Arthur raised his hand to wave and made to call to his friend, but even that small exertion proved such a fierce and insistent agony that the effort lapsed as soon as it began. Instead, he drew a deep breath and held it until the pain subsided, then turned his attention to his wounds. He could see little, for they were covered with strips of cloth that had been soaked in some kind of aromatic liquid. Gingerly, and with the minimum of movement, he lifted the edge of one of the cloths and saw an ugly, ragged cut, its red, inflamed edges oozing blood and pus.
He had just replaced the cloth and was about to close his eyes against the throbbing in his head when there was a movement in the doorway. He turned on the pillow to see a young Chinese woman enter the room, carrying a steaming bowl. She was dressed all in white with long, black, braided hair, and he recognized her at once.
“You.” Arthur sighed. “You are the angel of my dream.”
Her perfect lips curved in a smile. “You are alive still. That is good.”
“It was you who saved me,” he continued, his voice an ineffectual whisper. “My angel.”
“Please,” she said, placing the bowl on the floor beside the bed. “What is ain-jel?”
“A creature sent by God,” replied Arthur, “to be a protector and helpmate of man.”
“Ah, anjo,” she said, then smiled and dipped her head. “For you, I am pleased to be ain-jel.” She drew the low stool close, seating herself primly on it. With the most graceful and gentle fingers, she peeled away the cloth covering his wounds, rolling the strips up and placing them into the hot liquid in the bowl.
“You speak English,” observed Arthur.
“Father sent me to Jesuit School. They teach me very well.”
Arthur’s eyes widened with surprise. “Xian-Li?”
The young woman smiled and dipped her head. “I am. And you are Master Arthur.”
“Xian-Li, the last time I saw you…” He fell silent looking at her, amazed at the transformation as if it had taken place before his very eyes. “You have grown into a beautiful woman, Xian-Li.”
“And you have been hit on the head,” she replied, carefully removing another strip of cloth. The bandage stuck to the skin and pulled at the wound, making Arthur wince. “So sorry.”
“No,” he said, “you continue. I am sure it is doing me a world of good.”
“So sorry, too, because I came so late.”
“So late?”
“To save you injury,” she said. “Father foresaw trouble. We went to inn and waited. When you did not come out, father went in. But you had gone. It was a little time to find you.”
“Yet, you found me,” replied Arthur. “For that I will be forever in your debt.”
She smiled.
“It is a service I must repay,” he told her. “I owe you my life.”
“You owe me new shoes,” she corrected lightly. She indicated her feet, and he saw that her blue silk slippers were soiled and stained with blood.
He smiled. “As soon as I am better, we will go out together, you and I, and we will buy you the best shoes in all Macau. On that, you have my sacred vow.”
CHAPTER 19
In Which Kit Is Mistaken for a Footpad
The journey back to London was a glum affair. Upon leaving Black Mixen Tump, the weather grew increasingly dank and dreary. Low clouds closed in, and mist rose up from the marshy places. Just outside Banbury, rain began leaking out of the heavy sky, and Kit, wincing and clutching his sore ribs with every jolt of the vehicle, decided they had had enough fun for one day and told Giles to stop at the inn. They ate a supper of lamb shanks and dumplings at a table with some other travellers and, after seeing the single communal room they would have to share with other late-arriving guests, elected to sleep in the coach instead. They were on the Oxford road by sunrise the next morning, paused at the Golden Cross for breakfast, and then resumed their journey.
Just outside Headington it began to rain again-a nasty spitting drizzle. Kit felt sorry for Giles, sitting hunched on his bench, alone, driving in the rain through a cheerless wet countryside. Once, Kit climbed up to sit beside his new friend just to keep him company; but, clearly, having his passenger up front made Giles uncomfortable-as no doubt, it violated the ironclad social protocol that firmly kept the classes in their respective places. So, Kit crawled back to his seat at first opportunity, and order was restored.
They reached Chepping Wycombe late and stopped at the Four Feathers coaching inn. Having spent most of their funds the previous night, they made do with a few meat pies and small beer and spent the night in the coach again. Next morning, they joined the London Road and settled in for another damp, dull day. The going was a long slow slog along muddy tracks, so Kit had plenty of time to contemplate the latest wrinkle in his peculiar plight. What he thought, chiefly, was that whenever it seemed that he just might manage to climb up out of the mire of misfortune, Lady Fate-that haggard old slapper-turned around and smacked him back down again.
There was, Kit noted, little satisfaction to be had pursuing such musings, but eventually he found that it helped somewhat to imagine himself a shipwrecked castaway, lonely and lost, marooned on a remote island called Seventeenth-Century England-a topsy-turvy place where everything was oddly familiar, yet vastly foreign at the same time. Like a good castaway, he took stock of his resources and realized that he was not completely alone, or without some considerable material assets. He had Sir Henry’s roof over his head-or soon would have-and there were a few friendly inhabitants around. What is more, they shared a roughly common language: with a steadily increasing fluency he could talk to the natives.
He had to keep his wits about him. Even well-known words were often pronounced differently and could have unfamiliar meanings; connotations were not fixed, but fluid. Definitions drifted. He was constantly brought up short by the sudden realisation that what he thought he had said was not at all what he meant-at least as it had been understood by his hearers. Still, he was coming to grips with the slippery speech, and his confidence was growing.
As for the rest: Cosimo and Sir Henry’s disappearance with the Burley Men sharp on their heels… Well, there was nothing he could do about that now, so he set it aside. Next on the list of his meditations was the outrageous, multistorey universe theory his great-grandfather was promulgating. The implications of that were simply too many and too monumental for him to entertain at any meaningful level. Without scientific training in such things, Kit did not know what to think. Indeed, he did not rightly know how to think about any of it. If only he had read that book-the one he’d always been meaning to read but that still sat dusty and unopened on his shelf: A Brief History of Time. That might have given him some mental ballast for his current voyage of discovery. As it was, the very idea of a near-infinite array of universes made his head swim. So, Kit decided to set that aside, for the time being, as well.
Thus, he shortly arrived at the conclusion that owing to his woeful ignorance-or, as he put it to himself, his lack of useful information-the wisest course of action seemed to be to simply accept things as he found them and advance his cause as best he could wherever opportunity allowed.
The next day on the road passed much as the one before, and Kit grew bored with his enforced solitude. He dozed on and off and woke at one point just in time to observe that they were trundling into London-a city he knew so well, and yet not at all. The rain increased as they passed the outlying villages and hamlets. The muddy thoroughfares-roads churned to goopy grey soup by foot and wheel-made the going tedious as one after another vehicle-whether farm wagon, coach, or handcart-became bogged in the sticky morass and had to be hauled free. Kit, chilled to the bone, slouched in the relative comfort of the carriage and watched the bedraggled host of foot travellers slogging along, many burdened with bundles and boxes on their heads in a vain effort to keep off the rain that ran in rivulets from the down-turned brims of sodden hats and from the ragged ends of tightly gathered shawls. Some few lucky ones rode in sedan chairs borne by servants sunk to their shanks in the mire.