by Kane, Clare
As it turned out, my words preceded some of the most terrible days of the siege. They were stifling and endless, they scratched and chafed at our collective patience. We lost lives at a steady pace as our lines of defense around the Legation Quarter continued to fall back. Friday the thirteenth of July marked the blackest day of our internment: Prince Su’s palace came under sustained attack and two mines exploded in the French Legation, leaving behind a single, dismembered foot as the only evidence of the lives of two sailors. This made for a most miserable Bastille Day for the French; I spent the fourteenth at the Su mansion alongside a host of soldiers of various nationalities who had come to offer some respite to the Japanese after days of heavy fighting. When I returned to the hotel in the late afternoon, Nina peppered me with questions about the welfare of those at the palace, but I could not bring myself to tell her of the disease I had witnessed within its walls, the lingering shadow of death cast across every corner of Su’s formerly august and majestic residence.
It was on Sunday morning that Oscar Fairchild once against visited the hotel. I had woken early to collect Nina: on Sundays the bakers started earlier than usual, the Chinese at the Grand were Christians after all, and they wished to worship later with their peers. La Contessa had stayed the previous night with me in the hotel, and as she fixed a diamond to her left ear she noted with soft wonderment: “Mr Fairchild. He is entering the hotel.”
“Christ.” I swung my legs out of bed; my feet met the wooden floor. “He has come again.”
“Is he in the habit of coming here?” Chiara asked, the diamonds in her ear glinting in the gentle light of morning as she turned to me. I thought again how beautiful she was, how much life she continued to exude. She couldn’t possibly have been as vibrant and vital as she had been a month earlier, hunger and desperation must have ebbed at her resources of energy and optimism, but perhaps she appeared to shine brighter as the world around us dimmed. How fortunate I was, I thought, to have found such a woman, unafraid to rise from the bed by her husband’s and to steal through the darkness to offer me intimacy and hope.
“You must not say anything,” I said, joining her by the window.
“I am in no position to judge,” she said, stepping away from the window and wrapping her arms around me. “I suppose we had better wait for him to leave.”
“He shan’t leave before we do,” I said. “I imagine he shall wait for me to return with Miss Ward. Very clever, installing himself in the hotel before she arrives, coming here as dawn breaks and there is no one to witness his arrival.”
“Well, I have seen him now,” La Contessa said simply. “And I see him sometimes, late at night, reading in the drawing room.”
I descended the stairs to the lobby and intercepted Oscar on his way to the kitchen.
“Mr Fairchild,” I said.
“Oh, Mr Scott.” He straightened, setting his features into careful absence of expression. “I am here to make some changes to our bread order.”
“I don’t suppose one of your servants might have come?”
“Oh. I wanted to stretch my legs, to clear my head before the day. We have had such a terrible run this week…”
“Mr Fairchild,” I said sternly. “You are here to see her, aren’t you?”
He did not protest.
“I think it best for Miss Ward that you leave her be. It might also be wise for you. Politically, I mean.”
We regarded one another in the hallway, quiet still in those first hours of the day.
“I suppose La Contessa agrees with you?” Mr Fairchild said archly.
I must credit his tactics; I was surprised.
“Yes, as a matter of fact she does,” I replied. “I am of course somewhat freer to seek her opinions on a variety of matters, given that I am not an employee of Her Majesty’s government. And there is the small fact too that La Contessa is a married woman.”
“Very well,” Oscar said severely. “Please pass on my regards to the bakers and request they prepare an extra loaf for us today.”
“With pleasure.”
“Make it two,” he said.
It was approaching midnight when a knock came at my door. I hoped it might be Chiara, but it was Hilde who waited for me; her face, usually bright with industrious cheer, appeared grey in the darkness of the corridor.
“I am sorry to disturb you so late,” she said.
“Please, come in. Take a seat.” I gestured to my armchair and poured her a small measure of whisky. She received it gratefully.
“Difficult day?” I asked.
“I took some of the children to the hospital,” she said, her eyes focused on the bottom of her glass, seeking, as many of us did then, the light at the bottom of the well. “There is so much sickness, Mr Scott. We cannot continue in these conditions.”
“I know,” I said solemnly.
“I must let you sleep,” she said. “I came only to speak with you of Mr Fairchild. Word reached me that he came here again this morning.”
“Indeed he did.”
“I do not know the particulars,” Hilde said carefully. “Yet people are talking. I understand it has something to do with Miss Ward.”
“Yes.”
“Mr Scott, I have always cared little for the rules of society, particularly those that seek to mold the behavior of women. Yet even I see the harm such a scandal could do to a young lady like Miss Ward.”
“Yes.”
“We must find a way to make this problem disappear. I am no missionary myself, but we must recognize that we are in the company of the devout. I do not wish to terminate Miss Ward’s activities here, but a scandal would leave me with little choice.”
“Surely it hasn’t come to that?” I said.
Hilde sipped her glass dry and faced with me with wearisome eyes. She had come across Phoebe Franklin earlier that day at the hospital. Phoebe had asked for Miss Ward’s welfare, taking Hilde aside to tell her that some of the missionaries had expressed disapproval of Nina’s intimacy with the Chinese converts living at the Grand. Nina’s irreligious eccentricity might be tolerated in the name of accepting all of God’s creatures, but suggestions of impropriety circled her now and such comments would only increase the closer she edged towards scandal; even her suffering at the hands of foreign soldiers at the Su palace was rewritten as a fate deserved, just the kind of thing a young woman such as Nina Ward would invite upon herself.
That there had been talk did not surprise me, though of course none of these horrified observers had taken me into their confidence. We were much together in those days, all of us, more so than any of us would have liked, but we communicated still within the confines of our social roles. Men spoke with men of military tactics and political intrigue; women spoke with women of injuries and children and sickness and, I suppose, other women. I suspected God’s most loyal servants might prove even more severe in these moments in their condemnation of others.
“Mr Scott,” Hilde continued. “I wondered if I might talk with Miss Ward. Of course I do not enjoy a friendship with her as you do. Yet perhaps as a woman…”
“Please speak to her,” I said firmly. “I have tried, and she does not wish to discuss the matter with me.”
“Very well.” Hilde rose. At the door she paused and turned to me, her smile unconvinced. “I shall try my best, Mr Scott, but I fear that a fence makes love more keen.”
XI
Hilde was a resolutely capable woman. Her skills may have resided more in the practical than the emotional realm, yet she harnessed the same expansive energy and straightforward confidence in addressing the question of Nina and Oscar with which she approached all other areas of life. Handing me my customary cup of coffee the next morning she vowed that she would speak with Nina before night fell, determining to approach her in that most quiet moment of the afternoon, the lull between lunch and the reawaken
ing of the spirit at dusk, that hushed hour when the bakers grew drowsy and their orders tailed off, and invite young Nina to her room for a cup of tea.
I did not doubt Hilde’s ability to achieve anything she might set her mind to, and yet when I collected Nina from the lobby that evening I saw that whatever Hilde might have said to Nina appeared to have wrought little impression upon her. If any shift in demeanor was notable it was that Nina appeared perhaps a little more animated than she had in recent days, greeting me with easy amiability and rising nimbly to her feet when I crossed the hall towards her.
“Good evening, Mr Scott,” Hilde said drily from behind the bar, not looking up as I approached.
A more frivolous character might have felt some temptation to glance meaningfully in my direction, to raise an eyebrow or twitch a lip in veiled significance, but Hilde only continued her duties, tidying and ordering behind the bar, politely asking the refugee children who crawled and played on the floor to move aside.
And Nina offered no further clue as to what may have passed between the two women, not on our walk through the Legation Quarter, where she made idle chit-chat about the day’s bread orders, nor over dinner, where she enacted her now habitual caricature of normality. I must admit that at some point I may have stopped searching for signs, distracted as I was by La Contessa, who glittered and charmed her way through the meal, and allowed the sole of her shoe to brush against my ankle just once, rewarding me with a careful smile when I met her eye. The disappointment, then, was bitter, when she passed me in the drawing room and murmured in low tones: “Not tonight”.
“Why?” I returned, but she had passed me and approached Miss Price and Mrs Moore, laughing heartily as she joined their conversation.
“Talking to yourself, Alistair? I thought I was the only old man here quite mad enough for that.”
Nicholas stood before me, hands clasped behind his back in his habitual, rather hesitant, social stance. When made to endure the company of others, my old friend could not hide his displeasure and discomfort at spending time away from his work; he seldom drank alcohol at dinners or parties, and certainly would never cradle a glass between his slender, academic fingers whilst engaging in witty repartee. Nicholas could not muster a false laugh no matter how great the effort at humor on the part of his interlocutor and he was given to frequently abandoning conversations, leaving acquaintances halfway through a trailing sentence as he ambled cheerily alone to some quiet corner. I was therefore not surprised by his bemused posture at the after-dinner gathering, but I was most pleased to see he had put aside his work for an hour or so to join the fray. He talked pleasantly of his book, detailing his latest thoughts on Boxer practices of spirit possession, and complained chummily of the heat while we edged warily around any subject approaching the polemical, skimming quite unusually over the topic of Nina, who was engaged only a few feet away in discussion with Phoebe Franklin about the health of those at the Su palace. My exchange with Nicholas felt congenial and fairly unrestrained, marking something, I might have said, of a return to our old footing. And so despite the disappointment I felt in knowing that La Contessa would not join me later and that I would lie restlessly alone while the Boxers burned their torches and chanted their threats, I left with a gently flourishing lightness of spirit.
Hilde waited for me at the Grand, poured me an unsparing serving of whisky immediately upon arrival and asked me to follow her. We ascended stairs at the opposite side of the building to where my room was located, and crossed a plain wooden landing, free from the brass antiques, jade ornaments and heavy, floral lampshades that filled the other corners of the hotel, and reached the doorway to what was Hilde’s bedroom. I was unsurprised by the sparseness of room: the practical wooden table, the unadorned bedspread, the bare walls all matched the pragmatism of Hilde’s character, but I was rather astonished that our meeting was taking place in that most intimate of settings.
“Might we not have gone to Edward’s office?” I asked as she closed the door definitely behind me.
“It is better that we speak here,” she said quietly, lighting a single lamp. “Edward does not know of this. He is in his office now, looking at the books.” She sighed. “I have told him that while somebody might make money from this war, it certainly shall not be us.”
She removed her gun from its holster and placed it upon the table, gestured for me to sit in a straight-backed chair, which wobbled unsteadily as I sat. There was nowhere else to sit but the bed, and Hilde forwent this option, standing solemnly before me.
“I spoke with Miss Ward,” she said carefully, each word leaden, considered and heavy upon her tongue.
“And?”
“It is worse than I had imagined.” She paced slowly across the room, turned when she reached one austere wall, retraced her steps.
“Please, Hilde, sit.”
She shook her head.
“Miss Ward is in love,” she said finally. “She is buoyed by promises, the most irresponsible, devilish promises, made by Mr Fairchild. He has told her he shall divorce his wife.”
“Divorce his wife?” I stood now too. The words spluttered forth without thought; divorce was unthinkable, unimaginable for a man like Fairchild. The most noble of English families could not survive such scandal; an official in the narrow social confines of Peking would be utterly ruined by such a misstep. “What nonsense.”
“Quite. I explained to Miss Ward that Mrs Fairchild is held in high esteem, that she had already lost a family in India to cholera, and that neither she nor her compatriots would stand for her to lose a second husband.”
I sat, took a deep but unsatisfying sip of whisky. Hilde moved now to her bed, perched herself uneasily upon on its edge.
“And what did she say?” I asked.
“That she was sorry, that it had never been her intention to become mixed up in gossip and tittle-tattle, that she had never asked Mr Fairchild to come to the hotel. She has tried to finish it, she says, but he persists. She feels very alone, almost under attack from those around her. Every word she speaks is wrong, everything she thinks is at odds with them. In him she finds understanding.”
“That’s one way to say it,” I said, the words bitter in my mouth.
Hilde bowed her head, folded her hands across her lap.
“I have proposed that she invite Mr Fairchild to the hotel tomorrow. We shall find them a quiet place to speak and then she can tell him finally to leave her be. I thought she might speak with him in your room; no one might object to her coming to see an old family friend.”
“My room?” I understood Hilde’s logic, but felt apprehension at any complicity in bringing the pair together, even if the ultimate aim in doing so were to cleave them apart.
“She cannot speak with him at home. Die Wände haben Ohren, as we say in Germany.”
“The walls have ears.”
“Precisely. Here there are only our ears. And our lips shall remain sealed.”
“And Edward?”
Hilde shrugged.
“He ought to understand. After all, I was betrothed to our neighbor Stefan when a strange Englishman came to stay at the local inn and persuaded me to follow him to China. He ought to know that the heart is an untamed beast, but he can be quite proper about such matters. It is better that he doesn’t know.”
How I missed La Contessa that night, how I desired the mollifying effect of her kisses, the mind-clearing impression of her touch. Sleeplessly I pondered Hilde’s plan, sitting by the window in the solitary midnight blue of my lonely room, watching the curled streets beyond the Tartar walls glimmer and blink red by the light of lanterns, tracing the waves of torches held aloft by the murderous Boxers, listening for the gunshots, the rat-a-tat-tat, the drumbeat of death, the anthem of our sorry summer. Whisky only confused my thoughts, swelling my anxieties, unformed, unnamed, but uncomfortably present. Of course we must help Nina. I had bee
n trying, rather unsuccessfully, to do so since she first crossed the border from her old life to the unfamiliar Legation Quarter with its unvoiced rules and damning judgements, since I had first seen her form coherent, sympathetic arguments as to why the Boxers might have felt compelled to attack foreigners in the most barbarous ways, and watched how her empathy, her straddling of two worlds, her simple ability to hold and examine two opposing ideas in her mind at one time, provoked rejection and rebuttal and forced upon her a profound examination of identity to which there was no simple resolution.
And Fairchild, solid, respectable Fairchild, must have seemed the most implacable, the most unwavering mast to which one lost at sea might pin his colors. My anger towards him simmered in the darkness, frothing and boiling by the time the sun appeared on the horizon, coloring my room a dusty orange. Allow me to make absolutely clear that I have no issue with men seducing women (how else might the world continue to spin?) and that it is a sport in which I have much partaken myself. Yet injustice enrages me, it is endless, tireless, present in every wretched place I have visited on this Earth, a fungus that grows and spreads and clings unbidden to every corner in which it lands, and never will I accept it. All is fair in love and war, as England’s fair bard observed, but my sympathies lie with Burns, that where you feel your honor grip, let that aye be your border. A man might battle a fair opponent, might lie to a cheat and deceive a tyrant, but to take advantage of one who comes to war unarmed…well, nothing disgusts me more.
In the brilliant blue light of early morning, the knock upon my door was hesitant. I opened it, saw on the threshold the melancholy beauty of Nina, felt pity at the care she had taken over her appearance. Her hair was neatly coiled and plaited in a style I had observed worn by Beatrice Moore and Lillian Price. Her dress, of stiff white silk and embroidered with blue lilies and green bamboo, was neatly pressed. She gave off a light scent of soap as she stepped into the room and looked around her, taking in the collected belongings upon my dresser, my comb, the novel I had tried and failed to read over the past three weeks, the candle burnt to a twisted stump.