by Kane, Clare
I observed the newly-formed food committee carry out of its first operations that very afternoon, watched as Lillian Price and Beatrice Moore gleefully accompanied a group of soldiers to raid a Chinese store within Legation Quarter lines. The discovery of huge supplies of grain led one American soldier to throw handfuls of it into the air, letting it shower down over his shoulders in a hollow and rather premature victory. I carried a sack of grain and accompanied Lillian to the Fairchild residence, where, assuming the responsibilities of her new role on the committee, the girl requested that Oscar Fairchild send his servants to gather any spare supplies from the cellar. They duly returned with a dozen bottles of wine and twenty-seven cigars.
“These will do well for the Continentals,” Lillian announced with new-found vitality. She, like many of my compatriots and New World cousins, seemed to blossom within the confines and hierarchies of systematic activity. This fresh wellspring of agitation made me realize to what an extent those days of waiting, of expecting rescue, of counting deaths on tired fingers, had deflated our spirits.
Nina, however, lacked the cheerful focus of her peers. She had been assigned to make sandbags out of any and all available material: men’s shirts, curtains, old bedsheets, and her enthusiasm for the task was muted. Following a dinner accompanied by one of the dusty bottles of wine from Fairchild’s cellar, Nina took her unpracticed sewing to the verandah, where her fingers weaved rapidly and inexpertly over her work. An open door separated her from the party in the drawing room, and it was with familiar irritation at our permanent state of being observed that I stepped outside to join her.
“Hello, Mr Scott,” she said gently.
The sky hung a low, dusty pink that cast dappled shadows across her cheeks. She looked ruefully upon the half-formed sandbag in her lap.
“Do you suppose one might learn to sew at the age of nineteen?” she asked. “Or do you think I am bound to produce such ugly stitches for eternity?”
“I believe a young woman in possession of such talents as yours ought not to waste her time on trivialities,” I said, walking to the edge of the verandah and looking out to the walls that surrounded the Legation Quarter. Thin, desperate wisps of smoke rose from the Chinese city beyond our reach. “If I were First Minister I would instruct you to negotiate with the Empress Dowager herself.”
“Then it is most fortunate that you are not First Minister,” Nina said. “Aiyo!” She drew a startled, bleeding finger from her needle, lifted it to her lips.
“You went to pray?” I said, lowering my voice.
Nina rubbed at the crimson tip of her bleeding finger with her thumb.
“I wondered,” she said in quiet tones to match my own, “whether Chang might have come to the Legation Quarter. Or perhaps even Pei. Of course I didn’t see them, and I am glad if that suggests they are in some better place. Mrs Franklin took us to the Su palace and, oh, what misery! Poverty and hunger as you could never imagine. At least the foreign powers have accommodated the refugees, Mrs Franklin told me some had suggested they might not.”
“And so you prayed?”
“It is quite straightforward,” Nina said. “One simply closes one’s eyes and hopes.”
I took my leave once more around ten p.m., and retired to the bar at the Grand, where I enjoyed my whisky in the company of two refugee families, their sleeping bodies arranged in the corners of the rooms. Edward and I spoke in hushed tones while Hilde cleared away glasses; a group of boisterous diplomats had only recently been induced to leave the families to their slumber.
“Six men of government hopeless enough to drink seven bottles of wine,” Edward said. “I believe that merits a drop more for us civilians.”
Hilde handed her husband the bottle of Chivas. Just as he made to fill my glass, the door to the bar swung open. La Contessa approached with arch smile.
“Mr Scott,” she said in unusually soft timbre, “I come with a request from Mr Ward.”
“Well, Mr Ward ought to come here himself,” Hilde retorted. “Imagine letting a woman walk alone at this time of the night. Are we not under siege? Are the streets not crawling with soldiers, are the Boxers not at the gate?”
“I like to take the air,” La Contessa said simply. “Mr Scott, if you please.”
We climbed the stairs to my room. I lit a lamp and closed the door; we could hear the soft roar of fire just beyond Legation Quarter limits, the resolute rumble of Boxer voices.
“What does Nicholas need?” I asked.
“And I thought you were expert in these matters,” she said. She laughed, velvety and languid, as her slender fingers made quick work of the buttons of my shirt. “It appears I still have much to teach you.”
Certainly her unabashed assuredness was novel for me; those other married women of my acquaintance, whilst generally accommodating and free with their affections, had endeavored still to hide their intentions from others, they had followed regular timetables, constructed excuses of afternoon teas and family visits. They had not walked, resplendent, exuberant and utterly uncaring through streets roiled of blood and despair, darkness their only cover and the ultimate betrayer of their intentions. Allow me a moment to indulge romance, and say I had never known a woman like La Contessa, and I doubt I shall ever meet another so vibrantly, carelessly individual. I submitted willingly to this sensual folly, forgetting as my lips met hers and my hands found the nape of her neck that Edward and Hilde waited downstairs. We were becoming practiced now, familiar with the desires and preferences of the other, and I felt a great swell of contented intimacy as we lay together upon my bed afterwards, the Boxer chorus, Sha! Sha!, accompanying our hushed conversation.
“There is something I must tell you,” she said, sitting suddenly upright, her fingers reaching to entwine with mine. “Miss Ward.”
She paused, looked to the ceiling, gathered her thoughts.
“Yes, Chiara? What about Miss Ward?”
“I do not judge,” she said carefully. “I tell you only because I worry for her.”
La Contessa explained that she had waited until Pietro fell asleep before leaving the house. It was after eleven, and she walked with silent tread through the darkened residence, her shoes cradled in her hands. Voices from the drawing room gave her pause and, wary of discovery, she stopped in the hallway. A weak, flickering light suggesting only a single candle had been lit trickled from below the door to provide a puddle of illumination. Her first objective was to avoid the light, to make no sound as she passed the doorway to exit the house. Skirting the entranceway she intended to pass right away into the night, but the conversation that filtered through the walls brought La Contessa to a halt. Two voices sounded; one, that of Oscar Fairchild, the second belonged to Nina. And yet Oscar spoke in a way La Contessa had never heard him previously. Gone was his easy, polite manner, and in its place she heard unconcealed desperation, a pleading, almost wild resonance.
“And what did he say to her?” I asked.
“I could not hear it all,” La Contessa said. “He spoke of his career, said he had never intended to end up in Peking, suggested that he was unhappy, dissatisfied with his life.”
“And Nina?”
“She tried to quieten him, suggested they might wake the others.”
“And?”
La Contessa held my hand more tightly, pressed her palm flat against mine.
“And then, Alistair, I heard the words that concern me most. Let them awaken, he said, and I shall tell them that I have never met one as beautiful, as true as Miss Nina Ward. I shall shout it until the Boxers of Shantung hear me.”
“And then?”
“And then there was nothing. No words at least.” She brought her face close to mine, brushed my lips with hers. I turned away. “I have upset you. I ought not to have said anything. It is only, if I hear them, so might anyone in the house. Her father, or…”
“T
hank you for telling me.” I rose from the bed, dressed myself once more. Possessed of sudden energy, I experienced a great desire to move. La Contessa watched me cautiously.
“But, where are you going, Alistair? Please, do not act without thinking.”
It is remarkable how those who have known us the least time can often most effectively read our unspoken thoughts. They see us for what we are, not what we once were or aspire to become. For I might have considered myself a rational man, considered and equanimous, but I did not think, could not think, in those moments. Thoughts suggested themselves to me, but failed to gain a foothold in my fogged brain. Rage, blind, righteous and unfocused, consumed me. I angered towards Oscar Fairchild and his cruel opportunism, I cursed Nicholas’ ignorance, his inaction. I maddened even towards Nina. Sweet, clever Nina; no painting or poem might save her from the frailty of the flesh, and no philosophy could protect her from the consequences of submitting to its whims. Had neither Nicholas nor Pei ever warned her that while lilies might grow amidst the mud, their petals must strain to avoid its stains?
“Please, tesoro mio.” La Contessa rose to embrace me. “Sleep now. Tomorrow you shall speak with Miss Ward.”
“Tomorrow might be too late,” I said.
“Ssh.” She kissed me. “I see how you care for her. To protect her, tonight you must do nothing.”
Silently she dressed and left me. I poured myself another whisky and sat at my desk, one foot tapping nervously against the floor. Lillian Price had not been mistaken. Nina and Oscar. Oscar and Nina. The names merged and fell apart in my mind, conjured images I wished to expel from memory. Nina at the party in May, my summoning of Fairchild, his eyes first setting upon her unblemished form. The knife thrust towards Nina, the trail of dropped pearls across the dusty ground, my urging that the Wards seek safety under Fairchild’s roof. I damned Oscar and castigated Nicholas, and yet I could not deny my hand in Nina’s fate. I, with unthinking good will, I, with admirable intentions, I, with a ghastly lack of foresight, had engineered this pairing. And so I vowed that I, with concern for Nina and care for future, would dissolve the corrupt partnership.
All days in the Legation Quarter were accompanied by fire, by great, roaring flames of destruction to our north, to our east, our west and our south. Yet while smoke and heat and the splintering sounds of buildings surrendering under force had become somewhat normal for us, this fire surprised even the most jaded of residents.
The Chinese, we all agreed, valued education. We ourselves might not have appreciated their particular methods of educating themselves, indeed we scoffed at the outdated civil service examination system still in place that obliged young men to sacrifice the brightest, most tender days of their existence to memorizing large swathes of ancient scholarly works. The educated Chinese was the reverse image of that other impression of the Chinaman printed in our shared imagination: the barbarian of gnashed teeth and fearsome cry. The Chinese, we believed, could only be warriors or scholars, either savage, loathsome creatures or long-nailed, effeminate men of no practical purpose. And no place was more precious to Chinese men of books than the Hanlin Academy, a seat of learning as brilliant in their eyes as the centers of Oxford or Cambridge in ours. And still the Boxers set it on fire, launching torches onto its parched rooftops in the morning, emissaries of a fire that soon devoured the walls to reach the precious books inside, and ravaged the many thousands of printed pages contained inside them.
The blaze was abrupt and powerful. Wisdom, it soon transpired, burned even more rapidly than wood. I had planned to make immediately for the Fairchild residence in the morning to see Nina, but the fire rather interrupted my plans, and Edward and I set out for the Hanlin, located just beyond the walls of the British Legation, instead. Marines had been sent to extinguish the fire and recruited any and all willing citizens to help with the effort. I saw Nina and Lillian join a large group of people already working to assist the soldiers in their quelling of the fire. Snaking, chaotic lines had been formed, made up of missionaries, diplomats and servants, who passed buckets from one frantic hand to another, water spilling over the sides as they raced hopelessly against the fire. The marines had been dispatched to inside the compound itself, where they set about felling the walls of the Hanlin’s halls in an attempt to halt the fire.
Phoebe Franklin was at the head of one of the lines of amateur firefighters.
“Hurry! Pass it here!” Her commands were invigoratingly human, untainted by her usual superiority, free from any references to the Lord or appeals to our better characters.
Edward’s wife Hilde followed us from the hotel shortly afterwards, gun strapped by her side, and immediately set to work, falling into line behind the wife of the French minister. The foreigners briefly forgot their national flags in the urgency of this shared task and toiled together in harmony. Imperial soldiers kept up a steady staccato of gunfire as we worked against the blaze. These potshots from the surrounding rooftops did not constitute the finest display of firearms skills, and felled not a single foreigner. That did not matter to the enemy, however, as they were intended only to serve as a simple nuisance, a distraction from the urgent task before us.
Despite the Imperial soldiers’ best efforts, eventually we succeed in taming the fire sufficiently to ensure that the Legation Quarter itself was not at immediate risk of immolation. Then I was able to join the marines inside the Hanlin. The ruin was breathtaking: the most important works ever penned by Chinese hand had been reduced to nothing more than curled, grey dust. The Hanlin itself was a skeleton, its main library had been salvaged only by a fortunate change in the direction of the wind. I picked through the ruins, my nostrils filled with dense, black smoke. I found three marines squatting amid the ashes, bodies limp with exertion.
“Look at this,” one of them called to me. He gestured to a pile of books, heaped into a quivering pyramid and sprinkled with dry leaves and arid wood.
I pulled one of the books from the pile, my fingers traced the charred corners of its pages. I could not decipher the contents of the silk-bound volume, yet even a novice in the written Chinese language such as myself could easily intuit the painstaking craftsmanship of the calligraphy upon its pages.
“I simply cannot believe it.” Nicholas approached, two books already placed under his arm. “If the Boxers wished to destroy Chinese civilization, well, they have succeeded.”
“At least they have not succeeded in their efforts to destroy us.” I placed a hand upon his shoulder, but his eyes maintained their glassy, distant expression. I had raged at Nicholas’ image in my mind the previous evening, but seeing him before me restored old affections. His devastation at such savage destruction of his greatest joy, Chinese scholarship, dampened my anger.
“Alistair, will you help me?” he asked. “We must save the books, take them away from here. I fear the Boxers will return.”
“Naturally.”
We made our way through the ashen maze of the Hanlin, collecting volumes as we went, instructing missionaries and refugees and servants to carry the books to Oscar Fairchild’s home, where Nicholas promised he would later sort the editions and find a secure place for their storage. In the main library we found Nina gazing hopelessly at her surroundings.
“Father!” She rushed to embrace Nicholas and the pair clung to one another under the high eaves that marked the entrance to the Hanlin’s principal collection. “It is too awful,” she said.
Softly Nicholas stroked her hair. The Hanlin was not a place she was intimately familiar with; Nina had visited the school only two or three times as a child, accompanying her father in search of texts to inform his research. Yet she had passed it frequently on her walks around the city and stopped to admire its elegant exterior, and she recalled now those happy afternoons when she had been allowed to play in the courtyards while her father spoke with the officious librarians. Then the shelves had towered above her, the ceilings had hung high
and distant. Now Nina was a giant, the Hanlin trampled underfoot.
We were not alone for long. Soon other foreigners charged into the library, loud and buoyant, calling to one another in the overzealous tones that identified those witnesses to terrible events. I had seen those faces a hundred times before: shocked by the depths to which humanity can fall, delighted to be alive, rapturously enjoying the righteous outrage permitted by such events. Scholars amateur and professional scoured the shelves for remaining works despite Nicholas’ protestations that no one take anything for themselves. We were not to discover all that had been removed until months later, when some of the men resident in Peking during the siege offered rare manuscripts to England’s most prominent libraries.
Nicholas and I crossed from courtyard to courtyard, passing the small pools choked now with fallen rafters and discarded shrapnel, the carp that once swam tranquilly in them crushed beneath this human debris, until we reached the street. Nina followed at a distance. In her hand, dusty with ash, she held a slim volume, a mere slither of a great, historic encyclopedia.
“I shall see you at home, Father,” she said, seating herself upon a low wall outside the library as the sun began its slow descent towards the night. She turned from us, shielded her eyes from the late afternoon light and surveyed the Hanlin, queen of a broken kingdom.