By Eastern windows

by Gretta Curran Browne

  Dr Duncan was Scottish and very efficient, as well as kind and fatherly in manner. He made up a negus of red wine and spices and sat by her bedside as she drank it, speaking to her in a soothing and questioning way, until she sighed and relaxed and agreed that the mixture was indeed giving her relief from the burning pain.

  Dr Duncan's face registered satisfaction. He urged her now to drink a cup of hot milk, in which he had slipped a measure of laudanum. The drug swiftly took effect, her eyes dulled over, and within minutes she was sleeping soundly.

  ‘In the morning she will find she can walk again,’ Dr Duncan said quietly, his back to Lachlan as he took a bottle from his medical bag. ‘Although, she will still feel very weak. Now, I shall leave you this bottle of spices to be mixed with red wine whenever she feels the burning heat again and needs relief.’

  ‘Red wine and spices?’ Lachlan ushered Marianne out of the room and glared at the doctor. ‘Is that all you intend to give her? Red wine and spices!’

  Dr Duncan buckled the fastenings on his bag. ‘I do not think it advisable to give her any other medicine. The mixture of wine and spices has given her relief so far, and will continue to give her relief.’

  ‘From what?’

  Dr Duncan half turned his head and looked at the girl in the bed. ‘The burning heat she feels, is, of course, due to the onset of a fever.’

  ‘She is not having a miscarriage then?’

  ‘Miscarriage?’ Dr Duncan turned and stared at him. ‘Mr Macquarie, pray forgive me, but in my letter from Dr Kerr I was led to believe that you understood the true state of your wife's health.’

  ‘She is pregnant,’ Lachlan snapped. ‘She says she is pregnant, and has never once varied in that conviction. And I believe her – not Dr Kerr. My wife, Dr Duncan, is pregnant.’

  ‘She is also dying, Mr Macquarie, and I sincerely apologise for not realising that you did not fully understand that.’

  For a long moment all the noise in the world seemed to have stopped again ... the silent blade of the knife was back, slipping under his ribs, preparing to rip through his heart. Then, once more, he heard the doctor speaking to him, but from somewhere very far away.

  ‘So hard for a doctor to say these things ... not the smallest hope of recovery, not now the fever has come on ... beyond the help of any medicinal aid ... Cannot live for more than a few months, maybe even weeks ... She has no idea, of course ... thinks all is due to pregnancy ... no point in alarming her...’

  His pain was devouring him, but he held it back, concentrating only on Jane as he went through the following days, living in a hell of smiles and lies.

  She rose the following morning and insisted on leaving her bed for breakfast, agreed to take it very easy, and sat for most of the morning in an easy chair reading.

  Later she walked with him in the garden, regaining her strength and some of her humour, speaking to him of their child, their return to Calicut, their future, and the presents she had still not bought for some of their friends’ children. In a day or two, perhaps, they would again go into Macao, could they?

  He agreed, and she smiled, but there was no colour in her face.

  In the evening they sat side by side on the warm terrace, their hands held together, listening to the noise of the harbour, comfortable with each other, as they had always been comfortable with each other, and never so much with anyone else. He rarely left her side, always to be found sitting beside her like a devoted husband, but then he had always been that.

  Five days after Dr Duncan's visit he awoke just before dawn to find Jane sitting up in bed.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The pain,’ she gasped, ‘the burning pain …’

  He quickly got out of bed and fumbled in the half-dark to light a candle, and then reached for the mixture of wine and spices that was already prepared. He handed her the glass. ‘Drink this, it will relieve you.’

  He helped her hold the glass to her mouth but after a few sips she was sobbing with the pain. ‘Drink more,’ he said. ‘Drink more!’

  Obediently she did as she was told, wiping the tears from her eyes as he laid the glass aside and settled her back against the pillows. He began to pull on his clothes. ‘I'll send for Dr Duncan.’

  When he had reached the door she called him back. ‘Lachlan!’

  He turned.

  ‘Don't leave me,’ she pleaded. Her face looked very frightened and very pale against the loosened chestnut hair that tumbled about her. Her bare arms and shoulders in the white petticoat had changed from golden to a pale ivory.

  He came back to the bed and took her face in his hands. ‘In a moment I'll be back, my angel. I promise you, I'll be back.’

  When he returned her pain had gone, but she was still shaking with fright at the thought of losing her baby. ‘Hold me, Lachlan,’ she whispered.

  He sat on the bed and held her, cradling her shaking body against his chest, comforting and soothing, until her trembling ceased. It had become his habit, ever since he had returned from Ceylon and known she was sick, known she was expecting a baby, this urge to cradle her, protect her, give her anything she wanted, anything that would make her happy.

  ‘Lachlan,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Last night I was dreaming of Calicut, of that blissful little place, and in my dream all I wanted to do was get back there. Can we go back? Not in four weeks, but sooner?’

  He squeezed his eyes shut against her plea. He was not taking her back to Calicut. He had already made his plans to take her to Scotland, to Edinburgh, where there were good doctors, the best doctors in the world.

  ‘In just a few days,’ he said, ‘an English ship is due at Macao. We will be on it. In just a few days we will leave here.’

  ‘Oh Lachlan,’ she said softly, ‘you're so good to me, so good …’

  The last words had trailed away into a whisper. After a time he wondered if she had fallen asleep. He bent to look into her face, and as he did a sudden pounding began to shake his heart. Her hand had gone limp in his own, he stared at it, squeezed it hard.

  ‘Jane?’

  The pounding of his heart and the roaring in his head was like a thousand battering bells as a quaking terror swept over him. `Jane,' he said, shaking her. ‘Jane … Jane!’ Her head fell back from his shoulder, her eyes closed, her lips parted.

  He stared at her in bewildered disbelief. The doctor had said months, enough time to get her to England or Scotland. Maybe weeks. But that had been only five days ago!

  ‘Jane!’ he cried frantically. ‘Oh God, oh, Christ … Jane!’ Again he shook her in terrified denial. ‘Jane!’

  But then it came to him, finally, that Jane had died in his arms. Snatched from him without warning.

  He stared at her lifeless face, and felt the agonising pain of his heart breaking.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘Those whom the Gods love die young.’

  It was the only complete sentence Marianne had managed to utter amidst hours of sobbing incoherently at the bedside of her mistress.

  ‘What is written, is written,’ Bappoo whispered, wiping a hand over his wet face.

  By noon the house was packed with visitors from the British factory. Mrs Beale whispered tearfully to Dr Duncan. ‘She never did say to us her age. Do you know it, Dr Duncan?’

  The doctor consulted a paper in his hand. ‘She was aged twenty-three years and nine months.’

  So young. And the poor girl had lived for only twelve days after arriving in Macao. Yet all noticed the bereaved husband looked very calm in his sorrow and sudden loss; unaware that he was seeing nothing, hearing nothing, and thinking nothing, lost in the pit of a dark and agonising hell.

  *

  Later that afternoon he was standing alone by the bedroom window, when, from behind him in the room, a few words spoken in broken English broke through the sound barrier of his calmness.

  He turned his head to see the speaker – it was the kind-eyed Portuguese woman, Mrs B
eale's personal maid, who had come to dress Jane for burial. His own Chinese housekeeper was assisting her, and she had paused to repeat to her mistress something the Chinese woman had said.

  ‘What did she say?’ Lachlan asked Mrs Beale. ‘What did the Chinese woman say to your maid?’

  Mrs Beale dabbed at her eyes. ‘You may tell him, Carlota.’

  Carlota glanced at the Chinese woman, then turned to Lachlan and flapped the air with her hands. ‘She say...’

  He listened with sharp attentiveness as Carlota explained in a mixture of English and Portuguese that the Chinese have a way of preserving the body so that it remained sweet and incorruptible for many years, and the Chinese woman had said that such was the way of this beautiful young lady who should now be preserved, sweet and incorruptible.

  ‘Yes! She is right,’ he said huskily. ‘Ask her to arrange it at once.’

  The Chinese woman looked at him, and seemed to understand him. ‘Gwai,’ she warned.

  ‘Costa many monies, O senhor!’ Carlota said.

  ‘Have it done as she says it can be done!’ Lachlan snapped.

  By that night the specially constructed Chinese coffin had been delivered, worked on by a team of expert craftsmen. And later still, the small tribe of Chinese women had finished their art of everlasting purity, and bowed to him graciously.

  ‘Joi gin,’ each whispered as they left the room, leaving him alone with Jane who lay sweet and incorruptible inside a beautiful lead and silver casket lined in white silk, looking as if she was simply in a peaceful sleep.

  He drew up a chair and sat to look at her. He spent hours just looking at her. In the darkest hour of the night Marianne gently touched his hand, but it was George Jarvis who whispered to him: ‘You sleep now, my father.’

  When he gave no sign of hearing, both children sat down at his feet and accompanied him in his silent vigil.

  Was happiness truly such a fleeting thing? he asked himself. Were the Gods truly jealous of those on earth who possessed it? ‘Paradise,’ someone had said in ancient times, ‘is a place which lies in the East.’ And he knew now that place was in India. Calicut had been his Garden of Eden, where the sun had set and the moon had risen over a house and garden basking in happiness and where there had been no pain or gloom or sin.

  And within the dark mists of his silent torment he felt he was dying himself, as the nightmare went on.

  *

  ‘She was a heretic! Both of you – heretics! She will not be buried in Holy Ground.’

  Lachlan stared in shock at the Portuguese official. ‘But the priest said – ‘

  ‘The priest is a Jesuit! All Jesuits think they are above the law of the Portuguese government in Macao. Take heed, Britisher, there is no cemetery here for heretics. And any Jesuit priest found to have assisted at the burial of a heretic will pay with his own death. Who is this priest? What is his name?’

  For a long time the two men stood staring at each other in silence.

  At last Lachlan slowly turned and walked out of the dim office, pausing at the door to look back for a moment, speak a few words, then closed the door quietly behind him.

  The Portuguese official turned to the window and watched him as he left the building and walked into the sunny square of Largo do Senado, watching until the Britisher was out of sight, his eyes troubled and his heart beating with a vague fear, for never had a man looked at him with such black hatred, and still his parting words trembled in the air.

  ‘May God damn your soul in Hell for all eternity!’

  *

  The gentlemen of the British factory looked at each other in silence, and then gazed at him compassionately. His wife had been dead four days now, and they were sure he had not slept. His face had a worn pallor and there were deep shadows under his eyes.

  ‘I think you still do not understand,’ said Mr James Drummond gravely. ‘When the Portuguese say your wife cannot be buried in Catholic soil, they mean the whole of Macao, within the city walls. Outside the walls is Chinese territory, but she cannot be buried there. The Chinese do not allow other religions to desecrate their soil either.’

  ‘So where then, in God's holy name, can I bury my wife?’

  ‘We have no religious minister here,’ said Mr Reid, `and never have had one. There are too few of us to warrant one being sent, you see. In the past Protestants have been buried in the Catholic grounds, but only by those priests who are prepared to risk their lives in so doing. The only place left, and where a number of other Protestants have been buried, is in that small strip of neutral territory beneath the city walls.’

  ‘But that neutral ground is not consecrated ground, is it?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Then it is not good enough!’

  ‘I'm sorry.’ Mr Reid was startled at the savagery in Lachlan's voice. ‘I'm sorry … but does it really matter where a body is buried? I know you are a good man, but I'm sure God will – ‘

  ‘No, sir!’ Lachlan pointed towards the room where Jane lay. ‘She was a good girl! An angel. All her principles were good and kind. And she will not be buried under some filthy dust outside the city walls of Macao!’

  After a silence, Mr Beale said quietly, ‘There is another place, up on the empty hills.'’

  Lachlan looked at him. ‘But you said that was Chinese territory.’

  ‘Yes, yes, it is, but...’ An idea had come to Mr Beale and he sat forward as he voiced it. ‘Perhaps we could take her up there in secret, during the night, and with all of us helping, perhaps we could bury her on the hills and get away before morning without the Chinese knowing anything about it.’

  He looked questioningly at Lachlan to see his reaction, but Lachlan's mind was miles away. ‘Well?’ said Mr Beale. ‘Do you think it worth a try, to take her up to the hills under cover of the night?’

  ‘No,’ said Lachlan, coming out of his thoughts. ‘No, she will not be buried anywhere in China. There will be no hole in the dark burial for my wife.’

  An idea had come to him too – the best idea of all, and he could not understand why he had not thought of it before. He said incredulously: ‘Why did I even consider leaving my angel alone in this foreign and hostile place? I will take her back with me to India.’

  ‘What? Good gracious! I say, dear boy, are you mad?

  The small British group looked at him as if he was indeed mad.

  ‘All the way back to India!’

  ‘My dear man, are you not getting this whole business out of proportion? In the end what does it really matter? The whole world is one big graveyard.’

  But Lachlan was suddenly and stubbornly resolved to taking Jane back with him to India. That night, for the first time, he lay down to sleep with a small measure of peace; but the nightmare went on.

  *

  The Chinese officials refused to allow him to take the coffin out of the country.

  The government of Macao, Lachlan began to realise, was not a simple matter to comprehend. The Chinese ruled, and the Portuguese ruled, depending on which door you happened to step through. Officially, Macao was ruled by the Chinese under a Portuguese administration. And the Chinese refused him permission to take his wife aboard a ship.

  Slowly he was beginning to understand that here in Macao he had enemies all around him – not because of his religion – but because he was British.

  The Portuguese hated the British because they had stolen nearly all the valuable land and rich trading posts they had founded in India. Even Bombay – Bom Baìa – the Good Bay, had belonged to the Portuguese, before the British swept in.

  The Chinese hated the British because twenty-four years earlier, in 1773, the British had unloaded a thousand chests of Bengal opium in Canton, and were still managing by corrupt and illicit methods to unload thousands of chests of the addictive ‘foreign mud’ every year, in return for China's precious tea.

  It did not seem to matter to these Western barbarians that, every year, more and more Chinese addicts were needed to ke
ep up the demand for Indian opium in order to supply the British nation's craving for tea.

  And China's tea was not the only thing the Western barbarians wanted. In the past there had been a number of Anglo-Dutch attempts to move into China and drain it of its riches. The first invasion attempt had been at Macao, but the Portuguese had joined the Chinese in fighting them off.

  Since then, under the guise of legitimate trade, the British had practically taken over Canton, and now had their greedy eyes on the superior harbour of Hong Kong.

  For almost a century the Chinese had been noting the activities of the British all over the world, and they had no intention of allowing the British to carve up China in the same way they had sliced up India.

  The Chinese Mandarins and Portuguese officials had no charity to spare for the bereaved husband, not the smallest drop of mercy, because he was one of the opium-smuggling, land-grabbing British.

  But even if he had found a way around the solid steel of Chinese officialdom and managed, somehow, by bribery or some other means, to get permission from the Chinese government to leave with Jane, he quickly learned that there was still no way he could take her out of Macao, because of the superstitions of the ordinary Chinese themselves. Their spiritual beliefs would not allow them to carry a coffin on their sampans and junks. Macao's inner harbour was simply not deep enough for a heavy sea-going vessel, and without a sampan or junk, there was no way he could get out to sea to board a ship.

  He had managed, with the help of his friends, to secure a passage on an English ship that was lying at the mouth of the outer harbour, but when he arrived at the waterfront, and the junk sailors saw his cargo, they waved their hands angrily and refused to take him.

  For hours he beseeched and offered bribes, in a position to do nothing else, but all in vain. Daybreak found him sitting on a box at the waterfront, numb and sick and swamped in exhaustion, surrounded by all his rejected cargo, a huge Moor servant, two Indian children, and a young wife in a coffin.