He smiled at her. “I’m ok, I promise. It’s just a small cut, nothing serious.” He put his arms around her and pulled her close, kissing her for several seconds. “I missed you.”
Captain Jansen and his adjutant passed them, and a sly smile cracked the captain’s stern veneer. “I’ll see you in the office, Bainbridge.”
Doug opened his mouth to introduce Lucy, but the captain was already halfway to the Bund. “That was my captain,” he said.
“Jonesy went to see him this morning.”
“So I heard.”
“Did they arrest Commander Rose?” she asked, as they walked arm-in-arm toward the Bund, where mid-day traffic zoomed by.
“They did,” he said, nodding. “I had tried to arrest him this morning, but he arrested me for mutiny. It turns out, I came to the same conclusion you and Jonesy did, on my own with different evidence. Put them all together, it’s a pretty solid case.”
“That’s a relief,” Lucy sighed.
They’d reached Jonesy, and he fell into step beside them. “All’s well that ends well, I take it?”
Doug had to laugh. “All’s well that ends well.”
“Then it’s good news all around today!” Jonesy said with a grin. “I stopped at the office while we were waiting for your ship, and there was a phone message for me from your friend Dr. Howerton. It seems Charlie Ford is awake and alert, and he’s asking for Bao.”
“That’s great!” Doug said, beaming.
“You’ll take Bao to the hospital to see him?” Lucy asked Jonesy.
“Sure will. He’s at work right now—did I tell you he got a job? At a Chinese five-and-dime store around the corner from my place. Since Charlie won’t be able to work anymore, Bao can bring in enough for them to eat, and live in some cramped little garret somewhere.”
“He’ll want to see Charlie right away,” Lucy said. “Any way you could talk his new boss into giving him the afternoon off?”
Jonesy chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do.” He touched the rim of his brown bowler hat, and walked toward the street car stop.
“How about lunch, sailor?” Lucy said, nudging him in the ribs. The playful move tweaked a bruise, but he didn’t flinch.
“I wish I could—I have to write up a report on the investigation for Captain Jansen; not to mention the classified reports I have to write for ONI about what we observed. I’ll just grab some fantuan from a street vendor and eat in the office. But maybe we can go out to dinner tonight?”
He didn’t miss the disappointed look in her eyes, but she nodded. “Dinner it is. We have things to talk about.”
“Anything important?” he asked, and raised his arm to hail her a rickshaw.
“We’ll talk at dinner.” She climbed into the rickshaw and waved as the runner pulled into traffic.
**
“Like I told you before, Lola and Tatiana seemed to me more likely to have hit him on the head with something heavy than to have shot him. And I was right, wasn’t I?” Lucy’s eyes twinkled, teasing him.
“You were right.” He took a sip of his wine. They’d come to Velardi’s, their favorite Italian restaurant in Shanghai. She’d been telling him everything she and Jonesy had learned, and the story of how they’d done it.
“I figured maybe they did hit him on the head, knocked him out, and then someone else finished him off with a gun. And that’s just about what happened.”
Doug smiled ruefully. He hadn’t considered the possibility of collaboration. “You have to admit, that was awfully speculative.”
“Of course it was,” Lucy said with a shrug. “But isn’t it all?”
He just smiled, put his hand on top of hers, and nodded in agreement.
She grew quiet, and a certain nervousness—unusual for her—made her movements, stiff, jerky. She looked around, sipped her wine—which she’d barely touched—and set the glass down a touch too hard.
“What’s wrong?”
She exhaled a puff of air, a strange half-smile on her lips. “Nothing, I hope.”
“You hope?”
She took a really deep breath, and let it out slowly. Then she took both of his hands in hers, and looked him in the eyes, appearing to search his face for a second. “I hope you think so, too. I’m pregnant, Doug.”
Doug wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that. He sat still, his extremities feeling paralyzed. His heart felt as if someone had punched him in the chest; but then, a few seconds later, another feeling radiated out from his belly, filling him with warmth, and—dare he say it?—excitement. Even his fingers and toes tingled.
His smile stretched so wide it made his cheeks hurt. He didn’t care. He stood and leaned across the table, kissing her.
“You’re happy, then?” she asked.
He took her face in both of his hands and stared into her eyes. Then he started to laugh. “Yes! Absolutely, yes!”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course! There’s only one thing, though—marry me?”
Her expression was a mix of hope and apprehension. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“It is!”
“I don’t want you to do it out of some sense of obligation.” But her tone seemed to say otherwise.
“I want to marry you. I always have, I don’t know why I never said so. Stupid, I guess. But I’m asking now—will you please marry me?”
She laughed in relief, looking down at their hands intertwined together. Then she looked him in the eye and said, “Of course I’ll marry you, Douglas Bainbridge.”
EPILOGUE
Tuesday, September 14, 1937
Jonesy nearly shook his head in disbelief while scrawling shorthand across his notepad.
“The objective of the Chinese command was to delay and harass the landing,” a Chinese Army spokesman said in careful English to the gathering of press from around the world. “It was not hoped permanently to repel the landing.”
And if anyone believes that, I’ve got oceanfront property to sell them. Jonesy doubted any of the reporters arrayed around the spokesman gave any real credence to his words.
The intensity of the fighting the last three weeks put the lie to the spokesman’s sentiments. So many men had died on both sides, that the ditches through the rice fields north of Shanghai ran red. One of the peasants had called them “Rivers of Blood,” and the phrase had stuck.
The Chinese were saving face.
Two days ago, they’d awoken to the surprise news that the Chinese divisions had pulled back from their embattled positions under cover of night, to what they claimed was a stronger line running from the North Railway Station in Chapei, Shanghai, north to the right bank of the Yangtze west of Luodian—an important river town which the Japanese had captured a few days before after a vicious fight.
And in the process, they’d left the Japanese in uncontested control of the entire left bank of the Huang Po, from Yangtzepoo in Shanghai all the way to Wusong; and from there to the mouth of the Yangtze. To Chinese and western Shanghailanders alike, It was unbelievable.
“The new line was reinforced by reserve forces in the days prior to the tactical withdrawal,” the spokesman continued. “We have every confidence in the new positions.”
Jonesy suppressed his doubt, and just transcribed the spokesman’s words. The scrape of pencils on paper was the only sound, every reporter silent with concentration. The spokesman reminded them that the Japanese had landed forty thousand troops along the Yangtze in the last three weeks, and that together with the ten thousand they had in Shanghai itself, meant they had “only” fifty thousand troops to face off against two of China’s elite divisions.
Jonesy didn’t want to think about all the reinforcements the Japanese could now land at will, with hundreds of wharfs now under their control.
The press conference wrapped up a short time later, and dozens of reporters scrambled for the nearest telephone. Jonesy’s office was only a few blocks away, so he rushed down the street
, ignoring the searing heat of another ninety-degree day. Summer’s almost over, he reminded himself. Not that early fall was all that much better, but he wouldn’t think about that right now.
“Someone’s here to see you, Jonesy,” Gladys said when he hurried through the door, and she nodded her head back over her shoulder.
Bao sat in a wooden chair next to Jonesy’s desk, and he stood now as Jonesy approached.
Something about the look in the young man’s face worried Jonesy. “Bao? Is everything alright?”
“I just come from General Hospital,” Bao said, and then paused, his lower lip quivering.
A jolt of fear swept through Jonesy. “Did something happen to Charlie?
Bao’s eyes grew wet. His voice quaked when he spoke again. “Charlie’s gone. The nurse say he was put on a ship for England.”
“What?” Jonesy tossed his notepad on his desk, and took both of Bao’s shoulders in his hands.
“She say British consulate order it. They say Charlie’s an invalid, can’t work, so they send him to live with his brother in England.”
Jonesy’s cheeks burned hot with rage, he clenched his teeth, his lips pressed tightly together, and exhaled hard through the nose. “When?”
“They sent him away yesterday. The ship leave this morning.”
Those bastards! Impotent rage surged through every inch of his body, and he stood rooted in place for a long time.
And the timing couldn’t be worse—Bao had been fired from his job only three days before, for ignoring the shop owner’s suggestion to marry his daughter one too many times. He’d lost his home—a tiny room off the shop’s storeroom—and had once again been sleeping on Jonesy’s floor.
“I’ll find out more, I promise,” Jonesy said, giving Bao’s shoulder a fatherly squeeze. Then he glanced at Gladys, motioned with his head, and she rushed over and put her arm around Bao.
“There, there, dear,” she said, guiding him toward her desk. “Let me make you an Irish coffee.”
Jonesy glanced at his watch, cursed under his breath, and sat at his typewriter to bang out the story before deadline for the afternoon papers in London.
**
Saturday, September 25
Doug had wanted to do it sooner, but his friends had insisted they wait a little bit, so everyone could witness it.
“The war’ll be over in four weeks,” Pete had said. “Julia, Betty, and Abbie can come back, and everyone will be together. We can do it at the Cathay ballroom, my treat.”
In reality, the war had only intensified over the last four weeks, raging nonstop across Chapei; Julia and Betty were still in Manila, and Abbie was still in Hong Kong.
And Doug worried that Lucy might start showing at any time, and the Reverend Mr. Jonathan Allen would notice.
He needn’t have worried. Lucy looked radiant in a floor-length white silk gown. She walked herself down the aisle, a break from tradition, but he loved that about her. Fewer than thirty people watched them exchange vows in the nearly empty ballroom on the eighth floor of the Cathay Hotel—Kenny, Pete, George, Fred, Stuart, Jonesy, Bao, a few of the men from Doug’s ship, and several teachers from St. Anne’s Academy.
Pete had sprung for a banquet room off of the ballroom, with a fancy dinner of Beef Wellington. Everyone mingled and chatted before dinner, as the first glasses of champagne were passed out. Doug watched with curiosity as Kenny approached Scott Farnsworth and introduced himself. The conversation moved from friendly to animated awfully quickly.
A pang of jealousy stabbed through Doug’s gut when Kenny touched Scott’s shoulder. He looked away, and his cheeks heated. Then he scolded himself. Where in the world had that come from? He’d think about that later. He turned back to Lucy, and the teachers she was chatting with.
Before they sat down to eat, though, Doug and Lucy sought out Bao.
“We’d like to speak with you privately for a moment,” Doug said, taking Bao’s elbow and leading him to a quiet corner.
“What is it, Mr. Bainbridge?”
“Lucy and I have been talking, and we have a proposition for you. We hope you’ll consider it.”
“Bao, we want you to come live with us,” Lucy said, taking his hand in both of hers. “We want you to be our amah.”
Doug had stopped correcting her usage. Technically, the word amah referred to women who served as both maid and nanny; there was no equivalent term for a man, though, so he’d let it go after their first few discussions.
Bao showed no sign of offence. In fact, his face lit up like a fireworks display.
“I know it’s unconventional, but we would rather engage you in the position, than a stranger,” Doug said, though he hardly had to sell it, judging from Bao’s expression.
“Yes, of course!” Bao beamed. “Thank you, Mr. Bainbridge, Miss Kinz—Mrs. Bainbridge. I am honored to join your household.”
“You’re part of our family, Bao.” Lucy kissed his cheek.
Bao’s eyes grew wet before he blinked them away. Then he bowed to them with a solemn expression. “I am most grateful to you. Thank you for the honor.”
Doug and Lucy returned the bow. Then Doug grinned, and patted Bao on the shoulder. “Let’s eat.”
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