The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (96 page)

‘You're not proposing to partake of these wages of sin?' Edward had cried, but the women ignored him, continuing with what they were doing.

‘I think that you should apologise to Mary,' Nellie had muttered, after a while.

‘For God's sake, woman, she's behaved like a whore. Have you not realised what she's just done?'

Nellie had contemplated him calmly. ‘Mary's what she is, Edward,' she said. ‘And she's feeding us, although she doesn't have to.'

Nellie often reflected back to that moment. It had marked for her the change in her husband's behaviour—his retreat into sullen melancholy, the awful passivity that had since overtaken him—and it had also marked for her the moment when she had quietly assumed leadership of their little group.

Nothing more had been said. Edward had sat on a tree-stump some distance off, while they silently ate what they could recover of the meal. Nellie had taken a portion to him, but he had shrugged her away. In the morning they had carried on with their journey.

So much had happened since—so many terrible things. There were many days during which even Mary was unable to produce food for them, and on the occasions when she could, nobody now said anything. They ate what she managed to provide, even Edward, although from that day on he had not spoken a word to her. One day she left them. They had long ago departed the confines of the Black Hills forests and were wandering through a plateau, pitted with deep gullies, in many of which were dwellings of the poor peasants who lived in those parts. They made their homes in caves dug out of the soft gully walls, surviving on the meagre crops they could gather from the terraces they had carved out of the steep slopes.

They soon learned to avoid these troglodyte villages, hiding where they could find shelter in the open countryside. They had not forgotten that they were foreigners and Christians in a country that had vowed to exterminate them. They saw no ostensible signs of Boxers, but in one village they came across a poster on a wall that contained xenophobic slogans and repeated the words of an unforgiving imperial decree. The villagers had looked at them with hostility, gathering in knots and pointing at them. They had left hurriedly, and some stones had been hurled in their direction. Afterwards they had kept their distance from human habitations. Without ever actually acknowledging it, they relied on Mary, who would slip away after they had all lain down to sleep. Usually there would be food of some kind waiting for them when they woke. Only one night she did not come back.

They had waited a day and a night tense with worry, hunger gnawing their bellies. On the second day they had made their way into the village. People stepped aside as they passed, and would not answer their questions. Finally they came upon an old woman, who pointed to one of the caves at the far end of the valley before hurrying away. There they had found Mary, cooking a meal at the hearth inside the cave. A grey-haired, wispily bearded peasant sat rigidly on a stool, ignoring them. Mary had burst into tears and told them that this man had agreed to keep her. She had had enough. She did not want to run any more. She was sorry. She asked for their forgiveness. Before they left, she had pressed on them several baskets of food.

The supply had lasted five days and after that they had no recourse but to beg for alms in the villages they came to, whatever the risks attached. Sometimes they found kindness and hospitality. Usually they were driven away with imprecations, and for one frightening night they were locked in a cell by the constable, but his wife had taken pity on Jenny and George and they were released in the morning.

Their emaciated bodies were covered with sores. Their feet were blistered in their rotting shoes. They were lice-ridden. Insect bites festered. It was a miracle that none of them had succumbed to illness more serious than diarrhoea, but at these high altitudes the heat was not oppressive in the daytime, and the nights were only cool. Nellie coaxed them on, rousing them in the morning when they did not wish to move, somehow finding the words to shame them into going on when they despaired.

Frankly she was amazed that Helen Frances had survived. There had been some very bad nights when she had screamed for her drugs, and the nights when she slept soundly were as bad: she would shout in her nightmares the names of Henry and Tom, or her hands would scrabble with the air as if she was fighting off an attacker. That she had a child growing in her belly was clearly visible now. Indeed, the swelling womb seemed to be sucking the life out of the rest of her body, like a hungry parasite demanding sustenance while its host starved. Nellie had become accustomed, when rationing out the portions of whatever meagre food they had been given, to loading Helen Frances's plate at the expense of her own; and sometimes her pity for her own suffering children meant that she took nothing for herself at all, splitting her whole portion between Helen Frances, Jenny and George. She was strong, she told herself, as she fought the pangs of hunger; she would survive, because her loved ones depended on her.

She felt a fierce, maternal love for Helen Frances. Sometimes, watching her thin frame waddling painfully along a stony path, realising that with the heavy weight in her belly every step she took was a matter of will, she felt through her sympathy a burning pride in her foster-daughter's courage. Breathing heavily, her face grimly set, Helen Frances never complained, though sometimes the strain became too much for her, and they all had to rest until she recovered the strength to go on again. On these occasions Edward would pace listlessly back and forth, or slump by himself on the side of the road. He was no longer the physician. Something had died in him. He would answer when spoken to, and once or twice Nellie observed him watching his two children with a tear in his eye, but for most of the time he remained wrapped in his own bitter thoughts. He avoided the others' company, never joining in their conversations round the evening fire. One day she noticed that his hair was nearly white, and his face had become worn like an old man's. Nellie could not think what was wrong with him—although it pained her to see him like this. Gradually—she was reluctant to admit it to herself even though she knew in her heart it was so—she had come to despise him. Sometimes she wondered if she had not come to despise all men, with their shallowness, their bravado, their violence, and their ultimate weakness.

Nellie would occasionally think of Helen Frances's irresponsible father, Frank. She doubted that the girl's deep reserves of willpower and her capacity for endurance were inherited from him. She wondered what sort of woman her mother had been—she knew that Helen Frances had never known her, but Frank had always spoken of her as a goddess. Had Helen Frances inherited this extraordinary tenacity from her mother? Nellie knew that this was idle speculation. Wherever they came from, Helen Frances's qualities were her own. She also possessed something much more fundamental, something shared by every woman who had ever borne a child: the knowledge that another life was growing inside her. Nellie had seen her pregnancy as the cause of her weakness, the slow draining of her strength on top of the malnutrition that threatened them. Perhaps she should be thankful that Helen Frances was pregnant. For all that had happened to her, she was a woman and a prospective mother, with all the instincts and fierce determination of any mother to protect the life of her child. Far from weakening her, it gave her the will to live.

One thing surprised Nellie. Not once since they had left the train had Helen Frances ever mentioned Henry Manners, although she would sometimes talk of Tom with fondness and even humour. Nellie knew that Helen Frances was aware that he was dead: on their first night around the campfire Edward had described to them the terrible scene he had come across in the Mandarin's compartment. She herself had been surprised when the extent of Manners's villainy had been revealed, and she had expected that Helen Frances would react to defend him, or give some other evidence of denial, or at least of sorrow—but the girl had merely listened with her head bowed, and had never spoken of the matter again. Well, she thought, perhaps it was for the best. As far as the world would need to know, Helen Frances's child could be Tom's. Perhaps it would be kind even to invent a marriage. Sadly she acknowledged that there was no one alive who could gainsay this now. If Tom had not died a martyr's death he would have done the right thing. She was sure of that. Of the two men in Helen Frances's life, the scales of Providence had clearly fallen on the side of the most worthy, and Henry Manners, at the end of his miserable existence, had merely shown what a beast he was. It was sad—she had come to like him, even admire him, but his final treachery had been unforgivable. It was nevertheless remarkable that Helen Frances had put the memory of him so easily behind her …

What was she thinking? Nellie roused herself. Daydreaming by the pool, when the evening would soon be advancing and she had to return with water to her thirsty family! If she did not return quickly the social consequences of Helen Frances's pregnancy would be academic. As it was, she feared that the girl would not survive many more days. Even the miracle of finding this water might not be enough to save her.

Her tired body was reluctant to leave the cool spring, but she forced herself to sit up and fill the goatskin. Poor darlings, she thought. Jenny and George must be going mad with thirst. Well, she would reach them shortly. She had enough water in the skin to last them for today. And tomorrow she would bring them here. Perhaps George really would find a way to trap one of the marmots—the little white furry animals that inhabited these wastes and had first charmed, then later annoyed them as they stuck their whiskered heads over the ridges, always just too far out of reach to catch. A vision of hot meat stew suddenly overwhelmed her. She closed her eyes. Enough. She would go mad. She leaned down and picked up the goatskin, and took two steps, dragging it behind her. And froze.

The late-afternoon sun was throwing shadows over the grass, but the shadow she saw in front of her, in dark, precise clarity, was not projected by any natural phenomenon of hillside or cloud. Thinking that she was dreaming she turned, and was dazzled for a moment by the sun, but unmistakably, in front of the fiery ball, stood the silhouette of a man. He was of short, squat build and was sitting on a small pony. He was holding another horse on a rein. A shotgun hung over his shoulder, he had a fur hat at a rakish angle on his head, and he was wearing a tunic with wide skirts that came to the top of his boots. As her eyes adjusted to the glare, she saw that he was smiling at her.

Something in his kind expression put her immediately at ease.

*   *   *

For the children, the months they stayed with Orkhon Baatar remained in their memories as a golden period in their lives. Each morning, when the small hole at the top of the
ger,
the felt tent in which they all slept, began to pale with the dawn light, they would wake to see the comforting figure of Sarantuya, Orkhon Baatar's plump wife, feeding dried cakes of animal dung into the stove. Orkhon Baatar himself would have been up long beforehand, stepping quietly over the sleeping bodies to release his sheep from their pens and tend the horses. By the time the wooden door opened and his wrinkled, humorous face reappeared, greeting the waking family with a merry laugh and as often as not producing from behind his back a rabbit or a partridge he had just shot, the stove would be alight and the tea kettle on top of it beginning to boil. They would eat their breakfast, huddled in a ring round the stove. Orkhon Baatar would take his proud position on the one patterned carpet the family possessed and pass round the bowls full of curdled whey, which he would pour out from a copper jug. He knew how eager George and Jenny would be to get away, and he would tease them, inventing excuses as to why they should delay, feigning tiredness or a sore stomach, or discussing the weather with his wife in such interminable detail that the children would be fidgeting with irritation—but he always knew when their patience was getting exhausted, and then his eyes would twinkle, and his mouth would open in a smile revealing his jagged teeth, and he would ask, in his broken Chinese, if there was anyone here who would be willing to help him find his sheep today. That would be the signal for George and Jenny to leap to their feet, and rush out of the
ger
into the bright sunshine. (In their memories it never rained and every day was glorious.)

Soon they would have saddled and be sitting astride two of his short-legged ponies, following him at breakneck speed down the sloping valley to where his sheep were grazing on a hill. He would turn round occasionally to smile at them, his shotgun bouncing on his back. They always tried to overtake him, and he would deliberately slow down his horse, until they had nearly caught up with him, and when they were near he would howl like a wolf and, leaning forward in his saddle, gallop away to the bottom of the hill, wagging his finger at them when they caught up.

For the next hour as Orkhon Baatar checked his animals, the children would lie on the grass, inventing names for the shapes of the big clouds that rolled in the sky above them. Orkhon Baatar had taught George how to catch a grasshopper, and tie a piece of string round its leg so it would chirp in circles around him, but Jenny did not enjoy that game and she was happier making necklaces with flowers. When Orkhon Baatar returned he would squat in the grass beside them and, smiling, ask them what they wanted to do today. Sometimes they went down to the riverbank, where Orkhon Baatar would retrieve a dead mouse from the folds of his coat and tie it to a length of twine. This was the bait for the savage
taimen,
the huge salmon with teeth that protruded from its tongue and could grow in size to nearly five feet in length. While Jenny watched, Orkhon Baatar and George would wade into the river to seek a bush under which one of these monsters might be hiding. If ever they caught one it would give them a fight, which might last for half an hour, but when it was landed, Orkhon Baatar would always throw it back. It was unlucky to kill a fish, he told them. When people died their souls would go into the river and take the form of a fish. He would look solemnly at them as he said this, but then he would laugh so they never knew if he was being serious or not.