For a long moment, Lord Cai said nothing. He only stared at her, like he was waiting for her to say she was kidding. Then, when Juliette did not offer an alternative, he reached into a side drawer by his desk and pulled out a series of photographs. The black-and-white images were grainy and too dark, but when her father set them down, Juliette felt her stomach turn, a rolling sensation tightening her gut.
“These are from the White Flower club,” Lord Cai said. “The . . . what was it? Xiàngrìkuí?”
“Yes,” Juliette whispered, her eyes still latched on the photos. Her father hadn’t actually forgotten the name of the club, of course. It was only that he refused to speak Russian, even if it was so easy to lapse into the language from Shanghainese with the sounds so similar—perhaps even more so than Shanghainese and the actual Chinese common tongue. “Podsolnukh.”
Lord Cai pushed the photographs even closer. “Take a good look, Juliette.”
The victims of the madness in September had gouged their own throats out, clawing and clawing until their hands were gloved in blood. These photos did not only show torn throats. Of the faces that Juliette could catch, they no longer resembled faces at all. They were eyes and mouths torn until they were no longer circular in shape, foreheads with golf-ball-sized holes, ears dangling from the thinnest inch of a lobe. If it were possible to photograph in color, the whole scene would have been drenched in red.
“I am not going to send you into this alone,” Lord Cai said quietly. “You are my daughter, not my lackey. Whoever is doing this, this is what they are capable of.”
Juliette breathed out through her nose, the sound loud and grating. “We have one lead,” she said. “One lead, and it says this mess is coming out of foreign territory. Who else is able? Tyler? He’ll be killed with a knife to the throat before the insects get him.”
“You’ve missed the point, Juliette.”
“I haven’t!” Juliette screeched, though she suspected she had. “If this blackmailer came out of the French Concession, then I will find them by merging right into their high society. Their rules, their customs. Someone will know. Someone will have information. And I will get it out of them.” She lifted her chin. “Send me in. Send Kathleen and Rosalind as accompaniment if you must. But no entourage. No protection. Once they trust me, then they will talk.”
Lord Cai shook his head slowly, but the motion wasn’t one that indicated refusal. It was more or less an action to digest Juliette’s words, his hands absently reaching for that mysterious letter again, folding it further into quarters, then eighths.
“How about this?” her father said quietly. “Let me think about what we shall do next. Then we figure out if you are to enter the French Concession like a covert operative.”
Juliette mocked a salute. Her father shooed her, and she skittered off. As she was closing the door after herself, she peered through one last time and found that he was still staring at the letter in his hands.
“Careful, Miss Cai!”
Juliette squealed, narrowly stopping herself from stepping right onto a maid crouching in the hallway.
“What are you doing there?” she exclaimed, her hand pressed to her heart.
The maid grimaced. “There is just a bit of mud. Don’t mind me. It’ll soon be clean.”
Juliette nodded her thanks, turning to go. Then, for whatever reason, she squinted at the clump of mud the maid was working at, and sighted, stuck inside the clump that had been smeared into the threads of the carpeting, a single pink petal.
“Hold on,” Juliette said. She got to her knees, and before the maid could protest too loudly, she stuck her finger into the mud and dug the petal out, dirtying her nails. The maid winced more than Juliette did; Juliette only wrinkled her nose, looking at what she had unearthed.
“Miss Cai, it’s just a petal,” the maid said. “There have been a few clumps here and there these past months. Someone is not wiping their shoes properly before coming in.”
Juliette’s eyes shot up immediately. “You’ve found these over months?”
The maid looked confused. “I—yes? Mud, mostly.”
A rumble of noise erupted in the living room below: distant cousins, arriving for a social call over the mahjong tables. Juliette sucked in a breath and held it. The mud was smeared right near the wall, a splotch small enough that truly nobody but an eagle-eyed maid looking for places to clean could have spotted it. It was also near enough to the wall that it could have been left by someone pressed up against her father’s office door, listening in.
“The next time you see something like this,” Juliette said slowly, “find me, understand?”
The maid’s confusion only grew. “May I ask why?”
Juliette stood, still holding the petal. Its natural color was a pale pink, but in this light, with so much mud, it almost looked entirely black.
“No particular reason,” she answered, flashing a smile. “Don’t work too hard, hmm?”
Juliette hurried away, almost short of breath. It was a stretch. There were plenty of peony plants across the city and even more patches of mud where those plants grew.
Then she remembered her father at that dinner so many months ago, when he had claimed there was a spy: no ordinary spy, but someone who had been invited into the room, someone who lived in this house. And she knew—she just knew—that this particular petal came from the peonies at the Montagov residence, from the back of the house where the petals shed from the high windowsills and settled into the muddy ground.
Because five years ago, Juliette was the one tracking these all over the house.
Kathleen was in another Communist meeting.
It wasn’t that Juliette kept sending her to them, but rather that the Communists kept meeting up, and if Kathleen was going to maintain appearances and get invited back to the next ones through the contacts she had painstakingly cultivated, then she had to keep showing up, as if she were another worker and not the right hand of the Scarlet heiress.
At last Kathleen finished pinning down her hair, having adjusted her whole style in the last five minutes while the speaker at the front talked about unionizing. She had learned by now that the initial speakers never had much of a point to them: they were there to ramble until the important people arrived and the seats filled well enough to avoid rustling when latecomers shifted into the open gaps. No one paying attention to Kathleen when she tuned out and squinted into a handheld mirror from her pocket, determining that the complicated plaits Rosalind had made earlier were a little too bourgeois for this meeting.
“Excuse me.”
Kathleen startled, turning at the soft voice behind her. A little girl, missing two front teeth, was holding one of Kathleen’s pins.
“You dropped this.”
“Oh,” Kathleen whispered back. “Thank you.”
“That’s okay,” the girl lisped. She was swinging her legs, glancing momentarily at the woman seated to her left—her mother, perhaps—to check whether she would be told off for talking to a stranger. “But I liked your hair better before.”
Kathleen swallowed a smile, reaching up to touch the pinned curls. Rosalind had said the same, lavishing praise on herself as she was plaiting. Her sister was rarely in the mood to sit around and chat these days. She would likely not refuse if Kathleen caught her around the house and asked for a moment of her time, but the trouble was precisely that she was never around.