Mr Chen's Emporium

by Deborah O'Brien

  About the Book

  Perfect for book clubs, Mr Chen’s Emporium is an enchanting historical love story, as East meets West in a sleepy NSW gold rush town.

  In 1872, seventeen-year-old Amy Duncan arrives in the Gold Rush town of Millbrooke, having spent the coach journey daydreaming about glittering pavilions and gilded steeples. What she finds is a dusty main street lined with ramshackle buildings.

  That is until she walks through the doors of Mr Chen’s Emporium, a veritable Aladdin’s cave, and her life changes forever. Though banned from the store by her dour clergyman father, Amy is entranced by its handsome owner, Charles Chen . . .

  In present-day Millbrooke, recently widowed artist Angie Wallace has rented the Old Manse where Amy once lived. When her landlord produces an antique trunk containing Amy’s intriguingly diverse keepsakes – both Oriental and European – Angie resolves to learn more about this mysterious girl from the past.

  And it’s not long before the lives of two very different women, born a century apart, become connected in the most poignant and timeless ways.

  Deborah O’Brien’s fiction debut is a mesmerising story of forbidden love and following one’s heart . . .

  ‘A real charmer and a fine debut.’ – Deborah Rodriguez, author of The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title

  Part One

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Part Two

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Part Three

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Part Four

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Five

  Chapter 15

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Q&A WITH DEBORAH O’BRIEN

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  AUTUMN

  ‘You shall have an emporium

  selling fine silks and wondrous wares . . .

  And you will be garbed in a suit,

  befitting one of the great merchants of the town.’

  ‘Histoire d’Aladdin, ou la lampe merveilleuse’

  Nuit CCCXVIII [Antoine Galland c.1710]

  1

  ARRIVALS

  Then – 1872

  Amy Duncan was only halfway through her journey and already she was longing for Sydney and its cool harbour breezes. As she waited at the coach stop outside Granthurst railway station, her new straw bonnet, tilted forward in the latest fashion, could do nothing to protect her face from the midday sun. If only she could board the next train back to Redfern terminal, she would be in her aunt’s house by suppertime. But that was the wishful thinking of a selfish girl who cared only to lead her own life. And that life she must forget for the foreseeable future. Her father had written saying her mother was ill – not dangerously so, but serious enough to need help with the chores. It was Amy’s duty to join her family.

  While the Cobb and Co coach to Millbrooke stood waiting, the driver loaded her luggage on top. Two gentlemen were already seated among the bags, cabbage-tree hats on their heads and pipes in their mouths. Prospectors off to the goldfields? She pitied them having to spend five hours perched on the roof in this March heat. Thank goodness she would be sitting inside with the ladies and children, though, of course, being inside would provide no protection from a band of highwaymen. Surveying the flimsy structure with its quartet of weary-looking horses, she wondered whether it could even complete the journey, let alone outrun a gang of bushrangers. Not that she was carrying any valuables, bar a cameo belonging to her grandmother and a single sovereign hidden at the bottom of her trunk.

  ‘Ye can board now, miss,’ said the coachman.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she replied. ‘Do you suppose there may be an encounter with a highwayman?’

  ‘I’ope not. For they ain’t the swashbucklers ye might imagine ’em to be.’

  Amy blushed. How could he possibly have guessed that she pictured bushrangers as Antipodean Robin Hoods, no matter what The Sydney Morning Herald said about them being thuggish brigands?

  ‘Did you ever have a brush with the O’Reilly Gang?’ she asked as the driver checked the harnesses.

  ‘It was me great fortune ne’er to meet ’em in me travels. They was hanged last year, thank the Lord. Good-for-nothings, the three of ’em. Ne’er worked a day in their lives. Stole sheep and ’orses when they was boys and then graduated to the gold escorts. Shot one of their own in a public ’ouse in Millbrooke and buried ’im under the floor.’

  ‘Millbrooke? You mean . . .’

  ‘That was their home town. Used to visit their lady friends in a bawdy house in the main street, though the bleedin’ coppers was jus’ down the road. Pardon me French, miss.’

  Amy smiled to indicate she wasn’t offended and nodded enthusiastically for him to continue.

  ‘Not a soul ever put those lads in. The folks there was too scared of bein’ shot. Though I shouldna speak of such things to a young lady like yeself. It will only give ye nightmares.’

  But it didn’t. On the contrary, as the coach jolted its way through scrubby bushland, she daydreamed about the Gold Rush town which was to be her home, seeing a magical city like Mr Coleridge’s Xanadu, its pavements inlaid with precious metals, its streets strewn with nuggets and its streams flowing yellow with gold dust. If this Millbrooke was indeed a glittering and sophisticated place, she might even be able to tolerate living in her father’s house again.

  Just as she was conjuring up the exterior of that very residence, complete with a shining fountain and jewelled peacocks, the coach arrived at a low building skirted by a broad verandah, and the driver announced the changing station. Here the mail was delivered and the passengers took refreshments. Amy had been sharing the carriage with a worn-out mother, her three restless offspring and a gentleman, who had introduced himself as a commercial traveller and was now entertaining the children by showing them haberdashery items from his sample case. The two men in cabbage-tree hats sat on the verandah, smoking their pipes and drinking from a flagon that Amy supposed must contain some sort of alcohol. The devil’s drink, she could hear her father say.

  When they set off again, Amy closed her eyes and tried to return to the golden city. But the heat was so oppressive, it was hard to concentrate. Suddenly there was a terrified bellow from the horses and the carriage came to a shuddering stop. A masked bandit on a white charger appeared at the window, brandishing a pistol. ‘Stand and deliver,’ he demanded, as he dismounted and ordered them out of the coach.

  The children were cowering behind their terrified mother and even the prospectors looked nervous, but Amy was bewitched by the velvety voice and confident bearing. One by one, the passengers handed over their valuables. When Amy offered up her grandmother’s cameo, the masked stranger pushed her hand gently away and told her to keep it. She smiled at his gallantry and ventured a glance at the mysterious brown eyes shining behind the mask. Then he lifted her into his arms and swung her onto his steed.

  ‘Spare the young lady,’ cried the commercial traveller, as the bandit mounted his horse with Amy behind him.

  ‘Do not listen to him,’ Amy whispered in the outlaw’s ear.

  He hesitated for less than a moment, then leaned forward and loosed the reins, crying, ‘Gee ho, Fleetfoot,’ and they galloped away. Not towards the golden city and the setting sun, bu
t in the opposite direction, towards the harbour lights in the far distance. With her arms wrapped tightly around his chest, Amy clung to her rescuer as they cantered across fields and flew over hedgerows. When they came to a deep ravine, the charger baulked. Could they make it? She held her breath. Then they leaped into the air, landing with a jolt on the other side. And all at once she was awake, her mouth dry and her head aching from the heat. Opposite her, the children were napping and their mother was listlessly wiping her brow.

  The eucalypt forests which had filled the landscape for most of the journey had given way to open fields and rolling hills. A row of hawthorn trees beside the road could have come straight from her native Scotland. They crossed a little creek, the horses straining as they pulled the coach and its load up a hill on the other side. Buildings were starting to appear and Amy tried to look out the window, but the children were in the way, jostling with each other for a better view. Then the road levelled out and the coach came to an abrupt stop.

  Amy’s head throbbed and her navy-blue dress stuck to her body as she waited on the boardwalk, her travelling bag and trunk beside her. Meanwhile her father was nowhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of gilded streets or golden pavilions. In their place, she saw only a road made of earth and an odd mix of ramshackle huts with low, tin roofs interspersed with grander two-storey edifices, their parapets crowned with Grecian urns. It was hard to determine which buildings might be the public-houses her father had so railed against in his letters as the source of all licentiousness and debauchery, but Amy did wonder whether the ugly orange building near the coach stop could be one of them.

  What a peculiar place this Millbrooke was. If towns were like people, this was a charlady donning her mistress’s pearls and pretending to be a grand dame. Amy longed to be back in Sydney with its tearooms and emporia, its theatres and pleasure gardens, and dear Aunt Molly. But she would bear this place for her mother’s sake. The Millbrooke chapter of her life couldn’t last forever. She straightened her back and filled her lungs with the hot, dusty air. Now where was her father?

  Five months ago, when the Reverend Matthew Duncan was transferred from his Sydney parish to St Aidan’s in Millbrooke, seventeen-year-old Amy had stayed behind to finish her schooling, moving into the Newtown house of her Aunt Molly, a wealthy widow. With no children of her own, Molly had made a special place in her heart for her niece, allowing her all the gentle pleasures Matthew Duncan condemned as venial sins – singing, dancing, concerts and plays, not to mention adornments such as lacy dresses and sparkling necklaces. At Aunt Molly’s Amy could laugh out loud whenever she wanted, and read her favourite books quite openly. In fact, her aunt liked nothing better than to sit in the drawing room, listening to Amy read aloud from the latest work of fiction, just arrived from London.

  Matthew Duncan only approved of reading if it was from the Bible. ‘The Good Book contains the best writing of all time, whether it be poetry or prose,’ he would say. ‘That is because it is inspired by the Lord Himself.’

  Amy found the Bible beautiful, but she also enjoyed Mr Dickens and Mrs Gaskell, the Brontë sisters and Miss Austen. And above all, Sir Walter Scott, whose rousing stories made her proud to be Caledonian.

  As a parting gift, her aunt had produced a pile of Amy’s best-loved books. Her favourite was a volume of fairytales in French, collected by Antoine Galland at the start of the eighteenth century. Amy had topped her class in French at Miss Howe’s School for Ladies and had no trouble reading the foreign text. Inside its pages, she discovered an intrepid Chinaman by the name of Aladdin, who had quickly become the hero of her dreams.

  ‘I know you love this book,’ Aunt Molly had said as Amy packed it into her trunk. ‘All the same, I do not advise you to read it to your little brothers. Some of the tales are not entirely suitable for small children.’

  ‘But I would be translating the stories for them, so I could easily omit the grisly incidents, and anyway it is only the villains who meet a nasty end.’

  ‘Indeed. However, there is also a degree of immodesty some might find distasteful. I recall, for example, that Aladdin slept in the same bed as the princess before they were man and wife. It is your father I am thinking of, my dear. I don’t want him to accuse me of being a bad influence. So do keep it out of his sight.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Aunt Molly. I shall hide it in my petticoat drawer.’

  All around her, Amy could hear languages she didn’t recognise, and unfamiliar accents speaking her native tongue. She herself had once possessed a distinctive accent, inherited from her father, but elocution lessons had softened the elongated vowels and rolled rr until she sounded exactly like her mother and her aunt, who both spoke in the genteel manner of the English Home Counties, despite being Glaswegian by birth.

  She had never seen such a diverse group of people before – prospectors in their shabby clothes, men in high-necked suits, children with bare feet, and ladies in crisp cotton gowns and floral bonnets. Walking briskly along the boardwalk was a young woman with a parasol held aloft. She wore a shiny blue dress, not a sensible navy like Amy’s, but the colour of a summer sky. What a fetching gown and such a sweet face with those cherry-red lips, rosy cheeks and milky complexion. The bodice of the girl’s dress, however, was astonishingly low, revealing far more than was fashionable in Sydney. As she approached, Amy smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon.’

  A puzzled look crossed the girl’s face and then slowly she returned the smile. ‘Good afternoon to you, ma’am,’ she responded with a bob of her head, though they were surely much the same age.

  Then, with a deepening blush, Amy realised the girl was probably someone her aunt would refer to as a ‘lady of ill-repute’. Close up, Amy could see the rouge applied generously to her mouth and cheeks. Aunt Molly had said such ladies were free with their favours. Amy wasn’t sure exactly what her aunt meant by that. From the tone of her voice, she hadn’t been referring to acts of charity.

  The girl moved on and Amy turned her gaze back up the dusty road to see a column of Chinamen approaching. They almost seemed to be dancing, though it was more of a shuffle than a waltz. Across their shoulders they carried bamboo poles with calico bags hanging from the ends. As they came closer Amy could see that each wore his hair in a pigtail under his peaked straw hat. But what struck her most was their bronze-coloured skin, the exact colour of her father’s communion chalice.

  Shadows were lengthening across the main street as she finally caught sight of the Reverend Duncan, hurrying towards her in his dark suit and dog-collar, his face bearing the grim expression he wore like a penitent’s hair shirt. When he stooped and gave her a peck on the cheek, Amy was suddenly aware of the frivolous bunch of velvet violets tucked into the brim of her hat, but he seemed not to have noticed them. He was too preoccupied with the procession of Chinamen shuffling down the street.

  ‘Wretched Celestials,’ he complained. ‘They don’t belong in this country.’

  While Amy was wondering how anyone would partner a curse-word like ‘wretched’ with something as heavenly as ‘celestial’, he took her chin and turned her face to his.

  ‘Ye didna speak to anyone, did ye, Amy Duncan?’

  She didn’t dare mention the young woman with the parasol. But before she could decide how to reply, he had hoisted her trunk onto his shoulder and picked up the travelling bag.

  ‘Get a move along, lass. Yer ma has the tea ready.’

  Now

  Tears streaming down her face, Angie Wallace sat on the hardwood floor of the sitting room, hemmed in by a circle of cardboard packing boxes, most of them still unopened. She should have known better. It was the photos that had set her off – they always did. Just when she had passed a full day without a single tear. Just when she’d started to imagine little scenes from a possible future, instead of playing the past like a movie channel in her head, month after month.

  Stupid of her to open the carton containing the albums and shoeboxes of photos and memorabilia. She s
hould have followed Vicky’s advice: ‘Mark each carton with its contents and which room it should go in. Then open them in order of practical priority.’ Which is of course what Vicky had done when she and Paul moved from their big house in Mosman to an apartment in Darling Harbour.

  ‘You need to plan a move carefully,’ Vicky had said. ‘Moving house can be just as stressful as getting a divorce or losing a spouse.’ Then Vicky had flushed pink as she realised what she had just said to a woman who had not long become a widow. Practical Vicky, but not always tactful. She was a veritable font of household hints and domestic do-it-yourself. She should have had her own column in a newspaper or perhaps an online blog: ‘Vicky Lamb – domestic detective, solving your darkest and dirtiest problems’.

  Angie hadn’t deliberately ignored Vicky’s advice, but some-how, in the chaos of wrapping things and putting them in boxes, she’d forgotten about it. Her sons had helped with the packing. It hadn’t been easy for them to see the bits and pieces of their family life crammed into cartons. Ever since Phil’s death, formerly meaningless objects had become the precious relics of lost relationships, between a husband and wife, a father and his sons.

  Nor were the boys happy about their mother’s decision to move to a town so far away from Sydney.

  ‘This is a time when you need your support network,’ said Blake. ‘Moving away is the worst thing you could do. It’s known as the geographical avoidance ploy. GAP for short.’

  It sounded ridiculous, but he was doing his Master’s in Psychology and he should know.

  ‘It’s like losing both parents,’ said Tim.

  That really hurt. Still, the boys were adults now with their own lives and Angie had to loosen her dependence on them and shake herself out of the lethargy that hung over her like a shroud.

  Millbrooke had happened by chance. At the four-month mark, Vicky and Chrissie had bundled her up and taken her on a girls’ weekend to the country. Lacking the energy to protest, she had allowed them to make a booking at a B&B and throw her clothes into an overnight bag. All the wrong things, as it turned out, but Angie couldn’t complain, having shown no interest in the first place.