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She would not let him see her face.
‘Li Mei, don’t. Please.’
But she hid her face in the pillow. Her shame was
far worse than her pain.
‘My sweetest love,’ Theo murmured, ‘let me bathe
your swollen cheeks and kiss the black bruises away from your
eyes.’
She curled up tight, away from him.
Theo bent over the bed and kissed the back of her
head, breathing in the sandalwood scent of her raven’s-wing hair.
‘Forgive me, my love. I shall leave you in peace. Here are some
medicines from the herbalist; the one in the black pot is for the
pain, the other for the damaged skin.’
He waited, torn between a fierce desire to sweep
her into his arms and the knowledge that more than anything she
wanted to hide the evidence of her disgrace from him.
‘Li Mei?’
Silence.
‘Li Mei, listen to me. You must never return to
your father. Whatever happens. We both know he would beat you into
the ground and make a slave of you, so you must stay away from him.
And from that turd-sucking brother of yours, Po Chu. Promise me
that.’
Nothing.
He reached out and rested a hand on the slender
curve of her hip. ‘In exchange I promise to have nothing more to do
with the dream smoke.’
Still no answer. But her shoulders started to
shake. She was crying.
That night Theo didn’t go to bed. Nor did he keep
the appointment on the river. He went down to the empty
schoolrooms, to the large carved oak chair that stood at the end of
the hall, and then he summoned one of the yard boys to come with
ropes. The nine-year-old boy was unhappy to do as Theo ordered, but
in the end he obeyed because if he lost his job his mother and
father and four sisters would starve.
Theo sat there all night.
No one to hear his moans and his cries except the
yellow-eyed cat. Most of the time she just sat and watched him but
once jumped up on his lap with a loud yowl. His wrists were bound
to the wooden arms, where carvings of tigers grinned up at him,
mocking his torment, and his ankles tied to the chair’s stout
legs.
When a faint red glow finally came up over the
horizon, Theo knew he was looking into the eyes of the devil
himself.