The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure

by Adam Williams

  Airton and Nellie and their own children, with their servants, Ah Lee and Ah Sun—a Cantonese couple who had looked after the doctor since he had first come to China fifteen years before—lived in a yellow stucco bungalow separated from the hospital compound by a short walk. It was a sprawling building, surrounded by a well-kept lawn and bounded by a wooden fence. Its sitting room and dining room would not have been out of place in his native Edinburgh. At his own expense he had shipped out furniture and family portraits, wallpaper, Sheffield cutlery, curtains, Nellie’s pianoforte and, her pride and joy, a modern cast-iron stove from Birmingham, which kept the house beautifully heated in winter and allowed hot water at any hour of the day. The doctor loved this house; he loved the smell of polished wooden floors, the aroma of bacon and hot buttered toast in the morning, the chatter of his children in their nursery, the absolute quiet of his study—but for a year now the long white corridors had seemed empty. He bitterly missed the company of his elder children. His fourteen-year-old son, Edmund, and his daughter, Mary, three years younger, had been sent back to Scotland the previous summer in the care of the Gillespies, missionary friends from Tientsin, and were now at boarding school in Dundee. Both Nellie and Airton knew that one day the younger children, Jenny and George, aged ten and eight respectively, would follow. For now, they were of an age that they could attend school in the hospital with the orphans. It was the doctor’s joke, and one endlessly relayed by the two nuns, that Nellie, despite her affection for Sisters Caterina and Elena, was convinced that her children would grow up to be papists under their tutelage, and that was why she insisted on sitting in whenever they gave Bible classes. Nellie would smile along with them, but it was a wry smile: there was an element of truth behind the jest.

  Jenny and George greeted Airton clamorously as he came through the door. He was tired, irritated and sticky from the heat. He longed for a bath. It had been a frustrating afternoon. As soon as he had arrived at the hospital on his return from town he had instructed Zhang Erhao and some of the other helpers to conduct a search for Hiram. Zhang had been deliberately obtuse and had only reluctantly set out after much persuasion. Sister Elena had then come to him with a hysterical complaint that moths had eaten the new shipment of cotton bandages, and it had taken him several minutes to calm her down. Then he had had to conduct complicated surgery on a wagoner whose leg had been crushed in a collision between two carts. And finally, at dusk, Zhang Erhao had returned to report that Hiram had disappeared. He had been spotted leaving the city with some of his street-urchin friends in the direction of the Black Hills. Zhang had shaken his head sadly, miming a throat being cut. ‘Iron Man Wang,’ he whispered. ‘Very bad.’ On Airton’s dismissal of this preposterous conclusion, Zhang had grinned. ‘Maybe it’ll be a ransom demand first,’ he said. ‘Then he’ll cut his throat!’ Airton told him to get a lantern and search through the night, if need be. Zhang had left, his shoulders shaking with silent mirth, knowing that he had successfully irritated his master; this minor malicious triumph somewhat compensated for the chore he had to perform.

  Airton sank into his armchair and gratefully received a glass of whisky from Ah Lee. Nellie was sewing at her table but smiled at him, a thread between her teeth. He smiled back. What a fine-looking woman she was, with her auburn hair piled high above a wide forehead, her firm jaw and her steady blue eyes. She was beginning to show slight signs of ageing, a greying near the temple, a ruddiness of the cheeks and at the tip of her nose, perhaps a hardening of the worry lines around her mouth, but her movements were lithe and her carriage erect. With her tall height and broad shoulders she possessed a natural stateliness. He reached into his waistcoat for his watch. He had half an hour to relax before they were due in chapel. He knew he should tell Nellie about Hiram. She would be more disturbed than he—but for the moment he did not want to think about that unpleasantness. Instead he told her about his meeting with Frank Delamere and the imminent arrival of Helen Frances.

  ‘I hope she’s not going to be one of these modern young women,’ said Nellie.

  ‘Oh, do be pleased about it,’ sighed the doctor. ‘It’s the only piece of good news I’ve had this whole dreadful day.’

  ‘You poor wee dear,’ said Nellie. ‘I thought you enjoyed the days you go off and talk to that murderous old Mandarin.’

  But Airton felt no desire to explain his bad mood. Morosely he sipped his whisky, wondering what he would say in chapel in half an hour. He thought of Septimus’s dreadful sermon, his ludicrous reference to the Samson story, and then he began to chuckle. ‘He fell off the roof!’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Nothing, my love. Just thinking of what text we might use for the lesson this evening. What about a bit of Judges? The story of Samson, perhaps. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”’

  ‘If your mind is still on Mr Delamere and his daughter, I think it would be very inappropriate. I can’t think that much sweetness could come out of a wicked old lion like him, however pretty young Helen Frances might set herself out to be.’

  ‘Oh, Nellie, how cruel you are,’ said Airton. ‘And you haven’t even met the girl!’

  But they were both laughing. Nellie moved over and pecked her husband on the cheek. The door burst open: the children bounced in, and in a moment the whole Airton family was wrestling on the sofa, a scramble of limbs and flying cushions.

  Two

  We pray in the temple for rain—but still the sun beats down on dry fields.

  The British Legation was holding a picnic in the Western Hills. The cavalcade of broughams, carriages, palanquins, and horse riders had set out at six in the morning, escorted by a troop of mounted servants. Sir Claude MacDonald, Queen Victoria’s Minister to the Imperial Court, doyen of the diplomatic community and senior spokesman of those Western nations, including Japan and the USA, with an established and powerful presence in China, had quietly left Peking the night before and he and his wife were already waiting for their guests in the Taoist temple that they had converted into a weekend villa.

  Temples were rather easily adapted for diplomats’ holiday homes. There was nothing to be done about the green curlicued roofs and complicated wooden rafters, or the inset panels complete with carved dragons and large red pillars made of solid tree-trunks because these were part of the structure, but a lot could be achieved with imported wallpaper and clever lighting. A few sofas and chaises-longues, a solid mahogany dining table and a pianoforte, fine paintings on the walls, a copy of Landseer’s Dying Stag and a portrait of Lady MacDonald’s grandfather in Waterloo uniform, blended well with the lacquer screen, lanterns and Ming dynasty chairs; a delightful mélange of modern urban chic and tasteful chinoiserie. The two windows, which had had to be hacked out on either side of the original Hall of Worship, gave much-needed light, and Lady MacDonald had chosen elegant yellow curtains to compensate for the desecration. The foreigners were, on the whole, observant of local sensitivities—these were, after all, places of worship they had commandeered—and it was considered bad form to destroy any paintings, carvings or other works of religious art that they might find on the walls. That was where good English wallpaper came into its own. Lady MacDonald recalled how she had been startled on the first night she had stayed here by the faces of ancient, flaking demons and bodhisattvas grinning in the candlelight from a fifteenth-century painting on the back wall. A layer of William Morris had made all the difference and, what was more, the flowered design went very well with her Persian carpets.

  Proud as she was of the inside of her house, she was prouder still of the garden she had fashioned out of the courtyard. She had knocked down the outer wall and one of the shrines and planted a lawn that stretched to the edge of the cliff. She had laid out flower beds and herbaceous borders and, with the white garden chairs and tables, the swing and the roller, she was confident that if the house was still China, the garden was unquestionably Surrey.

  It was here that the uniformed
houseboys, their long queues hanging down their backs, were busily lining up the crystal on the sideboard and laying out the last of the silver on the four long tables neatly spaced under the shade of the willow trees. The white of the servants’ jackets and the starched tablecloths blazed brilliantly against the restful background of green lawn and fir-covered hillside. They worked quietly and efficiently, but they were conscious of the scrutinising eyes of Lady MacDonald, who was making some last minor adjustments to the flower arrangements. She was dressed in a wide, feathered hat and a tight-waisted taffeta dress of a subtle and becoming violet, and the oversized pair of garden scissors were somewhat incongruous in her fashionably gloved hands. Sir Claude, on the other hand, blazered, white-bagged and straw-boatered, was a picture of ease as he smoked his long cheroot, looking idly over the drop to the yellow plain below.

  Much admired by his more temperamental European colleagues for his imperturbability, the canny analysis behind his short, enigmatic observations, his understated but natural authoritativeness—a typical English pro-consul, they judged, more mandarin than the mandarins—Sir Claude was actually a shy man, whose deep reserve was often mistaken for coolness or arrogance. He was respected rather than liked by his subordinates in the British Legation. Nearing fifty he had the colouring of a younger man, a full head of sandy hair and red, bony cheeks. A blond moustache waxed to thin points stretched out way beyond his ears at either side of his narrow, freckled face. It quivered as he moved, and seemed strangely detached from his face, rather as if a yellow bat had chosen to balance on his lips. Thin eyebrows frowned above pale, searching eyes. A tall man, he walked with a slight stoop, but even in the casual clothes he was wearing today, the deliberation of his movements evoked an aura of ceremony and grandeur. Under Sir Claude, the Legation functioned with an Imperial style, which extended even to its picnics.

  Sir Claude was never the man to boast about his achievements, but he had been responsible for several diplomatic successes in this posting, not least for the negotiations that had dramatically increased British territory and influence in China. He had been the moving force behind the leasing of Wei Hai Wei as a new colony and, almost as an afterthought, the acquisition of the New Territories in Hong Kong; he had also secured from the Chinese government the recognition that the Yangtse valley was a British sphere of influence. He had ably countered similar aggrandising moves from the other powers in the scramble that followed China’s unexpected defeat by Japan in 1895. Sir Claude was now keeping a wary eye on the activities of the Germans in Shantung and the Russians along the whole land border. Only yesterday he had received a worrying cable from his consul in the remote outpost of Kashgar, describing suspicious troop movements in the mountain passes leading to India. He had invited the Russian minister to the picnic and would choose a moment gently to communicate a veiled warning. It was not Sir Claude’s style to seek confrontation when a quiet exchange behind the scenes might defuse tension.

  He had found that his method of diplomacy harmonised well with that of the Chinese. He had struck up a practical working relationship with the officials at the Tsungli Yamen. Together they had resolved a number of thorny issues. Sir Claude had been proud of his intervention in the autumn of last year, after the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi, the real power behind the throne, had deposed the Emperor in a palace coup following the young man’s abortive hundred-day reform movement. A wave of executions of the Emperor’s servants and advisers had followed and the Legations, knowing the reputation of the Empress Dowager, expected the worst for her nephew. The diplomats’ fears seemed confirmed when the palace issued a bulletin announcing that the Emperor was ill and that ‘all medical treatments had proved ineffective’. It had been then that Sir Claude had delivered a note to the Tsungli Yamen urging the palace that it had better find a cure, for the Emperor’s death at this juncture would have an effect on the western powers that would be disastrous for China. The result was that the Emperor achieved a remarkable recovery, albeit in continued confinement in the Summer Palace. Sir Claude had been gratified, however, to see him produced at a reception that the Empress Dowager had organised in December, her way of showing the foreign community that on this occasion she had taken their advice, at least as far as the prevention of murder was concerned.

  The occasion itself had been unprecedented in other ways since, for the first time ever, the old lady had requested to meet the wives of the ministers from each Legation. He did not know which had more astonished him: the sedate tea party between the mythical Dragon Empress and the respectable corseted matrons of the diplomatic community, or the repeated murmur from the old tyrant’s lips, ‘One family. One family.’ There were different interpretations of this enigmatic remark. He personally was encouraged, believing that the Dowager, while throttling reforms, was at least convinced of the need for engagement with the powers. He tended therefore to dismiss the rumours of antiforeign martial-arts societies gathering in the countryside, and the excitable beliefs of some of his colleagues that a xenophobic movement was being brewed by the palace. He had yet to hear an authenticated account of this ‘Boxer Movement’, as it was beginning to be called, which would convince him that it reflected anything more than the usual local dissatisfaction among the peasantry that anyone who had lived in China for more than a few years had come to expect. Without being complacent about the problems the country faced, Sir Claude felt justified in having said in the report he had recently sent back to the Foreign Office that there was ground for cautious optimism that Great Britain’s influence and trading stake would be uncompromised in the years to come.

  The dust of the cavalcade was visible at the bottom of the hill. It would take them another twenty minutes to negotiate the winding path that led to his villa. Savouring a last puff of his cheroot, Sir Claude made his way to the gate, ready to receive the select and fashionable of Peking’s foreign community.

  * * *

  Helen Frances cautiously sipped her champagne and looked with wide eyes at her fellow guests. She had never been to a gathering where so many languages were being spoken at once and by such an imposing array of people. When Tom had told her that they had been invited to a picnic she had thought it would be something along the lines of the outings she had had with her aunt to Ashdown Forest. She had imagined a small, casual group of friends gathered round a rug on the grass, chicken drumsticks, hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches, with perhaps a canter after lunch or a tour round one of the temples that Tom had told her could be found in the Western Hills. She had not conceived that the setting itself would be a temple, transformed into a luxurious mansion filled with exotic furniture. Nor that there would be a full meal in a manicured garden, with grander placings than in the dining room of the Hôtel de Pekin or the captain’s table on the liner that had brought them here. And she certainly had not expected that everyone would be in such splendid dress.

  It was true that some of the men in the party, including their host, were wearing comfortable country clothes, but in the circumstances it was an exaggerated insouciance. Many of the European diplomats had come in top hats and frock-coats. The Russian minister was displaying his medals. And the quiet Japanese minister, accompanied by his tiny kimono-clad wife, appeared to be in Court dress. Even so, the men were dowdy in comparison to their wives, who might have been presenting themselves at Ascot or the Henley Regatta. Helen Frances gazed in wonder as the Countess Esterhazy, a guest at the Austrian Legation, sailed by in a shimmer of blue organdie and peacock tails, laughing at a bon mot from the dapper French military attaché, who was dancing attendance behind her. Wide, feathered hats fluttered like a breeze through flowering cotton or mustard fields. Some of the women were wearing riding habits, as Helen Frances herself was, but the difference was that theirs might have been designed for the Windsor Hunt, with skirts cut in elegant velvets, shining black hats trailing transparent blue silks, jackets tightened round the waist to reveal the full magnificence of the female form. Helen Frances, in her brown travellin
g clothes and sturdy bowler, felt as out of place as a governess at a ball.

  She had begged Tom not to leave her alone but he had been whisked off almost as soon as they arrived to take part in a game of rounders that some of the younger men were playing at the end of the garden. She had watched him for a while as he fielded. She saw him leap and catch the ball, roaring, ‘Howzat,’ with the others, as he held his trophy high. His red face beamed with happiness, his yellow hair hung awry. She had felt warm with fondness and pride, and he had looked across the lawn at her and grinned. Then Lady MacDonald had scooped her up and taken her to meet Madame Pichon, the wife of the French minister, who had proceeded to test her schoolgirl French to its limits. After some comments about the weather, they had managed to agree that the Great Wall of China was indeed very long, and Madame Pichon was observing, a touch tartly, that that was perhaps the very reason why it was called a Great Wall, when thankfully her attention was diverted to a more interesting conversation, and a flustered Helen Frances was left to her champagne. For the moment she was happy to remain ignored.

  She found herself listening to the conversation of a small group of men gathered round Dr Morrison, the famous Times correspondent and traveller whom Tom had pointed out to her at the hotel. Her attention was drawn to one of the younger men lounging beside him, a strikingly handsome, black-haired man, with broad shoulders and a relaxed, powerful frame, whose strong limbs were contained in a tight tweed suit of elegant cut. He reminded her of a panther she had once seen at London Zoo, lazy, somnolent, but full of energy and muscle, with a coiled strength behind the sleek skin, ever ready to spring. She had noticed him on the ride out here, cantering past her carriage. She had watched as he pivoted effortlessly in his saddle to shout a jest at one of his friends, one hand steadying the neck of his horse, his blue eyes briefly meeting hers as he turned. He had twitched the reins and the horse had broken into a gallop, disappearing in a cloud of dust. The image of his erect, military bearing had remained in her mind. In the carriage she had not dared ask Mr and Mrs Dawson, the representatives of Tom’s company in Peking, who he was. For some unaccountable reason it would have seemed disloyal to Tom. She felt a sudden anxiety in case the man looked up and saw her staring at him now. Another part of her wished very strongly that he would.