Dragons in Shallow Waters

by Kane, Clare

  “Did you enjoy it?” I asked finally.

  “The air is fresh there,” she said simply, and then with a sigh: “I doubt I shall see it again.”

  “Does your father know that you went?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “But he does not know I went alone with Mr Fairchild.” She studied the book in her hands, restlessly turned its pages. “Do not worry, Mr Scott, I shall not return there, or anywhere else, with Mr Fairchild.” She closed her eyes, opened them once more and looked at me with chilling frankness, the green of her irises cold and expressionless. “Please, let us speak of another matter.”

  I took a sip of the rice wine, felt it cloying and sweet in my mouth.

  “Then it is finished?” I pressed.

  “What?” She turned her head sharply, irritated, and I saw that La Contessa’s emeralds sparkled in her ears.

  “Mr Fairchild.”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” I said.

  We sat in silence. I sipped the rice wine, not enjoying the taste, but seeking some activity to occupy me while Nina’s fingers restlessly traced the spine of her book. I knew when she prepared herself to speak, recognized the crease of her brow, the quiet concentration of her lips pressed against one another as she ordered and arranged words in her mind. Audibly she sighed, then leaning forward in her seat she spoke.

  “You were right. I am a silly girl.” Her words were quiet, controlled, devastating in their gelidity. “Mr Fairchild told me today that we could not see one another any longer. He said this was the most important moment of his career, that while he cared for me he must remain married to his wife, that a man of his position could not risk the consequences of a divorce. He said I must never speak of our…Oh, I suppose I must call it an affair, but what a flimsy word that seems for what we experienced together.”

  “Nina, I am sorry,” I said, and rose from my chair.

  Nina stood, placed her book on the seat behind her, and accepted my embrace.

  “I promise,” I whispered to her, “that you shall forget all of this, that one day it shall be a distant memory, faded and unimportant.”

  “I will never forget it,” Nina said, and rested her head upon my shoulder.

  We remained in this posture for two or three minutes, my hand brushed her back, my mouth mumbled useless words of limited comfort. I felt Nina so delicate in my hold, so wretched, a young woman on the threshold of a future hazy and uncertain, its once splendid potential overshadowed now by the tenebrous silhouette of scandal, the cragged overhang of war.

  “Nina,” I said. “You are not a silly girl. You are perhaps the most intelligent person I know.”

  “How?” she asked, and stepped back from me, revealing cheeks pink and stained with tears.

  “You see it all,” I said. “You see it all, the futility, the hypocrisy, the deceit with which most people live, and you reject it. You live purely, unfettered.”

  “You think so?”

  “It will not make life easy for you, Nina, but it is a noble endeavor.”

  I closed the distance between us once more, took Nina in a close embrace, felt her form still, and knew her weeping had ceased. She pulled away from me, and we watched one another, eyes fixed and still, and that moment, that suspension of conversation, that departure from reality, that absolute disappearance of rationality, I have revisited it countless times in my mind, remembering, wondering, abashed at my actions. Because when I saw her face, pale and sweet, looming large before mine, and witnessed my stare reflected, green and burning, in hers, I could not help but to kiss her. Her lips yielded to mine, and together we bowed to the succor of the physical, stepping into the arms of phantom loves.

  It was a kiss of shallow pleasure, rewarding the spirit and soothing the nerves as any kiss is wont to do, but it was an undoubted error. I broke the kiss, and in the pall of this corporeal surprise we stood once more in observation of one another.

  “I am sorry, Nina,” I said. “I only wished to comfort you.”

  “And I you,” she responded.

  “You do not want this,” I said. “Not really. I ought to leave.”

  She smiled, warmly and sympathetically, and held me one last time.

  “Good night, Nina,” I said and turned to leave.

  “Wan’an,” she called behind me. Peaceful night.

  In the courtyard outside, Liberty wound herself around my legs, I knelt to pet the cat, crouched a moment, looking to the dark corners of the courtyard. Alone I crossed the desolate streets to the Grand, where I avoided a raucous crowd that gathered now in the bar to toast freedom, and went to that small room I called home where I wished for sleep to calm my heart.

  XV

  Peking, though ostensibly peaceful, was not a pleasant place as summer staggered to its end. Negotiations were underway, the officials told us, but on the streets we witnessed little change to daily life. The hunt for Boxers continued, and executions took place almost every day. I went to watch many of these dawn executions myself, but advised Nicholas and Nina to avoid them; one required the hardiest of dispositions to watch those wretched Chinese collapse lifelessly to the ground before skies of blistering red dawn. Following a particularly efficient round one morning, a British solider turned to me and said: “Not as bad as it looks, you know. Chinese don’t feel pain.” I did not reply as we watched a pack of dogs scrabble over the dusty ground towards the collection of freshly killed corpses.

  And so it was with great surprise that I received news from Hilde one evening that a civilian visitor had requested a room at the Grand in an unanticipated return to normal business. The Chinese refugees had mostly vacated the hotel, and the Grand now functioned as lodgings for dozens of military men, who, Hilde was pleased to note, did at least have the means to pay for their rooms, even if their late-night carousing did keep her awake.

  “He asked after you,” she told me of the unexpected visitor. “I have sent him to your room.”

  I had had the pleasure and misfortune in my five years in China to meet a great host of characters, men of commerce, men of government and men of altogether more mysterious means, who might have thought to call on me when their business brought them to Peking, but I could not imagine that any of those gentlemen, however varied their desires and their debts, might have decided to visit Peking so shortly after the rebellion. Intrigued, I climbed the stairs and discovered the door to my room lying open. From the landing I perceived the outline of a young man in the candlelight, one hand clasped around a glass of whisky. I knocked lightly upon the door, and the man turned. I was startled by his appearance, at once familiar and unexpected, his features smooth and unblemished, his frame sturdy and well-fed; his evident health marked his absence from Peking that summer.

  “Excuse me, Mr Scott. I hope you don’t mind that I have helped myself,” said Barnaby George.

  The banker from Hong Kong, the young man who had asked for Nina’s hand in those last days of innocence, seemed a traveler from another era, a vision from a life entirely irreconcilable with my current existence.

  “Good Lord! Mr George, I did not expect to see you so soon. Have a drop more.” I lifted the bottle, served him a measure. “You shall need it. Peking is not the city it was when you departed. Please, sit.”

  I poured myself a generous amount of whisky.

  “Whatever brings you here?” I asked him. “The bank can’t have sent you?”

  “I am here for Miss Ward,” Barnaby said shyly, looking into the depths of the glass he held.

  “Miss Ward?” I repeated. “And does she know that you are here?”

  Barnaby shook his head.

  “I meant to see her right away, but I stopped here for a room and Mrs Samuels told me that you were also resident in the hotel. I wondered if it might not be better to consult with you before speaking with Miss Ward. I can only imagine the horro
rs she might have witnessed over the past weeks, the unfathomable terror…”

  I placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Quite right,” I said. “I must say that I am impressed. To come to Peking at a time like this speaks volumes of your character. They must have thought you mad in Hong Kong.”

  “Positively deranged,” he said, laughing, relaxing a little. “I was due to leave for England a fortnight ago, but I decided to delay my departure. I did send a letter to Miss Ward; I suppose it was foolish to think she would receive it under siege.”

  “Now, Mr George,” I continued. “What exactly do you plan to say to Miss Ward?”

  “My plan was simply to come to Peking. Now I am here I feel rather unprepared for whatever it is that I ought to do now,” he admitted.

  I poured a short stream of whisky into his glass, and saw in the gentle tremor of his fingers, in the hard swallow of his throat, the opening up of an opportunity, wholly unexpected, yet magnificently timed.

  “Allow me to help you, Mr George,” I said.

  In those moments now when the night demons visit, or in those times when I make the mistake of regarding myself too long in the mirror, wondering what quality of man I might consider myself to be, one question haunts me always. Did I believe Barnaby George to be Nina’s equal in any measure? The reason this thought troubles me so is because the answer to my self-administered enquiry is so painfully, searingly clear. And yet, when I saw Barnaby George in the Grand Hotel, his appearance clean and pressed, his unobtrusive presence familiar and somehow soothing, his arrival an unanticipated solution to a persistent problem, I grew warm towards him. And so I helped him, I encouraged him, I let him try out words and phrases upon his awkward tongue until, just past a black midnight, we had a plan.

  In the morning I walked with Barnaby to the Wards’ home. He hesitated when we reached the gate, and so I reached for the lion head’s knocker, and sounded it three times. Barnaby took a sharp inhale as we heard the approach of deliberate footsteps. One of Fairchild’s servants led us to the drawing room, where Nicholas sat in an armchair, newspaper opened before him, reading glasses perched upon the end of his nose.

  “Alistair,” he said warmly, before starting at the sight of the man in the crisp navy suit by my side.

  “Mr Ward,” Barnaby said. “Good morning.”

  “What a surprise,” Nicholas said. “Please, do come in. I shall ask Feng to fetch us some tea. I suppose that you wish to see Nina.”

  “Yes. If that is, if that is… quite all right,” Barnaby said, his voice trailing. “And please do not trouble your boy to fetch any tea, I have had rather a generous breakfast at the Grand.”

  “Very well.”

  Barnaby and I followed Nicholas through the house, which by then had been more or less restored to its previous state: frames had been straightened, plates had been scrubbed, bedding had been washed and ironed. I wondered if Barnaby perceived a shift in the atmosphere of the place, the undeniable apprehension that I now sensed in the air.

  “Here she is.” Nicholas paused by the door of his study. “She has been helping me with my books. We discovered some exceptional volumes at the Hanlin.”

  Over Nicholas’ shoulder I saw a confusion of books spread across the floor and one pale, slender leg emerging from dusky pink skirts.

  “Nina, you have a visitor,” Nicholas said.

  He stood aside. Nina peered around her father’s frame and caught sight of Barnaby. The pair regarded one another for a moment. What did Barnaby see? The girl he had left behind, yes, but there was a sharpness to her now, a wariness in the angles of her face. Her skin pulled taught across her bones, her green eyes darted restlessly. Her feet were bare, her hair fell loose and wild around her shoulders. And what did Nina see? A neatly tucked shirt, shoes of high polish, an unremarkable face comforting, I suppose, in its familiarity. Nina stood, and they approached one another as might two animals of distinct species, in cautious, hesitant circles.

  “We shall leave you,” Nicholas said. “I expect you have much to discuss.”

  “Good day, Nina,” I said, and she at me in bewilderment.

  Nicholas and I retreated; from the corridor we heard Nina’s voice, keen and defensive.

  “What are you doing here, Mr George? Peking is the last place in the world anyone would want to be right now, is it not?”

  “He is a very courageous young man,” Nicholas said with gentle chuckle. “One needs pluck to return to Peking, but to seek out my daughter once more…”

  We walked outside, looking not at one another but rather at the expanse of the courtyard in front us, the collection of blue and white porcelain pots, the plants craning their delicate necks towards the sun, the bamboo growing in infinite spirals.

  “Thank you, Alistair,” Nicholas said, placed a hand upon my shoulder. “Thank you for all you have done.”

  His words, light and benevolently intentioned as they were, struck me still. The siege had ended, and so too had our merciful dance of ignorance; the clement silences, the words void of meaning, the expressions not exchanged, could not sustain themselves against the stark prospects of a life post-siege. Returned to a home irrevocably, permanently altered, cleaved by terrible violence from Pei, Nicholas must have seen that his daughter’s fate hung nebulously, inauspiciously before the Wards, a puzzle without resolution, and as such, salvation in the form of Barnaby George, however unimaginative, however undesirable it may have been to Nina, suggested at the very least a direction in which her unmoored existence may travel. For that, Nicholas was grateful, and in his state of more relaxed amiability he implored me to stay for a cup of jasmine tea. I wished to stay, to converse, to debate with my old friend, to return to simpler times, but I was gripped by a sudden anxiety, I felt the walls of the Wards’ home press close around me, noted that familiar dread of conversations momentous but unknown taking place nearby, the foreboding of closed doors and lowered voices, and I could not stay a moment longer in that old happy house of theirs.

  Barnaby George waited for me at the bar of the Grand as the day descended to dusk, one foot tapping impatiently against his chair.

  “Not too early for a drink?” He rose to greet me.

  “A bad day, Mr George?” I removed my hat and took a seat next to him.

  “Terrible,” Barnaby said darkly.

  Hilde bustled through from the kitchen, gun slung across her torso.

  “I heard you from the kitchen,” she said to me. “Whisky?”

  “Please,” I said, and turned to Barnaby. His skin, habitually a ruddy shade of scrubbed pink, looked pale in the dim light of the bar, and his posture was rounded, defeated. “So, you have seen Miss Ward,” I started.

  “Most foolishly, yes. The answer was no. Once again.”

  “I’m sorry. Truly,” I said.

  “She told me she might never marry,” Barnaby continued, and I noted the glass before him lay empty. “I told her that everyone must marry, and she said that marriage was folly, that yes, everyone marries, and then they are abandoned, as was her father, or perhaps they are betrayed. What was it she said? That married people are miserable in a prison they build with their own hands.”

  “Very eloquent,” I said, for Nina’s words did strike me as elegantly true and wise beyond her tender years, but I also spoke to fill the yawning inadequacy of my guilt, knowing no words I might say could justify to Barnaby George my hasty advice that he once more seek Nina’s hand, and aware, even then, that while marriage to Mr George created an exit for Nina from her current murky circumstances, it was not one she was inclined to take.

  “Miss Ward has had a terrible summer,” Hilde said quietly as she filled my glass.

  “I am well aware of that,” Barnaby said. “It was most stupid of me to come here. I suppose I must leave as soon as possible.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “You wouldn’t
like to miss the victory parade tomorrow, would you?”

  “Victory parade?” he repeated.

  “Yes. I am not sure who shall be left in Peking to witness it, but the parade shall follow a most illustrious route. They shall even march through the Forbidden City.”

  “What is one more day after so many wasted ones?” Barnaby said.

  “That is the spirit,” I said.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen. You may help yourselves from behind the bar. There is someone I must see.” Hilde left us, gun thumping against her hip as she moved.

  I had done my best to kill the night with Barnaby, seeing him to his room just at the point when a switch from whisky to Chinese rice wine had appeared to him a sensible idea, and was preparing myself for sleep when Hilde rapped confidently upon the door. Proprietarily she strode across the room, seated herself by my desk.

  “I went to see her,” she said. “Miss Ward.”

  Hilde removed her gun from the holster affixed by her waist, placed its shining body upon the desk.

  “And?” I pressed.

  “We have tried, Mr Scott, we have done all that falls within our power.” Hilde sighed. “She was very quiet, her father said she had not left her bedroom since Mr George’s visit. It was there that I saw her, and entreated her to consider with some care the offer made to her by our young friend Barnaby. I said that he was kind, solid, secure, that she must remember that Mr George might offer her a future while Mr Fairchild could not.”

  “What did she say?” I asked. The anxiety of our circumstance was stifling, and I felt my breath shallow, constricted. What misery we had wreaked, I thought, Hilde and I, in the armor of good intentions. How blithely, easily I had sent Barnaby George to the fresh pain of rejection, how confidently I had believed myself the skilful puppeteer of Nina’s fledgling romantic life, how foolishly, arrogantly Hilde and I had imagined ourselves Nina’s guardians, her ultimate protecters, and how useless we had finally proved at the most acute moment of her wretchedness.