The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (45 page)

Manners peered at her. Then, leaning on the railing of the verandah, he stared into the shadows of the courtyard. Nothing moved. He turned back to her. ‘No,' he said. ‘Please don't leave.'

‘I mustn't. I can't,' breathed Fan Yimei.

‘For a few moments. Sit with me. Talk with me. I could … I could do with company tonight,' said Manners.

‘I can … I can call Mother Liu,' said Fan Yimei. ‘Perhaps Chen Meina…'

‘No,' said Manners. ‘You misunderstand me … Please.'

‘Major Lin…' she started.

‘I know,' he answered. ‘I know … But please. For a short while. Keep me company tonight.'

Fan Yimei remained very still, her head bowed. Manners moved a heavy hand up and wiped a flick of hair from his forehead. He shrugged, made as if to say something, then reached forward and gently lifted her chin, looking deeply into her eyes as he did so. ‘You're crying,' he said. ‘Please don't cry. Here.' He reached into his pocket and dabbed her cheek with his handkerchief. ‘You're remarkably beautiful,' he said softly. ‘I've never thought you belonged here. I've watched you. You listen and understand. You're educated. What was the tragedy that brought someone like you to this hellhole?… This country,' he sighed, ‘so many tragedies…' He stepped back and contemplated her. ‘I wouldn't hurt you,' he said. ‘Not for the world.'

The two stood facing each other, one with her head bowed, supporting herself against the pillar, the other larger figure swaying in the doorway. Eventually she nodded. ‘There is a boy,' she said, in a small voice. ‘I will ask for your help.'

‘Yes,' he said, after a pause. ‘Whatever.' He turned heavily and went into the room.

Fan Yimei followed and the door closed.

*   *   *

The courtyard was silent. A bough swung in the light breeze. A dog barked in the alley outside.

A figure moved from the shadow of the trees, a slight figure on tottering feet. It was Su Liping. Cautiously she crept forward, up the steps and onto the balcony ringing the pavilion. Silently she slid along the wall. Hardly daring to breathe, she moved the small panel that disguised Mother Liu's peephole. Trembling, she put her eye to the aperture, and watched for a long while.

*   *   *

Next afternoon George and Jenny with Ah Lee as their escort went for a walk down the country path that ringed the bottom of their hill. It was a bright spring afternoon. The trees were sheathed in a furze of green buds. The winter nakedness of the millet fields was beginning to be covered in a blanket of shoots. Plum blossom was already visible among the orchards. From a distance they could hear a cuckoo, the first after the long winter. It had been their mother's idea to get the children into the fresh air, to gather wild flowers for the vase on the dining-room table.

George was talking excitedly about the Mandarin's annual tiger hunt, which was to take place during the following month in the Black Hills. As usual, invitations had arrived for the foreigners. Last year their father had gone and they had been lucky. A tiger had been found. At bedtime he told them frightening stories of how the huge beast at bay had disembowelled one of the hunting dogs with its paws, and knocked over one of the spearmen, horse and man, how it had broken out of the ring of hunters and charged towards the hillock where the doctor had been waiting with the Mandarin, and how the Mandarin had drawn his bow and slain the tiger with three arrows fired in quick succession, all in the time it took for the doctor to take a frightened breath and fiddle with the safety-catch of his gun. George could never forget the size of the dead animal strung on a pole and carried by four men when the triumphant procession had returned to Shishan.

They were bitterly disappointed that they were not considered old enough to go with their father and Helen Frances, and it was only a small comfort that their mother had agreed to stay behind and keep them company. This year they would have been particularly excited to see Mr Manners and his Japanese military friend among the hunters. They were convinced that Mr Manners would perform extraordinary feats of heroism.

George had found a curved stick, which he had tucked into his shoulder like a rifle. A hunter stalking his prey, he had crept on ahead of Jenny and Ah Lee, who were occupied in gathering violets from the bank on the side of the road. The road curved there and a large willow tree hung down from the bank obscuring the path ahead. George manoeuvred carefully through the drooping branches; in his imagination he was creeping through dense jungle, listening for the growl of the tiger. With a cry he leaped through the willow branches and exploded into the road on the other side, his rifle cocked and ready to fire. ‘Bang! Bang!' he cried.

He found himself face to face with a Chinese boy his own age. The boy, stripped to the waist and nut brown as any peasant, contemplated him silently with his arms folded. George was aware of big white eyes in the dark face, looking at him curiously at first then narrowing superciliously when he saw the stick George was aiming at his face.

The next thing George knew was that the boy had vaulted into the air, at the same time emitting a high-pitched cry like that of a seagull or a crane. For a second he seemed to hang in the air, one leg and arm stretched forward, the other leg curved behind him. Then George felt the stick rip from his hands, as the boy's foot snapped it in two. One end of the stick flicked up and tore his cheek and temple while a glancing blow on his shoulder rolled him into the mud. When he looked up from where he had fallen the boy was standing as he had first seen him, his arms folded, contemplating him. Behind him lounged several tall young men, some holding spears and swords, most with yellow scarves wrapped round their heads. One of the men rested a hand on the boy's shoulder. The boy looked up at the man with a proud smile. George began to cry.

Ah Lee and Jenny appeared round the bend in the road, their arms full of flowers.

Ah Lee screamed something and ran forward dropping his flowers. The man who had congratulated the boy blocked his path. As Ah Lee tried to edge to one side the man in the headscarf moved to counter him. The other men and the boy began to laugh.

Gently the man pushed Ah Lee's chest so he tottered backwards. Ah Lee cursed and swung a blow at the man's head. Effortlessly the man ducked, his leg snaked out and Ah Lee fell on his behind in the mud. ‘You turtle's egg,' he hissed, and launched himself at the man, who caught his head in a shoulder lock and began to twist.

The other Boxers were shouting,
‘Sha! Sha! Sha!'
which George knew was the word for ‘Kill'.

Jenny stood frozen in the middle of the road clutching her flowers.

Suddenly the Boxers fell silent. With a start George recognised the Boxer priest in the middle of them. It was as if he had appeared from nowhere. He was wearing the same strange clothes decorated with pomegranates that George had noticed the last time he had seen him during those unforgettable seconds when the man had stood in front of the oncoming train. Sightlessly, expressionlessly, the priest made a gesture with his hand. Then, turning his back, he moved off down the road that led to the Black Hills. The man who was strangling Ah Lee spat, and dropped his victim to the ground. He kicked the groaning body, then turned after the priest, who was already far down the road. The others followed, including the boy, and in a few moments the road was empty, except for George who was now crawling towards a wheezing Ah Lee, sitting in the dust, clutching his neck and shaking his head, and Jenny standing where she was frozen, her bluebells and violets pressed against her open mouth, her eyes round with horror and fear.

Ten

The gods have descended. It is true.

I saw it—with my own eyes.

 

Dr Airton sat alone by the campfire hugging his mug of tea. The embers crackled into flame, the tall trees loomed, the shadows edged closer, and a drum thudded softly in the forest. He assumed that it was the beaters celebrating the success of the hunt—but the noise welled and subsided and was sometimes quenched altogether when the wind gusted. He would not have been able to swear from which direction the sound was coming or from how far away, or even whether he was imagining it, and this made him feel dislocated and unsure. The presence outside the ring of firelight of the few guards left behind by the Mandarin gave no reassurance; if anything their hovering added to the indefinable sense of menace.

The doctor usually enjoyed camping. He loved the starry nights and the scent of woodsmoke. He felt awed and humbled by vast spaces. He loved the wet dawns and the heart-stopping mystery when the first rays of sunshine blew away the night mists and blazing Nature was revealed in all her glory. Nellie had once asked him what it was in his western shockers that so appealed to him, and he had answered, in all seriousness, ‘The great outdoors, my dear. These are stories about men who live in Paradise.' And he believed it. Whatever squalid gunfight or robbery was the ostensible subject of the penny dreadful, it was the shining backdrop of the prairie that compelled his imagination. His thoughts used to soar over the cacti as he scanned the printed page. The stockman laying his head on his saddle at the end of a hard day's riding, the thin column of smoke rising from the chuck wagon to a sky of scudding clouds, thunder murmuring over the faraway hills, and cattle lowing by the deep-flowing river—this was mankind living at peace in the canvas of Creation as it had been before the Fall, or such had been the message he had laboured to pass to his bemused congregation of Catholic nuns and Chinese invalids in a recent sermon. He had quoted from the psalms: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.' For him cowboys lived in nothing less than an Eden fashioned by the God of the sunrise and the sunset, and sleeping under canvas brought him close to it.

Only tonight it was a darker deity who presided over this camp in the Black Hills.

He shivered and pulled the blanket closer round his shoulders. ‘Pull yourself together, man,' he muttered. ‘You're becoming as agitated as an old woman who's misplaced her teeth.'

He closed his eyes and held his breath in an attempt to quieten his thumping heart, but the mocking image of the Mandarin flashed behind his retina—and the anger and disappointment, which had been growing for a fortnight, welled in his bosom.

It had taken three whole days, and even then an audience had been denied. Three whole days, during which George had tossed on his sickbed, and Jenny had huddled in her nursery chair, not speaking, not responding even to her mother.

He could hardly bear to recall that first scene of horror and pandemonium—Sister Caterina bursting into his office shouting at him in a gush of Italian so that it took him several moments to understand what had happened, then the pounding run through the courtyards and corridors to the infirmary, where Nellie and Helen Frances were struggling with the children shaking uncontrollably in their arms. Nellie had been dabbing at the blood that was running down his son's head. And he had seen immediately the blank terror in his daughter's eyes and her unnaturally pale complexion. For a long second he froze, his mind unable to cope with the implications. His own blood roared in his ears, blocking any sounds. Nellie was calling out to him but he could not make out what she was saying.

The scene seemed to take on a nightmarish aspect of farce, as if a Punch and Judy show were being staged in slow motion in a morgue. In the foreground his son's lifeblood pumped silently over his wife's dress. Behind this central tableau, Ah Sun was beating her husband with a dust tray, screaming curses at him for failing to protect the children; Ah Lee, half swooning on the bed, held his strained and swollen neck in one hand, trying ineffectually to ward off the blows with the other. On the other side of the room, Sister Elena, who might have been expected to help, was relieving her consternation by yelling and gesticulating at the major-domo, Zhang Erhao, who stood hangdog by the window, clearly failing to comprehend any of the nun's contradictory instructions. Outside the window the moon faces of the opium addicts stared in blankly.

After an age, his physician's instincts took over and started him into mechanical activity. He could not remember now what he had said or how he had restored order. It had taken only a short examination to apprehend that mercifully there was no serious physical hurt inflicted. George was bruised and had a nasty gash on his temple, Jenny—thank Providence—was untouched, and Ah Lee, while in pain, had no injury that would not soon be mended. There was no denying, however, the terror and shock to which the children had been subjected. It had therefore been in a state of barely controlled rage that he had struggled into his formal clothes and walked the interminable two miles to the
yamen
—only to find that the big wooden gates were closed and his path barred by two well-armed
yamen
runners.

‘Do you not know who I am?' he had shouted in their impassive faces. ‘I am the foreign
daifu,
the Mandarin's friend. I demand to be let in.'

The two guards had grinned at each other and folded their arms.

He had pushed past them and banged on the gate with the end of his cane, only to be seized and thrown roughly to the ground. The smiles on the
yamen
runners' faces had changed to scowls and one had drawn his sword.

The small door in the gate creaked open and the chamberlain, Jin Lao, stood smiling above him. ‘Honourable Daifu, why are you lying on the ground? Your clothes are covered in dust.'

‘Jin Lao! Jin Lao! I never thought I'd be so glad to see you.' Airton panted to his feet. ‘You must take me to the Mandarin. A terrible thing has happened. I must see him right away.'

‘A terrible thing? I am grieved to hear it. Has another of the mad American's children run away, perhaps?'