by Kane, Clare
I agreed that Nicholas was more than a simple scholar.
“He lives his work,” I said. “He loves China, he does not simply tolerate her.”
“And young Nina, she’s very eloquent. Humorous even, sometimes.” He stopped. “Nicholas is the real expert, I suppose. I wonder what they might make of the incident at the racecourse.”
“There is no mystery to it, Mr Fairchild,” I said. “A token of empire reduced to ashes.”
Oscar drained his glass and left.
The sun rose unfeeling and bright over Peking the next day. In the Legation Quarter, talk was muted, and in soliciting opinion I was greeted by a succession of downcast eyes and mumbled responses rehearsed from a script of understatement. How fortunate no one was seriously hurt, they said. The stand had always been unstable, they conceded, and would have required fortification soon in any case. The Boxers shall be crushed in a matter of days, they consoled themselves. They wished to believe what they told me, those earnest trade officials and steadfast diplomatic secretaries, they longed to sweep away the destruction as nothing more than a native jape gone awry. Perhaps the most committed believed the plain, unfeeling words they spoke, but their discomfort under questioning suggested quite the opposite. Trouble had taken residence in our town, and heavily he dwelt in our bosoms.
The news created a great and strange sense of animation in the Fairchild household. For days its residents had anticipated some Boxer occurrence and reports of the fire were greeted with a sentiment not unlike relief. Their fear, previously of the abstract variety, had been cast now in flesh and bone, their dread justified, its growth fomented. I paid a visit after lunch and found them all, with the exception of Nicholas who still insisted on returning to his own home to continue his work, gathered together on the verandah, talking in hushed, frantic tones. I had hoped I might see Nina alone and offer some succour following her exposure the previous evening to those forthright comments not intended for her ears. I was pleased to find that she sat quite comfortably amongst the other guests and hoped that her shame and dismay had lessened overnight. And yet I noted that while she was physically in the presence of Phoebe Franklin, La Contessa and Lillian Price, Nina’s companionship was rather uncommitted. Listlessly her gaze wandered the horizon, thoughtlessly her head tilted to the side, betraying her disinterest in the conversation of her neighbors. She looked, I felt, a little peaked. Her pale skin usually possessed a smooth, almost glassy texture, but today it appeared coarse under the glare of the afternoon sun. She smiled towards me and I crossed the verandah to greet her.
“We decided to come out here,” she said quietly to me. “Although we cannot go anywhere, we might at least feel as though we aren’t trapped inside the house.”
“Quite right,” I said, but already her eyes roamed the dense, unyielding walls that encircled the Legation Quarter. I wondered if she thought of the home that lay beyond their reach.
“Did you know, Mr Scott, that Mr Millington shall today come here, where we might care for him properly?” Lillian Price said. “Mr Fairchild thought it a wonderful idea that we remove him from the student residence and see he is provided with adequate care.”
“Really?” I asked. I silenced my next thoughts, but saw in the delicate arch of La Contessa’s eyebrows that she shared my bewilderment. James Millington’s actions had further complicated the ongoing negotiations with the Chinese authorities. The authorities claimed now that the dead Boxer had been a mere passerby, an innocent intrigued by the smoke billowing menacingly from the racecourse, a regular citizen shot by a zealous English student for demonstrating concern for the destruction of his own city. This was nonsense, of course, I had seen the man with my own eyes and known by his characteristic costume that he could be nothing but a Boxer, I had witnessed the red turban wound closely around his head, recorded in my mind the folds of his loose red robes, their edges stained by the blood that flowed from his fatal chest wound. And yet such was the frustrating, fantastical nature of negotiations that the Boxer had become for the Chinese an anonymous symbol of a nation downtrodden by the unforgiving foreigner, while the British had repainted him a fanged, brutal barbarian, his death a much deserved inevitability.
“Naturally, Mr Scott,” Lillian said. “We cannot leave a young man far from home to rot under the disinterest of a Russian doctor. He shall arrive shortly and we shall nurse him ourselves if we must. I requested he have a nurse by his side at all times, but I am told,” and here she leaned forward conspiratorially in her chair, “that they are too occupied with care of Chinese from the countryside. Now, I am most glad that they care for these people, but oughtn’t the Chinese have their own doctors and nurses?”
“Those Chinese are Christians,” Phoebe Franklin said severely. “Persecuted Christians deserving of our care and attention.”
“I do not believe Mr Millington’s injuries severe enough to require twenty-four hour nursing, Miss Price,” I said, finding myself once more in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with an ocean-crossing proselytizer. “I hear he is recovering well.”
Lillian sighed, her eyes shot heavenward.
“Come,” she said, rising to her feet, “come and help me finalize the preparations for Mr Millington’s arrival.”
Phoebe and Nina followed the American girl, but La Contessa, with a sharp shake of the head, stayed behind. Boldly she arranged herself in a chair opposite me, her lips hinting at a smile as she curled and uncurled a loose tendril of hair with jeweled fingers.
“They do not know,” La Contessa said softly. “That is why they are so sweet.”
“Know what?” I watched as La Contessa languidly removed her shoes, exposing the pale topsides of her feet to the sun.
“That Mr Millington shot the Chinese,” she said simply and bent to light a cigarette. “My husband tells me very little, but he was so enraged last night when Miss Ward requested Mr Millington come here, so angry, my Pietro, that he could not keep it even from me, what the boy had done.”
“Nina requested that Mr Millington come here?” I asked. “Are you quite sure?”
“Quite sure.” La Contessa took a first inhale from her cigarette and looked up at me with coquettish expression. “Please do not tell my husband that you have seen me smoking, he disapproves so.”
“I shan’t,” I said. “It is a secret of mine that I believe women smoking to be quite becoming.”
She sat suddenly upright, scattering ash across the verandah, and posed a smile so inviting I allowed myself to imagine for a moment that this sentiment I perceived growing between us, fragile and promising, was the product of desire on both our parts, and not merely my own wishful thinking.
“Mr Scott! La Contessa! Mr Millington has arrived,” Lillian Price called and reluctantly I stood and turned towards the house. Slowly La Contessa rose, extinguishing the last embers of her cigarette as she slipped her feet once more inside her shoes.
We joined the small committee by the front door. James, supported in his unsteady steps by Hugo Lovell and an antique walking stick, limped past us, his head bowed. The servants watched at some distance, their bodies lined neatly down the hallway formed a silent welcoming party. Lillian stepped forward to embrace James.
“Oh, Mr Millington! Come, we have prepared a bed for you. You shall be comfortable here amongst friends,” she said, guiding him and Hugo down the hallway. The rest of us followed a little further behind. The servants stood by, unmoving.
Lillian settled James in the makeshift bed by a window in Oscar’s study. The sun shone brilliantly, allowing me to see the room with fresh perspective, its corners lit now where they had lain dark and unknown the night before. James squinted as his head rested upon the pillow and Lillian hastily drew the velvet curtains closed, casting crimson shadows over the room.
“Poor Mr Millington,” she said. “Now, you just tell us what we might do for you. Nina, where are the servant
s? Someone ought to be here. What if Mr Millington is hungry?”
“Please, do not trouble them. I wish only to sleep,” James said, his voice weak.
Phoebe Franklin settled on folded knees by the young man’s bedside.
“Mr Millington, let us praise God for sparing your life,” she said, each word weighty and sober.
“Thank you,” he said, looking in befuddlement at the group gathered in the room. I observed James as he received the missionary’s prayers, noting the raging laceration across his forehead, the bloated distention to his misshapen cheeks, the fluttering of his eyelids as he struggled to stay awake.
“Oh, these Puritan prayers!” La Contessa whispered furiously to me. “At least in Italy we pray with our souls. Excuse me.” She left the room with a vivid sweep of skirt, pushing past Hugo, who shifted from foot to foot, hands fumbling in his pockets. Nina and I turned to follow.
“Miss Ward,” James said, his voice stronger now. “Won’t you stay?”
“Naturally, Mr Millington.” Nina stopped, turned back to the patient.
“They tell me that you asked Mr Fairchild if I might come here,” James said to Nina, who edged closer now to the bed. “That was most kind of you.”
“Really it was Miss Price who brought you here. You ought to thank her,” Nina said, taking a step backwards.
“I was most moved by the gesture, Miss Ward. Thank you.”
“Sleep well, Mr Millington.” Nina bowed her head.
“Miss Ward,” he tried, but she ignored his call and crossed the room to the door.
“I did not know Mr Millington was such a close friend,” I said to Nina as we walked together the length of the hallway.
She frowned.
“He is not,” she said. “It is just as I said now; Miss Price brought him here. She is close to him, I believe, she played tennis with him and Hugo when circumstances were… normal.”
“Yet you asked Fairchild if he might stay?”
We descended the stairs together, Nina slow and deliberate in her movements, her face angled away from me.
“Miss Price asked me to speak with him, yes,” Nina said as we reached the bottom step. Her words were unnatural and stilted, her personality paled. Increasingly in the Fairchild house I felt we each performed roles: I held myself at more of a distance from Nina than my intimacy with the family required, and she redacted her thoughts, reduced her usual flowering sentences to the barest bones, and pronounced them in detached, polite tones. Only when we reached the drawing room did she drop her voice to a whisper and explain that Miss Price had insisted she speak with Mr Fairchild.
“I did not wish to bother him,” she said, “and I thought Mr Millington would be fine at the residence, but Miss Price found the idea of him staying there most unpalatable.”
Fortunately, Oscar had received the request with magnanimous courtesy, Nina said, although Pietro Mancini had staged voluble protest at the idea.
“I do not really understand,” she said, “what is polite and what is impolite, what is expected and what is unusual.”
“Nor do they,” I said. “They are only more practiced at the pretense.”
Nicholas was still working, a servant informed me when I paid a visit late in the afternoon, although I was welcome to wait for him to finish. Contentedly I sat in the shade of the Wards’ courtyard, sipping green tea and admiring the comfortable silence maintained in the neat, enclosed space as the world raged beyond its perimeter. Around half past four Nicholas joined me, taking a seat sheltered by the curve of a pomegranate tree.
“I write against time,” he mused. “I write of the Boxers, of China, of belief, and it is a game I am destined to lose. These things change form before me, my pen cannot so speedily record their transformation.”
“And yet you must try,” I said.
“Perhaps it is men like you who are best placed to record history,” Nicholas said. “Paragraphs, not pages, allow for the twin virtues of quality and urgency.”
“Paragraphs are for amateurs, Nicholas,” I said warmly. “And you are an expert.”
Nicholas shook his head, dismissive of my compliment, and in the intensity of his gaze I intuited that this would not be one of our habitual wandering, open-ended conversations of unhurried intellectual flavor. Instead, he hastily shared his experience of the Fairchild house so far: he was, he admitted, finding the company of so many unfamiliar women somewhat trying. He missed Pei, whom he had not seen since moving to the Legation Quarter, despite hoping each time he returned home that she might be there, and he found it increasingly difficult to carve out any time alone with Nina.
“I have never taught her of these things,” Nicholas said. “The inanities of which women talk, dresses and servants and popular novels. I see how she exerts herself, how delightful she is, and how it pains me then to see them watch her askance, to recoil at her opinions, to reject all those things that I have taught her with such pride. I am not blind to it, Alistair, I know that amongst these people my daughter is an oddity.”
“A delightful oddity,” I said.
“An oddity all the same. I never imagined that we might live amongst such people, and yet now that I see how unprepared Nina would be to live in England, or even to reside in a place such as Hong Kong, I fear that I have failed her. A mother might have helped her more.”
I attempted to reassure Nicholas that his daughter was faring well in her unfamiliar environment, but my words were hollow; I too had witnessed her uncomfortable adjustment to such strange surroundings. I suggested then that we return to the house together, and perhaps find some time to talk with Nina.
“Another man at the dinner table would be most welcome in my eyes,” Nicholas said. “Besides Mr Millington. Do you know, the servants told me that he murdered an innocent Chinese at the racecourse yesterday? Naturally I told them that it must be nonsense, but one still worries of course, and wonders what Fairchild was thinking in inviting him to stay.”
I hesitated, recalled the expression on James’ face the day before, the terror of success in death, and decided to say nothing. It was the first time that I had withheld information of any sort from Nicholas, with whom I shared great confidence, and I see now as I apply retrospective reason to my actions, that I did it for Nina, for her protection, that she might not learn of the gravity of her misstep from her father and feel further embarrassment. And so as Nicholas and I walked the desolate, deserted streets to the Legation Quarter together, dusk settling pink over the grey roofs of the city, James’ misdeed remained a truth unspoken upon my tongue.
La Contessa languidly reclined in a chair, and I admired the manner in which her long, slender fingers gripped the stem of a glass of vermouth. Nina called for a servant as Nicholas and I stepped onto the verandah, but before one could attend to us La Contessa had already poured me a generous serving from her bottle of Cinzano. Gladly I accepted it from her, while Nicholas politely declined the offer. His eyes stayed upon James Millington, who was propped uncomfortably in a chair, a light blanket spread over his knees, a cup of black tea held between grazed knuckles. Phoebe Franklin cradled a Bible in her lap, and glanced up every so often from her verses to observe us, the damned who drank before the dusk. I noticed that La Contessa consumed alcohol in the same manner as did I, and I liked her for it. It was unusual to find women who would really give themselves to drink, who would open their spirits and let alcohol lift them, carry them away from reality. Women drinkers so regularly face disapprobation, but La Contessa, as her very name suggested, was of a class where the approval or disapproval of others had very little bearing on her fate. As such, she was open-minded yet opinionated, questioning but certain, the kind of foreigner that proliferated on the seductive shores of treaty port China, the characters so keenly missed amidst the guarded and conservative society of Peking.
“From the rising of the sun to its setting, the
name of the Lord is to be praised,” Phoebe Franklin read from her Bible.
“Come, Mr Millington, have a little of La Contessa’s chocolate,” Lillian said. “The sugar shall make you feel stronger.”
James, a lock of hair slick against his damp forehead, struggled to lean forward to accept the offering.
“It seems the Italians have the best of everything,” Lillian said as she placed the chocolate in James’ open palm. “When I go to Europe I must stop there. Do you suppose Rome is as beautiful as Paris, La Contessa?”
“Infinitely more so,” La Contessa said.
“I suppose both cities are more beautiful than London at least,” Nina said, closing the book she held in her hands. The faded blue of its cover and the dim gilt of its title were familiar; I looked closer and saw it was Fairchild’s copy of Far From The Madding Crowd, the very volume I had discovered on the desk in his study.
“Miss Ward,” James said, laughter in his voice. “You mustn’t be so hard on London. England is a beautiful place. Green. Not like Peking.”
“Like Shantung province?” Nina asked him.
“Sorry?”
“Is England green as Shantung is green?” Nina insisted. She spoke in earnest, but I saw the brief pain that crossed Nicholas’ face as his daughter, that delightful oddity, sent gentle ripples of distaste through her new community of half-strangers.
“You mean to say the province from which the Boxers hail?” James asked.
“Well, yes. It is also the birthplace of Confucius, but I suppose that is irrelevant to our concerns. Shantung is beautiful and green. Father and I went there last summer. Perhaps I might imagine England that way. Is Shantung like England, Father?”
Nicholas coughed and shook his head briefly.
“I don’t suppose England is anything like Shantung province, Miss Ward,” Lillian said crossly. “What a ridiculous comparison to make. Don’t you agree, Mr Millington?”
James did not speak, but looked ahead, a distance in his eyes. Lillian wiped his brow with a towel. There seemed no natural way to continue the conversation, though I felt obliged to fill the silence that followed Nina’s questions, heavy and uncomfortable. I wished to introduce some uncontroversial subject, but La Contessa spoke first.