Chapter 18
The rain had stopped—in fact, it hadn’t rained for two days since the party—but even so, Lisan’s room felt damp. There was
a dankness to the curtains and bedclothes, and each morning she still draped her clothes on a chair in front of the fire to
warm them a bit before getting dressed. She worried about catching a cold and had been feeding wood into the fireplace, but
the chill simply wouldn’t go away.
Little Liao, who brought her a stack of wood each morning, expressed confusion. “Miss Liu, I have stood in this room and I
can’t feel any drafts—I mean, nothing worse than in any other room.”
She sighed. “Well, maybe you need to be here when the wind blows in from a particular direction to feel it. Don’t worry, just
bring lots of wood.”
What Little Liao and the servants did worry about was Charles Burnett’s ghost. They worried the noise and gaiety of the party
had roused the dead man’s specter.
“I saw his ghost by the lake after dark,” Xiao Wu insisted, “a man walking beside the willow trees.”
“That was Master Mason,” Chin said. “He often goes for walks in the evenings.”
“But I’ve only seen the ghost since the party,” Xiao Wu said, “for the past two nights, never before. It must be the spirit of the dead man—it’s awakened. Foreign musicians playing familiar tunes, foreign voices speaking his language, perhaps even gossiping about him.”
“Calm down, Xiao Wu,” Yao said. “It was Master Mason you saw. It hasn’t rained for the past two days since the party, so now
he can stroll around the garden in the evening. He’s spoken to me. It’s not a ghost.”
The older servants hooted with laughter, but to Lisan, their amusement hid relief. And to tell the truth, she felt relief
as well that what Xiao Wu saw had been Mason Burnett and not a phantom.
It was getting to the point where she dreaded the night, but the last thing she wanted was to let anyone know about her dreams
or that she was hearing things, like the sounds of a woman sobbing. Especially since half the time she wasn’t sure whether
she was awake or still dreaming. Was it better to be superstitious or going mad? If she believed in ghosts, she would say
that Charles’s ghost had chosen to haunt her by sharing his obsession with Rosalie. He had died in despair, alone with his
anguished thoughts, abandoned by the woman he loved; so now he assailed her sleep by reliving his final days in her dreams
and disturbing the twilight moments of early morning with the sounds of a woman’s wailing. Charles, staying invisible while
conjuring up his memories of Rosalie.
Yet even after hearing all the gossip about Charles and Rosalie, whenever Lisan looked at the portrait, she couldn’t find
it in her to put all the blame on Rosalie for Charles’s tragic end. Charles had been a poor businessman, he had gambled and
drunk too much, and he had taken opium to forget his troubles. No wonder Rosalie had run away. There were too many examples
of opium addiction driving families into total poverty.
Back in her room, Lisan looked up at the portrait.
“We have something in common, you and I,” she said.
The sweet, melancholy features gazed down at her.
“You don’t belong to either Chinese or Western society and I don’t know where I belong.
I’m not part of the Liu family and I’m not a servant.
Nor can I ever truly belong to Ju Ming’s crowd, even though they were my classmates. ”
Rosalie’s expression seemed to commiserate with Lisan; her dark eyes suggested sympathy.
Lisan climbed into bed. Had she brought this on herself with the portrait and the diary? No, she recalled how she’d felt the
first time she entered the gates of Lennox Manor, the rickshaw puller’s feet splashing through puddles, her first glimpse
of a woman in red at the window. The odd sensation of being drawn to the house. Even before she found those left-behind fragments
of Rosalie, before she knew of Lennox Manor’s history, she’d felt a gentle coercion.
Come find me.
A coercion that had developed rapidly into compulsion, along with an obligation that cramped itself around her heart and fogged
her thinking. She did not know what the obligation entailed. Those three words. Come find me. A woman’s voice. Did Charles want her to go look for Rosalie? And there was something else. Lately, the thought of leaving
Lennox Manor, of setting foot outside its wrought iron gates, caused her to flinch, as though she didn’t deserve to be free,
not yet.
Thank-you notes had started arriving the day after the party. Caroline told Lisan to bring them to the breakfast room in the
morning instead of to her parlor; she wanted to share them with Thomas before he left for work. Almost all of the thank-you
notes also included invitations to dinner, to join clubs and attend charity functions, offers to sponsor their membership
to the Shanghai Race Club.
The breakfast room smelled comfortingly of buttered toast and coffee, and one of the flowering lemon trees stood in a corner, perfuming the air with its delightful fresh scent. But Lisan sensed something else in the air, a tension that contrasted with the warmth of the room.
“Thank you, Lisan,” Caroline said. “Will you come back in about ten minutes? I want to sort through these before you take
them up to the parlor.” Her words were pleasant and polite, but her voice was strained, her expression rigid.
Lisan saw Da Wu in the hallway, coming up from the kitchen with a jug of hot water. “Da Wu,” she said in a low voice, “did
you hear anything in there? Are those two having an argument?”
Da Wu had been working hard to learn more English. He listened carefully and whenever he was in the kitchen, often repeated
sentences he had heard to ask Lisan what the words meant. He was illiterate but had a good ear and a good memory, and Lisan
had been impressed with his progress.
“Oh yes,” he said, “no shouting or throwing things, but Missy Caroline is very, very upset.”
“Do you know why?” she said.
He frowned in concentration. “Something to do with Master Mason, because I heard her say his name. And then Master Thomas
said something, he used the word ‘family’ and Missy Caroline grew very quiet.” Da Wu continued on to the breakfast room, knocking
softly on the door before entering.
When she returned to the breakfast room for the letter tray, Thomas was just getting up from the table. He folded his newspaper
and dropped it on the sideboard.
“I’m off to work, my darling. Uncle Mason is probably coming down right now.” He seemed impervious to his wife’s mood, to
the fact that Caroline’s features were carefully composed and gave away nothing of how she felt.
“You haven’t had your hot lemon water yet.
” Caroline took the carafe from the sideboard and poured hot water into a cup, squeezed in half a lemon.
Thomas grimaced at the sour taste. “If you drank less while entertaining investors, you wouldn’t need this for your liver,” she said, and he chuckled, kissed the top of her head in farewell.
Caroline pointed to the letter tray, and Lisan took it up to the parlor and set it down on Caroline’s walnut desk. She glanced
through the two piles: one of thank-you notes, the other of invitations that would need replies. That would be their work
for the morning, as it had been for the past two mornings since the party.
It occurred to her that there had been a blue envelope printed with a hotel’s name: Les Trois Lanternes. Now the pale blue envelope was not in either pile. The hotel’s cheap stationery had caught her attention when she’d glanced
through the mail earlier before delivering it to the breakfast room. It stood out from the other envelopes, which were of
heavy, expensive stock, most of them monogrammed.
She checked her address book, which contained the contact details of every guest who’d received an invitation, and she was
right, Les Trois Lanternes was Andrew Grey’s address. Caroline had removed his letter from the pile. Was it so that Thomas
wouldn’t see it?
What was behind Grey’s arrogant insolence, the way he’d behaved and spoken to Caroline? His sneering tone of voice, as though
she were a maidservant or shopgirl, not the wife of a respected man. I know your secret. What sort of secret did Caroline harbor that she seemed so vulnerable to Grey?
In Caroline’s dressing room, she found her employer very quiet, brushing her hair and gazing at her reflection in the vanity mirror.
“Thomas is so forgetful about his lemon water,” Caroline said, leaning closer to the mirror to smooth her eyebrows.
“He dines out so often I worry that he is drinking too much these days.”
“Master Thomas is lucky you take such good care of him,” Lisan said, standing by the window. “There’s someone at the gate,
it’s just opened. Goodness, it’s a sedan chair! How very odd. Hardly anyone rides in sedan chairs anymore, they’re actually
extremely uncomfortable. Only officials and aristocrats use them, and mostly for ceremonial occasions.”
Caroline joined her at the window. The sedan chair advanced at a slow and stately pace toward the house and vanished under
the shelter of the porte cochere.
“We shall know soon enough who it is,” Caroline said. “How very curious.”
A few minutes later, Chin knocked on the parlor door. “The visitor wishes to see Miss Liu,” he said, “and only Miss Liu.”
He held out a calling card.
Princess Masako Kyo
“How astonishing,” Caroline said, when Lisan showed her. “Why do you think she wants to see you?”
“I’ve no idea,” Lisan said. She remembered the woman’s avid, almost predatory attention. She looked at Caroline pleadingly.
“Won’t you come with me, Mrs. Stanton?”
But Caroline shook her head in playful reluctance. “You heard, Her Highness wants to see you alone.”