Chapter Two

The Traders was frequented by travellers, businessmen, a smattering of explorers and scholars: anyone who had travelled further East than India and wanted to talk about it. It was not busy, but there was a small group of old China hands that he knew, so Crane joined them, pulling up a deep leather armchair to savour a very decent whisky and listen to "Town" Cryer's latest news.

Town, whose real first name Crane had long forgotten, finished an account of a piece of triple dealing involving Macau import-export law to a general murmur of approbation, and turned to Crane, who contributed an amusing anecdote about his purchase of a minority holding in Sheng's.

"Oh, jolly good, Vaudrey!" said Shaycott, a Java man. "Crane, I mean. You always tell a good story. You should come more often, we haven't seen you here in an age."

"I've been cursed busy with family matters." Crane acknowledged the sympathetic nods. "What news, Town? Bring me up to date."

"Well," said Town thoughtfully. "I suppose you heard about Merton?"

Crane's lip lifted in a twitch of distaste. "What about him? Got on a boat, I hope?"

"His last voyage." Shaycott intoned the words. "Dead, just last week."

A youngish, tanned fellow, slightly the worse for drink, murmured, "Oh, dear, poor chap. I, er, should we…?" He started to raise his glass.

"I'm not drinking to Merton," said Humphris flatly. He was another Shanghai trader, one of the few Crane liked rather than tolerated through habit.

"I'll drink to his passing," Crane added. "Accident, or did an outraged parent finally catch up with him?"

"Accident, cleaning his gun." Town gave a meaningful cough.

"Not just a swine but a coward." Humphris spoke contemptuously, and then looked at Crane with sudden horror, very obviously recalling that his father and brother had both killed themselves. "Good God, Vaudrey, I'm terribly sorry. I didn't mean—"

"Not at all." Crane waved it away. "And in any case, I agree with you."

"Still, I beg your pardon." Humphris cast about for a change of subject. "Oh, have you heard about Willetts? You know, the copra dealer. Did you see in the papers?"

"No, what?"

"Murdered."

"Good God." Crane sat up. "Are you serious? Is there an arrest?"

"No, none. He was found in Poplar, by the river. Stabbed, apparently. A footpad."

"The devil. Poor fellow."

"Willetts and Merton, within a fortnight." Shaycott kept up the portentous tone.

"Yes, the subscription book here is going to start looking thin at this rate," Crane agreed heartlessly, and Town added, "The Curse of the Traders."

"Don't joke about that, you fellows. I've heard some things in my time—" Shaycott ignored the susurrus of irritation this kind of remark always produced, and launched into a tale. It was one of the deceased Willetts' stories, a lengthy yarn involving rats the size of dogs, but Crane had heard it several times before and found Shaycott dull even telling the best of tales. He drifted off into a reverie, wondering whether Stephen might be curled up in his bed when he returned home, and what he would do if he was. His attention was only recalled when Humphris waved a copy of The Times in his face.

"Look sharp, Vaudrey! I was asking if you've seen this? The Engagements column?"

"Oddly enough, I haven't read it today. Are we to wish you happy, Monk?"

"Monk" Humphris, who was as confirmed a bachelor as Crane, although in his case because of a natural preference for celibacy, made a rude gesture. "Not me, you fool. Leonora Hart is getting married."

"The devil she is!"

"Oh, you hadn't heard?" said Town. "I had wind of it some time back. The chap's smitten, by all accounts."

Crane grabbed the newspaper and scrutinised it. "Eadweard Blaydon? How do you even say that?"

"It's pronounced Edward. Politician. Member of Parliament. He's a reformer. Rooting out corruption. End the sale of honours and the benefits of clergy and the pernicious practices of bribery. An honest mandarin."

There was a dubious murmur at that, unsurprisingly, since most of those present regarded bribery as something between a handy tool and a form of tax, and none of them had high opinions of mandarins, of whatever nationality.

"Do you think she's told him about Hart?" an unpopular man named Peyton remarked snidely. "If there was an official in Shanghai he didn't bribe, I never met him."

"Hart was no fool," Crane said. "Blaydon will have a job on his hands to match up."

"Is that why Mrs. Hart hasn't remarried? Hart's glorious memory?" Peyton's voice was sneering. "Because I heard there was some sort of scandal with some Singapore man. Town, do you know—"

"Tom and Leonora Hart were two of the best friends I've ever had," Crane interrupted, locking eyes with Peyton. "Hart saved my skin more than once. His death devastated Leo. If she is able to marry again, I'm damned glad for her, and if any of you feel the urge to spread spiteful fishwives' gossip about her or Tom, I suggest you resist it." Peyton went red. "Leo is perfectly capable of defending her own honour," Crane went on, loudly enough that the other conversations in the room were suspended, "and I'm sure Blaydon can and will do so for her as well, but just to be clear, I will take any offensive comments about Leonora Hart as a direct personal affront, and I will make the speaker eat his words, at the end of my boot if need be."

"I'll back you up on that," Monk Humphris said.

"Sir, I don't like your tone to my uncle." The young man stood as he spoke, slightly too violently.

"And I don't like your uncle's tone, so it evens out," Crane replied, and stood too, staring down at the young man for a couple of deliberately intimidating seconds, before going over to pour himself another whisky from the tantalus. This allowed Monk and the others time to persuade the young man to sit down and be quiet. The words "disgraceful" and "lawless" were audible in Peyton's nasal voice; "quite right", "bad man to cross" and "that vicious brute Merrick" came from the others. Judging that a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of his capabilities to put the young spark off, Crane strolled back to his chair, deciding that he'd find out what the hell Leo was playing at in the morning.

Stephen lay naked, arms spread wide, the Magpie Lord's ring glowing on his finger, illuminating the fingers that curled like claws. He writhed and twisted, uttering incoherent pleas for mercy as his silky cock jutted hard from the reddish curls at his groin.

"Please, my lord, please," Stephen was sobbing, as Crane positioned himself at the entrance to the small sinewy body.

"Please what?" Crane demanded, nudging the tip of his cock against Stephen's arse. "Please what ?"

Stephen howled out, arching his back, thrusting himself towards Crane. "Please, my lord!"

Crane pushed his shoulders down hard. "One more chance, pretty boy."

"Make me yours," said Stephen. "Make me fly. Make the magpies fly."

"You will fly." Now he was thrusting in the dark heat of Stephen's body, watching the birds flutter on his lover's skin, the black and white flickering over his amber eyes. The seven tattoos were silently flapping and shrieking, and magpies were rising all around them in a storm of wings and cawing as the feathers spread wide from Stephen's extended arms. " Fly ," he said again, and came hard and hot as the magpies screamed.

He woke up thrashing in a tangle of sheets and an empty bed, sweating, momentarily bewildered, and with an unmistakeable sticky wetness on his belly.

"Fuck," he muttered aloud and let his head drop back onto the hot pillow as he tried to shake off the dream.

It had only been a few days, damn it. Nocturnal emissions seemed hardly appropriate at his advanced age. And he was beginning to lose patience with the bloody magpies.

Crane, though without magical talent of his own, was the last descendant of the Magpie Lord, a hugely powerful sorcerer, and in some way he didn't understand he—his blood, his body—acted as a conduit between his ancestor's power and Stephen's talent. One of the more bizarre side effects of this was that Crane's seven tattoos of magpies took on independent life when he and Stephen fucked, flying and hopping across both men's skin. One had even decided it preferred Stephen and had taken up residence on his back, leaving Crane with the frankly unsettling experience of looking in a mirror and seeing plain unmarked skin where a tattoo used to be, and Stephen the equally disturbing gift of a tattoo that he'd never had inked. Crane could live without the damned birds invading his imaginary love life as well.

He touched a hand to his shoulder, where the defecting tattoo had once spread its wings, uttered a curse on magpies, dreams and absent lovers, shifted into a less sticky patch of sheet, and went back to sleep.