Tai-Pan (66 page)

Zergeyev moaned, and Struan went over to him. The Russian was still in shock and almost unconscious.

Then Struan noticed Mauss’s Chinese convert watching him. The man was standing on the main deck beside the starboard gunnel. He made the sign of the cross over Struan and closed his eyes and, silently, began to pray.

Struan jumped out of the cutter onto their new wharf at Queen’s Town and hurried along its length toward the vast, nearly completed three-story building. His limp was more pronounced today under a white-hot sky. The Lion and the Dragon fluttered atop the flagpole.

He noted that many smaller buildings and dwellings were completed all over Happy Valley and that a start had been made on the church on the knoll; that Brock’s wharf on the far side of the bay was completed and the factory adjoining it almost ready. Other buildings and residences were still encased in soaring sheaths of bamboo scaffoldings. Queen’s Road was rock-surfaced.

But there were very few coolies working, although it was only early afternoon. The day was hot and very humid. A pleasant easterly wind had begun to touch the valley lightly.

He strode into the main foyer, his shirt sticking to his back. A perspiring Portuguese clerk looked up, startled.

“Madre de Deus,
 Mr. Struan! Good day, senhor. We did not expect you.”

“Where’s Mr. Robb?”

“Upstairs, senhor, but there—”

But Struan was already running up the staircase. The first-landing hallway led off north and east and west into the depths of the building. Many windows watched seaward and landward. The fleet was silently at anchor and his lorcha had been the first home from Canton.

He turned east and passed the half-completed dining room, his footsteps a brittle echo on the uncarpeted stone. He knocked on a door and opened it.

The door let into a spacious suite. It was half furnished: chairs and sofas and stone floor and Quance paintings on the wall, rich carpets, an empty fireplace. Sarah was sitting in a high-backed chair beside one of the windows, a bamboo latticed fan in her hand. She was staring at him.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“Hello, Dirk.”

“How’s Karen?”

“Karen’s dead.”

Sarah’s eyes were pale blue and unwavering, her face pink and greasy with sweat. Her hair was streaked with white, her face aged.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said.

Sarah fanned herself abstractedly. The slight breeze made by the fan wafted a limp strand of hair into her face but she did not brush it away.

“When did it happen?” he asked.

“Three days ago. Perhaps two,” she said, her voice flat. “I don’t know.”

The fan kept moving back and forth, seemingly of its own volition.

“How’s the bairn?”

“Still alive. Lochlin’s still alive.”

Struan wiped a droplet of sweat off his chin with his fingers. “We’re the first back from Canton. They burned the Settlement. We got Robb’s letter just before we left. I’ve just arrived.”

“I watched your cutter come ashore,” she said.

“Where’s Robb?” he asked.

She motioned with the fan at a door, and he saw the thinness of her blue-veined wrists.

Struan went into the bedroom. The room was large, and the canopied fourposter had been made from a pattern of his own.

Robb was lying in the bed, his eyes closed, his face gray and gaunt against the sweat-stained pillow.

“Robb?” Struan said. But the eyes did not open and the lips were slightly parted. Struan’s soul twisted.

He touched his brother’s face. Coldness. Death-coldness.

A dog barked close by, and a fly battered the window. Struan turned and walked out of the room, and closed the door quietly.

Sarah was still sitting in the high-backed chair. The fan moved slowly. Back and forth. Back and forth.

He loathed her for not telling him.

“Robb died an hour ago,” she said. “Two or three hours, or an hour. I don’t remember. Before he died he gave me a message for you. It was this morning, I think. Maybe it was in the night. I think it was this morning. Robb said, ‘Tell Dirk I never wanted to be Tai-Pan.’ ”

“I’ll make the necessary arrangements, Sarah. Best you and the bairns get aboard 
Resting Cloud.”

“I closed his eyes. And I closed Karen’s eyes. Who’ll close your eyes, Tai-Pan? Who’ll close mine?”

He made the arrangements and then walked up the small rise toward his house. He was thinking about the first day Robb had arrived in Macao.

“Dirk! All your troubles are over, I’ve arrived!” Robb had said with his wonderful smile. “We’ll smash the East India Company and obliterate Brock. We’ll be like lairds and start a dynasty that will rule Asia forever! There’s a girl I’m going to marry! Sarah McGlenn. She’s fifteen now and we’re betrothed and we’ll marry in two years.”

Tell me, God, Struan asked, where do we go wrong? How? Why do people change? How do quarrel and violence and hatred and hurt come from sweetness and youth and tenderness and love? And why? Because they always do. With Sarah. With Ronalda. And it’ll be the same with Culum and Tess. Why?

He was at the gate in the high wall that surrounded his house. He opened it and looked at the house. All was quiet: ominously quiet. The word “malaria” flooded his brain. A slight wind waved the tall bamboos. The garden was well planted now: flowers, shrubs, bees foraging.

He walked up the steps and opened his door. But he did not enter at once. He listened from the doorstep. There was no welcome laughter, no muted chattering singsong from the servants. The house felt empty.

He looked at the barometer: 29.8 inches, fair weather.

He walked slowly down the passageway, the air strangely incense-laden. He noticed dust where there had been none before.

He opened the door of May-may’s bedroom. The bed was made and empty and the room abnormally neat and tidy.

The children’s room was empty. No cots or toys.

Then he saw her through the windows. She came from the hidden side of the garden with cut flowers in her hand and an orange sunshade shielding her face. Then he was outside and she was in his arms.

“God’s blood, Tai-Pan, you’ve crushed my flowers.” May-may put the flowers down and threw her arms around his neck. “Where you come from, heya? Tai-Pan, you crush me too tight! Please. Wat for your face so strange?”

He lifted her and sat on a bench in the sun. She stayed contentedly in his arms, warmed by his strength and his relief at seeing her.

She smiled up at him. “So. You miss me fantastical, heya?”

“I missed you fantastical, heya.”

“Good. Why for you unhappy? And wat for when I see you, you are like ghosted?”

“Troubles, May-may. And I thought I’d lost you. Where’re the children?”

“In Macao. I sent them into house of Chen Sheng into the keeping of Elder Sister. When fever sickness began, I thought it terrifical wise. I sent them with Ma-ree Sin-clair. Wat for you think you lost me, heya?”

“Nothing. When did the children go?”

“A week ago. Ma-ree would watch them safe. She returns tomorrow.”

“Where’s Ah Sam and Lim Din?”

“I sent them for foods. When we spy your lorcha, I think ayeee yah, the house she is terrifical dirty and no foods, so I make them hurry clean house and send off to get foods, never mind.” She tossed her head. “Those lazy good-for-nothing whores needs a beating. I’m terrible glad you’re back, Tai-Pan, oh yes indeed. Housekeepings have soared and I have no moneys, so you’ll have to give me more because we support Lim Din’s whole clan and Ah Sam’s. Huh, na that I mind their immediate family, that’s of course fair squeeze, never mind, but their whole clans? A thousand times no, by God! We’re rich, yes, but na that rich, and we must hold on to our wealth or soon we’ll be penniless!” She frowned as she watched him. “Wat for troubles?”

“Robb’s dead. And little Karen.”

Her eyes widened and her happiness fled. “I knew about little girl. But na Brother Robb. I hear he has fever—three, four days ago. But na he’s deaded. When this happen?”

“A few hours ago.”

“That’s terrible joss. Better we leaving this cursed valley.”

“It’s na cursed, lass. But it does have fever.”

“Aye. But forgive me for mentioning it again, dinna forget we live on the dragon’s eyeball.” Her eyes turned up and she loosed a stream of Cantonese and Mandarin supplications. When she was calm again she said, “Dinna forget our feng shui here is dreadful terrible bad.”

Struan had to come to grips with the quandary that had racked him for weeks. If he left the valley, everyone would leave; if he stayed, May-may might catch the fever and die, and he could never risk that. If he stayed and she went to Macao, others would die that need not die. How to keep everyone safe from the fever, and at the same time preserve Queen’s Town and Hong Kong?

“Tai-Pan, we hear you had bad troubles in Canton?”

He told her what had happened.

“Fantastical crazy. Why for loot, heya?”

“Aye.”

“But terrifical wise for all na to fire Settlement until trade is finished. Very wise. What will happen now? You go against Peking?”

“First we crush Canton. Then Peking.”

“Why Canton, Tai-Pan? It was the emperor, na them. They do orders only.”

“Aye. But they should have warned us of trouble. They’ll pay six millions of ransom and pay it quickly or they’ll have nae city, by God. First Canton, and then north.”

May-may’s frown deepened. She knew that she must send word to her grandfather, Jin-qua, to forewarn him. Because the Co-hong would have to find all the ransom, and if Jin-qua was not prepared he would be ruined. She had never sent information to her grandfather before, and had never used her position of knowledge clandestinely. But this time she felt she must. And the thought that she would be part of an intrigue excited her greatly. After all, she told herself, without intrigue and secrets a huge part of the joy of life is missing. I wonder why the mobs pillaged when there was no need to pillage. Stupid.

“Will we mourn a hundred days for your brother?” she asked.

“I canna mourn more than I have, lass,” he said, drained of strength.

“A hundred days is custom. I will arrange Chinese funeral with Gordon Chen. Fifty professional mourners. With drums and rattles and banners. Uncle Robb will have a funeral remembered for years. In this we spare no expense. Then you will be pleased as the gods will be pleased.”

“We canna have such a thing,” he said, shocked. “This is na a Chinese funeral. We canna have professional mourners!”

“Then how for do you public honor your loved brother, and give him face before the real people of Hong Kong? Of course there must be mourners. Are we na The Noble House? Can we lose face afore the meanest coolie? Apart from being disordinary bad manners and bad joss, you simply canna do it!”

“It’s na our custom, May-may. We do things differently.”

“Of course,” she had said cheerfully. “My whole point, Tai-Pan. You look over your face with barbarians, but I will do same with my people. I will mourn private one hundred days, for of course I canna go in public to your funeral or Chinese funeral. I will dress in white clotheses, which is color of mourning. I will have a tablet made, as always, and we’ll kowtow nightly to it. Then, at the end of hundred days, we burn the tablet as always and his soul will be reborn safely as always. It is joss, Tai-Pan. The gods had need of him, never mind.”

But he was not listening to her. He was racking his brain for an answer: how to fight the fever and how to have the valley and how to protect Hong Kong?

Three days later Robb was buried, beside Karen’s grave. Wolfgang Mauss said the service in the roofless church under a cloudless sky.

All the tai-pans were present except Wilf Tillman, who still lay on the Cooper-Tillman hulk more dead than alive with Happy Valley fever. Longstaff was not at the service. He and the general and the admiral had already sailed for Canton—with the fleet and troopships and all the soldiers who were fit. The distemper—dysentery—had decimated their ranks. H.M.S. 
Nemesis
 had been sent ahead.

Sarah sat in the first roughhewn pew. She wore black clothes and her veil was black. Shevaun was also in black. And Mary and Liza, Tess and the others. The men too were dressed somberly and they sweated profusely.

Struan got up to read the lesson, and Shevaun watched him intently. She had given him her condolences yesterday and knew that there was nothing more to be done now. In a week or two all would be well again. Now that Robb had died, she would have to revise her plans. She had planned to marry Struan quickly and then take him away: first to Washington to meet those of great importance, hence to London and to Parliament—but with the added strength of close American ties. Later, back to Washington, Ambassador. But now the plan would be delayed, for she knew he could not leave until Culum was ready to take over.

Simultaneously with the silent, somber, black-clothed funeral in Happy Valley and the cortege along Queen’s Road to the cemetery, a deafening white-clothed Chinese funeral procession wove through the narrow alleys of Tai Ping Shan and cried to the gods about the great loss of The Noble House, shrieking and moaning and groaning and tearing their raiment and banging drums.

And the people of Tai Ping Shan were greatly impressed with the manners of the Tai-Pan and with the largess of his house. The stature of Gordon Chen increased with the gained face of his father, for none of the dwellers on the hill would have guessed that the Tai-Pan would so honor their gods and their customs. Not that Gordon Chen needed an increase of face. Was he not already the greatest landlord in Hong Kong and did not his business tentacles extend in all directions? Did he not own most of the buildings? And the sedan chair business? And three laundries? Fourteen fishing sampans? Two apothecary shops? Six restaurants? Nineteen shoeshine stands? And clothes shops and shoemaking shops and knife-making shops? And did he not own fifty-one percent of the first jewelry-making shop with expert Kwangtung carvers, both of jewels and of wood?