Dragons in Shallow Waters

by Kane, Clare

  “It is strange, isn’t it, to suppose they watch the same sun as we do?”

  She met my eye with bold, almost brash, assurance. I endeavored then as I do now to resist vanity; I knew that as a man already past forty that it constituted folly to assume that all female interest displayed towards me might be romantic, and yet I believed my seductive powers not to be entirely dimmed. Whilst the passage of time had turned my blond hair a sandy brown, the blue of my eyes had not faded, and my skin, once of the customary transparent shade found in my damp, dreary homeland, had adopted a hue rather more golden with my travels. And so I allowed myself to wonder as La Contessa regarded me with those dimpled, glowing eyes, her feet once again gloriously, sensually unsheathed, whether I might constitute a romantic possibility for her. A man needs such convictions, in times of conflict more than ever, when the potential of kisses not yet bestowed, of skin still to be caressed, of hope written plainly in the circle of woman’s waist, might be all there is to sustain him.

  “Who?” Nina asked.

  “The Boxers.” La Contessa took a full, delicious sip of wine and I imagined it tumbling, burning down her throat. “They are on the other side of the wall, watching the sun, hoping like us that it will finally sink away and bring sleep.”

  “Naturally we are all God’s children,” Phoebe Franklin said. “Yet some of us are closer to God than others.”

  “I think, La Contessa, that the side of the sun the Boxers see might be rather darker than that which we see here,” I said drily.

  Phoebe Franklin nodded.

  “Metaphorically, certainly,” she agreed.

  La Contessa offered me a wry smile, and parted her lips to speak, but paused when we heard the tap of confident footsteps approaching the verandah.

  “Good evening, all!” Oscar Fairchild announced himself. He stepped grandly onto the verandah, followed by the rather meeker Pietro Mancini, who glanced anxiously at the glass in his wife’s hand. “I have some very good news to share.”

  “Negotiations with the Qing?” Nina suggested, turning her face up towards Oscar. “Has an agreement been reached?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Oscar said. “We have received word, however, that soldiers dispatched from Tientsin shall arrive tomorrow. They shall secure the Legation Quarter and we have their word that they shall remove any of you who so wish to safety. Away from Peking.”

  “Wonderful!” La Contessa raised her glass. “Let us enjoy a celebratory dinner. Pietro, go and fetch that special wine.”

  Her husband turned quietly to follow her command. La Contessa met my eye extravagantly. I was first to look away.

  “Oh, what excellent news,” Lillian said delightedly, her hand reaching in manner unthinking and automatic to take James’, before quickly dropping his fingers from her grip.

  “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” Phoebe said quietly, unnoticed or ignored by all, even when she closed the heavy shell of her Bible with a hollow clap.

  V

  Our promised hope had yet to arrive; no hooves sounded beyond the city walls, no swarms of weapon-bearing men appeared on the horizon. The inhabitants of the Legation Quarter grew restless, chattering, bickering amongst themselves as the afternoon deepened and the temperature remained stubbornly elevated. I had spent the bulk of the day at the Grand, drinking one bitter coffee after another, each served with warm efficiency by Hilde, and becoming increasingly agitated. There is nothing a newsman hates more than waiting; those wasted hours before an event during which speculation, that sly, alluring temptress, writes for us stories extravagant and fantastic that humble reality later forces us to discard. And so when trade official Benjamin Moore hurried in at the hottest hour of the afternoon, flustered, sweat pooling in the hollows of his jowls, I stood immediately to attention.

  “They’re here?” I said, my coffee cup clattering against the saucer.

  “The Japanese!” he cried.

  Heads turned in the bar.

  “The Japanese?” I repeated. While no one could describe the Japanese as exactly innocent of aggression in China, they were, for the time being, considered allies in the fight against the Boxers.

  “They killed him. Cut him to pieces.” Moore’s words were spiked, senseless. “They took him…”

  “Sit.” I lowered Moore into a chair and signaled to Hilde to pour the man a drink. “Take a breath and tell me what happened.”

  “They got him. A Japanese…He…” Benjamin shook his head, his mouth hung slack and dumb. “A bad business. They tore him to pieces.”

  “The Boxers?”

  “The Boxers,” he breathed. “We mustn’t leave. Lock the doors!”

  “Get a hold of yourself,” I said to him. I adopted the quiet but firm tones I had learned in the course of my two decades of talking to witnesses to human tragedy, the patient insistence required to extract my narrative from their devastating reminisces. The other patrons had gathered around us, expressionless faces peering at Benjamin, a man we knew as serious and sensible, even a little pompous, gibbering now, stuttering and halting. “You shall cause nothing but hysteria carrying on like this. Now, are you absolutely sure that this happened? You saw it with your own eyes?”

  “Yes, absolutely. I saw…” Benjamin heaved a breath. “I saw him, I saw his limbs, the blood…They showed no mercy.”

  “Mr Moore,” I said finally, passing him a generous glass of gin prepared by Hilde. “I think you ought to go home. You wouldn’t like Beatrice and the children to worry, would you?”

  The other patrons murmured in cool-headed agreement, but I could see the light in their eyes, the glittering delight, that vile excitement. Barbarity and blood and Boxers, it had finally happened, and, even better, the first victim was Japanese. We Europeans could retell events, we could grow ever more fearful reliving the terrible, grim little details of it all, smugly aware that the victim had not been one of ours. Benjamin Moore stood, legs shaky under his portly carriage.

  “Yes, quite right,” he said, straightening and lengthening himself, returning to his customary dignified posture. “I do apologise. A most terrible fright.”

  “Quite, quite.” I ushered Benjamin out of the bar with the aid of one of his colleagues.

  “I must tell Kitty,” he muttered. “Warn her.”

  “Who?” I asked, but Benjamin’s face was clouded, impassive. I departed, leaving him on the arm of the other trade official; I was by then far more concerned with the welfare of Nicholas Ward.

  Stubborn Mr Ward would be at home as usual, I was sure, unwilling as he was to allow anything, be it rainstorm or Boxer uprising, to cleave him from his work. But the moment had arrived for Nicholas to abandon his noble charade of normality. I hurried towards his home, horribly aware that once humanity has shed its first skin in a conflict it tends to rapidly disappear altogether, powerless against the beasts of brutality. Nearing the edge of the Legation Quarter, I stopped suddenly. Before me stood a Boxer in distinctive red garb, the first I had glimpsed within the Legation Quarter itself. He was alone, a carving knife grasped tightly in his right hand. A rag was knotted loosely around his head, and scarlet ribbons fluttered from his wrists. His face was steely and hard-set, his long, black queue brushed his shoulder. We regarded one another warily as foxes meeting in the night. He lifted his knife, stroked the blade with the calloused fingers of his left hand.

  A roar sounded behind me. Baron von Ketteler, the German Minister, barrelled towards the Boxer, pushing me to the side, a band of uniformed marines close behind him. I had never studied German, but von Ketteler’s cries were intuitive to decipher. Da ist her! There he is! Töten ihn! Kill him!

  The German lunged towards the Boxer, who, with a quick, clean turn, sprinted rapidly towards the outer walls of the Legation Quarter. While I didn’t believe in the supernatu
ral power of the Boxers, I had to admit that this particular one ran as though flying. He skipped down an alleyway, the Germans giving chase. The Boxer’s long plait swung behind him, his form seemingly weightless as he hopped and jumped out of reach of his assailants. The Germans in their heavy uniforms and thick boots struggled to match the Boxer’s velocity under the relentless sun. Von Ketteler led the marines, brandishing a long stick, waving it wildly and calling so loudly for the man’s head that his shouts followed me all the way to Nicholas’ door.

  “Nicholas!” I was surprised to see him open the familiar red door himself.

  “The servants have gone,” he said matter-of-factly. “I arrived this morning and there wasn’t a trace of them. They haven’t even had their wages for the month.”

  “Did they take anything?” I stepped into the cool relief of the courtyard. Two swallows chirped from the sloping, curved eaves.

  “No,” he said.

  “The Boxers killed a Japanese,” I said, mirroring his neutral tone.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. And there is a Boxer in the Legation Quarter. I left von Ketteler and a crowd of Germans chasing after him.”

  “A Boxer in the Legation Quarter,” Nicholas said. “I suppose it is really happening then.”

  I urged Nicholas to return to Fairchild’s house, offering to help carry any books or other items he wished to take with him. I noted his reluctance as his fingers worried his white beard, his gaze falling upon the peaceful courtyard around him.

  “I suppose if the servants have gone,” Nicholas said, his voice faraway. “Only for you, Alistair. And Nina.”

  I held Nicholas’ rigid, proud arm as we stepped out to the street. A wild surge of people, their faces covered in soot, their voices rising in a shared, shrill cry, descended upon the Legation Quarter from each of the city’s four corners. They were Chinese converts, fleeing their homes to seek sanctuary after the Boxers, rampaging across Peking, had razed their homes. The warriors had not abandoned the chase, and gripping knives between white-knuckled fingers, they followed the displaced Christians towards the Legation Quarter, their swift, agile forms identifiable by the red rags wound around their heads. The Chinese Christians moved together, an irrepressible tide, crashing over the streets of the city, ferocious in their distress. Even the women with bound feet tottered quickly over the cobbles, their fear overpowering the stabbing pain of crushed bones and rotten flesh. The Boxer cry of Sha! Sha! swirled and swelled thick as cloud around us, growing more menacing with each repetition. Flames licked hungrily at the edges of the Legation Quarter, climbed its walls.

  “The road to hell is rather crowded,” Nicholas said.

  As we reached the gate of the Legation Quarter, I was surprised to see James Millington approaching the same horrific spectacle from inside. Sprinting towards us, he appeared to be evading a pursuer unseen; frantically his head turned back and forth, and valiantly he struggled against the crowds, a boat batted against the current. It was odd, I thought, that Mr Millington, not only injured but also jealously protected by the women of the Fairchild house, should have braved the streets on a day as bloody as this. Chinese converts pounded down the street towards James and wavering, he pressed himself against the wall to let them pass. A pair of Boxers stopped their chase of the Chinese Christians to regard this big-nosed white devil, alone and defenseless, standing before them. Then I lost sight of him in the melee, and my honesty compels me now to admit that my only interest lay in safely returning Nicholas to the house, where he might bolt the door and remain inside with the women.

  I suggested we take shelter in the nearest home, thankfully, eerily abandoned, and there we waited for the crowds to pass. We sat on two squat armchairs, our heads lowered, Nicholas’ labored breathing echoing in our warm, dark surroundings. If such chaos had not reigned outside, it may have proved an opportune moment for a nap, so pressing was the heat, so seductive was the darkness. When the noise outside subsided, I led Nicholas back to the street. He followed me with unsteady steps. He flinched as we passed inside the Legation Quarter. On the ground before us lay the body of a young Chinese girl, her coarse, plain clothes soaked in blood. Her face, grubby with soot, was tranquil.

  “She looks as though she were sleeping,” Nicholas said.

  We pressed on the short distance to the Fairchild residence, and it was only a few steps beyond the body of the young girl that we found James.

  “God Almighty,” Nicholas said, his fingers digging into my arm. “That’s…”

  “Go inside,” I instructed him. “I will move the body. We mustn’t let the girls see him.”

  “No, no, I won’t leave you.”

  “Nicholas,” I said firmly. “Nina must be worried for you. Please, go inside. I shall come as soon as I can.”

  Nicholas left me, looking twice over his shoulder, thinking about returning. I waved him away.

  James was not only dead, but also in pieces. The Boxers, in their exuberant savagery, had reduced him to a collection of crude parts, and seeing him so mutilated I was unsure as to how to proceed. How confident I had sounded when I sent Nicholas away, but I thought now of Nina, innocent of such brutishness, mere moments from this grotesque horror, and realized that I would need help to rapidly move evidence of this Boxer atrocity. I ran towards the Grand Hotel, where Edward Samuels paced before the entrance, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

  “Alistair!” he called. “I am glad to see you. What are we going to do about the converts?”

  “The converts?” I replied.

  “The Chinese converts,” he said. “They have nowhere to go. I am prepared to offer our rooms as lodgings, but I cannot house them all.”

  “James Millington is dead,” I said. “I need your help.”

  “What?” Edward placed his arm around my shoulders and guided me inside the hotel. “Come, have some water.”

  I followed him to the lobby, where Hilde was inspecting a collection of guns laid upon the reception desk.

  “Hello Mr Scott,” she said, not lifting her eyes from the guns. “Quite a day we’re having.”

  “Yes.” I gulped down the water Edward served me, brushing the back of my hand over dry lips. I explained that James had been killed in the most brutal manner and that his body now lay in pieces just yards from Fairchild’s home. “I must move it, but I have nothing.”

  Hilde, staring down the barrel of a gun towards me, carefully placed the weapon back upon the desk and ascended the stairs.

  “Millington?” Edward said softly. “Isn’t he the one that shot a Boxer?”

  “Yes.”

  “A terrible shame,” Edward said. We were silent a moment, listening to Hilde opening and closing cupboards upstairs. She appeared then at the foot of the stairs, a large trunk held in her thick, sturdy arms.

  “It feels rather unceremonious,” she said, handing it to me. “Packing up a young man’s life, but it is the best we have for now.”

  “Thank you, Hilde.”

  “Be careful,” she said with a curt nod. “Edward shall accompany you.”

  She bolted the door behind us with grave finality.

  James’ body remained in position. Edward and I labored together wordlessly, carefully lifting each severed part into the trunk. An involuntary urge to vomit rose within me when I was forced to place James’ head, empty now of thoughts and dreams, inside it, and my fingers brushed his dark hair, matted with blood. Swallowing down the sour viscosity, I fastened the boy’s remains inside the trunk. Edward asked what we might do with the body now and I was forced to admit that my plans were not yet so advanced.

  “I suppose we ought to take him to a church,” I suggested. I am not a religious man, and under the circumstances I felt very much prepared to sacrifice the following of traditional burial rites, but life is brutish, and I have always felt some dignity ought to be award
ed to men in its passing. More pressingly, I could not think of anywhere in the heat and the chaos of the Legation Quarter where we might deposit the remains of the deceased young man.

  “Well, we cannot take him to the church here,” Edward said. “Word would spread immediately, and they are overwhelmed by the arrival of so many native Christians.”

  “Then where shall we take him?” I asked, and heard impatience in my voice. “We cannot hand him over to his friends in pieces.”

  “I know Bishop Laurent at the Peitang,” Edward said slowly. “We would have to leave the Legation, but perhaps he would allow us to bury the body there, as long as we do not alert the women and children in the church. It’s a terrible scene there too.”

  “Terrible scenes are my business,” I said, as much to convince myself as Edward.

  “Millington wasn’t a Catholic, was he?” he asked.

  “Not as far as I know.”

  Edward shrugged.

  “Let us go. One would hope that God might overlook such divisions at a time like this,” he said.

  Taking a handle each, we shared the weight of the James’ soul between us, winding slowly, cautiously through the blood-stained streets to the edge of the Legation Quarter. The crowds had thinned somewhat, but the air remained hazy with smoke, and no one else dared leave the Legation Quarter. The body swung heavy between us, and a dull ache spread from my wrist to my shoulder. Short of breath and damp with sweat, we exited the Legation Quarter against the best advice of a young soldier who stood guard before one of its imposing gates, and Edward hurried to find a rickshaw. I waited for the best part of ten minutes, warily watching the streets in their curious quiet, before Edward returned with a hesitant coolie prepared to take us to the Peitang for four times the going rate. Finally we reached the Northern Church, somehow sinister today, its two symmetrical towers spears piercing the ashen sky. A chaotic crowd milled around its elegant entrance. Many of the Chinese gathered under those divine arches wore the weather-beaten faces of rural poverty, and the bulging cloth bags they hugged under their bony arms confirmed their status as refugees from some Christianized hinterland. Amongst them too existed city-dwellers, identifiable by their garments of fine cloth, only lightly rumpled and gently stained, and their pale faces that indicated customary shelter from the elements. Together these displaced people, united by faith if not by wealth or dialect, numbered at least one hundred. They became to me then, I am ashamed to say, an impersonal mass. I have seen it many times, tragedy multiplied so greatly it becomes diluted, horror so inconceivable it is rendered mundane. They represented to me then an obstacle only, a wall to be broken through to secure the safe deposit of James’ body.