Mary Sekloong was struck again by the animal force that had first attracted her. Like a black panther in repose, her husband appeared totally sure of his male strength. For the first time in almost two years, she felt the liquid ache in her loins Charles had once called forth simply by looking at her.
Charles and Mary sat silent on the twin yellow-brocade sofas flanking the marble fireplace. She was turning the pages of E. J. Eitel’s Europe in China: The History of Hong Kong; and he was contemplating the leaping flames. Though they were six feet apart, she involuntarily responded as if his fingertips were stroking her thighs. She shifted uneasily on the down-filled cushion, feeling constricted by corsets that compressed her waist to a twenty-one-inch span beneath the low-cut bodice of a panniered burgundy-silk dress. Her breasts swelled under the light caress of her filmy camisole, and a pink flush suffused her shoulders and face.
A rush of shame of her sensuality dismayed Mary. Worse than unseemly, it was unwise. In that moment she hated the female weakness that was so profoundly stirred by the familiar male body that had consistently betrayed her trust. Laying the book down, she stared into the fire. Their gazes intersected, but did not meet.
“Underlying this mixed and fluctuating population of Hong Kong,” the historian Eitel had written, “a self-perpetuating amity: the secret inchoative union of Europe and Asia (as represented by China).” Could it, she wondered, be true in any way?
Drawn by her slight movement, Charles looked up from the fire. He sipped his brandy-and-soda before speaking in the liquid baritone that at once soothed and aroused her.
“So you went to the old man?” he asked softly.
“No, Charles, I didn’t.” Her voice was tense. “I wouldn’t. He came to me.”
“Whee-oo!” He exhaled with a muted whistle. “Your stock must be high. You’re sure he came to you? How did he know about the unpleasantness?”
“Did you really think he wouldn’t know?” Mary strove to keep her voice free of asperity.
“No,” he conceded without rancor, “I suppose not. You can’t keep anything from him. It’s uncanny.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“Mary,” he said haltingly, “Mary, I’m sorry about this morning. Did I hurt you much?”
“Yes, Charles. Badly.”
“I regret most deeply dishonoring myself by violence,” he said with extravagant politeness.
Mary did not reply. His unabated arrogance was so characteristically Chinese, and she knew that he was incapable of unbending. Granting him quick forgiveness would therefore mean nothing. Half-hating him, she wanted to draw his head to her breast and to say she forgave him. But she remained silent.
“The old man raised the nine devils out of Hell.” Charles sought contact with her, unconsciously reverting to the Chinese idiom in his agitation. “He was rough.”
“But, Charles, how … how could you attack me?”
“I was angry. I’ve been angry for a long time. I can’t live with those rules you make.”
“Charles,” she said wryly, “whether I’m pregnant or not is up to you.”
“I’m sorry, Mary, but I won’t use those things. It’s wrong.”
“And I’m sorry, too, Charles. But I won’t bear any more children for a while. I’m too young to be a brood-mare.”
“And too beautiful.” His mood changed abruptly, and the flash of his smile lit his hazel eyes. He was playing on her emotions so adroitly, she found it virtually impossible to resist. They were drawing closer, groping for contact across the barriers of different backgrounds and different standards. He would, it was blatantly obvious, commit himself neither to using a contraceptive device nor to bridling his wandering fancy. But she could not flatly reject his overtures without imperiling their total relationship.
Her resentment and her self-control were both being eroded. Longing engulfed her, and she lay back on the sofa, languorous as a Siamese cat.
“There is,” he ventured, “a right time, I’m told, when the Maiden in the Moon allows …”
“So I’ve told you.”
“And might this be the right time?”
“Perhaps.” She smiled, her reluctance abandoned.
He came to her, and his mouth touched hers fleetingly. The back of his hand brushed her cheek, and his demanding mouth parted her lips. A tide of warmth swept over her entire body. She felt him rise against her, and yearning surged between her thighs.
“Perhaps,” she repeated, rising and taking his hand, “that time is now.”
His hand cupped her breast, but she evaded him with a swirling pirouette to open the doors. They laughed like children as she raced up the stairs and he pursued her.
Charles slid the bolt closed, and the red-draped bedroom became a refuge. His arms enclosed her, and his hands grasped her buttocks. They undressed each other in awkward haste, garments falling to the thick carpet in a multicolored ring that encircled them. Her breasts and thighs glowed at his touch, and she longed for his distended maleness.
“Now, Charles!” she cried out, falling back on the bed. “Now, my love!”
He came into her, thrusting and dominant. She enveloped him, lifted by a tide of triumph in surrender. She grasped him within her, and their climax was shattering. All reserve, all consciousness were overwhelmed by waves of crimson fire lanced by golden rays.
Mary longed to hold him in peace inside herself forever, and fiercely pressed her legs together to confine him. After several minutes, they reluctantly disentangled their limbs and lay side by side, exultantly exhausted. She drowsily reminded herself that she must pick up their scattered clothing. But there would be time before Ah Sam brought the morning tea. As the delicious languor of satiation overcame her, she reflected, half awake, that it was, fortunately, the right time of the month. Not only harvest and spring festivals were governed by the stately progress of the waxing and waning moon across the Eastern skies.
The young woman who called herself Countess Vera Vorobya embarked for Sydney on February 7, 1905. The packet Sir Jonathan handed Elizabeth Metcalfe on New Year’s Day, he later told Mary, had contained a steamer ticket and £1,000 in notes. Mary was almost grateful to the woman she had glimpsed only in passing; she was almost grateful to Rachel Wheatley for her malicious tongue. They had inadvertently not merely restored her husband to her, but opened the gates of bliss.
The two weeks following her hectic reconciliation with Charles were a kaleidoscopic joy, a carnival of the senses in the big bed with the red-brocade canopy. Charles swore he had never known such perfect pleasure; and Mary knew she had never gloried in such total abandonment. They were besotted zealots, seeking their own earthly paradise in each other’s bodies.
For two weeks Mary lived in a golden haze, and Charles was not only an ardent lover, but a model husband. Sir Jonathan and Lady Lucinda beamed their pleasure at the reconciliation and confidently expected that another grandchild would soon enhance their complacent satisfaction.
At the beginning of the third week, the golden glow was fading; desire was giving way to satiation; languid fatigue was becoming exhaustion. Mary had discovered unsuspected and unseemly depths of sensuality in herself. But the overwhelming fleshly passion could not endure—if, for no other reason, because she suffered a constant burning sensation.
Dr. Moncriefe smiled when she described her symptoms.
“Honeymoon cystitis,” he said archly. “I congratulate you, my dear, on captivating your husband so. The complaint’s most unusual after the first few months of marriage.” Himself a devout Scots Catholic, the physician explained again the periodic abstinence the Church called “the rhythm method” for avoiding pregnancy.
Mary would not bear another child so soon, though she had impetuously risked pregnancy in the first raptures of their impassioned reconciliation. She was, moreover, forced to recognize that their new joy sprang chiefly from her surrender to his demands, rather than from new understanding between them or any mutual compromise. Charles was enth
ralled because she had become the ardent, ivory-skinned houri of his fantasies. But his revived ardor did not acknowledge her as an individual human being possessed of any needs or interests outside the canopied bed.
For nearly four years her womb had been a cornucopia pouring out children to enlarge the Sekloong dynasty. During the weeks just passed she had been hardly more than a receptacle for his seed, and she felt soiled. They cleaved together only physically, while their emotions and their thoughts remained separated. Even their love-making, she reflected with revulsion, had become a set, meaningless ritual, like actors playing fixed roles. Charles and she remained virtually oblivious to each other’s hearts and minds; their bodies were reduced to no more than ingenious devices for manufacturing gratification by mutual friction.
Charles was tolerant when she tried to convey her doubts—tolerant and uninterested. Rather than listen, he embraced her and kissed her until, to her disgust, she felt the familiar stirrings and feared that she had become a captive of his sensuality.
“That was glorious,” he said afterward. “But, sometimes, silence pleases fate—and talk offends. We say: Do not rouse the tiger by shouting or frighten away the benevolent dragon. Europeans spoil good things by probing them. Besides, bed’s no place for intellectual discussions.”
She had subsided, silently giving herself to his embrace. The next night, when they lay in the half-darkness under the red-brocade canopy, she kissed him gently and turned away to compose herself for sleep.
“What’s this?” he demanded. “My beautiful bed-companion turning her back on me?”
“Charles, I’m tired tonight.”
“Oh, is that all?” he responded. “I worried we were going back to the old ways. Well, maybe later or tomorrow.”
“No, Charles,” she whispered, cradling her head on his shoulder. “Not for a while, at least.”
“And why not?” He was still tolerantly amused. “Is something wrong?”
“Well, not really.” She weighed her words. “Not really anything wrong, though we have been overdoing it. It’s been wonderful, but Dr. Moncriefe …”
His arm stiffened under her, and he asked harshly: “Back to that again?”
“No, Charles,” she reassured him, “we’re not back to anything. Only it’s not the right time now. Dr. Moncriefe explained. You know I really don’t want another child so soon. Perhaps, but not just now. So—”
“More damned nonsense,” he snorted, pulling his arm away. “My mother had seven, lost four—and none the worse for it. What are women for?”
“For children, but also for other things.”
“The devil with it,” he swore. “God save me from intellectual women, all vapors and high-flown philosophizing. Might as well go to bed with a Taoist nun. You still don’t understand: we’ve got to build the clan.”
“But Charles,” she protested, still hopeful, “you don’t really believe that … that getting children’s the only …”
Her words trailed off, for he was feigning the deep, regular breathing of sleep.
The next morning, Charles did not return to their bedroom after his breakfast to kiss her good-bye. That evening, he did not return for dinner. When he had not returned by midnight, Mary bitterly recognized that he would not return at all that night. During the following weeks, his frequent absences gave her much time—too much time for anguished reflection.
Mary realized anew that she did not understand the man she had married. His ostentatious anger, she feared, sprang as much from her daring to oppose his will as from her physical withdrawal. Like his father, Charles demanded absolute obedience. Only the total submission she could not make would mollify him. His moods were beyond her comprehension, and no stable foundation sustained their relationship.
For weeks, the Small House was a fortress where two armies, allied only by expedience, watched each other with deep suspicion barely veiled by formal courtesy. Charles restricted his conversation to brief sentences spoken before the servants. After several vain attempts to break through the barrier he had erected, Mary, too, uttered no more than polite half-sentences.
They coupled twice, no more than brief, uncomfortable writhing on rumpled sheets. He took her contemptuously, without physical or verbal preliminaries, determined to master her body. She yielded, knowing it was the time Dr. Moncriefe called the “safe period.” But the physical act meant nothing—in truth, less than nothing. It was destructive. He could not break her to his will, and she loathed his cold determination to do so.
Mary still allowed herself to hope for a true reconciliation. Left alone they could find their way back to love. But they were not left alone: Sir Jonathan was elaborately courteous, but his eyes were agate cold; Lady Lucinda regarded her with pitying uncomprehension. She was, she felt, no longer an individual, but the family’s possession. Nor could she turn to the Metcalfes for comfort; some things she would not discuss even with Elizabeth, and no advice could help her. Her spirit and body wracked by tension, she was desperately alone amid the flock of children and servants. But still she hoped.
Her vestigial optimism was blasted by a conversation with Charles in late March after they had eaten their evening meal in awkward silence.
“Mary,” he began. “I must talk with you.”
“As you wish.” Her tone was defensively noncommittal, though her spirit leaped in renewed hope. “I’m always happy to talk.”
“Not much else lately but talk.”
“Other things are possible—with a little consideration and affection.”
“Well, we’ll see. But there’s something else.”
“What is it then, Charles?”
“You know what I promised the old man—no scandals, no public humiliation.”
“Yes, Charles.”
“There’ll be none, no such thing. You won’t be affected. Your position remains the same. But I’m obliged to tell you … give you notice.”
“What are you talking about, Charles?”
A chill premonition overcame her. It was inconceivable that he should force an open break. The scandal would badly hurt the clan, when Sir Jonathan was still preparing his coup against the Wheatleys. Besides, divorce was forbidden him by his Church. What notice could he possibly give her?
“I’ve taken a concubine,” Charles said flatly. “Had to.”
“You’ve what?” She literally could not believe she’d heard correctly. “What?”
“Taken a concubine. You won’t give me more children. She will.”
Her first rage subsided within seconds. She was beyond anger, beyond surprise, almost beyond despair. As if confronting a dangerous animal, she warily considered her reply. When she finally spoke, her tone was pitched to the offhand politeness of small talk with a casual acquaintance.
“I’m puzzled, Charles.”
“Puzzled? That’s a queer word.”
“Did you expect me to weep? Gnash my teeth and tear my clothing in mourning? I’m truly puzzled. I don’t understand your strange customs.”
“We’re off on the chink business again, are we?” Charles’s quick temper flared. “Bloody British superiority.”
“By no means superiority. I’m just puzzled by your Chinese customs. How can you take a concubine when we were married in your Church and promised to remain true to each other? Not, I know, that infidelity bothers you. But the law, too, requires monogamy.”
“Who’s to stop me?”
“No one, I suppose. Only your own conscience.”
“It’s a sanctioned Chinese custom. When the first wife can’t—or won’t—produce children, the husband has a right … a duty … to take a concubine.”
“And Hong Kong law? Does it agree?”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s a Swatow girl, and Chinese law permits the relationship. We believe big families, many children, are a blessing. And she will—”
“Produce children,” Mary interrupted. “I’ve gathered that. But I’d rather you didn’t tell me about her.
”
“I won’t. The old man said you should know. He didn’t object.”
“How quaint—you’re to follow in his footsteps in all things.”
“It’s my decision. I’m my own master.”
“Really?” she taunted. “I’m glad to hear you say so. Is that all you have to say?”
“Since you take it that way, yes. That’s all. Except that you remain the Number One Wife, and I won’t bring her into this house.”
“How considerate of you,” Mary replied. “Courteous and considerate as always.”
Charles brooded in frustrated silence while Mary methodically turned the pages of S. Wells Williams’s thick tome, The Middle Kingdom, taking in not a single word. After half an hour, he flung out of the house, and she climbed the stairs to the dressing room. Her steps were as slow as an arthritic old woman’s.
Overwhelming weariness weighted her limbs as she undressed and put on her nightclothes. Coldly despairing, she avoided her own eyes in the dim-lit mirror as she brushed her long, red-gold hair. Was this insult, she wondered, any worse than Charles’s previous lighthearted philandering? But she was too exhausted to attempt an answer. She automatically slipped between the silken sheets. Her last conscious act of will before sleeping was the decision to put off all further thought. Perhaps this final deed meant that her marriage was over and that she must find a way out. But she was too tired to think, too numb to care.
On an afternoon in mid-April when the sunlight gilded The Peak, Mary was playing with her three older children in the formal garden behind the Small House. Baby Charlotte, not quite a year and a half old, toddled uncertainly under the protective eyes of her sister Guinevere, just a year older. Jonathan, who would be four in November, chased the red-and-white ball his mother threw for him. Ah Ying, the baby-amah, scowled her disapproval of Tai-tai’s usurping her functions and gasped with ostentatious anxiety whenever Jonnie stumbled.
“Mary! Hoi, Mary!” A deep voice called from the terrace. “Where are you?”
She drew breath in surprise. The voice was Charles’s, and he had come home in midafternoon for the first time in a year. Despite her numbed dismay at his taking the concubine and his methodical neglect, she yearned for a reconciliation. Pride burnt out, she knew that he was all she had. Her heart leaped as she turned to greet him, then plummeted.
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