He floated.
Swept up on the sound, drifting higher, drawn by the current of it toward the light.
At last he saw her and his heart started to beat once more. She was smiling at him. Her beautiful face. He murmured her name. Kuan Yin. Again. Kuan Yin. The goddess who understood pain. He remembered with a clear rush of cool blood to his brain that when her father tried to burn her to death, she had put out the fire with her bare hands. Pain. Hands. China’s sweet and holy goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin, my pain is nothing to yours.
A bird settled on his chest. It was small and light but covered with coppery feathers. They glowed so bright they burned the slime from his eyes. From his ears. He could hear the bird sing. Just one sound. Over and over, it twirled inside his head.
‘Please.’
37
She would not let him see her face.
‘Li Mei, don’t. Please.’
But she hid her face in the pillow. Her shame was far worse than her pain.
‘My sweetest love,’ Theo murmured, ‘let me bathe your swollen cheeks and kiss the black bruises away from your eyes.’
She curled up tight, away from him.
Theo bent over the bed and kissed the back of her head, breathing in the sandalwood scent of her raven’s-wing hair. ‘Forgive me, my love. I shall leave you in peace. Here are some medicines from the herbalist; the one in the black pot is for the pain, the other for the damaged skin.’
He waited, torn between a fierce desire to sweep her into his arms and the knowledge that more than anything she wanted to hide the evidence of her disgrace from him.
‘Li Mei?’
Silence.
‘Li Mei, listen to me. You must never return to your father. Whatever happens. We both know he would beat you into the ground and make a slave of you, so you must stay away from him. And from that turd-sucking brother of yours, Po Chu. Promise me that.’
Nothing.
He reached out and rested a hand on the slender curve of her hip. ‘In exchange I promise to have nothing more to do with the dream smoke.’
Still no answer. But her shoulders started to shake. She was crying.
That night Theo didn’t go to bed. Nor did he keep the appointment on the river. He went down to the empty schoolrooms, to the large carved oak chair that stood at the end of the hall, and then he summoned one of the yard boys to come with ropes. The nine-year-old boy was unhappy to do as Theo ordered, but in the end he obeyed because if he lost his job his mother and father and four sisters would starve.
Theo sat there all night.
No one to hear his moans and his cries except the yellow-eyed cat. Most of the time she just sat and watched him but once jumped up on his lap with a loud yowl. His wrists were bound to the wooden arms, where carvings of tigers grinned up at him, mocking his torment, and his ankles tied to the chair’s stout legs.
When a faint red glow finally came up over the horizon, Theo knew he was looking into the eyes of the devil himself.
38
Exhaustion finally claimed her. Lydia woke with a start to find herself still in the chair but sprawled forward on the bed, her weight pinning down one side of Chang. She jumped off in alarm. His hand, she mustn’t crush his hand.
It was dark and cold and her mind felt thick as treacle. She stood up, stripped off the clothes she had been wearing for the last forty-eight hours, pulled over her head one of the two new embroidered nightdresses that lay in her otherwise empty chest of drawers, and lifted the sheet.
She slid into the bed. Instantly all desire for sleep vanished. She lay on her side, curving her body to fit beside his, aware of his nakedness and the thin cotton of her nightdress between them. She let her arm rest across his waist and her cheek lie against his shoulder, so that she could smell the cooling camphor on his skin. She breathed it in.
‘Chang An Lo,’ she whispered, just to hear his name.
She closed her eyes and experienced a warm bubbling sensation in her chest. Happiness? Was this what happiness felt like?
She dreamed bad dreams.
Her mother was fixing a metal collar around Chang’s neck. He was naked and Valentina was dragging him on the end of a heavy chain through great drifts of snow. It was in the heart of a forest with wild winds and the howling of wolves, the sky red and bleeding onto the white snow beneath, like scarlet rain. There was a man on a great horse. A green greatcoat. A rifle. Bullets flying through the air, slamming into the pine trees, into her mother’s legs. She screamed. And one bullet tore into Chang’s bare chest. Another lodged between two of Lydia’s own ribs. She felt no pain but couldn’t breathe; she was gasping for air, filling up with ice in her lungs. She tried to shout but no sound came out, she couldn’t breathe…
She shuddered awake.
The room was full of daylight, sweet and normal daylight that steadied her racing pulse. She turned her head and gasped aloud.
Chang’s black eyes were staring right at her, no more than a hand’s breadth from her own.
‘Hello.’ His voice was a whisper.
‘Hello.’ She smiled at him, a wide welcoming grin. ‘You’re back.’
For a long moment he studied her face, then nodded very faintly and murmured something too low for her to catch. Abruptly she became acutely aware of her leg draped over his, of her arm warm against his skin and her hip tight next to his, and suddenly she was embarrassed. She blushed fiercely and slid out of the bed. When she was on the floor she turned to face him and gave a formal little bow, hands together, a brief lowering of her head.
‘I am pleased to see you awake, Chang An Lo.’
His lips moved, life returning to them, but no words came out.
‘I would like to give you medicine and food,’ she said softly. ‘You need to eat.’
Again he gave the faint nod, and closed his eyes. But she knew he was not asleep. She felt in a panic. But a totally different kind of panic from before. She told herself it was a kind of fluttery on-the-surface panic because she feared she may have offended Chang An Lo with the forwardness of her actions, made him disgusted with her alley-cat ways, and that he would not want her to nurse him or feed him or even touch his body, that body she knew so well now. But all of this was nothing like the deep-down panic of before when she thought he would die, that he would leave her with just his bones and none of himself, that she would never see again the way his black eyes…
Stop it. Stop it.
He was awake. That meant everything. Awake.
‘I’ll fetch some hot water,’ she said and scuttled downstairs.
Her touch was like sunlight to him. It warmed his skin. Inside, Chang felt cold and empty, like a reptile after a night of frost, and it was the touch of her fingers that brought life flowing back to his limbs. He started to feel again.
With feeling came pain.
He fought to centre his mind. To use the pain as a source of energy. He focused on her fingers as she peeled back the bandages. They were not beautiful. The nails were square where they should have been oval and her thumbs were oddly long, but her hands moved with a confidence that was beautiful. He watched. They would heal him, those hands.
But when he saw his own mutilated hands, the pain broke free from his grip on it and exploded in his head. It blew him apart. He tumbled in pieces back down into the slime.
He opened his eyes.
‘Lydia.’
She didn’t look up from where she was bent over a metal bowl stirring something strongly scented inside it. A thin wintry ray of sunlight from the window trickled over her hair and down one side of her face, so that she seemed to shine.