Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,107
do? Even before Forbes died, I was determined to find a way to care for her. But now I can do whatever I want and I want that child more than anything in the world. Can you take me to her right away?”
“Not right away,” said Hero. “But I have an idea. . . .”
* * *
Tuesday, 21 June
Early that morning, Ji helped Alice set up in her favorite spot in Leicester Square, then moved a ways apart—close enough to protect Alice’s cup from thieves but not so close as to attract attention. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Ji began silently reciting sutras. She prayed, first for the man she had so shamefully wished would be reborn as a hungry ghost. Then she prayed for Hayes.
It was the twelfth day after his death. If Ji were in Canton, she would be burning incense and giving cloth to the monks on Hayes’s behalf. But she wasn’t in Canton. Never again would she smell its sweet plum blossoms or see its gentle waterways, and that hurt. But it didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as the knowledge that she would never again see Hayes.
When Ji was a little girl in Canton, she used to stare at the faces of random women in the street, looking for the faintest suggestion of a resemblance—the arch of a brow, the curve of a lip. And she’d wonder, Are you my mother? Are you the one who conceived me after lying with a man your family considered a ‘barbarian’ so that when I was born, they took me from your arms? Were you horrified when you looked down at my face and saw the truth of your shame written there for all to see? Were you relieved when they carried me away to leave me on the banks of the Pearl River to die? Or did you cry out and grieve for your loss? Do you miss me still, the way I miss you? Do you search the faces of the little girls you see in the street, hoping against hope to find me?
“Oh, Ji,” Hayes would say, holding her close, “I’m so sorry.”
He could have lied. He could have told her that she was his child, that she’d been born in love to that woman who’d died in childbirth just hours before Hayes—devastated and wishing for his own death—had stumbled upon an abandoned, wailing infant on the banks of the river. But instead he had told her the truth: that his child had died along with her mother. That was his way.
“Even a well-meaning lie can sometimes cause incalculable harm,” he was always telling Ji. She had seen the look on the face of Hayes’s friend Jules Calhoun when Hayes told the story of his escape from Botany Bay. About how he’d killed the ex-soldier caught up in the floodwaters with him, and then bashed in the man’s face so that everyone would think it was Hayes who had died. Another man might have lied and said the soldier was already dead. But not Hayes. Years later, he was still reciting mantras for the benefit of the man he had killed.
Ji let her head fall back, her gaze blurry with unshed tears as she stared up at the gray English sky. “I miss you,” she whispered.
Swallowing hard, she lowered her gaze to scan the crowd in the square, looking for potential trouble. That was when she saw him—Hayes’s friend Jules, standing at the corner of Cranburn Street. And there, nearby, was the awe-inspiring woman from the Red Lion, Grace Calhoun.
The more she looked, the more familiar faces Ji saw. The man from the Turkish baths whom Hayes had pointed out to her as an old friend. The extraordinarily tall gentlewoman who’d been interviewing Alice the day those men tried to grab Ji in Clerkenwell Green. And that other lady, dressed now in the severe black that Hayes had explained Englishwomen wore when in mourning. Ji recognized her as the woman they’d watched from a distance in St. James’s Square—the one Hayes told Ji he’d once loved.
That he still loved.
The woman in black came closer. She stood for a time listening to Alice play her hurdy-gurdy before stooping to drop some coins in the tin cup. Then she turned and walked right up to Ji.
Ji rose shakily to her feet, ready to run.
“Do you know who I am?” said the woman.
Ji studied her pale face and yearning eyes. “Yes.”