There was a light wind up here, just enough to tug at the curtains.

He turned, realizing Penelope had been watching him from the doorway.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Penelope breathed in deeply. “Forgive me if I don’t come to the door.”

“Of course.”

“Good luck, Richard.”

Field walked across the room, his footsteps loud on the wooden floorboards as he passed the foot of the iron-framed bed. He could not help glancing at the section next to the fireplace beneath which he had concealed the pages from Lu’s ledger the previous night. He wondered if she had heard him pulling up the floorboards and understood.

He stood in front of her, their faces close. “What will you do?” he asked.

“Where will I go, do you mean?” Her eyes were peaceful now, her demeanor calm and unhurried. “I’ll stay here, Richard. Unlike you, I have nowhere else to go. Or perhaps I should say, no reason to go anywhere else.” She smiled.

Field pressed the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other.

She touched his shoulder. “Good luck.”

Field bent to kiss her, but she took him into her arms, her grip tight as she held him. Then she released him and stepped back.

Field hesitated and then walked along the corridor. He stopped by the stairs and looked back.

She wore a fragile smile.

“Do you think,” he said, “they will give me what I want?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, “but you are right to try.”

Field looked at her. She stood with her legs together and her hands by her side, in a position of studied composure.

He put a foot on the stairs.

“Richard?”

Field stopped. He could tell it was taking every fragment of her strength to hold back the tears.

“He was a good man, you know. And that part of him was always there; it just got smaller and smaller.”

She had begun to cry now, and Field stepped back toward her.

“No.” She raised her hand. “Please.” Penelope wiped her eyes. “Just tell me I was not completely wrong.”

Field thought of the gaping wound in Lena Orlov’s stomach, of Alexei’s frightened face and the photograph that Maretsky had given him of Natalya’s mutilated body. He thought of Natasha’s bruised lip and the fate that had so nearly befallen her. He hesitated, then looked up again at the diminutive figure in the shadows.

“You weren’t wrong, Penelope.” He shook his head. “You weren’t wrong.”

He began to walk down the stairs.

“Good luck,” she said again.

Fifty-six

As the national anthem started, a great cheer went up. The crowd in front of him was a sea of red, white, and blue. They had gathered in their thousands, in front of the consulate. Field shifted to the right to get a better view.

He did not believe he had been followed from Crane Road, but there were so many people about that anyone who wished to tail him without being observed could easily have done so.

The sergeant, mounted on his horse in front of the guard of honor, shouted, “Three cheers for the king and emperor,” and the crowd around Field erupted. “Hip, hip, hooray!”

Field helped a man who was struggling to get his young boy on his shoulders and rescued his Union Jack from the ground.

The nearest troops were the Sikhs, dressed in white, their buckles and bayonets gleaming in the midday sun.

A portly, middle-aged woman, with a tiny flag tucked into the band of her hat, turned to him with tears in her eyes. “Look at the marines,” the woman exhorted him and whoever else was listening, gripping his arm. “Aren’t they absolutely marvelous?”

The crowd began to sing the national anthem. Field watched the marines, who were ramrod straight and completely aware of the splendid, heartening spectacle they were creating, a reminder to every inhabitant of this city of the power of the empire, upon which their fortunes rested.

He checked the revolver in his pocket as a group of drunken young men surged forward, crushing those at the front as they attempted to drown out everyone around them with the noise of their singing.

Field edged forward, pushed himself closer to an elderly couple. They were talking to each other excitedly in German, the woman’s face shielded behind an old-fashioned broad-brimmed blue hat. They were a wealthier version of the Schmidts and he excused himself as he shoved past them, fingering his revolver once more.

The crowd was thicker at the front, made up mostly of parents who’d fought to give their children the best view of the Bund. The white rope was ten yards from the line of Sikhs and only about a hundred from the gate of the consulate itself.

A gun went off as the national anthem came to an end-the midday salute.

He could see the sweat on the faces of the Sikhs as they stood to attention, their rifles now by their sides, the tips of the bayonets just above their ears.

There was another shout from the sergeant and they began to cheer, their turbans raised aloft on their bayonets. “Sat Sri Akal!”

Field pushed through the crowd again. He almost tripped over two young boys kneeling beneath the rope barrier.

As he walked toward the consulate building, a Sikh policeman, also dressed in white, hurried toward him. Field was sweating violently. “Richard Field, S.1,” he said, holding open his wallet to display his identity card.

The man examined it more thoroughly than he needed to, perhaps for the benefit of the onlookers. Then he stepped away from the rope to let him pass. Field breathed a little more easily. He crossed the road and looked back at the crowd, which stretched to the line of masts and funnels on the quay behind and for as much as a mile in each direction.

He passed the line of marines and reached another group of Sikh guards outside the front gate.

“Field, S.1,” he said, holding out his wallet once more.

The man he had approached was a sergeant, with a mature, confident face and a long, bushy white mustache. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, shaking his head. “But I’m afraid we have strict orders not to allow anyone through today.”

“Charles Lewis is expecting me,” Field said, his voice taut, sweat breaking out on his forehead again.

The Sikh continued to shake his head. “No one in here, sir, I’m sorry. C in C’s orders.”

“The C in C?”

The Sikh pointed to the man standing in the center of the dais overlooking the gardens, an extension of the terrace to the side of the consulate. He was dressed in white, with a large triangular, feathered hat. “Admiral Sir Edward Alexander Gordon Brewer, Commander in Chief, China Station.”

“I’m from S.1, Sergeant. I’d appreciate it if you could send someone to find Charles Lewis and get him to come down here to collect me.”

The Sikh was still shaking his head.

“I’m from S.1, Sergeant,” Field repeated slowly, as if the man was hard of hearing. “If you don’t want to be going home without your pension, I would get off your backside and go and find Charles Lewis. Now!”

Field had barked the order so loudly that a couple of women on the near end of the dais turned. The C in C was giving his address, but the wind was in the wrong direction. Field could not hear a word he was saying.

The Sikh was angry, but after a brief hesitation, he turned away and spoke urgently in his own language to one of his subordinates, who ran up the gravel path and through the big door at the top of the steps.

He was gone only a few minutes and returned to whisper in the ear of his superior, who then stood aside and opened the gate.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Lewis was waiting in the hallway beneath a portrait of Disraeli.

“Good afternoon,” Field said.

Lewis didn’t reply. He led Field up a black and white stone staircase, past a series of oil portraits of previous commanders in chief of the China Station.