“But I thought—I couldn’t—I don’t see—”
“Liz has a whim of iron, Mary. Keep the bauble. But I’m forgetting my manners. May I present Sir Jonathan Sekloong and Mr. Charles Sekloong?”
The name wrenched Mary from her preoccupation, dispelling the storms of self-recrimination, which had been abruptly transformed into elation. She had first heard of Jonathan Sekloong from Hilary Metcalfe on the Orion. Later, her father had grumbled: “Now they’ve done it. Made a chink a Knight in the last Honors list. Next thing Ah Sam’ll be a Lord.”
Jonathan Sekloong was not wholly Chinese, but half European, and his services were invaluable to Derwent, Hayes and Company. He was the “comprador,” the essential link between the British trading firm and its Chinese customers. He had also proved an invaluable channel between the British Government and the Imperial Government when China was forced to lease three hundred and seventy square miles—the so-called New Territories—to Hong Kong for ninety-nine years in 1898. He had been knighted for those services, only the second Chinese to be so honored. But he had refused to accept his knighthood unless he was permitted to build a residence on The Peak, which was tacitly reserved for Europeans. Sekloong Manor was already rising, its vast foundations dwarfing Government House itself. Hilary Metcalfe hoped Sir Jonathan’s elevation would show both communities that their interests were linked and, further, that Chinese and British need not always live apart.
The man himself was almost dwarfed by the flamboyant tales told about him. He was praised by his friends for his acumen, his benevolence, and his energy; he was vilified by his enemies for his cunning, his rapacity, and his “bandit-connections.” In his late forties, his erect form was spare under the Chinese long-gown, and his features were oddly more European than Oriental. His nose was straight and slender with a thrusting Irish-arched bridge; his forehead was high, and his hazel eyes were only slightly almond-shaped. His air of assumed authority contrasted with Prince William’s petulant self-assertion. Yet the Eurasian could not conceivably have been invited to the Royal Ball, however impressive his accomplishments and however great his wealth, if he had not recently received the accolade of knighthood.
“Congratulations, Miss Osgood.” Sir Jonathan’s courtesy broke into Mary’s revery. “May I boldly say that you are the handsomest young lady here tonight?”
Mary smiled her gratitude. Sir Jonathan’s English was marred by the faintest lilt. His accent might have been Welsh, except for the slurred s’s, incomplete vowels, and stilted diction characteristic of Hong Kong’s English-educated Chinese.
“Charles wants so much to dance with you,” Sir Jonathan continued. “Before he takes you away, may I ask if you will soon dine with me and my good friends, the Metcalfes?”
“I’d be delighted, Sir Jonathan.”
“We must celebrate,” the Eurasian continued. “We two broke into Hong Kong’s social fortress tonight. Perhaps it’s less impressive inside than seen outside.”
“Will you dance with me, Miss Osgood?” Charles Sekloong asked formally.
His intonation was slightly more lilting than his father’s, slightly more Hong Kong, and his pronunciation was marred by similar minor flaws. Charles was taller than his father and darker, his skin a golden olive. But his light hazel eyes were set squarely under heavy black brows, and his nose was imperiously arched. Mary surreptitiously studied the long, clean run of his jawline, taking pleasure from the sculptured sweep under the fine skin she had never previously felt looking at a man. His powerful shoulders strained the fine broadcloth of his tailcoat, which had obviously been made on Savile Row, not by any Hong Kong tailor.
Madame Rachelle’s ballgown suddenly seemed dowdy under Charles Sekloong’s disconcertingly direct gaze. She was also intrigued. His manner breathed a passion for living, in which her countrymen were notably deficient. Neither the puppylike John Williams nor the pampered Lord Peter French had ever looked at her with such unabashed, intense admiration. No young man she had ever known carried Charles Sekloong’s aura of self-assured command.
“I’d love to dance.” She smiled.
From H.R.H. Prince William to the son of a Eurasian knight—the spectacle would keep tongues wagging for months. But, she told herself, do what you will—and, even if it’s foolish, do it thoroughly. If the Osgoods possessed a family crest, that would be her motto. She very much wanted to dance with the compelling young man who seemed only a year or two older than herself.
His encircling arms were more powerful than the Prince’s or John Williams’s. She felt herself yielding to their implicit demand. His determination was a full-grown man’s, and his emotions were frankly expressed, regardless of the world’s opinion.
“Magnificent, Miss Osgood, you were, and very beautiful. I reveled watching you with the Prince. You made them look sick—the fools who think they rule Hong Kong.”
“You flatter me, Mr. Sekloong,” she murmured.
“Not flattery, just good observation. You’re like me. You don’t care about these fools, and you won’t let them put you in place—where they’d like to put you.”
“I never thought of it,” she answered half-truthfully.
“You know that hairpin was my mother’s? She gave it to Elizabeth Metcalfe. But she’d love you to wear it. It’s already a bond between us.”
Mary smiled. Charles Sekloong was, in his way, as imperious as Lord Peter French. But nicer, much nicer—and much more exciting. He was quite different from all the young men she had ever known—a man, rather than an overgrown boy.
Mary’s evening passed in a golden haze. She would, she knew, afterward never quite recall the separate details of that night, only the sensation of joy.
Having escaped the stockade Lady Blake had erected around him, Prince William called for more champagne. He danced with Mary twice again, and once, she saw, with the Honorable Rachel Wheatley’s daughter Cynthia. John Williams claimed Mary for three dances. His eyes were bright with pleasure at her success, but his mouth was sulky when she danced with Charles Sekloong.
At half past three in the morning, Prince William at last yielded to Lady Blake’s glances, at first commanding and finally pleading. The orchestra swung into “Good-Night Ladies,” and John Williams claimed Mary from Charles Sekloong for the last dance. When Royalty withdrew, the other guests made their farewells, the older yawning for sleep, the younger bubbling with exhilaration.
John Williams drew Mary’s arm under his own as the open carriage clattered down Garden Road, the driver swaying half awake on his perch. She laid her head sleepily on the red-clad shoulder, finding it comfortable rather than stirring.
“Thank you, John. Thank you for taking me.”
“Mary,” he said softly as they alighted before the bungalow, “Mary—I wonder—”
“Yes, John,” she prompted imprudently.
“Mary, I—I wonder—but no, not yet. Just this.”
His blond hair blotted out the stars, and his lips pressed hard on her own. With a sigh, she responded, her arms around his neck drawing him down to her. But she slipped out of his embrace as his arms tightened possessively.
“Good-night, John. Thank you for a lovely evening.”
“Good-night, Mary.” The melody of the chiming glass beads in the doorway obscured his soft farewell. “A beautiful night.”
August 14, 1900–September 18, 1900
Behind its battered brick walls, the ancient metropolis lay heavy on the ocher North China plain. Seen from hillocks outside the walls, the golden-tiled roofs that sheltered the Imperial Palaces were as literally square within a broad border of red-and-gray tiles as building blocks in a child’s sandbox. Powdered yellow dust mingled with pale-gray smoke to cast a gauzy canopy over the Legation Quarter in the southeast corner of the capital of the Manchu Dynasty. Already seared by the late summer heat at eight A.M. on August 14, 1900, Peking was uneasily preparing to receive her new masters.
The seven Western nations that had joined with th
e Japanese to rescue their beleaguered citizens from the fanatical Boxers and avenge their humiliation were the latest in a cavalcade of conquerors that had begun more than 3,000 years earlier. Before that time, even the Chinese passion for historiography had not recorded the city’s travails. But wandering marauders had undoubtedly assailed the Bronze Age settlement—just as other armies would take the city in the decades still in the womb of the future.
Ever since Peking, which meant “Northern Capital,” had become a city known as Yenking, the capital of the Duchy of Yen in the second millennium B.C., such invasions had been mounted against it by non-Chinese “barbarians” or by Chinese rebels intent upon taking the city to assert their rule over, first, the original feudal state, and, later, the nation. The Manchus, themselves “northern barbarians” from outside the Great Wall, had conquered the city in A.D. 1644, driving out the Chinese peasant-rebel who deposed the decadent Chinese Ming Dynasty and proclaimed his own dynasty—one that endured for only a week.
Similar rebellions had been endemic to the Manchu realms since the reign of their greatest sovereign, the Chien Lung Emperor, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. That Emperor had in 1793 contemptuously rejected the request of the British envoy, Lord Macartney, that China enter into free trade with Europe. The British emissaries who followed Macartney had exacerbated the misunderstanding between the “overseas barbarians” and the Supreme Empire. Nonetheless, the Court still permitted the British to trade with China—as long as they continued to adhere to rigid conditions, formalized in 1759, that included voluntary confinement to an area of some 8,500 square yards in Canton.
Peking assumed that the aggressive British intruders would again reconcile themselves to restricted commerce conducted on China’s terms, as had the pioneer Portuguese and other early European and British merchants since the sixteenth century. But the Manchus had underestimated the commercial ardor of the British, who became the vanguard of the foreign intruders.
Ignoring the wishes of the isolationist Manchu Empire, the British, Europeans, and Americans had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, asserted their right to trade on their own terms through military campaigns somewhat inaccurately called the “Opium Wars.” Brief clashes between the Chinese and foreigners were used as a pretext for dispatching Allied expeditionary forces to wear down Chinese resistance, and in 1841 the British took Hong Kong. A few years later, the European powers had not only seized Chinese territory, but had also forcibly opened many Chinese ports to Allied trade, exacting the right of residence in those previously forbidden ports for their own commercial and diplomatic representatives.
Angered by Chinese hauteur, an Allied expeditionary force had taken Peking in 1860 and sacked the Summer Palace of the Emperors to the northwest of the city. But none of those incursions had produced such cataclysmic effects upon the decadent Manchu Empire as were wreaked by the righteous campaign to relieve the siege of the Legation Quarter—and that climactic campaign was finally going well.
The inept Imperial forces had already sacrificed hundreds to halt the Allied columns that finally thrust out from Tientsin on August 5, 1900. The impassioned bravery of the ill-armed, ill-trained Chinese forces had been swept aside by the quick-firing guns of well-disciplined foreign units—and the Chinese general had taken poison. Most resistance within Peking had already dissipated before the threat of the foreign banners which had subjugated the Empire’s capital four decades earlier. The soul of the Dynasty, embodied in its sovereigns, was poised for flight that had, characteristically, been too long delayed. The strong-willed Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi had finally released her nephew, the neurasthenic Kuang Hsü Emperor, from the confinement that she herself had imposed. Accompanied by a bedraggled cloud of complaining courtiers, the sixty-five-year-old princess and her twenty-nine-year-old puppet were to jounce in unsprung carts along deep ruts carved through the millennia by turning wheels. Their destination was the ancient former Imperial capital called Sian, “Western Peace.” Peking’s regular garrison was also fleeing the bumbling but implacable advance of the Allied forces.
Small bands of the Righteous Harmonious Fists still held strong-points around the Legation Quarter they had almost taken, while the foreign armies dragged their unwieldy length from the coast of the Yellow Sea less than one hundred miles away. Those Boxers who had neither fled nor died still believed that their amulets and incantations rendered them invulnerable to foreign bullets: they awaited the assault of the overseas devils with confidence enflamed by the lust for inevitable victory. The Boxers—the besiegers who had become the besieged—were as certain in August that they would slaughter the sacrilegious intruders on the holy soil of China as they had been in May when their protracted uprising closed upon the Legation Quarter.
Company C of the Second Battalion of the Royal Wessex Fusiliers marched toward the pall of dust and smoke over the Legation Quarter. Having come late to the expedition, the English unit was contending not only with British-led Sikhs and Rajputs of the Indian Army, but with the hard-bitten American Marines, the tireless Imperial Japanese Infantry, the Czar’s swashbuckling Cossacks, and the enduring Tonkinese of the French Colonial Army for the glory of entering Peking first.
Captain Lord Peter French, commanding C Company, and Lieutenant John Williams, his second-in-command, communicated in curt and hostile worlds. They had, for the moment, subordinated to their common purpose the mutual detestation that sprang from their mutual interest in the same young woman. Both were sweating profusely in heavy khaki drill uniforms belted about with field-glasses, map-cases, revolvers, and water bottles. Lord Peter retained an air of insolent elegance, though his eyebrows and mustache were caked with yellow dust and his lean face was smudged with black powder. John Williams wearily rubbed his forehead, smearing sweat and grit into a gray swirl, but his heavily muscled body appeared inexhaustible.
“Sar’nt-major!” French’s high-pitched command voice pierced the din. “Dress ranks. Load with ball. Quick march.”
John Williams loosened his Scott-Webley revolver in its leather holster. Magazines clicked in metallic menace before rifles snapped to khaki shoulders.
The infantrymen’s spines stiffened, and their clumsy boots, marching at one hundred and twenty paces a minute, kicked up spurts of ocher dust that enveloped them in a golden cloud. The Fusiliers advanced across the alien plain as if on parade: the khaki files die-straight; the red-white-and-blue Union Jack whipping in the morning breeze; the officers’ swords sparkling in the sunshine. A crystalline ray pierced the golden cloud.
Puffs of black smoke from a volley ballooned above the city wall, and the battle flag dipped with solemn grace. The flag-bearer’s jaw was shattered, and bright-red arterial blood spurted from splintered white bone. Before the flag-bearer fell, the corporal beside him seized the banner. A second rattle of shots exploded from the wall.
“Maxim gun section, halt, mark target, and open fire,” French ordered. “Riflemen, follow me.”
The panting soldiers advanced at a trot. On C Company’s right flank the Maxim guns coughed in staccato rhythm, and lead raked the bricks beneath the smoke-puffs. A field-piece lobbed a shell, and the wall cracked minutely. The Boxers fired another ragged volley, and the sergeant beside John Williams, clutching his stomach, sank into the yellow dust.
“Jingals,” French remarked conversationally. “Open ranks.”
The khaki rows accordioned outward while maintaining their forward momentum. The Boxers were firing nails, chains, bolts, stones, and broken bottles from the jingals, their bell-mouthed brass cannon. Resembling outsized, muzzle-loading shotguns, those hand-forged culverins were the only heavy weapons the defenders mustered after the Imperial troops had withdrawn with their few quick-firing Krupp fieldpieces. The primitive jingals were, however, deadly at close range.
The Boxers’ fire ceased when the Fusiliers stood safe in the shadow of the wall, for the Chinese could not depress their muzzles to rake their assailants. Few of the British tr
oops looked back at the plain where four khaki-colored heaps were just visible against the dun earth, marked by gouts of crimson flesh and the white faces turned upward to the pitiless sun. Their enemy’s barricade was the Fusiliers’ best protection. Even the intoxicated Boxers would not expose themselves to the Maxims’ scything bullets in order to fire down into the British ranks. The shells of their own field-pieces were a greater danger to the Fusiliers. But the wall’s battered bricks were slowly crumbling under the explosions that would breach a fortress built long before modern artillery was invented.
“Lieutenant, see the men through,” Lord Peter directed. “Follow with the rear platoon.”
John Williams bit back a protest against the order that would make his company commander the first man into Peking. Stifling his resentment, he watched in bitter silence. Lord Peter’s scarred, begrimed riding boots, lovingly crafted by John Lobb of St. James’s Street, clambered over the red-brick rubble. A fifteen-foot-wide section of the wall tumbled to the ground. The narrow breach had become a gate through which a platoon could march. The rasping coughs of the Boxers’ muskets were overwhelmed by the mechanical bark of the Fusiliers’ Lee-Enfields. Transferring his sword to his left hand, John Williams drew his revolver and led his men through the gap.
“Damned thoughtful, Sah,” his sergeant grinned, “this dirty great hole. Bloody well as easy and come-into-my-parlor as changing guard at Aldershot.”
The Fusiliers advanced through the breach into the unsuspected trap of an oblong courtyard surrounded by unpierced walls. At the far end, the round opening of a traditional moon-gate had been bricked shut. The masonry stubbornly withstood the repeated blows of a half-dozen rifle butts. Standing insouciantly in the center of the courtyard, Captain Lord Peter French was exposed to raking fire from the Boxers atop the surrounding walls. His pale sergeant major relayed commands to soldiers sheltering beneath the walls.
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