by Kane, Clare
That evening, following another unsuccessful attempt to persuade La Contessa to visit me, I walked back to the Grand as a storm raged, the culmination of days of sticky rain. The Legation Quarter was restless, and the squall lent it a sensation of strangled hysteria, of repressed agitation. Dissatisfied, I circled the hotel, accompanied by an unreal feeling of invincibility; the whine of thunder muted both the Imperial Army gunshots and the Boxers’ violent cries. I could not face returning to the hotel, to the small dimensions of my room, to the quiet tyranny of siege, and so I walked towards the Su palace. A Japanese soldier waved me inside, and I crossed the courtyard to the palace’s main hall, where the prince’s harem was gathered, dressed in their finest silks, their necks and wrists glittering still with jade, only the coarseness of their unwashed hair betrayed their hopeless confinement. Holding their instruments, the women performed a song from an old opera. I stooped to ask one spectator, a woman of sunken cheeks but warm eyes, where I might find Miss Ward.
“You mean Miss Nina?” she said pointing eastwards. “In the girls’ dormitory.”
Quietly I entered that hushed room where already most of the girls were asleep and the old men and women whose bodies formed a protective ring around their sleeping forms gestured for me to remain silent. I saw Nina at the far end of the room, her spine a straight column against the wall and Lijun’s small head pressed against her thigh. Nina ran her fingers lightly over Lijun’s arm, cheek and ear, attempted to keep her locked in slumber. Cautiously she waved to me, and I crossed the room to her.
“It is very late,” I whispered. “Would you like me to see you back?”
“That is most kind, Alistair,” she said. “But I might stay here tonight. The storm sounds terrible. And you look rather damp.”
Self-consciously I brushed my face with my sleeve, and pulled it away dripping wet.
“Then we must at least let your father know.”
Nina nodded without commitment. It was then that we heard the crash of feet outside. At first I questioned whether it might be a simple burst of thunder. Then came the rise and fall of male voices; the words they formed were neither English nor Mandarin but rather a confusion of tongues, all leadened, slowed by alcohol, their consonants and vowels overlapping to create a chilling dialect. We heard the Japanese guard at the doorway remonstrate with the men; he pleaded with them to leave.
“Let us in!” a single voice cried in strangled English.
I jumped to my feet. Nina stiffened. The girls stirred in their sleep; Lijun lifted her head.
“Miss Nina, what’s happening?” she asked.
“Nothing. Sleep, child, sleep.”
I rushed to the door, pressed my ear against it, heard the Japanese guard again instructing the men to leave. Nina followed close behind me, the dozen elderly men and women whose bodies had ringed the circumference of the room were also getting to their feet. Some of the girls sat upright, they whispered frantically to one another.
“They are only children,” I heard the guard say.
Lijun walked unhurriedly across the room, coming to a stop by Nina’s side.
“Fangxin ba,” she said. “Rest your heart. I shall help you.”
Lijun cocked her head towards the door; a frown flickered across her face as she heard the scuffles taking place outside. Nina started at the sound of glass shattering, stepping back as amber liquid seeped under the door. Lijun did not react, letting the beer wash over her bare toes.
The door shuddered on its hinges. I pushed my weight against it, but was immediately thrown back. A dozen men charged into the room; some wore the uniforms of the foreign troops charged with protecting the Legation Quarter.
“Stop!” I cried, reaching for the man closest to me, frantically pinning him to the wall. He struggled beneath my grip, with ease I struck his jaw. Drunk, the young man’s head lolled from side to side, with another punch his knees buckled. Still he tried to struggle against me, mumbling words incoherent and indignant, his impotent limbs lurching to the broken rhythm of his inebriation.
“Get out!” I heard Lijun cry in English.
I turned to look over my shoulder, and saw that the soldiers paid her no heed; they scattered chaotically across the room, some clutching bottles in their hands, others with their fingers trained around their guns. The girls ran in tottering circles as they tried to evade these pursuers, who grabbed wildly at their neat pigtails and threadbare dresses. The young man in my grasp evaded me in my distraction, cutting across the room in jagged line. An elderly Chinese man stood in front of one of the very youngest girls, shielding her on his unsteady legs; a solider in Russian uniform knocked him flat to the floor. From the old man’s ear spilled a steady stream of thick, stolid blood, from his lips emitted a strangled moan.
“Do something!” Lijun called to me, to Nina, to anyone who might listen to her, but we could only watch aghast as an American soldier dragged one of the girls across the room, his knuckles wrapped so tightly around her wrist it seemed ready to splinter under his force.
“I’ve found a real beauty here,” he boasted to another solider. “Come, little lady, come.” The girl struggled under his grip, twisting and turning her small frame as she tried desperately to spin out from his hold.
“That’s quite enough,” I started, running towards the pair, but I was beaten by Lijun, her face set in a terrible and ferocious snarl. She bit the soldier’s forearm, clawed wildly at his face.
“Hey!” he cried.
I watched as his determination to keep hold of his victim seemed only to increase and the girl’s fingers turned white under his grasp. I wondered then quite what the scene was that unravelled before me; my forgiving, rational mind decided that this was mere wassailing, that the boys had drunk too much and found in the barren Legation Quarter no recipient for those amorous feelings that fester and rise in a young man far from home, that they sought only a momentary release, a singular, snatched pleasure, and I questioned the girls’ terrified response, thought perhaps if they had smiled sweetly and listened to the soldiers’ stories of home and tolerated their tuneless songs that such alarm might have been contained, quashed, in the immediate moments following the forced entry to the schoolgirls’ quarters. And yet, when I saw Lijun, undeterred, sink her teeth into the soldier’s upper arm, then rise to stand on beer-soaked toes and clasp his cheek, holding fervently to his flesh as a dog to a bone, and still he did not yield, I knew I could not so easily forgive the young men their depravity. No one might deny a soldier forgiving company and tender touch, yet these men’s brutal determination, their corporeal drive, went far beyond the malady of homesickness. I stood behind Lijun, and struck the same soldier with force. Groaning, he finally dropped the girl’s hand and she raced sobbing to Nina, who enveloped her in a maternal embrace.
“Do not touch this girl,” Lijun said in halting English. “Never.”
The man cursed Lijun, but surrendered, taking two or three steps back, and raised his palm to soothe his cheek.
“Get out,” I said, striking him once more on that most sensitive spot. The soldier backed away towards the door, but surveying the rest of the room, I saw it was still in thrall to a most grotesque havoc. The soldiers chased after the girls, who sprinted from them to seek shelter behind the withered, defenseless bodies of their elders. The men, their spirits curdled with drink, laughed uproariously at this great sport, lunging after the girls and calling out salacious remarks to one another. Feeling useless, I did not know how they might be stopped. These men, the protecters of the Legation Quarter, the last defense against the Boxers, had undergone a demonic transformation. I reached once more for the man I had held first; in the dizziness of drink he once again surrendered to my grip, but I was only one man, and a dozen of those iniquitous characters ran free around us. I pulled the man closer to me, a knee to his gut forced him to the floor.
“Please,” he said with sou
r breath. “We only wanted a little fun.”
The tenor of his voice, clipped and assured, was as familiar as it was sinister, for knelt unwillingly before me was a soldier of Her Majesty.
Shouts from outside, barked, anguished, and in foreign tongue, stole my attention. Through the doorway sprinted half a dozen Japanese, called from their sentry duty elsewhere in the palace, guns raised above their heads.
“Out, out!” they cried, and I experienced a profound relief.
The soldiers did not pause until a bullet was fired singularly and significantly into the air. Then the men halted their chase and filed out of the room with their heads bowed. Short of breath, their chests heaved still and an occasional, high-spirited guffaw escaped their lips; the Japanese greeted such frivolity by cocking their guns in the direction of each laughing soldier. At the doorway, the American who had suffered Lijun’s rage looked over his shoulder and called to the Japanese soldiers: “It isn’t fair of you to keep the best for yourselves.”
The men were gone, but the terror they had sowed remained in the room. Many of the girls wept, they held one another, their cheeks were flushed feverish and pink. Lijun stood apart from the others, her arms wrapped around herself in solitary embrace. Nina moved towards the girl, reached out a sympathetic hand out to comfort her. Lijun recoiled from her touch.
“Lijun, very well done,” Nina offered.
“For what?” Lijun angled her shoulders away from Nina.
“You were very brave,” Nina insisted.
“I am not brave,” Lijun said flatly. “You might say I am the very opposite of brave.”
“Lijun, what do you mean?” Nina asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Lijun said. She shook her head, her lips curled.
“We have had a terrible shock,” Nina said. “You mustn’t forget, Lijun, that you did a very good deed. Everyone shall remember your kindness.”
“If only I had done such a good thing before,” Lijun said bitterly. Nina placed a tentative arm around the girl’s shoulder, but Lijun snaked her body away from Nina. “Let me be.”
Nina nodded and went to console the others girls, sharing her words, assurances and embraces, aware that her offerings, however well-intentioned, were hopelessly inadequate.
Naturally, I was revolted by these events. I despised the malevolence inherent in the very act, which would have been deplorable whichever nationality had carried it out, yet I also resented the soldiers for the confusion they wrought in the morality of the Boxer conflict. I have existed as both a journalist and a simple man too long to give credence to the idea of a clear dividing line between right and wrong in any conflict. The rather trite expression has it that there are two sides to any story; my career has proved that adage to be something of an understatement. That said, the conflict had hitherto offered a fairly convincing narrative of right and wrong: we, the extended foreign community in China, were innocent, we were good, we were victims of an undeserved, unwarranted attack, while the Boxers were plainly bad. And so for our own men to molest those girls, those mere children who had lost everything, their families, their dignity, everything but the last shreds of their pitiful hope because of their faith in a religion we had imported, well, those circumstances were rather too dreadful to bear. As a foreign man standing in that devastated room, I experienced a roiling shame by association. I looked to Nina, who stood with her arms wrapped around the girl who had captured the American soldier’s attention. Unseen by the girl, Nina wept silent, unending tears.
“Miss Nina,” the girl asked gently between sobs, “why did the men not chase after you?”
The expression that passed across Nina’s features then was grievous to observe; with great, startling immediacy her face passed from the questioning of a furrowed brow to the slack, unthinking shock of realization. Finally, undeniably, this was the moment in which she must accept that in the midst of this great conflict it mattered not that she had been born in Peking, that her feet had never trod upon the shingle at Dover. No, that night she learned the terrible truth of wars, that every conflict requires its participants to choose one side over another and as such eliminates, through physical or spiritual means, the existence of those people who prefer to inhabit the middle of any spectrum; people, in my opinion, absolutely necessary to the continued peaceful survival of any successful society. Are you one of us or one of them? the war asked, and as Nina watched the schoolgirls sob, shiver and whimper in the aftermath of the soldiers’ visit, her own flesh untouched, her very skin unscratched, she knew, finally, to which side she was perceived to belong.
I helped the elders to clean the room, sopping up the puddles of beer and clearing away the streaks of rainwater left behind by the unwelcome visitors. The elderly women insisted I leave the task to them, and while they were undoubtedly more dexterous and efficient in their efforts, my contrition demanded of me some action, and I knew my natural talents did not extend to becalming the fearful girls in the room.
Nina tried to settle the girls; eventually some agreed to lie once more, letting Nina place their bedsheets lightly over them, turning reluctantly and restlessly as sleep and peace evaded them. The young girl who had been subject of the American’s attack remained anxious, and refused to lie down; instead she wrapped her arms tightly around Nina’s neck. Nina stroked the girl’s back gently, whispering in her ear until the child eventually allowed Nina to lower her to the floor. Still she sobbed, and Nina set to plaiting the girl’s hair over and over, the repetitive motion offering a salve to fear.
“Why did they do that?” the girl asked Nina.
Nina had no answer for her.
“I am happy Lijun bit that dog.” The girl laughed, and the maturity, the emptiness, the lack of youth and joy in the sound she emitted, surprised and pained me. “I know why she helped me. It is not the first time she has seen men like that.”
“Not the first time?” Nina’s fingers worked unflagging at plaiting the girl’s hair. The little girl’s eyes fluttered closed and open.
“No. When she’s quiet sometimes, I ask her what she’s thinking. And she told me once she thinks of a man who did a very bad thing to her after she ran from the village, after the fire and after her family was killed.”
Nina did not reply, but started to sing an old Chinese lullaby. I talked a short distance away with the distressed elders, advising them on how to secure the doors and windows, arranging with the Japanese for a permanent guard on duty, and yet I could not concentrate fully on the words of the young girls’ guardians, so distracted was I by the words Nina sang, her voice steady, haunting, transcendent in that airless room of timidity and trepidation. Nina’s mother must have sung to her before she left, but naturally Nina did not recall the words to any of those distant English songs of sheep and cradles, instead she treasured the silver-toned melodies and familiar lyrics of the lullabies the servants sang to send her to sleep as a child.
“The moon is bright, the wind is quiet,
“The tree leaves hang over the window,
“My little baby, go to sleep quickly,
“Sleep, dream sweet dreams.”
She repeated the lullaby twice, and the girl slept by the end of the second round. Quietly I approached.
“Come,” I said, offering my hand. “I shall accompany you home.”
I enlisted a Japanese soldier to walk with us and we followed his stocky frame through the Legation Quarter. He remained several steps ahead at all times, gun poised by his shoulder. The imperial troops maintained a steady volley of bullets as we passed, firing skywards from their posts beyond our fortifications, but the three of us progressed undetected in the shadows of the high walls and makeshift barricades that separated us from the gathered combatants. The rain fell in an unrepentant deluge and Nina struggled to fight her instinct to flinch at each roll of thunder. I was impressed, however, at how she kept her body bent in imitation
of the Japanese soldier and did not so much as glance up when bullets flew overhead. The soldier bowed deeply by the doorway of the Fairchild household, took a step back and lingered, waiting for me.
“Please, go back,” I said.
I accompanied Nina inside, instructing a servant to fetch her a towel and a glass of brandy. Light emitted from the drawing room as we walked towards it. I detected hesitancy in Nina’s step and at the foot of the stairs she paused.
“Thank you, Alistair, but I think it is best I go to bed right away.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “You must dry off and have something to steady your nerves. Come, sit down a moment.”
Nina’s light summer dress clung to her as seaweed to a rock, and one curl, matted and wet, pressed against her forehead. Her countenance was pale and drawn, her mien faded.
“You have had a terrible shock. Come.”
Nina stood firm.
“I do not wish to see anyone,” she said quietly, looking with trepidation towards the drawing room. And how might I blame her? For no friend could lie on the other side of that anonymous door; who did she dread to see more, Oscar Fairchild, source of her shame, Lillian Price, instigator of her downfall, or her own father, freshly remote, newly forbidding and utterly unable to help her?
“Miss Ward.”
The tone was sharp, the voice, commanding and unshakeable, belonged to Phoebe Franklin. Nina let out a breath. Wordlessly she followed me into the room, where the missionary sat alone, erect in an armchair with an open Bible across her knees. She rose stiffly as we entered.
“Thanks be to God,” she said. “Tell me, child, what happened? They sent me away, I had no idea of what might have befallen you until a French missionary came by to check if you were safely returned. Oh, the horrors he told us.”
“Mrs Franklin, I have come to no harm. I’m sorry to hear you were worried. I have kept you up so late.”
