One of the men on the Customs ship looked back at me, a flat look that said he knew exactly what we had in our hold – if it had been legal, there would have been no need to bother with a visible Englishman – but the ship kept going, away from us, towards one of the little jetties on the shore where a Chinese junk was waiting for inspection, one of its red sails stuck half-unfurled where a line had caught.
We came into a deep, cold shadow. I was still looking at the island and the Customs ship, but beside me, Keita leaned back.
‘Christ,’ he said in his adult way, which was all the odder because he was half the size an English boy his age would have been. He was a Japanese runaway who spoke fluent Chinese and English by means he had always managed not to disclose.
It was a British Navy ironclad, towering above our little clipper. It had five masts, the sails furled, and the gigantic waterwheels were stopped, but the engines were thrumming and there were still the last dying wisps of steam from the funnels. It must have just moved into place. I could see they weren’t manned or ready, but I felt nervous as we sailed past the gun ports.
‘They’re not ready to fire yet,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘We’d better get out quickly, though. I think it will be today or tomorrow. They won’t hang about long.’ While I was talking, a little supply boat steamed up to the hull and started to load person-sized shells up to the waiting winches.
He thought about it. The hems of his mind dragged a long way behind him. It took a while sometimes for him to look at all the briars caught in them and find which were relevant. ‘I think today.’
‘Why?’
‘Just a feeling,’ he said. He had a long history of accurate feelings. He always knew when it would rain. He always knew when Sing was coming, even though Sing was a great believer in arriving unannounced. I’d never asked him straight out if he had some real sense of things to come – it felt too close to an accusation of madness – but it had happened often enough now for me to pay attention. He shifted anxiously as if he didn’t like being near the guns either.
‘Before or after we get through?’ I said.
He was quiet for a long second. He went tauter and tauter, then shook his head as if he didn’t want to say. ‘After.’ I thought at the time that he sounded like he was lying, but I couldn’t think, then, of a reason for him to do so and wrote it off the second it crossed my mind.
‘I know it’s itchy, cutting it so fine, but—’
‘But Mr Sing will do worse than run a Navy ironclad at us if we come back with no silk, I know,’ he said. If he had been any other child I would have put my arm around him, but he would have stiffened and hated it.
‘Look at those idiots,’ I said instead.
He looked, then smiled when he saw what I meant. There was another clipper over the other side of the river, flying a faded and aged Jack above a very Chinese crew. They had dressed a tiny European boy in an officer’s uniform. It was hard to tell if they were taking the piss or if it was all they needed to avoid Customs these days. Nobody wanted to touch anything that could possibly have been a British crew now. Technically the Customs men had the Emperor’s authority to search and seize any suspicious cargo, but they had tried that on a British ship last year and the Admiralty had gone ballistic – was still in the process of arranging its ballistics now – hence the gunships. Permission to fire on Canton until someone apologised had come through from Parliament this week. We finally passed the last of the guns and I felt easier, which was stupid, because it would have taken a clear fifteen minutes to load them from nothing.
Like always, Keita had a tangle of clockwork in his hands. He was adding to it fast, with a pair of fine tweezers and a little jar of cogs hanging from the rail on a loop of string, unaffected by the small motion of the ship. It was nothing like the painstaking way I’d seen watchmakers work before. He dropped things into place, never had to wiggle a pin, never fumbled anything. He had gone back to it while we talked, but he stopped now. ‘I think we ought to go inside.’
‘Are you cold?’
He pointed at the ironclad.
Just as he did, its engines roared and it started forward. The wave from the hull knocked us sideways and I nearly fell off the rail, though Keita rode it well. He didn’t seem surprised. We climbed down on to the deck and he unhooked his jar of cogs, to carry by the loop like a lamp. Back beyond our wake, which had wobbled, there were smoke plumes on the horizon too big for the clippers and nothing to do with the little red-sailed junks pottering in wind-tack zigzags. It was another gunship. One I knew. One of the plumes was bumpy, from a stuttery funnel. ‘Jesus. That’s the Thunder. Sixteen guns. I thought the Navy would just fire a few warning shots but they mean to raze the city with all this, don’t they?’
Keita made a small reproachful sound as he bumped into me, thrown forward by another wake wave, this time from a clipper racing in the opposite direction. I put him on to his balance again, wanting to pick him up. All around us now, more clippers were running for Hong Kong, back the way we had come. A few of them steamed close as the river bottlenecked. Keita looked too little to be in the middle of it all and I nudged him inside. He was shaking in the tiny, buzzing way mice do. He didn’t like sailing at the best of times. Ships, he always said, were an unforgiving form of travel. If a horse went lame you could usually dismount and walk away. If a ship went wrong you usually drowned. I settled us in the little mess room and we played backgammon until we pulled in to the long wharves at Canton that evening, thankfully well out of sight of the ironclads. There were soldiers on the bridge over the river. Keita watched them unhappily.
I climbed down on to the wharf before the gangplank was lowered and lifted Keita with me, wishing I’d had the sense to leave him in India this time. He was normally such a collected person that it hadn’t occurred to me he might be frightened now. He didn’t mind storms, tea farmers shooting at us, mandarins threatening us. The Navy, which usually aimed well, hadn’t seemed any different.
‘If you’d tried to leave me in India I’d have settled down in the hold, thanks,’ he said flatly.
‘Stop talking to what I haven’t said. How do you do that, anyway?’
‘You’ve got one of those faces.’
‘That makes no sense.’
‘On purpose,’ he said.
‘Fine,’ I laughed. ‘Let’s get this over with. Stay in front of me,’ I added, because the wharf was crowded, not with stevedores but ordinary people holding children and bags, trying to reach Hong Kong before anything happened. We wove through them as best we could, up to the warehouses, where somebody who wasn’t our usual silk trader came out to meet us. Above the roofs, on one of the garden gantries that seemed to float with all its struts lost in wisteria, a beautiful, impassive woman smoked a tobacco pipe while she watched the river. She was in her fifties; she must have seen it all before.
‘Mr Tremayne! Mr Wang sent me out to see you. He’s, er . . . fled,’ the new man explained. ‘Nobody knows when it’s all going to start.’
‘Soon,’ I said. I had a decent grasp of Chinese. Keita was there for when things became too specific or for the people who didn’t quite trust that I knew what I was saying, which was a wholly reasonable doubt to have. ‘There are gunships coming up from Hong Kong now. Shall we get everything swapped over?’
‘There’s an extra condition,’ he said quickly.
‘You’re coming with us, of course you are.’
‘Thank God,’ he said, half-crumpling. ‘Do you suppose we have time?’
‘I think so. It’ll take the gunships two hours at least to get here. They don’t go fast. Come on, let’s get going.’
Most of the warehouse men had fled, so we had to unload the opium crates and then load the silk bales ourselves with the crew, but some of the trader’s men hurried round with a cart while we did. The opium disappeared onto the back of the cart, which sped straightaway towards the bridge, while there was still a bridge. Keita stood just inside the hold and directed
. He was good at even distribution and making the best use of space, whatever the mad shape of whatever we were loading. Halfway through, he froze and his head snapped to the side, towards the river, as if he had heard something huge, but there was nothing but the rattle and chatter of the crowds. He stayed like that for a long second.
‘Is it starting?’ I asked quietly.
He nodded. ‘Soon. We’ll have to sail through it. But they won’t be aiming at ships; it should be all right. That can go over there,’ he added in his courtly Mandarin to two of our men who were bringing more silk bales. Behind us on the wharf, people were waving money at the captain for a place onboard.
‘That’s going to have to do,’ I said. If I had been a better man, I would have jettisoned the silk cargo to make room for more people, but I was too frightened to lose the work. I had nothing else, and would have no references if I made Sing angry enough. Leaving behind cargo was exactly the kind of thing that made him angry. ‘Mr Shang! There’s space.’
Shang, the captain, had been waiting to see if he could let people aboard. He had already moved women and children to the front. He put the gangplank down again and waved them across.
I shepherded Keita up the ladder to the deck to see if anything had changed on the river. There were no more incoming ships now. ‘We have to go. They’ve blocked the river further up.’
The engineer had seen too. The smoke from our funnel thickened as he stoked up the coal.
Shang climbed back into the cabin and pulled a throttle, and we leaned out into the current. The people he had let in through the hold began to come up on deck. He must have packed them in below, because it was quite a crowd. I felt the ship rock and sent the bigger men back down, to be ballast.
‘Is silk really important enough to start a war over?’ Keita said to me when I came back. He already knew the answer, but when he was worried he asked things like that in the way other children asked to be told fairytales they already knew off by heart.
‘Sit up here,’ I said, tapping the rail so that we could hear each other over everyone else talking and fretting. He climbed up and I put my arm across him in case one of the other ships bumped us. They were close. ‘It’s not about the silk. It’s about not pissing about with the East India Company. If you try and dictate terms of trade to them – if you say you can only buy silk with silver bullion – they make sure you do something stupid. They’ll run obvious smugglers, like us, until someone snaps. Some poor bastard from Customs boards a British ship to try and put a stop to it, like they did with the Arrow.’ He nodded. I explained it in the same way every time and sometimes he filled in parts if I left space, but he didn’t now. He sat back against me, fitted to my chest like he never usually would have. I squeezed his arm, worried. It was starting to bother me that he was frightened of shots that wouldn’t even be aimed at us. In the near future hung the shape of something else, something he wasn’t saying, but there was still nothing unusual on the river.
‘That’s a violation of treaty. They can’t touch our flag. So the Navy comes, shells the hell out of everything for a week, and when the Emperor folds, Britain dictates the terms of the peace treaty. This time it will hinge around the legalisation of opium.’ I could smell iron; the ship was running hot. ‘It’s a new kind of war. There’s no need to lay a siege and take someone’s capital city any more. You just have to make them sell underprice. That’s . . . I don’t really have the right sort of mind for all this, but it’s how the British Empire works, I think. There’s a queen, a prime minister, and the East India Company board of directors.’
Keita nodded. He had absolutely the right mind for it. ‘Quinine next. They’re selling it too dear, aren’t they, in Peru?’
‘Damn right they are. The sooner someone shells Lima and makes them trade the sodding stuff for tea, the better. I’m sick of getting a cough and worrying for a fortnight if Sing will spend the money on us if it’s malaria.’
He was holding my sleeve hard and looking, not at the other ships, but down at the water. I could feel his heart through his ribs.
We were passing the crocus fields just outside the city and I was starting to feel like we might just have got away. Between the crumbling buildings and above the flooded streets – it had rained all last month – great swathes of dyed cloth swam yellow from lines strung thirty feet above the ground. A melon seller was still going about his ordinary business close to the shore and so, around him, was everyone else. The dyers and saffron pickers had nowhere else to go. The chances of their having helpful relatives in Hong Kong were the same as my having them on Mars.
‘It’s none of my business,’ I said, ‘but can I ask why you signed up for all this rather than staying safe at home like, you know, an ordinary child?’
Keita laughed, but not much. ‘Really it was the cook. I don’t like him.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘He keeps post under his wig. I mean, when he collects it he brings it back like that, even if he isn’t carrying anything. And it’s just . . . if you wear a wig, that’s an effort towards ordinary hair, isn’t it? But there isn’t much in the way of a verisimilitudinous illusion if there are envelope corners sticking out of it. I don’t know. I feel like he might be a stupid person and the postal wiggery typifies the stupid. Does it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He looked uncertain. ‘Usually I’m being unreasonable.’
‘No, I think that sets a worrying standard of behaviour. Don’t go back, stay with me. Japan sounds bloody dull anyway.’
He tensed well before the shell screamed over us, although it was completely incongruous. There had been no warning; we were too far from the ironclad to hear them beating to quarters. The shell smashed into some buildings on the riverbanks and blew them to pieces, some of which crashed into the water right up close to our hull. I twisted back to wave at Shang and point towards the middle of the river, but every other ship was doing exactly the same. He shook his head and we sped up to bypass it all, but we were dangerously close to the banks. Another shot blasted a dyer’s. I saw a vat of saffron fly whole across our path and land in the water, where the dye spiralled out and made a floating, bright yellow patch.
We swerved, and I felt Keita slip from under my hands. Later, I was sure that he had pushed himself from the rail on purpose. His balance was so good and I’d been holding him so tightly that he couldn’t have fallen. I stared at the empty patch where he had been for a second, then dived after him. Because the water was exactly the same temperature as the air, it felt for a bizarre second like hitting a denser sort of mist.
The shell must have been a stray. They wouldn’t have aimed at us, and there was nothing close to aim at anyway. But the reeds about twenty yards from me exploded, and I felt myself lifted up and hurled backwards in the water. At first I hung still, not sure which way was up, or what had happened. When I understood at last, it was because Keita was next to me and dragging my sleeve. We broke the surface together. Bits of blasted reed floated around us, and chunks of mud torn from the riverbank.
‘Swim. I can’t help you, you have to swim,’ he said, as unlike a child as I’d ever known him in all his history of unchildishness.
I did, because at the time I couldn’t feel anything wrong. It was only when Shang swung back to find us that I saw what had happened to my leg.
When I woke up properly, I couldn’t tell where I was. It was a good room with a big piano taking up half the far side, which usually meant Hong Kong. A while ago, a firm in Manchester or somewhere had been certain that every one of the thirty million or so moneyed ladies in China would want a piano now that trade was more open and so they’d shipped a silly number out, only to find that the climate was all wrong for piano strings and nobody was interested anyway. In an effort at charity, all the British diplomats and EIC writers had bought two apiece and fitted them into whatever corners they could. On the wall was an oil painting of some tea clippers.
Sing was in the chair beside me.
‘You’ll be lucky
to walk again,’ he said, and I had a strange wave of gratitude that he had got straight to the point rather than edging around it. He was pale. ‘The bombardment started half an hour early. It was a mess. They ended up catching French troops in the crossfire too. I’m surprised they didn’t hit Hong Kong by accident.’
‘I’m sorry,’ was all I could think of to say.
‘So am I.’ He let his breath out. ‘Just get better the best you can. I do not want to send Horace bloody Spruce out to the Amazon. He’ll spend half his time coming up with Greek names for all the new kinds of cinchona he misidentifies.’
I laughed, which sent a pulse of bone-deep pain twanging up through my spine. ‘Yes. Right.’ I could already feel it was never going to be better, but never is a broad thing to understand in the few seconds after waking from an opium sleep. I could see the idea, but I couldn’t hold it or feel it.
He watched me for another moment and then stood up, which brought Keita into view where he was sitting in the window. ‘I’m going to arrange passage for you back to England.’
‘Can’t I stay here?’
‘Only until you’re well enough to be moved,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry. We’re not the Navy. There’s no invalid provision. If you’re not working we can’t keep you.’
He left in his clipped way and I sat very still, knowing I was in that strange, long space between being shot and feeling it.
‘Come over here,’ I said to Keita, to give myself something to do. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ He was. Somebody had found dry clothes for him, Chinese. But he didn’t look like a coolie’s son. He was too healthy and too clean, and he had a slow, unskipping way of moving that might only have been his own character, or old-money tuition. I’d never asked. ‘Does it hurt?’ he said.
The Bedlam Stacks Page 22
