Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [42]
“There is hot water and a bath,” he told her. “And cold rice and tea, unless you wish American food. I don't recommend it.”
“Thank you.”
“Tomorrow we will go to San Francisco, and you can have some proper food.”
“Hot water is better,” she said, and to her surprise, his face lit up.
“I thought you might want it. I remember all too clearly my own trip, and that wasn't with smugglers.”
The next day, clean and dressed in the unfamiliar Western clothing he had brought for her, Mah and her bridegroom continued their illicit journey to the city. Before the day was out, Mah had seen his worth and been reassured. This man she was bound to was unfailingly polite to her. When he spoke to the white man who drove them in the man's own tongue, the driver, like the woman the night before, understood without a problem. And when they climbed out of the closed truck, she was in a place where the people had familiar faces and the air smelt almost normal.
The rooms he took her to were clean, if sparsely furnished, and held a surprisingly large number of books in both Chinese and foreign writing. And he might appear rough, but he was in fact so gentle as to be almost shy, and she found herself telling him that she was able to read, a little, forgetting momentarily that her mother and father had been adamant that she was not to let slip the admission until the marriage had been legally formalised.
Both were relieved, and satisfied, and the two strangers set about forming a partnership.
There was much work to be had in San Francisco, if one did not mind sweat and dirt. The city was growing so fast it seemed to be tumbling over itself, and Long Kwo's mastery of the white man's language meant that he was often chosen to supervise the crews of workmen.
Mah was slower to learn English, but learn she did, and work she did. The money was steady. They bought a house, a building with a shop on the ground floor to give an income, and they made themselves a part of the tight community of Chinatown.
The only thing they did not have was a child.
After nine years of marriage, not one of Mah's pregnancies had spent more than three months in her womb. She had been sad and angry at first, and frightened that her husband would put her away. But Long seemed honestly not to mind, and gradually she became resigned to their state.
And then in the closing weeks of the Western year 1899, a woman in their apartment building died, leaving her seven-year-old son an orphan in fact where before he had been one in practice. The woman had no relatives, and her dead husband, too, had been alone in this country, but still, had the boy been a more attractive proposition, he would have been welcomed in any of several homes. However, the child was small and bent, scrawny from neglect, and he looked at a person strangely—in part this was his habit of squinting, but also a sort of aloof manner, as if despite his unprepossessing exterior, he looked upon the adults around him and found them wanting.
But Mah rather liked the child. He was well mannered, other than the look of superiority, and intelligent. Which, she reflected, might account for the look as well.
They talked it over, went before the community association responsible for orphans, and offered the boy a home. Their friends argued with them, saying that there was something very wrong with the child, that the boy must have attracted the evil eye somehow, to be so consistently cursed, and that he would bring his disastrous heritage with him. Mah's soft heart could be understood, but surely Long could see that the best place for the child was a nice anonymous orphanage? His friends' arguments, however, fell on ears that had been deafened by the faint ring of hope in his wife's voice. Long determined to go ahead; his friends and neighbours shook their heads, saying that his weakness for