by Kate Forsyth
One night, after Viviane had helped her stepmother eat and wash and tucked her up under the blanket as if she was a child, Clothilde whispered to her in the darkness. ‘He did not die, you know.’
‘Who?’
‘Your lover. He did not die.’
It took a while for Viviane to understand her meaning. ‘David?’ she said at last, stupidly.
‘The English gardener. He escaped. I’m not quite sure how. Your father was furious.’
‘David’s alive?’
Clothilde nodded.
Viviane bent her face down into her hands. An agony of regret, a glorious joy. He’s alive!
She did not sleep that night. She lay on her lice-infested straw mattress, shivering under the rank blanket, the shadow of bars striping her face, and spoke to David in her mind. I am so sorry, I thought you were dead. My father lied to me. I should have known. Please forgive me and know that I love you.
She sent her thoughts outwards towards David with all her strength, then lost herself in daydreams of searching for him, finding him, holding him in her arms. Her lips curved. For the first time in a long while, Viviane felt happy.
‘Citoyenne de Ravoisier!’ the prison warden read out.
Viviane stood as if struck to stone. It has come, she thought faintly. Today I will die.
It was only when the gaolers clamped their hands on Clothilde’s arms and she had begun to shriek that Viviane realised it was her stepmother who was to go to the guillotine. She almost swooned with relief. The pang of guilt and self-reproach which followed was almost as overwhelming. Viviane sank to her knees. She watched as Clothilde was dragged away.
Clothilde had been determined to go to her death with her head held proudly high, her face pale but composed, her golden tresses rippling down her back, so the screaming mob at the foot of the guillotine would be struck with pity and admiration for her beauty.
Instead her chemise was torn, her hair hacked off, her face swollen and smeared with dirt and tears.
‘Please! I am too young. I will do anything …’ Clothilde clung with all her strength to whatever she could grasp. An iron bar. A gaoler’s leg. A doorjamb. Her grip was broken ruthlessly. She was thrown into the tumbril. When she tried to scramble up, the gaoler knocked her down.
Viviane clung to the bars of the gate with all her strength. Her stepmother was only twenty-one years old. It seemed so cruel, so futile, a death.
The men were brought out. A weeping boy who looked no older than sixteen. A few old men, their bare legs spindly beneath their grimy shirts. One raised his hand to her. It took Viviane a long moment to realise it was her father. She did not recognise him without his white wig and maquillage. He looked old and haggard, his eyes deep sunken.
Her father had never once spoken a word of love to her. He had beaten her and mocked her and lied to her. Yet still she wept for him as if her heart was breaking.
That evening, Viviane crouched in the shadows while the women around her rehearsed their coming deaths. She tore a scrap from the hem of her chemise, pierced her finger with a pin, and painstakingly wrote a few words with her own blood. She tied the rag about one of her last coins and flung it out the window with all her strength. She could only hope in the goodness of heart of whoever found it.
‘Viviane!’ another of the women called. ‘Will you not come and join us? We are practising dying.’
Viviane shook her head. ‘No. I am done with playing at death. I plan to practise living.’
Part IV
Blue Wonder
A ‘blue wonder’: an improbable tale, something to make one stare. The French, contes bleus.
The Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898)
28
The Deep Story
19–20 December 1793
It was cold.
David’s breath misted white. Dragon smoke, he had once called it. He stood on the deck of a barge, gaily decorated with banners, gazing out at the Pearl River. It was crowded with vessels of all shapes, sizes and purposes. Ferries laden with people in conical straw hats were rowed from shore to shore. Small junks piled high with sacks and boxes sailed past. An old man stood on a narrow boat made of five bamboo poles lashed together. He had one big straw basket, a long fishnet, and half-a-dozen huge black cormorants perched around him.
‘Look!’ David pointed. ‘I’d heard Chinese fishermen trained cormorants to fish for them. I thought it was a myth.’
‘They have some kind of ring fastened about their necks,’ Scotty observed. ‘To stop them swallowing the fish, perhaps.’
A junk headed towards the sea, its high prow painted with a crane with wings outstretched. Along the river banks, thousands of houseboats were tied in rows, creating a floating city. Women crouched on their haunches, cooking over small braziers.
‘Look at the pretty lady.’ Tom gestured towards a languid woman in emerald silk being rowed towards an elegant yacht. Her black hair was fastened on top of her head with ornate gold and turquoise pins, hung with tassels. Her face was white, her mouth crimson, her eyes obsidian. One servant held a pink parasol over her head, while another entertained her by plucking the strings of a Chinese lute. Yet another held a long ornately carved pipe to her lips. She breathed out a long plume of blue smoke and relaxed back into her cushions, as the servant began to pack the pipe for her once more.
‘Opium?’ David said in a low voice.
‘I hope not,’ Scotty said. ‘It will destroy her beauty in the end.’ He sighed. ‘It is strange how something that has so many uses for good can also cause so much harm.’
‘Dr Hickey tells me the British merchant ships are smuggling opium into China from India, and then sailing home full of tea.’
‘I have heard the same thing,’ Scotty said. ‘To address the trade imbalance. China doesn’t wish to import any of England’s commodities, wanting the British to pay for their tea in silver. So they bring in opium, sell it at auction and use the proceeds to pay for the tea.’
‘I was hoping to acquire a few camellia sinesis seedlings for Sir Joseph, but they were too closely guarded. I have many other rare plants, though, that I hope will please him.’
David could not help smiling. For months, the Chinese mandarins had controlled their every step, preventing them from seeing anything of interest or use. But after their summary dismissal from the emperor, their guardians had relaxed their vigilance. Travelling from Peking to Canton down a network of rivers and canals, the Englishmen had often been allowed to step off the junks and walk along the shore.
David had seen mulberry groves and taken cuttings of morus alba, the white mulberry used to feed the silkworm. The West had known the secret of silk for centuries, ever since two Christian monks had smuggled silkworms out of China concealed within hollow bamboo canes. The Honourable East India Company, however, wanted to know how the Chinese managed to keep their silk snowy-white, when British silk yellowed with age. So David had also taken samples and asked questions of the mulberry farmers about propagation and pruning and the composition of the water in which the silkworms were boiled.
He also collected the little yellow sunbursts of chrysanthemum indicum, and was shown how to make an infusion from its petals said to relieve chest pain and dizziness. Another useful plant he found was panax, which meant ‘all-healing’ in Greek and was named gin-seng by the Chinese, or ‘man-root’, for the roots of the plant were forked like a man’s legs.
John Haxton had found a sweet-scented pink double rose, still flowering despite the wintry weather, and had been permitted to dig up a small bush and wrap its roots in damp hessian. It was the only rose they had seen in all their travels, and David was acutely jealous of his discovery. If only he had not stopped and turned to see how Tom was faring, following so faithfully along behind. David could only console himself with the knowledge the rose was blush-pink, not ruby-red.
By mid-afternoon, the embassy fleet had reached a palace built on
an island in the Pearl River, where Lord Macartney and his entourage had been invited to stay. The palace belonged to one of the great Hong merchants, a man named Shy Kin Qua, said to have made a fortune from tea. The palace was built as usual in a series of elegant wooden pavilions with high flying eaves and scarlet latticework, connected by covered walkways. The main pavilion was two storeys high, and was guarded by two lion statues made of bronze, one resting its paw on a patterned ball, the other on a sleeping lion cub.
The embassy was met with great ceremony, a mark of favour that did much to smooth the ambassador’s ruffled feathers. Scores of mandarins in silk gowns bowed low, again and again, and the Englishmen were led to an open pavilion overlooking a large pond, where they were served tea with milk from cows that had been brought over especially on flat barges, lowing mournfully all the way.
Willow trees trailed their golden tresses in the water, and lotus flowers spread their wide green leaves. A moon bridge led to an island where a tiny lacquer-red temple was situated under flowering plum trees. David was enchanted.
A stage had been set up in the courtyard, where clowns and acrobats and musicians performed, and a magnificent feast was spread out on high tables, with white tablecloths and napkins and proper chairs.
Afterwards, the men were showed to their quarters. The pavilions had all been fitted out with glass windows and fireplaces in the European way, with soft beds piled high with warm quilts and pillows instead of straw mats and hard ceramic headrests. These small signs of comfort and civilisation were met with much appreciation and a general thawing of the mood, though Dr Gillan loudly regretted the continued absence of water closets.
David was sharing a pavilion with Scotty, John Haxton and John Barrow. A moon gate led into a small sequestered courtyard centred around a tiny juniper tree in a pot. David had been curious about these miniature trees since he had first seen them in Ting-hai, but he had never been permitted to examine them closely. Now he and John pored over it, marvelling at the perfection of the form.
‘A juniperus chinensis would normally grow up to sixty-five feet tall,’ David said. ‘This is only twenty-five inches.’
‘I wonder how they do it,’ John said. ‘Imagine, if we could learn the secret we’d make our fortune. Every English lady would want one for her drawing-room.’
‘It must take years,’ David said, noting how the roots of the tiny tree had been trained to grow over rocks, and how its trunk had been encouraged to develop twists and knots just like a juniper tree in the wild.
It was cold that night, and David woke to find a faint frost glittering on the ground. It was only just dawn. Well wrapped up, he went out to explore more of the gardens.
Everything looked magical in the low-hanging mist. David walked down towards the pond, and saw an old man dancing alone beneath the willow trees. It looked as if he was waltzing with a ghost. David stopped in his tracks, wanting to watch but not wishing to intrude. The old man did not acknowledge him, but kept slowly dancing. Each movement was as graceful and flowing as water, his hands lifting and gesturing as if offering an invisible flower. He was dressed in simple robes of indigo blue, padded for warmth, and his long beard was wispy and white, his face heavily lined. Black slippered feet lifted and were set down with controlled precision. His long white plait swayed from side to side.
David did not like to stare so he moved away through the gardens, looking back often. When he returned ten minutes later, the old man was gone.
He walked back to the main pavilion to see a theatrical production was being staged on the front porch. Actors with garishly painted faces and long robes with flowing white sleeves were moving through a sequence of stylised gestures that were almost like a clown’s mime. Musicians plucked moon-shaped lutes with their fingernails and blew into flutes made of bamboo, while the actors sang a high wailing tune.
A group of Englishmen watched, laughing and commenting rudely, secure in the knowledge no-one could understand them.
‘What an infernal noise!’ Dr Gillan said. ‘How can they call that music?’
‘It’s barely dawn,’ yawned Dr Dinwiddie. ‘Must we be woken by such a racket?’
‘I have a good mind to tell them to pipe down,’ said Anderson. ‘His lordship is worn out and needs a good rest.’
‘I wonder what the emperor would think if he visited London and the king sent a flock of Covent Garden opera singers to serenade him at dawn each day?’ John Barrow said.
David saw the old Chinese man standing at the edge of the crowd, his hand folded into his wide sleeves, his face inscrutable. Although he knew the old man could not understand him, he felt uncomfortable and so said, ‘I think it is very kind of them to provide for our entertainment.’
‘You call this entertainment?’ Dr Gillan said incredulously.
The singers came to the end of their song, bowed low and retreated off the porch, replaced by boys who spun through the air as if they were made of hollow bone and feathers.
‘You must admit their acrobats are incredible,’ David said.
Dr Gillan snorted loudly. ‘If you admire such circus tricks.’
David suddenly felt as if he could bear no more.
‘I do,’ he said, then turned and walked away. He found John still sleeping and shook him awake, saying, ‘Let’s go and see what we can do about getting our plants settled safely.’
Within the hour, David and John were being rowed across the river to the Thirteen Factories, as the principal warehouses of the foreigners were known, on a flat barge crammed with all the plants they had collected on their journey south from Peking.
The Thirteen Factories were built in a narrow strip along the Pearl River, and guarded on all sides by high walls. Inside were their warehouses and residencies, while their ships were moored outside on the river. Traditionally the Western merchants came with the monsoon winds between June and September, then departed once the wind changed direction in the winter months. Now that December was here, many of the merchant ships were returning to Europe, laden with tea, silk and porcelain. David hoped to find an East India Company vessel with room for his botanical specimens.
The British factory was a white palatial building, crowded with merchants and sailors. A Scottish gardener named James Main was deputised to advise them. He was in service to one of the East India Company’s top men, Gilbert Slater, now retired and spending his wealth on rare and beautiful plants. James had been sent privately to hunt down magnolias, peonies, camellias, begonias, black lilies and roses.
‘You are so lucky to have been allowed to travel within China,’ James said enviously, as he inspected their haul. ‘The Chinese are so jealous of their secrets they’ll not permit us to visit any of their gardens or nurseries. I’ve managed to see only a few since I’ve been here. The nurserymen come here to the Factory, with little paper envelopes full of seeds which they try to sell us, and half the time the seeds are for common weeds, or are mislabelled.’
‘We’ve not seen many gardens either,’ David said. ‘Only the imperial parks and a few courtyards hidden inside pavilions.’
‘Chinese gardening is peculiar,’ James said. ‘There is a littleness in all their designs. They build tiny lakes where a mackerel would be puzzled to turn, surrounded by rocks which a man could carry away under his arm, and ancient trees that are only fifteen inches high. I swear, if a Chinese had ten acres to beautify, he would cover it with the same kind of childish, fanciful freaks repeated a thousand times over.’
‘There’s something fabulous and magical about it all, though, don’t you think?’ David said. ‘Nothing has been left to chance, everything wrought with such care and harmony. It is as if they seek to paint a picture with the landscape.’
‘Perhaps in the palace gardens,’ James said sourly. ‘I’ve not been permitted to visit them. The only gardens I’ve seen are tiny courtyards at the back of merchants’ houses, and it is all rocks and raggedy bamboo and those vegetable cripples they like to make.’
‘Do you not like the little trees?’ David asked with interest.
‘I’d rather see a tree growing wild on a mountain than bound within that tiny pot,’ James replied.
‘But what if you cannot go to the mountains?’ David said. ‘It’s a way to bring the wild hills and forests into your home. And such skill, such patience, in the way the trees are wrought.’
‘I suppose so,’ James said with a shrug. ‘You are lucky if you’ve been given a chance to examine one closely. I have not.’
He gave them advice about dealing with the Cantonese nurserymen, and suggested they visit the famous Fa Ti nursery about three miles from Canton, on the southern bank of the river. ‘Go to the picture shops first and purchase drawings of the plants that you want,’ he suggested. ‘Then you can show them to Samay, the old gardener there, and he will find them for you. Ask him “how much-ee dollar” and never give him what he asks for.’
They made arrangements to go to the nurseries the following day, and then returned to the merchant’s palace just as the sun was setting. Men stood about in groups, looking worried and agitated. Most had open letters in their hands.
‘Mail from home!’ Scotty called to David. ‘We’re at war with France.’
The words a blow to his solar plexus. ‘But why? What has happened?’
‘They’ve murdered their king,’ Tom called, sounding most indignant. ‘Months ago, and we had no idea of it. The scoundrels!’
‘It is an action most execrable,’ Herr Hüttner said.
‘They invented a new killing machine that is really most efficient,’ Dr Gillan said, in a tone of scientific curiosity. ‘It’s a beheading device with a sharp blade that falls like lightning and lops off the head. They are calling it the guillotine after the doctor who designed it. Apparently, the executioner can cut off a dozen heads in just thirteen minutes. Quite remarkable.’
