Lucifer's Children

LUCIFER’S CHILDREN

Worlds of Yifan Book 5

The Technical War Book 1

J L Blenkinsop

In memory of Alek Lotoczko, 1960-2018. My best friend.

This work contains the full text of the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost, quoted without permission from the copyright holders. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951.

Lucifer’s Children, Copyright © 2017, 2018, 2019 by John L Blenkinsop. All rights reserved. This eBook may not be copied, converted, given or sold, used within any other document, quoted or altered without the permission of the copyright owner. The copyright owner may be reached at john_blenkinsop@msn.com

Table of Contents

Prologue

Shanghai

Burial

Hunger

Travelling

Bran Castle

London

The Scholomance

Initiation

Town Visit

The Master

Drachenfels

Lucifer and His Children

The Wolf

Lucifer’s Children

Prologue

I was born in 2002, in Changchun, in Jilin Province. The winters there were bitterly cold, sinking down to minus forty degrees on the Centigrade scale, and the summers ferocious, reaching up to thirty-five. But I was not there long enough to experience much of that range of discomfort, because my parents took a flight to Japan.

No-one told me why they needed, or wanted, to go there, in the years that followed. All I eventually found out was that they had boarded a dirigible at Longjia Airship Port, and seven hours later they were among four hundred bodies floating in the sea off the port town of Sonbong. I was then eighteen months old, and suddenly an orphan.

My mother put me into the arms of her mother-in-law, kissed me, smiled and waved bye-bye. She – I dreamt of her as impossibly glamorous – took my father’s arm; they went out onto the grassy field, turning to wave every few paces until they reached the steps up to the forward gondola. I saw this in memories I constructed many years after the event, saw my beautiful parents mount the stairs, stopping at the top, smiling so lovingly at me, waving.

And that was all there was.

Until I was ten years old I did not know any of this, nor had I begun to imagine it. For my grandparents, full of the windfall of money that came with the possession of their son’s child, the inheritance they promised to keep for their precious little girl, sold up and moved down to Shanghai. There they bought a fine rambling house, and several apartment buildings to rent out. As soon as they considered me old enough they told me that my mother and father would never be coming back, and why, and put me into a boarding-school that catered for Chinese children whose parents wanted them to become Westerners.

This solitary girl thrived there. She fought off bullies, made a few close friends. She discovered she loved to learn. She discovered, too, that she hated her grandparents, and loved her mother and father, because her parents hadn’t stayed away from her because she was bad, but because they had died. Death, I thought, brought me in peace into the arms of my mother. I did not realise, then, what death was capable of, nor how far, through time and space, my mother’s arms could stretch.

Shanghai

A bell clanged and fourteen girls scraped back their chairs and swept up their books and bags. We filed out of the classroom, half-bowing to the Geography teacher even as we pushed her against her desk, heading for the next subject in our timetable: History. By the time the last of us was out of the door the first of Mrs. Juniper’s next class were coming in. I saw her sigh, and knew she was yearning for a cup of good old British tea.

Sir Luke Prendergast was the grandson of the last British Governor of Hong Kong. How he had come to teach at Miss Hart’s Academy for the Daughters of the Chinese Gentry I did not know, but he bore his lot with fortitude and with great kindness toward us girls, always genteel and correct.

He waited patiently as we settled, standing easy before the blackboard, flanked by the portraits of the immortal leaders of our modern world – Queen Victoria, Empress of Britain; Franklin Roosevelt, President of the American Republic; Franz Josef, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor; and our own dear Cixi, Empress Dowager of China. In but two years’ time I would be seventeen, and Victoria would celebrate the bicentenary of her own birth. The stability, peace and prosperity these – and other, lesser, monarchs – had brought since the end of the war confirmed to us all the Golden Age in which we were so fortunate to be alive.

Sir Luke cleared his throat quietly, and I directed my attention to him. Last week, he began, we talked about the causes of the Great War; the rise of nationalism in Europe, of Imperialism in the East, and the trigger being the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by... He waited expectantly.

Please, sir... Sir Luke, sir... A girl, I think it was Jao, waved her hand frantically in the air. Our teacher nodded toward her. It was Armadillo Pritship, sir!

Very close, Jao, (I was right, it was her) "It was Gavrilo Princip, a member of a gang of Serbian dissidents trained and directed by the Chief of the Serbian Military Intelligence, Dragutin Dimitrijević. The trigger was not the whole reason for the war, of course.

Today we will discuss the progress of the war, and the aftermath. Since we have a double lesson, this will complete your knowledge of that era; and our next lesson will concentrate on modern history.

I, together with my sorority, listened with half an ear to our teacher as he droned on, precisely and with footnotes, on the length and ferocity of the Great War, 1914-1937. At one point he used the term ‘the Technical War’, but it went over our heads. It had been a long war; it was a long time ago; it ended with plague and pestilence. So long as we revised, we would pass our History examinations. Most of us were looking forward to lunch. And some, to the lesson that followed.

The English stream was very popular. There were twenty pupils in Mister O’Donnell’s class, and as we entered he was pacing in front of his desk, desperate for a smoke.

I, Shen Aoyun – named for the Summer Olympics of 2002, which had been held in Beijing – was now almost fifteen. I plonked myself down beside Wu Jing, my always-ever best friend, who smiled broadly and pushed over a note which, opened covertly while the class settled, read ‘I love Mister Odon-li’. I smiled, screwed up the paper and dropped it on the floor.

What’s that? the teacher called out over the din of settling girls. He looked pointedly at me.

What’s what? I countered, looking innocent.

You appear to have dropped something.

Oh! I looked down. There was a piece of paper by my feet. I picked it up and took it to the bin. Merely a Chemistry jog. Please accept my apologies; I should not have littered the floor. I smiled shyly, and he smiled back.

The class, settled, began to learn about gerunds. It was a bore, but Mister O’Donnell followed in the second half with readings of poetry: Wordsworth, Rossetti, and Frost, whose words spoke in my heart.

Do you really love him? I squeaked at Jing, wide-eyed, when we were finally free to play for a quarter-hour in the wooded park surrounding the school.

Yes! Oh, he’s dishy!

I raised my eyes theatrically to heaven, where my parents were. I’d picked the note out of the bin during the end-of-class scrum, and now I took it from my pocket and threw it at Jing. He’s nearly forty, and he’s married. And you’re only thirteen.

Jing stuck out her tongue and ran off.

Around the park rose the metropolis of Shanghai, with buildings over twelve stories all around, some in the business district behind the Bund as tall as mountains, twenty floors and more, all of offices, all conducting Commerce around the globe. I would go to one of those in a few years, making deals, directing the flow of money towards our Empire, making myself rich and thumbing my nose at my monstrous grandparents.

The bell rang far off. I shouldered my bag of books and went back to the ornate red-brick building for my favourite lesson, Mathematics.

The blinds were drawn down in the classroom when we filed in. Lady Sheldrake, who taught the subject, had weak eyes and could not bear the glare of the China sun. She typically arrived at the school in the back of a brougham and stepped down draped in a linen scarf, her eyes shaded by tinted spectacles. Sometimes, if it was raining or if the sun was exceptionally bright, her coachman would hold an umbrella or a parasol for her until she disappeared into the main building. Once inside the classroom she pulled down the day-blinds, which muted the light but did not cast us into darkness, and discarded her protection to stand, as now she did, erect, slim and beautiful, to greet her pupils.

There were more girls fancied themselves in love with her, than there ever were for Mister O’Donnell.

Which of you, Lady Sheldrake began, once the class had settled, can recall what we learnt in our last lesson?

All hands went up. Wu Jing?

Geometry, your Ladyship.

Correct. Her Ladyship recapitulated the salient points, then segued into Trigonometry. This, occupying ninety minutes, was followed with much attention and very little restlessness from us girls. We all knew that China’s future in the world was to be scientific, commercial and triumphant; we, though we were mere females, would be among the drivers of our country’s prosperity.

To my surprise Lady Sheldrake asked me to stay for a minute after class. It was the last of the day; no penalty would ensue from being late for a walk in the grounds with Jing. I smiled, and sat at my teacher’s bidding.

Your progress is very good, Shen Aoyun, the great Lady opened. It is always a pleasure to teach you.

I muttered thanks shyly.

I understand that your parents are no more – please don’t mind me being stark, I mean nothing but good for you. Your grandparents bring you up now, I’ve heard?

The school brings me up, said I, and very well. I don’t see my grandfather and grandmother much at all, even in the holidays... They send me to Changchun to stay with my mother’s family, who are always so sad to see me because I remind them so much of... of her... I was surprised to find I was crying. The teacher’s gloved hand came to rest on mine, and I hung my head.

When Lady Sheldrake left, muffled against the late afternoon’s sun, I walked into the parkland behind the school, dazed, muted, toward a favourite spot for solitude. I climbed a tree, one of a dozen in a copse that hid a pool of cool water, fed from a tinkling stream. There I went over in my mind what had just happened.

Jing, when she begged for details of the interview later in our dormitory, was ecstatic.

She wants to sponsor you? To present you in Society?

Other girls chipped in their presents of awe and incredulity.

Why you?

Because she’s an orphan, that’s why.

Because Aoyun is clever and kind, said Jing determinedly, jutting out her jaw. And she’ll be a wow in Society, just you see!

Well, so long as the school lets her, said Jao, practical as ever. She’d miss evening meals, prep, prayers – I don’t think they’ll agree.

But the school, flattered by the attention of a Lady, were only too eager to consent, so long as their pupil had an approved chaperone. They chose Miss Yuan, an elderly spinster who taught music, badly. Lady Sheldrake graciously agreed to the arrangement and a week or so after our chat I found myself, with the slightly deaf Miss Yuan, being driven out of the grounds in the school buggy, toward the Sheldrake’s large house on the Bund.

On that first evening my head swam with new experiences. Their house was magnificent, in the Italian style, with an open courtyard in the centre and galleries rising up four stories, a fountain cooling the air. The Sheldrakes sat on the shaded side, with friends from many of the Embassies surrounding them, for Count Arisztid Sheldrake was the Ambassador for Romania; and many of the other diplomats had brought their sons and daughters, who seemed at first outraged and then amused that some random Chinese girl should have been brought in from the street to sit with them.

It was of no concern to me. I was used to sitting quietly, in the company of my grandparents sometimes, and of my mother’s inconsolable family. I could do that for hours, responding politely to enquiries, laughing pleasantly at others’ jokes, keeping boredom away by making up nick-names for those around me.

This one, the Belgian Ambassador’s daughter, fat and with bad teeth – she was Gongfu Panda. The girl with the frizzy hair, whose brother kept bringing wine, was at least twenty, and should by now have been married – she was Junior Yuan. And so on, around the group. Only one of those present smiled at me and essayed a few kind words. This was an earnest fifteen-year-old black girl, the daughter of the Nigerian Consul, and who I suspected had been until my own appearance the neglected one in the party. I smiled back, and made polite conversation. Sipewe – for that was her name – surprised me by speaking in very passable Mandarin, at which the other girls gaped, then aped, chanting Ywa ywa, mwa mwa, ching-chong-cha! until the adults told them to be still.

They are fools, Sipewe said, in the language the others could not, and would ever not understand. They spend their days with tutors and in boutiques, they learn nothing. Only existing to find some poor man to marry. And then, to torment.

I do pity them, I replied. Why don’t they go to school?

School? Oh! They would hate it. To risk meeting someone of a lower class than they? Sipewe laughed, which earned glares. To speak of which – how do you come to be here?

I determined to take the remark as humorously meant, and gave a short account of my meeting with the Lady. Sipewe nodded. Well, perhaps you will grow from this experience. I know that the Count and Lady Sheldrake have no children of their own. Perhaps they will adopt you.

This hadn’t occurred to me. I felt uncomfortable, then, but stuck with my new friend, talking about what I supposed, and what Sipewe knew, about the life of those limited to living in the foreigners’ enclave, rich though it was; and by the time the evening was over I felt quite comfortable, and had no thought about being adopted by a rich Western couple.

I was handed into the buggy, and Miss Yuan, who had amused herself with sherry, was poured in behind me. Back to the school we went, to a telling-off for the teacher and an interrogation for me behind the doors of my dorm.

Illness was rife in Shanghai in that summer, even in the enclave. Funny Ghost – the nick-name I bestowed on a slim, pale girl in the clique of diplomatic daughters – sickened and died, having become paler and thinner each time I had seen her since that first evening. Her parents mourned, but the callous girls all forgot her within a week.

Tragedy and death are always close, I remarked to Lady Sheldrake, when we were getting ready together for a Ball. My chaperone had been discontinued; it was satisfactory to my school that the Sheldrakes now sent their own coach and a maid to bring me, and poor Miss Yuan needed a break from the sherry.

I am aware of that, Aoyun, my benefactress replied with a smile. She held up a necklace made all from diamond and platinum. Will you wear this tonight, for me? She put it around my neck and fastened the clasp. Her face was powdered lightly, cheekbones hinted with rouge, lips naturally full red. She came so close that I felt her breath – minty, but with a trace of metal to it. Of iron. The clasp closed, her hands fell away. Lady Sheldrake stepped back and I breathed again. Then she gave me a hand-mirror; there were no other mirrors in the dressing-room.

Look! You are a princess! And indeed, I was. I saw, when I held the mirror far enough away, a perfect almond face, black hair dressed just-so, up in a chignon and with sweeps of my long hair on either side brought around to curl on my collar-bones. The dress, bought from a swish store just behind the Bund, showed my shoulders to advantage, and was bodiced to make the most of what little chest I had so far obtained.

I turned, to catch myself in different angles of light. I was so beautiful, I almost dropped the mirror. But I did not; and placed it, with exaggerated care, glass side down on the dressing-table, and turned to my sponsor, smiling with delight, sparkling with diamonds and joy. Let’s go down! The carriage must be waiting!

So we went, and had a wonderful time at the Columbian Embassy, where I danced with careless boys and uncaring girls – for there was a dearth of male companions – and spinning in my mind why it was that when I had turned the mirror, there had been no sight of the Lady who stood beside me, but only an empty dress standing on its own.

On the anniversary of my invitation to the Sheldrake’s coterie I, now almost sixteen, completed my General exams.

I took the required Imperial examinations in Mandarin, calligraphy, poetry, mathematics and technology, and the school’s examinations, from the Cambridge curriculum, in English, art, mathematics, music, sciences and general philosophy. It was a very progressive school, taking advantage of its distance from Europe to promote its own conviction that girls must be at least as intelligent as boys, and wanting just as much intellectual stimulation. Of course, I did well; but my Form teacher thought that I might have done better.

You spend so many nights out, Mrs. Juniper complained when she handed me my envelope. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear you’d failed everything! But I hadn’t.

Of course you did well in English, Wu Jing moaned. YOU’RE not in love with Mister O’Donnell. Her own scores had been very good save in that one subject. Although you did quite well in mathematics, which surprises me.

I laughed. I was not in love with Lady Sheldrake. Truth to tell, although I liked the Lady, I felt that I was being pushed toward a decision I did not want to take, which was to consider being adopted by the Sheldrakes. I felt it would be a betrayal of my own parents; but in quiet hours I could see that this was a foolish fancy. My parents would have approved of any means by which I could escape my grandparents’ uncaring and avaricious guardianship.

And I was now almost of age to accept for myself, or deny, as I wished. The money left to me by my parents’ demise would rest in the old folks’ hands until I turned eighteen, but in almost all other ways I was now free from their control.

And Lady Sheldrake, once the results of the examinations were known, came straight to the point.

My husband and I would like you to come to live with us, she began. You would attend the school as a day-girl, and of course you may bring a companion with you. But we – I – we find that we love you as if you were our own; having had your company for a year, we find we can’t bear to think of you remaining here, alone, bedding down in a draughty loft full of other girls. Please – say you will come to live with us?

It was a heartfelt plea, accompanied by the glimmer of a tear in the Lady’s eye, and I found it impossible to refuse. I of course nominated Jing as my companion, which brought a wide grin to the girl’s face, and the school made the arrangements rather more efficiently than it normally would; so that we were out of the stuffy farty dormitory and into the big Italianate house on the Bund within a week.

The Lady sent a steam-wagon to bring our trunks and valises, as well as we ourselves. It was exciting, but the smell of hot metal and burning coke, the particles of soot and the infernal clanking made us both feel sick, and when we stumbled out onto the carriage-park at the end of the drive we swore never to go horseless again.

The accommodation was wonderful. I had seen the upstairs rooms before, but had never spent the night. Jing wandered around our shared suite, touching things, examining the bathroom fittings – there was a shower, and it had hot water! – and generally oohing and aahing over the smallest convenience.

There isn’t a mirror, she complained eventually, sitting on her own bed, in her own chintzy bedroom.

There’s a hand-mirror on your dressing-table, I pointed out nervously. Jing conceded that, but still found it peculiar. A pillow-fight changed the subject, and Jing never mentioned it again for the rest of her life.

I, Jing, Sipewe and the few other non-white girls formed our own clique within the group of diplomatic and Society young women accepted into the ballrooms and salons of the foreigners’ enclave. We acted together, finding strength in our unity. Our ripostes in response to the insults from the others were witty and hit home, so much so that we found ourselves in an ascendant, selecting our dancing-partners from the young males and hardly ever having to dance with one another; while the pasty-faced teenage girls fumed, going quite red in the cheek at our audacity.

Sophie – Lady Sheldrake, but now, in loco parentis, Sophie to we two girls – bought clothes and jewellery for Jing and me, effortlessly upstaging the fashion-setting attempts of the ‘creamers’ – the nick-name I had given to the white girls. Indeed, there was so much jewellery around the Sheldrake home that it was impossible to wear the same thing twice in a season.

I donned an ivory silk dress for the ball at the Ecuadorian Embassy, and Lady Sophie fastened a wonderful ruby choker around my neck before we went, two tiers of baguette-cut rubies, dark like blood, set in butter-yellow gold. They smouldered in the hand-mirror like lava.

Sipewe caught sight of us as we entered the Embassy and bustled over, grabbed my arm and started to pull me towards a stand of potted palms.

What are you doing? Let go!

Come; or I’ll hurt you. Sipewe was strong, and she dragged me, struggling, behind the plants and pressed me hard against the wall, then reached around, fumbling with the clasp of the choker. I protested but my friend pressed hard; and finally the jewel was free, and Sipewe dropped it into her reticule. You’ll get it back later.

Why? What’s wrong... Are you jealous of me? Sipewe –

The Nigerian girl hissed through her teeth. I had never seen her so angry. That necklace belonged to Adriana.

Who?

Funny Ghost, you called her.

I was speechless. How could my benefactress be so crass as to purchase, and then to display, such an item? Oh! So... Oh, thank you, Sipewe – you have saved me from such an embarrassment, I can never repay...

She was buried with it around her neck, Sipewe growled, her eyes mere slits. She turned and left me stock-still behind the palms, my brain in turmoil.

The mirror thing was real. The Romanian diplomat and his wife attended many balls and soirees, but never in the American Embassy, which ballroom was lined expensively with floor to ceiling mirrors of Venetian glass; and when they went to other venues they tended to keep court in some un-overlooked area, dancing seldom, and otherwise not moving much about. I sometimes glimpsed them in a glass, and saw how any normally unobservant spectator might not notice anything amiss – they were covered, in the main, the Count with the usual male outfit, gloves, and a simple and undetectable wig, the Lady with long gloves, a silken shawl or mantilla and often a wig of her own. A keen eye could have discerned the absence of faces in the mirror, but the normal mind would dismiss the image as fancy.

I didn’t say anything to anyone, not even to Jing. I should have. I wish I had.

We of course still attended school. Every morning after breakfast the brougham would take us there, and sometimes in the afternoon we would come back with Sophie. Since now I was a sixth-former I had time to study by myself, rather than in the class-room; and it was while I was so engaged, in the copse of trees around the pool, that a distasteful incident occurred.

Mister O’Donnell, the English teacher, emerged from the shrubbery that surrounded my hideaway and tipped his hat to me. I nodded back. I was seated beneath a tree; my books were spread around me, my head was spinning with Physics and the theories and discoveries that had sprung up since Professor Einstein, a century ago, had pronounced his theories of Relativity, and Professor Planck had propounded the Quantum universe. So that I was surprised when Mister O’Donnell was suddenly beside me, and waving something in my face. I was confused, and then it dawned