“It could have been worse, much worse,” he later told Mary. “But it could have been much better.”
It could, indeed, have been worse for China, which at least endured as an independent nation. Two years before the Boxer Uprising, China’s chances of survival had been dubious, for the Empire was about to be “cut up like a melon” by the alien powers. American Secretary of State John Hay had then proclaimed the Open Door Policy, which promised all foreign nations equal access to China’s markets and bound them to eschew all further territorial claims. The Europeans sneered that John Hay had put forward those conditions because the United States, alone among the great powers, possessed no territorial holdings in China. But the Open Door Policy, backed by the U.S. Navy’s Great White Fleet, helped prevent destruction of the Ta Ching Chao, the Great Pure Dynasty. Even the fanatical ferocity of the Boxer Uprising, exacerbated by the stubbornness of the wily but ignorant Empress Dowager and the rapacious greed of the West, could not yet destroy the Empire. China’s best defense was her immensity and diversity, which inertly frustrated colonization. Still, the final settlement could, as Sir Jonathan said, have in justice and in good sense been much less humiliating to China. A more lenient settlement might also have resulted in less sanguinary strife in the future.
Under duress, Peking accepted the West’s terms: Public apologies for the foreigners killed by the Boxers, the missionaries in general and Japanese and German diplomats assassinated in Peking in particular. (Those culprits who were apprehended were sentenced by Chinese courts of law convened by the same Imperial Government that had encouraged the Boxer Uprising.) Memorials to the martyred diplomats and missionaries were erected at Chinese expense. All sales of arms to China were banned, depriving the Empire of a good measure of its sovereignty. The Legation Quarter in Peking became a self-governing enclave occupied by foreign troops. Finally, China undertook to pay indemnities totaling $335 million over a forty-year period; the pledge was secured by liens on the Empire’s customs dues and salt taxes, its two chief sources of revenue. China, thus, remained a sovereign state—barely.
At last the chief issues seemed settled, and a new, stable relationship between China and the outside world was apparently created. The Chinese emissaries wept after signing the agreements, and Chinese resentment was not notably mitigated by the benevolence of the United States in using indemnities to establish “Boxer Scholarships” that educated Chinese students in America and to endow universities in China. The Boxer Settlement evoked not only hatred of the West, but deep suspicion of all Western motives and actions. Though Chinese liberals were already turning eagerly to Western models of thought, science, and democracy, the Boxer Settlement poisoned those intellectual currents at their source. The Marxist Soviet Union, apparently untainted by such extortion, was later to be the beneficiary of widespread suspicion of the liberal West.
In the fullness of time, retribution was to be exacted on all foreigners in China. That harsh revenge would, nonetheless, appear mild to vehemently nationalistic Chinese when compared with the foreigners’ original misdeeds.
Mary Osgood was a spectator to those great events. The subsequent consequences of the gory summer of 1900 unfolded so gradually that she did not comprehend their full import for some years. Besides, the quickening pace of her own life demanded all her concern.
Six days after she returned to her father’s bungalow, Ah Sam padded into the cozy parlor with unwonted ceremony. He presented a silver-plated salver on which lay a small parcel wrapped in stained burlap. It was subscribed: MISS MARY PHILIPPA OSGOOD, OFFICERS’ LINES, MURRAY BARRACKS, HONG KONG—BY COURTESY OF COMMANDER M. R. E. EDWARDES, R.N.
She cut the rough stitching with her nail scissors that seemed infuriatingly blunt to reveal heavy folds of cream silk tied with a crimson cord. When her fumbling fingers finally undid the knot, a necklace of massive sea-green jade stones set in gold spilled into her lap. She caught her breath in delight. Clasping the necklace around her throat, she admired herself in the mirror. Finally she opened the accompanying envelope engraved with the familiar crest of the Regiment. The sender was John Williams, V.C., Captain, Royal Wessex Fusiliers. It was, she realized, the first time she had seen his small, neat handwriting.
Peking
26 August 1900
Dearest Mary,
I write you as a rough soldier unskilled in the literary arts, though I long for the pen of a Tennyson or a Shelley. Only the lyric passion of a poet could tell you how I truly feel. [Inarticulate John Williams had not written those phrases without assistance from a brother officer of literary inclinations, she surmised—and then was ashamed of her own coolness.]
But I must haste. Persephone sails within the hour, and Commander Edwardes stands impatiently beside me. You may have heard that I was wounded slightly in the unpleasantness. I am happy to be able to allay whatever unease (perhaps I flatter myself!) you may feel. I am recovering well, and I shall be returning to troop duties in a week or two. It will be longer, perhaps months, before the Regiment returns to Hong Kong, since we are ordered to root out all the remaining Boxers.
You may have heard that I was fortunate enough to be in the forefront when we met with some resistance. They have given me the Victoria Cross, though many of our brave fellows deserved the honor much more than I. I shall wear it for them. They have also promoted me to captain. The step came before its time, and I am grateful.
You must pardon me if I presume—or flatter myself unduly—in feeling that you will be concerned with my affairs. However, I can say that my prospects are now much better than they appeared only a few short weeks ago. The Colonel has assured me that a “Career” is now truly open to me. Apparently I am to be forgiven my professional studies because I have demonstrated the traditional rashness of the “fearless” British officer.
I hope devoutly that these tidings will interest you.
Mary, dearest, for the first time, I am in a position to put to you the question I have so long yearned to ask. Will you marry me when I return? I long for our union more than any honors our Sovereign can bestow.
I pray that you will find it in your heart to accept my suit. I shall presumptuously close by sending,
All my love,
John
Mary avidly reread the letter through a mist of tears. Yes or no—she could not know what her answer would be, but a wave of tenderness rose in her breast. She gently lifted the magnificent necklace from its silken wrapping. She knew instinctively that the costly jewels were a product of the looting Hilary Metcalfe denounced, since John Williams could never have found the funds for its purchase. But it was no more than a paltry reward for the suffering he had endured and the courage he had displayed. And, she reflected, admiring her image in the looking-glass, it was magnificent.
October 3, 1900–December 26, 1900
Five high-pooped junks circled the anchored ketch like sportive whales. When the cumbersome craft turned, their patchwork sails swung across decks strewn with fishing-nets, cooking pots, dog kennels, wooden tubs, and tangles of ropes. Fishermen and their wives shouted earthy jests in their own rough dialect, and naked infants tottered across the cluttered decks.
“Don’t the children ever fall overboard?” Mary Osgood asked lazily.
“Sometimes,” Charles Sekloong laughed. “But they don’t drown.”
“Why? Divine protection?” she persisted idly. “Does the Goddess of the Sea save them?”
“That’s not the secret,” he replied. “Look more closely. They’re tied to Chinese life-preservers—empty wooden kegs.”
“How ingenious!” Mary sustained the light conversation, though her thoughts were engaged elsewhere.
“They’re Tankas, the outcasts of the sea. The brats swim long before they walk. Most Tankas never touch land—except for burial.”
Mary shuddered at lifetimes spent amid the putrid reek of fish on junks that tossed like walnut shells, sheltered from the blazing summer sun and the cruel winter rain only by thre
adbare tarpaulins. Consciously complacent, she contemplated her slim legs stretched in the deck-chair under the green sun-umbrella. The squared neckline and puff-sleeves of the bodice of her blue-serge bathing costume were far less revealing than a ballgown. But the lace-frilled pantaloons under a mid-thigh skirt ended just below the knee, and in the fierce heat her calves were not covered by the long stockings that were essential to modesty in England.
Sprawled on the holystoned deckplanking of the foredeck, Charles Sekloong slitted his eyes against the glare. Unobserved, she appraised the strong features dominated by his arrogantly arched nose and the tautly muscled body revealed by his striped-jersey singlet and blue trunks. Faintly tinged with gold, his olive skin glowed with health. Mary had met Welshmen and Scots who were darker than Charles. He was actually fair compared to the Spaniards and Maltese she had seen on the trip out, though they were considered “white Europeans.”
She had met few such vitally attractive male animals. But she felt instinctive, unreasoning revulsion at the thought of his mixed blood. It was foolish, she reproached herself. Worse, it was atavistic and bigoted, but she could not quite suppress the feeling. Yet the man himself fascinated her, in part, she admitted, because he was so different from all the other men she had known. His body’s hairlessness alternately attracted and repelled her. Her hand reached out of its own will to touch his smoothly rippling shoulder, and she consciously checked the movement. There was, she had been brought up to feel, something weak and womanish about a man whose torso, arms, and legs were utterly hairless. But there was nothing remotely womanish about his trained athlete’s powerful grace. His sinuous muscles, she knew, had been trained by horseback riding, cricket, rugby, and hard slashing tennis. And his hazel eyes were charged with wholly masculine desire when they frankly assayed her.
“Why do the junks keep circling?” Her words remained completely detached from her thoughts. “I’ve heard so much talk about pirates.”
Charles laughed reassuringly, happy to press his undeclared courtship by parading his knowledge and his power. Despite his father’s outspoken opposition, he wanted this woman—and he would have her. Uncharacteristically self-analytical, he reflected that he had never been thwarted during his entire life—except when his wishes clashed with his father’s will. At the age of twenty-four he had never been denied by a woman he desired, and he had never seriously considered marriage, though his mother constantly impressed upon him the splendid virtues of the daughters of the leading Chinese families of Canton and Hong Kong. This woman, he knew, he could possess only in marriage, though his feelings about her race veered wildly, one moment enhancing her attraction, the next provoking revulsion. He had been brought up as Chinese, with all the Chinese pride of blood. His parents had fervidly encouraged that pride—in part, he suspected, because his father hated the memory of his own Caucasian father.
“The junks?” Mary’s laughing reminder pierced his reverie. “You are in a brown study.”
“Oh, yes. They’re waiting for the tide to change. Fataumun, the strait there’s studded with underwater rocks. They must pass through just right. They can’t beat against tide and wind like us. But no need to worry even if pirates were all around us, not just fishermen.”
“Why not? Why have the boat-boys hidden rifles in the ventilators?”
“They always do. A safeguard against kidnapping. But that is our sure protection.”
He pointed to the mizzenmast, from which fluttered a royal-blue banner embroidered in golden thread with the winged Sekloong dragon.
“Everybody knows that emblem, every fisherman, merchantman, and pirate from Hainan in the south to Dairen in the north. Even the wild sea brigands of Taiwan pay homage to the winged dragon. Only madmen could defy it. We Sekloongs have many friends—and much kuan-hsi, many connections. I’ll tell you more some day.”
Mary knew that assertively male note well, for he was obviously deploying his words to impress her. They had been much together since August; she had heard the welling peacock tones frequently, and, more often in the last few weeks, a yearning, tender tone. She knew, too, that Charles was exaggerating only slightly, if at all. The Sekloongs lived like princes, rather than merchants, and innumerable convoluted tendrils connected them with the sources of power in both Hong Kong and China. Hilary Metcalfe, who sat ponderous and rubicund in white linen shirt and trousers beside Lady Sekloong under the sun-awning on the after-deck, had told her much—and hinted more. Charles’s tone was the familiar courting display of the male, but his braggadocio proceeded from a splendid reality.
The sailing ketch Orchidia alone would have been beyond Mary’s imagining if the Metcalfes had not introduced her to this glittering new world that evoked Coleridge’s line, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” Called Orchidia after Sir Jonathan’s mother, whose name, Mei-lan, meant “beautiful orchid,” the vessel carried twelve crewmen smartly turned out in gold-striped blue jumpers. The ketch was one hundred feet long, a bare ten feet shorter, Charles had told her, than the racing yacht Britannia His Royal Highness Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was building at Cowes.
Orchidia was just one of the three pleasure craft that flew the winged-dragon pennant. The newest, Lucinda, fifty-eight feet of gleaming steam-pinnace, normally lay at anchor off Blake Pier so that Sir Jonathan could stroll across the praya from his offices in St. George’s Building for lunch and a catnap. Regina, eighty-five feet in length, broad in proportion, and powered by new twin turbines, had been a present to Lucinda, Lady Sekloong, on the birth of her youngest son Harry almost twenty-one years earlier.
“Mother doesn’t like Orchidia,” Charles had explained. “Sailboats make her stomach queasy, so father built Regina for her.”
Yet plump Lady Lucinda sat enthroned on a deck-chair between Elizabeth and Hilary Metcalfe on Orchidia’s afterdeck, her fingers mechanically telling a Buddhist rosary. Why, Mary wondered, had she joined them on the sailboat? The daughter of a prosperous Cantonese gold-merchant was normally self-indulgent—except when her children’s interests were involved. Surely Elizabeth Metcalfe’s chaperonage would have satisfied convention. And why was Harry Sekloong lounging indolently on the afterdeck?
A few months older than herself, Harry was slightly darker, a shade taller, and definitely more exuberant than Charles. The three had been much together, since he normally accompanied Charles and herself for propriety’s sake. Laughing at Harry’s antics, Mary felt the warm affection she might toward a mischievous twin brother who was her only companion of her own age. Though Harry could rarely resist baiting his serious elder brother, he was keeping his distance from the foredeck.
“There they go,” Charles broke into her sunlit musings. “Look.”
The five junks pointed their prows toward the Fataumun Strait and the open sea.
“Does that mean the tide’s changing?”
“Must be.” He consulted the gold pocket-watch that lay with its heavy chain beside his cigar case. “And right on time. We’ll have to buck the tide. I told the coxswain not to try to catch it.”
“Why, Charles?” Mary asked provocatively. “What’s special about today?”
“Oh, nothing particular, though it might—it might, perhaps, be, but—”
“Be what?”
“Just pleasanter to sail back in the cool dusk.” His voice was uncertain, the assertive, demanding note muted. “I’m sure it won’t be cold for you. Anyway, the saloon’s snug.”
“I shan’t be chilled,” she smiled. “You always take good care of me.”
Charles did not rise to the opening, but silently trickled his watch-chain through his fingers. Mary was momentarily abashed. Was she too blatantly flirtatious? Charles himself had been hinting so broadly she felt it not unseemly to trail her petticoats with a provocative swirl. It was, after all, only a game she was playing—with greater freedom because her choleric father was still in Peking with the Regiment two months after the relief of the Legation Quarter. No,
she decided, her manner was not wanton. How could she possibly be wanton under the vigilant eyes of Elizabeth Metcalfe and Lady Lucinda? Besides, the prospect was absurd—unlikely to arise and unthinkable if it did.
“Why so pensive, Charles?” she teased. “What’re you brooding about, a great business coup or winning the Kwangtung Handicap at Happy Valley? I’d like a tip, you know.”
“Neither, Mary. Dragon Prince is a good bet—if I can convince Harry not to ride him,” Charles said in jest. “It’s more important.”
“More important than business or racing? In Hong Kong, nothing’s more important.”
“Some things are. My parents feel—that is, I’ve discussed—”
Mary’s relief was marred by a chill of disappointment. She knew then that she would not face the dilemma she anticipated and feared, though she had already decided on her answer. She had given Charles no reason to presume that his suit would be successful, though she had noted all the signs indicating that he would propose marriage to her. But, she realized at that moment, he would not do so: his prickly pride, which verged upon arrogance, arose, she had discovered, from a conviction of superiority that was not founded upon absolute certainty. He could not bear to appear ridiculous or less than wholly in command of himself and those about him. She could not believe that he would discuss with his family the prospect of marriage to her until he had first assured himself that she would not reject him.
Watching the junks’ tattered sails recede into the clouds, she lowered the guard on her tongue and her heart she had automatically raised when Charles’s conversation seemed to veer toward the proposal she feared. No longer directly involved, she could quite properly coax him to express the thoughts at which he shied for some reason.
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