Free Magistrates of Hell by Barbara Hambly Page B

Temple.
    ‘Ten cents, ten cents,’ agreed the Baroness affably. She spoke little English, but appeared to be conversant in the pidgin used by every servant and rickshaw-puller in the city. ‘Of course he’ll abscond the moment someone offers him eleven,’ she added, switching back to French as she straightened the veils on her flat, outdated little hat. ‘But there are always a dozen pullers just down Silk Lane, so we won’t have lost anything much.’
    Over tea at the Legation yesterday morning, Sir John Jordan had promised to arrange for Lydia to see something of the city in the company of one of the doyennes of the small European community. Lady Eddington, the senior woman in the British quarter, who would ordinarily have taken the newcomer under her wing, was incapable of seeing anyone in her grief, but in St Petersburg eighteen months ago Lydia had become acquainted with a cousin of the Baroness, who in any case would tolerate no interference with her right to overwhelm any visitor who came her way. To Lydia’s inquiry if Sir John could perhaps find some way to include Signora Giannini in the invitation, he had given her his lazy, intelligent smile and replied, ‘Leave it to me, ma’am.’
    Paola Giannini was the woman whose screams had brought everyone to Holly Eddington’s body in the garden Wednesday night. But having met the Baroness, Lydia realized that Sir John had assumed she’d been warned about her and sought to mitigate some of the impact of her company.
    Guidebook in hand, the Baroness strode through the carved gateway of flaking green lacquer and into the courtyard beyond. ‘You’ll observe the post-and-lintel construction of the ceiling,’ she commanded. ‘The main building is called the
cheng-fang
and invariably faces south, and it contains the most auspicious apartments of the establishment.’
    On the ship from Southampton, James had described Peking as a succession of mazes, like a series of puzzle boxes. Without her spectacles, which would have detracted fatally from her forest-green-and-lavender chic, Lydia found the city a sinister labyrinth of gray-walled lanes, brilliant and dirty shop-banners, brittle sunlight like white glass and the most astonishing cocktail of sounds and smells. Under the shadows of massive gateway towers, narrow cats’ cradles of the
hutongs
alternated with wide, arrow-straight processional avenues jammed with traffic, hopeless to keep track of or to orient oneself in.
    The rickshaw-pullers all worked for the men who owned the vehicles themselves, Paola had explained as the three rickshaws dodged nimbly between carts, porters, candy vendors, night-soil collectors and old gentlemen carrying birdcages: rather like cab drivers in London. Often the pullers slept in the rickshaw barns, and frequently they were in a sort of indentured servitude to the owners for other favors as well, a form of livelihood that merged into the criminal underworld of moneylenders, brothel-keepers, and men who bought guns illegally from the Army and resold them to the Kuo Min-tang.
    ‘Thus the bodyguards, you understand,’ the Italian girl had added, with a wave at the third rickshaw behind them, which contained Korsikov and Menchikov, immense mustachioed Cossacks who seemed to have stepped straight out of The Ballad of Ivan Skavinsky Skavar. ‘In truth, I have never had the slightest trouble since I came here – the President of the Republic is most careful to keep friends with the powers of Europe. Even so, I should not wish to be set afoot in the city alone.’ Like the Baroness – and everyone else in the Legation Quarter except the Americans, who in Lydia’s opinion could barely cope with English – Paola spoke French.
    Lydia had peered around her at the gray walls of the
hutongs
, the gates opening into courtyards full of children and laundry, trying to orient herself and failing. Now and then a particularly handsome roof would be seen over the walls, tiled in bright red or