Magistrates of Hell Read Online Free PDF

can make tea
nearly
as well as you do. But if Richard Hobart didn’t want to have Holly Eddington as his wife, all he had to do was send her home once they were married and stay out here in Peking. If he’s going to inherit that much money, he could afford not to live with her.’
    ‘True also,’ agreed Asher. ‘Which makes the whole thing doubly odd.’
    Together by the light of the single candle they tiptoed down the glacial servants’ hall to the door of the nursery. Mrs Pilley, a nameless mound of blankets, was a great believer in ‘cold room, warm bed’, but Miranda at least was tucked up under a number of eiderdowns with a warm cap tied over her soft fluff of red hair.
    After ten years of marriage to Lydia – and two miscarriages which had devastated that matter-of-fact, curiously fragile woman who had been everything to him from the moment he first laid eyes on her – the birth of their daughter seemed to Asher a miracle. When Professor Karlebach had telegraphed him in August, asking him to accompany him to China, Asher had refused. Even when the old man had crossed to England, arriving on Asher’s doorstep with the
Journal of Oriental Medicine
in his fist, Asher had had misgivings.
    Asher had read the article himself when it had appeared, and had recognized the description of the creatures he’d glimpsed in Prague.
    But it was Lydia who had said,
Of course we have to go
.
    He slipped his arm around her waist now, gently closed the door.
    Miranda
. Tiny, red-haired, beautiful beyond belief . . .
    And as safe here, he reflected, as she – or Lydia – would be back in Oxford.
    Possibly safer. Since the Boxer Uprising in ’01, the King’s representatives kept a sharp eye on everyone who came and went in the high-walled Legation Quarter.
    And curiously, he found his meeting with Ysidro that evening at Eddington’s reassuring.
    Deny it though Ysidro would, Asher knew that the vampire, in his curious way, loved Lydia. And he, James Asher, could ask no better protector for her than that yellow-eyed Spanish nobleman who had died before Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.
    Died and become Undead.
    The bedroom was arctic. Ellen had warmed the bed with a stone water-bottle, and it, too, had gone icy. By candlelight Lydia pulled off her tea gown and corset in record time and, night-gowned to the chin, scrambled beneath the feather bed, then immediately proceeded to use Asher’s legs as a foot-warmer.
    Later, as they were drifting off to sleep, she asked, ‘Are you really going to look into things and question Sir Grant’s servants?’
    ‘It isn’t my business,’ said Asher sleepily. ‘And, I have doubts about what I’m going to find. But yes. It’s only his word that will shield me from suspicion, and there are several people who might very well recognize me from my previous visit. I can’t really refuse.’
    Silence, and the scent of sandalwood and vanilla, as she rested her head on his shoulder and stroked his mustache into tidiness with her forefinger.
    ‘Did Ysidro say how long he’d been in Peking?’ A trace of hesitation tinged her voice as she spoke the vampire’s name. There had been a time when she had refused to do so – a time when she had turned her face from Ysidro completely.
You defend him, too?
Karlebach had asked, and she had had no answer.
    ‘We were interrupted.’ Asher spoke with deliberate matter-of-factness.
    ‘Or whether there were vampires in Peking?’
    ‘No,’ said Asher softly. ‘I wondered about that myself.’

THREE
    F rom the Wagons-Lits Hotel it was a straight walk of a few hundred yards along the decaying banks of the old canal, to the gray walls of the British Legation, massive in the morning sunlight. Rickshaw men followed Asher and Lydia like persistent horseflies, with cries of, ‘Anywhere Peking twen’y cent! Chop-chop,
feipao
—’
    Asher stifled the urge to shout, ‘
Li k’ai
!’ at them –
go away
! But it was always better when
abroad
– as His