City of God Read Free

mother agreed. “But here you will find truth. I wrote it for you to know.” The book—rice paper pages bound in silk—was offered by a hand deformed by rheumatism, the joints swollen, the fingers bent into claws.
    The daughter grasped her mother’s wrist. “Have you been soaking your hands and feet every day the way I told you?” Her mother’s feet had been bound at age three. She was forty-seven now and her feetwere three inches in length. The beautiful and elaborate silk wrappings covered horned and calloused flesh and deeply ingrown nails, a source of constant pain. “The powder I gave you will help, Mamee, but you must use it regularly.”
    The older woman was called Mei-hua, plum blossom, a delicate and exquisite flower. Once it had suited her. “There is no reason. Nothing will change. I will not be young again.”
    The daughter’s given name was Mei Lin, a Chinese phrase meaning beautiful grove. For a time she had taken another and then a third. None were what she was called today. “The soaking powder is to ease the pain, Mamee. Not to make you young.”
    Beyond the window of the carriage two of the women walking the battlefield pulled a body free of a stack of corpses and carried it towards the hospital tent. The daughter drew in a short, sharp breath. Dear God, they couldn’t possibly find them all. The ones with a spark of life left in them but not the strength to crawl from beneath the piles of dead would be buried alive. “I must leave now, Mamee. I must return to my work.”
    Mei-hua leaned back against the red velvet upholstery and smoothed the silk of her long, slim skirt and her short jacket, both green silk shot with gold. Old, yes, but she looked better than her daughter. Ugly black bonnet. Ugly black dress. Ugly work to be picking and prying among the bloody dead. There was a rising stink about the place. About Mei Lin too if she stayed here. If those around you have fleas, soon you will itch. She had told her daughter that many times. Too late now to say words into deaf ears. “I am tired. Take me home.”
    “I will tell the driver, Mamee. I cannot go with you now. You know that.”
    “This-place-red-hair yi will not permit it?”
    “He has nothing to do with it. I really must leave, Mamee.”
    “Very well. Go,” Mei-hua said, waving a dismissive hand. “Tell the yang gwei zih to take me home.”
    The driver had been with Mei-hua for half a dozen years, but he was not Chinese and so was a yang gwei zih, a foreign devil. “I will tell him, Mamee.”
    The daughter leaned forward and kissed her mother’s cheek, then she opened the door and climbed down to the world of dead bodies and suffering flesh. She paused just long enough to tuck Mei-hua’s book beneath the short cape of the black habit of Mother Elizabeth Seton’s Sisters of Charity. In moments it was safe and hidden. Just like her.
    Except that Nicholas Turner still stood outside the hospital tent, watching both mother and daughter. And Nicholas Turner, the this-place-red-hair yi , knew everything.

Book One
1834–1835

Chapter One
    M EI-HUA LAY CURLED next to him in the glow that followed love, her back against his chest, his arm around her waist, their breathing synchronized. Everything was perfect. Or so it seemed to Samuel Devrey.
    After a time she moved just enough so one foot caressed his calf. The silken wrappings of her golden lily, the foot that had been first bound when she was three—excruciating pain inflicted and endured for him, indeed at his behest—were exquisitely erotic. Sam felt the sap rise in him yet again but he resisted. “There isn’t time.” He breathed the words into the jasmine scent of her hair.
    His Mandarin could be understood, but it had been learned too late to be perfect. His tones were never exactly right. He spoke always the speech of the yang gwei zih , the foreign devil. Mei-hua would die a slow death before she would correct him. “My lord not need do much. Quick and easy.