“What?”
“No, nothing—let me—”
“Marshall.”
“Can I just—”
“Marshall.”
The edge in Juliette’s voice got through. With the slightest shake of his head, Marshall continued to feign casual, but he said: “I had some ties to the Kuomintang before joining the White Flowers, that’s all. General Shu is bad news. Once he latches on to something, he won’t let go. If he doesn’t want a Scarlet vaccine distributed across the city, it’s never going to go out.”
Juliette supposed she wasn’t surprised at that, given what she already knew about the man. But:
“Weren’t you a child when you joined the White Flowers?”
Marshall shook his head again, more firmly this time. “It was a youth group. Now . . .” He shifted one last curl in place. “You no longer look like a rickshaw driver dragged you through the mud. Happy?”
“Overjoyed,” Juliette replied, getting to her feet. Something still sounded a little off, but she hardly had the time to prod at it. “I’ll take my leave now, but—”
“Stay inside, I know.” Marshall waved her off. “Don’t you worry about me.”
Juliette shot him a warning glare as she walked to the door, but Marshall only grinned.
“Goodbye, you menace.”
Twenty-Two
As it turned out, when Lady Cai said that she needed accompaniment to the city temple in the afternoon, she meant the very minute noon passed, and now Juliette was late. When the car came to a stop, Juliette leaned into the rearview mirror and retouched her hair once more before tumbling out, searching for her mother and her cousins. She tried not to bristle when indeed she found Rosalind and Kathleen alongside her mother, as well as Tyler with a group of his men.
Since his stunt with the safe house, the Scarlets had praised him with vigor. She was having quite some trouble doing the same.
“We almost thought you wouldn’t come,” Rosalind said as Juliette joined her, eyes still fixed on Tyler. He was cleaning his pistol, twisting a cloth roughly along the barrel. If he wasn’t careful around the trigger, it was going to go off and then one of his men would have a hole blown through the stomach.
“I didn’t think everyone left so early.” Her mother had sighted her now and was coming this way. “What is Tyler doing here?”
“He came with your mother,” Kathleen supplied, standing to Rosalind’s other side with her arms crossed. “Extra protection for the walk.”
Juliette tried not to grit her teeth so hard. She was going to put a crack in her jaw at this rate.
“Ready?” Lady Cai asked, smoothing her qipao down and waving them along. Tyler stayed put where he was, his men spreading out along the entrance into the temple walls, but Juliette gave him one last look before turning and following after her mother.
“So, I heard an interesting rumor.”
In synchrony, Juliette and Rosalind lifted a foot over the protruding threshold into the temple. Anytime Juliette needed to do this to enter a building, she could gauge its age—gauge that it had been built before the roads were entirely smooth and the people had needed to protect against the possibility of floods. The temple itself was a quaint building, but a vast courtyard circled its perimeter, protected by tall, sun-faded walls with two golden gateways to the north and south, each facing the sides of the dusty red temple.
Rosalind’s eyes slid over. “Quoi?”
“Une rumeur,” Juliette repeated, perhaps with an unnecessary bout of flourish as she switched to French too. “Floating around the city.”
“You know better than to—” Rosalind stopped suddenly, looking beside her. When Juliette turned too, she realized it was because Kathleen had stalled behind, pausing just after the entranceway, looking around the courtyard. It appeared like she was waiting for something.
“Mèimei,” Rosalind called. “You okay?”
A small smile played at Kathleen’s lips. “I’m fine.”
Juliette and Rosalind waited for her to catch up, walking again only when Kathleen had fallen back in step. They passed a silver xiānglú—one that was so enormous it looked like a giant bowl fitted with an awning. Three women stood around it to light their incense, delicately holding their sleeves so as not to get caught in the flames in the basin.
“We were just talking about Rosalind’s lover,” Juliette said to Kathleen.
“Shh!” Rosalind immediately hissed, her gaze snapping up to make sure Lady Cai hadn’t heard.