Transmuted (28 page)

That was a word I understood. I tipped my head at him. “How so?”

There, a glint of impatience. Despite it, he obliged me. “By the flow of the Five Phases, she was able to transmute the poison into water within his body. He was strong enough to facilitate the process, but the corrupt
qì
had to be channeled elsewhere.”

“Thus the items.”

“Correct,” Zhànzhàn said.

There was fundamentally more here than met the eye, but I was not inclined to sit through an entire lecture of eastern practices of alchemy. I frowned thoughtfully. “The silver concoction. Was it mercury?”

“Among other things,” she said. “Western alchemy teaches that transmutation is a thing that occurs outside the body. True alchemy—”

“Allows for transmutation within, exoteric and esoteric,” I finished, earning a raise of her wispy eyebrows and a measure of approval.

I cared nothing for it.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “But we are beside the point. Should you choose to compare knowledge another time,” she added with a faint, knowing smile, “I shall be more than pleased to do so.”

I had no doubt at all that she hoped still to learn the secrets of my father’s alchemical serums—secrets that I now knew had been forced upon him by my mother. I returned her smile stiffly. “I think not.”

“Then we turn to my brother,” she said, as though it mattered not at all. “The truth is that he does not simply want to create an army.”

“Do tell,” I said dryly, somehow not at all surprised. Or perhaps just weary of the whole situation.

“I have said,” she continued calmly, “that he wishes to make of himself the Yellow Dragon. Please pay attention to the following.” Her hand sketched an imaginary circle in the air. “Each direction correlates with an element, a phase and a heavenly creature.”

I had not gone through all of this for nothing. Half turning in my seat, I braced an arm against the back of the sofa and frowned up at Hawke. “Are we back to that tiger and dragon business?”

“Worse,” he said, low tones.

I sighed. Bloody metaphors. “How could it possibly be any worse?”

“Because as in all things,” Hawke said flatly, “there is power in such business, especially in
her
business.”

“I’ll, eh…” Glass clinked, and Piers frowned at his unwittingly empty glass. “I’ll have another, then, shall I?”

“As will I,” I said, and he waved a hand of acknowledgement without turning away from the sideboard.

“The Yellow Dragon occupies the center, as harmony,” Zhànzhàn said, ignoring the offer. Her hand eased to the right. “The Azure Dragon.” Then lower. “The Vermillion Bird.” To the west. “The White Tiger.” And then at the top, a full circle. “The Black Tortoise.”

“This is a great deal of metaphor, isn’t it?” I asked.

She responded not at all to my sarcastic sigh. “Despite my brother’s wishes, the Yellow Dragon must never stand alone,” Zhànzhàn said firmly. “To do so is to shed the balance.”

That made no sense to me. “Why would he want to shed the balance?”

“Zhànzhàn,” Hawke growled. Another warning.

I did not, I noted with a great deal of self-deprecation, like the feel of her given name on his lips.

She blinked. “Immortality.” Her mouth flitted up into the briefest of smiles. “To what other purpose is the purification of self?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Chinese practices of alchemy were both the same and different than the ones Ashmore taught me. Metaphor still reigned supreme, but unlike the precepts I knew, there was precious little science behind it.

Too much mysticism filled the eastern philosophies for me to understand with any clarity. All I could say for certain was that whatever Zhànzhàn had done, it had saved Ashmore’s life.

Before she left our company, to be escorted by an extremely irritable Hawke, she pressed upon me a last word. “Matters of immortality transcend any single definition.” Her gaze held mine without kindness nor concern; she simply existed, and in that existence, she felt herself superior.

I gave as good as I got. “Your brother is in for a rude awakening.”

“It is that awakening,” she replied, “that you should fear most.”

She left before I had answer to give her.

Hawke caught my chin in hand and tipped my face up for a kiss that bruised. “Do not,” he said, his lips brushing mine, “be rash.”

I expected nothing less.

I allowed him nothing more. “I promise nothing.”

“Ask of me to stay,” he said, low and dark, “and I will.”

That
surprised me. My eyebrows lifted, eyes widening. “What of your prisoner?”

I could all but read his irritation, his frustration with the way things were. Unable to answer, knowing that any he gave would not salve either his pride or mine, he growled, “Say that you will return to me.”

The sheer mandate of it rankled.

As if he knew, as though he could pierce my fragile flesh with the devilish glint in his eyes, he pressed upon me another kiss and turned away.

Although I watched them depart, it was the eerily forthright stare of the girl he escorted that looked back at me.

Would I have promised?

Could I have demanded he remain?

I returned to Ashmore’s bedchamber, intent upon keeping watch, and found Piers already present. He had quite lost his head on drink, and now snored in a chair beside my tutor’s bedridden form.

A maid tapped on the door, her eyes sleepy and haggard from it. Guilt touched me. “Did we keep you?” I asked, whispering my concern.

“Oh, no, my lady,” she said, bobbing into a curtsy. A lie, and well I knew it. “His lordship said to take you to your room.”

“My room, eh?”

The guest room provided was much grander than what I expected. I was tired, too tired to note anything other than the nightclothes laid out for me.

As I fell into bed, my head was full of the information Zhànzhàn had delivered.

Immortality, was it? And all this nonsense of creatures. Tigers and birds and dragons and whatnot.

I was certain it meant
something
, but I had not the knowledge of the Orientals to bolster what I had learned.

When Ashmore woke upon the morrow, if he did so, I would pluck his brain for all he knew of the Chinese version of what this all entailed.

To make of men beasts and then rise to power, that was dangerous enough. Why all of that complexity if the goal was immortality? What did Ma Lài require?

I fell asleep quite soundly, and did not dream at all. So tired was I, so mired in exhaustion, that I did not wake until noon.

One day back above the drift, caught in Society’s clutches, and I’d already fallen back into habit.

When I awoke to find a maid in my room, drawing the curtains to warm sunshine streaming through wide windows, I felt a sudden wash of surreal confusion.

For a moment, it was as though I’d never left such affluence behind.

By the time she’d coaxed me up and into borrowed clothing that fit well enough for its sort, all made of crape without any accessory, I recalled that I was in an estate Piers had taken us to.

“My escort,” I said suddenly, startling the maid. I caught her hand, the veil she held unattached. “Leave that off,” I said with distaste.“Is Mr. Ashmore awake?”

“No, miss,” she replied. She set the veil down. “But Lord Compton was saying how sir is looking much better.”

Relief filled me. I finished dressing hurriedly, rushing the young lady I did not recognize. When my stomach growled most voraciously, she giggled—lulled into complacence by my general lack of curtness, I supposed.

“There is repast below,” she assured me, and I followed her dutifully through what I now realized was a large estate. The windows had been cleared to allow the sun to shine through, and the appointment was beyond elegant.

By the time we approached what I assumed to be a vast dining hall, the first of my wariness turned into a fist within my stomach. I found myself unwittingly a guest in a vast estate, and of all the places where Lord Piers might feel at home, I could think of only one.

Stepping over the threshold gave physical form to my fears.

The table had been laid out with such fare as expected of a genteel morning, similar to what Mrs. Booth often made for us. Of course, the dining room was much larger, with sun allowed to stream within, and the utensils of marvelous delicacy and polish.

Those who sat around the table were no less posh.

The earl occupied one chair, but not the head, for that belonged to his father, Lord Benedict Kerrigan Compton, Marquess of Northampton. Wherever his lordship was, he did not grace the table with his presence.

Piers had indicated as such some time ago. The death of his eldest made of the marquess an obsessive man focused too readily upon matters of Crown and Parliament.

That his eyes were not among those lifted to my entry relieved me.

Until I recognized the faces bearing the weight of foggy green eyes turned to me; an all too familiar wash of icy fear as the frigid scrutiny of Lady Almira Louise Compton, Marchioness Compton, raked over me from head to toe.

I had always considered her my own personal gargoyle. Now, trapped within the confines of the estate I had only visited once in all of my life, all recourse for retreat was stripped from me.

I would be forced to face the fear I’d hoped to leave behind.

All before even a bit of tea to soften the bite.

Piers rose, a bit of courtesy that his mother promptly stripped by allowing her teacup to clatter most distinctly against the saucer she held in her other hand. “What is the meaning of this?” she asked, elegant tones of formidable polish clipped to the very quick.

The lady had always been lovely, statuesque of figure and with a wealth of golden hair that had faded with time. Unlike many matrons of an age, the years had conspired to turn the beauty of youth into the striking handsomeness of a woman matured.

Both sons had inherited her pale green eyes, though for all their raising, neither could mimic the sheer ice the marchioness could channel through a level stare.

Unlike myself, Lady Northampton was clad in the very perfection of mourning. Her attire was so beyond reproach that the well regarded handbooks detailing every aspect of Society’s expectation would have something to gain from the lady’s comportment.

That I had foregone the requisite widow’s cap and attached veil was a thing that did not go unregistered. Her features, aristocratic in the extreme, hardened to utter distaste.

If her cheeks, already pale by nature of the black she wore, seemed to go even whiter, I could not fault her. My fingers clenched into the folds of my skirts.

Would it have truly cost me to sit still long enough to apply the widow’s cap?

“Mother,” began Piers in placating tones, “I hoped—”

Lady Northampton stood so quickly that her chair made the most unbecoming sound as it scraped across the floor. “I will not,” she said, so coolly that I flinched, “sit with common rabble at my table.”

The earl stood as well, bracing both hands around his unfinished plate. “Mother, please.”

She said nothing, favored me with no other glance or sign of my presence. She simply set her eating cloth beside her plate, its contents virtually untouched, and swept away with such dignity that I felt a marked awe at her departure.

Awe, and no small amount of regret.

“I apologize,” I said when the silence fallen in her wake grew too unwieldy.

Piers sank back into his chair, a rudeness to which I would not take offense to. Such weariness filled his every line that my heart quite went out to him.

This was, at least in part, my own doing.

I claimed for myself a chair. “I did not realize we were in your family home,” I said quietly. “I am so sorry.”

“No.” The word came on a sigh, resignation merged with a bit of wry humor. “Had I been less distracted by matters, I’d have warned you. This was my fault.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

He favored me with a smile, strained though it was. No sign of his recent bout of cups showed upon his features, which I took to be a good sign. Men who spent too long in the stews began to show dissolute symptoms about the face.

I hoped this meant he had slimmed down on his vices. Perhaps Miss Turner had softened him somewhat.

Or perhaps, I thought as he nodded to the aging butler who stepped inside, the responsibilities of his position had done much to settle him.

Yet the grief that continued to pinch at his mouth when he thought none could see earned my sympathies.

Once I had been furnished with my own plate—the portion carefully allotted as though this were a matter of course for the household—and the help had gone again, I gingerly broached the topic. “Your family. They are…”

Lord Piers took my tendered offering with a rueful slant to his smile. “Not overly well. I suspect it will take a great deal more time.”

“My condolences.”

“And to you, dear sister.”

I bent my attention upon my plate. There was not enough food upon it to satisfy me, but it would suffice for the time and place.

“I brought you here,” Piers said after a time, “because it was closer than my Eaton Square home.”

“Thank you for that,” I said. “Without your quick thinking, it would have been the worse.”

“It rather nearly was.” He dabbed at his mouth with a cloth. “Was it of any use?”

I considered this. During the pause in which I did so, I polished off the rest of my plate. My host’s smile deepened a touch. Finally, as I took my tea in hand, mindful of the fragile porcelain, I said, “We learned that the Society collectors were furnished with a poison meant to cause sleep.”

“So why, then, did they turn to the other?” he asked.

“A fine question.” I tipped my head up, blinking at the wash of warm light streaming through the windows. Each pane was beveled, enhancing the light allotted.

It was lovely here, I’d allow that much. Spacious and warm.

I could readily imagine my late husband growing up here, learning his manners and, when he was allowed, tearing through the wide corridors with his younger brother in tow.