by Kane, Clare
“You are likely aware that we are presently in negotiations with our Chinese counterparts with regards the Boxer question,” Oscar continued. “We are to meet Prince Ching in the coming days to discuss the murder of two missionaries south of Peking.”
“Missionaries?” Nina repeated.
“Two British missionaries. Slaughtered in a most terrible way,” Oscar said, and Pietro Mancini shook his head gravely. “Circumstances grow more terrible by the minute, and yet the Chinese seem absolutely uninterested in preventing Boxer destruction of their own country. These ruffians shall burn the place to the ground if we do not impel the Chinese to act at once. You are familiar with the etiquette of the Chinese, are you not?” He fixed his eyes upon her.
“Mr Fairchild, I am not sure I am the right person to advise on matters of statecraft,” she began.
“She admits it herself!” Pietro interjected.
“Statecraft is only a matter of people and, in this case, the people of China,” Oscar said. “Miss Ward, it seems to me that you have an understanding of the Chinese. I ask only how you would conduct a meeting with Prince Ching as a person, not as a diplomat. No further expertise is required on your part.” He leaned back in his chair, invited Nina to speak.
I nodded my encouragement, puzzled still by Oscar’s decision to invite Nina to participate in the conversation. Yes, she lived almost as a Chinese, but was the Legation Quarter not already crowded with real Chinese by the names of Wang and Hong and Li, any of whom might have accurately described China through the eyes of a native? And what of my expertise, I asked myself in a pique of chagrined pride. Was my very position not that of observer and interlocutor of the Chinese, translator of events and customs, narrator of the country’s unfolding story?
“Let me share, then, my most inexpert opinion,” Nina said deliberately. “There are as many philosophies of life as there are men in China, and I cannot speak for all. Even if I were to consider myself an expert on the Chinese character, one has to recognize that the ruling classes are Manchu, and not Han Chinese, with the subtleties of culture and history such differences entail. Yet if I were to draw a general conclusion, I would hazard that the only way to quell the Boxers is through softness and comprehension, not hardness and combat. The Boxers see no advantage in the presence of foreigners, they only see them casting Chinese gods as devils or constructing railways in sacred places. A harsh or punitive approach to negotiations with the Qing government would only further justify the Boxers’ cause.”
She paused. Oscar listened intently with thoughtful expression, but I detected amusement in the countenance of Pietro Mancini. Nina looked in the direction of the Italian and swallowed nervously.
“I appreciate that you are short on time,” she continued. “As such, I suggest only that you remember to give the prince face. Do not pressure him or his officials with impossible deadlines or extreme demands. Imagine the negotiation as a stream. Drop a boulder into the stream and the water shall find a new course around it. The Manchus avoid confrontation where possible, so do not raise your voice. If you shout, they shall plan your downfall in whispers.” Nina stopped, lightly cleared her throat. “I am sure there are many scholars who might tell you far more than I am able to share. My father is the real expert on these matters, perhaps you ought to talk to him tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Miss Ward,” Oscar said sincerely.
“Do not expect any decisions immediately. I have no doubt that all shall be reported to the Empress Dowager and that she will take any final decision,” Nina added. “Allow the water to settle and the mud to clear, and do not force action.”
“Oh yes, the famous Empress Dowager. What are your thoughts on the her, Miss Ward?” Oscar asked.
Pietro sighed deeply, raised his eyes to the gold cornice that lined the library ceiling.
“She is the first woman to rule China since the Tang dynasty,” Nina began, trying to ignore the dubiety with which Pietro Mancini regarded her. “She has the will to survive this new century, but not the support of the court; at least this is what my father says. Her feelings towards the Boxers are rather ambivalent. When they are a useful political tool she does not hesitate to make use of them.”
Nina stood, suddenly aware of Pietro staring at her, his expression unreadable now. “Perhaps I have said too much, I really have very little idea of these things. I ought to excuse myself,” she said.
“Thank you, Miss Ward,” Oscar said sincerely.
“You are your father’s daughter,” I said. “A most incisive analysis.”
“Good night.” Nina stood to leave, and I rose with her, saying to Fairchild that I ought to return home. The night had yet to unveil its dark heart, we were still an hour or two from the velvety moments when the Boxers took to the streets, and I had no desire to cross paths with the enemy. As we reached the door Nina paused and looked back at Oscar and Pietro, bowed silently over their drinks.
“Mr Fairchild, if I may,” she said. “You said that statecraft was a matter of people. The Chinese are people. Think of them as humans, not two-headed dragons, and perhaps you shall have more success.” She pursed her lips, thinking she had perhaps gone too far, but Oscar laughed genially.
“You are quite right. Thank you, Miss Ward, for your candid observations. Good night.”
Nina closed the door quietly behind her, and together we crossed the dark corridor.
“Oh, Mr Scott,” she whispered fiercely to me. “Did I say too much? Why do you think Mr Fairchild called for me?”
I told her that I did not know why he had summoned her, and urged her not to worry about what she had said, which, after all, had been eminently sensible, if rather unexpected from the mouth of a nineteen-year-old woman. We stopped outside the drawing room, and I bowed my head goodnight.
“Until tomorrow, then,” I said, catching, as I leaned towards her, fragments of the women’s conversation inside the room.
“It is quite improper,” I heard Lillian say.
“It only encourages her,” Beatrice Moore agreed. “She understands nothing. It is as though she is neither English or Chinese but rather something feral.”
“Miss Price, did you not say she is to be married?” La Contessa asked.
I pulled back. Nina stood unnaturally still, her lips frozen in a half-smile. I observed the first hot springs of tears in her eyes.
“Nina,” I started, but she only lifted a finger hurriedly to her lips, and turned to climb the stairs quickly, not turning back to look at me as she ascended them two at a time. I heard the bedroom door close, and thought for a moment of saying good night to the ladies in the drawing room, before dismissing the idea on the basis of my loyalty towards Nina. I hurried towards the night dark and foreboding, the first echoes of the Boxers already in the air. Sha! Sha! Kill! Kill!
IV
The next day brought rumors of a Boxer incident at the racecourse, and I was, in the contrary manner of a newspaper man, quite happy to hear it. Finally, a promising story within striking distance of Peking’s foreign village, terrible and pertinent enough to stir the masses back home so far largely unmoved, according to my editor, by the second-hand stories of torture, beheadings or kidnapping passed to me from the hinterlands. The racecourse offered powerful symbolic value; in Peking, as in every corner of empire, the British had found a likely piece of land upon which to impress a circuit, construct a stand and cement a clocktower. The racing ground lay to the west of the city, a good five or six miles from the Legation Quarter, where dry, dusty paths at last gave way to the flat green of the countryside. The races functioned as the axis of a familiar life recreated under foreign skies, and in China the pastime was popular with both the British and European communities, as well as a small number of wealthy Chinese. The Qing authorities, however, bristled at the sight of their citizens queuing eagerly to hand over their money to foreigners and nurtured suspicions that
the unfamiliar sport was rigged somehow against the locals. It was logical to me, then, that the burning of the grandstand could be no accident, and surely constituted a Boxer attack against the outsiders. The fire beckoned me closer with curls of black smoke that wavered across the horizon as scores of grim-faced men, impatient to confirm whether the Boxers had succeeded in razing that old place of sunny days and civilized society, surged through the streets alongside me. I spied some of the student interpreters riding a little further ahead, their indignation palpable as they forged an unyielding course southwards.
The body of the grandstand had fallen swiftly and its structure was crumbling still. Rogue pieces tumbled to the trampled lawn in charred, blackened lumps. Horses had bolted from the stables and they galloped wildly across the course, leaving spirals of upturned mud behind their nervous hooves. The Boxers, most of whom had taken rapid retreat, could be spied running further south, the red rags of their informal uniform billowing behind them. A handful of the most courageous warriors stood challenging and triumphant around the far edges of the course.
With the destruction of grandstand almost complete and most of the Boxers escaped, the only role any of us might serve would be that of a passive witness to the horror. I recognized James Millington and Hugo Lovell amongst the crestfallen faces of the gathered Englishmen. James, normally circumspect, was warrior-like now upon his horse, his face rubicund and scowling under dense, slate-colored hair. Impatiently he tugged on the reins wrapped between his fingers, determinedly he pressed against his horse’s flank with tensed thighs. Hugo, fair and slight, appeared feeble and impotent by his side.
“This is a bad business.” Edward Samuels stopped beside me. “We could hear the Boxers so clearly last night, it was as though they were inside the hotel with us. They appear absolutely fearless.”
My eyes were fixed still on James and Hugo. Their horses were agitated, offering occasional flashes of teeth.
“I have said to Hilde that we will be safe within the Legation Quarter, but I wonder if I ought to have sent her away like the other wives,” Edward continued. “Not that she would have gone, I suppose.”
“Hilde does not strike me as a woman who would be afraid of a few Boxers,” I said.
“She is not afraid, but…” He faltered. “I have been here almost twenty years, but this, this is a bloody mess. Where are the soldiers?” Edward shook his head. “For what purpose did they bring troops here? Only to antagonize the Chinese? It is utterly senseless.”
The most foolhardy Boxers came closer then, a gaggle of fewer than a dozen men who had stayed to relish the despondency their violence had bred in the enemy. They surrounded the Englishmen, moving in a dire, dizzying dance, mocking and scoffing in coarse language I was sure the interpreters had yet to study in their Chinese classes. James Millington’s complexion grew ever more rufescent and his expression more brutal as his lips twitched with whispered curses. And then a shot. Clearly, it rang out across the racetrack. A rapid, remorseless shot, with long, hollow echo.
“What was that?” Edward Samuels started.
We saw the body of the Boxer, suddenly, shockingly lifeless, splayed and expired amidst the muddle of horses and men. I moved towards the melee but Edward stopped me, held his arm across my chest. And quite right he was to do so: my instinctive reaction to an injured man is not, I am ashamed to say, to tend to his wounds or to offer honeyed visions of the realm that lies beyond death. No, it is my habit instead to try to wring one last word from his soon-to-be-silenced mouth, it is my aim to have him, in his last expiring breath, reveal to me the purpose, the core, the truth of his life and the reason why I might record its passing in text. This selfish interest in the last moments of another’s life endears me neither to his friend or to his foe, each of whom regard my actions with great suspicion. And so I stopped myself, though I couldn’t help but to lean forward in the saddle, to glance more closely upon the Boxer’s dim face, to wonder if he had felt, as the bullet pierced his supposedly unassailable skin, that this generational struggle against the foreign justified the termination of his existence.
The muttering, indignant crowd of Englishmen reluctantly parted as a single Boxer leapt from his horse and hurried towards the corpse. The Boxer shouted to his companions to help him retrieve the body, but they, apparently cowed by the death of a peer, allowed this single most valiant of their number to trail the man’s limp, motionless form over the grass. The man’s skin was still slick with sweat. His face fell slack, but a flush lingered upon his cheeks. I lifted my eyes from the body and saw James, cavalier and imperious on his horse, his face a canvas of triumph and terror. I had seen that very mien before: the countenance of the man who has taken his first life. And then suddenly James was pulled from his saddle, wrenched from his gun, set upon by two Boxers in a confusion of strikes and kicks. Limp and defenseless he lay upon the ground, his being fading, receding like that of the man he had killed.
“Edward,” I said. “We must act now. They shall kill the boy!”
A thundering of hooves announced the arrival of real troops. The Boxers ceased their hail of violence and raced away, leaving behind a victory still evident in the rusty smell of burning wood and charred metal, their glory only gently dimmed by the loss of one of their men. James Millington stirred, ragged breaths swelled his chest. The troops put out the fire with little heart and methodically Hugo and friends lifted James atop his horse once more, talking of doctors and bandages and Chinese firewater to clean the wounds. Resignation dampened the smoky air, the shame of defeat reduced those usually brash, confident English tones to nothing more than vexed mutterings. The stand was devastated, and whilst it was unlikely that any of us would have spent the summer at the races in the current circumstances, seeing its cragged remains, watching as its rows of splendid seats collapsed upon one another, constituted an undeniable wound to our pride.
James Millington survived. He was safely returned to the Legation Quarter, where a Russian doctor treated his wounds. Hastily I recorded my account of events, writing word after hurried word until they blurred before my eyes, trying to pull a string of sense through the disparate elements before me. A racecourse, a dead Boxer, a halo of magic. And what of James’ role? It had unnerved me, that shot of his. James was a boy, really, had only recently finished his university studies. Over the course of my career I had seen many boys fail to mature to men, fossilizing instead as stumps of unrefined masculinity, stunted by violence. James’ actions had not been heroic; the graceless tumble from his horse, the dislodging of his gun, were more farcical than noble. And so I omitted his name, saying only that a Chinese had been shot, leaving unspecified whose finger had pulled the trigger. I wondered then, as I wonder now, if James appreciated the protection I afforded him by withholding his name. But perhaps, in that secret and proud heart possessed by many young men, he experienced disappointment that his vanquishing of another had escaped official record. The decisions we must make as journalists are immediate but enduring; our light choices weigh heavily on the existence of others.
My work complete, I instructed one of my boys to carry the article to the city borders where it might be transported to the nearest town with a functioning telegraph system, which rumors had informed me might not be for two hundred miles. Then I called at the Grand Hotel, hoping to catch Edward. Instead his wife Hilde served at the bar, and greeted me with raised eyebrows.
“An interesting day for you, Mr Scott,” she said, and I noticed the gun strapped around her waist.
“Where is Edward?” I asked.
“Asleep,” she said lightly. “I fear today’s activities rather exhausted him.”
Oscar Fairchild was seated at the bar, half-way finished a generous serving of gin. His still youthful face was pinched and grey following two days of discussions with the Manchu authorities; unceasingly his fingers circled smarting temples.
“And just when I thought things could not b
ecome any more complicated,” he said to me. “Now this damned racecourse. Mr Millington, a simple student…At least he is alive, and the Russian doctor says he shall stage a speedy recovery, but really, this incident does rather complicate matters.”
“You experienced similar in India, did you not?” I suggested, taking a seat beside him. “I’ve heard it said that you crushed an insurgency or two in your time there.”
There was truth in my words, and Fairchild did strike me as a considered and competent official. What I did not say, although both Fairchild and I were painfully, politely aware of the fact, was that in the shadow of South Africa’s Boer War, official decisions about China had of late been taken in haste and without discernment. Fairchild’s predecessor had retired to Yorkshire three months earlier and Fairchild’s name had immediately been suggested by Foreign Office mandarins in London amongst whom he had garnered respect following the quashing of a small local uprising in India triggered by intrusive British tactics in controlling an outbreak of plague. He was now expected to work similar miracles of repression and subjugation further east, yet Fairchild’s career in India had been a slow burn up to a pair of blazingly successful years, and now his reputation loomed too large, eclipsing, perhaps, his abilities.
“I had Violet in India. She had been there for so long,” he said softly. “I felt I understood the Indians. And they didn’t speak this fiendish Mandarin.” Oscar released a long, low groan, a bodily exhalation of several days of frustration. “I suppose I am accustomed to people who recognize that we are in charge. In Peking it feels rather as though everyone is still deciding whom to obey.”
“The Manchus are in charge,” I said plainly. “As they have been since the seventeenth century.”
“I spoke to the Ward girl and her father about it,” Oscar continued. “Sometimes I feel that the Wards are the only ones here who understand the Chinese, who even respect them a little.”
