“John, I’m flattered. And I am fond of you, too. But it’s so difficult in Hong Kong.”
“Difficult? I don’t understand.”
“It’s difficult for us, the Bandmaster’s daughter and a commissioned officer. You do see, don’t you? There are so few opportunities with propriety.”
“Blast propriety!”
“We can’t really, can we? Neither of us.”
“I suppose not,” he conceded glumly.
“Of course, there is … but, no, it’s impossible.”
Mary put her words forward as skillfully as a chess player advancing his key pieces. Her scheme was fully shaped. In archaically caste-conscious Hong Kong attending the Royal Ball would automatically elevate her social position. Her presence at John’s own invitation, though itself unorthodox, would create the circumstances under which they could meet with propriety and would, simultaneously, pay off the insufferable Mrs. Wheatley. She felt no compunction at using his newly awakened sympathy for her to attain a purpose they both desired.
“What,” he pressed, “were you thinking?”
“Just that there is a way. But I couldn’t—”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure you could. Do tell me, Mary.”
“It’s too much, John, really. But the Governor’s Ball. If, somehow, I were invited, then there’d be no problem—no difficulty in our seeing each other.”
“Capital idea. But how?”
“I don’t know, John. I just don’t know.”
“Of course!” he exclaimed. “You’ll come with me.”
“But the Colonel and the officers’ wives. What would they …?”
“Blast the Colonel and the wives. Mary, you must come with me.”
Having precipitously gained her end, she was momentarily abashed. She thought first of her father’s anger and next of the inescapable complications. John Williams would be embarrassed by squiring the daughter of the man on the bandstand. She would herself invite snubs beside which Mrs. Wheatley’s iciness might appear cordial. But she replied recklessly.
“Yes, John, I will. I’d love to go with you.”
“Oh, Mary,” he blurted, “that’s splendid.”
Perhaps he was already regretting his impulsive invitation. But, she reflected coolly, she must leave that concern to his own conscience. She had received a normal invitation from an attractive young man, and she had accepted with normal grace. And she desperately wanted to dance at the Governor’s Ball. Her immediate problem, she concluded practically, was twofold: wheedling a suitable ballgown from tight-fisted John Philip Osgood and placating his wrath.
John Williams left her at the glass-beaded doorway after clasping her hand in both his own.
Her father was out again. After dinner, as she prepared for bed, Mary wondered idly how he spent his evenings—and was fleetingly ashamed of her curiosity. The Chinese merchants who catered to the band constantly pressed invitations upon the Bandmaster, and he accepted most. Their hospitality was, she suspected, not limited to sumptuous banquets laved with claret and brandy, but was capped by visits to the flower boats in Causeway Bay.
Hilary Metcalfe had told her forthrightly that the girls on those floating bordellos were normally no younger than twelve and no older than eighteen. After repaying the proprietors who bought them from impoverished parents, most accumulated a small dowry and married respectable farmers or artisans who accepted their past and their dowries without recrimination. A fortunate few would be taken by wealthy merchants—as concubines or even as second or third wives. “Some,” Metcalfe had explained, “stay in the game because they like it. In time, they can become entrepreneurs who buy lucky young country girls out of toil and privation. The system is more humane and less hypocritical than Europe. There are no ruined girls.” Respectable—even respected—prostitution and the equally respectable—even honored—opium trade. Perhaps she already knew too much about Hong Kong.
Mary twisted on the hard bed under the tentlike mosquito net. Sleep was repelled by both the stifling humidity and her agitated memories of the day. Her restless thoughts passed to British Hong Kong’s stratified social structure and her own place—or lack of any place—within the rigid framework. The stern realism instilled by her lonely upbringing told her that she was an embarrassment to the Crown Colony’s prim matriarchy.
A half-century earlier, the rise of the new manufacturing and professional classes had breached traditional social barriers in England. The breezy permissiveness of the embryonic Edwardian era was at that moment shaking their foundations. Yet Hong Kong had not merely preserved, but had raised and strengthened caste distinctions that were cracking at home. Chivvied by their pretentious wives, the middle-class merchant-adventurers had erected even more formidable barriers of their own design. “A female cabal,” Hilary Metcalfe insisted, “really runs the Colony—by gossip, innuendo, and slander. More careers and lives have been destroyed over the teacups than by the law courts, the counting-house, or the battlefield.”
Her father’s position and, therefore, her own were equivocal. He was British, and the lowliest Briton was virtually a lord compared to the Chinese. Yet John Philip Osgood was neither a commissioned officer nor an “other rank,” an enlisted soldier. Either grade would have precisely defined his position—and her own. But he was a warrant officer, a hybrid creature. She could mingle unconstrained with neither the sergeants’ wives and daughters, who, in any event, bored her beyond tears, nor with the officers’ ladies, who were hardly more stimulating. She was not welcomed by the self-anointed civilian elite, who were at least as tedious—and much ruder. Only the Metcalfes’ hospitality offered her surcease from stark loneliness.
If she had been overwhelmingly beautiful, much might have been forgiven her by the matriarchs, as well as their men. She might have swept all before her if she had typified the ideal of the age. Had she been either a languid blonde or a dark-haired beauty with regular features, insipid conversation, and a taste for the genteel flirtation, she might have overleaped the barrier of her father’s position.
But she was not beautiful. She was, she knew dispassionately, attractive, though her features lacked classic symmetry. Her nose was acceptably high-bridged, but her mouth was too wide. Her glowing auburn hair, a flaming crown Burne-Jones would have rejoiced to paint, was her chief beauty, and her figure was striking. Yet she was too vivacious, too “pert and outspoken,” too “strong-minded and intellectual” for the small-minded ladies who ruled the Colony’s society. Her manifest deficiencies—social and personal—had already compelled her to resign herself to living on the fringe of proper British Hong Kong. Since the domineering hostesses could forgive neither her origins nor her manners, she had not hoped to attend the Grand Ball hallowed by Royalty’s presence, the event of the new century.
Her attendance could make a vast difference in her status, but she could not be as certain as she had intimated to John Williams. She knew without vanity that the young officers, civil servants, and gentleman clerks of the great trading hongs found her attractive. But did they consider her anything more than, at best, a pleasant diversion or, at worst, a casual conquest? Some were betrothed to “suitable” young ladies in England, while others were searching for brides whose connections and wealth would advance their careers. Really, she concluded, Mary Osgood had only one thing to offer. Some suitors would persevere—until she either yielded or decisively rejected them.
“Maybe I should take myself to a flower boat!” She laughed aloud in the moonlit bedroom. “I’d be a sensation, a red-haired flower girl. And think of the money—I’d be a very rich woman in a few years.”
The ebullience of youth had overcome both her depression at the Honorable Rachel Wheatley’s cruel snub and her agitation at having maneuvered John Williams’s invitation. She turned on her side and composed herself in renewed invitation to slumber.
July 23, 1900–August 1, 1900
The clatter of crockery woke Mary Osgood. Ah Sam coughed softly as he place
d the teacup on her teak bedside table. His elephantine tread normally aroused her before that morning ritual, but exhaustion had granted her deep and dreamless sleep.
The Number One Boy’s entry at dawn no longer disturbed her. A manservant’s awakening a single lady was unthinkable in England. But respectable Hong Kong thought nothing of it, for the Colony’s mores unabashedly combined prudishness and license. Some matrons, gossips whispered, summoned their boys to scrub their backs as they sat in their deep baths. Mary found it hard to imagine of a harridan like the Honorable Rachel Wheatley, but the tale was often told.
“After all,” the ladies observed, “you can’t consider them ‘men.’ They’re just Chinamen.”
Ah Sam’s features grimaced in his customary ferocious good humor, but his manner was heartily disingenuous.
She knew she had found an ally, perhaps even a friend, in the piratical-looking Number One Boy. After his initial suspicion, he volubly approved of her studying his language, and they chatted in improvised Cantonese, reverting to pidgin English to bridge the gaps in her new knowledge. She had apparently won the regard of one member of the race most of her compatriots derided as “the beastly Celestials, not quite human.”
“Good morning, Ah Sam,” she said in Cantonese. “It’s a lovely morning.”
The stocky servant normally contented himself with echoing in his clacking tongue, “Jow-sang, Siu-jieh, Tin-chi ho-ho ah.” But this morning he lingered, adjusting the curtains with deliberation and flicking imaginary dust from the dressing table.
“Ve’y good mo’ning,” he said in pidgin, apparently determined that she should not miss his meaning. “But mans not so good. Have got bad Englishmans in Hong Kong. Also have got many bad Chinee mans.”
“How so, Ah Sam?”
“Yeste’day,” he answered, “I hear bad words at teahouse.”
Ah Sam’s teahouse usually meant the hole-in-the-corner food shop where he observed the ritual called yum cha—drinking tea. Yum cha really meant playing Mah-jongg and gossiping while consuming a variety of succulent dumplings with the fragrant tea. But “teahouse” was also Ah Sam’s euphemism for the divan where he occasionally smoked a few soothing pipes of sticky, black opium. Mary had read de Quincey’s and Coleridge’s reminiscences of “opium eating,” but the word “divan” still conjured up images of dark evil in her mind.
“What teahouse, Ah Sam?” she pressed at the risk of straining the tenuous confidence between them.
“Oh, othah teahouse, Missy,” he replied without hesitation. “Not reg’lah one. You know what teahouse. Sometime, othah teahouse have got bad mans. They say young—what you say—g’andson of g’eat English Queen come Hong Kong next week—and they say maybe some bad mans want chop him. Say Englishmans behave ve’y bad up no’th Shanghai mo’e fah—shoot many Chinee mans. So they wanchee chop g’eat English Queen’s g’andson.”
“You told Master?”
“Oh, no need speak, Missy.” Ah Sam’s face closed stubbornly. “Some British mans know al’eady. I go now, see to b’eakfast.”
Mary knew she would learn no more from Ah Sam, despite their useful alliance against her father’s rages. He revered the “g’eat English Queen” almost as deeply as he did the Dowager Empress in Peking, who was sixteen years younger than eighty-one-year-old Queen Victoria herself. But his ultimate loyalty necessarily lay with his own people.
Could she dismiss the matter as casually? She pondered the question as she stripped the nightdress from her body, sticky with sweat, and reveled in the cooling breeze blowing through the shutters of the tiled bathroom. She stood naked for several minutes, stretching luxuriously and letting the air play on her bare skin. Since coming to Hong Kong, earthy despite its outward prudishness, she was no longer shy of her own body. She felt pleasure in the rough caress of the bath sponge on her breasts and the firm swell of her belly above the inverted triangle of flame between her thighs. She suddenly blushed and seized the pannikin floating in the porous earthenware water butt.
Mary flung dipper after dipper of cold water over herself, delighting in the successive shocks. Was her enjoyment of the bracing drench, she wondered guiltily, lust of the flesh? She vigorously toweled herself dry, but was half-drenched with perspiration by the time she’d finished dressing.
To resolve the dilemma Ah Sam had posed, she wrote a brief note. Emerging from her bedroom, she saw with relief that her father had already left the bungalow. She summoned the coolie, the man of all work, to the front door and instructed him to carry her message to Mr. Metcalfe.
While she was sipping her pale tea, the coolie returned bearing Hilary Metcalfe’s familiar blue envelope with his seal’s red Chinese characters impressed on the flap. The message was brief: “M.O., Matter under control. Come see us soon. H.M.”
She had done all she could, for Hilary Metcalfe’s voice commanded attention in Government House. She was subsequently to wonder if she had truly done all she could. But that was much later.
At 6:47 on the morning of August 2, 1900, Her Majesty’s Ship Defiance, heavy cruiser, steamed past Green Island into the drifting mist of Hong Kong harbor followed by H.M.S. Persephone, light cruiser. The squadron was on passage to Taku Bar to join the flotilla supporting the Allied force that was still girding itself to march on the capital of the Chinese Empire. Tientsin, the chief seaport of North China and the gateway to Peking, had finally fallen to naval gunfire and infantry landings in mid-July. But there the relief force had stuck after one weak thrust was repulsed by unexpectedly tenacious Chinese resistance. Fearful confusion in Tientsin had prevented a lightning sweep like that which took Peking in 1860. At that moment, the commanders of the eight-nation array were finally resolving their own disputes. Goaded by the self-confident British, they had finally agreed to march in force on August 5, waiting no longer for full complement of cavalry and artillery or the Balloon Section that had just embarked from Southampton.
The Legation Quarter of Peking was being squeezed behind its contracting perimeter by the pressure of the fanatical Boxers, unofficially supported by the motley regular troops of the Empress Dowager. Wholly committed to their own bloodthirsty oaths and totally confident of their invulnerability, the Boxers were slowly wearing down the will of the besieged; the passage of time was consuming both the provisions and the ammunition of the few soldiers and the armed civilians who defended the foreign legations. For the first time since 1839, Chinese forces were engaged in effective military action against Europeans. China was striking back at the arrogant barbarians who had almost effortlessly imposed their will on the decadent Empire for more than forty years, extracting vast sums, humiliating concessions, and immunity from Chinese law that chipped away China’s essential sovereignty. Exultation outside was matched by suffering within the Legation Quarter. If the Allied forces did not rescue them soon, the besieged would be slaughtered in expiation for the transgressions of their predecessors—the women raped repeatedly by filthy fanatics, the men barbarously mutilated before sword strokes ended their agony.
Nonetheless, Hong Kong apparently believed that the chief purpose of the gray ships’ long voyage from the Mediterranean was to honor the Colony with the presence of His Royal Highness, Lieutenant Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, navigating officer of Defiance. Sirens howled from steamers; whistles shrieked joyous paeans from square-rigged sailing ships; hoarse foghorns reverberated jubilantly; and bells peeled from churches. Fusillades of firecrackers punctuated the pounding of drums and clashing of cymbals from junks and sampans. A solemn twenty-one-gun salute thundered from Jardine’s Wharf as the cruisers dropped anchor.
The Colony was en fête, the board praya along the waterfront a kaleidoscope of gaudy bunting. Bamboo-and-matting towers swayed in the light winds, their many-colored paper streamers dancing in the morning sun. Arches flung across the streets bore the scrolled initials VR for Victoria Regina, as well as fulsome declarations of loyalty in red Chinese characters. Blake Pier was smothered by sunbursts of rosett
es, bunting, flowers, and banners—all dominated by the great sign-board: HONG KONG WELCOMES H.R.H. PRINCE WILLIAM!
“Once again,” Hilary Metcalfe observed sourly and portentously, “this jewel of Empire has managed to transform a crisis into a revel. One would think Defiance had come to celebrate a great victory, rather than to assist a squalid, mismanaged, minor expeditionary force. If this little lot had lived in Pompeii, they wouldn’t have fled. They’d have danced in the streets as the lava engulfed them.”
Mary Osgood and Elizabeth Metcalfe indignantly reproached the Sinologue for his cynicism. Like their own, every feminine heart in Hong Kong fluttered in hope of actually beholding the dashing young prince. A martial demi-god, his divine chariot the armored ship, Prince William embodied not only Britain’s Imperial might, but the perfection of British manhood.
Those ladies favored with invitations to the receptions planned for His Royal Highness’s three-day visit fluttered in a frenzy of preparation. Dressmakers, milliners, and perfumers were overwhelmed with custom; harried clerks and gratified proprietors, pale tailors and consumptive seamstresses worked through the nights by the flickering light of gas lamps and kerosene lanterns. Merchant princes and senior officials retreated behind the blue-and-white arches of the Hong Kong Club to escape the hysteria. But the waiters inside, like the rickshaw pullers outside, flaunted red-white-and-blue rosettes.
Many maiden pillows were drenched with tears of disappointment. The glorious culmination of the Royal visit was to be the Grand Ball given by the Governor, Sir Henry Blake. That imperious arbitrix of fashion, Lady Blake, had pruned the guest list with ruthless shears. Only those unmarried ladies might attend whose standing was unchallengeable—by the Colony’s particular standards. Besides those few who asserted special claims because of noble connections or wealth, the chosen few included only the daughters of: senior officers, majors and above; superior civil servants, under secretaries and above; and the ranking executives of the great trading houses, the hongs that actually ruled the Colony.
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