Mandarin-Gold (26 page)

'And I foolishly believed I was dealing with a man of honour. As you told me, a promise is a debt. I am offering you the opportunity of paying that debt. You have about fifty-seven minutes in which to do so.'

'I could make over this little company to you, doctor, and then you might be murdered and flung into the sea. Or you could be blacklisted by every merchant and trading company in the East.'

'I could be,' agreed Gunn. 'But not by you, because blackmail is a sword with two sides. And at the first sign of any reluctance of
any
individual to trade with me, I will publish your secret. I am not concerned with continuing the practice of medicine, so I am indifferent to what you say about me. You now have barely fifty-five minutes in which to make out those papers.'

The Parsee picked up his telescope and focused on the
Hesperides.

Gunn crossed to the window by his side and opened the casement. The myriad sounds of a tropic day
_:
rushed in. Casually, he took Bonnarjee's red silk handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his left hand. The Parsee pulled a bell tassel, and spoke rapidly to his servant. The man glanced at .Gunn, went out and returned with the four men who had carried the sedan. They were squat with broad shoulders, shaven heads and cruel, slanting eyes. One wore gold earrings. All carried bamboos and they stood with their bare feet spread well apart like wrestlers.

'These men,' said the Parsee, smiling, 'will deal with you as you should be dealt with.
Then
we will seize the
Hesperides
and bring in my son-in-law. I own other ships with guns.'

'No doubt,' said Gunn. 'But if you apply your telescope again to the
Hesperides
you will see that the ten pounder in her bows is trained on this house.'

He leaned against the window, unwrapped the handkerchief and held it outside. A puff of warm wind made it tremble slightly.

'Touch me with your ruffians and I will drop this handkerchief. At once, MacPherson will open fire. Admittedly, I may be killed but so may you. And, of course, inevitably, your son-in-law. You are a man of decision, so decide now what you want to do. We have talked enough. But remember, I can drop this handkerchief before any of these rogues reach me. And I will.

'I suggest therefore that you do not resort to force or even the threat of violence, as with peasants who disagree over the ownership of a cockerel. Instead, accept that violence is only fit for those who cannot win a duel with words. Now, what is your answer?'

The Parsee swallowed with difficulty. Anger constricted his throat. He would avenge himself on this Gunn somehow; but if not now, then later, in his own time, in his own way. He nodded to his servant. He and the four men bowed and walked backwards. The double doors closed behind them.

'Fifty minutes,' said Gunn, taking in his hand.

'Let me warn you, doctor, that between us there will now be war, and war is made up of many battles,' said the Parsee. 'You may win this first skirmish. You will never win the last.

'It is written: "Let a man avoid evil deeds as a merchant, if he has few companions and carries much wealth, avoids a dangerous road; as a man who loves life avoids poison."

'You love your life, doctor, and I recall from our earlier conversations that you love the prospect of wealth. You may gain your wealth briefly, but you will lose your life.'

'I will also quote from what is written,' replied Gunn. ' "He who has no wound on his hand may touch poison with his hand. Poison does not affect one who has no wound. Nor does evil befall one who does not commit evil." You are poisoned in your mind, Parsee, and you have wounds in your soul.

'You also have about forty-eight minutes in which to give me an answer.'

The Parsee crossed to his desk, took a sheet of paper from a drawer, sat down with his quill and began to write. He handed the paper to Gunn in silence. Gunn read:
I
,
the undersigned, do hereby make over all my shares in Crutchley & Company to Dr Robert Gunn.'

Gunn handed it back to him.

'Add the words,
"in consideration of his services rendered and the return of my cheque for three thousand pounds",'
he said. 'Then call in your man to witness it.'

The Parsee sat down again and wrote at Gunn's dictation. He scattered fine sand from a silver casket to dry the ink. Then he pulled the tassel; the servant came in and signed his name. Gunn folded the paper neatly, put it in his inner pocket, and handed the Par-see his cheque.

'Do not have me attacked on my way back to the
Hesperides,
or our discussion will have been in vain, he told him. 'For again, as Buddha says, "Riches destroy the foolish, and the foolish, by their thirst for riches, destroy themselves".'

'And you have today destroyed yourself, Dr Gunn,' replied the Parsee in a voice so soft it sounded like the hiss of a snake. ‘I would remind you that in your Bible in the Apocrypha it is written, "Gold hath been the ruin of many"?'

'And I would remind you,' retorted Gunn, 'that lack of gold has ruined far more people.'

'We shall see,' said the Parsee, as though the matter was of no further interest. 'Tell me one thing, doctor. What are you going to call your company now?'

'Mandarin-Gold. I will be seeing a lawyer about the necessary paper work when I leave you.'

'So the two things you wish for most, power and money, are united in one name. How revealing! As I say, Dr Gunn, we shall see. Sometimes we can best leave revenge to the gods. The sword of heaven is in no haste to smite. But it never leaves a debt unpaid.'

He turned away, back to the window, as though dismissing an inferior. Gunn waited for a moment and then left the room, walked past the servant, and the four men, along the corridor and out into the waning afternoon sun. His mouth was dry with reaction and he felt suddenly weary.

It was rubbish, of course, that he had the only antidote for the Parsee's son-in-law. He had no such thing. Bonnarjee would recover very quickly on his own. But the Parsee did not know that. Audacity had triumphed — as it had triumphed when he had seized the
Hesperides
and marooned Crutchley; as he was convinced now that it always would. Faint heart never won anything but the chance to be feeble again.

As Gunn walked, however, the Parsee's words echoed and re-echoed in his mind like a gong booming in a well:
'You have today destroyed yourself, Dr Gunn.'

What could the man mean? This was only a business deal, and he was learning that such deals were hard, that inevitably someone must be hurt. The Parsee was angry, of course, and understandably; but Gunn could not shrug off the remark as one simply made through pique.

He had come a long way from that morning when the
Trelawney
had docked at Whampoa, and he had learned that Marion had gone away with another man. True, the road he was following now was not the one he had intended to take when he had first qualified as a doctor. But was that altogether a bad thing? Surely a man could follow many paths to fulfilment and success?

Yet, by so speedily abandoning his principles, and the pledges of the Hippocratic Oath, perhaps he had not only lost his way. Perhaps he had also lost himself?

12

In Which Special Commissioner Lin

Achieves One Aim, and Dr Gunn Another

Captain Elliot bowed to Mackereth, who sat down nervously in a high-backed wicker chair. Through the window of Elliot's office in Macao the sea blazed like blue glass, the sails of the junks were fluttering fans.

'I have asked you here,' said Elliot — who did not like the man and so spoke more roughly than he would normally have done — 'because, apart from Gutzlaff, who is at sea, I understand you speak Cantonese and can read the characters. Am I correct in this assumption?'

'You are, sir,' agreed Mackereth.

When he had first been summoned to Elliot's office, he had wondered uneasily whether tales of boys who visited him in his rooms had reached Elliot's ears; and if they had, whether their accounts would be believed or his. He had prayed long and earnestly beside the narrow bed on which he had lain with so many of these boys in the past, but somehow he had risen from his knees without any comfort from the Almighty.

If the British used their influence to put him out of Macao, if they
wanted
him out — perhaps hoping to injure this newcomer Gunn, who had within months taken over an established company and become so successful with his forays along the coast, for they realized Gunn would never find another interpreter — then where could he go? There was nowhere left in all the world. If he moved in any direction, he would only be going back, and to what? To a bank that had failed, to a memory of wealth no longer his, to old age alone in a cold country.

Now Mackereth sat, legs crossed, hands tightly clenched so that the blood was squeezed from his thin knuckles, eyes fixed intently on Elliot's face.

'We have had a hasty translation done of this Edict from the new Commissioner Lin,' Elliot went on, tapping the paper. 'I'd like you to just read it through to me in the original, and see if you agree with our translation.'

He handed the document .over the desk to Mackereth, who mouthed a few words and then began to read aloud.

' "I call upon you to hand over for destruction all the opium you have in your ships and to sign an undertaking that you will never, bring opium here again, and that you are aware that, if you are found to have done so, your goods will be confiscated and you yourselves dealt with according to the law."'

' ". . . To prevent foreigners from embarking or disembarking. You foreigners have had a week to make up your minds about my earlier Edict, in which I gave you three days to surrender the opium. I have had no answer, so today I have-given orders that all loading and unloading of any foreign vessel will stop.

All craftsmen, employed by foreigners are to leave their service forthwith, and anyone who enters into any agreement or negotiation for service with them in future will be dealt with according to the clause of the Celestial. Code that forbids secret relations with foreign countries."

'That means death,' said Mackereth hoarsely. 'Death. He goes on . . ."If there is any attempt to evade these restrictions, I, the Governor General and the Governor, will obtain permission from Peking to close the harbour to them and put a stop to their trade for ever . . ."

'He says that the British Sovereign will surely take strong measures against you if the trade is stopped, and he gives reasons why he thinks the opium should be surrendered at once. Foreigners must surely dread the wrath of heaven which will punish them if they continue to ruin so many Chinese homes and kill so many opium smokers and opium dealers, for the death penalty is in force for both of these offences.

'Again, British, American and Portuguese ships carrying opium are, like all seafarers, in particular danger from gales, thunderstorms, crocodiles, dragons and the giant salamander. Do they not fear that Heaven, if further offended by these continuing offences, will use these creatures and unnatural forces as instruments of their anger?'.

'Apart from the giant salamander,' interrupted Elliot, 'is all the rest just bluff?'

'With anyone else here, I would say it was,' said Mackereth. 'With Lin, I just do not know. My friends among the merchants say he is entirely incorruptible. He does not want money, or women, or even — and here Mackereth's voice dropped to a whisper — boys. He simply wants to do his duty, and his duty here — as he sees it — is to destroy the opium trade. He thinks he will. I think he can.'

'You confirm my fears,' said Elliot, standing up. 'I had better return to Canton.'

'What course will you adopt there, captain?' Mackereth asked him.

'One that will not be popular with my countrymen. I agree with Commissioner Lin that the opium trade is_ foul and degrading. Why should we force a poisonous drug on these wretched peasants so that a handful of dealers can live like kings and retire to buy honours and squiredoms in England?'

'There is a lot of money involved,' Mackereth pointed out anxiously. True, Gunn had drastically reduced his fee from one thousand pounds a voyage to three hundred, but three hundred was still a very large sum.

'Money is not all important,' replied Elliot. 'You, as a man of the cloth, will be the first to admit that. In my last appointment, I made myself unpopular with the owners of slaves because I insisted they treat them as human beings, not as beasts of burden who happened to walk on two legs.

'They hated me for this. They had a punishment, Mr Mackereth, of awarding slaves fifty-five stripes for almost any offence. Or they locked them in the stocks for three days, or shut them up alone in a dark room for the most trivial misdeed.

'I made every owner keep a true record of all punishments meted out to the slaves. And if these records were falsified or the punishments were too hard, they had to explain the reasons in court. I can tell you, I became most unpopular, Mr Mackereth. But as a man of God you know that the popular way, the easy way, does not always lead on to the true glory. And my policy paid handsomely.

'When I landed in Guinea no taxes were being collected, and it was only a matter of time before those poor black wretches flung themselves on their oppressors and murdered them all. But the owners could not see the advantages of a more liberal policy without persuasion. So I persuaded them. Now the colony is on the way to prosperity.