Mary’s vivid memories drew an invisible curtain between herself and the five men’s discussion of Dr. Sun’s grandiose plans. After an absence of eleven years returning to England to put Jonnie into school had been a memorable—and unexpectedly decisive—experience.
The splendid spring and summer of 1911, the first full year of the reign of George V, was historically unique. Even at the moment, intelligent men and women were consciously aware that they were living through an epoch-making change in Britain’s life. The fiery Welshman David Lloyd George was demolishing the structure of privilege that had been England. A cowed House of Lords was stripped of its power of veto, and the golden days of the landed gentry were numbered; the income tax, blocked for so long, was enacted, and the era of immense private fortunes began to close; new laws granted trades unions the right to organize, and a new class grasped at the levers of power. Those events were so portentous that many informed contemporaries clearly saw the matrix of their lives altering.
However, only a few Britons foresaw the great catastrophe that impended, the first total war to convulse Europe, the first great war since the Battle of Waterloo had shattered Napoleon’s cosmic visions in 1815. A century of buoyant optimism amid bounding progress was to close on the blood-sodden fields of Flanders only three years later. But only sour pessimists expressed their forebodings that their civilization was hurtling toward destruction. They were derided by the solid citizenry. The Royal Navy was supreme, and the pound sterling was lithically solid. Gay holiday crowds, the men flaunting boater-hats, the women trailing kimonolike sleeves, whistled “Lily of Laguna” on the promenades at Brighton, and hemlines crept upward to reveal trim ankles in sheer silk stockings. Popular optimism was as glorious as the unbroken sunshine.
For the second—and last—time in her adult life, Mary Sekloong was oblivious to great public affairs. After flurried preparations that, Charles grumbled, “wouldn’t disgrace the embarkation of an expeditionary force,” she had sailed for Southampton in March 1911 on the Peninsular and Oriental liner Monarch. The thirty-one-day voyage contrasted sharply with her fifty days aboard Orion in 1900. She was attended only by her personal amah, who looked after herself and Jonnie. But the Sekloong name commanded assiduous service from both Chinese stewards and British officers; she traveled like a crown-princess.
After her regal journey, England was at first a disappointment. Though she soon entered an enchanted realm she had never known, the unseen magician who ordered her affairs was capricious. Bleak boredom alternated with moments of delight at the half-forgotten land that had bred her. At her brother Thomas’s new house near Hampstead Heath, Bandmaster John Philip Osgood, finally forgiving her marriage, doted on his daughter and the grandson he was seeing for the first time. Her father was as gruffly matter-of-fact at fifty-seven as he had been at forty-seven. But his eyes glowed when, thinking himself unobserved, he watched Jonnie frolic with his young cousins. Her brother, transformed into an ambitious solicitor, was embarrassingly attentive. His admonitory cable inveighing against her marriage was deeply regretted—or so he would have had her believe, for the passing of a decade had made the Sekloongs’ wealth an acknowledged force in the City of London, the financial capital of the world. Thomas told her baldly that his brother-in-law required the services of a lawyer who was a member of the family and was, therefore, both totally trustworthy and wholly committed to the Sekloongs’ interest. Mary politely parried his unsubtle advances.
She was inundated with invitations after she took a small country house, which was staffed by only three servants, at Esher in Surrey, twenty-five miles south of London. She had left England a nobody. She returned the wife of the heir-presumptive to an expanding commercial empire and herself, they whispered—the omniscient, omnipresent, anonymous they—a major power in that empire in her own right. They beseeched her presence at dinners, theater parties, receptions, and balls. Only in July did she have a moment free to examine herself and her England. With the London season at its end, the old Edwardians who had become the new Georgians retreated to Scotland or Ireland for the shooting; traveled to France, Germany, or Switzerland to revive their overburdened livers at spas; or embarked in their yachts on long Mediterranean cruises. Their era was closing fast, but, blissfully unaware, the overprivileged sported in its golden twilight.
Equally unaware that the unchallenged supremacy of the English ruling class was ending, Mary instinctively put a certain distance between herself and that ruling class, which courted her as diligently as it had once negligently ignored her. Instead, she gravitated to the Haleevies’ cousins, the Sassoons, who, established in ducal splendor in Sussex, were pressingly hospitable. Although they had, as the young Baronet Sir Siegfried said, “become more English than the real English,” the Sassoons no more wished to forget their ties to the Far East than they wished to alter the proud, Semitic arch of their noses. Mary realized that she felt more comfortable with the Sassoons than with her own family because they shared with her not only knowledge of the Asia she had briefly fled, but the attitudes of that other world. She hesitantly recognized another tie: The Sassoons possessed the great wealth to whose pleasures she had become habituated.
At a house party at Guilford she met again Lord Peter Comyn French. Still unmarried, he was almost uncannily unchanged from the languid young captain she had known eleven years earlier. To her surprise, he greeted her as an intimate and paid court to her like a cavalier. She discovered that Peter, who shared her experience of both Hong Kong and England, was almost as satisfactory a confidant as Harry Sekloong had been before he was seduced by the twin lures of danger and politics. Mary was, quite consciously, rediscovering England. She candidly acknowledged to herself that she was pleased to make that voyage of discovery in the company of a scion of the aristocracy. His acute comments revealed an England she had never really known.
Lord Peter wore the crown and star of a lieutenant colonel when he occasionally took himself off to his military duties, but seemed to possess almost unlimited leisure. Commanding the duty battalion of the Coldstream Guards, he spent more time at her house in Esher than in London. His presence was, Mary assured herself, quite proper. Besides a puritanical Irish butler and her own suspicious amah, they were always chaperoned by other house-guests, usually two respectable married couples. Peter was unassertive, yet constantly attentive and remarkably sensitive to her moods. She could lower her defenses and enjoy their innocent flirtation. Under his guidance she sought new roots that might sustain her in exile in Hong Kong or, perhaps, nurture her should she return to England, an expedient she still considered.
Jonnie accepted his new uncle unreservedly. Peter displayed inexhaustible patience with the nine-year-old and bestowed upon him an equally inexhaustible largesse of gold sovereigns or small gifts like the pearl-handled penknife that made Mary shiver with apprehension whenever she saw its blade glittering in Jonnie’s small hand. By the end of the summer, it seemed only natural that Lord Peter French should help her move to the Ritz, where they left the little amah to watch over Mary’s belongings like a vengeful Buddha. As a matter of course, Peter entrained with them at Euston Station for Preston in Lancashire to enter Jonnie in St. Mary’s Hall, the preparatory institution for Stonyhurst College, Britain’s premier Jesuit public school.
Jonnie darted from side to side of the open landau in excitement when the matched grays trotted through the white gates and between the two shining man-made lakes to the stone castle. Stonyhurst was, the Jesuits noted, the largest building in England, the refuge where Oliver Cromwell had spent the night before the decisive battle of Preston in August 1648.
“Old Noll must spin in his grave every time he remembers that Stonyhurst’s a citadel of the Scarlet Woman of Rome,” Peter laughed.
The landau turned sharply to the left before the stone lions that guarded the entrance to the main hall, and they were borne through leafy groves to the smaller gray bulk of St. Mary’s Hall. Small boys wearing short trousers and black b
lazers scampered about the lawns, greeting each other with shrill cries. Some newcomers hung back, but Jonnie was out of the landau before it stopped. While Mary chatted with the headmaster, finding his black cassock with the flying Jesuit sleeves they called wings oddly reassuring, Jonnie disappeared into the throng. He had already left her, apparently unperturbed by the prospect of a separation that would endure for at least two years. Only after she had seen the room he was to share with six other small boys did he reveal his awareness of her feelings.
“Don’t cry, Mother,” he urged. “I’ll be fine, though I’ll miss you and Uncle Harry and Grandpa—and Daddy, of course.”
She did cry when the landau bore them through the white iron gates. Peter’s arm about her shoulders comforted her, though, she told herself, any masculine arm would have done as well. Still, it seemed only natural, almost foreordained that he should take her hand on the red-carpeted, marble staircase at the Ritz. She was surprised chiefly by his gentleness when he closed the door behind them and took her in his arms. He led her to the broad bed as if that, too, were the most natural thing in the world.
Theirs was a quiet passion, generating more of warmth than flame. They experienced no wild ecstasies during the five days before her ship sailed, but knew comforting gratitude for mutual needs fulfilled. Though he hinted that she could if she wished remain with him, presumably in marriage, she instinctively turned the talk before he could make a formal declaration. Peter seemed to understand and pressed her no farther, while Mary only half-understood that she had taken another critical decision.
When the interlude ended, not only an idyll, but an era closed for Mary. When she stood on the boat-deck of the Olympus at Southhampton Dock, her eyes were wet, but she shed no tears. The foreshortened figure of Peter French waved from the pier, and her handkerchief fluttered in grave dismissal.
Mary had never felt quite so alone in all her life. She would never again see Jonnie, her first-born, as a vulnerable, engaging small boy. Harry was already lost to her, seduced by Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s revolution. Peter she had rediscovered only to leave him. She was eager to hug the girls, Guinevere and Charlotte, and the younger boys, Thomas and James. Charles and Sir Jonathan were fixed if flickering beacons in a Hong Kong she despised, yet yearned to see again. Above all, she knew eerily, she would never again live in England.
“Mary!” Charles’s voice broke into her reverie. “Mary, our guests are leaving.”
She shook herself into full awareness. The men were filing out the double-doors, Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Judah Haleevie followed by Sir Jonathan, Harry, and Two-Gun Cohen.
“The very best of luck to you, Sir,” Charles called to Sun Yat-sen.
Sir Jonathan muttered, barely audible: “He’ll need it. We all will.”
June 2, 1914
The sun rising over the jade-green South China Sea lit the outlying Chinese-held islets and kindled those British outposts, the Ninepins, Waglan, and Poktoi Islands. Its rays burnished the pyramidal Peak with gold. Half-light suffused The Peak’s shadowed northwestern slopes, and the City of Victoria lay in a pool of darkness. Across the bay, where heavy-lidded boatmen steered their purple-sailed lighters, the Kowloon Peninsula was a shining silver spearhead. The jagged hill ranges that guarded the troubled Chinese nation slept like gray dragons beneath the roseate sky.
Sir Jonathan Sekloong slipped from his high ebony bed and padded barefoot to his wife’s adjoining bedroom. Satisfied that Lady Lucinda’s smooth face, supported by a blue porcelain pillow, bore its accustomed half-smile of unconscious contentment, he gently closed the door before kneeling on the embroidered rail of the carved-walnut prie-dieu that had once served Isabella of Spain to recite two Pater Nosters. After five minutes of silent prayer, he entoned two Ave Marias and was ready to attend to the day’s business.
An hour later, at 7:06 A.M. on June 2, 1914, he stepped from the green-painted Peak Tram and noted with complacent approval that his sedan chair was waiting. Four arrogant coolies in his blue-and-gold livery ignored the throng that flowed around the chair like the sea split by a rock. Royal-blue enamel plaques on their breasts flaunted the golden Sekloong winged dragon, and the panels of the sedan chair displayed the same motif. When their master was seated, the bearers swung uphill. They trotted along Upper Albert Road, where rigid sentries in scarlet coats guarded Government House, before plunging into the Chinese-inhabited labyrinth that clung to the steep slopes above Queen’s Road. Halfway down a narrow lane, they stopped before a red-painted door.
The door opened, and an elderly manservant clasped his hands in obeisance. Filigree-iron balconies looked down on a miniature courtyard paved with russet tiles, where mauve-and-red jardinieres flaunting multicolored zinnias alternated with blue-and-white jardinieres holding miniature orange trees.
A slender young woman kneeled in the courtyard, her red-and-green robe spread like a circular fan around her. Gold-embroidered sandals peeped from the hem of her robe, and her glossy black hair was caught in a chignon. Her wide-set eyes shone with pleasure above the high cheekbones of her camellia-soft face. Three small girls kneeled behind her, each a miniature replica of her mother. She was twenty-three, her daughters seven, five, and three years old.
“Pao-chu, chin-ai-ti, shen-ma tou hau ma?” Sir Jonathan spoke in the soft northern dialect. “Precious Pearl, my dear. All is well with you?”
“Yes, My Lord, we thank you. All is well.”
The solemnity of the three diminutive ladies dissolved into giggles. The Pearl Concubine looked at them reproachfully, but surrendered to their gaiety. Her own laughter was silver wind-bells tinkling on a pagoda’s unswept eaves.
“They are overjoyed to see their father, though they forgot the proper formulas of respect,” she said. “And I tried so hard to get it right this time.”
Sir Jonathan happily cast off the formality the Rites enjoin on the master when he visits his concubine and her family. He raised Precious Pearl to her feet and embraced her, gently rubbing his cheek against hers. Released from their mother’s silken discipline, the girls swarmed upon his tall figure. Their arms clasped him, and inquisitive hands explored the pockets of his frock-coat. Sir Jonathan kissed his daughters and murmured into three small, warm ears.
“I must leave you now, Pearl.” He pressed into her hands a red envelope crackling with new banknotes. “But I shall return for a longer stay one evening this week.”
Her face shadowed by disappointment, the Pearl Concubine bowed submissively and murmured the formula of farewell. Her daughters’ treble tones gravely echoed her words.
Sir Jonathan smiled in contentment as he opened the small iron gate half-hidden in the corner of the courtyard. Precious Pearl and their daughters were possessions that entailed little responsibility. Since they were but females and only tangentially part of the clan, he need not train them either to bear the burdens or to enhance the glory of the House of Sekloong. At most, he might gain marginal advantages through his daughters’ marriages. Otherwise, they were to him a source of pure pleasure blessedly detached from his ambitions.
His private pleasure was not a secret pleasure. Lady Lucinda never spoke of the Pearl Concubine—no more than she spoke of the Jade Concubine whom Sir Jonathan had pensioned off. But she sent Pearl’s daughters lavish presents at Christmas and Chinese New Year, and on every other occasion when her own children and grandchildren received gifts. That generosity was her duty and her privilege as the First Wife. Both the Chinese and the British communities knew of Pearl’s secluded existence. Hong Kong law legitimized both polygamy and concubinage as respected Chinese traditions. Even Sir Jonathan’s confessor, a tolerant Jesuit, did not press him, but observed: “A blind eye’s essential to a priest, essential as his theology.”
Sir Jonathan was less easy about his next call, though it was as respectably customary in his milieu. Father Collins laughed openly at the “black, heathen superstition,” and he felt the bite in the gentle Irish laughter.
Musing on his ow
n inconsistency, he climbed rickety wooden stairs hung on a ramshackle brick building. When a pock-marked youth opened the weathered door, Sir Jonathan blinked at the abrupt transition from the morning sunlight to the somber chamber dimly lit by revolving oiled-paper lanterns on which green dragons endlessly chased their own tails. A gilt Buddha brooded on a low altar-table, half-obscured by the smoke of incense sticks and votive candles in vermillion-and-gold holders. Behind an ebony table inlaid with mother-of-pearl sat an emaciated figure wearing a Taoist monk’s gray robes. His eyes were concealed by smoked glasses.
“Good morning, Lord!” he murmured in the dialect of Sekloong Town.
“Good morning, Seer,” Sir Jonathan answered in the same dialect. “Is all well with the Silver Seventh Brother? And how are the auguries?”
“All is well,” the blind-man answered, “thanks to Your Lordship’s benevolence. As for the auguries, I fear they are mixed. They require further explication.”
“Then get on with it!” Sir Jonathan snapped colloquially. “Don’t grow moss on your buttocks.”
The name “Silver Seventh Brother” recalled the Taoist mythology’s Eight Immortals of the Hills and enhanced a profitable trade in prophecies and counsel. The soothsayer’s clients—hard-headed businessmen, as well as staid matrons and tremulous virgins—were further impressed by his blindness. They believed that his inability to see illusory external shapes facilitated his comprehension of the invisible inner workings of fate.
Though Silver Seventh’s clients were many, he was above all the creature of Sir Jonathan, who had discovered him in Sekloong and brought him to Hong Kong. Though he derided the soothsayer’s powers, the master of the House of Sekloong consulted the seer whenever he felt himself threatened or planned a new enterprise. Silver Seventh therefore knew more about the affairs of the House than anyone except Sir Jonathan, who could no more distrust the soothsayer than he could distrust those other useful articles—his abacus, his desk, and his writing brush. Like any tool, Silver Seventh lay in the palm of his patron’s hand. But that patron periodically reinforced his servant’s loyalty by recalling his dependence.
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