“I’ll escort the young lady home,” Peter MacNair said in a voice that brooked no argument.
“Yes, sir.” Reginald was gone in a flash. Lydia had a glimpse of him racing pell-mell for the gate, without so much as a backward glance.
“Here.” Peter MacNair gave her his hand and helped her to her feet. The bodice of her dress was torn, and she was grateful that he looked away while she adjusted it as best she could. It gave her, too, a chance to glance at him undetected.
How handsome he was, with his sandy brown hair that spilled carelessly over his forehead, and eyes so dark a brown that they looked black when he was scowling, as he was now. But why was he angry? Did he think she had encouraged Reginald?
“I thank you for coming to my assistance,” she said aloud, hoping to put his mind at ease on that account.
“It was nothing,” he said curtly. “Shall we go now?”
Intimidated by his cool manner, Lydia went wordlessly with him, out of the grove, and back to the city’s gate, wondering as she did so what she had done to offend him.
In fact, Peter MacNair was annoyed not with her, but with himself for having intervened in something that was none of his business. The two had looked little more than children on a lark when he had seen them disappear into that bamboo grove. He had gone there only intending to warn them of the danger abroad, and when he’d seen what was afoot, he had very nearly turned around and gone on his way; what did it matter to him if the daughter of a pompous missionary entertained some lout among the bamboo?
But then the girl had started protesting, and she had looked so damnably young. He had spoken on an impulse, and having once taken such a stand, he could hardly have backed down from it without looking like an ass.
So now here he was, escorting the silly child home, and no doubt the righteous Reverend Holt would think he was the one who’d torn her dress in an attempt to have his way with her.
The idea having entered his mind, however fleetingly, he instinctively gave the girl an appraising glance, and as quickly chided himself for being foolish. She was every bit as young as he had thought at first sight, and on top of it, not even his type. That red-gold hair of hers, falling in a luxuriant cascade about her face and shoulders, was smashing, particularly with her green eyes, but he favored dark-haired women, and in due time those wide-set eyes would lose that look of enraptured innocence that made them so appealing just now. As for the rest, well, she had hardly any breasts, and she tended toward plumpness, though that might have been some lingering baby fat.
All and all, he’d much rather have one of the Chinese singsong girls, though truth to tell he had been hankering for a white woman lately. He had been in China nearly a year, and he was not a man noted for continence.
They had entered the city by now, but its teeming streets had lost their charm for Lydia. She walked at the trader’s side with her eyes dejectedly downward. It was apparent that she had somehow offended her rescuer, though she couldn’t for the life of her imagine how. She stole a quick glance up at his profile—he was taller even than Papa—but at the sight of his stern visage, she glanced away again at once.
She had been traveling with her parents since she was a mere baby, in one remote corner of the world after another. Cut off as she was from the usual social mingling, she had experienced none of the innocent flirtation, the tentative exploration of romance that was usual for girls of her age. Reginald was the only boy she knew near her own age, and she knew him only slightly. Her parents had even sheltered her from the romantic novels that might at least have given her some clue to why her pulse quickened whenever she glanced at the handsome man beside her.
All that she did know was that to be near him like this gave her pleasure, but one so intense that it was akin to pain. He moved with a certain cocksure manner that reminded her of a prize-winning stallion her father had once taken her to see. It gave her a peculiar thrill of excitement to see how he towered over the Chinese about them. If only he would take her hand again, as he had when he had helped her up from the ground; her palm still tingled from the memory of his touch.
“Oh, there’s Papa,” she cried suddenly, spying her father in the street ahead of them.
Reverend Holt had already seen them, and was waiting for them to come up, scowling at them. MacNair saw the father’s eyes go to his daughter’s torn bodice and return to him, glinting angrily.
“Reverend.” MacNair lifted his topee, the pith helmet that whites wore for protection from the burning sun, in greeting; Reverend Holt made no gesture in reply. “I found your daughter outside the gates, and thought it best if I escorted her home.”
Holt’s eyes went again to Lydia’s torn dress. “I tore my dress on some bamboo,” she said hastily, her face reddening. Now that she was no longer in any danger from Reginald, she saw no point in causing trouble, though she hoped Peter MacNair would not refute her explanation and make her out a liar.
He did not, nor did her father question her explanation. “We thank you for your trouble, Mr. MacNair,” he said stiffly. “It was foolish of my daughter to go wandering off alone. There are many unscrupulous persons who might be tempted to take advantage of her youth and innocence.”
“Lucky she met me instead,” MacNair said. “Good day to you, sir. Miss Holt.” He tipped his hat to both of them again and, turning on his heel, strode off. The throngs of Chinese seemed to part before him as if before the prow of a ship.
“You are not to speak to Mr. MacNair in the future,” the reverend said.
“But Papa, he was so kind to me,” Lydia said. “You can’t mean it.”
Her father’s jaw tightened; it was the first time his daughter had ever challenged one of his commands. “I mean it most assuredly,” he said, his voice icy. “And we will not discuss it further. Mind what I say.”
Despite his admonition, she was about to protest further, but she was suddenly aware of something unusual that was occurring. At first she could not grasp what it was, then suddenly it came to her that an abrupt silence, more striking in a Chinese street than it would have been elsewhere, had fallen. Her father, whose great height made it possible for him to see further, suddenly took her arm and drew her into the slight shelter of a doorway.
In a moment she understood. Four peasants passed through the street, moving quickly and silently, and they bore a new coffin between them.
Another victim of the cholera. The silence lingered briefly after the coffin had passed. Then, from somewhere behind, came a sudden din, the beating of gongs and the snapping of firecrackers, the Chinese way of frightening off the evil spirits that had brought the cholera.
It was odd but that unexpected silence, and the passing of the coffin, followed by that uproar, frightened Lydia more than all the talk of illness or murder had before, and when her father, still holding tightly to her arm, drew her from the doorway and began to hurry her toward their house, she went with him meekly, glad once more to be in the shadow of his domination.
CHAPTER TWO
Lydia was surprised when her father handed her a brown wrapped package somewhat later; with everything else that had occurred, she had forgotten that it was her birthday.
“Oh, Papa, it’s beautiful,” she cried, unwrapping the package to reveal a golden locket. Inside was a likeness of her father, taken only a few years before, and so lifelike, with his stern expression and his eyes seeming to see right into her heart. Peter MacNair had looked at her like that in the bamboo grove.
Her heart sank as she remembered her father’s admonition not to speak to the trader in the future. It was unfair. Of course, she had known that the two weren’t on very good terms. Her parents had gone to see MacNair soon after he had arrived.
The meeting had not gone well; they had returned out of sorts, and her father had pronounced the Scotch-American “not a Godfearing sort.” And though she