Chapter 1
The Lover
For someone who had lived her entire life thousands of miles away, Catherine Blade knew a great deal about London.
By memory she could produce a map of its thoroughfares and landmarks, from Hyde Park in the west to the City of London in the east, Highgate in the north to Greenwich in the south.
On this map, she could pinpoint the locations of fashionable squares and shops, good places for picnics and rowing, even churches where everyone who was anyone went to get married.
The London of formal dinners and grand balls.
The London of great public parks in spring and men in gleaming riding boots galloping along Rotten Row toward the rising sun.
The London of gaslights, fabled fogs, and smoky gentlemen’s clubs where fates of nations were decided between nonchalant sips of whiskey and genteel flipping of The Times.
The London of an English exile’s wistful memory of his gilded youth.
Those memories had molded her expectations once, in distant days when she’d believed that England could be her answer, her freedom.
When she’d painstakingly made her way through Herb’s copy of Pride and Prejudice, amazed at the audacity and independence of English womenfolk, the liberty and openness of their lives.
She’d given up on those dreams years ago.
Still, London disappointed. What she had seen of it thus far was sensationally ugly, like a kitchen that was never cleaned.
Soot coated every surface. The grime on the exterior walls of houses and shops ran in streaks, where rain, unable to wash off the encrusted filth under windowsills, rearranged it in such a way as to recall the tear-smudged face of a dirty child.
“I wouldn’t judge London just yet,” said kindly Dr. Rigby, whom she’d “met” in Shanghai three months ago, before the start of her journey.
She smiled at him. It was not London she judged, by the foolishness of her own heart. That after so much disappointment, she still hoped—and thus doomed herself to even more disappointment.
“There they are,” cried Mrs. Chase. “Annabel and the Atwood boys.”
It was impossible to know Mrs. Chase for more than five minutes—and Catherine had known her five weeks, ever since Bombay—without hearing about her beautiful daughter Miss Chase, engaged to the most superior Captain Atwood.
Such boastfulness was alien to Catherine, both in its delivery—did Mrs. Chase not fear that her wanton pride would invoke the ill will of Fate?—and in its very existence.
Parental pride in a mere girl was something Catherine had never experienced firsthand.
At her birth, there had been a tub of water on hand—to drown her, in case she turned out to be a girl. In the end, neither her mother nor her amah had been able to go through with it, and she’d lived, the daughter of a Chinese courtesan and the English adventurer who’d abandoned her.
She’d been a burden to her mother, a source of worry and, sometimes, anguish.
She’d never heard a word of praise from her amah, the woman responsible for her secret training in the martial arts.
And the true father figure in her life, the Manchu prince who’d brought her mother to Peking and given her a life of security and luxury—Catherine had no idea what he thought of her.
And that was why she was in England, wasn’t it, one last attempt to win Da-ren’s approval?
On the rail platform, a handsomely dressed trio advanced toward them, a young woman in a violet mantle flanked by a pair of tall men in long black overcoats.
Catherine’s attention was drawn to the man on the young woman’s left.
He had an interesting walk. To the undisciplined eye, his gait would seem as natural as those of his companions.
But Catherine had spent her entire life in the study of muscular movements and she had no doubt that he was concealing an infirmity in his left leg—the strain in his back and arms all part of a mindful effort to not favor that particular limb.
He spoke to the young woman and a strange curiosity made Catherine listen, her ears filtering away the rumble of the engines, the drumming of the rain on the rafters, the clamor of the crowd.
“…you must not believe everything Benedict says, Annabel,” he said.
His head was turned toward the others, the brim of his hat and the high collar of his greatcoat obscuring much of his profile.
“My stay on the subcontinent was marked by nothing so much as uneventfulness. The most excitement I had was in trying to keep a friend out of trouble when he fell in love with a superior’s wife. ”
She shivered. The timbre of that quiet voice was like the caress of a ghost. No, she was imagining things. He was dead. A pile of bones in the Taklamakan Desert, bleached and picked clean.
The other man was adamant. “Then explain why your letters came only in spurts? Where were you all those months when we hadn’t the least news of you?”
Miss Chase, however, was more interested in the love triangle. “Oh, how tragic. Whatever happened to your friend? Was he heartbroken?”
“Of course he was heartbroken,” said the man who refused to limp. “A man always convinces himself that there is something unique and special about his affections when he fancies the wrong woman.”
Catherine shivered again. An Englishman who’d spent time in India, whose brother suspected that he’d been farther afield than Darjeeling, and who had a lingering injury to his left leg—no, it couldn’t be. She had to have been a more capable killer than that.
“You wouldn’t be speaking from experience, would you, Leighton?” said Miss Chase, a note of flirtation in her voice.
“Only in the sense that every woman before you was a wrong woman,” answered the man who must be her fiancé, the most superior Captain Atwood.
A shrill whistle blew. Catherine lost the conversation.
Mrs. Reynolds reminded her that she was to entirely comply with Mrs. Reynolds’s desire to put her up at the Brown Hotel.
Catherine suspected that Mrs. Reynolds, out of gratitude, planned to find Catherine a respectable husband.
A tall task: She herself had never come across a man willing to marry a woman capable of killing him with her bare hands—and easily, too.
Except him.
Until he changed his mind, that was.
The welcome party was upon them. Greetings erupted, along with eager embraces. Miss Chase’s fiancé stood only a few feet away. Catherine looked toward him, her heart beating fast without a shred of reason.
He had a face that was almost ridiculously beautiful, exactly the kind of progeny one visualized—but didn’t usually get—when an extremely lovely woman married an equally handsome man.
A face that would have been considered too pretty were it not for a long scar on his jaw.
And there was something hard-edged and cynical about the otherwise amiable smile he directed at his future mother-in-law, who fussed over him as if he were her own firstborn son.
Catherine had never seen this man before.
Of course. What was she thinking? That the lover who had betrayed her, and whom she had punished in turn, would be miraculously alive after all these years?
Then he glanced at her and she gazed into the green eyes from her nightmares.
If shock were a physical force like typhoons or earthquakes, Waterloo station would be nothing but rubble and broken glass.
When remorse had come, impaling her soul like a device of torture, she’d gone looking for him, barely sleeping and eating, until she’d come across his horse for sale in Kashgar.
It had been found wandering on the caravan route, without a rider. She had collapsed on the ground, overcome by the absolute irreversibility of her action.
But he wasn’t dead. He was alive, staring at her with the same shock, a shock that was slowly giving way to anger.
Somebody was saying something to her. “…Lieutenant Atwood. Lieutenant Atwood, Miss Blade. This is Miss Blade’s very first trip to England. She has lived her entire life in the Far East. Lieutenant Atwood is on home leave from Hong Kong, where he is serving with the garrison.”
Benedict Atwood was several years younger than Catherine, a jollier, brawnier version of his brother. “Please tell me that I did not overlook your society while I was in Hong Kong, Miss Blade,” he said. “I would be devastated.”
She made herself smile, in a properly amused manner. “No need for premature devastation, Lieutenant. I rarely ventured into Hong Kong. Most of my life has been spent in the north of China.”
“And may I present Captain Atwood?” Mrs. Reynolds went on with the introductions. “Captain Atwood, Miss Blade.”
Leighton Atwood bowed. Leighton Atwood—a real name, after all these years. There was no more of either shock or anger in his eyes, eyes as chilling as water under ice. “Welcome to England, Miss Blade.”
“Thank you, Captain.” Words creaked past her dry throat.
Then she was being introduced to Annabel Chase. Miss Chase was young and remarkably pretty. Wide eyes, sweet nose, soft pink cheeks, with a head full of shiny golden curls and a palm as plain as a newborn chick.
“Welcome to England, Miss Blade, I do hope you will like it here,” Miss Chase said warmly. Then she laughed in good-natured mirth. “Though at this time of the year I always long for Italy myself.”
Something gnawed at the periphery of Catherine’s heart. After a disoriented moment she realized it as a corrosive jealousy. Miss Chase was not only beautiful, but wholesome and adorable.
Every woman before you was a wrong woman.
Of course. A woman such as Catherine was always the wrong woman, anywhere in the world.
“Thank you,” she said. “It has been a remarkable experience already, my first day in England.”
* * *
Catherine could not stop looking at her erstwhile lover.