his clothes. She was so nervous that her breath came hard, but she managed to smile at him for the first time ever.
He smiled in reply, and she saw his member rise up from the thick tangle of hair at his loins, growing with his delight.
She wanted to shut her eyes to the sight, to block the experience from her mind as she had learned to do in the preceding days, but she resisted the urge. She wanted to live, to survive; she could not do that without Ke Loo’s support. She had no weapons, no strength to match his, no means to resist or escape him.
But she had her wiles, and with those, perhaps, she could conquer.
Perhaps she could even live to see Peter MacNair again, and have the satisfaction of seeing him suffer.
Ke Loo came to the bed, crouching over her, tearing hungrily at the cloth covering her body. To his amazement, she slapped at his hand. He stopped, glowering angrily, but his anger turned to bewilderment when he saw that she was smiling seductively at him.
She took his wrist and brought his hand to her breast, moving his hand upon it, but slowly, softly.
“Gently, my lord,” she told him in his native tongue.
He smiled again, delighted at her new attitude. No Chinese woman would have dared to instruct a man in lovemaking, nor resist whatever he desired. He fondled her breast gently, as she had indicated.
She lifted her arms about his neck and parted her lips to welcome his. As she felt his weight upon her, she closed her mind to what was happening.
I will live, she thought, feeling his touch, newly tender, upon her thighs.
I will survive.
I will have my revenge.
* * * * * * *
While they were still on their journey, Lydia missed her monthly, and by the time they had arrived at their destination, she was certain that she was with child.
Her feelings were a mass of contradictions. Some motherly instinct within her filled her with joy at the thought of her own child, a darling baby to hold and cuddle. In the wake of losing her parents, she welcomed the hope of someone to love, someone who loved her in return.
But a half-Chinese child? Her feelings recoiled at the thought that Ke Loo was the child’s father, and it made her sick in the pit of her stomach to think of the child being conceived with him on one of those nights in the dreadful inns.
A new idea occurred to her: what if Ke Loo weren’t the father of the child? What if it were Peter MacNair?
Her immediate reaction was a feeling of relief that the baby would not be of mixed blood, but no sooner had that idea crossed her mind than she was filled with anger at the prospect that she might be carrying the child of the one man she hated most in all the world. She would rather die!
Of course, she really didn’t want to die. She had survived so much already. And then she would think of eyes the color of sable, long-lashed and shining; what a lovely child she would be, the daughter of Peter MacNair; and little she would know of her father’s perfidy.
Yet another thought sobered her: would Ke Loo welcome a child who looked like Peter MacNair? Surely not. And as for a daughter, she well knew they were not welcomed in China.
During the journey, they had stopped for a rest near a hillside covered with graves and, with her guards and the nurse following her, she had made her way up the hill to a stumpy little tower, cone-shaped and made of rough-hewn stone. It had struck her as quaint and picturesque, and she had thought it some sort of memorial.
There were a number of baskets strewn about on the ground, and on one side of the structure a rope extended from an opening. A sickening odor escaped from the opening, and in an instant she had realized the nauseating truth: it was a baby tower, and the rope was used to gently lower the babies into the deep pit beneath the tower.
It had left her shaken and ill. She was filled with horror at the thought of her child, her very own daughter, suffering so cruel and ignominious a fate.
A boy, then—she would pray for a son. And she must pray too that he was Ke Loo’s son; else, his gender notwithstanding, he was little likely to escape the mandarin’s displeasure.
No matter who the father, though, no matter what the color of his skin or the shape of his eyes, he would be hers, and she would love him.
And no one would take him from her.
* * * * * * *
It was with such thoughts as these that she arrived in Kalgan, Ke Loo’s city. It lay not far from the Great Wall itself, on the route of the caravans that wound across the vast Gobi desert on their way to Peking.
Summer was waning, and the bleak Chinese winter would soon be upon them. The last straggling caravans, laden with goods of every imaginable sort, hurried southward, and soon the desert route would be closed until spring.
At the moment, however, the city was teeming, even by Chinese standards. Everywhere that they had been, Lydia had been an object of great curiosity, but nowhere more so than here. The amah whom Ke Loo had assigned to attend to her told her that no white woman had ever before ventured into this region of China. Here too, Ke Loo was a great lord, and as such great interest attached to his doings. The news that he had brought with him a foreign devil as a bride had somehow preceded them.
“I don’t see how,” Lydia complained. “We’ve only just gotten here ourselves, and they’ve no trains or telegraph, or anything like that.”
“Men travel on foot,” the amah replied, grinning at the girl’s naiveté. “News travels on the wind.”
Despite her predicament, Lydia could not help feeling a certain excitement at knowing she would be living in a palace. Like most Chinese palaces, Ke Loo’s was in fact a series of separate buildings, joined by numerous gardens and courtyards, the whole contained within a high wall that afforded them quiet and privacy though they were actually in the very heart of the city.
She was to live in a little house of her own, surrounded by a garden with ornamental pools and almond trees. There were only two rooms, a sort of sitting-dining room, and a large bedroom.
“Evidently my lord expects me to do nothing but eat and sleep,” Lydia said when she had explored her quarters.
The amah, who shared the house with her, giggled. She found her new charge shockingly outspoken. It was not a woman’s place after all, to question such matters.
Lydia’s facetious remark, however, proved closer to the mark then she had expected. Immediately upon their arrival, a brief wedding ceremony had been performed, making her Ke Loo’s wife in fact as well as in deed, but she considered this of little consequence. What did that matter, in view of the fact that she was really a slave?
From the moment that her condition had been confirmed, however, the mandarin ceased his nocturnal visits to her, though he came every day and studied her briefly, as if weighing her in the balance.
“I wish for a son,” he declared at the beginning.
“As if I had any choice in the matter,” Lydia complained privately, but she too hoped for a son. She could not bear to think of what might
