A shout made him raise his head. He hadn’t even realised it had dropped onto his hands. A dark-headed lad was struggling with a girl over the ownership of a pen.

‘Philips,’ Theo said sharply.

‘But sir, I…’

‘Silence, boy.’

The culprit glared at the girl. She smirked.

Theo let it pass. Their faces merged into grey patterns in front of his eyes. He blinked to bring them back into sharp outline and looked around at the other young faces. Few appeared to be working. Girls were whispering behind their hands, and one of the boys was folding a sheet of paper with perfect precision into a paper dart. The Russian girl was staring out the window. With an effort he ran a hand over his eyes to wipe away the cobwebs that felt as if they clung there. The Russian girl turned to watch and he felt a touch of unease. There was something about the way that girl looked at you, as if she could see into all the black holes you tried to hide. He wondered if she knew how lucky she was to be still alive after that Black Snake business with Feng Tu Hong.

Alfred was a fool to get involved with that family.

For no reason he suddenly recalled the conversation he’d had with the girl in the Ulysses Club and the ferocity of her desire to mould her life into something she wanted. By sheer force of will. Well, life wasn’t that simple. Didn’t it ever occur to the silly girl to wonder why she was the only foreigner in the school, the only non-British pupil among all the Taylors and Smiths and Fieldings? Didn’t she find that odd? Not that she was much of a mixer. She’d always kept to herself, except for the Mason girl. He looked at Polly’s glossy blond head bent over her work. She seemed to be the only one really concentrating on the exercise, and suddenly a bitter anger rose in his throat, so that he felt an urge to strike out at the poor defenceless creature.

Christopher Mason.

A fitting name. A man of stone.

‘No,’ Mason had said over a gin at the club, with a smile that wasn’t a smile. ‘No. It will not end so easily.’

‘Damn you, man,’ Theo had retorted. ‘The debt to the bank will be repaid by early next year and then that’s an end to it as far as I’m concerned. No more.’

‘I must disagree.’

‘Don’t be absurd. You can run the business on your own. You don’t need me anymore, neither you nor Feng Tu Hong.’

‘Oh, but I do, Willoughby. Don’t underestimate yourself.’ Slate grey eyes and a slate grey tongue.

‘Why?’

‘Because, my dear chap, Feng won’t do the deal without you. The old devil wants you in on it or he shuts up shop, God only knows why.’

Theo felt chills up his spine. ‘That’s your problem,’ he said, ‘not mine.’ He started to walk away.

‘The inside of a jail is not very pleasant, I’m told.’

Theo swung round. The urge to crush his fist into this man’s grinning face almost blew him over the edge, but some vestige of survival instinct clawed him back from the brink. He leaned over Mason, emphasising the difference in their height, breathing hard in his face.

‘Is that a threat?’

Mason nodded slowly. ‘Yes.’

‘You mean you would report me. To customs.’

‘Exactly that. As a trafficker in opium, Foreign Mud as they call it. I can provide times, dates, black-sail boats, the whole damn lot. Witnesses who saw you. You’d be staring at four filthy walls and ten years in prison before you could even blink.’ There was savage enjoyment on his face.

‘If you shop me, Mason, I’ll take you down into that hell with me, you bastard, I swear to God I will.’

Mason laughed. ‘Don’t kid yourself, you bloody fool. You have no proof. There’s nothing to connect me with your nighttime activities on the river. You don’t think any of that money has gone into my bank, do you?’ He laughed again, a harsh grating sound that tried Theo’s nerves. ‘You’re in a box, Willoughby, and you can’t get out, any more than a dead man can crawl out of his coffin. So just enjoy the nice cosy benefits, why don’t you?’ He stared with amusement at Theo. ‘It looks to me, old chap, as if you’re up to your eyeballs in them already.’

Theo knew he was trapped. The rage inside him was burning holes in his belly and only the sweet black paste seemed to blunt the pain. But Li Mei did not understand. She said little. But he saw the look in her eyes each time he went to the drawer.

‘Sir?’

Theo blinked hard. Got his brain moving. The class was still there. It was Polly. Pretty Polly.

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve finished, sir.’

‘In which case, Miss Mason, why don’t you join me here in front of the class and read it out loud for the benefit of those who lack your speed of mind.’

Polly’s shoulders hunched down as if she wanted to crawl under her desk. She mumbled something.

‘Pardon, Miss Mason, I didn’t catch that.’

‘I said I’d rather not, sir.’

Mason’s laugh in his ears goaded him on. He didn’t normally make Polly read aloud to the class as her academic talents were very mediocre, but to hell with it. Today would be different. She stood in front of the rows of expectant faces and started to read in a halting voice, her cheeks a miserable red. Theo realised with surprise that she was talking about Henry VIII and the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Is that what he’d set them? He’d forgotten already. Her words faltered, stumbled, grew slower and smaller.

‘That’s enough, Miss Mason. You may sit down.’

She threw him a glance of gratitude and escaped back to her seat. Gratitude. She should be hating him for that display of petty cruelty, hating him as much as he hated himself.

‘I congratulate you, Polly, on your diligence in class. The rest of you,’ he scowled at his pupils and vaguely registered a tawny gaze glaring at him with fury, ‘will stay in at break time and write an account of the Diet of Worms. You, Polly,’ he smiled at her benignly, ‘you are excused from it because you have worked well.’

Her blue eyes widened with pleasure.

It was too easy. To take revenge that way. Mason was the one who deserved the spike through his heart. If he had a heart, that is.

‘Mr Theo?’

‘What is it, Lydia?’

‘Please, would you do some translation for me? Only a few sentences. Into Chinese, I mean.’

It was the end of the school day and his head was thrumming. He could barely stop his limbs trembling and twitching, desperate to seek out the pipe and the paste and the little heated spoon, but first he had to steel himself for the ordeal of the parents-at-the-gate ritual. Fortunately the wind was keen and gusting through the yard, so the mothers and amahs did not linger over picking up their offspring or stand around making aimless conversation. But now the Russian girl wanted something. What did she say? Translation? She was holding a piece of paper out to him, expecting him to take it. His fingers reached out and he saw her watching the way the tips jumped erratically around the paper before he grasped it. With an effort he read what was on it. There were four short sentences.

1. Do you know someone called… ?

2. Can you direct me to… ?

3. Where is… ?

4. Does he live/work here?

‘Ah.’ He smiled at her. ‘The young Chinese. You’re after him, aren’t you?’

He was astonished by the girl’s reaction. Her mouth fell open, her lips bleached bone white, and she seemed suddenly painfully young and as vulnerable as eggshell.

‘How do you know?’ she asked urgently. ‘Where is he? Have you seen him? Is he well? Do you…?’

‘Slow down, Lydia.’ Her hand was shaking worse than his. ‘If we’re talking about the same person, no, I don’t know his name and I don’t know where he is. But you needn’t worry about him because when I saw him last he was under the protection of Feng Tu Hong, the big boss of the Chinese Council and of the Black Snakes, so he should…’