I saw a young woman in a traditional black sam foo lurking around the perimeter of the club. I saw Tak-Tam glance over and see her too. I stared too long and she looked back and shot me the evil eye. I tried to stop staring. There was something familiar about her—did I know her from somewhere? She continued to circle the congregation, eventually moving beyond the edge of my peripheral vision. But I could sense her behind us, exuding something unpleasant.

Lindsay Ride didn’t seem to notice. He began the ceremony. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today …”

Emily fidgeted with her bouquet, and I was afraid it would come apart again in front of everyone. I touched her wrist discreetly, and she stopped.

Lindsay Ride talked about the meaning of marriage and what it might signify in particular for a young Chinese couple who would witness the growth and changes of a new city coming into its own. “Does anyone here know of any reason why this man and this woman should not be joined in holy matrimony?”

He waited to give the congregation a real chance to answer.

Behind us, the young woman in the traditional black pantsuit took a breath so deep that everyone heard it and turned to look at her.

She spoke.

Her voice was not loud, but it was strangely deep. It came out of her as though from another world beneath her feet. Very slowly, in that otherworldly voice, she said, “A hundred reasons I shall not speak.”

She took another deep, croaking breath, like a spirit from the underworld trying to surface, and continued in English that was perfectly clear, though unnaturally low: “But I damn their first-born child to wander the earth for eighty years, lost and confused, without a friend to call his own. May he travel in spirals, never knowing left from right or up from down.”

The congregation heard. A few people near the back, close to where she stood, laughed nervously.

Ride heard. He must have. He cast his eyes to the ground for a moment as though some chthonic being were peering up at him through the flimsy platform on which he stood.

A hot wind blew up from nowhere, and everyone began to sweat, even as their fancy jackets and silk dresses rustled in the unnatural movement of air.

Ride closed his eyes and seemed to mutter something, a prayer perhaps. The pause was achingly long, but at last his eyes opened again. “Hearing none, we shall proceed. Emily Mah Wai-Yee and Cheung Tak-Wing have come to enter the holy state of marriage,” he said.

Ting-Yan fled the scene, and the hot wind died down.

The congregation murmured, muttered, and whispered. If truth be told, the British are as superstitious as the Chinese. Their fantasy party had been ruined.