Sergeant Howells whistled, and his ruddy face paled.
“I wouldn’t look if I was you, Miss,” he advised.
“But what is it, Sergeant? What are those bundles?”
“Pirates, Miss, pirates. They caught ’em trying to pirate a steam-coaster up northways in Bias Bay.”
“And—”
“And off with their heads. Only way to stop ’em. Give ’em a quick trial and off with their heads. Same way their own people punish ’em.”
“But,” she protested, “twelve men executed right here in the center of Hong Kong! And the bodies left lying!”
“To show the others, Miss. These chinks think they can make free with us. Only way to show ’em. They’ll leave the bodies there for a week.”
He took her arm and gently led her away.
“Beggin’ your pardon, Miss. You looked downright funny. I thought you was fallin’. Rough things happen in old Honkers. But here’s the chair.”
A pair of long bamboo poles lay on the cobblestones, a coolie standing at either end. Between the poles, a seat and a foot-rest hung from ropes like a child’s swing.
“Now, if you’ll just settle yourself, Miss, they’ll carry you along—all comfortable and safe as a kiddie in a pram. Too hot for a lady to walk.”
Mary gathered her skirts and gratefully leaned on the Sergeant’s arm to step between the poles. She felt the swing-seat rise beneath her and scrabbled to place her feet on the foot-rest. Chanting “Hoo-hoo! Hoo-hoo!” the chair bearers broke into a half-trot, and she was swaying three feet above the ground.
The pendulumlike swing of the chair intensified her nausea at the barbaric execution scene. Striving for composure, she looked around.
Sergeant Howells waved reassuringly from his own chair. She had heard that in Hong Kong a sergeant, even a private, was a privileged being because he was white. In England, the Sergeant would have walked on his own broad feet—and stepped into the roadway to let gentlemen pass. In Hong Kong, he was privileged, one of the white lords of the Orient.
The sedan-chair bearers, she surmised perceptively, ranked above the bare-chested coolies who groaned behind with her luggage. They wore tunics of beige nankeen clasped with cloth frogs, and the Regiment’s badge hung from their necks. The trotting legs, bare beneath short trousers, were corded with taut muscles over knobby bones. At each step, swollen purple veins writhed like snakes beneath dark skin.
Mary’s white-knuckled hands gripped the poles in fear, but she ventured a wider glance. The broad street ended at a white clock tower, its hands showing thirty-three minutes past twelve. The chair bearers turned a corner, and she was thrown to the left. They resumed their steady trot down a road sheltered by spreading trees. Red-painted rickshaws lined the curb, their green oilcloth hoods raised against the sun. Some rickshaw pullers scooped rice into their mouths from small bowls with short sticks. Most squatted between the shafts like dray horses awaiting the crack of the driver’s whip.
Mary shuddered, acutely, viscerally aware that those men were beasts of burden—and that she herself was being carried by human beings. Her tumultuous arrival had obscured that abhorrent reality, as had Sergeant Howell’s breezy assumption that all Chinese were lesser beings divinely appointed to carry superior beings like herself.
She suppressed the impulse to bid the chair bearers to set her down. It was so hot she might truly faint if she walked. The chair bearers, she consoled herself, were accustomed to the climate and had freely chosen to earn their living by such demeaning labors. Only fifty or sixty years earlier, ladies had been carried through the streets of London itself in sedan chairs. She must go slowly, as her father had warned her. “Nothing is considered more ludicrous,” he had written in his stilted manner, “than the horror of the newcomer at the established ways of the Colony. And nothing is more futile than his feeble attempts to set things to rights according to his lights by dictating to the old inhabitants who have built Hong Kong and established its proper customs.”
Resolutely, Mary turned her gaze to buildings, at once reassuringly familiar and piquantly exotic. The upper stories extended over the footpath to provide a shaded promenade. Across one façade, she noted with pleasure in the familiar, was painted: QUEEN’S DISPENSARY. But deep open drains extended alongside the roadway, and pedestrians crossed to the footpaths on precarious wooden planks.
The yellow-brown faces of the passersby were faintly menacing, and their clothing was extraordinary. Black-trousered maidservants trotted intently along the footpaths, their long pigtails flopping rhythmically against their white jackets. Chinese ladies in calf-length tunics over loose, purple-embroidered pantaloons swayed past a pillared gray-stone building carved with the legend COURTS OF LAW. Their gait was mincing, and their embroidered slippers were no larger than an English three-year-old’s. Those slippers must encase “golden lilies,” the miniature club-feet produced by the barbarous custom of female foot-binding she had read about.
The chair bearers were slowed by the incline before a parade-ground dominated by a square, dun-colored building with shaded balconies encircling its upper stories. Soldiers in the Fusiliers’ new khaki undress uniforms were just breaking ranks to disperse into stone-built barracks, fanning themselves with white solar topees. Threading a lane between the bungalows like the married officers’ quarters at the Regiment’s depot in England, the chair bearers finally halted. The white-painted front of the bungalow bore a small sign: J. P. OSGOOD, BANDMASTER.
“Well, here we are, Miss,” Sergeant Howells boomed as she disentangled herself from the sedan chair. “Home, sweet home, at last. Mr. Osgood says he’ll be along this afternoon—early as he can. But that luncheon could go on to late afternoon. Fearsome lot they eat and drink here, the nobs.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” she answered, coolly discouraging his familiarity.
“Well, Miss, I’ll just see the coolies get your boxes into the house and then leave you to rest. Old Ah Sam’ll look after you. He’s Number One Boy. Used to be a pirate, they say. But he’s reformed now—maybe saw some snick-snack as light near the pier and reformed chop-chop.”
A burly figure wearing a white, high-collared jacket and black trousers stood in the doorway. His round face was twisted into a fearsome grimace that displayed a treasure-vault of gleaming gold teeth. He was, she realized after her instinctive, fearful recoil, smiling broadly, and he was at least fifty if the lines in his brown cheeks and the grizzled stubble on his shaven head told true. But his thick queue was jet-black and shining with pomade.
Its windows shaded with bamboo screens, the bungalow’s dim interior was a delightfully cool refuge. The furniture, she noted, was primarily light wicker. But a mahogany sideboard bore an array of English crockery, and the light of familiar oil lamps flickered through ponderous glass-beaded shades. Above the fireplace hung her father’s favorite picture, Landseer’s Stag at Bay. With unanticipated nostalgia, she sniffed the pungent scent of his Bulldog pipe tobacco. The reassuringly familiar odor mingled with the dank mustiness that seemed to pervade the Colony.
“Come long this way, Missy,” the Number One Boy said in a curious sing-song parody of English. “Master say come back by ‘n’ bye. But I makee you very fine curry tiffin.”
“Thank you, Ah Sam,” she smiled, speaking for the first time to one of the strange denizens of Hong Kong. “I’ll just wash first.”
She had, she reflected wryly, come home, though home was ten thousand miles from England.
July 22, 1900
The bone-handled knife sliced through the two-inch beefsteak, and crimson rivulets puddled on the coarse white plate. Bandmaster John Philip Osgood smugly inspected the singed chunk impaled on his fork before popping it into his mouth. Blood stained his fox-red mustache, but his napkin remained crumpled on the table. He drained a bumper of claret and belched contentedly.
“Nothing like a good breakfast to set you up in this devilish climate.”
Mary Philippa Osgood sipped her tea pa
le as straw, and fought off nausea. Even tea with milk and sugar was too rich in the moisture-drenched, mid-July heat of the bungalow’s cramped dining room. Mesmerized by revulsion, she watched her father’s fox-furred fingers manipulate the knife and fork. Having already devoured a papaya, he was avidly consuming a pound of steak and a half dozen kidneys. Washed down with two pints of claret, that was his accustomed breakfast.
At seven in the morning she herself could barely face a boiled egg and a piece of toast. After almost two months in Hong Kong, she found the climate exhausting; the thermometer hovered in the high nineties and the humidity inexorably kept pace. The light cotton wrapper over her nightdress was stifling. She had tossed almost all night under the tentlike mosquito net, sleeping briefly and awakening periodically between sheets sodden with perspiration.
“You’re looking peaky, Mary,” her father observed. “No … female problems?”
His ponderous delicacy irritated her. She assumed that she loved the heavy-set, insensitive man whose incongruous passion for music had brought him to his present impasse. Otherwise, why should she have undertaken the long, wearying journey to the end of the world? She suspected, but could not fully acknowledge to herself, that she had been moved not so much by love of her father as by the bleak prospects she faced in England. She could no more tell him that she detested the climate, which left him untouched, than she could admit that the lure—and the hope—of the unknown, rather than filial affection, had drawn her to Hong Kong.
“No, Father, I’m fine,” she answered. “But it was hard getting to sleep. I’m a bit tired.”
“Um … takes some getting used to, this climate. It’s harder for the ladies, I suppose.”
At forty-six, John Osgood was almost as totally ignorant of the female character as he had been at sixteen. Mary had no sisters, and her parents had not lived together since she was two and her brother Thomas a year older. Her mother had flatly refused to join her father on overseas postings. He had been an occasional visitor, rather than a husband or parent.
“Don’t worry, Father. The climate’s wearing, but Hong Kong is fascinating. I’m so glad I came.”
“Well, that’s good. But what’s all that fascinating?”
“Everything’s different and fascinating—but mostly the people.”
“Now, see here, Mary. You mustn’t get mixed up with the chinks. Don’t mind your dabbling in chink painting; that’s ladylike enough. But this learning chink talk—I don’t like it.”
He slapped down his knife and fork emphatically. Their ends were propped on his plate, and their bone handles dribbled gravy onto the cheap lace tablecloth. Mary winced at the clatter and immediately reproached herself for a priggish snob. Coarse table manners did not reveal a man’s true nature. Besides, she reflected bitterly, fine manners were superfluous in the circles her father frequented—and would always frequent.
“And another thing, my girl. Your mother was a lady all right. Her father was a schoolteacher, not a poor greengrocer like mine. But your mother knew her place—didn’t get above herself. You’re flying high, too high. You may come down with a bump.”
Mary suppressed rebellious irritation. When her father was excited, his native Yorkshire tones thickened. “Coom doon wi ’a boomp,” he’d said. She knew his lower-middle-class accent shouldn’t annoy her so, but she would not allow him to dictate to her. She placated him with a smile, carefully measuring her geniality to avoid fanning his anger.
“It’s only Mr. Metcalfe, Father. Tea with his sister … and some officers.”
“Exactly what I mean. Yon Metcalfe’s a nob … an odd sort of nob, but an important man in the Colony in his own strange way. Pots of lolly, he has. I don’t like you getting above yourself. After all, I’ve a father’s responsibility.”
“I’ll be good, Father.” She had learned how to manage men even more irascible than her testy parent. “I won’t push myself forward.”
Partially mollified, Bandmaster John Osgood tucked his solar topee under his khaki-clad arm, reverently lifted the baton that was his badge of office, and strode heavily through the minuscule front hall. For three minutes after he had vanished into the heat haze of the parade-ground, the strings of glass beads hanging in the doorway to deter flies chuckled their farewell.
Mary meditatively took up her teacup. Mercifully, her father was lunching at the Warrant Officers’ Mess, and she need not again cajole him into letting her have her own way. After breakfast, she would bathe, then dress in the cool dimity and brief undergarments that were acceptable in the Hong Kong summer, though she still felt half-naked in that attire. After lunch, Mr. Wong would come by to teach her Chinese painting and the Cantonese dialect. Her father called him “that fancy old chink.” She herself addressed him as Sin-sang, “Teacher,” though Ah Sam, the Number One Boy, hovering in elaborately casual chaperonage, frowned his puzzlement.
When Mr. Wong left, she would stroll through the relative coolness of the late afternoon to the Metcalfes’ small house on Upper Wyndham Street. The Colony was already a substantial city. Some fifteen thousand Britons and other “foreigners,” chiefly Eurasians, Indians, and Portuguese, lived among a quarter of a million Chinese. But essential British Hong Kong—those who really mattered—was a village of no more than five hundred. The Metcalfes mattered.
Nothing, Mary thought, could be more respectable and homey than the Metcalfes’ house, despite her father’s admonitions. Elizabeth Metcalfe was a plump and comfortable spinster, a few years younger than her brother. Her only eccentricity was the numerous strings of rose quartz, lapis lazuli, and onyx necklaces that cascaded onto her massive bosom, where they jangled like the glass beads in the Osgoods’ doorway. Her only passion was her brother. She chided him “for failing to use your intellectual gifts fully and for failing to take our proper place in society.” The Metcalfe name and the Metcalfe fortune would open every door, she complained, every important door from Bombay to Peking, but he was content to serve Derwent, Hayes and Company as a “kind of glorified Oriental secretary.” She meant, of course, every important European’s door, for Miss Elizabeth Metcalfe was outwardly a model of propriety.
Walking among the glowing marigolds, asters, and dahlias displayed in the street stalls, Mary smiled. Her father would, she imagined, disapprove of Elizabeth Metcalfe—should they ever meet. She was beyond question a “real lady” by his standards, but she was also an “educated lady,” a type he abhorred. There was, he had observed, too much “highfalutin’ argy-bargy” in the Metcalfe household that had become her refuge, “too much worryin’ about the chinks.”
Mary’s pleasure in the gorgeous colors of the banked blossoms was diminished by a vague feeling that something was amiss. The flowers, she realized abruptly, gave off only the faintest aroma. Half their number would have overwhelmed with their fragrance in England, but these Oriental blooms were almost scentless. The earth tilled so intensively for so many centuries had long ago yielded almost all its abundance. It was exhausted by producing color alone.
“Come in, my dear,” Miss Metcalfe welcomed her. “Hilary’ll be down in a minute. I believe you know Captain French and Lieutenant Williams.”
“Servant, Ma’am,” Captain French drawled, his exaggerated bow almost tumbling his gold-rimmed monocle onto the golden Tientsin carpet.
“Good afternoon, Miss Osgood,” Lieutenant Williams bubbled. “I’m delighted to see you.”
The officers were at ease in cream linen suits. The light fabric was a concession to the climate, though the unshakable complacency of the British Army in the waning days of the reign of the great Queen Empress insisted that no officer wear uniform off duty. But the formality of the age required them to imprison their throats in high, stiff shirt collars even when they doffed their jackets for the picnics attended by dozens of servants that were a principal diversion of late Victorian Hong Kong.
The British Army was itself suspended between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The moral and
practical lessons of the Crimean disaster forty years earlier were, at that moment, being reiterated by Britain’s gory bumbling on the South African veldt. But few officers’ minds ranged beyond the parade-ground, the grouse moor, and the ballroom. Lord Jackie Fisher was remaking the Royal Navy, and even the Army was reluctantly acknowledging the necessity for efficient staff work and an effective logistical apparatus. Though the purchase of commissions had been abolished in 1860, the social criteria for rank and promotion remained virtually unchanged. The inborn arrogance of the British ruling class, who were the corps of officers, had been further reinforced by victories in tribal wars on the frontiers of the Empire. The Hong Kong Garrison believed itself an invincible unit of the best army that had ever marched across the world. The officers knew beyond a doubt that a platoon of British soldiers could disperse a full regiment of the Chinese Emperor’s gaudily clad “Braves.” That judgment was not wholly wrong, though irregular “commandos” of hard-riding farmers were humiliating the flower of the British Army in South Africa. The primitively armed Chinese troops were far less effectively trained and even worse led than the maltreated British infantryman. Yet the Chinese officers, like their British counterparts, were totally convinced of their own superiority, the convictions of both not merely unshaken, but untouched by cruel experience.
Mary had been fascinated by the extreme differences between the two young officers since first meeting them at the Metcalfes. Captain Lord Peter Comyn FitzHubert French, equinely handsome with sleeked-down black hair, epitomized the British officers’ hauteur. He wore his well-cut suit with negligent grace, and his manner blended languid formality with casual arrogance—more like a slim Regency buck than a man of the new twentieth century.
Lieutenant John Williams was awkward in a suit cut with more concern for economy than style, and his blond hair bristled under its coating of pomade. At six foot two he towered over his superior’s elegant figure by four inches, but he was gauche beside that self-assured prig of the aristocracy.
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