Magistrates of Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

Majesty’s Secret Servants would euphemistically say when they were poking around in countries where they had no business being – to pretend total ignorance of the local tongue. One heard far more interesting things that way. And in any case, he, James Asher, had supposedly never set foot in China before. He laid a gloved hand over Lydia’s, where it rested in the crook of his arm, and looked about him with the fatuous smile of an Englishman surveying a country that didn’t come up to British standards of government, hygiene, morals, cooking, or anything else.
    But he murmured to her from time to time. ‘This canal used to be better kept up . . . Behind that wall, where the Japanese Legation is now, was Prince Su’s palace . . . There was a lane over there that led to what they called the Mongol Market. The vegetable-sellers would arrive before dawn on market days with trains of camels, and the noise would drive anybody out of bed . . .’
    Lydia, for her part, turned her head with a gaze which appeared regal but was in fact an ingrained battle not to squint at a world which was nothing to her but blobs of dazzling color in the brittle bright Peking sunlight. The sewagy pong of the canal water mixed with flurries of charcoal smoke from the dumpling man’s cart, then sharp sweetness as they passed the vendor of sugared bean-cakes. She was longing to put on her spectacles, Asher knew, with a head-shake of regret. There were times when he wanted to go back and thrash the stepmother and aunts who’d told her she was ugly.
    ‘The Chinese say that when people first arrive in Peking they weep with disappointment,’ he remarked, ‘and when they leave, they weep with regret.’
    She smiled. ‘Did you?’ She had, Asher knew, been disconcerted at her first glimpse of it, from the windows of the train from Tientsin yesterday afternoon: stagnant pools around scattered congeries of pigsties, chicken runs, and clumps of low-built houses in the Chinese City. Even here within the towering walls of the Tatar City, and of the walled Legation Quarter tucked away in one corner of it, the impression was of dirt and desolation, gray walls, blind alleyways, and grinding poverty.
    ‘I was hidden in a corner of a boxcar filled with raw cowhides,’ returned Asher, ‘with a price on my head and fifteen German soldiers on my trail. So – no.’
    Lydia laughed.
    At the rambling old palace where His Majesty’s Ambassador still had his headquarters, Asher sent in his card and gave Sir John Jordan the same story he’d given Hobart the previous evening: that he was here to look into a remarkable piece of ancient folklore which had resurfaced, for purposes of incorporation into a book he was writing on the transmission of rodent motifs in Central European legend. ‘While I’m here,’ he went on, after Sir John had inquired in a friendly manner about the book, ‘might I visit Richard Hobart at the stockade?’
    The ambassador paused in the act of signing an order for an armed detail to escort Asher to the hills on the following morning, his eyebrows quirked.
    ‘I’m a cousin of his mother’s –’ this was another fiction, though Asher had met Julia Hobart on the occasion of her son’s matriculation from Caius College – ‘and I’m a bit concerned that poor Hobart might be . . . Well, that any letter he sends her now might paint a picture affected by his own feelings. As is quite natural.’
    And, his eyes on the ambassador’s face, he saw it: the flare of the nostrils and the way the lips compressed over words that the man would not say to an outsider.
    He not only thinks Richard did it . . . but he also isn’t surprised at the crime. He saw it coming
.
    No wonder Hobart wants to shove the blame off on to that unprovable mass of aliens outside the Legation walls
.
    ‘Of course, Professor Asher. Mr P’ei—?’ Jordan’s touch on the desk bell brought the dapper Chinese clerk in again. ‘Would you take Professor Asher over