She looks back and around, and sees what’s missing from this titanic mosaic.
“Who’s the lucky girl?” she asks, because sure as chips and vinegar this lot is not for her.
“A scientist. It is a woman, actually.”
“Well, where is she?” Edie glances around, looking for a bespectacled schoolmarm with chalk on her fingers. Abel Jasmine sighs.
“Ah. We were hoping you might be able to help us with that, Miss Banister. There’s a slight problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
“His name is Shem Shem Tsien.”
The face in the photograph is in monochrome, tinged with a deep celluloid blue. It is no brighter than the faces around it, no older, no closer to the camera. And yet, it is indisputably the face, unique and apart.
Granted, it belongs to the man to whom everyone else is apparently deferring. He is richly dressed, and surrounded by dependants, concubines, and offspring. And yet, Edie has seen other pictures in the past where one child, caught by chance in an attitude of casual joy, has completely outshone such a parent; where one unthinking scullery maid has glanced at the camera and displayed for a moment her natural beauty, and the social order has been quite overturned. Photography is without mercy—though it’s nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat’s meat men.
There’s no such revolution here. The camera has fallen in love. It has given itself entire to Shem Shem Tsien, thrown itself at his feet and worshipped at his altar. He absolutely gleams, matinée-idol splendid, with broad white teeth and a hero’s moustache in two delicate bars, as if drawn on with charcoal, emphasising the masculinity of his curving upper lip.
Shem Shem Tsien: graduate of St. John’s College, Cambridge; debater, gambler, and rake; born the second son of the second son of the Khaygul Khan of Addeh Sikkim, a tiny tinpot nation on the edge of the British Raj. Industrialist and moderniser, favourite dinner guest of presidents and commissars alike, hunter of big game and bronze medallist at the Olympics in the foil event—would have done more, no doubt, but he’d spent the preceding six days drunk in the arms of a Hollywood starlet of pneumatic and renowned athleticism. His smile shatters marriages, unfrocks nuns. As a youth, he ravished Europe and the Americas, was the darling of the society pages—and then, disaster: his father, brother, and his royal master were taken all in one night by a sickness which swelled the brain, leaving Shem to look out for his beloved nephew (seen, indeed, in Abel Jasmine’s photograph, carrying a butterfly net and clinging shyly to his uncle’s knee) which he did by burning the corpses with due ceremony and installing the boy on the Khaygul’s throne. Alas, all unforeseen and unimaginable, a fishbone lodged in the new sovereign’s throat and could not be got out, leaving the wise, educated, clubbable Shem Shem Tsien the last (officially recognised) son of his line.
Or perhaps: Shem Shem Tsien, unfavoured and suspect child, his birth nine months after the visit of a noted British libertine, his face a little too beautiful, his hair too thick to be his father’s boy. Not exiled so much as encouraged elsewhere, he served in the British Army and the Russian, carved out a kingdom in opium country before he ever came back to Addeh Sikkim, knows the Camorra of Naples and the Yakuza of Kyoto, the Boxer Triads of Beijing and the Kindly Men of London. Red-handed enemy of the Barqooq Beys of neighbouring Addeh Katir, he is a trader, a producer, and a supplier of laudanum to kings and potentates, of anaesthetics and pain relief to armies; a Svengali, a Mesmerist, a blackmailer, an extortionist, and a kidnapper (all things one might expect, notes sniffy Abel Jasmine, in a Cambridge man). He is also a poisoner, a sponsor of thugs and an assassin, a bringer of plagues. Were his brother, father, uncle all dead when he locked them in an iron room and set them on fire? Not known. His inconvenient nephew, Abel Jasmine’s agents report, was quite unquestionably held face down in a plate of Giant Mekong Catfish (and what idiot would eat such a magnificent, doomed thing? It’s like tucking into the last mammoth, a dish for the dissolute and the small) until he choked.
Shem Shem Tsien owns the largest collection of preserved lepidoptera in the world.
He keeps nearly one hundred thumbs in a display case.
He is received in embassies from Brunei to Moscow, owns property in Mayfair.
Fifteen thousand infantry, nine thousand cavalry, and three thousand artillerymen, sappers, and murderers take their orders from his lips alone.
His word is law from Kalimpong to the southern reaches of the Katirs.
Shem Shem Tsien is the Opium Khan.
It occurs to Edie, powerfully, that Shem Shem Tsien is entirely Britain’s fault. For whatever pressing reasons, the mother of democracies has given suck to this man. The Empire’s great educational institutions have shaped him, her military has trained him, and her drawing rooms and salons have completed his development. Oh, all of Europe has played a part. In Shem Shem Tsien, Marx rubs shoulders with Wellington and Paine with Napoleon, each jostling for the unwelcome title of Kingmaker—but it is in Britain’s melting pot that he has been composited. A British fiend, all manners and poisonous politesse, in every sense a home-made International Bastard of Mystery.
Of his whole family, saving himself, only one other member now remains: his revered and gentle mother, Dowager-Khatun Dalan, still known in Bloomsbury as Dotty Catty—quite the girl in 1887, got herself ejected from a music hall with a peer of the realm, and that was no easy task back then—the only one of the whole brood he trusts enough to leave alive.
The one who has now betrayed him.
Edie Banister, orphan child, born of some poor knocked-up wench in a poor town west of Bristol, adopted ward of schoolmistresses, charities, and latterly the British Government, occasionally has trouble understanding what other people see in families.
She glances at Shem Shem Tsien’s photograph again, then flicks to the beginning of the file. The name on the frontispiece unsettles her: Angelmaker. It sounds altogether too churchy, too much like a funeral hymn. She shivers, and turns the page.
The Ruskinites are artisans for hire. They do not discuss the projects they work on. They evidence the spark of the divine in the detail of human labour; they do not engage in espionage.
But nine days ago, according to the file, the Keeper requested Abel Jasmine’s presence at Sharrow House, the converted stately home over the Hammersmith Bridge, which serves the Ruskinites as their home.
The Keeper had a message. He was uncomfortable. He was betraying a confidence. This one time, with considerable misgivings, the Keeper wished Abel Jasmine to be aware of something. The Ruskinites felt what was taking place was more important than their general mission.
“More important than the human soul?” Abel Jasmine asked, with a smile on his lips. It was his pleasure to tease the Keeper, very kindly, just as it was the Keeper’s pleasure to suggest by his bland expression and benevolent eyes that he had not noticed. This time, he frowned.
“Than the excellence we might achieve and the benefit to a finite number of souls. Yes. Possibly.”
Abel Jasmine put away his sense of humour.
“In a far-off place,” the Keeper said, “we are assisting a Frenchwoman with the construction of… things.”