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Dynasty
A Novel
The Imperial China Trilogy
Robert Elegant
For Kitung—
and for Moira, again and always
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
JUNE 27, 1970 / 7:30–8:30 P.M.
Part I
Mary
MAY 28, 1900–DECEMBER 26, 1900
MAY 28, 1900
JULY 22, 1900
JULY 23, 1900–AUGUST 1, 1900
AUGUST 14, 1900–SEPTEMBER 18, 1900
OCTOBER 3, 1900–DECEMBER 26, 1900
INTERLUDE
JUNE 27, 1970 / 8:30–10:30 P.M.
Part II
Mary and Charles
FEBRUARY 4, 1905–NOVEMBER 16, 1906
FEBRUARY 4, 1905
FEBRUARY 5, 1905
FEBRUARY 5, 1905–MARCH 16, 1905
JUNE 19, 1905–NOVEMBER 16, 1906
Part III
Mary and Harry
NOVEMBER 13, 1908–SEPTEMBER 11, 1909
NOVEMBER 13, 1908
JANUARY 5, 1909–JANUARY 7, 1909
JANUARY 29, 1909
MAY 13, 1909–MAY 31, 1909
JUNE 10, 1909–SEPTEMBER 11, 1909
Part IV
Mary and Jonathan
DECEMBER 6, 1911–JUNE 18, 1916
DECEMBER 6, 1911
JUNE 2, 1914
JUNE 5, 1914–AUGUST 8, 1914
SEPTEMBER 28, 1914
JUNE 8, 1916–JUNE 18, 1916
Part V
Thomas and James
MARCH 2, 1924–DECEMBER 15, 1927
MARCH 2, 1924
JUNE 7, 1924–JUNE 9, 1924
MAY 31, 1925–JULY 9, 1926
APRIL 11, 1927–DECEMBER 15, 1927
Part VI
James and Harry
JULY 7, 1937–DECEMBER 9, 1944
JULY 7, 1937–MARCH 7, 1939
AUGUST 24, 1939–JUNE 10, 1940
DECEMBER 8, 1941–DECEMBER 26, 1941
OCTOBER 20, 1944–DECEMBER 9, 1944
INTERLUDE
JUNE 27, 1970 / 10:30 P.M.–12 N.
Part VII
The Sekloongs and the Lao Pai-Hsing
NOVEMBER 28, 1950–FEBRUARY 22, 1959
NOVEMBER 28, 1950–JULY 12, 1951
MAY 28, 1957–FEBRUARY 22, 1959
Part VIII
Albert and the Red Guards
OCTOBER 24, 1965–SEPTEMBER 26, 1967
OCTOBER 24, 1965–MARCH 6, 1966
JUNE 8, 1966–SEPTEMBER 26, 1967
POSTLUDE
JUNE 28, 1970 / 1:04 A.M.–4:31 A.M.
About the Author
Prelude
June 27, 1970
7:30-8:30 P.M.
Foghorns wailed from burnished-white liners and rust-scabbed freighters tethered to massive buoys. The oily swells barely rocked the big ships. Hong Kong harbor was as forebodingly flat as a pitted black mirror, and the greasy fog crept implacably down the surrounding hills to enshroud the bay.
The last ferry to Kowloon cautiously picked its way among the moored ships. Its horizontal rows of lights cast a pale nimbus in the encroaching darkness, and its siren lamented the coming of the night. A bat-sailed junk drifted like a ghost on the breeze. The ferry’s coxswain muttered Cantonese obscenities and spun the six-foot wheel to avoid the unlighted vessel. Grimy walla-walla motorboats skittered through the murk, their horns shrieking mournful warnings.
Typhoon Linda was racing toward the smug British Crown Colony at 30 knots in the early evening of June 27, 1970. Though the haze was still spreading and the rain still came in gusts, the Royal Observatory’s forecasts were ominous. The typhoon’s breath would soon blow away the fog, and the rain would stream across the bay in opaque sheets.
The Colony’s communications were sophisticated: the tilted white bowls of the satellite earth-station shone on the Stanley Peninsula; the enormous grids of white-and-red checkerboard radar antennae perched on the hills; and a forest of radio masts sprang from Cape Collinson.
But all movement across the harbor would cease within an hour. Despite man’s technological cunning, no man could move from Hong Kong Island to the Kowloon Peninsula jutting from the mainland of Asia when the angry winds stormed out of the South China Sea. The 200-foot breadth of the runway of Kaitak Airport extended 8,350 feet into the eastern arm of the harbor, but the West’s wondrously complex aircraft were earthbound by the rage of Tien Mu Hou, the Empress of Heaven and Goddess of the Sea.
Air Force One squatted unlighted on the tarmac before the Royal Air Force Terminal. Defying the weight of their four Pratt and Whitney engines, the silver wings of the Boeing 707 tugged against the wire cables that secured them to ring bolts set in concrete. Before the Civil Aviation Terminal, eleven jetliners flanked a 747 Jumbo. All were similarly tethered against the oncoming cataclysm, and the bright symbols on their tail planes were intermittently obscured by the rain-bursts that presaged the typhoon. Three smaller private jets huddled near the airliners like eagles beside friendly dragons.
The immobilized aircraft had already disembarked their passengers. Twenty-three had been summoned to the British enclave on the periphery of the Communist People’s Republic of China by the same command. Air Force One had borne Under Secretary of State Spencer Taylor Smith to the Crown Colony despite his misgivings. The spacious first-class compartments of Japan Air Lines, Swissair, and TWA jetliners had disgorged fifteen of his relations by marriage into the torrents of rain. Five others had alighted from their private jets, and obsequious attendants wielding umbrellas had escorted them to limousines.
Alongside Air Force One, a British Aircraft Corporation Trident also stood aloof from the covey of civilian jets. Occasionally revealed by the writhing fog, its tail plane displayed five clustered golden stars on a crimson rectangle. Flying direct from Peking, the Trident had carried a reluctant General Shih Ai-kuo, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China and Deputy Political Commissar of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Incongruously paired, the transports of the United States Air Force and the Chinese People’s Air Force were heavily guarded. Sergeants and constables of the Royal Hong Kong Police wearing black slickers crouched in drenched misery under the broad fuselages.
Through the squalls, illuminated signs shone faintly from the shadowy bulk of Hong Kong Island across the bay. The neatly squared, pale-blue letters on the left read: HONG KONG HILTON. On the far right a scrolled yellow M marked the Mandarin Hotel. Between those pleasure palaces of the self-indulgent West, four angular Chinese characters pierced the night with glowing red rays. They proclaimed: LONG LIVE CHAIRMAN MAO!
In his suite five stories below the scrolled M, the Under Secretary of State peered into a mirror to adjust his bow-tie. Finally satisfied, he slipped the crimson-and-white star of the Legion of Merit on its rose-red ribbon around his neck and pinned a row of miniature decorations to the silk lapel of his tailcoat. He contemplated his slightly florid, slightly corpulent handsomeness with approval.
“Damn it, Blanche!” Spencer Taylor Smith growled to his honey-haired wife. “What the hell have you gotten me into? The old lady’s all right. But why do we have to get mixed up with this bunch of chinks and yids? Worthy Orientals and Hebrews, I suppose I should call them. And what in God’s own name am I supposed to call General Shih? ‘Uncle James’?”
The slight woman with the deep-set blue eyes rose from the mirrored dressing table. Unperturbed, she clasped a diamond-and-sapphire
necklace around her slender throat.
“Now, Spence,” she said equably, “please zip me up.”
The Under Secretary muttered ill-temperedly as he inched the zipper up to the green brocade curtaining her ivory back.
“You can call him whatever you damned please, as far as I’m concerned.” Blanche Smith’s voice was edged. “‘General Shih’—‘honored colleague’—‘Uncle James’—or ‘You Communist bastard.’ Don’t talk to him at all if you don’t want to. All I asked is to come for Lady Mary’s birthday—I don’t complain about your interminably boring state banquets.”
“Could be damned embarrassing,” the Under Secretary grumbled.
“I’m sure you’ll manage, dear. You always do. You can even charm the cranky French. And don’t forget you married one of those chinks and yids.”
“Sorry!” The Under Secretary was momentarily abashed. “Shall we go?”
In the anachronistically plush penthouse atop the Bank of China, General Shih Ai-kuo was alone with his forebodings. His wife, Lu Ping, alternate member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, had declined to accompany him to Hong Kong. Of her own will, he wondered, or on the Party’s orders? But the Premier himself had insisted that the General attend the celebration of his mother’s birthday. Were they, he brooded, setting him up for “criticism” and subsequent dismissal? The Premier’s instructions had been deplorably vague, merely: “Observe and report.”
General Shih scowled as he pulled his high-collared, blue-gray tunic over his bulky shoulders. His hazel eyes narrowed, and his high forehead wrinkled above his aquiline features. Only the slight slant of his eyes and the faint golden cast of his skin were markedly Chinese. Comrades ignorant of his background assumed that he was part Turkyi from Central Asia, and he rarely bothered to enlighten them.
“Ninety she is,” he muttered in English. “And I’m practically sixty-four, and I haven’t seen her in twenty-odd years. Of course I want to see the old girl. But why the decorations? Nobody’s worn them in years.”
Distastefully, he weighed two medals in his broad palm. Brilliantly chased in red-and-gold enamel, each was as large as a silver dollar. Squaring his shoulders, he pinned the Order of a Hero of the Chinese People on his breast and, beside it, the Order of August First. He would have been happier with a simple plastic button displaying the benevolent features of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. But his orders were quite precise in that respect: he had been specifically instructed to wear the orders that had been out of fashion for a decade.
“Like a damned Russian comic-opera general,” he complained. “And why wouldn’t Ping come? Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Women’s Association, hell! She’s skipped them before when it suited her—or them.”
The General’s Mercedes 280SE waited in the cavernous garage, whose exit ramp to Bank Street was guarded by the Party’s plainclothesmen. Though he could not delay much longer, he parted the purple satin drapes and gazed up at The Peak. Clustered lights from the beehive apartment houses on the lower slopes overbore the fog by their profusion, and segmented orange glowworms marked the zigzag road to the heights. He felt he could almost see the sharp turnoff to Sekloong Manor, that monstrosity of bourgeois ostentation where he had been born. A semi-opaque curtain of haze and rain swept across the mountain, obscuring all but the hint of distant luminescence.
On The Peak itself, the leaden fog blotted out all the works of man and nature. The gross gray mass flowed over villas and mansions, over broad roads and narrow byways, over trees, flowers, and rocks. In the feeble orange glow of sodium streetlights, motorcars crawled along Magazine Gap Road into Peak Road. Drivers craned their heads through the windows, searching for the white centerline to avoid the precipice on the left. Only the diffused loom of lights warned of oncoming traffic. Automobiles appeared like gleaming spirit cars, to be ingested again by the blackness.
Turning sharply right, a stately Rolls-Royce Phantom IV shone its locomotive headlights on the leering tortoise gargoyles astride the arch guarding the private road to Sekloong Manor. Greasy tentacles of fog coiled around the upturned eaves of the twenty-five-foot-high gate, and its canary-yellow tiles gleamed insubstantial when the mist momentarily parted. On the broad crossbeam, illuminated by the Phantom’s uptilted lights, a golden dragon writhed in high relief. The supreme beast’s black claws clutched white clouds, and its outspread wings shaded from pale azure roots to the broad, bright carnelian tips. Its crimson eyes fixed on the pearl shimmering before its open jaws; the great reptile appeared in the shifting light to lunge toward the unattainable gem.
Each of the beast’s feet had four claws, since only the Emperor’s dragon might display five claws. But its hue was indistinguishable from the Imperial yellow, and the carving was as fine as any outside the Imperial City in Peking. The dragon represented the Emperor’s temporal and spiritual power, for he was Tien-tze, the Son of Heaven.
Jonathan, founder of the House of Sekloong, had taken the winged dragon as his own symbol almost a century earlier, when the Emperor still reigned. The gesture was then not merely presumptuous; it verged upon blasphemy. But Jonathan Sekloong spurned his contemporaries’ shocked remonstrances. He had, he said, been born in Sekloong, which means Stone Dragon, and had taken both the town’s name and its symbol as his own. His Chinese mother could not give him a name, and his Irish father would not.
During the ensuing years, the ultimate symbol of grandeur had come to seem no more than Jonathan’s due. The Emperor had been dethroned, and the Ta Ching Chao, the Great Pure Dynasty, had been overthrown. But Jonathan Sekloong had flourished, building a great commercial empire and founding a dynasty that endured. His achievements recognized by two British knighthoods and, subsequently, by a baronetcy, he had died Sir Jonathan at the age of ninety-seven, in 1950.
The older passengers in the limousines crawling along Peak Road remembered Sir Jonathan’s imperious temperament. Even before his death twenty years earlier, he had been more myth than man. His own life and his descendants’ lives were themselves the chronicles of more than a century of the tumultuous history of both modern China and that unique anomaly that had profoundly influenced the violent course of the world’s most populous country—British-ruled, Chinese-inhabited Hong Kong. Despite the approaching typhoon, almost a hundred descendants and several hundred guests were assembling to pay tribute to his daughter-in-law on her ninetieth birthday. Their homage was tendered equally to the spirit of the colossal figure who had spanned the Orient and the Occident. Though Lady Mary Sekloong was herself legend, the Matriarch maintained that she was but the legatee of the Old Gentleman. When Hong Kong spoke of the Old Gentleman—or any Sekloong anywhere used the term—it meant only Sir Jonathan.
The stately Rolls was the first vehicle of the motorcade that passed under the arch. Sweating Chinese constables halted oncoming traffic with swinging yellow flashlights to clear the turn into Sekloong Manor. Eldorados and Imperials, Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, and Mercedes 600’s rolled under the rampant winged dragon. Gaudy sportscars, driven through the murk with more dash than skill, revved throaty salutes to the mythical reptile. The English police inspector commanding the traffic detail counted two Ferraris, four Jensens, six Lotuses, and three Maseratis. When the stream dwindled, he enviously calculated that he had waved on more than $3 million worth of finely tuned machinery.
Battered Minis, Morris Minors, and Volkswagens mingled with those ostentatiously expensive toys. For her ninetieth birthday Lady Mary had summoned not only her own children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, but all known descendants of the Old Gentleman by his two wives, his three concubines, and his numerous liaisons. The Matriarch could not herself count their exact number, though she knew that the Old Gentleman had fathered nineteen children as far as he was aware. His children and their children had procreated enthusiastically—with and without the sanction of Holy Church or the law.
The air-conditioned, deep-cushioned dimness of a Lincoln Continental enclosed Lad
y Mary’s younger daughter Charlotte and her fourth husband, Avram Barakian, whose accountants could not precisely calculate his wealth in ships, oil, factories, and land. Charlotte Sekloong Way d’Alivère Martin Barakian’s sixty-six-year-old eyes roved hungrily over the sprawling compound where she had known her happiest days—if she ever had been truly happy since leaving the security of the Manor.
The motorcars rolled through the cascades of light that played along the triangular road leading to the Main House. Banks of spotlights lanced the fog, and many-colored lanterns gyrated in the wind-battered trees. Strings of incandescent bulbs outlined the three Small Houses, themselves mansions by ordinary standards. Floodlights on the lawns carved balconies and overhanging roofs into geometrical patterns of alternating brilliance and blackness. At the apex of the triangle stood the Main House, which successive generations of Sekloong children had called The Castle.
Only the children had explored all The Castle’s remote corners, clattering noisily up spiral staircases to the eight towers that raked the sky. Soaring from the corners of the four-story central structure and its lower wings, their tops invisible in the fog, the towers were both turrets and minarets. The crenelated battlements connecting the spires were spectacularly incongruous above green-tiled roofs with out-flared eaves. Sir Jonathan’s implacable will had not only built his own monument, but had imposed an improbable harmony on the curious structure. Though The Castle was grotesque, it was as overwhelmingly impressive as he had intended.
The Castle contained forty bedrooms. But Sir Jonathan’s daughter-in-law, the second Lady Sekloong, lived in the central structure alone except for twelve servants and their broods. Two other dowagers shared her state, each reigning over her own household in its own wing.
Sarah Haleevie Sekloong was darkly vivacious and still compellingly attractive at sixty-five. Proudly self-assured, the daughter of the most powerful of the four great Iraqi Jewish families that had virtually built modern Shanghai was accustomed to her solitary state. Her husband, Jonathan II, the Matriarch’s eldest child, had died in 1945 when a young sergeant-pilot brushed the wingtip of his RAF Dakota against the mountainside that guarded the approach to the old landing strip at Kaitak.
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