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to the stockade and tell Captain Morris he’s to be given every accommodation in seeing Hobart?’
    Lydia remained behind, for tea: everyone in the Legation Quarter was delighted with any new face, and even the married men would flock around an intelligent, well-spoken lady like pigeons to corn. Asher left Sir John showing her around the courtyard – this part of the original Legation still retained its scarlet pillars, green-tiled roofs and the gold dragons on its ceilings – and followed the helpful Mr P’ei down the bare yellow dust of the central mall to the newly-built barracks and the stockade.
    ‘I swear I would never have harmed a hair of her head.’ Richard Hobart raised his face from his hands, blue eyes sick with dread. ‘No, I hadn’t the slightest desire to marry Holly – Miss Eddington – but for God’s sake, I wouldn’t have murdered her to get out of it! If I was fool enough to propose to her, the least I could do was go through with it, even if I was . . . was too stupid with drink to know what I was saying.’
    Tears swam in his eyes. His face was longer than his father’s and narrow. At Cambridge, Asher had been struck by the boy’s resemblance to his lanky American mother. His cheeks glittered with stubble of the same bronze-gold color as his dirty hair, but his clothes were clean, and not those he’d had on last night. His father, Asher guessed, had brought them earlier that morning: the neat gray suit of a young embassy clerk, its starched, spotless collar adorned with a subdued green tie. Young Hobart’s hands trembled convulsively where they lay on the scuffed table of the interview room, and under a wash of sweat his face was chalky.
He must have the hangover of the century, if not worse
. Asher wondered how much opium the young man smoked and how frequently.
    ‘Do you recall anything of the night you proposed?’ He had learned that a matter-of-fact tone would often steady someone on the verge of hysterics.
    ‘Not a damn thing.’ The young man shook his head in despair. ‘Father was having some kind of ghastly whist-club over that night, so Gil and Hans and I made ourselves scarce. The Eddingtons would be there, you see, and I – well, I was rather avoiding Holly. I know it sounds frightful, Professor Asher, but she did
cling
so, and she was always going on about how much she loved me . . . A bit sick-making, really.’
    A shudder went through him, and he pressed his hand to his lips. ‘We stayed down in the Chinese City long enough, I thought, that they’d all be gone by the time I got back. But I must have been wrong about that, because I have a vague memory of meeting Miss Eddington as I came up the garden walk. I was feeling a bit wibbly in the morning and came down late, thinking Father’d gone by then, but he was sitting at the breakfast table with a face like Jupiter Tonans. He practically struck me over the head with the newspaper and asked me what the hell I meant, getting engaged to Holly Eddington. I guess her mother’d sent the announcement in, first thing, and it was in print by noon.’
    ‘Were you angry?’
    ‘I was bally well appalled. Well, Miss Eddington was a . . . I’m sure you know, sir, how hard it is to avoid someone here in the Quarter. And the Eddingtons go everywhere. One doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But I wasn’t falling in love with her, as her mother kept hinting. I’d had enough of that at Cambridge – matchmaking mamas shoving their daughters at me . . . Father’d have it that I never proposed at all: that Miss Eddington and her mother cooked it up between them, knowing I wouldn’t remember what I’d said. But she had a ring – the cheap sort of thing you’ll find down at the Thieves’ Market – and was showing it off all ’round the Quarter by that afternoon. It drove me wild, but what can one say?’
    ‘When was this?’
    ‘Last Thursday, the seventeenth. Just a week ago. That wretched mother of hers had