“Yes, Mrs. Hart?” said Esther.
Everyone turned. Leonora was staring at nothing, mouth slightly open. Her skin was pallid.
“Leo?” said Crane.
“Who were the shamans, Mrs. Hart?” Esther asked.
“Pa Ma and Lo Tse-fun,” Leonora whispered. “They’re dead? And so is Rackham… Oh, no. No no no. I have to get out of here.”
“You’re going nowhere.” Crane grasped her wrist as she leapt up.
“Get off me!”
Crane tightened his grip. “Sit down.”
Leonora struggled fruitlessly. “Let me go, you bastard,” she snarled, in English, and then slapped a hand over her mouth like a child.
“Watch your language,” said Crane. “And stop playing the fool. Whatever this is about, your best chance is to tell these two about it right now.”
Leonora swallowed. “They’ll want me dead.”
“If you tell us who they are, we can stop them,” Stephen said.
“No. I mean you. You’ll want me dead.”
Stephen and Esther looked at each other.
“In the general way,” Stephen said carefully, “we don’t often want people dead.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Esther. “Why don’t you tell us about it, Mrs. Hart, and let us be the judges of what we think.”
“Nobody ain’t going to lay a finger on you, missus,” said Merrick. “Not while me and my lord are standing. You tell Mr. Day about it and don’t worry no more.”
“Since when did you talk to the law?” demanded Leonora in Shanghainese.
“Since his nobility’s been fucking it. You want the shortarse on your side.”
“That’ll do.” Crane spoke in English. “Sit, please.”
He pulled at Leo’s wrist once more, and she collapsed without resistance onto a chair, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
“This is about Tom, isn’t it?” said Crane, watching her. “What happened? What did he do?”
“Who’s Tom?” Esther asked.
Leonora scrubbed at her face with the heels of her hands. “My husband. He was a…businessman, in Shanghai.”
“Tom had a small legitimate trading concern, and a rather larger illegitimate one,” Crane said crisply. “He ran a few smuggling operations as well as funding various less-than-reputable businesses. He was pretty ruthless and a bad man to cross. On you go.”
“He loved you,” Leonora said reproachfully.
“I loved him. What did he do?”
“Pa and Lo. They were shamans. From Xishan, in the countryside. But they didn’t want to be shamans, they wanted to be city boys. Do you—is it the same for shamans here?”
“I doubt it.” Crane looked at the two justiciars. “Chinese shamans are more like a priesthood, like monks even. There’s rigorous training, asceticism, they don’t drink or gamble or use drugs. They can marry but they don’t whore. They live rightly.”
“Well, Pa and Lo weren’t like that,” Leonora said. “I think they’d run away from Xishan. They wanted to live the life in Shanghai, but they had no money and really, they were a pair of bumpkins, utterly hopeless. And Tom…well, he saw an opportunity.”
“To…?”
“To use their skills. That was what Tom did, he got people to do things for him. And here were these two country boys, all they wanted was to go drinking and whoring and gambling without getting taken away for re-education by the other shamans, and they had these astonishing powers. So Tom took them under his wing.”
“Hold on.” Crane was frowning. “When was this? I don’t remember any of this.”
“You were in the north that year, playing the fool with that warlord. It started after you’d gone, and ended long before you were back.” Leo took a deep breath. “Pa and Lo were stupid and greedy and lazy, but they weren’t particularly bad men. Not at first. But something happened to them. Corruption.” Her eyes were distant. “They went bad. They became nasty drunks. They liked their work for Tom too much.”
“Doing what?”
“Reminding people to pay their bills. Setting up deals. Solving problems. That sort of thing.”
“Shamans did that stuff?” Merrick sounded shocked.
Leonora shrugged impatiently. “You know how Tom was. He kept them supplied with drink and girls and opium and let them gamble in his places, and they did what he needed. I didn’t like them. They were just the usual sort at first, but they changed. They began to frighten me, eventually.”
“Perhaps Chinese shamans have a reason for their rules,” said Esther mildly.
“And then Rackham got in trouble. He was working with them and Tom, as an intermediary of sorts. And he asked for help, and Pa and Lo went, and… The girl died.” She bit her lip. “They killed her.”
“Shamans?” said Crane. “Shamans killed a girl?”
Leonora nodded, staring at her intertwined hands. “I don’t know if they meant to. They said it was an accident. But she was dead. So Tom helped them to…you know.”