Shanghai (62 page)

Despite Silas's questions, the doctor refused to be drawn out on the meaning of his ominous statement. Then he took Miranda aside.

Walking home, Silas asked, “Miranda, what did he say to you?”

Miranda smiled wanly, then replied, “That I should enjoy the rest of my pregnancy.”

A shiver of fear etched its way up Silas's spine as he grabbed hold of her hand and held it tight.

For the remainder of her pregnancy he was hardly ever from her side. He had delegated much of the Hordoon Company's business and simply put entire projects on hold. Then her waters broke, and Silas sent for the two midwives the street doctor had recommended.

Both arrived with surprising speed, as if they'd expected the summons that morning somehow, and they ushered him out of the room. But before they closed the door he saw the darkness on their faces and heard one say to the other, “This will be very bad.”

Sixteen hours later one of the women came from the room and touched Silas gently on the shoulder. He jolted into waking. “Must come, fast now. Be brave.”

Silas followed the midwife into the room. Miranda was propped up on the pillows, her red hair a sunburst on the white linen, her pale ivory skin glistening with sweat. Something small, entirely encased in sheeting, sat on the foot of the bed. The moment Silas entered, a midwife grabbed the thing from the bed. Silas saw blood on the linen. “The baby …”

“No baby. No baby here.”

“But …”

“No baby here!”

Suddenly he was on her and throwing off the sheeting. The thing that the morning light revealed was more vegetable than human. Some parts were identifiable. Many were not. The shape itself was almost like a ball. He looked up. “What …?”

“Not a baby. Not live. Dead. Not a baby. Give back, give back. And look to your wife, sir. Look to your wife.”

Silas didn't remember the thing being taken from his hands, but the strength of Miranda's grip on his lower arm surprised him. “Promise me,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Promise me you'll build a garden. A garden to honour things that grow.”

“I promise, Miranda, and when you're feeling—”

“And find my mother's grave. Her name was Miriam.”

“Miriam, yes … but where …?”

Suddenly Miranda's eyes flared wide and she gasped.

“Miranda, what?”

She turned slowly to him and said simply, “Why?” and then exhaled one long breath—and did not take in another—ever again.

—

Silas weeded the small garden he had made at the foot of her grave, then turned to the small mound beside her. The “not baby” he had buried at his wife's side. At first he had resented the thing that had taken Miranda from him, then he'd managed to move past that.

He put his hand on the small mound. Thoughts flew into his mind—but only one word came from his lips: “Why?”

And even as he said that word he looked up and a great Indiaman sailing ship—a white bird on water—took the far reach of the river and headed to the port of Shanghai. On deck was a young, enthusiastic Southern Methodist missionary named Charles Soon—another Man with a Book.

That night, after his return from the three graves, Silas tried to induce sleep with brandy and only managed to make himself sick. So as the depth of the night crept upon him and the dark minutes took hours to pass, he roamed his house, sensing Miranda in every room—every room except his private study, which he entered precisely as the grandfather clock in the front foyer struck the first bell of three. It was the hour the Bard of Avon had called “the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and Hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.” Silas wouldn't have put it that way, since Shakespeare was not on his list of favoured authors. The Bard of Avon definitely was one of his father's most loved, though. Silas recalled as a boy his father quoting Shakespeare to his Uncle Maxi, who
would always nod sagely. Then, after asking, “What does that mean in English?” he would demand that Richard tell the story of the play from which the quotation came. Silas remembered his father often putting aside whatever work was at hand and sitting to tell Maxi about Hamlet or Macbeth or Cymbeline. Silas would listen carefully, but it was the joy on his Uncle Maxi's face that was his real reward. How his Uncle Maxi enjoyed things! No, loved things! What joy he found in his life!
How unlike me,
Silas thought.

“How unlike me,” he said in a whisper aloud, then laughed softly. But as the last echo of the last chime of the grandfather clock faded to silence, Silas suddenly sensed someone else's presence in his study. He spun around, somehow expecting to see Uncle Maxi, but found himself staring up at the top shelf of one of the many bookcases. To be precise, staring at the overhanging edges of the unruly pile of journals his father, the famous opium trader and opium addict, had bequeathed to him at their last meeting.

Silas hadn't thought much about the stack of personal journals his father had given him. He'd put them on the back of the uppermost shelf in his private study beneath the elementary Mandarin books he'd used as a child to learn the language, the oldest version of which was the original Mandarin-English dictionary from which Vrassoon's head China hand, Cyril, had so assiduously studied.

Silas needed to stand on his tiptoes and reach as high as he could to take down the uppermost journal. He turned on the green baize lamp on his desk and began to read of the great crumbling palaces of Calcutta, the failure of the grandfather Silas had never met, Maxi and Richard's time at the Government of India Alkaloid
Works at Ghazipur, and finally of the prophecy that a brother would kill a brother.

For a moment Silas thought that the light in the lamp had failed, but he quickly realized it was his tears that made the words swim on the page. Brother would kill brother—he had killed Milo. He, Silas Hordoon, was a murderer—a fratricidal murderer. It was why Miranda was taken from him, of that he had no doubt. He shuddered and pushed his father's journal aside.

The grandfather clock chimed the fourth hour of the night. He opened the window and the dense aroma released by the sweet olive trees entered the study. “It's quiet,” he said aloud, “only at this hour is the Bend in the River quiet.” The great city seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. The last of the night carousers was safely abed, and the morning chores of the night-soil collectors had not yet begun. A moment of peace was on the land. Then he felt Miranda's hand on his shoulder and almost turned to see her—but he didn't. He knew that she was just another of the ghosts that he would have to carry. His brother, his father, his uncle, and now his beloved. Stacked like cordwood on a coolie's back. High and heavy.

He bowed his head and looked down. In the plate glass of the window he saw the lamp's reflection and his father's journal open on his desk.

A dry wind, all the way from the Gobi Desert, whooshed through the window, swirled past Silas, and flipped the pages of the journal. Silas knew the Chinese warnings about the dry wind—the madness wind—and respected them, as he had found over and over again that when a practical people like the Chinese feared something, there was always a reason for concern.

He walked slowly to the desk and looked down at the page the wind had exposed. And there was his
father's story of meeting the dwarf Jesuit, Brother Matthew, and the man's pleading imprecation, “Do not do the Devil's work.”

Silas looked up and took in the many markers of his own wealth in the room—the fabulous carpets from Tikrit, the Ming Dynasty vases, the hand-painted leaded glass windows, the polished mahogany floor, the large roll-top desk—and wondered if he had, all this time, been doing the Devil's work.

“Nonsense,” he muttered, and shoved the book aside. It fell from the desktop onto the floor. Silas heard the old binding crack. He hefted himself out of the chair to retrieve it.

The book had landed open and the spine had fractured. The surprisingly cheap thing had loosed several of its pages onto the hardwood floor. Silas cursed silently. His father hadn't numbered the leaves so it was going to be hard to figure out exactly which page went where. When he picked up the loose sheets from the floor he was taken aback to see that in this part of the journals each entry was a different, completed entity with a date at the top and the word
Finis
at the bottom. Each was penned in his father's unique hand, but in a script so tiny that it filled every inch of the page. Without close examination one could believe that there was no writing on the pages at all—that they were just ink-filled leaves.

Silas smoothed out the first of the pages on the floor and brought down the lamp from his desk. He sat cross-legged on the floor, something he hadn't done since he was a child, and read the first of the opium voyages his father had so meticulously committed to paper.

¨ ¨ ¨

 

I knew it from the very first. Knew it but couldn't express it. But now I know—or believe I know, that we were somehow expected. All those eyes on the banks of the Yangtze somehow knew we were coming. And although like every occupier we were hated, they knew that they needed us—needed to use us, somehow.

As I stood on the deck of HMS
Cornwallis
with Maxi at my side I felt them. I even said as much to him, but my brother was not inclined to such nuances. I was. I always had been, and it was part of what drove me to … to the serpent smoke.

In the smoke I often see their eyes watching, expecting us. I have written several times to Thomas De Quincy of my insights, and he has responded with warnings. Warnings that “while riding the serpent's back it is hard to discern true from false, what is to come from what has already been, and what we wish to meet us with what is in fact awaiting our coming.” True. Just before his death Mr. De Quincy sent me a manuscript of a young writer he thought I should read. The man had “unusual insights that seem to match up to yours.” Mr. De Quincy suggested I acquaint myself with this promising young writer, a certain Mr. Rudyard Kipling.

—

Silas jotted down the name, then continued reading.

¨ ¨ ¨

 

The short story he sent me was untitled. It postulated how fear first came to the jungle. According to the story, the jungle had assumed a kind of hierarchical order developed over many centuries, and although there were
those who bridled at the “law of the jungle,” none broke its basic precepts, and there was peace. Then a limping tiger, unable to track and bring down his usual prey, left the jungle and was the first to kill a human.

And of course men replied by invading the jungle and bringing fear where there had been no fear before.

When I put down the story I noted the perspiration on my hands and thudding of my heart in my ears.

It will happen here at the Bend in the River. Of that I am sure. There have been Europeans killed in Shanghai but never in a manner that was outside the understanding of the order of our occupation of their country. But it will happen. A “limping tiger” will assault our power and kill as many of us as they can. Look for its coming and the inevitable “bringing of fear” from us—then ultimately their response to our terror and the oncoming of the end of our time at the Bend in the River.

—

Silas looked up from the manuscript and thought of the rumours now racing through the city of a murderer killing those he labelled “collaborators.”
A limping tiger
,
perhaps
, he thought as he turned the page.

¨ ¨ ¨

 

For all of its religious mumbo-jumbo, the Taiping Rebellion was really just an expression of the destitution of the huge number of poor people in this massive country. The more wealth we bring, the more we egg on the poor. The more we support those Chinese who continue to suppress the poor, the more we enrage them. Despite the huge number of deaths in the Rebellion, their movement has not ended. Cannot be
ended. There is not enough wealth in the entire world to raise up the poor of this vast country, and they will not remain content in their poverty with our wealth constantly there for them to see. But the poor are not the only potential source of rebellion in the Middle Kingdom. The Manchu government has been fatally wounded by our presence. Every day that we continue to prosper we turn the knife in the wound we have inflicted upon them. As they lose power, their institutions sunder. Some of them may well have outlived their time. But those institutions brought order to the millions upon millions of people in the Middle Kingdom—an ordered hierarchy to their jungle. Should that order ever break down, the first object of the anger of the Chinese will be us. And they may well be led by those who have been cast out by the decline of their system. Namely, their literati. These people have devoted their lives to the learning of an ancient literature that we no longer value. They will fall from their elevated status very quickly, and because they have historically had power, they may well be able to rally others to their anger against those whom they perceive as having brought them low—us, again.

But that is not the greatest danger.

The greatest danger will come when these two disaffected groups—the poor and the literati—join. Then our time here is within breaths of being over.

Can this be stopped? Not while every
Fan Kuei
's only interest is in the making of as much money as quickly as possible.

Should this be stopped?

Perhaps not. Perhaps what all those eyes watching us on the deck of HMS
Cornwallis
gliding up the mighty Yangtze knew on that day in 1842 was that we were only visitors—unwelcome, but necessary visitors—only here to lift them to the next level of their glory.

Watch their eyes as they watch us and try to understand the hate that lives there. And beware the limping tiger.