Netherworld

by Lisa Morton

  The river was also lined with military forts.

  Most were built on high peninsulas that thrust into the river like tall fingers, but they seemed to be largely in ruins, with tumbledown stone walls and no evidence of habitation.

  “Why are all these forts deserted, Yi-kin?” she asked the young man, who was working the deck nearby.

  He squinted up, saw the one they were just passing, and answered, “Oh, old forts. There are many on the river. Many years ago Chinese use them against British opium ships. Then Chinese say opium is legal, so forts no more need.”

  “Yes, when the Chinese lost the Opium Wars,” Diana said.

  It was the first time she’d said anything like that to Yi-kin, and she knew it could have been a test of their friendship; but Yi-kin only glanced at the passing ruin and said, “Because the British are more strong.”

  She hadn’t realized they’d been joined by Antonia, who was watching the conversation keenly. “It’s true, Diana.”

  Diana shrugged. “Well, of course. That, and we weren’t afraid to kill thousands of Chinese. I’ve read that while we incurred losses of five hundred, the number of Chinese deaths may have been as high as twenty-thousand.”

  Antonia hesitated, then said, “The forts served another purpose, too, after the Opium Wars: They guarded river traffic from pirates.”

  “Pirates?”

  “Oh yes. I have an aunt who was once sailing from Canton to Macau when her ship was attacked and she was taken hostage by pirates. They held her for a week in a small space below decks no larger than coffin. She received a bowl of rice each day, and was beset each night by all manner of vermin—insects, spiders, rats. She thought sure she would die in that horrible, cramped little cell when suddenly one day the hatch was thrown back—she didn’t know by whom. She managed to lift herself up, and discovered she was quite alone on the ship. It seemed that the pirates had spotted a British gunship approaching and had all fled in terror. My aunt swore she would never return to China after that.”

  When Diana didn’t answer, Antonia nodded, “That was barely twenty years ago, Diana. You see, the Chinese can be brutal as well.”

  Diana found her eyes seeking Yi-kin’s, but he had wandered away to busy himself elsewhere.

  They arrived in Canton that evening.

  They steamed up the river past the great island of Macau and the massive shipyards at Whampoa, and docked at a large island which served to house the docks and godowns, or warehouses, of many of the British companies. When Diana heard one of the crewmen mention “Ho-Nam,” she stopped the man and questioned him.

  “That’s the name of this island,” he’d told her in his thick Liverpool accent.

  Ho-Nam was where The Book of Gateways, Conjurations and Banishments said the Canton gateway would be found.

  Although Diana was anxious to set foot on Ho-Nam, Captain Hughes and Antonia both told her no one would be allowed to disembark until they’d checked out the location. A messenger was sent to the Hinton Company offices, and returned near midnight with dire news: The comprador, Mr. Wong, was now among the missing.

  By morning, Antonia had gathered all the Hinton representatives and ship captains in the area, and made arrangements for a meeting in the company’s offices. Without the Hintons’ chief Chinese contact, it would be necessary to deal with other local officials, and so Antonia put together a packet of something she euphemistically referred to as “tea money.” Then she and Captain Hughes set off down the docks while Diana, Mina and Yi-kin remained behind with the rest of the ship’s crew.

  Poor Yi-kin was positively champing at the bit; he did miss his native soil more than he admitted, and he peered wistfully toward the mainland, pointing out local landmarks, such as the huge, red, Five-Storied Pagoda, and regaling Diana with tales of Chinese food and festivals. He was particularly sorry to have missed Ch’ing Ming, the celebration of ancestors which included visiting cemeteries and cleaning graves (and which Diana reckoned to be similar to the European November 2nd celebration of All Souls Day). They watched the many boats negotiating the Pearl River, many ferried by women, and Yi-kin pointed out the “house boats,” opulent sampans that served only particular British companies or families.

  The sun was setting when Antonia and Captain Hughes finally returned to the Althea, with the encouraging news that arrangements had been made for Diana (and for Antonia) to immediately occupy the Hinton family residence in the Shameen district. Diana would have preferred to begin searching Ho-Nam for the gateway, but instead she reluctantly bundled up her things, and a half hour later she and Mina were stepping onto one of the sampans with Antonia. She was mildly distressed that Yi-kin would not be joining them (no Chinese were allowed in Shameen, unless employed there as servants), but he assured her he had his own place to stay in Canton. The sun had set as the little boat finally crossed the Pearl, tied up to wooden moorings behind one of the mansions in the Shameen district, and Diana stepped onto Chinese soil.

  She was told the British section of Shameen had been reclaimed from river silt by the British at great expense. It surprised (and perhaps slightly disappointed) her to discover that it looked much like parts of Calcutta, which in turn looked much like parts of London. The Hinton family house was decorated largely in Western style, with few touches of local elegance—an exquisite jade carving or vase, a lacquered end table. The few Chinese she saw were servants, and Antonia treated them with a surprising disdain that made Diana acutely uncomfortable.

  After a superb dinner of turtle soup and curry roast beef, Diana (and Mina) did take a quick stroll of the small Shameen area, but was dismayed by one scene in particular: An Englishman in a neighboring house was beating a cowering young woman with a bamboo switch. As Diana gaped in horror, peering in through a window, the man was joined by a woman—undoubtedly his wife—and Diana breathed a silent sigh of relief, assuming the woman would stop the beating.

  Instead, the woman laughed and Diana overheard the phrase “yellow imbecile” before the beating continued.

  Diana nearly stepped forward to stop the abuse, but the man finally seemed to grow tired of the activity. As he dropped the switch, he looked up and saw Diana watching. She tensed, expecting a confrontation—and instead the man smiled and nodded a greeting before following his wife back into another part of the house. The young Chinese girl was shaking badly as she pulled herself to her feet, her dress was torn and bloodied…but she returned to her work as if it were all just part of her regular routine.

  Diana was beginning to believe she would truly regret having made this trip to China…but not because of the Chinese.

  Chapter XIII

  May 24, 1880

  Canton, China

  Her room was as elegant as any found in a British manor house, only a few touches (an exquisite waist-high cloisonné vase in one corner, a teak dressing table with geometric inlay) of local culture intruding, but Diana’s night there was nonetheless uneasy. When she left it in the morning with Mina (who was overjoyed when Diana let her scamper briefly in the small courtyard near the house), Diana breakfasted with Antonia, who told her that after the meal she needed to attend to Hinton Company business. She then informed Diana that she’d arranged for her to take a tour of Canton with a famous local guide named Ah Kam. Diana would have preferred to head back to Ho-Nam, but she knew it would be unsafe to go without Yi-kin, so she agreed to the tour.

  She found Ah Kam awaiting her just past the heavily guarded bridge that spanned the small inlet separating Shameen from the rest of Canton. Ah Kam—who had accrued a small fortune acting as guide for at least two generations of visiting foreigners—was an older Chinese man dressed in elegant silk robes and knobbed cap, and with three-inch long nails on the fourth and fifth fingers of each hand. Diana had read in her studies that the long fingernails were a Chinese sign of status, since their owners were capable of very little manual labor.

  “Ahh, Lady Furnaval, welcome,” he greeted her, bowing and smiling. “I will show
you best parts of Canton.”

  He gestured behind himself, and with some horror Diana saw that he had two sedan chairs and coolies ready.

  “Thank you, Ah Kam, but I’d really prefer to walk.”

  The elderly guide put up a brief argument, but decided to let the headstrong fan-gwai have her way, although he insisted upon a sedan chair himself.

  And so, Diana had a walking tour of Canton, as Ah Kam leaned out of his sedan chair, pointing out the sights and offering explanations in his pleasantly-accented English. He showed her the narrow streets of the merchant district, barely six feet wide and extending up three stories through a proliferation of carved wooden signs. They visited a jeweler’s where Diana gasped in delight as the proprietor worked actual insect wings into his designs, and they rested at a tea shop where Diana sampled a luscious oolong that smelled of orchids and was completely unlike any other tea she’d ever tasted. Ah Kam showed her Tung Wu Ti-low, Canton’s famed water clock (a contrivance of four copper jugs that dripped water at such a precise rate the clock was said to have been accurate for hundreds of years), and the “Factory,” which had housed workers with the East India Company a hundred years before, but was now only a pathetic Chinese tenement.

  Diana was enthralled by the city. She loved its bustle and speed, she adored the clash of silk-clad merchants and bare-chested laborers, of adolescents happily gambling on street corners while accountants sat behind them figuring sums on their abacuses. Canton was no more or less crowded than her own London on a week day, but London had never sounded or smelled like this. Open barrels of dried herbs exuded scents that were completely new to her; large metal pots full of simmering wontons set her mouth to watering. Her ears picked out the strains of a two-stringed erhu issuing from a second-floor salon, sounding like the love song of a dying heron.

  Most of the Chinese simply ignored her; a few strangely eyed her Western dress and features, and gave her a wide berth; children occasionally ran after her pointing and shouting “Fan-gwai!” A few (especially the merchants) bowed to her.

  She tried to remember some of the Cantonese Yi-kin had taught her, but found she couldn’t correlate it to the fast, heavily-slurred language that whirled around her. She yearned to try the tantalizingly-spicy local foods she scented around her…until she found herself next to one street vendor hawking rats, their tiny bodies impaled and cooked on long spits. Apparently rats were considered something of a delicacy, much favored by Chinese men who believed they aided in growing hair. Diana thought she already had quite enough hair, thank you.

  Ah Kam seemed most excited to show her Canton’s infamous execution grounds, which were located just outside the city walls near the river shore. En route, he proudly told Diana that they carried out some fifteen-hundred executions per year at the place; when Diana asked about their crimes, Ah Kam leered and told her they were murderers, rapists and traitors. Diana knew little of the Chinese system of justice and wondered what a trial must be like, or how much evidence was required to sentence a man to death. Her guide explained how prisoners were carried in baskets through the streets of Canton before arrival at the execution grounds, where they were lined up in rows of fifteen or twenty, and then swiftly beheaded by swordsmen who were so experienced that each decapitation took only a single stroke. When they arrived at the accursed place, Diana noticed the ground was permanently stained dark red, a testament to the thousands of killings. When she asked Ah Kam about some large earthenware jars lining a far wall of the grounds, he laughed and had a coolie remove the lid from one of the jars. Diana looked in, and saw the jars were packed with severed heads; the smell of quicklime made her flinch and pull sharply back. Ah Kam giggled at the look of disgust on her face, and Diana agreed that perhaps one commonly held western belief about the Orient might be true: Death held little terror to the Chinaman.

  The last item on the tour was a larger horror.

  Ah Kam’s bearers stopped before an ordinary-looking brick building, which Diana would have taken for a hotel, or apartment house. Her guide alit from his sedan chair and led the way down a short corridor into a large, dark open room.

  The smell assaulted Diana before her eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and she grimaced at the combined scents of musky opium smoke and unwashed human bodies.

  Then a small light flared as another pipe was lit, and she saw them.

  There were a dozen men in the room, all reclining on filthy bunks. Some sucked languidly on long pipes; other simply lolled, motionless, eyes half-open. All were thin and wasted-looking; none were older than early middle-age.

  Ah Kam seemed to think Diana would find the den scandalous. “See this man?” he said, pointed at an addict who couldn’t have been older than thirty, and who gave no sign that he was aware of their presence. “His family very famous merchants. He is supposed to take over business, but he end up here.”

  Diana turned away, sickened. “I’m sorry, Ah Kam, but this isn’t what I wanted to see.”

  As Diana strode back towards the exit, he followed, genuinely puzzled. “But British gentlemen and ladies always like to see opium dens—”

  “No doubt they do…but this one doesn’t.”

  It was sundown when Ah Kam finally led them back down Factory Street to the Shameen bridge. He stepped down from his sedan chair, his coolies puffing as he did so, and he bowed deeply to Diana. She paid him with a liberal tip (which produced another bow), and then without a word she returned through the gate to the Hinton house.

  She was surprised to find that Antonia had not arrived yet. She dined alone (on an excellent meal of crab, with local mangoes for dessert), and by the time she retired there was still no sign of her host. Diana wondered what business could have kept her friend out overnight. She only hoped her suspicion, that something bad might have happened, was wrong.

  It wasn’t, as she discovered the next day, when Antonia could barely choke out words through a throat constrained with terror.

  Chapter XIV

  May 25, 1880

  Canton, China

  It was the morning of her third day in China when Diana, who was relaxing with an excellent cup of a local “gunpowder” tea and reading a book on Chinese history, looked up from her chair in the sitting room to find Antonia in the doorway, shaking badly and ashen-faced. Diana poured her a cup of tea and waited while Antonia tried to collect herself. Mina helped, seating herself at the young woman’s feet and staring up at her with such obvious feline concern that Antonia finally exhaled hugely and stopped trembling.

  “I did a foolish thing, Diana,” she admitted, gazing down into her teacup as if searching the unfurled leaves for omens. “I went to the docks yesterday.”

  “The docks at Ho-Nam?”

  Antonia nodded, and Diana knew then that something terrible had come through the Canton gateway.

  “Oh, Antonia, why didn’t you tell me? I should have been with you.”

  Antonia ran a hand through her disheveled hair. “I thought…it was foolish, as I said…but I just felt as if this was company business, and it was my duty to investigate the situation before allowing you into it.”

  Diana felt a surge of affection for her, and reached across the small table between them to take her hand.

  Antonia returned the gesture, as if hanging on to Diana for her life. “Truthfully, Diana…I didn’t believe the stories. I thought they were surely naught but the imaginings of superstitious men, some oriental fantasy….”

  “You learned it was no fantasy, I take it,” Diana said.

  “No fantasy,” Antonia concurred. Mina leapt into her lap just then, and Antonia seemed to dissolve into blankness, absent-mindedly stroking the cat.

  After a minute of silence, Diana gently prodded: “Antonia, can you tell me what happened? It’s important I know.”

  It took the entire night and well into the following day for Antonia to gasp out her story, between choked reactions and shudders. Diana stayed with her the entire time, even when Antonia finally slept
, moaning softly. She was able to finish the story in the morning light, but even then she half-whispered parts of it, looking away. Diana almost thought she could see Antonia physically age during that night, and she regretted forcing her friend to relive the horrors she’d endured—

  Antonia had gone back to the Althea just after their breakfast the morning before, and gathered a small troop of the strongest crewmen. She’d also taken a pocketful of cash, which would be useful should she need to bribe her way out of a predicament, and a pistol, which she had some skill with.

  Accompanied by her six crewmen, Antonia set out for the Hinton godown on Ho-Nam, a short distance from where the Althea was moored. Her plan had been to search the warehouse thoroughly, and then occupy it for an entire day and a night, proving to the Chinese workers that their fears were baseless.

  An inspection of the warehouse revealed nothing but tarpaulin-covered crates, rusting pulleys and hooks, and a few side storerooms; the empty warehouse was like those to be found anywhere in the world, except that the writing on the crates was mostly in Chinese. The day passed quietly, the men patrolling or conversing while Antonia perused some ledgers she’d found, which turned out to be thoroughly unremarkable. At dusk they lit several lamps and seated themselves in the center of the large building, the crewmen squatting on crates and lighting pipes.

  Sometime after midnight they heard the first sound—a rhythmic thumping or pounding coming from one of the storerooms. Antonia ordered two of the men to wait, while she went with the other four to investigate. They easily located the sound, coming from a storeroom. The sailors formed themselves around the door leading in, and she stood off several feet, raising the pistol. The door was opened, and at first there was nothing, only darkness. The pounding noise stopped, and one of the men was just raising a lantern to look within when something lurched out. They all leapt back in surprise, and one man thrust forward with a long knife.