“My dear Mary! It’s been so long. I came as soon as I could.”
His arms gathered her up, and she tasted tobacco and whiskey on his lips. She slipped out of his embrace, her heart hammering.
“You look lovely, absolutely lovely. I’ve dreamed about this moment.”
He kissed her again, and she yielded for an instant before again evading his arms.
“It’s delightful to see you,” she laughed. “But you must be good—or I’ll have to ask you to leave. Only Ah Sam’s about, and it’s not proper—”
“All the better!” His new confidence spoke. “All the better—a man should be alone with his fiancée after so long away. Mary, I do love you.”
She seated herself behind the sturdy teak dining-room table as a barrier to his ardor.
“John,” she reminded him, “we’re not affianced, you know.”
“Not affianced? Nonsense! I could tell from your letters.”
“What could you tell?” She intended to be stern, but feared that she was involuntarily coquetting. “What?”
“Just that I could tell. You never said no. So I knew you meant yes, though you were too shy, too diffident.”
“I never said yes, either, did I?”
“Just what are you getting at?” he demanded. “You led me to believe—Mary, do stop your teasing.”
“I’m not teasing, John. I never said yes, and I didn’t mean yes. Perhaps I didn’t say no directly. Perhaps I wanted to say I didn’t know, but how could I—”
“Then it’s true,” he glowered, “the rumors I’ve been hearing—but couldn’t believe. You’ve been playing fast and loose with me and that … that Eurasian, Sekloong.”
“Hardly fast and loose,” she replied coldly. “I wrote you as I’d write any friend … any good friend. But I didn’t lead you to believe—anything. Besides, what makes you believe it must be another man if it isn’t you?”
“And my presents?” He ignored her question. “You kept them, didn’t that mean something?”
“I kept them for you. I wrote that I was keeping them for you.”
“Well, then, Mary, where do we stand? Can I hope or shall I leave?”
“I’d hate to send you out alone just after you’ve returned. But you must see—”
“You’re not—you’re not committed—not promised to that half-caste chink? I’ve had my bellyful of chinks.”
“No, I’m not committed to anyone … to Mr. Sekloong or to you, Captain Williams. And don’t call Charles a chink. He’s a fine gentleman—a good deal more sensitive and more gentle than you.”
“A chink’s a chink, however he’s dressed up—or his father hung with a title. You’re mine, Mary, not his.”
“I’m my own woman, John. Can’t you understand?”
John Williams shifted his weight in the creaking wicker chair. Perplexed anger rose like a red tide across his open face.
“I’m trying to understand, Mary,” he said grimly. “If you’re not promised to him, then marry me before the week’s out.”
“I’ll marry no one until I please.” Her temper finally broke. “I’m not a prize for valor awarded by Her Majesty’s Government.”
“But you are for sale to the highest bidder!” Williams’s voice thickened with choler. “And the highest bidder is the chink.”
Mary’s vestigial self-control snapped. The decision she’d evaded was taken in one searing instant. Forced to weigh her suitors, she unhesitatingly chose the absent one. Her fiercely possessive defense of Charles showed that she did truly love him very much.
“No, Captain Williams, I’m not for sale to the highest bidder, and I won’t be browbeaten into marriage. No, Captain Williams, I won’t marry you. I will marry Mr. Sekloong.”
“Mary,” he interrupted contritely, “Mary, just listen to me.”
“I’ve listened too long, and now it’s too late.”
“Marry Sekloong or his father’s money?” Williams shouted. “A Queen’s officer’s not good enough for you. Must be a nabob, even a chink nabob.”
“Think what you will, Captain. I will marry Charles Sekloong with all my heart—and I will make him the best wife I can.”
Interlude
June 27, 1970
8:30–10:30 P.M.
The muted ringing Lady Mary heard as she fingered her necklaces was a haunting echo of the past. Amid the quiet joy of a ninety-year-old dowager, she remembered the exhilaration of a twenty-year-old girl after her first Grand Ball and the same girl’s dismay at the wrath of a rejected suitor. The gentle chiming of the glass beads in a vanished doorway and the spiteful rattle of those same beads on an angry afternoon almost seventy years earlier reverberated in her mind. The sounds her ears heard were the clatter of ivory chopsticks against porcelain bowls above rolling waves of conversation and the soft tinkling of her own strands of jade.
Her immediate family, forty-two in all, was seated at the broad oblong table in the Great Hall of The Castle where medieval European wood-carvings stared blindly at thousand-year-old Chinese scrolls. Her back was to the doors, and Sir Mosing Way, himself eighty-five, sat in the place of honor directly opposite his hostess. Lesser members of the House of Sekloong and the Crown Colony’s dignitaries sat at nine identical tables, while battalions of waiters presented the fifty-six courses of the Imperial Manchu Banquet. The feast included extravagant delicacies like hummingbirds’ tongues, bear’s paws, and elephant’s trunk, as well as the more familiar shrimp in rice-flour wrapping, crackly Peking duck, sharks’ fins with minced chicken, crab-claws with black beans, delicate baby corn with conch, roast young squab, crisp chunks of pomfret in a sweet red sauce, and eight-treasures soup in a hollow winter-melon. Mary had made only one stipulation when Sarah and Opal suggested the menu first conceived for the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi. Afterward, the guests were to be served traditional birthday noodles, their length symbolizing long life—but the feast was to end with jook, the rice-gruel that was the staple of the poor in South China.
“Remind them of their origins,” she snapped. “Remind them how all this grandeur and mock-grandeur began.”
The gesture would probably pass unnoticed amid the ostentatious splendor. The ten tables set with a gold-mounted service for more than four hundred were dwarfed by the immensity of the Great Hall. As The Castle dominated Sekloong Manor, The Castle itself was dominated by the Great Hall, one hundred and fifty feet square, three stories high. A Peking carpet commissioned in 1921 covered the waxed parquet with patterns incised in blue and gold on a beige field. From one of six carved-wooden galleries, a chamber ensemble played Mozart.
The wooden figures of angels, saints, knights, and ladies adorning the galleries had come from châteaux in France, Schlösser in Germany, and manor houses in England. Recesses in the teak-paneled walls displayed the porcelains of three Imperial Dynasties: the softly glowing celadon of the Sung, the brilliant blue-and-white of the Ming, and the varicolored, six-foot-high vases of the Ching. A time-darkened Rembrandt study of his mistress Saskia hung in a pool of light on the far wall. Extending ninety feet along the opposite wall, a minutely detailed painting depicted the sixty-mile-long sweep of the Yangtze Valley from Wuhu to Nanking. The artist had spent twenty-three years painting the procession of musicians, cavalrymen, courtiers, officials, and palanquined concubines accompanying the Emperor Kao Tsung of the Southern Sung Dynasty to his capital seven hundred and fifty years earlier.
The past was too much with her, though the chiming was not swaying glass beads. She was fingering the four-inch-square jade pendant that had been Sir Jonathan’s gift, her fingers tracing the winged dragon rampant on the cool, sepia-striated stone. She stroked the plaque and set her necklaces ringing whenever she brooded on the plans her great-grandchildren called “Lady Mary’s diabolical schemes.”
Toying with necklaces was a universal feminine gesture. Even proper British matrons—once attired in flowing, pinch-waisted dresses, but now uniformed in skirts and twin-sets—fingered their
pearls unaware. The proper, proper British! She had lived with them and quarreled with them, despised them and loved them all her life—as she had the Chinese. Henry, the eldest son of her own eldest son Jonathan, was proper British. He was Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Jonathan Osgood Sekloong, Baronet, and chain-mail epaulettes glittered on his dark-blue formal uniform of the 17/21 Lancers. The skull-and-cross-bones insignia of the Regiment on his lapels were to soon be exchanged for the red tabs of a Brigadier. Despite his clouded background, Sir Henry had been gazetted to command the Armored Force Training School at Bovingdon in Surrey. That was rapid promotion for an officer of only forty-three in a shrinking military establishment.
For the British, position was a great leveler. But wealth was an even greater leveler, and he was the extremely wealthy third Baronet. Yet they could never quite forget his origins. His dark good looks owed more to his mother, Sarah Haleevie, than to the Sekloongs. The Jewish strain was marginally more acceptable than his Chinese blood, though Sir Henry had inherited the Old Gentleman’s slimly erect figure and inborn dignity. But he had learned to mute both the Sekloong brilliance and the Haleevie vivacity. The firm molding of the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College and the discipline of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst had made him the model of a proper British officer.
By God, there were too many soldiers in the family! Perhaps the inclination was passed along by her father’s frustrated genes. A figure in a light-blue uniform sat across the table from Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry. The twin stars of a major general of the United States Air Force shone on his shoulders, and four rows of miniature medals hung below the laurel-wreathed-star that crowned the silver wings of a command pilot.
Her eldest grandson, Major General George Chapman Parker, Jr., was just forty-four. His breezy manner was very American, as was his occasional earnest solemnity. Blanche Taylor, wife of the Under Secretary of State, was his sister, younger by two years. Lady Mary’s daughter Guinevere had married Dr. George Chapman Parker to found the American branch of the family and to die with her husband in 1944. Her son George was heavy-set and grizzled blond, his intent hazel-green eyes his chief inheritance from the Old Gentleman. He had flown fighter-bombers in Korea and had commanded a wing in Vietnam.
Sir Henry had also fought in Korea. Lady Mary wondered again if the grandson she had never seen might have died under Henry’s cannon fire or George’s bombs. Her son, James (she simply could not call him Ai-kuo) had dutifully written to report his own son’s “heroic sacrifice in defense of the Motherland” on a nameless, half-frozen hill in North Korea in the spring of 1951. James himself—addressed, of course, as Lieutenant General Shih Ai-kuo—had commanded the corps of the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” in which his son served as a political commissar.
A fleeting frown marred the translucent skin between Lady Mary’s eyebrows. The romantic girl of twenty had dreamed of bringing East and West together, united in the fruit of her own body. The wise old lady of ninety reflected with sorrow purged of bitterness that East and West were still irreconcilable. Rather than finding harmony in their common blood, her grandsons had warred against each other. The apparently irrepressible conflict between two worlds had erupted within her own family—as it might again.
She twisted on the red-velvet cushions of her gilt-carved chair. The lesser dowagers, Sarah and Opal, watched uneasily. They knew how feeble she had grown during the past four months. She smiled reassuringly and turned her eyes to the array of statuettes shielded by a glass case.
The figurines buried with a Tang Dynasty nobleman 1,300 years earlier always comforted her. Their eternal beauty salved the sting of mortality by reminding her that men’s works endured, though men’s bodies perished. Fierce warriors mounted on arrogant, long-necked horses guarded a caravan of camels, pack-horses, and donkeys; green, brown, and yellow glaze glowed on their flanks. A pair of Mandarins escorted three hook-nosed Central Asian traders, one holding a bird, the second cradling a dog, the third hunched under a heavy sack. Dancing girls, servants, and a covey of small birds played around the caravan.
The display-case was protected by its own burglar alarm, for the figures had been valued at more than $5 million by London’s most conservative auctioneer. But their imperishable beauty was far more to Lady Mary than their presumed worth. Money, once the key to life and freedom, had become almost meaningless over the years, breeding on itself to produce amounts so vast they defied her perception. The men and women assembled in the Great Hall represented more than $3 billion in personal assets; they controlled corporate assets running into tens of billions.
Passions even stronger than acquisitiveness moved the assemblage. Angry shouts broke Lady Mary’s contemplation of the Tang figures’ perfection. Her sons Thomas and James were on their feet shouting insults at each other in the harsh Cantonese that was their childhood tongue.
“Liar and betrayer,” the Nationalist General screamed at his younger brother. “You sold China to the Russians. You betrayed the Generalissimo. You’ve destroyed China’s culture.”
“Lackey of the imperialists,” the Communist General shouted. “Running-dog of the Americans. Your corrupt lot of thieves squeezed the people ’til blood ran from their fingernails! Your Generalissimo is no more than …”
“Thomas! James! That will do!”
The two aging Generals sank abashed into their seats, silenced like errant schoolboys by Lady Mary’s high-pitched voice.
The Under Secretary of State stared into his gold-rimmed rice-bowl as if the shimmering porcelain might reveal the solutions of the world’s most pressing problems. The first cousins, Colonel Sir Henry Sekloong and Major General George Parker, chatted animatedly across the table. Charlotte Barakian laughed nervously. Her husband was impassive, deliberately withdrawing himself, for he did business with both Peking and Taipei. Sarah Haleevie Sekloong and Opal watched Lady Mary in renewed concern.
The waves raised by the brief clash spread far from the main table in concentric circles. The heavy-shouldered Shantung plainclothesman behind General Shih Ai-kuo stepped forward, his hand on the holster under his loose-cut tunic. The crew-cut young man in the dark suit standing behind the Under Secretary raised his miniature transceiver to his lips. Six waiters pushed through the throng, their hands in the pockets of their white coats. They were the elite vanguard of the Hong Kong detectives assigned to the most splendid banquet the Colony had seen since the visit of H.R.H. Princess Margaret the preceding year, when 1,500 sat down to dinner. Compared to that state occasion, this gathering was potentially more important politically, and much more volatile.
The waves spread outside The Castle itself, and the uniformed policemen moved toward the great carved-teak main-doors. The cordon was assigned to direct traffic and to exclude the uninvited. But two blue-bereted platoons of the Riot Company waited in slat-sided lorries, and the British Assistant-Commissioner commanding all police on Hong Kong Island sat in an unmarked car fitted with four radio antennae.
His chief, the Commissioner, had warned the Governor that the power and wealth assembled in the Great Hall could attract thieves, kidnappers, and assassins. The Governor had ordered maximum security precautions, for he was acutely sensitive to the danger of any incident or—his nightmare dread—killing. Both Peking and Washington, not to speak of London, would scream for his head, and the Colony’s crowded streets could erupt in vicious rioting worse than the violence of 1967. The big Alsatians and the watchmen who normally patrolled Sekloong Manor had, therefore, been supplemented by 150 men of the Royal Hong Kong Police Force. The shock waves raised by a serious incident could extend far beyond the compound, beyond Hong Kong itself, to imperil the precarious balance of the great nations.
Apprehension swept the Great Hall. Even the sculpted Tang warriors appeared alert.
Old Sir Mosing Way rose to quell the unease, supported by his grandson, forty-six-year-old Mokhing Way, the fruit of Charlotte Sekloong Way d’Alivère Martin Barakian’s first marriage. The old man in
the Chinese long-gown and the younger man in the tail-suit poignantly reminded Lady Mary of her first meeting with Sir Jonathan and Charles. Sir Mosing was not a blood relation, and his son Manfei, Charlotte’s first husband, had been killed by kidnappers decades earlier. But no general assembly of the Sekloong clan could exclude him. The family-obsessed Chinese called them chin-chia, “members of the same house.”
“To our hostess and to family harmony,” Sir Mosing intoned reedily. “As the only other member of the eldest generation present, I claim the privilege of the first toast. To Lady Mary, much joy and long life.”
Cups rose to lips, and the tension broke. Partaking of the toast in the Chinese manner, Lady Mary raised her gold-chased cup to sip the rice wine specially brewed and aged twelve years for her. Compared to the harsh yellow-wine of Shaohsing or the fiery, medicated maotai of Kweichow, it was as a Taittinger blanc de blancs champagne to a raw Algerian red.
“To the family,” she responded. “To all my family here gathered and to those absent. To all our friends from all quarters of the earth. To all within the four seas and all under Heaven. I drink to love and peace—this night and forever.”
“Amen and amen!” a baritone voice concluded. “Blessed be the peace-makers.”
Lady Mary turned in delight. Charles had finally arrived—Charles, perhaps her favorite child and certainly equal in her affections to her prodigal, the alternately sullen and affable Communist General, James Sekloong. Charles Cardinal Sekloong’s spare figure and the serene determination that suffused his lean, regular features made him a living replica of his grandfather, Sir Jonathan. She could not look at him without a conscious thrill of pride and love.
He had warned his mother that he would be delayed, because the Colony’s large Catholic community insisted that the visiting titular Archbishop of Chungking celebrate a High Mass. The fifty-nine-year-old churchman was at least as eminent as any other person in the Great Hall. As secretary of the Roman Curia’s Council for Public Affairs, he was the Vatican’s effective foreign minister. The only mark of that eminence was a bishop’s purple square beneath his Roman collar.
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