“Not this way,” Sarah said, hesitating. “The gate’s over here.”
“We won’t be able to go there,” Lydia said. “You’re not well enough to travel so far. We’ll go to Mr. MacNair’s.”
“The Scotsman?” Sarah came to an abrupt halt. “But we can’t. He’s not a God-fearing man. And all those Chinese girls...it won’t do.”
“It will have to do, Mama,” Lydia insisted, urging her along. “He’s white, and a man, at least. He can’t refuse to help us, I know he can’t.”
Sarah came, but reluctantly. “Your father didn’t like him at all. He’d be shocked to know we went there,” she said.
Father can’t help us now, Lydia thought, but did not say it aloud. They ran across the roughly paved street.
They had gone only a few yards when the sound of running footsteps brought them up short. “Someone’s coming,” Lydia said. “In here, quick.”
She thrust her mother into the deeper shadows of a doorway. They huddled together, watching the way they had come. Already Lydia’s cloak was soaked through from the rain and she could feel her mother trembling through her clothes.
Ke Loo’s sedan chair materialized out of the rain. This time he came with several attendants, burly-looking coolies wearing, despite the storm, nothing more than loin cloths, their hair in long pigtails down their backs. Two of them, Lydia saw, carried large sacks flung over their shoulders. The procession came to a halt outside the house she and her mother had just quitted.
For a moment Ke Loo leaned from the sedan chair, conferring with the two coolies. Then he disappeared within the curtains, and the two ran stealthily toward the dark house.
Lydia shuddered. They had left not a moment too soon. Ke Loo had come back, clearly intending to take them by force. He had known somehow that Papa was dead. He had guessed the truth, that mother and daughter were without masculine protection. In China, that meant they were at the mercy of a man such as himself.
“We mustn’t stay here,” she whispered, urging her mother from the doorway. She had seen everything she needed to see, and to remain where they were was to invite discovery. When Ke Loo learned they were gone, he was certain to look for them.
An alley led from the street a few doors down, and in a moment more it had swallowed them up. As they vanished into its gloom, Lydia heard an angry shout from the direction of their house.
Though it was only a few streets to Peter MacNair’s house, it seemed to take an eternity to reach there. At any minute Lydia expected to hear the sounds of pursuit. She hurried her mother along as quickly as she could, but Sarah was by now barely able to walk. Lydia was half supporting, half carrying her by the time they arrived, stumbling and staggering through the rain.
Lydia felt a surge of relief when she saw the dim light filtering through a shuttered window. She had been afraid to contemplate the possibility that he might not be there, and there would have been no place else for them to turn.
Of course, they still did not know what kind of welcome to expect, but though she would never have said so to her mother, she could not help being glad that, if they had to flee, circumstances had forced them to come here. It was as if heaven were granting the secret wish that she had made, that the Scotsman would somehow take notice of her, instead of ignoring her as he had done before.
He’ll see now that I’m no child, she thought, without at all considering the full import of the idea.
“You wait here,” she said, guiding her mother to the shelter of a gateway. “I’ll be right back.”
She was grateful that her mother was too weak to argue. She was sure it would only alarm Mr. MacNair to find a sick woman on his doorstep, without a moment to be prepared for the event. And if it crossed her mind that this way she would have a moment or two of his undivided attention, she steadfastly refused to recognize that thought as she ran up the path and tapped, rather timidly, at his door.
To her surprise the door swung open almost at once upon what she thought at first to be an empty room, before she realized that whoever had opened it had stepped behind it as he did so. As a result, neither of them could, for the moment, see the other.
“About time you got here,” a masculine voice said from behind the door. “Get inside, before I get my death of pneumonia.”
Speechless, Lydia stepped obediently into the house. As the door started to swing shut after her, the male voice added, “And get those clothes off right quick. I’ve had my fill of waiting.”
Lydia gave a horrified gasp and whirled about.
“Damnation,” Peter MacNair swore, his mouth dropping open in astonishment.
His surprise, however, was nothing compared to Lydia’s, for the closing of the door had revealed the handsome Scotsman behind it, and he was as naked as the day he was born!
CHAPTER THREE
Never in her life had Lydia seen a naked man, and the reality was far different from anything that she might have imagined. As if of their own accord, her eyes went to his loins and the turgid member thrusting out.
But however do they manage to conceal it in their trousers? she wondered, and at once went crimson, bringing her glance upward again.
“What the devil are you doing here?” he demanded, more angry than embarrassed.
“I—I’ve brought my mother,” Lydia stammered, unable to meet his eyes either. “We need your help.”
He sighed with exasperation. “Of all the—”
“Please, Mr. MacNair,” she interrupted him, “would you...could you....” She fluttered a hand in the general direction of his midsection.
“Just a minute.” He strode impatiently into the adjoining bedroom. “Did you say your mother’s with you?” he called from in there.
“She’s just outside. Please, may I bring her in?”
He barked a curt yes. Lydia hurried out, grateful for the cold rush of air on her burning cheeks. By the time she had brought her mother inside, Peter MacNair had donned a silk robe, not unlike the one Ke Loo had worn earlier.
“Good Lord, she looks half drowned,” Peter said. “Here, put her on the couch.” He helped guide Sarah to the couch. She collapsed upon it, barely conscious.
“It’s not that,” Lydia said, “It’s the fever, cholera I think. I’m sorry to expose you to it this way.”
He knelt by the couch, feeling Sarah’s temperature and her pulse. “I’ve been exposed before. You can’t travel in this blasted country and not run into it. What’s this all about, anyway?”
She told him, as briefly as she could, of her father’s death and their fear of the anti-white sentiment among the Chinese.
“You were right to worry about that,” he said. “These people hate foreigners at the best of times, and when they get worked up like this, there’s no telling what they might do.”
“Aren’t
