Dragons in Shallow Waters

by Kane, Clare

  “We understand now the functioning of the court,” Oscar said. “The pro-Boxer faction gains the upper hand and we are fired upon. Those more favorable towards us regain power and we are given watermelons. It could change tomorrow. This is no time for risk; we shall wait for the troops to liberate us.”

  I turned my attention to Nina. Studiously she observed Oscar, her eyes did not waver from his face, her body curved towards the warmth of his voice. I left without goodbyes.

  The following day is perhaps the most difficult for me to recount. If I were a man of Christ, I might have considered it my reckoning, and if I were a Buddhist, I might have seen in those events my karma, each terrible turn more deserved than the last. As it stands, I strive to be a man of logic and reason, yet even the rational sciences cannot deny that one thing leads to another, that our actions create reactions. And how heavily, how terribly, was the force of my actions returned to me that day.

  I arrived at the Fairchild household at the usual time to collect Nina for her duties at the Grand. Immediately upon stepping inside the house I sensed an imbalance in atmosphere, detected foreboding in the meek stance of the servant who opened the door for me, who showed me inside with bowed head. No pots clanged in the kitchen, no feet hurried across the floors; the entire building was in thrall to a terrible quiet. I walked the corridor to the drawing room, feeling the air heavy around my shoulders. I found Nina alone, still wearing her nightdress, eyes ringed red. She had the appearance of a phantom; long white gown gathered around her, dark hair loose and unkempt, face drawn and pale.

  “Nina, why are you not dressed?” I asked sharply.

  She did not reply, but regarded me with great, tender pity.

  “Nina, what has happened?”

  The silence of the household roared then in my ears, marched defiantly towards me, threatened the worst of fates.

  “Nina. Is this to do with Mr Fairchild?”

  “Oh, no. Never.” A sob, ungainly and visceral, escaped her then. “Oh, Alistair, it is La Contessa.” Nina buried her face in her palms, her shoulders shook as she wept. I meant to approach her, but her words stilled me. La Contessa, those two words, so joyous to the tongue, so rapturous to the ears, pronounced now at such desolate pitch. Rooted to my position, I pressed her.

  “What has happened to La Contessa?”

  She lifted her head, and her face, swollen with tears, moved me, and afforded no doubt that the words she spoke next were true.

  “She’s dead.”

  I laughed; gruff and coarse, the laugh of a man defeated, a man who knows that reality, dreadful and unreal as it may appear, has vanquished him.

  “Impossible,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that her death was eminently possible. Death was our constant companion that summer, we had mourned dozens in a few short weeks, death, in many ways, was more natural to our state than life. “How?”

  Nausea overwhelmed me, I took a staggered step. Nina rose immediately, cradled my arm, guided me to a chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, kneeling before me and taking my hand. “Mr Mancini shot her. He said there were Boxers outside the house, that she asked to be saved from them.”

  “Mancini did it? Mancini?”

  Nina raised a finger to her lips, but I could not perceive the volume of my own voice. The room around me drained away, illusory, blurred, and I heard only the terrible cry of one repeated thought: she’s gone, she’s gone, and my hands too are stained with blood.

  “Yes, Mr Scott. I’m sorry. I don’t believe La Contessa would ever have asked…”

  Nina was cut short by her father, but even without hearing the end of her sentence, I knew that I agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment. La Contessa, immortal La Contessa who stole through the Legation Quarter in the deepest hours of the night, who sprinted under a canopy of bullets to steal a kiss, who smoked and drank and laughed as though the siege were an interminable party, a sensory feast, La Contessa would never fold so easily at the sight of a mere Boxer.

  “Alistair.” Nicholas entered the room. “You are here.”

  “Yes.” As I stood to greet him I felt my legs buckle weak beneath me.

  “Terrible news,” he said.

  I made to reply, but the appropriate words eluded me. Despair had cornered me suddenly, and hopelessness threatened me. The persona I wore so well, the war-hardened cynic, the laconic observer amidst the ruins, the character I had persuaded myself I truly was, slipped momentarily from my control. Tears and self-pity tempted me, the very qualities I disdained in others. Silence offered me safety, self-preservation.

  “I fear if the Boxers don’t murder us we shall turn our guns on ourselves,” Nicholas continued. “It is simply not healthy for us to remain in such intimate conditions.”

  “But remain we must.” I turned to Nina. “Come, Miss Ward. Your bakers await you.”

  “Baking? Today?”

  “Yes. Do you think that La Contessa would wish to see you so forlorn? Come with me. Fresh air and a walk will do you good.”

  Nicholas, constant, serene Nicholas, had returned me somewhat to myself.

  “Yes, Nina. Go and dress,” Nicholas said.

  Nina retreated with slow, unwilling steps. Nicholas watched me carefully, stroked his beard once, twice before speaking.

  “I am terribly sorry,” he said softly. “I know you were fond of her.”

  “Weren’t we all?” I matched his tone with equal caution.

  “Indeed.” His eyes leveled with mine. “A terrible loss for us all.”

  I left Nina in the bakery and retreated to my room. There I reclined on the bed and closed my eyes. Of course I understood the patterns of grief; in the many conflicts I had witnessed, I had observed the same structure repeated again and again: hysteria, denial, anger, pleas to an invisible power. I knew what recovery required, that I ought to turn over my memories of La Contessa, the images I held of her in mind, right there in that very bed, her lips bruised red from kisses, her hair a gentle tickle across my chest. But my mind wouldn’t, couldn’t, resurface those pictures. Instead I escaped to a mindful emptiness, and to my shame, I slept. Upon waking I fancied I could smell her bergamot scent upon my pillow, a sweet, sharp citrus that called tears unbidden to my eyes. I shook my head and went over to my desk where I poured myself my usual remedy for melancholy: a thimbleful of whisky, drawn from my diminishing supplies. Hilde, hearing my steps, knocked gently on the door and served me a plate of cool rice and pony meat.

  “Miss Ward told me,” she said simply. “You missed lunch.”

  “Thank you,” I said, my voice cracking. I could not look directly at her face, round and open, shadowed with concern. Her kindness served only to stoke my guilt.

  “She was a very special woman,” Hilde said. “We all-”

  “Enough!” I said, struck my fist on the desk before me. “Enough of this pretense! She was murdered by her husband, murdered because-”

  Hilde gripped my shoulders, her stout, practical fingers pressed sharp against my flesh.

  “Hush,” she said. “I know, I know. But you mustn’t say anything, Alistair. You must protect yourself as you have protected Nina.”

  “And as I failed to protect La Contessa.”

  “Alistair,” she said sternly, hands close and firm around me. “Do not let the despair set in. Do not lose yourself, not now.”

  “Hilde,” I said, hearing my voice faint, my spirit spent. “Please leave me to my work.”

  Simply, silently she nodded, and stepped back from me. She paused by the door, offered me a weak smile, and departed.

  Immediately I set about writing a short article about our imminent rescue. I could not stop myself from adding a reference to La Contessa: Latest events in the Legation Quarter suggest Boxers are not the only threat to the survival of foreigners in Peking. An Italian countess was shot by her dip
lomat husband as Boxers neared the house where they had found shelter during the siege. It was sentimental, personal, worst of all, it gave credence to Mancini’s lie. I was deserving of the very criticisms I lobbed at the lowest talents in my industry, but I decided on this day to permit myself the infraction and set out with the story, hoping to find a willing Chinese to smuggle it out into the city and from there on to Tienstin, or the closest place from which telegraphs might pass unimpeded by Boxer destruction. Oh, Chiara, I thought as I stepped out into the Legation Quarter by dusk, only your kisses might lift me from these depths, and never again shall your touch bring me peace.

  There is a rather trite maxim that holds that the darkest hour comes shortly before dawn breaks. In the days that followed La Contessa’s death, we all had little choice but to cling to such hollow niceties and hope unfounded optimism might will them true. Phoebe Franklin further expanded our repertoire of shibboleths, furnishing us with Bible verses about perseverance: Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will you life as your victor’s crown. We mumbled these lines as events took a decisive turn for the worse, as though La Contessa’s death had been the first of many loaded dominoes. The fighting worsened, the Qing appeared to abandon any pretense of a truce and the nights roared with thunder and gunfire. The conflict so deteriorated that Nina had no choice but to sleep one night at the Grand; returning to the Fairchild household posed too great a risk. Hilde and I sat with her in the bar until the early hours, the floor beneath us scattered with bodies sleeping and scared. Hilde had offered Lijun shelter for the night, but she had insisted on running the gauntlet to join her peers at the Su mansion. Nina explained Lijun’s motives, telling us that two of the schoolgirls at the former palace had attempted to commit suicide. Despairing of ever making it out of the Legation Quarter alive and convinced they would be tortured before the Boxers would free them in death, they had jumped together from a window. They were found with their little feet bound together by a wrap of silk; likely an old adornment of one of Prince Su’s harem. The poor girls did not die, but did break their legs, and now they writhed in pain, starved and delirious in the crowded palace. A visit from a Russian doctor had been promised, but they had yet to see him; the high number of military casualties amongst the foreigners kept him otherwise occupied. Lijun dreaded sleeping next to their cracked and useless bodies, hearing the moans and cries that robbed her of sleep, but she thought solidarity the only force strong enough to see the girls through the siege and so bedded uncomplainingly beside them.

  “Please, Mrs Samuels. May I have some gin?” Nina asked as she ended the story.

  Hilde poured her a small serving.

  “To help you sleep,” Hilde said.

  The two shared Hilde’s bed that night; the oppressive heat and unending noise meant both slept only sporadically, never reaching any true depth of slumber.

  Hilde reported that Nina had posed her an intriguing question in the morning: “Mr Fairchild says that Mr Mancini shot La Contessa because she was afraid of the treatment a European woman might receive at the hands of the Boxers, that she had asked him to do so if Boxers ever approached the house. Do you suppose Mr Fairchild really believes that?”

  “He is an official,” Hilde said. “I am sure he says many things he doesn’t believe, but I cannot begin to imagine the inner workings of his mind. You are far better placed to understand that, my dear.”

  Nina had only shrugged, and said no more, but this unusual query, and the insistent nature of Nina’s questioning, struck Hilde as a sign of some shift in her relationship with Fairchild.

  “Perhaps they have had a disagreement,” she said to me.

  “One can only hope,” I said.

  The afternoon brought about a lull in attacks from the other side of the walls and I offered to accompany Nina to the Fairchild household. We walked quickly through the Legation Quarter, yet we could not help but to notice the not insignificant quantity of bullets collected on the dusty ground and the human detritus that evinced death: rags stained with blood, clumps of hair, shoes missing their pairs. Those were for me the most doleful, miserable days of the entire bloody siege. I bid Nina farewell at the doorway, my shame was too hot still to allow myself the chance of meeting Pietro Mancini, or even to chance passing before the knowing eyes of Phoebe Franklin, whose omniscient godliness no doubt led her to at least suspect me of wrongdoing.

  “Take care, Miss Ward,” I said.

  “Likewise, Mr Scott,” she said. Then with kindness she added: “You seem tired. Make sure to rest a little this afternoon.”

  “After all, we may be liberated tomorrow.”

  She laughed. “If not,” she said, and her eyes sparkled, “I may have to defect to the Boxers.”

  It was a terrible night for fighting; the Boxers had returned to the heights of their horror and were resolute once more in their attempts to bring about our destruction. They were unassailable in their belief that their supposed immortality would save them from death, though quite how they maintained such braggadocio at this late stage of the conflict I cannot say. That night they appeared to fear nothing, and even engaged some of our men in crude hand-to-hand combat, their high kicks and curved punches a macabre ballet before the burning sky. Colonel Shiba in Su’s palace begged his men to bang pots and pans to create such a din that the Boxers might believe more fighters lay behind the building’s ravaged walls. Doom had once again set in across the Legation Quarter and the Boxers denied us sleep as we kept terrified vigil.

  I listened to this orchestra of chaos from my desk by the window, pen posed in my hand, whisky by my side, any attempt at sleep long abandoned. I wished to capture the shared desperation of the siege, to faithfully record the oranges, the reds, the great burning tableau of the sky, but found my words instead returning again and again to the realm of the personal, to my memories of La Contessa, to my fears for Nina, to that unanswerable question Nicholas had asked me: what might become of Nina after the siege? And then. A terrible rumble, one low, menacing crash that immediately rolled into another. The nearby scuffles paused following this deep, unusual sound, resulting in an crackling silence, a collective intake of breath that suggested neither side knew the origins of this terrible thunderclap. The sound returned; distant, powerful and menacing. I stood at once, pressed my face to the window. The ravaged scene before me did not change, but I sensed hope in those intervals of silence. It came once more, the drumroll of liberty, the commencement of freedom, and I raised my glass to the ruined city, felt my spirit soar winged and light above its blood-soaked streets. Finally, salvation.

  London, July 1902

  Alistair,

  Breathlessly, secretly I read your words in those moments when I am finally alone, and how I feel my heart almost stop beating when I remember those most wretched days of the siege. My poor father, he loved me so, and yet he lacked the simple words to tell me his fears.

  I read this story as though it happened to someone else, I anticipate the end of the siege as though I do not know what may come to pass. Yet I know it all, I picture our future as plainly as those women in England who read fortunes in cards, or those monks in Peking who divine from the Book of Changes…I know what awaits us, and how my spirit wonders at what other destinies we might have chosen instead.

  I wish I might see you, Alistair, to share with some sympathetic listener the most disturbing and stirring thoughts your words provoke in me. I think of that most apt of Chinese expressions, 触景生情, touch the past and sentiment is born.

  I await your next visit and for now enjoy the company of your words.

  I remain,

  Your faithful and solitary reader,

  Nina

  XIII

  I have in my career witnessed a number of historical moments; the beginnings of battles, the endings of accords, the ringing of a single bullet that her
alds victory or defeat, and I have invariably found these pockets of time profoundly trivial in their lived experience. When one reads of events in the history books, one imagines each man present at the scene to be imbued with a sense of significance, one sees his flesh pimple and crawl in expectation of the great future importance of the event he observes, one pictures his eyes filling with premonitory tears. Yet I have found that time is time, and it passes just as mundanely when history is recorded upon it, in steady breaths and hunger pains and idle talk. And so while I felt great anticipation at the prospect of our release from the Legation Quarter, I was unsurprised by the damp feeling of bathos that clung to me as I stepped out onto those familiar streets, and watched, a glass of slightly flat champagne in my hand, the euphoric transformation of the Legation Quarter.

  Standing shoulder to shoulder with Edward and Hilde, I watched the hotel’s refugee guests fill the street in front of the Grand, their faces displaying the first genuine smiles I had seen since their arrival. These were not the usual weak half-smiles of thankfulness, of politeness, of the determined will to survive, but rather grins of unbridled happiness. They were joined in celebration by the foreign inhabitants of the Legation Quarter, who had also begun to pour onto the streets. Mr Cologan, the Spanish minister, ran in great circles, shouting at the top of his voice: “We are saved!” The women wept, the men cheered, everyone held a drink in their hands. Edward and Hilde, a habitually undemonstrative couple, embraced and kissed, and I turned to permit them some privacy.

  I do make one admission to the power of historic moments: in announcing their significance, in forcing themselves upon one’s future memories, they bring about a swift evaluation of the most essential elements of one’s existence. Who did I want to see in that moment? Who would I picture by my side when I rewrote my personal history of the Boxer Rebellion, when I erased from memory the lifeless sparkle of the wine and the smell of rotting flesh, and pictured only the rapture of salvation? The Wards. And amidst the happy confusion I made my way towards the Fairchild household to find Nicholas and Nina.