Fates down upon them all. Ahcho feared he was a weak man and an imperfect Christian, and this was the best he could do.
And yet he also reminded himself about the many Sunday mornings when the Reverend had spoken of Jesus's honesty and forthrightness. In order to obey the Reverend's entreaties to be like the Lord, Ahcho had had no choice but to show his master the skull. He could not hide so important a clue. For while the sight of it might ruin the Reverend, it might also help bring his son back to him.
Ahcho felt relief as he transferred the object from his old and weary hands into those of the Reverend, who was far wiser and bound to know what to do.
"Place it in here," the Reverend said. He pointed to the pouch with the twin golden dragons that the unfortunate madam had given the Reverend earlier that evening.
"You do not intend to wear that filthy peasant thing strapped over you?" Ahcho asked.
"I will carry it with me until dear Wesley is found. It shall be my hair shirt."
Ahcho would have liked to have asked what this shirt of hair was all about, but another wave of pain washed over the Reverend, and he shut his eyes.
Six
I n the first days and weeks that followed, as the Reverend regained his strength and his rib healed, his second-in-command, the Reverend Charles Martin, led several unsuccessful search parties into the Shansi Desert and the borderland provinces beyond. The Reverend was most grateful, and yet he could not have been more frustrated. While he waited for his compatriots to return, he wrote passionate letter after letter as he sought help from the Chinese authorities and the local warlords of the region. The American legation in Peking became involved for a time.
A long month later, Doc Hemingway granted permission, and the Reverend was finally able to take over the search. During his period of recuperation, he had devised a plan to visit every village of the mountains and plains. He set out right away. He followed rumors. Someone had seen a startlingly pale child in a market, or on a boat going upriver, or on the back of a Mongol tradesman's horse. The Reverend remained on the road all through that summer. He would return to the compound for a day or two but then quickly saddle up again. As head of the mission, part of his duty was to support and grow the outlying churches, yet everyone soon understood why he was gone so much of the time.
Confined at home through the humid summer months as the child in her belly held on, Grace had her bed turned to face the window. Her nervous condition remained inflamed, and Mai Lin saw to her health with strong potions. Grace could not shake from her rattled mind the feeling of her son being torn from her arms. The panic that had accompanied that moment hovered over her still. It kept her awake at night until Mai Lin arrived at a correct dosage.
When the moon spread a pewter glow over the rocky ground and a breeze from across the plains finally blew in milder, Grace was given respite and reward for her vigilance. The ghosts of her babies came back to her, and she was most grateful for their presence. They hovered just over the windowsill and beamed at her with their sweet, divine faces. Their high, angelic voices sang her to sleep, although a restless sleep it was. In that dreamy state, she listened to her angels of the desert, whom she came to both love and fear. As night wore on, she thrashed about in her bed, waiting for the visions to calm her. Sometimes it took hours for her to no longer reach out and try to snatch her children back. Instead, she would finally let them go and, when morning came, she woke with a pillow wet from tears but with a renewed lightness in her heart. Her children were out there, she was sure of that. It was only a matter of time before she was allowed to hold them again.
It would have been so much easier to simply give up, to lose one's faith; easier to turn against the Lord as she had on the first night after Wesley had been stolen. But from that dark moment, her true self had risen again. There was no denying she was a cheerful Midwestern girl at heart: an American girl, synonymous with optimism. And in so being, she understood that she must endure her greatest punishment. She must live with the hope, the infernal hope that love could survive even out here where nothing else did. Her son would return to her. She just knew it.
One evening near the end of summer, as Mai Lin prepared Grace's sleeping concoction by the water basin, the Reverend startled them both by rapping on the bedroom door. Mai Lin let him in and stepped aside. He did not seem to notice the old woman. Grace knew he had been terribly preoccupied since Wesley's kidnapping with his travels and attempts to find the boy. But she wished he would be kinder to the one person who had been kindest to her in the aftermath. Given her delicate condition, Grace felt certain that her current pregnancy could not possibly have lasted into the fourth month if it had not been for her skilled amah. The Reverend needed to appreciate that.
He strode into the room with remarkable haste and stopped at her bedside. He rattled as he walked now, the several pouches and bags he had begun to acquire on his summer-long trips making him sound altogether too much like Mai Lin, who wore similar belts of accessories. Grace started at the sight of him bedecked in his amulets but then quickly began to pat down her flyaway hair. She was glad that she had changed into a fresh gown that morning.
"My dear, this won't do," he said abruptly.
She looked down at her hands.
"People are beginning to wonder about us," the Reverend continued. "I would like you to accompany me to chapel tomorrow morning. The natives need our example."
She nodded. Of course she would. He was right. In so many ways, he was right.
"We must carry on, mustn't we?" he asked.
She lifted her chin and attempted a smile.
He pushed aside his long coat and the belts with the pouches hanging down as he sat at the side of her bed. The sack with the twin golden dragons was most handsome and bulged as if it held some sort of orb. She had meant to ask him about its contents, but she had seen him so rarely in the past few months, she did not wish to distract them from more pressing matters.
"My dear," he said, more softly now. He took