He was no longer looking at her. His lashes were lowered, his face as silent and withdrawn as carved marble. Gradually his breathing changed, grew deeper, slower, something she could feel but not hear. As it altered, he altered: he still seemed powerful and solid, and yet the aesthetic purity of his features gave him an unreal aspect, like something from an artist’s dream of absolute and flawless force. In the colored light, his hair was gold and red and a thousand subtler tints; his body in the dark clothing distilled midnight into life.
“Now,” he murmured, lifting his lashes. “Pull.”
Leda clasped his ankle and slowly began to exert a light tension.
“Harder than that.” He met her eyes, and she bit her lip, gripping more firmly. His face never changed, and yet she felt his intensity, his active acceptance of the agony that this must cause. She felt him begin to oppose her strength with his, and had to set herself back against him, harder and harder, until her whole weight hung entirely on her hands. She heard a grating sound.
“Don’t let go,” he said softly, catching her in the instant of revolted surprise before the nerve fled her fingers.
She nodded, feeling faintly sick, puffing her lower lip free, still holding steady and hard as he leaned over. She closed her eyes quickly, before she saw his leg, and kept them squeezed shut.
“All right,” he said in a calm voice. “Very slowly, ease your hold. That’s enough—keep some traction on it.” She heard the sound of the newspaper. She couldn’t help herself; she opened her eyes. He moved with methodical assurance, wrapping the stiff splint of newspaper, an inch thick, around his leg, tying it fast with the strips of towel above his knee and twice down his calf. He held the last strip toward her. “Can you tie it at my ankle?”
His peaceful manner gave her confidence. Carefully, without allowing his foot to touch the floor, she bound the splint closed. It took some effort, for the paper stuck out an inch beyond his heel, requiring her binding to hold against the pressure of the thick casing bent over the top of his foot. But she was surprised at the strength and rigidity of the makeshift dressing.
“Are you a doctor?” she asked.
“No.”
Something in his voice made her look up. Now, after his leg was immobilized and the punishment over, he sat very still; for a frightening moment his eyes seemed to lose focus and drift, sliding halfway closed. She lunged up and seized his wrist, thinking to catch him before he toppled forward in a faint, but he did not move or slump down onto her push—he seemed to yield and yet check her at the same time, so that she stopped halfway through the motion with the sensation of pressing against a wall, though it was only his forearm beneath her fingers.
She groped for equilibrium and found that instead of steadying him, it was he who braced and balanced her against collapsing over on his shoulder. “Forgive me,” she gasped, finding her feet. She let go and stepped back.
“Did I hurt you?”
He looked up at her. His subtle smile, so improbably beguiling, seemed to focus all the controlled energy of him into a ray of light on her heart. “You didn’t hurt me. You did well. I want to ask you something important.”
“What?” she asked warily, recalled to the reality of conversing casually with a commonplace thief.
“Can you write?” he asked.
“Certainly I can write.”
“Type?”
She almost hesitated. She almost took an instant too long to answer. He was alert and observant, but her sudden lie came out with the smoothness of utter reckless desperation. “Forty words a minute,” she said, repeating what she’d read in an advertisement for expert typists. “With accuracy.”
He appeared to accept this lavish exaggeration with complete confidence. “I have a great need of someone like yourself. Will you come to work for me, Miss Etoile?”
“As a robber?” she squeaked.
He gave her a weak grin and shook his head. “I’m finished with stealing. Just being in your public-spirited presence has reformed me of burglary.”
Leda gave a little snort of disbelief.
“I find myself in need of a secretary. A man Friday, you might call it. It may be a little surprising to you, but I have rather extensive—and legitimate—business interests.” He bent down and began to retie the full black cloth over his calf and the makeshift splint. “It looks as if this leg will be somewhat confining to me for the rest of the time I’m in England. I’m going to want someone to assist me with my concerns. In Hawaii I’d pay a hundred and fifty American dollars a month. With the exchange rate—” He straightened up. “Say—ten pounds a week?”
“Ten…pounds…a week?” Leda repeated.
“Does that sound fair?”
She sank backward against the table. “Fair,” she said, weak with astonishment. “Fair!”
“For forty words a minute.”
She stood up, her spine stiffening. “I cannot. I couldn’t possibly. You’re a criminal.”
“Am I?” He looked at her steadily. “Truth is something you have to know for yourself. I don’t have the words to persuade you.”
She put both hands on the sides of her face. He was a criminal. How could he not be a criminal, sneaking about with stolen goods and a mask in the middle of the night? Ten pounds a week! Only an outlaw could pay such absurdly high wages for a secretary. He might have killed her in the dark—he almost had; he’d admitted it himself. And stayed with her, and helped her breathe. Hidden up in the ceiling beam, no gentleman, the wretched beast; and then looked guilty for it.
She lowered her hands. “If you’re not a criminal, then what are you doing stealing all these swords and things?”
For a moment he was silent. Then he rubbed his chin and said, “There’s no name for it in English.”
“Oh, is there not? ‘Burglary’ seems descriptive enough.”
“Kyojitsu.” He looked levelly into her eyes, not wavering. “False-true.”
“‘False-true’?” she repeated with heavy skepticism.
He made his hand into a fist and spread it open, as if a better definition would unfold out of it. “Deceit and honesty. Tact. Subterfuge. Weak and strong. Bad and good. A ruse. It means all of those things.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked at her patiently, as if she were a backward child. “My intent. You asked me why I removed things from their conventional place.”
No wonder Miss Myrtle had always warned her against men. Provoking creatures.
“Well, I’m afraid I’ve no talent for Oriental riddles,” she said testily. “Perhaps you will tell me what are these ‘legitimate’ businesses of yours?”
“Shipping, for the most part. I manage the Arcturus Company for Lord and Lady Ashland, and I have my own—Kaiea Shipbuilding and Transport. I have a timber mill on the North American coast. Some holdings in cotton and sugar markets. Several banks. Marine insurance.” He smiled. “Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know.”
“I might be making this up. Kai ea means ‘rising sea’ in Hawaiian. Arcturus was the name of the tea clipper Lord Ashland’s uncle built in 1849. Lord Ashland rechristened her Arcanum. But perhaps none of that is true. I might be a quick thinker and a good liar.”
“I believe there are such,” she said majestically.
“Then I could answer your questions for a thousand years, and you wouldn’t be any nearer judging what I truly am.”
“What I do know, Mr. Gerard, is that you’re the most singular person I’ve ever had the ordeal of encountering!”
He watched her, his eyes dark silver, like the moon on a wild and cloudy night. Slowly, he shook his head. “What you know here,” he said softly, holding his fist against the center of his body, “that is the truth.”
Ten
Breakfall
Hawaii. 1872
Dojun never taught him the songs. Dojun never taught him anything except Japanese, never sang him anything except orders to work, err
ands to run, heavy wood to chop, and buckets of carp to carry from the fish pond to a distant neighbor who hadn’t even asked for them. Often Dojun wanted strange things: a flower from a tree limb far out of Samuel’s reach, a stone from the highest cliff at Diamond Head, a feather from a live bird that nested in the eaves of the lanai.
The flowers and stones were not impossible: Samuel learned to climb and jump; he walked with Dojun to Diamond Head on Saturdays, ten miles there and back, no stopping, and Dojun merely accepted the hard-won prizes with a nod and floated them in water in a black bowl above Samuel’s place at the dinner table. When dinner was over, Samuel carried the bowl to his room and lay on his bed, staring down into the bowl on the floor, studying it, wondering what it was about the object that made Dojun choose it.
The feather eluded him. He studied the bird and the nest for hours, watched what it ate and where it landed. He talked to some Hawaiians and learned to build a trap with a net and sticky sap spread on the branches. He trapped the sparrow, and took a feather from its tail before he let it go.
Dojun accepted the feather silently. In halting Japanese, Samuel explained the trap, pointed out the clever sticky snare and how he’d chosen where to hide it. Dojun listened without speaking.
At dinner, there was no black bowl and feather.
Samuel felt ashamed, not knowing how or why he’d failed. He spent long afternoons on the lanai, staring at the sparrow as it hopped along the eave. He climbed the nearest tree and sat still, unblinking, watching the tiny bird flit among the thin branches far out of his reach.
One day Master Robert came into Samuel’s room and caught Samuel practicing with a pincushion, trying to move with the flash of speed it would take to capture the unhampered bird in his hand. Robert thought it was play; he was six years old and rather foolish to Samuel’s mind—even little Kai, at three, could be quiet and thoughtful sometimes, but Robert never stopped wriggling or talking or crying except when he was asleep.
Samuel made it into a game for him, tying a string to the cushion, but Robert was so impatient and clumsy that he could never once jerk the target away before Samuel could capture it with his hand. Even if Samuel closed his eyes, he could outstrip Robert, over and over, until the younger boy began to cry, his wails of frustration rising to greater frenzy with each defeat.
Lady Tess came, standing in the doorway with a vexed look. Robert ran to her, burying his face in her skirts, crying so that he couldn’t even speak over his hiccuping sobs.
Samuel stood up as she hugged her son. “I’m sorry!” he said quickly. “I was teasing him. I’m sorry.”
He waited while she comforted Robert, a sick uncertainty curling in his stomach, making his breath seem thick and achy in his chest. She patted the boy’s back and let him cry out his baby frustration against her neck. When she stood up, Samuel took a step backward, watching her face, dreading to see a disapproving frown. His secret fear was that she wouldn’t want him anymore, that she would discover that she didn’t like him after all, and his room and his place and his anchor would disappear. He didn’t know where he would go or what he would do if she made him leave, but he only cared that she wanted him to stay.
“What a very silly pair of boys,” she said, and held out her hand to Samuel. “Come here and tell me what monstrous torment you’ve caused this little wretch.”
A huge relief swept him at her smile. He went forward, and when she put her hand on his shoulder he suddenly did what he hadn’t done in three years—he gripped her skirt in his fist and leaned into her embrace, holding tight to the single steadfast kinship he’d had in his life. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. “I’m sorry.”
She stroked his hair. Suddenly Robert wriggled from her arm, already out of sniffles and on to another topic of interest. Lady Tess let him go and stood with her hold tight around Samuel. The sound of Robert’s bare feet on the floor receded as he trotted off down the hall.
Silence fell around them. Samuel kept his fierce grip. She rubbed his hair between her fingers and squeezed him hard. “I love you, Sammy,” she said softly. “You’re safe here with me.”
She was the only one who could call him by that old and hated name; the only one who knew it. No one, not Dojun, not even Lord Gryphon, understood what Samuel’s life had been the way that she understood. She had been there. She had seen it. And still she said she loved him, and he wished that he could stand here in this secure and protected place and hold on to her for the rest of time.
When he looked at her face, she was wiping her fingers across her eyes. “There now,” she said, in a muffled voice. “You see that Robert is not entirely heartbroken. But I shouldn’t think you’d find it very rewarding to tease him anymore, unless you have a fondness for passionate scenes.”
“No, ma’am,” he said obediently, not letting go.
She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. “Smile for me, Samuel. You almost never smile.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and made a curve with his mouth.
She held the handkerchief and shook her head. “Good!” she said cheerfully.
He broke away from her and went to his koa-wood chest of drawers. He dug down beneath his clean shirts and found the sharp, pockmarked brown stone with the tiny sparkling shards of green in it that he’d brought from the cliff at Diamond Head. “This is for you,” he said, and held it out in his cupped hand.
She took the stone, and looked at it, and rolled it over with her fingers, touching it gently, as if it were something precious. “Thank you,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
He did smile, then. It wasn’t beautiful, not really, but he felt embarrassed and pleased anyway, and sat down on the floor, toying with the string on the pincushion, tugging it in little jerks across the slick wood. He heard her blow her nose again.
“You’re still helping Dojun,” she said. “You remember what Gryf told you, Samuel—you don’t have to do that. You mustn’t think you have to work.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He flicked the pincushion back and forth. “I remember.”
“As long as your schoolwork is as good as it’s been, all you have to do is play.”
“I like to work,” he said to the floor between his crossed legs. “I want to do it.”
She stood silently behind him. He felt her looking at him, felt all hot and agitated, but he only sat still, as still as if he were in the tree with the bird, and stared down at the floor.
“All right,” Lady Tess said finally, in a reluctant voice. “If you truly like it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I do.”
She stood there for another moment more, and then he heard her soft sigh, and the sound of her skirts rustle as she went away.
That afternoon, he tried to catch the bird. He waited in the tree, dived to grab the sparrow when it came, and fell out of the branches. Dojun found him woozy and helpless at the root of the tree. Samuel vaguely remembered that the butler put his bare foot on Samuel’s armpit and pulled on his arm, and it hurt awfully for an instant before he went blank. He woke up in bed, and stayed there for a week recovering from a dislocated shoulder and concussion.
He was afraid Dojun was disgusted with him. For a long time after that, he could not find the courage to speak to the Japanese butler. When Dojun came near, Samuel faded away, making himself unnoticeable: quiet and still and humble the way a mouse would hide in shadows. Until one day Dojun came upon him unexpectedly, passing through the empty dining room. Samuel heard his step; he had time only to move behind the door and freeze into invisibility. The butler laid the table setting, moving around the room with small chinks and clinks of silverware.
“Good at that, aren’t you?” he said in Japanese as he leaned over to place a fork. “Kyojitsu is difficult to learn, and already you know how to do it.”
Samuel knew Dojun must be speaking to him: no one else had any Japanese at all. Samuel didn’t know the word kyojitsu, and he was pretty sure Dojun knew he didn’t.
?
??Foolish people use only one kind of disguise.” Dojun went on setting the table. “Shin is what you are in your mind. What you are in your heart. Itsuwaru is pretending to be what you’re not. Together, they can be kyojitsu. It’s too easy to be a tiger all the time. If you’re a tiger, you do things the way a tiger does, you move the way a tiger moves, you use only set form, the kata, of the tiger. You meet a bigger tiger, and then what? You’re in trouble. Better to know the kata of a mouse, too. Better to know how to be small and silent. Maybe then the big tiger won’t see you, and you live to be a tiger again.”
Samuel listened, startled to hear Dojun speak of a mouse as if he’d seen into Samuel’s head. But he didn’t sound angry or scornful about it; he sounded as if it were a good thing. Slowly, Samuel took a breath and stepped out from behind the door.
Dojun just went on laying out the silver.
After a moment, Samuel bowed respectfully the way Dojun had taught him. “I can’t get the feather,” he said in Japanese. “I’m ashamed, Dojun-san.”
Dojun straightened up from the table and looked at him. The very foreignness of his features was reassuring. Samuel had never known anyone like Dojun: he never looked mad or hungry or eager. The enigmatic Oriental eyes made Samuel feel safe and curious at the same time.
“Why ashamed?” Dojun said blandly. “Got the feather, first time you tried, with the trap.”
Samuel hesitated. “I thought—it was wrong. You didn’t put it in the bowl.”
“You think too much. How do you know what’s right or wrong? You’re too young to know. You want too much. You want a feather in a bowl. So what do you do? You fall on your head to get it. Tonight I’ll put a feather in a bowl for you. Will that make you happy?”