by Kane, Clare
“Good morning, Alistair,” she said.
“Hello, Nina.”
Uneasily we regarded one another. We were habitually generous with our words, our conversation ebbed and flowed, but never halted. Silence had never before stood between us; now we were both unforthcoming.
“Thank you,” she said eventually, and crossed the room to the window. The Legation Quarter was quiet that morning, its residents were weary, deprived of sleep, their last hopes were withered and threatened to break.
“Well, I shall leave you now,” I said. I feared speaking more, worried that any spoken admission of what was to take place would somehow make my involvement real, irreversible. As I closed the door behind me, I thought not of Nina, but of Nicholas, content in his ignorance, steeped in words, his mind and heart occupied by the drought that had ravaged the Chinese countryside, the imperial forces that had speared China’s pride, and all the while unknowing, unbelieving, unconcerned by his own daughter’s ruin, her future as bleak, as unknown, as unthinkable as that of the condemned villages burned to the ground by the Boxers. I have done a good deed, I told myself, descending the stairs. I have done what is best for Nina.
I could not look at Fairchild when he arrived at the hotel and passed through the lobby with easy stride, greeting me in warm tones. I left the Grand immediately and walked to the message board by the chapel in an unproductive search for news. I paced the streets as a beast caged, how small, how narrow, how constricting they felt now, under the mocking openness of the sky. I walked almost unseeing: the Legation Quarter was so familiar that I knew its every wall, pockmarked by bullets, recognized its every residence, filled with desperate, ravenous guests, circled its dismal tennis courts, empty of matches for the best part of a month. So naturally the presence of something unfamiliar startled me, shocked my eyes from their dull reverie. At the mouth of an alleyway stood a cart laden with fruit. Only a hungry man can truly appreciate the exterior of food, only a body denied the sweet, fresh pleasures of fruit could laud the ripe, promising roundness of the watermelon, describe the lush shade of forest green that colors its skin, rhapsodize of its hinted taste, imagine the blissful dissolving of its flesh in one’s mouth. Only a man as hungry as I would launch himself unthinking towards the cart and reach unrestrained for one of those tender, full-bodied fruits. A foot away, I stopped myself, scanned the ground for some trap, with my rational mind instructed my physical self to wait. A Chinese man by the cart nodded his encouragement.
“A truce,” he called. “They have called a truce and given us fruit!”
Euphoric refugees began to crowd around the cart, grabbing for the watermelons.
“From the Empress Dowager herself,” the man said. “We shall live!”
Hastily I took a fruit for myself and hurried back to the hotel, presented the watermelon with delight to Hilde.
“Fairchild’s gone,” she said. “I shall ask them to cut this for us in the kitchen.”
“They say the Chinese have called a truce,” I said. “Are you not pleased?”
“I shall withhold judgment,” Hilde said, turning from me with the watermelon cradled under one arm. “This is not the first time we have been promised liberty.”
The door to my room was wide open. I had rather hoped to find Nina alone, to tell her the good news of the ceasefire and to hear from her that the affair was ended, but instead she sat upon my bed, hair loose and fanned around her shoulders, with Lijun by her side. Both ate watermelon, a plate of slender rinds sat on the bed between them.
“I see you have made yourselves comfortable,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sorry Alistair. Lijun brought me some watermelon and we couldn’t wait to eat it.”
Hastily she rose from the bed, came towards me and offered a slice of the ripe, red fruit. I noticed that tears still dampened the corners of her eyes. I took the watermelon from her, my teeth broke the fleshy core of the fruit, its juice gathered around my chin with that first tentative bite. And then I devoured it, each swallow hungrier and less satisfying than the last until I was left only with the melon rind and a faint sense of nausea.
Oh, were we weary by then. It was not that we did not wish to believe that a truce had been offered to us, but only that we were by that late stage far beyond belief and trust and the old civilized ideal of taking a gentleman or an Empress at their word. And so we ate their fruit, but we did not swallow their words.
Oscar Fairchild decided to take advantage of the suspension in combat by going to inspect the Chinese defenses along the Tartar wall and, to my surprise, he invited me to accompany him on this look-see. I had rather planned to use the unforeseen period of peace to attempt to find a messenger who might deliver my writings to the nearest place from which telegraphs might be sent, but I am a curious man, and Oscar offered a fascinating study. And so together we admired the Tartar Wall in its solid glory, ascended it and traversed its ramparts; after just twenty minutes of inspection we were stopped by a Chinese commander in Manchu military regalia, who called to us from the other side of the wall. He held his hands out to indicate that he approached in peace. An impressive man, tall and broad, his skin was colored the deep hue of one who had battled in the back blocks of the Manchu empire.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “I mean no harm. I have only a small favor to ask.”
Oscar stiffened as the commander approached. His uniform confirmed my conjecture: the man before us was a leader of the fiercest tribe of imperial troops, the Kansu braves, celebrated for their swift and bloody repression of a Muslim uprising in that province in 1895, a display of ruthlessly efficient bloodshed that had earned them the status of permanent defenders of the imperial capital.
“Go on,” I said in Chinese.
“I respectfully ask your permission to collect the bodies of our men. We lost them in early July.” He gestured across the barricade to a pile of corpses, already mostly rotten and smothered with black flies. “We wish to bury them.”
I translated the commander’s request. Oscar paused. His fingers danced over his mustache and I expected he might decline.
“Of course he may,” he said to me, and stepped aside to let the man cross the barricade.
The commander whistled and a number of his men climbed over the barricade and jumped to the ground, where they proceeded to gather the bodies of their peers with no discernible sentiment. Theirs was an unenviable task: as they transferred body parts over the wall limbs and bones fell away, one skull hit the ground on the Chinese side with a definite thud.
“Terrible to see,” Oscar commented as we watched the Kansu Braves roll their peers in straw mats, which they balanced on their shoulders to carry over the wall. When the soldiers had finished their grisly task, the commander thanked us with a respectful bow and made to descend the wall back to the Chinese city.
“Tell him to wait, will you?” Oscar said to me, suddenly urgent.
I relayed the message. The man wavered.
“I only wish to speak with him a moment,” Oscar explained. He removed a cigar from his jacket and offered it to the commander, who gingerly accepted the gift, holding it between calloused fingers and eyeing it with the healthy suspicion of a man with many enemies. “Ask him to sit with us.”
The commander assented and sat beside us atop the barricade. Oscar lit the man’s cigar and smoked one himself. I translated the two men’s words as they smoked, the rich, woody scent of their cigars assuaged somewhat the stench of death that pervaded the lines of defense. The commander asked Oscar who the men were who wore strange hats; Oscar and I deduced that he spoke of the American marines.
“We are most afraid of them,” he admitted. “We have lost a great many men to these men in hats.”
“Alistair, tell him that we only seek to defend ourselves. That we did not wish to fight the Imperial army, but to protect ourselves from the Boxers.” Oscar raised the cigar to his lips
, his stare fixed on the commander.
“I am under the command of Jung Lu,” the commander replied. “He wishes to cease fighting. Perhaps you might write to him and explain your position. You are an important man, are you not?”
“An interesting idea,” Oscar said thoughtfully.
The commander shrugged and took a last inhale of his cigar. Both men rose on either side of me and marked the end of their exchange with a warm handshake. The commander disappeared back to his side of the wall, turning only once to glance at us as he retreated.
“How strange,” Oscar said. “Yet somehow reassuring.”
We continued along the Tartar wall; the clear, unobstructed view of Peking beyond our walls revealed the true nature of the peril we had faced over the past weeks. Of course we had known that the numbers of Chinese troops had swelled, that the Boxers had been joined by soldiers with powers of strategy and conflict far beyond their grassroots peasant abilities, but we had not known just how many soldiers flush with imperial colors peopled the low-lying rooftops that lay just beyond the Legation Quarter borders.
“Do you know,” Oscar said to me, surveying the milling masses beyond the wall, “I really might write to Jung Lu. I don’t suppose it can do any harm.”
“Mr Fairchild,” I said. “Did you ask me to accompany you for any reason this morning?”
Oscar considered this.
“Beyond your excellent Chinese skills and the hope that you might write of the exhaustive efforts of the British crown to protect its subjects under siege?”
“Beyond that,” I said.
“I only hoped that we might be friends,” Oscar returned. “Sometimes I fear that you have rather a mistaken impression of me, Mr Scott, and I consider it my duty to counter that.”
“Mr Fairchild,” I said, “we may have had our differences, but I trust that they have now been resolved.”
“Indeed.” Briskly he extended his hand to shake mine and smiled warmly. “Good day, Mr Scott.”
Oscar made good on his promise. He returned to his office and immediately addressed a letter to Jung Lu in which he proposed a new set of rules for any future battle, vowing, in a most generous pledge to the Imperials, that foreign soldiers would no longer shoot at the Manchu troops unless in retaliation. Oscar sent one of his servants to deliver the message to the commander we had met; given the suspension in fighting the household staff was now unafraid to wander the Legation Quarter and even take a few steps outside it. Sure enough, the next day the Kansu Braves paraded a flag along the wall announcing a truce. A letter from Jung Lu accepted Oscar’s proposals.
To paint this as a diplomatic victory for Oscar would be too much, to blow cattle, as the Chinese might say. You or I might see his actions as just and noble and consider the waving of a flag on the Tartar wall an accomplishment that belonged rightfully to him, but it soon became evident that even in that period of supposed peace, circumstances changed hourly. Clearly some of the Imperials possessed a genuine desire to bring about an end to fighting, but there existed no unifying view across their varied ranks. Sporadic firing still took place and no other officers displayed the friendly overtures of the cigar-smoking commander. Nevertheless, spirits in the Legation Quarter remained buoyant: residents were free to wander as they pleased and many organized trips to the outermost reaches of the district, seizing this opportunity to peek out at the now unknown city beyond our walls. One afternoon I came across Lillian Price and Hugo Lovell at the Hanlin, alternately pressing their faces through a hole blown in one of the institution’s old walls. Animatedly they gestured for me to observe the scene on the other side: a frieze of Boxers in battle. It took me a moment to realize that the Boxers were all slain, so anguished and alive were their faces. Their mouths were twisted in their final cries, their limbs were stretched long in combat, their garish red turbans were still affixed atop their heads.
“I have never been so close to a Boxer,” Lillian said breathlessly. “How fierce they look even in death!”
“How are your injuries, Mr Lovell?” I asked the young interpreter.
“Much improving. I hope to be well enough to fight if necessary,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Lillian said, and took a step closer to him. “I insist, Mr Scott, that he must stop this talk of combat. I couldn’t stand to lose him, not after….”
Hugo cleared his throat.
“Miss Price, we each must play our part. I already feel quite useless.” He lifted his chin. “The kittens. Come.”
“Kittens?” I repeated.
“Yes, Mr Lovell has found some abandoned kittens in a corner of the Hanlin. The mother must have died and left them. He says they’re very sweet,” Lillian explained.
“Of course,” I said, shaking my head. “Kittens.”
And so they left me alone with the Boxers, agonized, fearsome and terribly, terribly young, even in death.
At the hotel, I stopped by the bakery, where Nina proved more industrious than ever. The peace agreement had resulted in the availability of foods within the Legation Quarter that had been the content of wild, hungry dreams just days earlier. Eggs, fruit and even chicken, that soft, delicious meat, so easy to digest, had poured across Legation Quarter borders via enemy soldiers moonlighting as market vendors. Eggs, naturally, had proved the most useful ingredient in the bakery’s activities and I discovered Nina and Lijun absorbed in the baking of a fruit cake.
“Good afternoon,” I said from the doorway.
Nina greeted me with brilliant smile.
“Good afternoon, Mr Scott. What luxuries we enjoy!”
“What a delicious-looking cake. I am afraid to say I salivate just looking at it,” I said. This was not hyperbole; the human body responds to starvation with an acute physicality that reminds one of how little separates us from the animals. “And how are conditions at Su’s palace?” I asked Lijun.
Su’s quarters [??], close to the hotel but existing in a lower chamber of hell, had become a burden of the conscience for me. I more than anyone knew that the British Empire was not built on hand-holding and respect for the natives, and that in even thinking of protecting Chinese lives I had done more than one might expect of a man in my position, but still I could not close my eyes to the suffering of the converts, knowing that I had taken them to Su’s palace. Then it had seemed infinitely preferable to house them there than to see them squabble for survival on the streets, and no doubt I had prevented a handful of deaths in delivering them to the gates of the palace. Yet how many had passed to the next world within those walls?
“Poor,” Lijun said simply. “More babies have died. They are so small. We go without food to provide for them, but still…they are so small…”
“Well, we must increase supplies to the palace,” I said. “With the ceasefire there’s no excuse for anyone to go hungry.”
“Mr Samuels has been serving Qing soldiers tea,” Nina said. “They popped over the wall and told us they were thirsty.”
“Consorting with the enemy, eh?”
“They bring us watermelons every day,” Nina said. “At a price, of course, but we appreciate it. Today they offered us a discount on rifles along with our watermelons.”
I left the girls in the sweet-smelling bakery to retire to my room. I passed Hilde in the reception area, where she served bread and meat to half a dozen refugee families.
“Mr Scott,” she called. “A word, please?”
With a polite nod towards the family on the floor she followed me to the foot of the stairs. “Perhaps we might go to your room?”
“Well, really, Mrs Samuels. I didn’t expect a proposition before nightfall.”
This roused only a feeble laugh from Hilde.
“I would like to speak with you alone,” she said seriously.
We entered my room, where Hilde stood awkwardly, with an uncharacteristic air of uncertainty.
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“I wish to speak with you of Miss Ward and the… arrangement we made the other day,” she stated.
“Please, take a seat.” I gestured to the armchair. “Too early for whisky?”
She declined the offer, but I poured myself a serve.
“As I have made clear to you in previous discussions, Mr Scott, I do not consider myself an arbiter or right and wrong. I do not pass judgement on the decisions of others, least of all their romantic choices. Here I am in Peking, thousands of miles from home. Had I married Stefan, I might never have seen a Boxer.” Stiffly she sat herself upon the armchair. “I will come out with it. Miss Ward’s problem continues.”
“Impossible. I saw Fairchild just today and we agreed that all had been resolved. The meeting served its purpose, did it not?”
“No,” Hilde said simply. “The meeting appears to have rather inflamed the situation. Miss Ward looks like one very much in love. She is so light, so happy. I fear she may do something… something reckless.”
“You mean she may try to meet Mr Fairchild again?” I asked.
“Precisely. And it is not only that; I worry that she is becoming careless. One of the converts told me they had heard her teaching Lijun love poems in Chinese.”
“Poetry in and of itself isn’t dangerous,” I countered.
“No, but it is a symptom of danger, Mr Scott.”
“In that case, what do you propose?”
Hilde took a deep breath, filled her chest with the stale air of my little room.
“I believe we have two options, Mr Scott. The first is for you to speak directly with Mr Fairchild and advise that he keep his distance.”
“And have him circumvent the truth once more,” I said.
What an optimistic fool I had been, walking along the Tartar wall with him, shaking his hand, thinking we had come to a gentlemen’s agreement, reaching an accord with gestures rather than words, when all the while I had been cheerily complicit in his continued seduction of Nina.