![]() ![]() “They are still drinking tea, he hasn’t even had his apprentice bring in the wares yet. “Has Boss Wu left already?” The silk merchant had arrived only half an incense stick ago. “Little girls as pretty as you don’t need to know the classics.” ![]() Bai was Ying-ying’s family name, gu-niang the respectful address for a young lady. “Bai Gu-niang studying so hard?” The maid, Little Plum, teased her gently as she went past. Ying-ying grabbed the writing brush she had left resting on the ink stone and pretended to smooth out excess drops of ink against the rim of the little depression that held the ink. The rooms were stretched against the wall of the courtyard like cubes of lamb on a shish kebob, in one straight row. She tossed the photograph into its redwood box and shoved the box under Mother’s fox fur-lined winter cape.ĭropping the lid of the great trunk, she dashed out to the study and climbed onto her chair just as Mother’s maid came through the doors of the front room. In her shock Ying-ying almost didn’t hear the footsteps coming into the courtyard. She had been distracted by the clothes, but the woman was no foreign devil. What stupid, impractical things the foreign devil women wore. She wore a ridiculous contraption: her sleeves the size of rice sacks, her skirts a tent large enough to sleep two. To the other side of the stool, a woman sat with her profile to Ying-ying, head bent, a large book open on her lap. He did not stand straight, but rather leaned to one side, his left foot propped on a stool, one black shoe gleaming. He had neither beard nor mustache, but the same hair that grew on his head extended down the sides of his face almost right to the corners of his lips, like a forest throwing out two spurs of itself down the slope of a mountain. His hair was a darkish shade, cut short, parted on the side, and combed slick. Thin, colorless lips twisted into a half-sneer. ![]() His nose protruded proudly, like the prow of a foreign-devil warship. In the fading photograph, his strangely tight-fitting garments were the brown of eggs cooked in soy sauce his white skin the color of weathered bamboo. He was the size of her thumb, yet she had trouble holding his insolent gaze. ![]() The twelfth year of the reign of Tong Zhi Emperor (1873) They can each be read as standalones, but together they make for a uniquely rich and multilayered reading experience. THE HIDDEN BLADE is a full-length companion volume/prequel to MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY. They do not know it yet, but their lives are already inextricably bound together, and will collide one fateful night when they least expect it. He dreams of escaping to find his beloved friend-but the friend is in China, ten thousand miles away. Torn from his family, he becomes the hostage of a urbanely sadistic uncle. Half a world away in England, a young boy’s idyllic summer on the Sussex downs implodes with the firing of a single bullet. What future is there for such a girl? But a mysterious figure steps forward and offers to instruct her in the highest forms of martial arts-a path to a life of strength and independence. In the waning days of the last dynasty, in a quiet, beautiful corner of imperial Peking, a young girl’s blissful ignorance is shattered when she learns that she is the illegitimate daughter of an English adventurer and a Chinese courtesan. ![]()
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