Shanghai Sparrow Read Online Free PDF Page A

stuff.
    He had looked so miserable, she almost laughed. “What, you can’t get it somewhere else?”
    He bowed. “I am not seeking anything but the pleasure of your company.” She looked him over, properly this time. She had dismissed him before as just another of the Chinee sailors, with their chattering singsong voices and funny eyes. Now she saw him properly, he was slender and neat, in his smart uniform, a matching green and gold cap perched on sleek black hair tied in a pigtail. His eyes were strange, but it was only a matter of the way they were set in the skin – for that, he looked pretty much like anyone, and a deal more like her than half the Folk did, especially the lesser Folk, like the bogles.
    “Why?” she said. “And how come you speak so fancy?”
    “You wanchee pidgin talk my?” he said.
    “I dunno what you just said, but if it was something rude...”
    “It was not. I would like to know you because you are very clever, and I speak good English because I am very clever.” He bowed again, grinning at her.
    “How do you know I’m clever?”
    He leaned towards her, put a finger on his lips, and then held up, before her eyes, a linen handkerchief embroidered with the initials JK in pink silk. “ Very clever,” he said.
    Evvie’s heart speeded up. She’d lifted that handkerchief just this morning, and had never felt it being lifted off her . “You... cheeky sod .”
    “I think that was rude, yes?”
    “Bloody right. What’re you doing with my billy?” She should be furious, but somehow the way he was looking at her, with his head a little to one side, like a dog that had just fetched a stick, kept bringing a smile to her lips.
    “ Your ... billy?” He gave it to her, with a flourish, like a fine gentleman bowing to a fine lady.
    She snatched it from his fingers, and made it disappear before he had straightened up. “What billy?” she said.
    He laughed.
    Since then, an odd, intriguing, half-wary friendship had developed. Evvie didn’t let herself get too fond of him – after all, his ship would eventually be mended, loaded, and back on its way.
    People disappeared out of your life easy as handkerchiefs. It happened all the time.
    Liu dropped lithely to the ground in front of her, and scrutinised her face. “What have you been doing, Evvie? I can see mischievous spirits in your eyes.” He grinned.
    “Get away with you; you can’t.” She grinned back.
    She hadn’t told Ma Pether about Liu, though if she didn’t know already she’d probably find out soon enough. She might even be pleased, though not about Evvie speaking with a young man – outside picking their pockets or otherwise making off with their goods, she didn’t encourage her girls to have any dealings with men. But Ma would be pleased about the words he was teaching her, because Ma believed in knowledge. She believed in it like some believed in the Life Everlasting. “The more you know, my birdlets, the stronger you are. Be you little as a kitten, if you’ve got a brain and the means to fill it, you can outwit the Queen and all her ministers.”
    But Liu was a friend, not business. She’d keep him secret from Ma as long as she could. “I gotta go.”
    “Meet me later and I will teach you how to ask for a cup of tea.”
    “It’s late. Tomorrow, if I can get away. By the pie shop on Matlock Street, about three.”
    He sighed. “Their pies are made of bits the pigs did not want even when they were alive. I will not eat one.”
    “No one asked you to,” she sang over her shoulder as she hurried away. “I’ll have two of ’em.”
    Where she’d been earlier, the city’s ever-present stinks – of sewage and soot, hot metal and humanity – had been overlaid with expensive perfumes, laundered linen, and well-tended gardens. Limehouse, on the other hand, reeked . The presence of human wastes was not a hint, but a bold declaration in letters fifty feet high. Other smells – filthy bodies, rotting food, damp,