Shanghai (61 page)

“I am sorry, Mother,” said Mai Bao, the middle daughter, “but I couldn't stop her.”

“You both heard our discussion, I assume?” Jiang asked innocently.

The eldest smiled and shook her head. “No need to play-act, Mother. You wanted them to overhear our conversation. That's fine with me.”

“Make us really beautiful things, sister,” said Yin Bao, “really beautiful.”

“What about clothing for the customers as well as for us?” asked Mai Bao.

Jiang looked at her middle daughter and was, as always, struck by her simple, classic beauty. “Explain, please.”

“We dress as characters from the book, and so do they.”

“We play characters and they play characters,” Yin Bao added. “Our customers don't want to be passively entertained, like watching a courtesan play the arhu—boring, boring, boring—or listening to stories.” She put her finger in her mouth and made a most unladylike vomiting sound. “They want to
be
the stories.” Then she added with a lascivious smile, “And do all the naughty things the characters in the book do.”

“Perhaps,” Mai Bao snapped.

“For certain,” Yin Bao retorted.

Mai Bao took a small step back and said demurely, “What they really want is to be part of the dream we create.”

“Nonsense! They want to have sex in other people's clothes.”

“Because,” Mai Bao's voice arced dangerously, “it allows them into the Flower World that we have so carefully built.”

Jiang nodded. “Very good, Mai Bao.”
Perhaps you will be the next Jiang, my dear,
she thought. Although she didn't really approve of the girl's latest companion, the penniless member of the literati with the ghastly purple mark on his face. Jiang had seen them together many times holding hands and talking softly to each other. Despite the young man, her daughter still attended to her
courtesan duties, entertained at parties, and on rare occasions offered sex to the most ardent of her pursuers. Jiang wondered briefly how the young scholar felt about that, then dismissed her concern. Penniless scholars and whores were the stuff of stories—ancient stories. Although Jiang could not recall a single scholar from a story who had a raspberry mark on his face.

Her other daughter, Yin Bao, was not tradition-bound. She didn't attend dinners and wait to be paid twice a year. She didn't wait to be wooed. She was a modern girl and slept with any customer who could afford her services. She charged such exorbitant rates that only merchants and gangsters—and
Fan Kuei
—could avail themselves of her attentions.

Two such different girls. But only one could become Jiang and join the Ivory Compact.

“I like your idea about costumes for the customers,” Jiang said, then asked, “Any comments from you, Yin Bao?”

The girl threw a practised whorish grin and replied, “The garments should come off simply.”

“Yes, of course,” Jiang said, then asked her eldest, “Is this possible?”

“Mother, it's just cloth. In my hands cloth can be made to do almost anything.”

Jiang nodded, then looked sternly at her two younger daughters. Both of them knew that only one of them would inherit her fortune and her title. Both also knew that they would have to produce at least two daughters if they were to be eligible to become Jiang. But then again, both were young—there was time to produce daughters—or so they thought.

In some ways, the most surprising of all the changes at the Bend in the River may well have been the transformation that took place in Silas Hordoon. Through the magic of Shanghai and the arrival of a certain woman from a small Hereford farming community, the most unexpected thing happened to Silas—love bloomed where before there had been only stone.

Then, as quickly as love had flowered—it withered, and died.

Silas stood above the graves and looked out at the mighty Yangtze River as it turned away from the Huangpo and headed toward the sea. Three marked mounds and a small rise were at his feet. Three souls that had touched him and one that he'd never known.

His father had been cremated as he had requested, and Silas had scattered his ashes across the western reach of the Huangpo where Richard and his brother Maxi had first landed at the Bend in the River. He couldn't think where else to spread his father's remains. It had briefly occurred to him to dust them through the opium dens that had been his father's real final resting place. He'd ultimately discarded the idea, although it held a perverse appeal.

But these mounds before him were graves, and the rise in the land overlooking the powerful river was his choice as a final resting place to honour those he had loved and those who had loved him.

He knelt beside the first grave and placed three sprigs of bamboo in a narrow-necked vase near the small headstone. He felt the bamboo's slender leaves and sensed their life within. His
amah
had never said much to him, but he had spent many nights as a boy nestled into the warmth of her back, and whenever he'd smelled the deep musky odour of her body it had brought on a feeling of safety. Silas knew her but never knew her. There had been a mention of her having children of her own back in Malaya, but he had never met them, nor was there ever an effort to bring the children to their mother. She was just a constant presence in his young life, a presence that was willing to protect him when others were not—and yet, he knew almost nothing about her. Even her real name was a jealously guarded secret. Like many in her position she was referred to simply as
amah.
She cleaned him and had access to his body in a way that no other female ever had. He remembered standing naked and covered with mosquito bites as she applied ointment to each red spot. He had touched her hair as she worked on a knee that had four
bites, one on top of another, and she had looked up at him. Her large brown eyes opened wide and she smiled. He hadn't seen her smile very often so he remembered that. Then she laughed and said, “Put on your clothes, Silas.”

“Put on your clothes, Silas,” he said aloud. The wind picked the words from his lips and flung them along the river and out to the sea. He noted that the bamboo had already begun to align itself to the sun.

The second grave was Milo's. His father had demanded an elaborate funeral for Milo, then had smoked so much opium that he wasn't able to attend. After the public ceremony, Silas had been left alone at the graveside with the coffin awaiting its descent into the pit. He simply turned to the four gravediggers and gave them all the money he had in his pockets to take the coffin to this hill overlooking the Yangtze. And here, beside their
amah,
Milo had rested ever since—although it was hard for Silas to think of his handsome brother at rest. Milo was like the wind and the rain. Like laughter in the darkness and joyous as he gorged on life itself. Silas stifled a swell of tears as a bubble of pain rose in his throat. He put a single stem of orchids on the grave and said only four words, “I am so sorry.” He'd said the words so often that they had taken on the weight of a prayer. They were all that he could find to say. What do you say to a brother you murdered? Now Milo was just one of the ghosts Silas carried on his back. There were times when he could swear that Milo was at his side as he walked around Shanghai—pointing out the fabulous women, the new bars, the prancing ponies. Silas hadn't ridden a horse since his brother's death, and after Richard's death he had sold every horse in the Hordoon stables. But it wasn't enough to expiate his
sin, to gain forgiveness. That had been done by the person in the third grave.

For a moment he looked away, unsure whether he could bear the sight of the grave or its small accompanying mound. But he forced himself to sit beside the simple stone that read: “Here lies my heart.”

Silas remembered reading Chaucer's dream allegories as a young man. He had been stunned by what he thought of as the insensitivity of the young knight who finds a lord crying in the woods. The knight asks the lord why he's crying. The lord immediately replies that his wife has died. The knight seems not to have heard and asks about the dead woman and leads the lord through how he met the woman, fell in love with her, married her, and then how she eventually died. The poem ends with the sounds of the “chase of the hart,” and the lord rises, brushes away his tears, and rejoins the hunt. Rejoins life. Silas had been trying without success to “rejoin life” for several years. He vowed that he would follow Chaucer's example this day and lead himself through the entirety of the sad tale of his life with Miranda—to perhaps allow him to rejoin the “chase of the hart.”

—

It had started on a particularly hard day at the office. He had never been good about enforcing rules, let alone firing workers, but that morning he'd had to face dismissing five men for stealing from the firm. The meeting had quickly escalated into threats, then accusations against the two Chinese men by the three Whites. Silas waited out the accusations, then addressed the two Han Chinese males in Shanghainese. The men answered
his questions, and it quickly became clear to Silas that the two Chinese men had been extorted into joining the three Whites. He thanked them and sent them from his office. Then he called for the police. “Be thankful we're in the Concession,” he told the three men remaining. “The Manchus have a particularly ugly way of dealing with theft.”

After the police hauled away the three White men, Silas looked out his office window down onto the Bund. As always, he marvelled at the swell of humanity on the street below. Then he saw her. Looking up at his window. He stepped back from the window, then carefully snuck a second look. The woman wasn't wearing a chapeau, and her red hair tumbled in curls down her back. Her pale white skin made the red hair even more startling. She turned and spoke to a pastor as she pointed up at his window. She spoke in an English accent that Silas was never able to identify.

When he returned from his lunch she was sitting in his outer office.

Their romance was quick and conducted in secret—as much as things can be secret in a town like Shanghai. But they were able to keep things at least somewhat to themselves, since neither needed any entertainment except the other. They spent all their free time together, mostly in Silas's private rooms. He was amazed how comfortable he was with her, how familiar.

For the first time in his life it didn't matter to Silas that he couldn't fully feel what he believed others felt. He was happy just making her happy. Happier than he'd ever been.

Their only excursions were to gardens. Miranda—her name was Miranda—loved flowers and the ornate
ornamental trees sold in the Bird and Fish Market. She turned the earth in the area behind Silas's house, and every morning when he went to work she went to her garden. Things grew for her that seldom grew in Shanghai. They grew as if they knew that Miranda loved them.

Then, on the Sunday morning when she announced that she was carrying his child, his happiness increased exponentially. In a private service they were married by a Justice of the Peace, and they prepared to give their child a fine home. Silas gloried in shopping for the baby to come, but early on Miranda's pregnancy gave signs of trouble.

“Miranda, are you all right?” he cried out when he realized that she wasn't in the bed beside him.

But when he went toward the water closet she insisted that she was fine and that he wasn't to come in. For weeks she barely ate, and Silas called in the company's doctor, who gave him a sly smile and said, “Women's problems. Don't worry about it. If it gets really bad, give her some of this.” With that he handed Silas a bottle of Mother's Cordial—an opium product widely used by European women with “women's problems.”

Silas pocketed the medicine and headed out on the street. Somehow he knew that giving opium to a pregnant woman wasn't the soundest advice. He walked north on the Bund, then headed up Beijing Lu. The sides of the street were lined with all kinds of tradesmen—one of whom was a doctor whom Silas had used several times to help him find an escape from his chronic insomnia. He waited patiently as the doctor dealt with a woman ahead of him. The woman had a large growth on her neck, and the doctor pondered the tumour before he inserted two sharp
needles beneath her left arm, then told the woman to sit and wait.

Then he turned to Silas. “You are having trouble with sleep again?”

Silas smiled. This was probably the only Chinese man in all of Shanghai who didn't use the word
sir
when speaking to him. Silas liked that. He liked the man's gruff honesty and his refusal to see one human being as any different from another. Silas laid out the basics of the problem, then the doctor asked the obvious question. “Why are you here and not her?”

How could Silas tell him that it was one thing for people to gawk at him talking to a Chinese street doctor, but quite another for his wife to be seen there with the man? The woman with the tumour on her neck began to moan softly, and the doctor went to her. He readjusted one of the needles, placed six more, then returned to Silas. “Tell me more. Tell me everything you know about this woman.”

“You mean about her illness?”

“Is your Shanghainese failing you? I said tell me everything you know about this woman.”

Silas did as he was ordered and was surprised how little he actually knew about Miranda's personal history. The street doctor's face grew darker and darker. Finally he said, “Bring her to see me. You can come very early in the morning. I'm here before the sunrise. But I'm not sure I can help you, or her.”

“And the baby?”

“I said nothing about a baby,” the doctor snapped.

The next morning, when Silas brought Miranda to the street doctor, the meeting was cordial but brief. At the end he spoke briefly to Miranda, then pulled Silas aside. “Get the best midwives you can. I can suggest
two if you wish. Don't allow her to take the opium, things are bad enough as they are.”