Dojun flicked his hand from his chest toward Samuel. “Me. You. No hit. No time never. Promise. Savvy, yeah?” He never smiled, never took his eyes off Samuel. “You make body believe Dojun, yeah? Head believe. Arm believe. Toe believe.”
Samuel only stared at Dojun warily. He knew it when he heard something that was too good to be true.
The Japanese man got up and walked to Samuel, stood in front of him with his legs spread in the shizen no kamae, the relaxed stance of readiness that would allow him to move easily in any direction. When he suddenly lifted his hand, Samuel flinched.
Dojun stopped the move with his hand at the level of Samuel’s shoulder, a foot away. “No buy it, eh?” He smiled dryly. “OK. Me you, no buy already either. No stupid, eh?”
He started to turn away. Samuel caught a small movement in the corner of his eye. Before he could recoil, Dojun’s hand swung with a lethal flash of white. Samuel stood braced against the wall, his soul dissolving, his eyes wrenched shut to take the blow.
It never came. He felt something like wind on his cheek, and when he managed finally to blink open his watering eyes, Dojun’s hand was still there, palm open and frozen in suspension, a bare breath from Samuel’s face.
Dojun’s fingers came against his skin, feather-soft. “Samua-chan. You believe Dojun. I promise. I no lie. No hit never.”
Samuel bit his lower lip, the only way he could keep it from trembling like a baby’s. He set his mouth hard against the weakness. “Tell me the word for ‘promise,’” he said hoarsely.
“Chikai.”
“Promise me in Japanese,” Samuel said.
Dojun stepped back, pressed his hands together and made a formal bow. “I pledge to you, Samua-san,” he said in his own language, “I will never strike you by intent for any reason.”
Slowly, Samuel gathered himself from his position mashed against the corner and stood straight. He put his palms against one another and copied Dojun’s obeisance, only he made his twice as deep, to say he was ashamed of himself, and sorry, and would do better, and believed Dojun’s promise with every fiber of his being.
Not quite every fiber believed, because when Dojun’s knee came up into Samuel’s face in the midst of the bow, his eyes squeezed shut automatically and his body started back in self-protection. But he caught the move half way, just as Dojun stopped the motion of his leg precisely short of impact. Samuel straightened up and stood waiting, trying to pretend the tears of relief and reprieve that were coursing down his face didn’t exist.
Dojun ignored them also. He seated himself again and went back to work on his chair leg. “No like boys down school, sō,” he said, as if all the intervening crisis had never occurred.
Samuel picked up a piece of sandpaper and fiddled with it, testing the rough edge against his finger. “It’s not so bad, I guess,” he said—and it truly didn’t seem so terrible, compared to how close he’d just come to utter annihilation.
“School-time, lotta fight boy. Fight bad thing, Samua-san. Dojun no like fight. OK, yeah, but boy don’t fight, only know two thing make for why. Boy scare. One thing. Boy too damn good never lose, two thing. You scare?”
“I’m not scared.”
“You say scare, no wanna go back down school.”
Samuel busied himself with sanding the planed side of the tansu chest. His cheek still ached from Dojun’s slap.
“You no scare. You good fight, eh?”
The sandpaper swished in a faster rhythm. Samuel bent over his work. “I’ve never had a fight.”
“Hey, I gonna teach fight, OK? Dojun damn good fight. Tiger-song, Samua-san. Remember tiger-song?”
“I remember.”
The strike flashed out of nowhere; Samuel saw it as Dojun’s fist rushed up under his chin. He jerked, freezing with Dojun’s hand just touching his jaw. He hadn’t even heard the Japanese man come up behind him.
Dojun moved back slowly. “Time here now. Listen good.” He held up his hand, and Samuel saw that it was closed in a fist, with only the little finger extended. Dojun opened his hand and made a fanning motion, as if scaring away a fly.
“Only one thing bad, Samua-san. You fight, somebody gonna hit. Me no hit, make chikai, got honor, no hit you. Dojun teach all day good fight, work, work, work. Samua-san learn how number-one fight, sō. Then you go out, onetime get hit—kotsun!” He slapped the heels of his hands together with a sharp sound. “You hurt, you stop fight, you one dead duck.”
Samuel didn’t have an answer to that. He put his head down and went back to sanding the tansu, and thought of taking the air all the way down into his body when he breathed, to calm himself.
“OK,” Dojun said. “OK. Sometime me, you, go down Chinatown, find somebody hit you.”
Thirteen
The maid who arrived in the morning with tea and fruit informed Leda that m’lady wished Miss Etoile to know the family would be attending the second service, and if it was convenient for miss to join them, the victoria would be ready at half-past nine, but if she wished to rest her self this morning, she was most welcome to do so.
The maid with hot tea and the simple, thoughtful message added to the dreamlike sensation Leda had felt upon awakening beneath a gold-and-blue canopy to fresh sunlight and creamy flowers. If she had thought about it at all, she would have assumed she would attend church quietly, slipping out of the house alone—or perhaps, just this once, neglect going in order to lie in bed and imbibe the amazing luxury of her surroundings. But declining Lady Ashland’s invitation was unthinkable: she hastily assured the maid that she would be honored to accompany the family to service.
Leda had never eaten pineapple, bananas, and oranges for breakfast before. Miss Myrtle had sometimes peeled an orange for dessert after dinner, but she had not much cared for any item which was not readily subdued with knife and fork. Pineapple was not something that heretofore had formed part of Leda’s experience. After the maid showed her how to remove the presliced crown and extract the sections that had already been cut inside the tough, prickly shell, Leda wasn’t entirely certain that the fruit was worth the trouble. It had a tangy, sourish taste that did not appeal. However, there was excellent toast, still warm and soaked in butter, and the tea tasted divine as she sat next the open window and sipped it just as she had been used to do in her own bedroom at Miss Myrtle’s.
Her black silk appeared, pressed and freshened. Leda was well-used to dressing herself and made certain that she was prompt to meet the family in the front hall. They were just as friendly and indulgent as they had been the night before, and by the time the carriage reached Hanover Square, Lady Catherine had managed to give a full account of last night’s dinner party. She particularly wished Leda to tell her if she had done the proper thing by declining the decanter of wine which the host had passed to her at dessert, because he had looked a little perplexed when she had done so.
After a more detailed inquiry, Leda made the conjecture that the host had meant to pass the wine decanter to the gentleman just beyond Lady Catherine, since a second glass of wine at dessert was something a lady was not supposed to require, and even if she did, by no means should she help herself to it, but the gentleman seated next to her would fill her glass.
“So you did very well to decline,” she assured Lady Catherine, “but perhaps he was concerned that the decanter didn’t go round the table then. Next time you may decline, and indicate to the gentleman next to you that he should fill his glass if he likes, and then things will proceed the way the gentlemen prefer. But I daresay they won’t be any the worse for not having had a second glass with dessert for one night.”
Lord Ashland and his son denounced that sentiment with good-humored jeers. “We need all the brain anesthetic we can get at these flings,” Lord Ashland said.
“Why, whatever do you mean, sir?” his wife inquired archly, sitting up straight and fanning herself. “I’m sure it’s the very best society, and the conversation is most uplifting, and the sooner one finds oneself fallin
g asleep, the more select one may assume the company to be.”
“Well, I like it,” Lady Catherine said cheerfully. “Some people are a little dull, it’s true, but they try so hard to make us welcome, and get so fluttery and anxious about something going wrong, that I can’t help but feel a little sorry for them.”
“When you ruined their party by not passing the wine, you silly cluck!” Her brother reached over and patted her knee. “Wait’ll Mother brings one of her pet jaguars to a ball because the poor thing’s too sick to be left alone. They’ll forget all about the wine.”
“I never brought Vicky to a ball, Robert. It was a charity luncheon. And I could not cancel because I was to speak.” Lady Ashland looked at Leda with a self-conscious dip of her chin, for all the world like a green girl caught with a spot of jam on her nose. “No one minded in the least, I assure you. She was never off the leash.”
Leda found herself nodding in spite of her bemusement; she couldn’t have helped herself from it, even if she hadn’t caught Lord Ashland’s teasing wink.
“This is Victoria the Fifth who attended the luncheon,” he said soberly to Leda. “She’s presently returned to hold court in her country seat. We find we’ve supported quite an ancient lineage of jaguars in Sussex from afar.”
“Taken over Westpark, the artful devils,” Lord Robert complained. “Fine thing, when a fellow finally gets a first look at his ancestral acres and can’t walk around the garden without some jaguar leaping through the bushes and scaring the wits out of him.”
“And we won’t even discuss the boa constrictor,” Lady Catherine added.
“Keeps the riffraff out,” their father said blandly.
Their mother cleared her throat, plied her fan, and maintained a dignified silence until they reached the church.
In the late-afternoon light, the drawing room of Morrow House seemed very airy, in spite of the massively carved marble hearth and majestic plasterwork ceiling. Against a background of faded gold damask walls, the furnishings were a strangely pleasant mixture of gilt-and-needlepoint love seats, bamboo chairs of the japonaiserie style, a plump sofa covered in multi-flowered chintz, and several lovely, simple tables of shining wood and alien design.
As Leda looked about her, she finally realized that the effect of lightness arose from the fact that, instead of the endless collections of picture frames and figurines and albums and antimacassars that made most drawing rooms she knew into cozy, cluttered nests, the tables and mantelpiece of Morrow House were bare of anything but more living orchids. Out in the conservatory that opened off the drawing room over Park Lane, the exotic blooms made spots of rich pink and purple color among the more mundane potted kentia palms and aspidistras.
Lady Ashland would not allow gas to be lit in the house, for it killed her flowers. The family were very particular in their requirements, the housekeeper had advised Leda in that manner that a good servant had: communicating with deferential loftiness that they were as strange as Chinamen. In order to safeguard the orchids and yet avoid a return to tallow and torches, Mr. Gerard himself had caused the house to be electrified on an earlier trip to London last year, among other prearrangements for the whole family’s first return to England in two decades—including having a closed cooking range, refrigerator, and ice cream freezer installed in the kitchen, the conservatory added along the entire front of the house overlooking Park Lane, filling the whole place with the rare tropical plants, and hiring a green houseman to care for them full time until the family arrived.
Her hosts really were quite endearingly outlandish, Leda thought. Lady Catherine, having returned with her mother from a Sunday garden tea, had knocked on Leda’s door in person, given her a piece of seedcake the girl had brought home in a lace “hanky,” as she called it, and begged Leda to come down and join everyone for cold supper in the drawing room. The girl was now busily plumping pillows around Mr. Gerard in his place by the front windows. Leda wasn’t quite certain what his feelings were about the attention; she thought Lady Catherine was perhaps not aware of how much it must hurt his leg to be padded and adjusted in that enthusiastic way, but he bore it with heroic calm. No doubt the new plaster dressing helped to protect him, but Leda saw the strain in his smile.
Lady Ashland must have seen it, too, for she lifted her head from the notebook in which she’d been writing and said, “For goodness sakes, Kai, you’re all but killing him.”
Her daughter straightened up, looking stricken. “Oh, no! Have I been hurting you, Manó? You should have told me!”
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.
Leda wondered if the man ever admitted that he felt any sort of bodily distress at all.
Lady Catherine, however, just gave a sigh of relief. “Good. I’ll only slip this pillow—”
“Kai!” her mother said warningly.
Leda saw Mr. Gerard and Lady Catherine exchange a look, the brief communication of two people who knew one another very well. “Perhaps you might bring me a book,” he said.
“There isn’t a book worth reading in this house,” Lady Catherine declared, settling herself in a chair next to Leda. “Let’s talk story.”
“You humbug wahine, talk-talk story all time plenty,” her brother said, strolling into the room and brushing her hair as he passed her. “Bumbye no got tongue left.”
“Close you ear, you no like, you,” she responded promptly.
“Mo’ bettah mahke-die-dead you mout’, blala.”
“It isn’t nice to speak pidgin when Miss Etoile won’t understand it,” Lady Catherine said righteously, and turned to Leda. “Did you know that Samuel once saved my life, Miss Etoile?”
“No, I didn’t,” Leda said politely.
“From a shark,” Lady Catherine said, with a theatrical lowering of her voice. “A great white shark, as long as from here to…that table.”
“Talk-talk,” her brother said, from the chair where he’ d settled in with the newspaper.
“That’s why we call him Manó,” she continued, without a pause. “‘Manó’ is ‘shark,’ and ‘kane’ is the word for ‘man.’” She pronounced it “kah-nay. Manó Kane. Shark-man. The princess herself named him that. It was a very great honor—because he was only ten or eleven years old, and he held me up out of the water on his shoulders while the shark went right past, like this—” She leaned over and made a graceful, sinister curving motion with her hand, passing within an inch of Leda’s arm, and then turned with a snap of her fingers all together that made Leda jump. “It was that close. It could have eaten us both. Chop-chop.”
“Would that it had,” Lord Robert’s voice floated from behind his paper.
“Honestly, Robert!” Lady Catherine flounced back in her seat.
“Well, I’ve only heard you tell this story about a hundred thousand times. You’d think you’d fought the dratted fish off with your own bare hands.”
“It’s a good story!”
He bent a corner of his paper down and looked at them over the top of it. “Why not let Samuel tell it himself for once? Might get a whole new angle on the thing.”
“Oh, yes!” Lady Catherine sat up and leaned over the arm of her chair toward Mr. Gerard. “Do tell it, Manó! Were you afraid? I was too little to even know what was happening, Miss Etoile, so I wasn’t really afraid. But I do recollect the shark. It was huge, wasn’t it?”
Mr. Gerard seemed to be more interested in his fist resting on the arm of his chair than in the size of the shark. “I don’t remember,” he said mildly.
Leda could see why it was Lady Catherine who usually did the story-telling honors.
“Well, it was huge. Wasn’t it, Mother?”
Lady Ashland took a deep breath. “Hideous,” she said briefly. “And huge.”
“They never caught it,” Mr. Gerard said.
It seemed a casual comment, but some undertone in his voice made Leda glance at him. He was still looking at his hand—until he slanted a glance of cool gray toward her. She had almost said,
“What a shame,” but she held her tongue when she met his eyes. He did not think it was a shame that the shark had never been caught. He was pleased.
How she knew that, she could not have said. But she knew it.
He seemed about to speak again, and for the first time Leda allowed herself to look directly at him for longer than the briefest of instants. Though he said little, he seemed to drain her attention so effectively that she had to labor just to make civil conversation. She actually had to strive against the temptation to sit and gaze at him like some ill-bred pumpkin, for Michelangelo’s mastery could not have created a more superb tribute to the human form than Mr. Gerard presented in living reality.
He was truly, forcefully beautiful, in a way Leda had never before known a man could be, outside of paintings and idealized art. One had, on occasion, seen gentlemen one might term “handsome,” or possibly even “fine-looking”; one did not as a rule see Apollo and Mars and Mercury fused into human shape and crowned like a ruined angel with hair of sunlight and eyes of hoarfrost…not, in any event, dressed in a smoking jacket and sitting with one leg propped up on pillows, quite in the manner of a tame man about the house.
A frown drifted into his expression while she held his look. Abruptly, as if she had disturbed him, his glance traveled back to Lady Catherine. It had seemed perfectly proper that Leda give him her whole attention, because he had appeared to be about to add something to the conversation, but the way he looked away so pointedly mortified her.
No doubt she had been staring. Most probably all sorts of vulgar people stared at him. He must be weary of it, and glad to be among those who had known him long enough to be accustomed to his appearance. The Ashlands did not give his flawless countenance the least notice. Even Lady Catherine, amid her solicitous attentions as she hopped up to take his supper tray from the maid and arrange it herself on a table beside him, only gave him a fond glance and a pat of her hand when she finished—just as if he had been a favorite uncle with the gout.