by Kane, Clare
Dragons in Shallow Waters
By Clare Kane
ISBN-13: 978-988-8552-29-0
© 2018 Clare Kane
FICTION / Historical
EB117
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Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)
London, July 1902
My dear Alistair,
Let us dance once more with flames licking our heels, let us mock the black night of death, let us drown in shallow waters until we are reborn dragons! I have read it all, and I say tell the world our story, let them live our suffering, our hope, our love and our despair.
Publish it and let us be damned!
Nevertheless, I agree that you are quite right to change the names. We must think of Charlotte, if nothing else.
Yours always,
Nina
I
It was a hot summer of fear in Peking, a season of distrust and despair, a fairground of vicious rumors, illicit liaisons and empty stomachs. That summer the China of tennis matches and tea parties was revealed as a mirage of hazy imperialism, and as the gilded scales faded from our collective vision I found myself confronting not only the darker aspects of our enclosed community, but also those more obscure elements of my own character. For that was the summer I learned the true meaning of loyalty, and discovered an astonishing capacity for betrayal.
Yet one was not to know, not in the first, uneventful months of the year, how the summer of 1900 would unfold. The spring had brought a hot, hostile dust and stubborn, scorched skies from the Gobi, but murmured complaints of dry heat do not a rebellion make. Setting down the story of that torrid time impels me, then, to select a point of departure, a moment that might be identified as the exact juncture at which normal life was suspended and our Boxer story began. This story is an exception to the habitual style of my journalistic narratives, for my usual position requires a cultivated observation of people, a close, unobtrusive and unceasing watch of my surroundings, while in this particular case events compelled me rather rapidly to adopt the uncomfortable role of the actor. Each of those little actions taken on my behalf, starting with the innocuous introduction of Nina Ward to Oscar Fairchild, I see now as part of a chain of unintended and unstoppable consequences, and I wonder which of those unconscious yet ultimately grave decisions might have been left unheeded, providing me with no story to write beyond that factual recording of the rebellion printed according to my editor’s preferences upon the sober pages of the London Herald.
After much reflection I have decided to begin my tale with the celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday held, as one might expect, in May. I am a man of sometimes sentimental notions, and recalling that event now, I imagine that some frisson, a charge, a premonition of sorts, permeated the party, an event that appeared at its surface almost indistinguishable from that which had taken place the previous year. The party, held at the ostentatiously grand residence of the British Minister, brought together the sixty or so British subjects who called Peking home. These were almost all men of government: tax officials, interpreters and other such uninteresting types. I found them indistinguishable, particularly after the consumption of wine, when their pallid faces turned puce and their opinions colored the same shade of disagreeable. It was with surprise and delight, then, that while we were eating I spied amidst these anonymous civil servants the figure of academic Nicholas Ward, accompanied by his nineteen-year-old daughter Nina. Following pudding and port the crowd trickled outside to the Legation grounds, where a band had started up by the tennis courts.
“I did not expect to see you here this evening,” I greeted Nicholas.
“Neither did I, Alistair,” Nicholas said drily. “I must admit that I was rather flattered into attending by a young banker visiting from Hong Kong. Barnaby George, he said. Came to visit me yesterday, and even claimed to have read one of my books. How then might one refuse such an invitation?”
“A banker who indulges Chinese philosophy,” I mused. “Truly all the world exists under Peking’s eaves. And you decided to come too, Nina?”
“Yes, Mr Scott,” Nina said. “Mr George suggested I might enjoy it, even though Father and I rarely attend these kind of events.”
Nicholas had raised his daughter alone since his wife’s sudden departure from China shortly following Nina’s birth. The girl’s education, overseen by her father only, had been something of a patchwork delivered by a succession of local governesses and her father’s best students from the university. As a result, Nina boasted an unrivaled knowledge of Chinese literature, philosophy and myth, but lacked the most basic of European manners and niceties. Needlework and dance, French and piano-playing were as alien to her as they were useless, and it was this lack of interest in maintaining the old ways, the absolute refusal to cocoon themselves in the comforts of a world five thousand miles away, that led much of the foreign community to complain that the Wards held themselves aloof. In fact, it was this distance at which the Wards kept themselves from the others that had first attracted me to them. They were the eccentrics I had hoped to meet in China, and who were largely absent from the administrative and political center of Peking. The old China hands, the unconventional, the interesting and the dissolute, were spread across the booming coastal towns to which I only ventured occasionally from the interior seat of government. Perhaps it was the journalist’s natural sympathy for the outsider that drew me to the Wards; whatever the case, I preferred them to the others, and my intimacy with this unusual family meant that Nina was the sun around which spun the planets of my particular experience of the Boxer Rebellion.
Mr Barnaby George approached us then. A man of plain and pleasant features, he reached out his hand to shake mine.
“You succeeded where almost all have failed,” I said to him. “You tempted Nicholas Ward from his bureau.”
“I am most glad he indulged my suggestion,” Barnaby said. “I have been in the city only a week and no one speaks of anything but the Boxers. The foreign community ought to engage Mr Ward more on this matter. After all, he is the greatest living expert on the Chinese people.”
“Oh, come,” Nicholas said. “I imagine any Chinese might be better qualified than I in that particular domain.”
The young man’s words were effusive, but not insincere. Nicholas was an eminent Sinologist and an exceptionally gifted linguist who had settled in China three decades earlier. His particular expertise lay in Chinese religion and philosophy and a pair of popular texts about Taoist thought had brought Nicholas as close to commercial success as an academic liked to stray. His daughter Nina had been born in Peking, and had not once visited her father’s native England. As Barnaby and Nicholas continued their exchange of pleasantries, I summoned Oscar Fairchild, the recently-arrived First Secretary and second-in-command of the British diplomatic delegation, to join us by the tennis courts. I had no motive to speak with Fairchild beyond the professional; as a man dedicated to the gathering of news no event was ever strictly social for me.
And so was my first unthinking tinkering with the Fates. Neither Nina nor Oscar might have realized the gravity of their first meeting that evening when Fairchild and his wife, a tall, fair woman in a dress of Indian silk, entered our conversation with polite smiles and firm handshakes. I noted tha
t Fairchild’s eyes lingered a little longer upon Nina when I pronounced her name; this was not a surprise. Nina was a beauty by any standards, and a true belle by those of Peking, where foreign women tended to fall into one of two unappealing categories: dour-faced missionary or plain wife of official. My historic friendship with the family meant my bond with Miss Ward was warmly platonic, and yet even I could not deny her blossoming loveliness, the unassuming allure of her flecked eyes, the subtle comeliness of her figure. Perhaps the most appealing of Nina’s many qualities was that she remained delightfully, innocently unaware of the delicate power she yielded by her physical attractiveness.
I asked Fairchild what news he had of the Boxers. Word had reached Peking of the murder of a French missionary in the hinterlands, and while party guests valiantly constructed a veneer of civil cheeriness, none could resist the topic of this latest anti-foreign outrage for long. The Boxers, a violent conglomerate of young men in the arid countryside to the north of the capital who practiced sinister calisthenics inspired by China’s long history of martial arts, were determined to uproot all imperialist and Christian elements from their native soil. They were angered by the appearance of menacingly unfamiliar technologies such as telegraph poles and dismayed by the sight of their starving countrymen kneeling before a foreign god in exchange for bread. They expressed their disenchantment with fire, swordplay and, in the most gruesome instances, beheadings. Thrillingly barbarous from a safe distance, the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist was a generous source of relished indignation and priggish pondering upon the future of China for Peking’s foreigners.
“I do not deny that the missionary’s death was most unfortunate, but I do wonder if it really ought to be of such concern to us here in Peking,” Oscar Fairchild said, cradling a pipe between long, elegant fingers. The French demanded action, he said, but the British questioned the wisdom of retaliation for crimes that had not yet touched the heart of imperial China.
“I believe it ought be of grave concern to us all,” Nicholas said solemnly. “That the Boxers have only killed in the countryside so far is a matter more of convenience than conviction.”
Barnaby George, bestowed with a false sense of security provided by his residence in the safe harbor of Hong Kong, expressed disbelief that the Boxers would dare to attack Peking.
“They believe bullets cannot pierce their skin,” Nicholas said with gentle, fatherly patience. “I imagine they think themselves quite capable of penetrating the city walls.”
“If we learned anything in India,” said Fairchild’s wife sharply, “it was that native unrest must be quelled immediately. Otherwise they can quite quickly lose all respect for the law of the land.”
Oscar nodded lightly, approvingly. Nina, uncharacteristically quiet in these novel surroundings, listened to the back and forth with her head cocked to one side, the hint of a smile on her lips.
“What do you think, Miss Ward?” Oscar Fairchild asked her directly. Perhaps he too had perceived the quizzical knit of her eyebrows, possibly he also sensed the formation of some thought on Nina’s behalf, and intuited that it would be more incisive than the rehashing of platitudes and the repetition of shallow truths offered by Mrs Fairchild and Mr George.
“Well,” Nina began. “The stance of the Chinese people, particularly in the countryside, is entirely understandable. How should we like it if England were overrun by Chinese showing scant regard for our traditions, forcing us to practice their religions, laying railway tracks in places we held dear?”
“I think we shouldn’t like it at all,” Oscar conceded. “But there is a reason why we are here and they are not there. We have a duty to these countries, you understand. We are helping them to embrace the twentieth century.”
“By what means?” Nina asked curtly. “With guns and opium? The Chinese invented gunpowder centuries before the Europeans did, yet they felt no duty to tell anyone else about it.”
Violet Fairchild frowned slightly, but Oscar only laughed softly and drew leisurely on his pipe. “Surely you don’t believe the Boxers justified?” he countered. “They are simple ruffians, intent upon sowing fear amongst the population and murdering any European unfortunate enough to cross their path. And their beliefs are quite absurd. Tricks and spells and ghost soldiers descending from the heavens.”
“I do not say that they are justified in their actions or right in their beliefs, only that I understand their motives,” Nina said.
Poor Barnaby did not know how to respond to this show of disagreement, however cordial in nature, and shifted nervously.
“Oh, come,” Violet Fairchild said, urging her husband by the crook of his arm. “Let us speak no more of such horrors. We have yet to greet the Moores and I see Beatrice there by the band.”
Oscar smiled broadly at us all as the couple departed, glancing over his shoulder at Nina and shaking his head with benign incredulity. Likely he considered their interaction a good piece of intellectual sparring; certainly the dichotomy of Nina, who presented a familiar exterior that belied her interior sympathies, had charmed the First Secretary.
“Nina,” Nicholas said in soft reprimand.
“Father, you agree with me,” she said, not looking at Nicholas but directing her gaze towards an abashed Barnaby George. “And perhaps if he pays my words any heed, Mr Fairchild shall come to agree with me too.”
In recalling that first interaction for myself, I wonder how often Oscar and Nina might have returned in their minds to that moment. Likely Fairchild summoned the image of Nina’s face in the days that followed, resurfacing, as men do, the face of a woman he considered lovely. Nina, soon distracted by an unexpected petition, most likely did not dwell upon their exchange. And yet in those brief moments their lives had already begun to unfold towards unstoppable, irrevocable change, and my part in it, by way of innocuous introduction, had already been decided.
Around noon the following day I raised my heavy head and left home. I lived just beyond the border of the Legation Quarter in a quaint Chinese street that today arranged itself in the usual moving tapestry of exoticism before me: snaking rows of children played a raucous game of catch the dragon’s tail, traveling merchants led mangy and unwilling camels over grey cobbles, silver-haired women chopped bloody meat on rickety tables erected outside their homes. On the best days, Peking’s distinctive unfamiliarity flooded you with vitality, on the worst it left you drained, cold, a stranger in an unfathomable city, longing for your native Edinburgh. That day, my mind fogged from the previous evening’s intemperance, my morning’s writing lost to sleep, the neighborhood pulled me gratefully awake. Still, it took a moment to recognize the figure of Barnaby George as he crossed the narrow hutung alley before me.
“Mr George,” I called. “You have decided to brave life outside of the Legation Quarter?”
Barnaby explained that he was on his way to visit the Wards. In keeping with Nicholas’ general attitude towards the other foreigners in China, he had elected not to live in the officially sanctioned foreigners’ quarter, but to reside instead amongst the Chinese, in a traditional neighborhood of sloping roofs said to date back to the Ming dynasty. I noticed a nervous tension in Barnaby’s voice, a strain at its edges, and imagined that perhaps he too was suffering from the effects of overindulgence. I wished him well, suggested a shortcut through Clear Sky hutung and proceeded to the Grand, an establishment on the edge of the Legation Quarter managed by my friend Edward Samuels and his German wife Hilde.
A hotel is of eternal interest to a man like me; a high incidence of one particular nationality or profession provides the first clues to a news story still in its infancy. But lately Edward Samuels had informed me only of the most ominous of all indications to any hotelier: a distinct lack of reservations. To a journalist this suggested one of two things: either Peking had become a backwater town of no interest to the outside world and I ought to pack my belongings and head south, o
r something great and unpleasant was expected within the city’s walls, in which case I couldn’t have found myself in a better position. Edward was not present when I stepped into the welcoming cool of the Grand. His wife, Hilde, stout and serious, polished the snout of a gun behind the reception desk.
“Mr Scott,” she said lightly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Is your husband here?” I asked.
Hilde shook her head.
“We have had a visit that I imagine you might find most interesting,” she said, her lips curling towards a smile. “From a Belgian engineer.”
“I can’t quite decide whether I care less for the nation of Belgium or the welfare of its engineers,” I said. “Why do you smile so, Mrs Samuels?”
Hilde laughed warmly and told me that an hour before my arrival a distraught Belgian of around thirty wearing a tattered, blood-splattered shirt, had stumbled into the Grand, spluttering and coughing. Between choked breaths the man explained that he had been engaged in the construction of a new railway line by Fengtai when Boxer rebels set upon him and his colleagues.
“It is a shame you were not here to interview him,” she said. “What descriptions he had of the Boxers, teeth gnashing, wild dancing. He said they ripped the railway tracks from the ground with their bare hands, pulled down telegraph polls.”
“Where is the man now?” I asked.
“He led Edward to Fengtai. They have gone to see if the others might be rescued. Some of the engineers had families living in the village there.”
“I must go,” I said. “At once.”
“Please, Mr Scott,” Hilde said. “Something to steady your nerves.”
She handed me a glass of whisky, I drank it in steady gulps and felt my head clear. The story forming before me had yet to arrange itself into the linear simplicity with which I would later have to write it, but the motives of the Boxers in this outrage were evident enough that I might pre-empt the outline of a narrative. The foreign powers invested heavily in infrastructure projects in China; developments such as railway lines they believed to be positive symbols of progress, enterprises conceived in the service of those most noble of secular aims: trade and civilization. The Boxers, meanwhile, perceived only the perils of unnatural technology and the egotism of profit-hungry invaders, and had decided to make clear their discontent by painting a horrific landscape at Fengtai station from their familiar palette of violence and terror.