Tai-Pan (99 page)

He walked along the corridor onto the landing and then down the east-wing corridor. His suite occupied the south end of this floor.

May-may, Yin-hsi, Ah Sam and Lim Din were playing mahjongg at a small table in the expanse of the living room. Lanterns were lit and the flames danced cheerily.

“Hello, Tai-Pan,” May-may said. She picked up another of the bamboo-ivory tiles and slammed it down with a curse. “Oh stinky day, Tai-Pan!” she said. “My joss is terrifical bad. I have na won a single game. I’ve lost four hundred cash, and we’ve been playing for hours. Woe, woe, woe! I’m glad to see you, never mind.”

The rain battered the shutters and the wind was rising.

“Cursed noise! Can you lend me some taels? I’m impoverished!”

“I’ll take it out of your allowance. Go back to your game, lassie.” Struan grinned. “We’ve company downstairs and all around, so dinna go out.”

“Wat for go out?”

He returned to Robb’s quarters.

Monsey was looking better. He had taken off his soaked clothes and had wrapped himself in a blanket. Horatio was sleeping restlessly.

“God saved us this time, Tai-Pan,” Monsey said.

“Why the devil did you leave Macao? Asking for trouble. You must have seen the weather.”

“Official business, Tai-Pan,” Monsey sneered. “His Imperial Excellency Whalen arrived by frigate last night. He ordered me to Hong Kong with an official dispatch for the ex-plenipotentiary. In this weather, if you please! As if a day or two matters! I hadn’t the heart to tell him the ‘big news’ had already been printed in the paper.”

“What’s he like?”

“I’d say he’s rather trying. He sailed into Macao about midnight, aboard a frigate, unannounced. Within four minutes I was summoned aboard. He presented his credentials, gave me the Foreign Secretary’s dispatch to read—it’s word for word with Skinner’s story; how do these damned newsmen get secret documents?—and ordered me to leave with the dawn to deliver the dispatch to Longstaff immediately. Said that he would be arriving in Hong Kong forthwith, that Longstaff was to leave at once. That I was to see the admiral and general and tell them that everything must be ready for an immediate departure north.” Monsey plopped into a chair. “An Irishman. What more can I say?”

“Why did he na come direct?”

“Can’t have two plenipotentiaries here at once—distinctly against the rules, Mr. Struan. There’s such a thing as protocol, thank heavens. I have to take over from Longstaff right away. As soon as he’s left harbor I can inform His Excellency. Then 
he
 will arrive.”

A gust of wind slammed against the shutters and rattled them.

“Blast the man. Nearly killed me. Things are going to buzz in Asia with him in control. The first thing he said was ‘That cursed rock can sink as far as I’m concerned.’ Oh, my word! If you don’t mind, I’ll turn in for a few minutes. I’m not feeling myself.”

Horatio began moaning again and then he vomited.

“Give him some more brandy,” Struan said. “There’s a bedroom next door.”

He went below to see how the lorcha’s crew was faring. They had already found the stores and liquor. Those who were not drinking or eating were sleeping or trying to sleep.

The barometer read 29.1, still falling.

“Good God, that’s more than three tenths of an inch an hour,” the young lieutenant said. He was tail and fair. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Struan, I’m Lieutenant Vasserly-Smythe, R.N.”

Struan shook the offered hand.

“Thanks for giving us a berth.”

A north window burst open and rain and wind poured into the foyer. Three of the seamen slammed the window shut and relocked the shutters.

“I think I’ll take a look at my ship,” the lieutenant said.

“Better come this way.” Struan led him along a corridor to a side window that was heavily shuttered but in the lee of the north wind. He opened it warily and peered out.

He saw that 
China Cloud
 and 
Resting Cloud
 were riding easily. The lieutenant’s lorcha was rising and falling with the waves, creaking and grinding against the pilings, and to the east there was no horizon. Just blackness. And the blackness was bearing down on them.

“Your ship’s as safe as she’ll ever be, Lieutenant.”

“Yes.” The young man took a last frightened look at the eastern sky and bolted the shutters. “She’s my first command. I’ve only been in these waters a few months. What happens in a typhoon?”

“The Supreme Winds come out of the gale against you.”

“What’re they?”

“Gusts. Squalls. Sometimes they’re called the Devil Winds.”

The first of the Supreme Winds swooped across the harbor an hour later and fell on 
Resting Cloud.
 Her hawsers snapped and she was adrift and helpless in the darkness. Mauss, in one of the cabins, looked up from his Bible and thanked God for His mercies and for Hung Hsiu-ch’uan. The gale heeled 
Resting Cloud
 over, slamming Mauss unconscious against the bulkhead, and the ship was driven, almost on her beam ends, toward the shore. In her path was 
Boston Princess,
 the Cooper-Tillman vessel. The two ships collided violently and 
Resting Cloud’s
 bowsprit tore away part of the other vessel’s upperworks before it snapped off, and she careened away, stern toward the shore. The tempest flung her into the floating village of sampans, swamping scores of the tiny boats, and grounded her viciously. Hundreds of Chinese were drowning, and those still secure in the sampans cowered under their flimsy bamboo coverings. But the next Supreme Wind snatched up the coverings and with them many families.

Aboard 
Boston Princess,
 Jeff Cooper dragged himself off the deck of the main cabin and helped Shevaun to her feet. The gale rose in violence and battered the vessel, but her hawsers held.

“Are you all right?” Cooper shouted above the tumult.

“I think so. Oh God help us!”

“Stay here!” Cooper opened the cabin door and fought his way toward the deck, pandemonium surrounding him. But the gale and horizontal rain drove him below. He went down three decks and along a corridor and into the hold. He peered around with a lantern. Where 
Resting Cloud
 had hit, the timbers were crushed and the seams starting to go. Cooper went back to Shevaun.

“It’s all right,” he lied. “So long as we don’t break our moorings.”

A Supreme Wind struck Glessing’s Point and snapped the flagpole, throwing it like a javelin at the harbor master’s office.

The flagpole smashed through the granite wall and chopped Glessing’s arm off at the elbow. It punched its way through the other side of the building, throwing Culum aside and cascading bricks and debris and burning coals on Tess before coming to rest.

The rain and gale howled through the broken walls, and Tess’s dress was ablaze. Culum groped to his feet and beat at the flaming clothes with his hands.

When he had extinguished the fire, he held Tess in his arms. She was unconscious. Her face was white, and her hair was partially singed. He ripped off her dress and examined her carefully. There were burns on her back.

Culum heard screaming. Turning around, he saw Glessing, blood spurting from his stump. And across the room he saw the disjoined arm. Culum stood up, but his legs would not move.

“Do something, Culum!” he shouted against the wind.

His muscles obeyed, and he grabbed a flag halyard and bound a tourniquet around the stump and stopped the bleeding. He tried to decide what he should do next, and then he remembered what his father had done when Zergeyev was shot.

“Clean the wound,” he said aloud. “That’s what you’ve got to do. Then cauterize it.”

He found the teakettle. There was still water in it, so he knelt beside Glessing and began to daub the stump. “Hold on, old boy,” he muttered, Glessing’s agony tearing his guts.

Tess whimpered as she regained consciousness. She groped to her feet, the wind churning the papers and flags and dust, half blinding her. Her eyes cleared and she screamed.

Culum spun around in panic and saw her staring at the severed arm.

“Help me! Find the fire tongs!” he yelled above the storm.

She shook her head and backed away hysterically, and then she was very sick.

“Get the godrotting tongs!” Culum shouted, his hands on fire. “You can be sick later!”

Tess forced herself upright, shocked by the venom in Culum’s voice. She began searching for the tongs.

“For God’s sake, hurry up!”

She found them and through her nightmare handed them to Culum.

Culum picked up a burning coal with the tongs and held it against the stump. Glessing screamed and fainted again. The stench from the burning flesh was overpowering. Culum fought his nausea down until the stump was thoroughly cauterized.

Then he turned his head and retched violently.

Brock looked up from the barometer, the whole ship vibrating and timbers howling. “28.2 inches, Liza! It’s never beed that low!”

Liza held Lillibet and tried to contain her fear. “I wonder where Tess be. Oh God, protect her.”

“Yus,” Brock said.

Then there was a shrieking of timbers and the whole ship reeled, but she corrected herself.

“I be going on deck!”

“Stay here! For luv of God, lad, doan risk—” But she stopped, for he had already gone.

“When’s it going to stop, Mumma?” Lillibet sobbed.

“Any minute now, luv.”

Brock poked his head cautiously out of the leeward quarterdeck gangway. He craned to look at the masts. They were bent like twigs. There was a monstrous crack as the main topmast stay parted.

“Belay there!” Brock shouted down the gangway. “Port watch on deck!”

A Supreme Wind shrieked out of the north and another halyard parted, and another, and the mainmast sheered off just above the deck and slammed into the mizzen, and both masts and spars and rigging pounded onto the deck, crushing the quarterdeck gangway. 
White Witch
 heeled dreadfully.

Brock freed himself from the debris and railed at the petrified crew. “On deck, you scum! For yor lives! Cut masts adrift or we be lost!”

He spurred the men on deck, and, hanging on with one hand, the gale wrenching him and the rain blinding, he slashed frantically with an ax at the main halyards and remembered the other typhoon that had cost him an eye, and he prayed that he would keep his remaining eye and that Tess was safe and Liza and Lillibet would not drown.

The scaffoldings of the new town had long since been torn away. A Supreme Wind rushed at the shore, demolishing the remains of the soldiers’ tents and wrecking the dockyard. It snuffed out the gin shops and pubs and whorehouses near the dockyard and flattened Mrs. Fortheringill’s establishment, pulverizing the painting and entombing Aristotle Quance in the rubble. Then it tore an arrow-straight swath through the hovels of Tai Ping Shan, obliterating a hundred families, and swept the remnants of the debris a mile away on the breast of the Peak.

Deep below ground on the Tai Ping Shan hillside, Gordon Chen crouched in the secret cellar he had constructed and congratulated himself on his prudence. The cellar was rock-lined and very strong, and though he knew that his house above had vanished, he cheerfully reminded himself that all his valuable possessions were safe here, and the house could quickly be replaced. His eyes ranged over his sets of ledgers, the files of land deeds, promissory notes, outstanding debts and mortgages, over the chests of bullion, boxes of jades, bolts of expensive silks and kegs of the finest wine. And over his concubine, Precious Blossom. She was propped comfortably, under the finest down coverlets, in the bed that was set against one of the walls. He poured himself another tiny cup of tea and got in beside her.

You’re a very clever fellow, he told himself.

The wind and the rain were pounding the north side of Struan’s factory in Happy Valley, and from time to time one of the Devil Winds would pull at it. But apart from an occasional tremor, and the raging noise, the building stood firm.

Struan was lighting a cheroot. He hated being inside the house and doing nothing.

“You smoke too much,” May-may shouted above the tempest.

“Smoking’s good for the nerves.”

“Dirty habit. Stinky.”

He said nothing, but checked the barometer again.

“Wat for you keep looking at that every ten minutes?”

“It tells where the storm is. When it stops dropping, the center’ll be over us. Then it’ll rise. I think.”

“I’m na very pleasurably happy we’re here, Tai-Pan. It would be much better at Macao.”

“I dinna think so.”

“Wat?”

“I dinna think so!”

“Oh! Do we have to sleep here again tonight?” she asked, tired of shouting. “I would na want you or Yin-hsi or even that turtledung Ah Sam to get the fever.”

“I think we’re safe enough.”

“Wat?”

“We’re safe enough!” He glanced at his watch. The time was twenty past two. But when he peered through a crack in the shutter, he could see nothing. Only a vague movement in the darkness and horizontal streaks of rain on the windowpanes. He was thankful that they were in the lee of the wind. This corner of the residence faced east and west and south and was protected from the violence. And Struan was thankful to be ashore. Nae ship can live through this, he told himself. Nae harbor on earth can protect the fleets from such an act of God for long. I’ll wager Macao’s catching it. No protection there. I’ll wager half her shipping’s wrecked and ten thousand junks and sampans for five hundred miles up and down the coast. Aye. And the ship sent to Peru? I’ll wager she was caught and she’s gone, Father Sebastian with her. “I’m going to look in on the others.”

“Dinna be long, Tai-Pan.”

He went along the corridor and checked the shutter fastenings. Then he walked across the landing and absently straightened a Quance painting and entered Robb’s quarters.

Horatio was sitting—half shadowed—on the bamboo chair in which Sarah had been seated long ago, and in the frail, flickering light of the lanterns Struan thought for a moment that it 
was
 Sarah.