All her living children were now gathered with her for the first time in decades, and Lady Mary sighed with joy. She would need them all for her latest “diabolical scheme.” It might be the most foolish she had ever conceived, but that was all the more reason for executing it with vigor. Cardinal Charles, she believed, would be her strongest support; but she needed them all.
If united, the family and its manifold connections could be a major force in the international mêlée, the unending contention of nations and beliefs. If the family could be united, for the diversity that was its strength spontaneously operated to prevent unanimous action. Sir Jonathan had in truth founded an almost imperial dynasty, its members occupying seats of power throughout the world, disposing of almost incalculable riches, and exercising immense influence. Like all dynasties, the clan was riven by personal, political, and ideological rivalries. The House of Sekloong embodied not only the relatively new contest between East and West and the old antipathies between Occident and Orient, but actively participated in the violent clashes between those forces.
Lady Mary was determined that the family would not dissolve in conflict. Though the House of Sekloong was disunited, her summons had brought all its major parts together, for all acknowledged the common bond of blood. She must now prevail upon them to recognize their common self-interest. By doing so she would crown her own life, which had given life to so many in the company while bestowing treasure and power on so many more. She envisioned a daring enterprise, and she prayed that her will would be strong enough to unite the House of Sekloong in that audacious endeavor.
Lady Mary closed her tired old eyes, seeking strength in recalling the origins of the contentious, glittering assembly. It had begun with a marriage between a young man and a young woman of wholly different worlds. Splendid to a nervous bride, that beginning was dwarfed by its overwhelming consequences. As Harry Sekloong had warned her, Sir Jonathan was determined to found a uniquely powerful realm inhabited by his descendants.
“He’ll fashion it out of chaos—if necessary!” Harry’s irrepressible mockery added. “We can only hope that he’ll rest on the eighth day.”
The initial act of creation was Charles’s marrying Mary on February 18, 1901. Their wedding was the first unofficial ceremony in Hong Kong’s history that both races attended as equals.
The Governor, the Colonial Secretary, the General Officer Commanding British Forces, and their ladies had all been present at the nuptial mass in the Cathedral. So, too, had Richard and the Honorable Rachel Wheatley, the latter sniffing beneath her veil at the portly Cantonese merchant seated beside her and gazing in frosty disapproval at the rows of Chinese faces in the pews.
Sullenly unforgiving, Bandmaster John Philip Osgood had refused to attend. He was infuriated by Mary’s defying his will and “marrying that jumped-up Roman chink.” Only his daughter regretted his absence—and she only fleetingly. On her wedding morning, she received a lengthily expensive cablegram from York signed by her frugal brother Thomas. The message pleaded with her to reconsider, and she knew that her father had contrived that jarring note. After expressing conventional regrets, Sir Jonathan had not attempted to conceal his relief that Hilary Metcalfe, rather than John Osgood, gave the bride away. The new realm he was creating required its crown-princess—auburn-haired, rather than black-haired if she must be. It required neither the presence nor the blessing of her somewhat seedy, beer-flushed father.
The marriage service, performed by the Roman Catholic Bishop, was a haze of incense, solemn chants, and many-colored vestments, Mary shining white in their midst like a lily in a field of wild flowers. She could recall only brief flashes of the lavish reception, for which Sir Jonathan had provided two hundred cases of Dom Perignon. Captain John Williams had already slipped away on a long leave. He had avoided Mary since she rejected him, and, in his bitter haste to be gone, had reclaimed none of his gifts, not even the gorgeous jade necklace. Unabashed, Captain Lord Peter Comyn French had donned the skin-tight regimentals of the Coldstream Guards and polished his gold-rimmed eyeglass to a high gloss to dance at the reception before taking his leave of the bride and the Colony.
The formal reception was the Sekloongs’ courtly bow to European customs, since they realized that they would thenceforth necessarily live with “a foot unequivocally in each camp,” as Sir Jonathan remarked dispassionately. Mary could not tell whether he was pleased at that prospect or merely resigned to it. The counterpoint to the reception was the time-prescribed Chinese wedding banquet at which she appeared first in a gown of crimson satin, the color of the traditional Chinese bridal costume. The same custom required her to change her dress six times in the course of the evening to display the lavish trousseau with which the Metcalfes had endowed her. But Charles refused to allow her to wear a Chinese-style dress, enigmatically insisting that it would be “inappropriate.”
The frustration of her own desire to compliment the Sekloongs’ Chinese ancestry and their Chinese guests by her costume had not marred Mary’s intense pleasure in that day and evening of exuberant excitement. To her surprise, she had actually found much pleasure in yielding to Charles’s wishes, since she thus honored her promise to “love, honor, and obey.”
That same night she further realized why marriage was every young woman’s dream, for she delighted in her voluntary submission. Her lusty response in bed first surprised and soon captivated her husband, who delighted in teaching her the arts he had obviously learned from skilled partners. Her fleeting jealousy of his past experiences was submerged by the rising tides of her own sensuality and by her knowledge that thereafter he belonged only to her. Their joy in each other’s bodies made luminous the first year of their marriage, which was passed in his parents’ mansion off Bonham Road while they waited for The Castle and their own Small House on The Peak to be completed.
Mary was simultaneously gaining understanding of the intricacies of the Sekloongs’ world, the world in which she had chosen to live. Bulbously pregnant as the year 1901 entered its second half, she was pampered as if she were carrying a prince or a princess. For the first time, she truly comprehended the grandiose ambitions that inspired both her husband and her father-in-law. At the end of that year, she congratulated herself on her graceful adaption to her new milieu. After giving birth to a son in late November, she was virtually venerated—almost as if she had performed a miracle. Each day, she felt, she was penetrating more deeply the unique customs and compulsions of her new world. Later, Mary was to realize that she had at that early moment merely been dazzled by the glittering façade that concealed the Sekloongs’ complex hearts and subtle minds.
Part II
MARY AND CHARLES
February 4, 1905–November 16, 1906
February 4, 1905
Mary Philippa Osgood Sekloong shivered and drew the pastel-embroidered cashmere shawl around her shoulders. Early evening had wrapped The Peak in a cold-gray cocoon on Saturday the fourth of February, 1905—by the Chinese lunar calendar the last day of the thirty-first year of the reign of the Kuang Hsü Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty. Staccato fusillades from the heights of Sekloong Manor replied to the unremitting barrage of New Year firecrackers in the valleys below. Despite the crimson-and-yellow flames dancing in the Adam fireplace, the overfurnished drawing-room of the Small House was chill and damp. The walls and ceiling were still settling behind their elaborate moldings, and the dank air reeked mustily of drying plaster. She had rarely felt as miserably cold in the England she had not seen for almost five years as she did at that moment in subtropical Hong Kong.
Dreading the formal dinner at The Castle, she decided, this once, to take enough yellow rice wine to warm her blood, despite the inevitable headache the next morning. It was still virtually impossible to heat the brick-and-plaster Small House Sir Jonathan had built as the first of the three mansions he planned for his children by Lady Lucinda. It would, for decades, be totally impossible to defeat the damp cold weeping from the stone walls of Th
e Castle.
In England, they expected the raw, pinching winter that always took Hong Kong by surprise. She longed for the coziness of the shabby-genteel gas-heated parlors she had hated when her mother trailed her brother Thomas and herself from one furnished lodging to another. She even yearned for the English fog, the friendly, brown English fog that shut out the intrusive world and accentuated the cheery warmth of small rooms. The alien gray pall outside seemed to extend thousands of miles over the sea and across the vast land-mass where hundreds of millions of outlandish yellow and brown people swarmed.
Dr. Alex Moncriefe, a hearty, red-faced Scot, had offered a ready answer to her continuing depression after the birth of her fourth child—her second son—just two months earlier.
“Tropical neurasthenia,” he diagnosed, “a feeling of despair induced by no particular cause—except living amid people with different features, strange pigmentation, and peculiar customs. Ladies are specially susceptible. Most get over it spontaneously. For those who don’t, there’s only one cure—ship ’em back home. Meanwhile, take an occasional brandy, my dear.”
Neurasthenia perhaps—but hardly tropical. The only thing tropical in His Majesty’s Crown Colony of Hong Kong in February was baskets of fruit from Malaya. The Chinese New Year was the most depressing time for Mary—the obligatory gaiety, the exchange of ostentatious gifts, and the constant visiting and receiving. It was not and would never be her holiday. Besides, her depression stemmed from a most “particular cause.” Mary feared that she had, just four years earlier, wholeheartedly done something that was not only foolish, but irrevocable.
Her twenty-fifth birthday still four months distant, she was a settled matron with four demanding children and a querulous husband. Of course, the children were darlings, particularly the girls. Two-year-old Guinevere and one-year-old Charlotte had inherited both her auburn hair and her normally irrepressible temperament. Her eldest, Jonathan, was a sturdy, sunny, four-year-old with Sekloong hazel eyes that flashed imperiously at the servants. Only baby Thomas, barely two months old, was a disappointment. His skin was sallow; his hair was coarsely black; and his dark brown eyes were markedly slanted. Somehow, he looked so Chinese.
She should not, Mary reproached herself, express such misgivings, even in her secret thoughts. She had freely chosen to make herself part of an essentially Chinese family. She had known that Lady Lucinda’s wholly Chinese blood and Sir Jonathan’s half-Chinese blood were likely to shape her children’s appearance, just as their Chinese manners and customs would shape her own life. But that choice, taken in substantial ignorance of its true consequences, was an abstraction beside the reality that oppressed her. Despite her deep interest in Chinese culture, she was a child of her times and the child of her fiercely prejudiced father. After four years of marriage, she should have resolved the conflict between her intellectual enthusiasm for the exotic way of life she had chosen and her instinctive shrinking from its alien demands. Instead, the internal conflict was becoming more acute and more distressing.
She had never before her marriage truly appreciated the joys of solitude, the opportunities to reflect undisturbed. The Sekloongs were inured to never being out of sight or earshot of another human being for more than five minutes. The multitude of servants were integral to their lives, and they would probably long for the habitual bustle if it should magically vanish. The gardeners, coolies, chair bearers, and houseboys were cheerful and ubiquitous, but her own worst irritation was the loud quarrels and gossip of the maidservants. They were called amahs, the word itself a typically Chinese evasion, for it meant literally “esteemed mothers.” The household included wash-amahs and coolie-amahs, cook-amahs and baby-amahs. The latter jealously disputed her interference with their management of her own children, though deliberate spoiling better described the way they pandered to the infants’ whims.
Sometimes, Mary just wanted to be alone. Solitude was the simple boon the Sekloong wealth could not buy: that lack, too, was typically Chinese. She suspected that Chinese nerves had developed insensitivity to the constant noise that lacerated her less robust European nerves.
She could, she mused, have borne all the worries of her new life happily if she had been sustained by her husband. But Charles was himself the chief cause of her ill-defined unhappiness, despite her love for him. She was unhappy with Charles for a number of reasons, some quite general—and one most specific.
It was, above all, a matter of attitudes. His character had changed greatly since their courtship. He was peremptory and inconsiderate, upon occasion petulant if his wishes were not obeyed immediately. The attentive, dashing young man she’d married seemed to have aged appreciably, though he was only twenty-nine. He was putting on weight, and, worse, he was growing magisterially pompous—as if his spirit were becoming obese. It really came down to the difference they had discussed, and dismissed, during their courtship. She herself had not reconciled her own wearingly contradictory feelings toward the Chinese. Charles and she had not reconciled his increasingly Chinese cast of mind and behavior with her own attitudes and actions, which were in self-defense becoming assertively more English.
Charles had been sulking for more than three weeks, ever since she had dared to assume the prerogative of the “new woman” whose advent English intellectuals were noting. She had told him that there must, for some time, be no more babies; she had insisted upon a long pause in her constant replenishment of the mansion’s nurseries in the sacred cause of enlarging and perpetuating the Sekloong clan. Charles had protested that he was a good Catholic, who was not only repelled by the crude devices available for contraception, but morally debarred from their use.
“What,” he’d asked plaintively, “will we do?”
“That, my sweet, is as much your problem as mine,” she’d answered, and he had slept on the chaise-longue in the dressing room ever since. “No,” she’d said, “no, nursing the infant doesn’t prevent conception, whatever tales your mother’s told you.” Besides, she had no intention of breast-feeding Thomas much longer. “You can please yourself,” she had concluded, “but you must take the appropriate measures or stay out of my bed.”
Charles was deeply shocked—as much by her frank language as by her resolute decision. He still could not quite believe that she was successfully defying him. Only his father, the founder-lord of the dynasty, commanded the crown-prince. Charles simply could not apprehend that a woman had presented him with an ultimatum. He was wilfully blind, deliberately refusing to recognize the strength of character and mind of the woman he had married. He simply could not see that she was as capable as she was strong-willed. Nor could he conceive that her searching intellect, her own attraction to power, and her restless energy would pose grave danger to himself and their one-dimensional relationship after she had cast off her enforced preoccupation with their children—unless her talents found suitable employment.
Despite their superficial Westernization, the Sekloongs still considered a woman little more than a female animal. The crown-princess was pampered because she performed the essential function of producing children to carry on the line. When related to that prime function, her whims were unchallengeable commands. Beaming his delight at her fecundity, Sir Jonathan occasionally introduced subjects unrelated to procreation. Exhausted by constant reproduction, Mary half-attended to his chief themes: commerce, politics, and the Chinese past. She was deeply interested, but she was too tired. Except for the devoted Harry, she felt all the Sekloongs looked upon her as a reliable brood-mare, best loved when gravid and docile. They had deprived her of her dignity as an individual. Nothing could compensate for that deprivation: not the luxury that cushioned her; the instant obedience to her female whims that pampered her; or the family solidarity that sheltered her.
Mary shivered and stretched her hands to the fire. The doors opened, and a draft fluttered the twin red paper signs inscribed in golden characters with the invocations: MAY OLD AND YOUNG DWELL IN PEACE TOGETHER! FILL OUR HALLS WITH
GOLD AND JEWELS!
Ah Sam entered, imposing in his high-collared white tunic. The old pirate’s rough ebullience had not been quelled by his translation from the Number One Boy in a warrant officer’s bungalow to the major-domo of a millionaire’s mansion, and he still walked with a porcelain-rattling stride. Before her marriage, six months before her father’s departure with the Regiment on regular transfer, he had announced: “I go with Missy.”
She could not have refused his services if she had wanted to. Though Charles would have preferred a factotum of his own choosing, at the time he still granted her slightest wish. And Ah Sam had remained her firm ally.
“Goong-hay, Tai-tai! Goong-hay fat-choy!” He boomed the traditional New Year greeting. “Congratulations, Madam! Congratulations and prosperity!”
“Goong-hay fat-choy, Ah Sam!” Mary replied absently for the sixth time that day. Ah Sam was obviously determined to miss no opportunity to remind the spirits of their duties in the coming year. He would allow them no pretext for neglecting those duties.
The cooks, she knew, were welcoming the Household Spirit’s return to his crimson niche after his trip to Heaven to report to his superiors. His old portrait had been removed, his lips smeared with opium and honey to insure that he would arrive in Heaven befuddled and utter only sweet words. His new portrait, painted on rice-paper, was at that moment being forcefully instructed that he would be rewarded handsomely for looking after the family’s fortunes, but punished by exile if he were remiss. Given the Chinese preoccupation with money, it was not remarkable that he did double-duty as the God of Wealth.
Ah Sam squatted to poke the fire. As always, he cleared his throat to signal an important remark.
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