Killigrew and the Golden Dragon

by Jonathan Lunn

  ‘He approached me in the street,’ said the first constable. ‘He wanted directions to the yamen.’

  ‘Did he, indeed!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Killigrew, and bowed again. ‘I would be humbly grateful if the magistrate showed the generosity of spirit to grant a barbarian such as myself the honour of an interview. I am a British naval officer who has been marooned on this island, and I only wish to return to Hong Kong. Naturally anyone who helps me will be generously rewarded.’

  ‘Marooned, you say?’ asked the chief guard.

  ‘Yes.’ Killigrew bowed again, buying himself more time while he tried to make up his mind about how much of his story he wanted to explain to these minions, when he knew he would only have to repeat himself when he was taken before the magistrate. ‘I was on the devil-ship Golden Dragon when it was seized by pilongs and…’

  Killigrew’s words trailed off as he found his neck surrounded by a ring of razor-edged swords. ‘So sorry, is my pronunciation at fault?’ he asked nervously.

  Chapter 14

  Tuen Ng

  ‘Do you honestly expect me to believe that?’

  Hearing her husband’s voice in the hall, Mrs Bannatyne rose from the writing desk in her boudoir and went out to greet him. She was curious to know why he had been called away so suddenly. She emerged on to the landing, and as the two of them crossed the hall below she heard Jago Verran reply.

  ‘It’s the truth, sir. He jumped overboard and swam under the keel—’

  ‘With his hands tied behind his back.’

  ‘He must’ve got them undone, somehow.’

  ‘Perhaps he persuaded one of those sharks to gnaw through his bonds,’ said Bannatyne. What her husband did not know about sarcasm was not worth knowing. She paused on the landing without showing herself, curious to know what they were discussing.

  ‘He’s a downy fellow, sir. You can’t overestimate a man like Kit Killigrew.’

  ‘I don’t intend to. You were the one who let him escape.’

  ‘I’ve seen to that…’ The two of them went into the parlour and their voices became muffled. Mrs Bannatyne tiptoed downstairs and stood close enough to the door to listen.

  ‘Verran, you’re a damned fool!’ Bannatyne’s tone, imperturbable as ever, was a good deal more temperate than his words.

  ‘You wanted the Royal Navy and the Chinese at each other’s throats, didn’t you?’

  ‘Leave that part of it to me. Your job was to deliver Killigrew to Zhai Jing-mu…’

  Mrs Bannatyne felt as shocked as if she had been punched in the stomach. She reached for the doorknob to enter and protest, then caught herself and continued to listen instead.

  ‘The Golden Dragon is well known as a vessel of the house of Grafton, Bannatyne and Co.,’ her husband was saying. ‘It will be my throat the Chinese will be at, not the Royal Navy’s. And what am I to say to Zhai Jing-mu? He’ll think I’ve humbugged him. And men like Zhai Jing-mu do not care to be humbugged.’

  ‘Yeh was there. He saw what happened. He’ll explain everything to Zhai.’

  ‘And if Killigrew somehow eludes the Chinese and makes it back to Hong Kong? If he tells Captain Morgan that you’re working with the pilongs? That will immediately point the finger of suspicion at me.’

  ‘He won’t be believed. You saw Morgan just now. He was only too willing to believe Killigrew ran amok and attacked a fishing fleet. So if the yellow-bellies don’t kill him, his own navy will. Rather clever of me, I thought.’

  ‘Leave the thinking to me in future, Verran. Have you any idea what kind of hornets’ nest your antics have stirred up? If his navy does get hold of Killigrew, they’ll court martial him. He’ll be able to tell them everything he knows. He may not be believed, but a great deal of mud will get thrown around and some of it may stick to me. I can’t afford that, not with the Tuen Ng so close. So you get back on board the Golden Dragon, return to Hainan, find Killigrew, and kill him.’

  ‘We haven’t finished repairing the fire damage in my day room yet,’ protested Verran.

  ‘Get it done en route. I don’t care what it takes: I want Killigrew dead.’

  The door opened abruptly and Mrs Bannatyne found herself face to face with her husband. It was difficult to say which of them was more surprised, but she recovered quickly.

  ‘Oh, hello, Blase. I didn’t hear you come in. Did I leave my parasol in there?’

  ‘Your parasol?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going to take tea with Mrs Dent this afternoon. Unless you have any objection?’

  Bannatyne smiled. ‘But of course, madam. You do as you please. I’ll have Amrish prepare the carriage.'

  She went back upstairs and changed quickly into her afternoon dress in time to meet the carriage as the coachman drew up outside the front door. ‘Harbour Master’s Wharf, please, Amrish.'

  The coachman opened the door for her and she was astonished to find her husband already seated there with Verran. Bannatyne had a calfskin holdall at his feet. ‘Get in,’ he snapped at her.

  She stared at him.

  Verran reached inside his coat, pulled out a pistol and levelled it at her. ‘Do as your husband says, ma’am. Didn’t you once promise to love, honour and obey him?’

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ she protested. ‘Blase, how dare you let him sit there and wave that thing at me?’

  ‘Get in,’ Bannatyne repeated tersely. ‘We have a lot to discuss.’

  She climbed into the carriage and the coachman closed the door behind her. Faced with a choice of sharing a seat with her husband or Verran it was a difficult decision, but in the end she plumped for her husband.

  Bannatyne rapped his cane on the ceiling of the carriage. ‘The factory, Amrish.’

  ‘Yes, sahib.' The coachman whipped up the horses and the carriage started down the drive.

  Bannatyne turned to his wife. ‘How much of my conversation with Verran did you overhear earlier?’

  ‘Conversation? What conversation? I don’t understand—’

  ‘Oh, come now, madam. You know as well as I do that the Dents’ house is not on Harbour Master’s Wharf. Who were you going to see? Captain Morgan? Commander Robertson? Since when did your social activities include taking tea with naval officers?’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, Blase! I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Really, madam. Do you really take me for a fool, after all these years?’

  ‘Why not? It’s now patently clear that you’ve always taken me for a fool—’

  Bannatyne slapped her viciously. ‘What were you going to tell Robertson? Come along, speak up. I haven’t got all day.’

  Stunned with shock as much as pain, she shrank into the corner of the carriage and stared at her husband in disbelief. ‘I’m sure I don’t know what any of this is about,’ she said dully.

  ‘Give her to me for half an hour, sir,’ leered Verran. ‘I’ll make her talk.’

  ‘Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ she spat.

  The carriage passed through the gates of the Grafton, Bannatyne & Co. trading factory at East Point and the coachman reined in in the compound. ‘Put her in my cabin on board the Golden Dragon, and take her to the Cap-sing-mun anchorage,’ Bannatyne ordered Verran. ‘I’ll deal with her in the fullness of time.’

  ‘But if she knows too much about our plans…’ warned Verran.

  ‘She knows nothing of our plans. We did not discuss them this morning. And… Verran?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If Mr Shen tells me you’ve harmed Mrs Bannatyne in my absence, I’ll kill you myself. She is still my wife. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Verran said surlily.

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ Mrs Bannatyne demanded fearfully.

  ‘Just put you out of the way for a while. There won’t be any visits to officers of Her Majesty’s ships, not until it’s too late. By then the Royal Navy will have enough problems of its own, without having to concern itse
lf with any far-fetched rumours about the tai-pan of Grafton, Bannatyne and Co.’ Bannatyne reached down and took a bottle and a gauze pad from the holdall at his feet. He tipped some of the clear liquid in the bottle on to the pad.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Mrs Bannatyne.

  ‘A new discovery from England, my dear. It’s called chloroform. Doctors use it as an anaesthetic in operations, so their patients don’t feel any pain.’

  Mrs Bannatyne did not feel reassured. She struggled as he clamped the pad over her nose and mouth.

  ‘…Just breathe normally, my dear…’

  * * *

  Killigrew was woken by the tramp of marching feet and the jingle of arms. He stood up and crossed to the door of his cell in the yamen. Peering out through the bars, he saw a troop of Imperial bannermen crossing the courtyard to his cell.

  He knew they were coming to drag him to his place of execution. If he was going to think of a way to escape, now would be a good time to do it.

  He had been kept in the cell for over a fortnight before the trial. He had been bedraggled and lousy enough after his trek across Hainan Island. Now what was left of his uniform was filthy and ragged, the kerseymere trousers and linen shirt now nearer black than their original white, his hair long and matted, three weeks’ growth of beard on his chin, his underclothes crawling with lice.

  The trial had been conducted in Mandarin Chinese, too swift for his understanding of the Cantonese dialect to be able to keep up with. Only the occasional phrase had filtered through: ‘piracy’, ‘mass murder’, and ‘death by strangulation’ had been common themes. There had been no jury: the magistrate had weighed up the evidence and assigned the punishment according to the Manchu Code. All Killigrew knew was that he had been set up somehow by Verran and his crew.

  His craving for laudanum was gone, thanks to enforced deprivation, but it had been a hard two weeks: a fortnight of nightmares both sleeping and waking, almost driving him to the verge of insanity. But now the craving was gone, and he was starting to feel himself once more. In fact, he felt better than he had done since Peri had been killed.

  And the men who were responsible for her murder were going to get away with it, while he was executed for a crime he had not committed.

  He looked desperately about his bare, filthy cell for something he could use to defend himself, but there was nothing. With the heavy wooden cangue locked about his neck and wrists, like a portable set of stocks, he was hardly in much of a position to defend himself anyway.

  One of the bannermen unlocked the cell, flanked by men who kept Killigrew covered with drawn bows. The bannerman entered, unfastened the chain which shackled the cangue to the rear wall of the cell, and then led Killigrew outside like a dog on a leash. He indicated the wooden bamboo cage they had brought with them.

  ‘Get in,’ he growled.

  ‘You know that if you execute a barbarian, China will be breaching the Treaty of Nanking. It will mean war between your people and the barbarians, and China will be humiliated again.’ For all that Killigrew did not approve of the treaty and the principle of extraterritoriality enshrined in it, he could not allow an innocent man to be put to death. Especially not when the innocent man was himself.

  The bannerman tugged on the chain, pulling Killigrew off balance so that he fell painfully on his knees. ‘In!’

  Killigrew was manhandled into the cage. It was so cramped, he had to sit with his thighs against his stomach and the edge of the cangue hooked over his knees. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable. The door was closed and locked, and then four coolies hefted the cage on to their shoulders. Then they proceeded to the main gate of the yamen, with six bannermen before the cage and six more behind it.

  There was a crowd outside the yamen, a hundred faces twisted in scowls of hatred and rage, spitting, throwing rotten fruit and eggs, chanting: ‘Death to the fan kwae! Death to the fan kwae!’ The guards struggled to clear a passage, and for a while Killigrew feared he might be lynched before he reached the place of execution, wherever that might be.

  The uncomfortable journey took him down to the docks, where a massive war-junk seemed to tower over the small, single-storey hovels and godowns which lined the waterfront. At the foot of the gangplank, the senior bannerman read out a proclamation.

  ‘By the order of his Imperial Excellency Governor-General Xu Guang-jin, it has been decreed that the high-nose barbarian will be taken to Canton to be executed before the barbarian merchants in Canton, as a warning to their people.’

  There was a roar from the crowd – part approval that the barbarians would be made to lose face, part disappointment that the crowd would not get to see a malefactor executed for their edification and entertainment (just like any crowd outside Newgate, Killigrew could not help thinking) – and for a few seconds the rain of rotten fruit and eggs being pelted at him seemed to intensify. Then the bannerman signalled the deck of the junk, where the Chinese sailors were already making preparations to get under way. The cage was manhandled below decks, through a series of ill-lit compartments like a rabbit warren. Eventually it was put down in a pitch-black chamber.

  ‘Leave him here,’ ordered the senior bannerman. Footsteps sounded on the deck as the coolies withdrew from the chamber, and Killigrew heard the door being locked and closed. Everything was silent but for the creak of the timbers and the slop of water close by.

  In the pitch-darkness, Killigrew had no concept of how long he was kept there. His limbs were already numb from being cooped up at such an awkward angle, and if he were kept like this all the way to Canton, he would be unable to walk once they arrived. Not that he would need to be able to walk to be executed.

  After a while the creak of the junk’s timbers changed, and the motion of the rolling deck seemed to increase. They were sailing out to sea. It was over three hundred miles to Canton; with fair winds, the junk would arrive within a few days.

  He heard the door open and saw a glimmer of light in the darkness, a taper jogging along unsteadily as if carried in someone’s hand. He heard footsteps: two people, but lighter of foot than bannermen or coolies. The door was closed behind them, and he heard a wooden bar slide into place from outside. The taper circled the compartment, lighting a number of lanterns, until there was enough light for Killigrew to see that, far from being in a fetid orlop deck, he was in a chamber luxuriously hung with crimson silk and furnished with soft cushions. Beside the cage was a large tub of steaming, soapy water.

  The two people in the room were a couple of pretty amah girls. The one holding the taper blew it out, and then they both bowed to him. The other had a set of keys which she promptly demonstrated fitted the lock on the cage, and the cangue about his neck. Having set him free, they stepped back and bowed again, apparently unaware they were locked in a chamber with a barbarian convicted of piracy and mass murder. There was a shaving razor and a pair of scissors on a tray close by, but there seemed little point in using them as weapons to hold these girls hostage so he could bargain for his freedom: they would be slaves, expendable, otherwise they would not have been put in this situation.

  Killigrew rubbed his chafed wrists, stretched aching limbs, scratched his louse-bites as discreetly as possible in the presence of ladies, and eyed them warily. ‘Perhaps I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth,’ he remarked in Cantonese, ‘but to what do I owe the special treatment? I’m sure not all convicted criminals are treated like this.’

  The two girls giggled. ‘You are to refresh yourself before you take dinner with Admiral Huang.’

  ‘Refresh myself?’

  ‘We have been ordered to fulfil your every desire,’ said the girl, and the two of them giggled again.

  He eyed them appraisingly. ‘Well, let’s start with a bath and a shave, shall we?’

  One bath, shave, haircut, massage, manicure and change of clothes later, Killigrew found himself dressed in a black silk tunic, pyjamy trousers and silk boots. He was ushered on to the poop deck, where Admiral Huang sat at a table be
neath a silk awning to protect him from the heat of the sun. He rose to his feet and bowed. Dazed by all this fine treatment, Killigrew bowed back.

  Huang indicated a chair. ‘Please be seated, Lieutenant,’ he said in English.

  They sat down facing one another. A servant brought a tureen of soup on to the poop deck and started to ladle it into their bowls. ‘Shark’s fin?’ Killigrew asked his host.

  Huang nodded. ‘You must be hungry. I do not imagine that gaol food is particularly sustaining.’

  ‘No worse than you’d get in a British gaol, I’m sure.’

  ‘I am sorry we are unable to provide you with barbarian food. My cook has prepared the finest banquet he could, under such circumstances.’

  ‘Oh, I like Chinese food.’

  His host nodded approvingly and tucked in. After a few moments, Huang looked up. ‘You are not eating, Lieutenant Killigrew. I trust you do not fear the food is poisoned?’

  ‘No. I’m just curious to know why I’m getting the mandarin treatment. Two hours ago I was being conveyed to my execution. Or is this the hearty meal for the condemned man?’

  ‘Please forgive the subterfuge, Lieutenant. I hope the manner of your being brought aboard this vessel did not incommode you unnecessarily. Feelings are running high in Hoi-how. There are few families who did not lose a loved one in the perfidious attack on the fishing fleet. If we had announced that you were to be handed back to your people in Hong Kong, then there would have been severe disturbances.’

  ‘So you intend to abide by the treaty?’

  ‘May demons wipe their backsides on your unfair barbarian treaties!’ snarled Huang. ‘If I thought you were the man who had masterminded the attack on the fishing fleet, then I would kill you myself, with my bare hands!’

  Killigrew refused to be flustered by the admiral’s sudden rage. ‘Since you haven’t, I can only suppose that you believe in my innocence.’

  ‘We Chinese are not fools, Lieutenant. Why would a man on board a ship attack a fishing fleet, and then jump overboard and swim to an island where he could expect to encounter only hostility for his crime? The ways of you barbarians are curious, but not suicidal. I learned from an informant that you jumped off the Golden Dragon seven hours before it attacked the fishing fleet.’