It was then I noticed that they had been dragging one of those small Chinese carts with them. My curiosity was aroused. If they had taken the trouble to drag the cart into the temple grounds whilst trying to escape us, then there might be something of value to be had. Not wanting to share this with my men, I sent them outside the temple wall, ordering them to be on guard lest there be others of the Boxer rabble in the vicinity. They knew what I was about of course, but they dared not disobey their officer.
Once they were out of view I dismounted and went to the cart. Inside were a number of articles of fine European clothing which I soon realised were of a religious nature. It was obvious that the blackguards had looted these during the rebellion. There were also several finely painted portraits, one of which I recognised as being of a Jesuit bishop in all his fine regalia. Underneath these portraits I found a large brass box, a box which is to be our future. It was fastened, but not locked. Inside I found all manner of precious things, mostly fashioned of gold, and some bejewelled. There were also a number of Chinese objects, and whether they had been made for use in the church I do not know, but I do not think so. I removed the cross, which I am now sending to you with this letter, and also several of the smaller items, both European and Chinese. There was a small digging tool in the cart and I used this to dig a hole about three feet deep amongst the roots of a tree on the right hand side of the entrance to the temple, and there I buried the chest and all it still contained.
Only then did I call my men back inside the walled enclosure and bid them to share out what was left in the cart, telling them that I had taken some jade items from the bodies of two of the Boxers and would keep these as my share. The hole that I had dug was a good twenty yards away from the cart and they would not have seen it.
My Darling, as soon as we receive orders to return from this expedition, I shall remove the box and bring it with me. I have been back once, and the ground lies undisturbed, so the box is safe. It is not large, not like the treasure chests that Mr Stevenson writes about. It is perhaps about the size of my writing chest.
My Darling, you should not worry. These Boxer devils are cowards and run from English blades and cower in terror at the sound of our guns. They are defeated and we are in the main engaged in rounding up the last of them and sending them off. I will be with you soon.
“Sending them off,” I said quietly. “The poor buggers were begging for mercy and he sent them off. They didn’t muck about, did they?”
“He was a cold-blooded bastard,” Sue replied. “He killed the lot of them as though he were swatting flies.”
“Yeah. Life was cheap, especially oriental life.” I reached for the stiff sheet of paper. “Let’s have a look at the map.”
It was a simple plan, but one drawn by a soldier, with north clearly marked and distances given from the legation buildings. It showed a rectangular walled enclosure with a main building at the northern end and a secondary one at the south. He had marked where the cart had been and had circled the position of the tree under which he had buried the chest.
“It all seems pretty clear, Suze. I wonder if it’s still there?”
“I doubt it,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“Well, that was over a hundred years ago,” she said. “There’s been a hundred and ten years of development since he hid the chest. The temple has probably been bulldozed and there’s a huge block of apartments sitting where it used to be.”
“Not necessarily,” I replied. “We saw lots of temples when we were there. Maybe we even visited this one. What was it called again?”
“The Temple of Agriculture. What a peculiar name.”
“Do you recall seeing it, or maybe remember the guide pointing it out as we went past in the bus?”
“No, although it might have another name now. The Temple of Agriculture seems a bit of a mundane name for a temple. Usually they’re something like Temple of the White Goose or Temple of Heaven, or something similar.
“Maybe he got the name confused,” I said. “Maybe he asked someone what it was called and they just said the first thing that came into their head. Anyway, I’m certain there are still a number of temples near the centre of Beijing.”
“Yes, and a couple of the ones we visited had been completely rebuilt and their grounds redeveloped.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Out with the old and in with the new. You know what Mao was like.”
“Yeah, well maybe this one hasn’t been butchered. Get on your internet and see what you can find out.”
She fired up her computer and five minutes later we had a picture of the temple on the screen.
“See,” I said. “Oh ye of little faith. Captain Monty was right all along. It was called the Temple of Agriculture!”
“Do you think it looks like they’ve done any work to it since the Boxer rebellion?” Sue asked. “The forecourt looks fairly new. Look at all those bricks. And is that a concrete path running up the middle? Did they have bricks and concrete in China a hundred years ago?”
“The Great Wall is made of bricks if you remember. And that path looks more like blocks of stone than concrete,” I replied.
She turned her head to me. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Well, it looks old,” I said, hopefully. “And look at those trees. They look at least a hundred years old. Remember the ones we saw at the Summer Palace in Beijing. Some of those trees were over six or seven hundred years old. The Chinese respect old trees. If the temple is still original, then the trees will be the same ones that were there when Captain Monty slaughtered the Boxers.”
“But maybe the trees were cut down during the Cultural revolution in the sixties,” she said, ever the pessimist.
“They destroyed works of art, and statues, and some buildings, but I don’t remember anything about them uprooting trees. Bloody hell, Suze, be a bit positive here!”
“Yes, okay. I’ll admit it. The trees do look like they could’ve been there for a hundred years or more.”
“Why don’t we go back to China and see if the chest is still there?” I suggested quietly.
“What, right now?” she asked.
“No, not right now. Bloody hell, woman, you’d drive a man to drink! No, we could go in a couple of weeks or so.”
“Steady on, Ben,” she replied. “If the chest is still there, and it’s been there for over a hundred years, then it’ll still be there in a month’s time or in a couple of months. There’s no rush. What did you intend to do anyway, race in there with a shovel and dig it up in full view of a dozen or more tourists?”
“No, of course not. We’d have to do it at night.”
“Hey, Ben,” she said, turning to me. “Just slow down and back up a bit. You want to go rushing off to China on the strength of this picture here on the screen?” She pointed to the computer.
“Yeah, why not.”
“Well, for one thing, we don’t know how old this picture is. It could be ten or fifteen years, or maybe even thirty years old for all we know. China didn’t start madly reconstructing Beijing until what, twenty years ago? Anything could have happened since that picture was taken.”
“No way,” I replied. “It’s a temple for Christ’s sake. If it was there thirty years ago, it’ll still be there now. They knocked down houses and old commercial buildings and those hutong laneways to make way for progress, but I’m certain they didn’t touch the temples. Mao would have, but he was long gone by the time this picture was taken.”
“Well, don’t you think it might be a good idea to contact someone in China and get them to go and check? If it’s still there they can also check as to whether the tree in this picture is at least a hundred years old, and preferably older? Don’t you think it would be also be smart to see if someone could find out whether the tree, if it is well over a hundred years old, has ever been shifted at any time during the last one hundred years?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Maybe we could even get the guide we had
the first time we were in China to do it for us. He was a pretty good guy. I’m sure he’d do it for us. I still have his email address.”
“Are you nuts!” I yelled a little too loudly. “If you asked anyone in China to do what you have just suggested, we’d suddenly have half the population armed with shovels digging so many holes in the forecourt of that place that it would look like a First World War battlefield!” I paused for breath. “The only thing we can do is go over there and find out for ourselves. We tell nobody. We involve nobody else.”
“But what if it’s not there? What if some of Monty’s men went back after he was killed? What if they knew he’d taken something from the cart? What if they’d peeked around the gateway and seen him burying something but had been too scared to take it while he was still alive? Once he was dead they’d have been back there in a flash.”
“Don’t be so negative!” I replied. “You’re always negative. If it’s not there, then what have we lost?”
“The cost of the trip,” she snapped back, slapping her hand on the table-top. “The last one cost twelve thousand dollars. How are we going to pay for this one?”
“I’ll sell the writing box to John Jenkinson-Smythe,” I shot back at her. “I’ll tell him that I want two and a half thousand pounds. That’s a bit over four thousand dollars. If we book the trip ourselves, without going on an escorted tour, it should be a lot less than we paid last time. We’ll only be going to Beijing, nowhere else. We won’t need a guide, or buses.” I pointed to the computer. “Get on one of the airline websites and see what a return fare to Beijing is.”
“About two thousand dollars,” she said a couple of minutes later.
“What, each?”
“No, that’s for both of us.”
“Okay, so that would leave two thousand dollars for a hotel, taxis, meals, etc. We should be able to get a reasonable hotel for a hundred dollars a night. We won’t have to dip into the superannuation at all. Come on, what do you say?”
“Are you sure about this? Are you sure that you want to sell the writing box? I know how much you like it. And this could be a wild goose chase. If we find nothing then you’ll have sold your box and have nothing to show for it.”
Now that the decision had reared its head I was having second thoughts. But if we found the chest with all its goodies, I could afford to buy a dozen such writing boxes and a whole house full of campaign furniture. And there was one other point to consider. As long as I had the writing box, John Jenkinson-Smythe would be on my back, trying to get me to sell it to him. But if I sold it to him, he would find the secret compartment empty. He would think that any papers containing information about the buried chest had been sent to England at some time in 1900 and had simply not arrived. There could have been many reasons why they had gone astray. They could have been entrusted to a brother officer who had either turned out to be not as trustworthy as Captain Monty had thought, or who had suffered a similar fate. It was necessary to cut John Jenkinson-Smythe off at the pass. I would sell him the box, even though it might result in the destruction of that beautiful piece of woodwork. I was certain that if he didn’t find the secret compartment within a short period of time he would rip the box to pieces.
But one of our problems was that we didn’t really know for certain what had been in the letter that Captain Monty had sent to his brother, George. Had he merely said that some money was coming his way, or had he hinted at riches already in his possession? Maybe he had already told him most of the details that he had put into the letter to his wife. Either way, it would be better for John Jenkinson-Smythe to satisfy himself that there was nothing in the chest to further his enquiries, and that he would either have to look elsewhere, or give up.
“Yes,” I said in answer to her question. “I’m sure. I’ll sell it to him. Does this mean you agree that we should go and have a look?”
“If you can get four thousand dollars from John, then yes, why not? But I still need to be certain that you’re happy with selling it to him.”
“Yes, I’m happy. Well, fairly happy, although we could always sell the cross instead. It should be worth a bundle.”
“Not a good idea, Ben.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“If we sell it, then we have to give it some provenance. We’d have to tell prospective buyers where it came from, and how we found it; which would mean disclosing the existence of the writing chest, the letter from Monty to his wife, and the papers describing how he came by the cross and the other bits and pieces. We can’t sell it until we find out whether the chest is still buried beside the tree inside the grounds of the Temple of Agriculture, and we won’t know that until we actually dig for it.”
“Do you really think we’d have to give all that information?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “And that’s not all. If we sell the cross, giving the writing box as part of the provenance, then John Jenkinson-Smythe might try to claim ownership, saying that the box belonged to his family. It’d get too complicated. Once he knows for certain that there was something of value inside the box, he’ll have no hesitation in suing us. At the moment he doesn’t know what we’ve found, if anything.”
This time she was right and not being merely negative.
“So you think the chest might still be buried alongside the tree?” I said.
“Well, we have to assume it’s there until we find out differently.”
“So we’ll hang on to the cross for the time being?” I replied.
“Yes, although I do think we should try and find out a bit more about it. We need to find out whether it really did come from a Jesuit Order, how old it might be, and whether the stones are semi-precious or precious, or just paste. We need to know what we’re dealing with.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
She pointed to her computer. “We’ll take some pretty pictures and post them on to one or two of the forums on line.”
“What are forums?” I asked.
“They’re sites where people having similar interests get together and discuss items that they’re not certain about, or that they want to proudly show to other like-minded collectors. Everybody gets a chance to give their opinion, and some of those opinions can be pretty expert.”
Sue got busy with her camera and took a number of shots of the cross and the other items that had been in the writing box. I sent an email to John Jenkinson-Smythe offering the writing box to him for four thousand Australian dollars. I told him that I was most reluctant to sell, but that I had spotted a nice campaign chest of drawers in an Antique shop in Brisbane for the same amount, and had put a holding deposit on it. I then passed the computer over to Sue and she got busy with all the key strokes that I could never have mastered in a hundred years and soon had the cross and one of the two gold Chinese items listed on two different websites. We didn’t list the Chinese jade items, nor the gold European medallion, nor the one remaining gold Chinese piece. One was enough.
It was now only a question of waiting.
There was an answer from John Jenkinson-Smythe the next morning. He was more than happy to pay the money, he said. I checked out the cost of sending the writing box by courier, and then emailed him our bank details and the final figure. The money was in our bank account two days later and I sent the writing box. I didn’t want it to go, but I knew that it had to be done. If I hadn’t been retired and had still been bringing in a regular income, I would have kept the box. But if I had still been working we wouldn’t have gone to China in the first place, and I wouldn’t have purchased the box. That was the problem with retirement, plenty of time but not enough money to do all the things that had come to mind during those free moments at the office.
But before I packed it up and sent it to him, I carefully brushed up some of the dust from the corners and crevices of the inside of the box and the side drawer, and then blew it inside the narrow cavity where the secret compartment lay, hoping to cover up any signs that we had disturbed it
and, more to the point, any sign that we had removed anything.
“Is there anything on the internet about the cross?” I asked Sue, for perhaps the third time that day.
“No. Give it time. We’ve only had the details listed there for a few days.”
“It’s been on there for a week!” I exclaimed. “What’s wrong with these people?”
“They’re not all retired like you, you know. Some of them only get on the computer during the week-end. Give it time.”
It was not until another week had gone by that we picked up any contact from one of the so-called experts on antique religious items. Sue called out to me and I knew by the tone of her voice that we had something. I rushed up from the downstairs rumpus room.
“What do they say?” I asked.
“Read it yourself,” she replied, and leant aside so that I could see the screen.
Hi. This cross appears to have been made in the 1700’s. The stones would be semi-precious, although I have doubts about the large black one. It’s too big. You have not said what the weight of the cross is, and it is not clear from your pictures whether it is a wooden body wrapped in gold leaf, or is solid. Intrinsically it would not be worth a great deal, unless it is solid gold. However, if it is what it appears to be then it would be worth a small fortune. I think that it is a Jesuit piece. Bobsyboy.
“Did you say that it was Jesuit when you put it on the site?” I asked Sue.
Dark Eye of the Jaguar Page 4