J i couldn’t stop shivering.
The night was warm, the dark sky above clear with a scattering of stars. And still the child shivered. Drawing back into the shadows of a crumbling, deeply recessed doorway, Ji stared across the narrow lane at the ancient inn. The warm golden glow of light from the familiar mullioned windows beckoned like a comforting old friend, but Ji’s heart was thumping with fear and uncertainty.
Trying desperately not to cry, the child listened to the outbursts of laughter from the inn’s taproom, the clink of glasses, the murmur of strangely accented male voices. Then the tavern’s door crashed open and a couple of drunken drovers staggered out to stand legs astraddle and relieve themselves against a post. The air filled with the acrid stench of their urine.
Everything in this place, England, was so strange. The crush of carriages filling the streets with the thunder of horses’ hooves and the clatter of iron-rimmed wheels over cobbles. The women—so many women, not only servants and concubines but also ladies from good families, or so said Hayes—walking in the streets, their dresses thin and filmy, their huge hats decorated with bows and flowers and towering feathers. And the smells! Canton smelled of open sewers, incense, roasting ducks, and steaming dumplings. But one of the most pervasive odors in London was a pungent burning aroma that Hayes identified as roasting coffee, mingled always, everywhere, with the dung of horses and the tang of ale.
“Well, Englishmen do like their horses. And their ale,” Hayes would say whenever Ji commented on it.
“Why? It’s nasty stuff,” Ji had said just that afternoon as they walked the shady paths of the gardens. “And they don’t know how to drink tea. They put milk in it!”
Hayes had laughed at the expression on the child’s face. “You should try it.”
“Never!” said Ji, and Hayes had laughed again.
Ji was trembling now, the child’s mind skittering away from the dangerous places it kept wanting to wander, to images of a shadowy clearing . . . memories of the sharp, raw smell of blood . . . a pale, dearly beloved face . . .
Choking back a sob, the child pushed away from the dank, rough bricks of the old archway and was about to cross the lane toward the inn when the shadow of a man shifted near the corner. Shrinking back, Ji watched as the man sucked on a pipe and the warm glow of burning tobacco illuminated his face. It was only for a fleeting instant, but it was enough for Ji to recognize him.
Poole, Hayes’s friend had called the man they’d noticed following them earlier in the week. Titus Poole.
“That’s a funny name,” Ji had said. But then, most English names sounded funny to the child.
“It is a bit,” Hayes agreed. “But there’s nothing the least bit funny about Mr. Titus Poole, from what I’m hearing.”
It was when he didn’t think the child was listening that Hayes had told his friend Mott, I’m afraid someone has hired him to kill me. Me, and perhaps Ji too.
Heart pounding now so hard that it hurt, the child stared helplessly at the beckoning light streaming from the old inn’s windows. If this man Poole knew where they were staying, then the inn was no longer the safe refuge it once had been.
With a spiraling surge of panic, Ji thought about going back to Hayes’s friend Jules Calhoun. But Hayes hadn’t trusted the nobleman and -woman Calhoun worked for and had carefully avoided going anywhere near their house himself. Hayes’s death might have driven the child there, briefly, but Ji wasn’t about to trust anyone Hayes hadn’t trusted.
Again the shadowy man sucked on his pipe, the tobacco glowing in the dark. Ji watched him exhale, smelled the fragrant smoke drifting on the warm night air. Was it you? the child wondered, shaking now with fury as much as with fear and raw, unimaginable grief. Did you kill him? Did you? Did you?
As if aware of the child’s gaze upon him, the man glanced around. Ji froze, not daring even to breathe.
It was going to be a long night.