The Blue Rose

by Kate Forsyth

  The embassy reached Peking on the 21st of August.

  Lord Macartney and Sir George and his son were carried in red lacquer palanquins, gaudily painted with golden dragons, but the rest of the entourage were crammed into common hired carts, with a roof of coarse straw matting. The horses were raw-boned and harnessed with rope, and no attempt had been made to match one to the other. It took seventy carts to carry them all, with four hundred porters trudging ahead, carrying the baggage.

  ‘This is not how the British embassy should be received!’ Anderson cried. ‘Where is the pomp and spectacle of one great nation welcoming another? Are we not the first nation in the west and China the first nation in the east?’

  David and Scotty and a few of the other young men preferred to ride, and – after a great deal of argy-bargy complicated by the language divide – were at last given some short rough-coated ponies to ride. It was a relief to be free of the carts, though, which had no springs of any kind, and David relished the chance to see more of the countryside.

  Thousands of people had gathered to watch the procession. Some were struck with wonder and fear, hiding their children behind their gowns. Many others pointed and made unpleasant scoffing sounds. Some even spat.

  ‘Why do they stare so?’ David asked uncomfortably.

  ‘They think you devils,’ Father Li explained, in his oddly accented Latin. ‘In Chinese theatre, only devils wear such tight clothes, or have red hair. And your eyes are wild beast eyes, devil eyes.’

  ‘Maybe I should wear tinted spectacles,’ David muttered, and fixed his gaze on the dusty road.

  At last the city walls of Peking reared above them, nearly fifty feet tall and immensely thick. One could have galloped a horse along the wall’s broad top. As the ambassador approached, he was welcomed by the ritual firing of guns which cast a pall of smoke over the scene. The mandarins led the way into the city, their servants shading them with silk parasols, soldiers keeping back the crowds with whips.

  The road was lined with shops decorated with tall gilded pillars and intricately carved woodwork. Long banners hung with Chinese characters swayed in the breeze. Riding on his pony, David was able to see over the heads of the teeming crowds and down the alleyways, lined with rows of dilapidated grey houses with grey tiles. They were so low and uniform, and so lacking in windows, it looked like an encampment of army tents.

  Men with long bamboo poles resting on their shoulders carried straw baskets filled with persimmons and dragon fruit. An old pedlar with a weathered face and no teeth sat behind a table piled high with desiccated bats, dried snakes in stiff coils, animal horns, ginseng and severed tiger paws. In flimsy street-stalls, blind fortune-tellers read horoscopes, singers warbled to the accompaniment of strangely shaped stringed instruments, and storytellers beguiled their audiences with tales of love, betrayal and reunion.

  For the first time, David saw women walking freely in the streets. Their faces were painted white, and the middle part of their lips delineated with a narrow vermilion strip. Their black hair was drawn high into elaborate hairstyles decorated with jewelled pins and flowers. To his relief, their feet were not mere stumps, though they wore ugly wooden platform shoes, shaped like horses’ hooves, that raised them a good two inches above the ground. He rode up to the palanquin where Father Li sat, and asked him – in his best Latin – why these women had not been crippled by their feet being bound.

  ‘Tartars,’ Father Li replied. He flashed David a proud look. ‘I am Tartar. We do not bind our women’s feet.’

  ‘You are to be applauded for your wisdom,’ David said, and the priest bowed to him.

  Ahead, David saw a glimpse of a high grey wall, and above it a roof of varnished yellow tiles with gently upturned ends, adorned with an array of fanciful figures, shining like gold under the brilliant sun. His heart thumped hard.

  ‘Look,’ he said to Scotty. ‘The Forbidden City.’

  They passed a set of immense double doors, painted lacquer red and decorated with rows of gilded studs.

  ‘Nine rows of nine,’ Father Li said. ‘It is the emperor’s number for it sounds like “jiu” which means everlasting. He wears nine dragons on his robes, and there are, I have heard, nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine rooms in the Forbidden City. Only one gate does not have the nine rows of nine studs. That is the Flowery Gate, which has nine rows of eight studs. That is the gate through which the dead pass.’

  ‘May we go in?’ Tom asked ebulliently. ‘I’d so love to see inside.’

  ‘No,’ Father Li replied.

  Then the Forbidden City was lost behind them, and soon the city of Peking too.

  The Englishmen slept that night in cramped and crowded conditions in a small ramshackle house, much to Lord Macartney’s displeasure and his valet’s horror. Anderson did his best to make his master comfortable, but his feelings could be discerned by the stiffness of his back and the force with which he thumped down the chamber-pot.

  The next day they were conducted to the Garden of Perfect Brightness, the emperor’s country residence outside Peking. David felt an almost painful eagerness. At last – eleven months after leaving Great Britain – he was to see a Chinese garden for the first time.

  The palace was composed of many small pavilions with sweeping curved eaves. Small courtyards centred around a single fantastically shaped rock, or one ancient magnolia tree, pruned so hard it was half its natural size. A circular gateway led to another courtyard, containing an oblong pond and a stand of bamboo arranged to cast delicate shadows against a white wall. A tiny wooden pavilion on a bare rock overlooked the pond, like a pagoda in miniature.

  It was not what David had expected. He had imagined something like the Jardin du Roi in Paris, vast gardens laid out in formal patterns, with lawns and gracious old trees and mixed herbaceous borders overflowing with the gorgeously coloured, and as yet unseen, flowers of China. These small, spare, secret gardens, each centred around a single tree or rock or pool, unsettled him. He did not understand the design principle.

  Beyond the walled gardens off the pavilions was a vast lake that stretched towards blue undulations of mountains beyond. An extraordinary marble bridge of seventeen arches vaulted across the water to an island with a temple. In the distance, a tall pagoda lifted tiers of tilted roofs to the sky. A long, covered walkway painted in emerald, scarlet and gold zigzagged though the park. Father Li said it had been built so that the dowager empress could walk in rain, snow or blistering heat.

  ‘But why did they not make it in a straight line?’ David asked.

  ‘Evil spirits can only fly in straight lines and so the zigzag confounds them,’ the priest answered.

  All was mysterious and strange, with poetic names like the Hall of Dispelling Clouds or the Garden of Virtue and Harmony. It took hours to walk round. David saw a pond laden with lotus leaves and flowers, but otherwise all was woods, lakes, rocks and temples.

  David asked Father Li where he could find roses growing, and the priest frowned at him. ‘Roses are unfortunate,’ he said, in his precise Latin. ‘We Chinese consider they bring ill fortune. Because of the thorns. They bring hurt and suffering, and so are planted on graves, not in gardens.’

  David felt such a pang of bitter disappointment he had to remind himself that Viviane was married to someone else. She was not pining in her château tower, waiting for him to return to her with a fabled blood-red rose. She had long forgotten him.

  Viviane was arrested on the 5th of September.

  The officers named her Héloïse-Rozenn-Viviane de Gagnon, daughter of the Marquis de Valaine, widow of the Duc de Savageaux. As she was led away, a small bundle of belongings in her hand, Alouette spat in her face.

  Viviane was taken to the Conciergerie, on the Île de la Cité in the middle of the River Seine. It was a beautiful palace of pale stone, with steeply pointed spires. The Seine rippled past, smooth as green silk. Behind, the towers and spires and flying buttresses of the Notre-Dame Cathedral were silhouetted
against the sky.

  The beauty of the day was lost as soon as she stepped through the doors. Beyond was a maze of dark cramped rooms and corridors that smelt of sweat and tobacco smoke and sewage. Viviane could hear moans and cries, and the barking of ferocious dogs.

  She was interrogated in a small, bare cell.

  ‘Are you Citoyenne Gagnon, the former Duchesse de Savageaux?’

  ‘I do not use that name. I was married against my will and hated my husband.’

  ‘But you were married to the Duc de Savageaux?’

  ‘Yes. For a short time only. He died some years ago.’

  ‘And you were in service to the widow Capet?’

  ‘For a short time only.’ Viviane shivered with cold and rubbed her arms.

  ‘But you went to serve her again at the Temple?’

  ‘Yes. I needed to find work. I had nowhere else to go.’

  Viviane wondered who it was who had betrayed her. Was it Alouette, eavesdropping the night Viviane admitted who she really was? Or Ivo, perhaps? He had not returned to the tower; she had not seen him again. Was he so angry at her deception that he would betray her? Or perhaps he was just trying to save his own neck.

  She could not believe that it was Pierrick. He would never do such a thing.

  The questions continued a long time. Viviane answered honestly. It was a relief, really, not to have to guard her every word and inflection. And it seemed this official knew it all anyway.

  But then the tenor of the questions changed.

  ‘Are you acquainted with Citizen Michonis?’

  Viviane was surprised. ‘I know him by sight – he was superintendent of the prison. But I have never spoken to him.’

  ‘Did you not suggest that he let the young Capet keep his dog?’

  Her surprise grew. ‘Well, yes, but …’

  ‘So you have spoken to him.’

  ‘I did not speak to him in particular. I spoke to all the men there.’

  ‘Because you felt pity for the Capet.’

  ‘Yes. I would feel pity for any little boy wrested from the arms of his mother.’

  As the questions continued, Viviane became more and more puzzled. They asked her about the flowers she had brought the queen.

  ‘Were they carnations?’ the man demanded.

  Viviane shook her head. ‘No, just a few violets I gathered from the garden.’

  They asked her how she knew the Chevalier de Rougeville. Viviane shook her head and said she did not know him. They asked if she had ever passed notes to the queen, or plotted to help her escape. Viviane admitted she had passed news to the king’s valet, but said that it was only ever information she had heard from the town criers.

  ‘I never tried to help the queen escape,’ Viviane said. ‘How could I? I barely ever saw her.’

  The official seemed to get frustrated. His questions grew terser. But eventually he threw down his pen. ‘You say you know nothing about the recent attempt to rescue the widow Capet?’

  He spoke with bitter irony.

  ‘No!’ Viviane cried. ‘Someone tried to rescue her? From here?’ She gestured at the thick walls, the heavy oaken door barred with iron. ‘But who would do such a thing?’

  Then she remembered how closely he had questioned her about Superintendent Michonis.

  ‘Did they succeed?’ she asked quietly.

  He smiled. ‘Prisoner 280 is safe in her cell. No-one escapes from the Conciergerie.’

  When Viviane was taken to her cell, she could understand why. Each corridor was blocked off by a huge iron door, with another door – only three feet high – set within it. The iron gate was manned by a turnkey. As she was hustled along the corridor, there was another iron door every ten paces or so, each being unlocked and relocked as she passed through. Guards were accompanied by huge mastiffs, their ribs showing through their mangy skin. They barked like the hounds of hell.

  ‘Do you have any money?’ the guard asked her.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘A bed will cost you eighteen sous a day.’

  Viviane blanched. ‘What happens if I can’t afford it?’

  ‘Then you sleep on the floor in the dungeons.’

  She hesitated. He said, with a certain rough kindness, ‘It is damp and filthy and infested with rats and lice down there. Best pay for a bed if you have any money at all. Besides, it won’t be for long.’

  ‘No?’ she asked with a certain faint hope.

  ‘No. The Revolutionary Tribunal is very efficient.’ He hesitated, then said in a lower voice, ‘There is a reason why they call the Conciergerie the antechamber to the guillotine.’

  Numbly Viviane agreed to pay for a bed, and was shown to a long dark cell. There were rows of cots, each furnished with a stained mattress stuffed with straw and a thin woollen blanket that smelt vile. Crude wooden stools and a bucket in the corner were the only other furnishings.

  Her cell looked out on the Seine. Viviane pressed her face to the window, desperate for the sight of the sky, for a glimpse of a green tree. A boy was standing on the Pont au Change below, waving a sheaf of newspapers in his hand. His shrill voice piped out, ‘Convention votes to make terror the order of the day! The people of Paris want blood? We shall give them blood!’

  26

  The Shining River

  5 September – 1 October 1793

  ‘Look!’ David stood up in his stirrups and pointed. ‘There it is.’

  Above them a long serpent of stone twisted along the mountain ramparts, writhing down precipitous cliffs and climbing up to great square guard towers and smaller watchtowers. Beyond, sharp mountains like jagged teeth.

  A chill ran over David’s body, raising the hairs on his skin.

  ‘The Great Wall,’ he whispered.

  ‘What a stupendous piece of work,’ Lord Macartney exclaimed, moved to awe for the first time since arriving in China. The mandarins were surprised, considering the dilapidated old barricade to be of little interest.

  ‘But it is two thousand years old,’ David exclaimed. ‘And more than five thousand miles long.’

  Sir George set his surveyors to measuring the ramparts and parapets, and testing the geology of the stones. The Chinese guards were wary and suspicious, with some reason. David had to admit the British officers had surreptitiously been taking notes of the country’s defences and armaments at every step of their journey.

  David and Scotty and a few of the other men set out to climb to the top, accompanied as always by Father Li and a bevy of disgruntled mandarins. The steps were so steep, the back of David’s legs were soon aching. Panting and laughing, they scrambled at last to the highest watchtower. It had the most extraordinary view across steep mountains and valleys, the stone wall scaling the peaks as far as the eye could see.

  It was no wonder the wall was called the Stone Dragon, he thought. One could almost imagine it had once flown the skies and now only slept, waiting to be awoken again.

  David stood as long as he was permitted, watching the shadow of the Great Wall stretch long. At last, his arms tugged on by three or four different mandarins, he allowed himself to be hustled back down the rough, uneven steps. As he left the wall, he bent and picked up a fragment of broken stone and put it in his pocket.

  That night, the sky was so clear David could see the crenelated shape of the watchtowers silhouetted against a sky luminous with stars. The dazzling curve of the Milky Way arched above the long twisting spine of the stone dragon below.

  ‘What do the Chinese call the Milky Way?’ he asked Father Li, in careful Latin.

  The priest looked up, a faint smile on his face. ‘The Silvery River.’

  ‘That’s beautiful.’

  ‘There is an old story,’ Father Li said. ‘A young man fell in love with the goddess of heaven’s seventh daughter and married her secretly. The two lovers were very happy, and had two children. When the goddess discovered her daughter had married a mere mortal, however, she was angry. She dragged her daughter back to heaven.<
br />
  ‘The young man’s ox spoke to him. “Kill me,” it said, “and disguise yourself in my skin, and then you will be able to climb up to heaven and find your beloved.” The young man did as he was told and, carrying his two children, ascended into the starry vault of the sky. But the goddess saw him and was angry. Pulling out her hairpin, she scratched a long slit across the sky to keep the two lovers apart forever.’

  With one hand, he mimicked slicing the sky apart.

  ‘Once a year, though, on the seventh night of the seventh moon, all the magpies in the world take pity on the lovers’ sorrow and fly up to form a bridge so they may be together again, just for one night.’

  David’s eyes were unaccountably hot, his throat thick. He rose to his feet and went to stand at the edge of the clearing, looking out into the darkness. He found he was rubbing the pit of the scar on his left hand.

  ‘You feel story is just like yours?’ Father Li asked softly. ‘You too have been parted from your beloved?’

  David could not answer.

  At last, on 7 September, the embassy reached Zhe-hol. Crowds of Tartars came to stare. They did not laugh, like the people of Peking had done. They were suspicious, hostile. Hundreds of monks with shaved heads and burnt-orange robes pressed close to the entourage, carrying smoking joss sticks, ringing bells and chanting. The sound was deep, guttural, outlandish. David was fascinated but also afraid. They were only a few hundred men, a very long way from home, surrounded by thousands of unwelcoming strangers. If the emperor chose, he could have them slaughtered where they stood and news of their death would not reach Britain for another year.

  There was no grand procession, no formal reception. The British embassy was shown to a cold, bleak pavilion and left alone. Lord Macartney was told to make his own way to meet with the emperor’s chief minister, a handsome young man rumoured to be his lover. Offended, Macartney refused.

  The next day, their rations were reduced practically to bare bones. Lord Macartney ordered all the men to refuse to taste a morsel, and sent a formal complaint. Within twenty minutes, trays of steaming delicacies were sent, as if the kitchen had been prepared and waiting but forbidden to serve. Everyone was angry and affronted.