He looked at her with such violence in his eyes that her voice trailed off.
“She cares nothing for how I look, thank God,” he muttered, as if he were the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Leda doubted that many other ladies had been of quite the same blindness as Lady Catherine. He was magnificent even as he sat in moody silence, contemplating his splint, a brooding Gabriel brushed by dark, invisible wings.
“This matter is of the utmost importance to me,” he said suddenly, without looking at her.
She fingered the notebook.
“I don’t know how to begin,” he said through his teeth.
She opened the book, uncapping the pen with a faint snap, blotting it against the square of absorbent paper tucked inside. Watching ink spread from the tip, she ventured, “She does not know of your—intentions?”
“Of course not. She’s been too young—I wouldn’t impose myself on her. She thinks of me as a brother.”
Leda allowed herself a wry smile, directed downward. “Perhaps more as an uncle, I should judge.”
“Do you think I’m too old for her?” he asked harshly.
Leda’s pen made an extra blot as her hand started at the sharp question. “No, sir,” she said. “Certainly not.”
“I’m not over thirty. I don’t know precisely. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I think.”
She bit her lip, her head still carefully lowered over the book. “I don’t think that is a concern,” she said.
“I’d wait until she was older, but I’m afraid—” He broke off suddenly and drummed his fingers across the sofa’s wicker arm. “She might be old enough to interest one of these damned English lords of the manor, anyway.”
Leda pursed her lips. “I’m sure that you wouldn’t like to fall into the habit of using rough language in her hearing,” she said quietly.
“I beg your pardon!” He met her eyes and immediately looked elsewhere, leaving an instant’s burn of barely suppressed emotion.
She ducked her head again. To Leda, it almost seemed as if he were aggravated by her, instead of any nebulous threat of English lords. It wasn’t a normal sort of conversation in the least—he only looked at her in flashes; he seemed to prefer not looking at her at all, for each time he did, his face grew taut with some strong feeling that Leda could not begin to fathom. Embarrassment, certainly—the whole topic was decidedly awkward enough—but there was more to his expression, something subtle and unsettling. She felt painfully self-conscious, her fingers fluttery. The blot beneath her pen grew larger as she watched it with her head lowered shyly.
A potent silence stretched between them, a bright mystery, full of uneasy fancies.
“She’ll be considered an heiress,” he said in a vague tone, the way someone would take up the thread of a topic that had been lost to contemplation.
Lady Catherine. They were speaking of Lady Catherine, of course. Leda cleared her throat and said, “I’m afraid that’s true.”
She gathered the courage to glance up. He was watching her hands, but just as she lifted her head he looked away, grabbing the newspaper that lay on the floor beside him, drawing it into his lap as he sat back. “I want you to take some notes,” he said, folding the paper and resting it against his thigh, scowling down at it as if what he wanted to know might be written there.
Leda sat with her pen poised over the book. She hoped that he would not speak too quickly in dictation.
“What do you recommend first?” he asked.
“With respect to Lady Catherine?” she asked dubiously.
“Certainly.” He rattled the paper. “What else would I mean?”
“Well, I…find myself at something of a loss, Mr. Gerard.”
“I suppose you haven’t known her long,” he said, with a touch of moodiness about his fine mouth. “You can’t be expected to be aware of her tastes yet.” He folded the paper, smoothed it, and then rolled it between his hands. “I’ve known her since she was a baby, and I can’t seem to figure them out myself.
Leda had no ready answer to that. The whole topic disturbed her profoundly.”
He held the rolled newspaper between his fists, frowning down at it. “How would you wish to be courted, Miss Etoile?”
Leda felt a sudden, wrenching weakness at the back of her throat. In dismay she stared down at the blurry book, desperate to hide herself and her silliness. “I’m not sure,” she said, very quickly, so that perhaps he wouldn’t notice anything wrong with her voice.
“You don’t have a single suggestion?” He slapped the paper against his open palm and gave a short, humorless laugh. “Take it backward, then. How wouldn’t you wish to be courted?”
She blinked rapidly. Sergeant MacDonald’s embarrassed face, all red and unhappy and helpless, crystallized against the blue-lined blank page. “I would not wish to be abandoned to contempt,” she said. “I would wish…to be stood up for.”
She felt Mr. Gerard looking at her. She felt it, because she could not lift her head—not after saying something so ludicrous.
She thought he would laugh at her, or think she was mad.
“I see,” he said slowly.
“Excuse me. That’s hardly to the point, is it?” She straightened her spine, trying very hard to be brisk. She clutched the pen and wrote the date and time and place at the top of the page. “I think—I believe that propriety demands you begin by asking Lady Catherine’s father for permission to pay your addresses, if you have not already done so. Shall I make a note of that?”
He reached for his crutches and pulled himself to his feet, swinging forward a step until he stood facing out the great window. “I’d never abandon her to anything—contempt or anything else. Never. I would have thought she would know it. Do you think I should tell her so?”
Leda looked at his back, at the athletic width of his shoulders and the strength in his hands. She remembered his face as she had set his leg: concentrated and severe and beautiful in its intensity.
No, this man would not fade in the face of anything. Whatever else he might be, he was not impotent.
“I’m sure that she knows,” Leda said. How could she not? she thought.
He looked at her sideways. She could not hold his glance, even for an instant. Something inside of her would not manage it.
She evaded his eyes, seeking an orchid hanging near his shoulder as a focus. “She told me about the shark, you recall. She seems very fond of the story, and your part in it.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve always watched over her.”
“You’re very good,” Leda said mechanically. “I’m certain Lady Catherine is much obliged to you.”
He was silent for a long while, staring out the window.
“So,” he said at last, “I’m to tell Lord Gryphon? I suppose that’s sensible.” He didn’t sound as if he looked forward to the prospect.
“I believe most young men find it rather dire, speaking to fathers.” She attempted to put a note of sympathy into her voice. “In this case, as Lord Ashland is well acquainted with your background, it would seem to be merely a polite formality.”
He gripped the crutch again. “How sanguine you are.”
“I shouldn’t think he would have any objections—” She stopped.
“Unless he knows me as well as you do?”
Leda moistened her lips, fiddling with the pen.
“I hope I haven’t been mistaken in you, Miss Etoile. I’ve given you the power to ruin me. Are you a turncoat?”
“No,” she whispered, not knowing why, or why not, but sure that, God forgive her, she would not go to Lord Ashland and tell him that the man who wished to marry his daughter was a nightwalker and a thief.
Mr. Gerard looked into her eyes then, with an intimacy and connection that Leda felt all down through her in a bloom of painful pleasure.
If only, she thought, a foible she had been careful not to indulge in all of her life.
Oh, if only….
Sixteen
; Heart Blade
Hawaii, 1879
“The warrior who walks in disguise will avoid salty things, seasoned things, food pungent with oils, garlics, and other such stuff,” Dojun said. “He does not reveal himself to the enemy by what he has touched, or where he has been—his passions do not betray him. Shinobi is to be one hidden. Another way to express this is nin, which is patience, endurance, perseverance.”
Samuel listened to the words, to ten thousand repetitions. His intrigues had been as easy as sweetening an Arcturus deal by making a large donation toward the purchase of the first steam fire engine in Honolulu, and as hazardous as tangling with a secret Chinese Hoong Moon society over protection payments, then bending to light the gas cookstove in the harbor office one morning…and smelling gunpowder an instant before he struck the match.
“Consider,” Dojun said, “the character for nin is created by writing the character for ‘blade’ above the character for ‘heart.’ Shinobideru is to go out in secret; shinobikomu is to steal inside; shinobiwarai is silent laughter; the jihi no kokoru is the merciful heart. All of these things are yours. Do not strive. Do not want. Be as the bamboo leaf bent by the dew—the leaf does not shake off the drop, and yet the moment comes when the dew falls and the leaf rebounds, releasing strength.”
Samuel considered the leaf. He did not think of it in a conscious manner, but without boundaries between himself and the bamboo and the dewdrop. Something shifted at the edge of sight. The drop fell. Samuel’s body drifted backward with Dojun’s strike, riding the force and slipping outside it.
He resumed his kneeling position. There was not a man in Chinatown now, Oriental pākē or native kanaka, who would move on him.
Samuel knew it. He could stand in a Chinatown street and sense it, as he could sense the spicy, sickly odor of opium that floated on the back of mango and fish and mud smell. No one would give him any particular notice; no one would skirt him as if he were worthy of exaggerated respect; but some burly Hawaiian who guarded the door of the nearest gambling den would watch him with a lazy smile of brotherhood.
With his blond hair and height, Samuel was not the only fan kwai who dealt in Chinatown, but he was foremost of the foreign devils, as Arcturus was the preeminent non-Chinese business in the quarter now, because Samuel contracted with anyone fair and to his word, and fought fire with fire if the need arose.
Dojun still demanded the limit of Samuel’s reserves. It had long ago become a strange contest between them, nothing so profitless as sauntering into a saloon and picking a fight with drunken sailors for practice. Samuel had encountered aggressive drunks once or twice, and it was too pathetically easy to turn and give way and let them defeat themselves by crashing face-down on the floor. No, it was Dojun who challenged him, who pulled invisible strings and found the subtle discords and weaknesses in Arcturus affairs where there should not have been snags. It was Dojun who matched Samuel and Arcturus against every faction and clan in Chinatown, one after the other, and then let him find his way out of it, by strength or by guile.
He knew what it felt like to fight for real now. They break you head kotsun, you no get out the way.
So he got out of the way, and then came back—to pivot, strike hard, and slide into silence.
Wind. Fire. Water.
And always there was Dojun, speaking of peace and instructing in violence, telling him that he must take the ruthless center he’d discovered within himself and make stillness and serenity of it.
Dojun could have hit him a thousand times. And a thousand times, Dojun froze the attack one breath from completion, never touching Samuel; never breaking his vow.
“The shinobi warrior must carry the truth within him.” Dojun’s voice was calm, inexorable. “He does not fight for money or a love of destruction. Strength and power are nothing. He maintains intention. He is an illusion within a real world; he has given himself a disguise, as the mantis imitates the twig. It does not become the twig. It does not forget that it is a mantis. You must be careful of this.”
Samuel bowed low over his lap in acknowledgment, his hands resting palm-downward on his thighs.
“What do you do about women, Samua-san?”
The question came gently, a bombshell, as unexpected as one of Dojun’s ambush strikes. Samuel felt his face go hot; his body flooded with shame.
“Ah.” Dojun’s voice was interested. “They give you disharmony.”
Samuel didn’t know what to say. Awkwardness had taken over his arms and legs; he just sat there like a dumb beast, waiting for Dojun to reach inside and shred that part of him into scraps.
“You do not go with women?” It was phrased as a question, but Dojun spoke as if he knew with certainty.
“No,” Samuel whispered, staring straight ahead.
For a few moments, Dojun didn’t speak. Then he said in a thoughtful voice, “Women congest the senses. In general, it is best to avoid them. It is best to live in the mountains and eat mild foods—then the senses are sharpened; a warrior can perceive a woman at a distance, knowing even what work she is about without ever seeing or hearing her. But women are desirable, are they not? A warrior must know his own weakness. The bodies of women are beautiful, they move gracefully, their breasts are round, the skin is sweet and soft to touch. Do you think of that?”
Samuel was silent. He didn’t have the words for what he tried not to think of. He had only the images that beleaguered him to fierce desperation, and suddenly—appallingly—no way to hide what they did to him from Dojun. Samuel was horrified. Scalding humiliation covered him while he betrayed himself as he had not done since he’d been a schoolboy.
“Your body answers to this appetite even while I speak of it, Samua-san.”
Samuel felt the blood heavy in his veins. He kept his eyes open, gazing into space. Breathe in. Breathe out. He felt as if he were drowning.
Dojun’s voice wove softly in the silence. “This is shikijō, to lust, to flush color for a woman. Women distract you. But by a man’s passion for a woman the universal force of life, the ki, becomes concrete, and new life is created. It is a delicate question. It is not wrong for a warrior to lie down with a woman, but it is better in many ways if you do not. You must not yield to personal weakness. You must have the essential principles within you: rectitude, courage, compassion, courtesy, utter truthfulness, honor, loyalty. By these things you will know.”
Like everything Dojun taught him, it was simple, and yet agonizingly complex. But in this one thing Samuel hid himself, kept the terrifying strength of his hunger concealed even from his teacher. He had no rectitude that would control it, no courtesy, no honor, no compassion. Only the bone-deep fear of losing himself, of falling, falling, falling, down a well to nowhere.
“Instead, take this energy of shikijō and use it in the art I teach you,” Dojun advised. “It is a young man’s vigor. Focus your ki.”
Samuel bowed to show his gratitude for the lesson, as if it were like the others.
“Do not scatter your life force on women.”
“No, Dojun-san,” Samuel said.
“Remember this as a particular weakness within you. Exercise discipline in all things.”
“Yes, Dojun-san.”
“You are a warrior. Your heart is a blade.”
Samuel bowed again, and closed his eyes.
Seventeen
Miss Myrtle had never had any quarrel with the spirit of benign curiosity; indeed, she had often said that it added a much-needed dollop of piquancy to the conversation of ladies who knew one another well, and had no evil habits such as a tendency to gossip or meddle marring their characters, which the South Street ladies agreed that they did not.
Miss Lovatt seemed taken aback for a moment after Leda had announced her new position. “Amanuensis!” she exclaimed.
“What a very long word,” Lady Cove murmured. “I shouldn’t like to be asked to spell it, though I daresay that our dear papa would have spelt it in a moment, and just exactly, too.”
“It will be Latin, won’t it?” Mrs. Wrotham looked apprehensive. “I never was comfortable with Latin. It seems a very manly language, and dead at that. Why ever should one wish to put words that are no longer living into one’s mouth?”
Lady Cove shuddered. “Like swallowing fish.”
“Fish!” Miss Lovatt gave her sister an exasperated frown. “The word has nothing to do with fish. It is a person who takes dictation.”
“Yes,” Leda said quickly, “and I have my own bedroom in the house, and whatever provisions that I require for correspondence, fresh paper and pens and so forth, and in place of a common desk, Mr. Gerard has provided me with a very fine secretary commissioned by Lady Ashland’s father, the late Earl of Morrow, designed by His Lordship himself and built to specifications out of precious wood brought from the South Seas. Lord Morrow was a great traveler and explorer, Mr. Gerard said, and his house is full of exotic things.”
“Did His Lordship speak Latin?” Mrs. Wrotham asked, still anxious.
Miss Lovatt took issue with the question as being nothing to the point. After fiercely snubbing Mrs. Wrotham with a sharp suggestion that Mr. Wrotham himself, not to mention Lord Cove, had certainly spoken Latin, or read it at least, as any gentleman must who had attended Eton, she swept an arch glance around the little gathering and said, “You realize, of course, what this family must be?”
Leda and the other ladies humbly confessed ignorance.
“You will be too young to remember,” Miss Lovatt assured Leda. “But Lady Cove and Mrs. Wrotham must recall it. The Ashland tragedy—oh, it will be all of forty years ago now. All the family, the little children too, perished in a fire aboard ship on their return from India. A terrible, terrible thing—the poor old marquess was left here at home with nothing—I believe his heir was unmarried, and the younger son’s family was all on board, too. They were burnt up, every one of them.”
“Yes, I do remember!” Lady Cove said, with a sad shake of her head. “It was such a ghastly misfortune. I remember it perfectly; that was the year Lord Cove took his business trip to Paris, and even the St. James’ Chronicle wrote of the disaster, because the family were of such very high lineage, about the poor little children and how the pirates had killed them. And then not long after there was the India mutiny, and oh—the dreadful, shocking stories! I could not bear it; I couldn’t read of it, but people would go on speaking of it until it made one’s heart break.”