Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  The successful bombing raid was marred on the return flight. Eddie McCormick ran out of fuel and crash-landed in a flooded rice-field. He climbed out of the Avro, redolent of liquid night-soil. The American spat explosively and grinned at the incredulous Cantonese farmers.

  “I guess Harry Sekloong’ll just have to buy himself another air force. The Avro’s a write-off, and I’m going back to the States. When you force-land in Iowa, the worst that can happen is a few broken bones and a dusting of horse-manure.”

  The miracle of flight was no more than a fleeting catspaw across the ruffled surface of Mary Sekloong’s mind on the morning of Saturday, June 17, 1916, five days after Eddie McCormick’s first triumphant ascent into the skies of Asia and four days before his one-man attack on Canton. She was not concerned with the coming triumph of airpower, as represented by the frail contraption the local Chinese had dubbed “the foreign, fire-breathing, flying-dragon with the wooden snout.” Her concerns were wholly personal.

  She lay late abed, exhausted by the continuing festivities that celebrated Sir Jonathan’s elevation, exacerbated by the unexpected wrench of Charles’s departure and the bone-shaking drive to Shatin. Besides, she felt a cold coming on. She had learned to respect the stubborn ailment the doctors called “summer grippe” and attributed to the damp heat. She suspected that they understood neither the illness nor its cause, but she had already suffered its protracted discomfort too often to flout their advice to drink large quantities of fluids while resting in a darkened room.

  This particular Saturday was a good day to take to her bed. The last race-meeting of the season was scheduled for the early afternoon. She had no wish to endure the ritual attended by every notable in the Colony, as well as throngs of wager-mad Chinese. Besides, Major General John Williams V.C. would certainly be in the Governor’s box. In her exhausted state, she simply could not face his heavy innuendoes and sly leers.

  Since Lady Lucinda detested the races and her daughters solicitously chose to stay with Mary, the Sekloong race party was made up of three generations of males. In a holiday mood, Sir Jonathan, Harry, Thomas, and James swung off in sedan chairs to ride the clanking Peak Tram to its lower terminus, where the Rolls waited.

  Mary’s Number One Boy Ah Sam had effaced himself early that morning to walk down to Happy Valley, where he hailed a rickshaw to carry him the last half-mile in state. He loved horses, and he shared his compatriots’ passion for gambling. Ah Sam looked forward to spending the afternoon crammed against the railing, laying small bets, sipping tea, and nibbling delicacies sold by strolling hawkers.

  Ignoring the glaring sun and the press of hundreds of sweating bodies, Ah Sam gossiped with his cronies and waited for the notables’ arrival. Despite his tolerant contempt for most of the men and women he so often served, he enjoyed their pomp. The Governor and Lady May ascended to their box, which was draped with clouds of bunting, fifteen minutes before the trumpets announced the first race. Richard and the Honorable Rachel Wheatley had just taken their places in Derwent’s box. The white-uniformed Chinese ushers greeted them with no less deference than the Queen’s personal representative—perhaps a shade more. Respect was due to their years, their frailty, and their wealth.

  The bend of the track blocked Ah Sam’s view of the Sekloong box, which was further obscured by the grass-matting canopies spread above the grandstand on bamboo poles to shade the gentry from the blazing sun he resignedly endured. But he knew the entire family would attend the climactic race-meeting of the season. Protocol required their presence; the gala assembly was a quasi-sacerdotal rite, a mass obeisance to the God of Fortune. Racing was the closest thing to a common religion Hong Kong possessed, the only devotion shared by Chinese and Europeans, by rich and poor.

  Inching at five miles an hour through moving thickets of carriages, rickshaws, sedan chairs, and pedestrians, the Sekloong Rolls boiled over in the 93° heat. Disgusted, Sir Jonathan told the chauffeur to allow the engine to cool. Since no other conveyance was available and walking was unthinkable, they would have to wait. Sir Jonathan and Harry, though not the eager boys, resigned themselves to arriving after the first race. Fortunately, their own horse, Golden Dragon, was running in the third, and they would not miss that race.

  While the Sekloongs fretted in the stalled Rolls, Ah Sam cast his critical eye over the horses parading around the paddock. Though hardened by exposure to the grueling Hong Kong climate, the ponies showed their distress at the drenching humidity. Their flanks shone with sweat, and their eyes rolled white with nervous fatigue.

  “Gam-tin mng ying-goi po-ma,” Ah Sam magisterially told his friend, Robert Hotung’s Number One Boy. “They shouldn’t be running today. Everyone knows it’s too late in the year and too hot. But try to tell anything to those fan guai-tau!” The epithet, “foreign devil-heads,” rolled off his tongue without malice. That was what one called foreigners, just as one addressed them as Missy or Master.

  Despite his misgivings, Ah Sam put a dollar on Number Seven. That was invariably his first bet, since he esteemed the talents of the soothsayer Silver Seventh Brother more highly than Sir Jonathan would admit to doing. Ah Sam grinned when the ponies pounded past the turn, lathered with white foam and laboring under the weight of the gentlemen jockeys. Number Seven, a rough-coated beast with a mean eye, was leading. The jockey in the scarlet-and-chartreuse silks of the Wheatleys was using his whip with sadistic urgency. On the inside, Number Three, carrying the blue-and-purple silks of Mosing Way, was closing the gap. The herd pounded past Ah Sam and out of sight around the bend. He waited in a fury of expectation until the numbers went up on the signboard: 7, 3, 1.

  Ah Sam turned to clap his friend on the back, but his heavy hand stopped in midair. In the corner of his eye he saw a red flare in the shadows under the mat-shed canopies. The next instant, a piercing cry arose from the sweating crowd jammed against the fence.

  “Faw-jook! Faw-jook!” the spectators shrilled. “Fire! Fire!”

  An urgent echo rolled back from the stands: “Gow meng! Gow meng! Save life! Save life!”

  The crowds boiled into violent, mindless motion like a beehive threatened by smoke. Most spectators in the grandstand fought toward the rear exits, though a few enterprising spirits vaulted over the railing onto the field. The close-packed throng around the rail hurled itself with a single will toward the safety of the open center field. Policemen wearing white sun-helmets pushed through the fleeing spectators to the Governor’s Box, while a handful of young Chinese and European men fought to clear the narrow aisles.

  Ah Sam stood irresolute, his solid bulk unmoving under the impact of the screaming throng. The next instant, loyalty ingrained by sixteen years’ service overcame his instinct to flee. His conscious choice required no more than twenty seconds. He hurled himself into the panic-stricken crowd like a swimmer breasting a torrent that was becoming a raging flood.

  His head low, Ah Sam thrust against the fear-maddened crowd. His powerful legs worked like pistons, and his heavy hands clawed through the fleeing mass of humanity. He saw orange flames envelop the mat shed and charged like an enraged bull.

  “Ma-lee Siu-jieh, wo lay-la! Ma-lee Siu-jieh, wo lay-la!” He proclaimed his single primary loyalty. “Miss Mary, I’m coming! Miss Mary, I’m coming!”

  Ah Sam’s momentum carried him to the railing of the grandstand, and the flames’ fiery breath scorched his eyebrows. A tall European in a white suit elbowed him aside, and he stumbled. Off-balance when the next wave struck, he fell to the ground.

  He was struggling to rise, still shouting, “I’m coming, Miss Mary, I’m coming!” when a policeman’s thick-soled boot struck his temple. He was only half-conscious when the throng trampled him. Each successive blow forced an anguished gasp from his drawn lips and slowly pummeled the life from his body. Finally, he lay still.

  Thomas and James returned late in the afternoon to report the conflagration to their mother. Mary sighed in shamed relief when they told her that all the Sekloongs
were safe. Sir Jonathan and Harry had remained to direct the emergency measures at Tung Wah Hospitals. All the injured were brought to Tung Wah, which was near the racetrack, all racial distinctions, for once, ignored. Equal in death, the corpses were laid out in the adjoining Yee Szeh Mortuary.

  Mary dressed distractedly, anxious to descend to Happy Valley to help at Tung Wah. But a united front of amahs convinced her that she could offer little help and might actually be a hindrance. Pacing the veranda in her voile robe, she waited for Sir Jonathan and Harry’s return. She could not even busy herself seeing that a hot meal would welcome them, for the servants were already preparing quantities of food. Even Ah Sam’s absence did not impair the household’s efficient, raucous operation. Early in the evening, when she noted absently that he had not returned, Mary assumed that he, too, had gone to the hospital to help. Ah Sam usually did what he thought best and asked permission afterward.

  The men returned shortly before midnight. Both were hollow-eyed with fatigue, and their clothes reeked of smoke. Sipping a brandy-and-soda, Harry spoke tonelessly.

  “It’s hellish! Last count we had was forty-three dead and more than a hundred seriously injured. God knows how many we missed.”

  “Who are they?” Mary was selfishly secure in the knowledge that all her household was safe.

  “They found the Wheatleys, Rachel and Dick, sitting stock upright in their box in the grandstand,” Harry answered. “They weren’t touched by the fire, not even suffocated by the smoke. Shock, the doctors said. But, by God, the old rascal was tough. Miracle he lived this long the way he drank. Old S. Y. Lo was burned to death … a horrible sight. Otherwise, clerks, servants. No one you’d know, except …”

  “Except?” Mary was chilled by apprehension.

  “Two others you know, Mary,” Sir Jonathan replied reluctantly. “John Williams. Six men carried him out still breathing, but he died in the ward. Heart attack or stroke. And, Mary … Ah Sam … your Ah Sam. They found him trampled underfoot, quite dead. It must have been quick, since …”

  “Don’t tell me any more,” she commanded. “Not just now.”

  At two in the morning, Mary Sekloong sat alone in a cane chair on the veranda outside her bedroom while the household slept. Dry-eyed, she looked down into Happy Valley, where moving lanterns flickered like restless ghosts as the Fire Brigade turned over the debris.

  Revulsion against the man John Williams had become initially dulled the shock of his death. But, alone in the night, she remembered the eager young lieutenant and grieved in silence for the swift passing of all youth and beauty. Not for what he was, but for what he had been—and for what she had been.

  All were gone, the men for whom she had cared before marrying Charles: Hilary Metcalfe, Lord Peter French, her father, and now John Williams. Except for her distant brother, death had severed all living ties with the young woman she had been before she entered the House of Sekloong.

  Her thoughts turned reluctantly to Ah Sam, and she wearily rubbed her eyes. Her fingertips came away wet with unshed tears for that rock-like man. Ferocious in aspect and cheerfully disrespectful when his judgment of her interests clashed with her own, the former pirate turned irreverent servant had, she realized, been a pillar of her existence.

  Then Mary wept in fearful loneliness. Abandoned to grief, she wept in the silent night, sobbing desperately and inconsolably.

  Part V

  THOMAS AND JAMES

  March 2, 1924–December 15, 1927

  March 2, 1924

  The daffodil-yellow hull—one hundred and six feet from the cap of bowsprit to carved poop-rail—slid down the greased ways into the green water. Standing on the bunting-draped platform where the prow had rested a minute earlier, Charles and Mary Sekloong laughed together. Splattered with foam from the jeroboam of champagne she had swung to christen the schooner Regina Pacis, they were momentarily deafened by the ten-foot-long strings of firecrackers that hung from the eaves of the boat-sheds and trailed on red ribbons from the sharp cut-water. Amid the billowing clouds of smoke, they shared their joy.

  Charles shifted the gold pommel of his malacca walking-stick to his left hand and took his wife’s hand with his right. Mildly surprised by her husband’s public display of affection, rather than astonished as she would have been ten years earlier, Mary pressed his fingers. They were leaner and, perhaps, less powerful than they had been a decade earlier, but they fitted better between her own.

  Charles Sekloong had not had what the British, with heavy understatement, called “a good war.” The conflict had neither brought him martial glory nor drawn heavily upon his courage and endurance. The Great War had, nonetheless, changed him substantially. In the early spring of 1924, he was a more impressive and self-possessed figure than the new-minted major who had sailed on Triton for Southampton in the summer of 1916. His figure, then tending toward corpulence, was slimmer, though he was still a heavy broadsword beside his rapierlike father. Steel gray at the temples, his hair was thinning, but the sleeked-back mode of the day made his high forehead imposing. No longer dimmed by flesh-cushioned sockets, his hazel eyes looked forthrightly at the world. At forty-seven, Charles Sekloong had finally become an adult, with a grown man’s self-assurance and compassion.

  Mary did not know precisely what had changed her husband during his absence of more than two years. The new Charles suited her, and she was wise enough not to probe the deeper reasons for his transformation.

  Perhaps it was no more than the awareness of his own powers and the power his wealth commanded—an awareness that had blossomed when, for the first time in his life, he had not walked in his father’s shadow. He had emerged from the war a full colonel wearing the pink-and-gray ribbon of an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire and the tricolor of the French Croix de Guerre, as well as the Chinese Order of the Phoenix. For almost a year after arriving in London in July 1916, he had been attached to the Ministry of Armaments, an assignment fitted to his talents, if not his inclinations. He had negotiated war loans from abroad, his success facilitated by the Sekloong connections in the United States. His services were invaluable; they were not glorious.

  After China declared war in August 1917, he was released from the condition he self-deprecatingly described as “my bondage to J. P. Morgan.” The United States had entered the conflict in April 1917, and London no longer needed to woo private consortia to fill her war chest. Already promoted lieutenant colonel, Charles was sent to France in September 1917. That posting finally brought him within sound of guns and insured his promotion to full colonel. The rank was necessary to his function as liaison officer to the 60,000 troops China hastily sent to Europe. Those raw levies were not employed as infantrymen, but as labor battalions. Charles became, as his brother Harry laughed, “field marshal of the coolie hordes.” He was one of the few field-grade British officers who spoke their languages, and they gave him their trust because of his name.

  Charles had finally overcome sensitivity about his inglorious war service, but preferred not to talk about the wound that left him dependent on a walking-stick. Neither German infantrymen nor German artillerymen had inflicted that wound. A berserk coolie, screaming in the incomprehensible Foochow dialect, had rushed at him with a pick-ax. Fighting drunk on unfamiliar Calvados, the coolie had not halted when Charles coolly shot him in the shoulder with his pistol. But Charles could not shoot to kill. The pick-ax had hewn into his thigh, and splintered bone protruded through torn flesh. Finally conquering the ensuing gangrene, the surgeons were pleased to leave him with no more than a bad limp. They had discussed amputation to save his life.

  Mary sympathized with his disinclination to talk about an incident that verged on farce. But the memory returned unbidden at the moment of his great triumph. The launching of Regina Pacis was Charles’s formal declaration of independence, a ceremony celebrating his belated coming of age. The schooner was bigger, more luxurious, and heavier-engined than any craft his father had built. Charles
wanted to call her Mary, as Sir Jonathan had named Orchidia after his mother and Lucinda after his wife. But Mary had rejected the compliment and his countersuggestion of Guinlotte.

  “Then I’ll call her for Our Lady,” Charles decided.

  The golden winged-dragon burgee would fly at her main trunk, but Charles had irritably rejected Harry’s jesting suggestion that he have the dragon embroidered on the square-sail that would cross Regina Pacis’s foremast when the wind was on her quarter. The emblem was essentially his father’s, and Charles was determined that Regina Pacis would be his ship. He was still annoyed by Mary’s refusal to allow him to name the schooner after her or their daughters.

  Adamantly opposed to the vulgarity of calling the craft Mary, she was appalled by the preciosity of a name compounded of her daughters’ names. Guinlotte, indeed! It reminded her of villas in Surbiton called Jametta for James and Henrietta, or the gimcrack cabin cruisers of new-rich stockbrokers named Milbert for Millicent and Albert. Hypersensitive at twenty-one and twenty, the girls would have been excruciatingly embarrassed. They already presented problems enough to her, while facing problems enough of their own.

  Although her self-reproach was mitigated by the practical difficulties the war had interposed, she still regretted yielding to Charles and Sir Jonathan’s insistence that Guinevere and Charlotte need not go to England for schooling. Mary felt she should have insisted that they attend the Convent of the Sacret Heart at Roehampton. Instead they had been enrolled at St. Paul’s, which was adequate for the daughters of middle-class Eurasians, aspiring Portuguese, ambitious Chinese, and those British who could not manage schooling in England. St. Paul’s was not adequate for her daughters.