Yellow Emperor's Cure (9781590208823)

by Basu, Kanal

  But before she could introduce the doctor to the gypsy, a voice called her from the garden making her jump. “How smart of me to have left out the best for the last, my husband!” Cutting short her introductions, she led Antonio and Ferguson out to the archery range.

  Antonio knew Cedric Hart the moment he saw him. He was the blond man cheering the maimed dancing boys at the festival of insects. A small group of guests waited silently as he stood erect, chest expanded and head held high with the bow poised just at the right angle for the flight of the arrow. Without taking his eye off the target, he asked his wife to call everyone over to the tables set up under the trees lit by Chinese lanterns.

  “He has risen like a rocket given his perfect ‘aim’!” Dona Elvira had made no secret of her disdain for her best friend’s husband, putting his success down to “party-manners” rather than the true instinct that marked out all those who had proved themselves in the tricky business of foreign service. “Servility is his secret weapon!” Unlike Dom Afonso – a real historian – he had acquired everything about the East from encyclopedias voraciously devoured for the sole purpose of impressing his party guests. The Harts, as described by Dona Elvira, were a perfect match, “his towering ambition sweetened by the mousse of her delicious gossip!”

  Relaxing the fingers of the drawing hand, Cedric let go of the arrow, which flew level with his bow shoulder and hit bull’s-eye to great applause. Handing the bow over to his compatriots and acknowledging success with a routine flick of his head, he came over to join the party, making it his business to get everyone talking, drawing out the quietest among them. Taking advantage of the thinning crowd that had started to move over to the tables, he caught Antonio standing alone under the lanterns and led him to the Japanese consul, Mr. Itami.

  “Let me remind you, gentlemen, of your past hostilities, of the embargo imposed by the Shogun on Portuguese traders in 1630 that led to the Nagasaki massacre.”

  “In 1640, you mean.” The consul smiled.

  “Yes …” Cedric Hart corrected himself. “You haven’t seen a Portuguese since then, I suppose?”

  Before Mr. Itami could begin to explain the Shogun’s strange decision, Polly reappeared to hurry along the stragglers. “Our Chinese chef will feel terribly insulted if you prefer talking to eating!”

  Hungry from his journey, Antonio started to nibble from the table of cakes. Joaquim Saldanha had told him earlier about the “fat tea” at the Legation – a late-afternoon meal that was more sumptuous than early rice. “It’s enough to fill your stomach for the whole day!”–he had patted his own–“enough even for a padre!” Antonio thanked his good luck for getting a break from his attendants, as he joined the queue of guests led by the Japanese consul, who was pecking at the dishes with his chopsticks like an overfed bird.

  “Our Cedric knows as little about the Nagasaki massacre as he does about most things!” Antonio heard Ferguson cackling under his breath. “He pretends to be a wise Manchu noble, but has brains the size of a bird’s!” The “gypsy” edged closer to him, flashing his gray eyes and gold bracelets, keen to test the new foreigner in Peking.

  “So you’ve come to find quacks for the pox!” Looking around the garden as if he might just spot one of them among the guests, Ferguson spoke to him like a confidant. “Why don’t you pay someone? This is a marvelously cheap country! Shouldn’t have to spend too much or wait too long to find what you’re after.”

  “Pay who?” Antonio parried the question. He wondered if Polly’s best friend was indeed the cleverest man in Peking, or just a plain gossip. He motioned with his eyes toward the guests.

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t trust Cedric or any of the respectable officers. Or for that matter the bunch of dejected jackals.” Ferguson pointed at the young archers, and narrowed his eyes. “Try Pinchback. He deals in secret matters! He could help you raid a withered eunuch’s treasure of pau de China.”

  “You’re in the wrong place, Doctor!” René Darmon, the champagne merchant, had overheard their conversation and joined them, bringing his friends over with him. “You should be in France, at the Hôspital Saint-Louis, the capital of syphilis. The famous Dr. Fournier has already found a way to cure all skin diseases including the pox.”

  “Rubbish. Syphilis isn’t a dermatological disorder.” Antonio’s loud voice drew more guests to their group. “All the French have done is build a waxwork museum in Saint-Louis showing ghastly models of pox victims.”

  “But thanks to Fournier we know that not just whores but even “happily married” bourgeois women get syphilis.” Mr. Pinchback’s quiet words, uttered with just enough indelicacy, expanded the interest beyond medical matters, causing Polly to seize the perfect moment to liven up the party.

  “Why just women, can anyone really be safe from the pox?”

  “If you’ve been unlucky enough to miss the pox in this life, then you’ll surely get it in the next!” Monsieur Darmon made a valiant attempt to revive his standing, sending a chill down everyone’s spine. Helga agreed with him, adding, “Even Bavarian nuns are known to get it, and shipwrecked sailors. Virgins, even!”

  “Syphilis without sin? That’s impossible!” Unknown to them, the American first secretary had come over, the big and blustering John Harris, one of Polly’s trophy guests.

  “Not impossible,” Ferguson teased him. “Depends on what you consider sinful in America. It can be spread by a kiss even, a touch, a whisper behind the curtains, by a glass shared between lovers …”

  “By a flutter of the eyelids!” A laughing Polly joined in, making the first secretary frown.

  “And yet, not everyone who goes to a prostitute ends up with the pox!” Ferguson shrugged, drawing a puzzled look all around.

  Fidgeting with his glass, John Harris said glumly, “It’s not a bad punishment for sinners, I’d think,” inviting yet another barb from Ferguson.

  “Just as the Jesuits thought the earthquake was a divine act of punishment for lascivious Lisbonites. Even today there’s no shortage of those who think that syphilitics should be burnt at the stake, married men with the pox castrated and their wives locked up in chastity belts!”

  With everyone going on about syphilis, Cedric Hart tapped Antonio on the back. “I thought I’d ask you about your teacher. Has he taken you to visit his hospital yet? Has he asked you to try your European treatments on his patients?”

  Before he could reply, Mr. Pinchback offered his measured advice. “I wouldn’t worry about treating the Chinese, curing them of their sicknesses. There are too many of them anyway – seven times the size of the British population, and four times that of America.”

  “I don’t think he keeps his patients in his hospital.” Yohan had come to join them late and appeared, as usual, to have more information than the rest. “He hides the rebels there, lets his patients die.”

  “Who?” Mr. Harris asked Yohan, busy balancing a pair of wine cups for himself and his wife.

  “Dr. Xu, the empress’s physician, among the few non-royals allowed into her court, a master of Nei ching, the “Horseman,” as our friends from Locke Mission named him.”

  “Rebels?” Antonio was eager to probe and find out more about the real Dr. Xu, but Cedric called everyone into the reception hall to avoid catching the evening fog in their lungs, before the precious oolong tea turned stale and the heavenly padre souchong lost its virginal whiff. As Antonio left the garden, he saw a shadow behind the trees stealthily approaching the tables – his friend Joaquim Saldanha, ready to wolf down the feast of fat tea – and heard Polly cackling on with her best friend about the queen of all diseases.

  “Tell me how did our Casanova get the pox?”

  “From a Manchu princess, of course,” Ferguson sniggered. “Who had caught it from a Franciscan, who in turn had only a Legation lady to blame and she …”

  “And she?”

  “And she a savvy merchant, the result of his misbehavior with a gardener and a houseboy, the long line of lovers going all t
he way back to a sorry sailor on Columbus’s Santa Maria!”

  “Really!”

  “From the land of our very own John Harris.”

  “God bless America!” Polly burst out laughing.

  They settled back into plush armchairs with tea and cakes, but the shift to the interior seemed to darken everyone’s mood. Linda Harris, John Harris’s wife, from New York, was first to touch on the topic that was topmost in everyone’s mind by mentioning a small domestic incident that had assumed sinister proportions. Her pantry maid had failed to return from a home visit even after a month, and she was preparing to write her off as yet another case of unreliable domestics when word came of her unusual troubles.

  “The Boxers are holding her against her will.” Stirring her teacup, Linda raised her voice beyond the ladies to include the officers as well. “She’s been accused of recruiting natives to serve foreigners, using her feminine charms. They’ve given us an ultimatum to leave China. As long as we stay here, they’d hold her prisoner and punish her for her sins.”

  “What sort of punishment?” Mr. Pinchback narrowed his eyes.

  “For every week we spend in Peking, they’ll cut off one of her fingers and send it over to us here at the embassy. That’s a grand total of twenty weeks for both hands and feet, give or take a fortnight for the Chinese New Year.”

  The spoons stopped stirring and the room fell silent. Mr. Pinch-back held his nerve to ask the next question. “And how many fingers have you received so far?”

  “None yet. John has been over to the Foreigners’ Bureau to demand her release, and we’re keeping more than our fingers crossed.” Linda’s voice had a steely edge.

  Even before the American first secretary could start to narrate his encounter with Chinese officials, voices came alive with more accounts of Boxer mischief.

  “The maid’s lucky. A Russian man and his wife have already been plunged into boiling oil.” Plump and nervy, Sarah Hollinger spoke in an alarmist’s voice. She had gone out with her servants to buy curtains, and heard the shops buzzing with rumors. News had come just a week ago about the sad plight of the Belgian engineers held hostage in Fengtai, as the locomotive shed built by them was set ablaze before their very eyes. The Boxers hadn’t spared the dowager’s special coach even, hurling it into the fire, chanting slogans against Western devils and their evil machines.

  “Boxers,” Polly explained patiently to a shy Mary McKinsey, the recently arrived wife of the young Scottish telegraph engineer, Roger, “are spirit soldiers, a ragtag bunch of bumpkins passing themselves off as god-sent saviors of China. There are eight million of them, or so they say, each capable of flying in air and spitting fire, immune to bullets and bombs.”

  “That’s why they’re called Boxers,” Linda Harris added. “Because they fight their enemies with their bare hands. And their ladies, called Red Lantern girls, are no less vicious, thought to be equal to their men in ferocity.” Mary’s eyes widened as she listened to Polly and Linda.

  “The Red Lantern girls can pull down a two-storied house with cotton strings, like expert seamstresses!” Ferguson quipped, but everyone else was dead serious.

  Sarah Hollinger repeated what she’d heard from the domestics, that the Boxers were threatening all those who were close to foreigners: cooks and washermen, gardeners, guards and sedan bearers. “They’re butchering the poor Chinese Christians, dragging them out of their homes and killing them on the spot, or torturing them at their Boxer temples, gouging out eyes, skinning them alive …” Her voice fell, as an agitated Helga spoke up from her reclining chair, “They’ll attack the Legation after they’ve finished with the converts.”

  “Just the yearly spring riots, I suppose, arriving a touch earlier than usual.” Roger McKinsey tried to calm his newly married wife, smiling kindly at her. Their honeymoon was due to start in a few days at the British minister’s private bungalow in the western hills, with acres of lush grounds and clear lakes brimming with goldfish and lotus flower.

  “That’s nonsense.” John Harris spoke calmly, and lit his pipe. “Even half of the eight million Boxers can wipe out the entire imperial army. The dowager might have to face the fate of the emperor, imprisoned in her own quarters. Even “invisible soldiers” might be too much for an unpaid, ill-fed, ill-armed and badly led army to save her let alone protect us here at the Legation.”

  Despite his gloomy appearance, the American first secretary inspired confidence in others. Pouring Antonio another cup of the oolong, Polly whispered to him, “Boxers for breakfast, Boxers for lunch, Boxers for dinner … that’s all we have here. Thank God for syphilis, for sparing us Boxers at afternoon tea!”

  Monsieur Darmon spoke seriously. “The sign of a bleeding hand has started to appear on the doors of the ‘unwanted.’ It’s the Boxers’ death warrant, more feared than the plague. Merchants and innocents are bound to suffer before our complacent officers wake up.” His ill-disguised contempt for the Legation ministers showed in the way he addressed his comments to Mr. Pinchback, the banker.

  “We haven’t been idle,” Cedric Hart piped up against the unwarranted jibe. “Along with the Americans, the French and the Italians, we’ve petitioned the dowager to suppress the Boxers.” Polly gave her husband a quick look, to warn him against an open argument with the king of the bubbly.

  “But she’s too rotten a reed to lean upon.” It didn’t take Ferguson long to add his two bits to Monsieur Darmon’s caustic remarks. “She’s behind the Boxers, their ‘invisible spirit’!”

  Tapping his pipe, John Harris agreed. “We must guard our house ourselves. The British warships moored off the mud bar of the Peiho River are a better guarantee for everyone, merchants included, than the mandarins. Plus we have Roger to reach a quick word to our bosses if we get into hot water.”

  “I don’t know if the bosses would care,” Sarah Hollinger said in a moaning voice. “Not the English ones, at least. Our lives are cheap. Think how many were killed in the Indian Mutiny.”

  “But we mustn’t stop doing business as usual.” Cedric tried to change the topic, reviving the memory of last year’s tennis competition that had thrown up the gypsy as the unlikely champion. The soiree afterward though had failed to live up to expectations. “We must encourage Sir Robert to whip his assistants into shape,” meaning the young agents who served at the imperial customs department and volunteered, “by order,” to add singing voices to their boss’s amateur operettas.

  “And let’s not forget the strawberries.” Polly beamed at the nervous Mary McKinsey. The strawberry growers among the Legation ladies did brisk business each summer, their order books no less healthy than Monsieur Darmon’s.

  Polly and Cedric tried their very best to make everyone cheerful, but the talk slipped back to dead missionaries and a possible siege of the Legation, with the men going on about guns – Nordenfeldts, Maxims and Krupps – and the ladies about saving a turkey for a rainy day. Mr. Pinchback had the most reasonable plans when it came to self-defense. Foreign troops would take forty-eight hours to reach them from Tientsin if a distress call was issued, a week even, if the Boxers mined the rail tracks and the troops had to march in over boggy marshes. The canal from Tungchow would provide another route into Peking, and it’d be fair to expect medium to heavy fighting on the way. Besides stockpiling food and guns, the Legation would need a healthy supply of sand.

  “Sand?” Even Ferguson seemed surprised.

  “For sandbags to guard against the enemy’s shelling.” Showing the instinct of a soldier, the Hong Kong banker looked up at the silk curtains and made the sign of scissors.

  Antonio’s eyes wandered through the glass doors to Norma Cook, sitting all by herself in the adjoining room, face shaded by a faint light.

  “It’s too early for her,” Polly whispered, “to go on with business as usual.”

  He saw her sobbing frame bend over an open sketchbook on her lap.

  The noose is tightening around our necks. … He recalled the nervous
merchant on the Santa Cruz. What on earth has gone wrong between Chinese and foreigners, he wondered, thinking about Joachim Saldanha’s accounts of burnt churches and slaughtered nuns. There’s never a good time to go to China. … Ricardo had urged him to change his plans even as he prepared to board his ship. Listening to the guests, his friend’s words came back to Antonio. … What if you’re shipwrecked in China with your miracle cure? And how about the Legation? How would it defend itself against the spirit soldiers? Polly smiled at him across the room, and he felt reassured by her presence among the mixed lot of foreigners. She’d know; she was more than a gossip. She could read what was on everyone’s mind.

  Polly tempted Antonio to stay back at the end of the party to “see the real sights of the Legation!” But he was reminded of Joachim Saldanha’s counsel, “You must leave before others do, before it’s too late to return to the palace.” Making his way out of the Hart villa, he found his bearers dozing as they waited for him. Fog had turned the barren trees into ghosts, arms outstretched to capture the innocent, the night promising more surprises than on his trip coming over. Cedric saw him out of the door, and he overheard Yohan teasing Ferguson about his rebel friends.

  “Will your spirit soldiers fight with real knives or imaginary ones?”

  “You bet they’d be real,” the gypsy replied. “The price of knives has shot up in Peking, don’t you know?”

  Antonio sat on the sedan on his way back and thought about Polly’s guests. Just a few of them stood out from the dozens that he was introduced to as the “brilliant doctor from Portugal,” the rest simply enacting roles that were expected of them. He tried hard to recall the names of the officers, who’d greeted him warmly with a firm shake only to turn back promptly to their friends. Polly had chaperoned him through the boring lot of visitors, and he had missed exchanging notes with Joachim Saldanha, who seemed to disappear as magically as he had appeared just in time for fat tea.

  “You’ll find a sprinkling of mysterious creatures among hordes of sleepwalkers.” Dona Elvira had sought to enlighten him about the Legation before he left Macau, and teach him proper etiquette in dealing with “our own kind.” “You can be yourself with the natives, but never with foreigners,” she had warned him. “They mustn’t know who you really are, otherwise they’ll play with your mind and twirl you around their fingers. It’s the game of the bored, left with nothing better to do than scheme each other’s downfall.” He took note of the mysterious creatures and a few amusing ones, but wondered if he had displayed proper etiquette toward the guests.