And Nellie and I? We spend much of our time sitting together, occasionally talking about Scotland and our many happy memories, but usually we are content to be silent together, like the auld man and wife in the story, nodding by the fire. One day Nellie noticed that we were holding each other by the hand, and she blushed, remarking that this was a fine time to be beginning a second honeymoon!
The one Malvolio in our happy circle is, I am sad to say, Dr Fielding, who cannot reconcile himself to our fate. Thankfully he no longer rails and criticises as he did, but it is sad to watch him pacing restlessly up and down the room, lifting the shutters to watch the Boxers outside. We tend to ignore him, as we do the Boxers. It is better that way.
Dear James, do not be sad for us. We are quite content.
I had intended to write a long formal letter to you as the executor of my will, asking you to look after this, and take care of that—but material things that once had such overwhelming importance, especially to us money-minded Scots, hardly seem to matter much now. I know you will do what is right with my little estate, and that you will see that my dear Mary and Edmund are well looked after. Truly I could leave them in no better hands. Dear James, you have always been friend as much as brother to me, and I know that you will be a faithful father to my children.
I hope this is not my last letter to you, but it may be. It is only a matter of time. In any case, there is little more to say. We are leaving this world of trouble and cruelty, confident that we will travel together to whatever Paradise those who have always trusted to our Saviour are heirs to. We are terrible sinners, with the most miserable failings, but somehow I know that the Lord will treat us mercifully. And I have no doubt, my dear James, that sooner or later you and I will also be reunited there, and we will walk the heather once more. (Can there be Heaven without heather?)
Goodbye for now, James. Scotland for ever!
Sunday, 7 July 1900
Dear James,
It is as we expected. Lin came today. He brought with him a memorial from the Mandarin. He has finally answered my letter. It is not the reply I hoped for when I wrote to him. It is a formal proclamation acknowledging my ‘appeal for mercy,’ but then it goes on to tell us that the foreigners ‘have been justly condemned for their iniquities’ and that we must await the ‘sentence of the Emperor’. So much for a trial. It seems to have already taken place in our absence.
Perhaps it is better this way. I am glad that Nellie and the children will be spared the indignity of kneeling in a yamen court. I asked Lin when our execution is to take place, but he was his usual cold self. We will ‘be informed,’ he told us. I imagine that it will not be long now.
Perhaps there is some humanity in the man. He brought with him a cartload of luscious watermelons, a gift for the condemned. You can imagine how welcome a treat this was for people who have been parched on small quantities of brackish water for the last few weeks.
We carried them into the kitchen, and made a great pile on the table. The children could hardly wait to fall on them. With rather doubtful humour Bowers brought down the chopper slicing the delicious fruit. ‘Chop-chop! Chop-chop!’ he said.
Oh, James, but you would have laughed to see …
Fifteen
Every day we attack the walls without success.
The ocean devils’ magic is hard to overcome.
‘You would have laughed to see…’ Airton smiled as he sat at his desk, wondering how to describe the look on Bowers’s so solemn face when he had realised the inappropriateness of his chopping remark, and his hangdog sheepishness afterwards. He wanted to describe it in a humorous way. After all, this might be the last letter he would ever write to his brother, and he wanted to communicate to James the good cheer that had blessed this household despite, or perhaps because of, their appalling predicament. Never before in his life, he realised, had he felt at such peace with himself. Never before had he felt such pleasure in the simplest things, or appreciated how truly wonderful it was to be alive. It was almost intoxicating. Even the ugly metal paperweight on his desk seemed to have a beauty of form. He felt suffused with love, for his family, for his fellow prisoners, even for the inanimate objects in the house. The motes of dust swirling in the rays of sunlight coming through the shutters made him think of flying angels. Of course he dreaded what was to come. He hated the fact that his children would suffer pain. He knew that all his fortitude would be required—but, strangely, even though his rational self reminded him of all these things and he knew that the time allotted to them was only a matter of days, the joy and intensity of living for the moment were enough to put all evil thoughts aside. It was like the holidays of his youth, romping on the beach in a golden for-ever, with no thought of the hospital ward or the study to which he would inevitably have to return. He wondered whether they had been granted a taste of the Heaven that was to come. A perpetual present bathed in the glow of love.
Absentmindedly he reached into his pocket for his tobacco pouch, but instead of the familiar soft leather he felt his fingers touching something hard. Surprised, he pulled out a small canvas package. Using his paper knife, he cut the string tying it. Inside was a folded piece of paper and a ring, a gold signet ring. With a shock he recognised the emblem, a griffin half rampant, and a Latin motto auxilium ab alto. The last time he had seen this was on Henry Manners’s finger.
The folded piece of paper lay on his blotting pad. He had a reluctance to touch it. He felt resentment, revulsion. Until this—thing had arrived, everything had been so clear-cut. The path ahead was laid out. The slow fugue of martyrdom, in all its quiet beauty, was playing to its fall. All they had to do was accept what Fate had ordained for them. Therein lay peace. But now there had come a jarring note of discord. He knew instinctively that whatever this message contained it would bring complication to their existence. The mere idea—and he could hardly doubt it now—that Manners was still alive alarmed him. The uncharitable thought came to him: Oh, why could he not have remained safely dead? All that Manners had ever brought to them in the past was trouble. The very fact that it had been Major Lin who had delivered the package denoted intrigue. The package could have come from no other quarter. Lin was their only link with the outside world. Yes, he remembered now how Lin had uncharacteristically stumbled over his spurs and clutched the doctor’s lapels to prevent himself falling. He must have slipped it into his pocket then. Airton resented the familiar emotions that were rising unbidden into his breast and that he thought he had conquered for good: those of fear—and, worse, of hope.
With trembling fingers he unfolded the paper and read the bold, incisive script. It was short, but very much to the point.
All are condemned. I can save you, your family and Helen Frances but nobody else. Say nothing to anybody but be prepared to move quickly. The window of your room after midnight. Lin will be the messenger.
Dr Airton dropped the paper. Then he laid his head on the desk and groaned.
* * *
‘My dear Ma Na Si,’ said the Mandarin, ‘for a man being tortured to the point of death, your cries are extremely feeble. Please give some consideration for my reputation. We have an audience skulking somewhere outside, and I would hate that Iron Man Wang should have so poor an opinion of my abilities.’
‘My apologies,’ answered Manners, and let out an animal roar of pain. ‘Is that better? When do I actually expire?’
‘You are impatient, like all foreign devils. You should know that the art of torture in this country is much refined over many years, and we are expert at keeping people alive for excruciating lengths of time. I would ask you, please, to put more concentration into the task. The split bamboo that has been carefully inserted into your rectum should now be tearing at some of your lower organs. A very loud scream would be much appreciated, then I might allow you to faint for a while.’
Henry howled.
‘Thank you. That will do. You may now consider yourself unconscious.’
‘Thank goodness fo
r that,’ said Henry. ‘I never was very good at amateur dramatics.’ He looked down ruefully at his bloody legs where the manacles had chafed his skin to a nearly raw condition. ‘Not that I have been acting overmuch lately.’
‘No, the cage must have been very uncomfortable. Of course, it is designed for smaller criminals so you will have felt even more cramped than the usual occupants. That is one of the penalties you must pay for being a large, and very hairy, barbarian. Perhaps you will write a book one day describing our heathenish and diabolical practices.’
‘I’ll leave that to the missionaries,’ said Henry. ‘If any survive. Do you really have to execute so many?’
‘The imperial edicts are very clear on that point. I am, as you know, a loyal civil servant. And, anyway, for the moment I am not exactly the master of my own establishment. Iron Man Wang has a bloodthirsty appetite, which I am afraid that I will have to indulge.’
‘You know that the powers will come back with an army? Very foolish of the Empress to attack the Legations. China can’t win on this one.’
‘I am sure that you are right, and no doubt they will utterly destroy this very weak dynasty—but we are, thankfully, a long way from Peking. And chaos provides opportunities for the unscrupulous—especially if they have guns. Who knows? Your powers may even be grateful for a loyal local ally who has cleaned his city of bandits and Boxers responsible for the most wicked of atrocities.’
‘You’re an evil man, Da Ren,’ said Henry.
‘That is what my dear friend, the daifu, keeps telling me. But you should not be one to complain, Ma Na Si. Under our arrangement, I will have the guns but you will have my gold. Think of the rewards your government will bestow on you for providing so amply to their coffers. That is, if your government should ever receive the gold. In a disordered land so many things can go astray. What was I saying about chaos breeding opportunities for the unscrupulous?’
‘I’ll bear that in mind. We have to get out of here first, though. While I’m still unconscious I wouldn’t mind if you could tell me the arrangements. You will still hold to your bargain about the doctor and Helen Frances?’
‘If my conditions are met.’
‘I am painfully aware of your conditions.’
‘You should be grateful for my generosity. It is foolish in my position to spare anyone but yourself. You are necessary to me. The others are not. But I confess that I have a soft spot in my heart for the daifu, and his agreement to my proposal concerning your own paramour would be an interesting development of a philosophical debate that has afforded me much pleasure over the years. Of course, I will have to spare his wife and children too. So high-minded is he that he may not agree to come on his own if they are not included in our arrangement.’
Henry coughed a bloody gobbet of spittle on to the stone floor. ‘Your bastard of a major might have damaged my lungs as well as breaking my ribs. You’re an evil, lecherous bastard too, by the way. And I’m a bastard for letting you have your way.’
‘You don’t really have a choice, if you want to keep the girl. My advice all along to you has been to let her go and find another, but there is no accounting for western sentimentality. I resent your use of the word “lecherous,” however. You are the lecherous one. If you are hurting from your beating by Lin you have only yourself to blame. Did I not warn you to avoid that courtesan of his?’ The Mandarin stretched, and yawned. ‘Am I lecherous?’ he asked distractedly. ‘No, but I am curious. Did I tell you that I once saw your woman from my palanquin? Her hair was of a most intriguing colour.’ He smiled. ‘Like fox fur. Come, come, these are bathhouse conversations. I am allowing myself to be distracted from my torture of you. A long drawn-out scream would be welcome if you can manage it. Please try to imagine that you are a man waking from unconsciousness to an agony of pain.’
‘You haven’t answered my question: how will I be getting out of here?’
‘Did I not say? How remiss of me. In a coffin, my dear Ma Na Si, in a coffin. How else?’
‘And when I have collected the doctor and the others, where are we to be taken?’
‘Initially to the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure. Can you think of anywhere more appropriate?’
* * *
Dust puffed up from white summer roads as the pony-trap clattered down the hill. The harness jingled and the frame creaked under their weight. All around them the bushes were exploding with flower and bloom, and the oak trees swayed above their heads. Of course birds were singing and the sunshine made a warm glow of their faces. In the far distance they could see Ashdown Forest rising in blankets of gorse, and mountainous white clouds erupted into the sky, ships and castles and prancing stallions. Helen Frances was sitting on her father’s knee. His tweed coat was rough on her bare arms, but she hugged him, half scared, half excited, totally content, and the sun beat down, and the cool breeze of their passing brushed her skin, and her father rattled the reins whooping out his jovial laugh, and the pony-trap gathered speed, while farmers, hoes on their shoulders, paused to watch their hurtling passage, and waved. The air was scented with all the perfume of all the flowers in the world. She looked up with adoration into Frank’s deep-set brown eyes, which twinkled with merriment under the heavy black eyebrows. ‘Hold tight, my little darling,’ he roared. ‘We’re coming to the ford.’ She hugged him tighter, hardly daring to look, and then there were fountains of water bursting around them, and the thunder of the weir, and they were through, and Frank was laughing, laughing, and she was screaming and laughing and crying, and the trap was bouncing along the dirt-track road, the seat was squeaking as it lifted them up and down, up and down, a rhythmic cradle rocking to and fro, to and fro, and she reached up and stroked her father’s florid cheeks and bushy black moustache …
And the movement continued up and down, up and down, and she was laughing and screaming and crying, and inside her she felt a heat she could hardly contain, volcanoes of fire in her belly, suffusing her breasts, her arms, her thighs, her cheeks, and her head was shaking from side to side, and when she opened her eyes again she saw Henry above her, his features contorted as he thrust and thrust, burning, burning, and she squeezed with her thighs, her calves and her heels pressed into his behind so that he would go further, and further, and further inside her, and her fumbling hands pulled his wet hair down on her neck and breast, sweat mingling, flesh tingling, stomachs slapping and sucking. And Henry groaned, and molten lava surged from her loins to her womb and throughout her body, and the movement became a shudder, and then Henry lay beside her and she saw the beauty of his form, the perfect white limbs, the hollow of his belly, and she moved over him and drank the moisture in the matted hairs of his chest, and his stomach, and touched his red stalk and watched it rise again, and her mouth closed over the delicious soft flesh, kissing, caressing, sucking …
Sucking the smooth wood of the opium pipe, waiting for the sickly sweet smoke to enter her lungs and take away care. Anticipating the ensuing languor, the peace, the absence of all thought or desire. Such a little puff of smoke: that was all she needed. Just one pipe. She could even see the poppy paste heating over the candle. Surely it would be ready soon. She sucked the pipe, tasting the tar. Surely it would be ready soon … but the paste bubbled over the candle, and she sucked the pipe. And the smoke did not come …
She woke in despair. For a moment she did not know where she was. In a panic she looked for the familiar curtains of her home in Sussex and listened for the rustle of thrushes on the sill. But all she saw were the shutters that could not keep out the bright sunlight of north China; nor could they block out the stifling heat of a north China summer, or muffle the calling of the Boxers outside. And above the dripping, sweat-soaked sheets on which she lay hung the hated white ceiling, where a spider was swinging patiently on a strand from a crack in the plaster.
She hated her dreams. What right had her father to come back to life again and make her relive the happy times of her childhood? What right had Henry to make love to her,
reigniting those still fires in her loins? Henry and her father were dead, and that was fine, because she, too, would be dead soon, and then there would be an end of it.
Every day she hoped that this would be the day. Sometimes in her imagination she had a chance to kiss the blade before it was wielded to strike off her head. She even imagined kissing the executioner’s hand, like a grateful penitent genuflecting to the cardinal’s ring. And she hoped that there would be no Heaven after, just nothing, an eternal nothing, oblivion that neither sleep nor the opium pipe nor the syringe could bestow.
And now she would have to get up for another day. She had slept very late. It must be afternoon. Mechanically she put on her skirt and blouse. She was tidying her hair when there was a knocking on her door. It was the doctor, and he looked extremely flustered. ‘I’d like you to sit down,’ he said. ‘I have some rather startling news.’
She sat down on the edge of the bed as commanded. The doctor was fumbling in his pockets. ‘My pipe,’ he said. ‘Would you mind? It’s a disgusting habit, I know, and this is your room, but it does help calm my nerves.’
The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure Page 57
