by Basu, Kanal
“If it hadn’t been for Christopher, she’d be dead by now.”
Entering the room, Antonio asked, “What happened in Shanxi?”
“Everybody seemed to have forgotten about the crime.” Chris spoke under his breath. “We didn’t meet a single villager who remembered Jeffrey Cook. The church had been turned into a granary and cowsheds, the altar’s wood stripped away inch by inch. Nothing, of course, remained of the ecclesiastical items. The only visible thing being the golden inscription on the dome–benedictus qui venit.”
Antonio saw Norma lying face down on a cot, with a Chinese maid fanning her.
“She was quite normal,” Chris continued, “picking up her husband’s personal items. The rioters, surprisingly, had left them untouched. One could almost smell Jeffrey inside his small and dark room, and make out the sag on the canvas bed caused by him sleeping on his side. She filled the traveling portmanteau to the brim then asked our guide for a small sack. I thought she wanted to take away the hard-dough cheddar cookies – the only luxury the reverend permitted himself– brought in jars from America. But she had other plans.”
“What plans?” Antonio asked, as he checked Norma’s pulse.
“She stuffed the sack with rat poison from the vicarage’s store.” Polly spoke for Chris, pointing to a moaning Norma, “then swallowed it on the train back to Peking.”
It was wrong to have the patient lie flat; Antonio moved quickly to prop her up on pillows. Polly sang the praise of Chris Campbell: “He was smart to spot Norma’s troubled eyes that had turned bleary on the train. She had started to swoon as if she was drowning. Our smart reporter persuaded the chair bearers to bring her here rather than travel all the way to the Legation.”
“It’s the perfect rescue, if only you can save the patient,” Polly said. Antonio dragged the washstand over to the bed, and held Norma’s jaws wide open, pouring jugs of water down her throat. It took special skill to avoid choking her, then he started to pump her stomach, bringing on pathetic howls and a frightening moan like an animal in the throes of slaughter. Everyone was amazed to see her bring up the poison – a glistening stream of liquid diamonds smelling of rotten milk – panting loudly and catching her breath to glare at her doctor. The room fell silent with her. The maids rushed about cleaning up the mess, while Chris Campbell held up a fresh towel for Antonio to dry his hands.
“She’s lucky there’s no arsenic in Chinese rat poison, otherwise she’d be dead by now.” Finished with his patient, Antonio lectured Chris and Polly on the correct procedure for treating low-grade poisoning by stomach pump and enema and preventing death by acute dehydration.
Later, sipping stiff grog in the lounge, Chris Campbell let Antonio into his scoop: “It was a homegrown plan.”
“What do you mean?” Antonio looked at him quizzically.
“Norma and her fried Sally Hollinger had cooked up the suicide scheme at the Legation itself.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she told me so! As she lay dying, she asked me to thank Sally for her sound advice to kill herself where she couldn’t accidentally be saved by foolish doctors. Little did she know …!” Chris chuckled and ordered them both a refill.
“We should’ve left her to die then!” Antonio shrugged in mock despair. “It’s our curse as doctors to save lives when in fact it’d be better to let them go.”
“I bet it’s rare though …” Chris remarked, stirring the ice in his glass and looking every bit a seasoned journalist.
“Not rare at all. Mind you they aren’t always as planned as Norma’s. Could be a foolish accident too, fully capable of spoiling a doctor’s plans. Like I had to save a man once from his own bullet on the feast of St. Anthony, had to spend a whole night at the hospital away from the girls. Back then, of course, I considered that a total catastrophe, a curse that’d doom me to eternal bachelorhood!”
They gazed at clouds tinged by sunset flying low over the humps of the peak. After months of living as an outsider – the only European without his own mission in Peking – Antonio sensed a surprising bond with the cub reporter. The nervous and faltering Chris Campbell he had met in Fengtai during Joachim Saldanha’s “accident” seemed to have grown out of his cocoon into a wry observer of both foreigners and Chinese, and of his masters in London as well with their insatiable appetite for oriental grotesquery.
“Jeffrey’s story wouldn’t have made it into the papers, if the poor man hadn’t lost his life. Nothing moves them as much as the Mutiny, with foreigners butchered in Calcutta’s Black Hole!”
“But with Saldanha’s torture you must’ve struck gold?”
“Oh, no, quite the opposite. Our editors were miffed that I hadn’t managed to interview one of his rotten torturers. Bible martyrs aren’t in fashion any longer, I’m afraid, not even if they died distributing the first locally printed edition as Jeffrey Cook had in Shanxi, bearing the proud name of its printer.”
Antonio stirred. “You mean Jacob de Graff?”
“Yes! The one who was killed. Not by the Chinese but by one of us.” Excited to show off his investigative skills, Chris mentioned that Norma had told him about a letter she had received from her husband while she was still in the States. It was about something awful, about a foreigner killing another for profit.
“Who killed Jacob and why?”
Chris Campbell shook his head. “It wasn’t a story I’d followed. Except that everyone at the Legation knew who the murderer was.”
Antonio adopted a different line of investigation. “Why would anyone want to kill him?”
“It might have something to do with the many more Koenig machines he was planning to buy to expand his press and make it the largest in China. Might’ve troubled those who didn’t like what he was about to print.”
“And how do we know he had such a grand ambition?”
“That’s simple!” Chris smiled confidently. “You don’t have to dig too deep to know the answer to that one. Not with Mr. Pinchback going around telling everyone how the Dutchman had almost cost him his job by dying, after the Hong Kong Bank had underwritten the purchase of the German machines and paid for their freight to China.”
Antonio slept badly, waking up every now and then to Norma’s snoring. At first he thought she was crying, complaining to her dead husband about the unexpected actions of an irresponsible doctor. The glow of the brazier beside the bed reminded him of his running battle with insects during his early days at the palace: the beetle army that he defeated every night only to be faced with recurring assaults; the yellow moth that had chosen him as a sleeping partner, made a habit of perching itself on the bridge of his nose. And ants that refused to be fooled by the sugar trap, marching doggedly to feast on the spilled wine on his bed.
He thought about Chris Campbell’s account of Jacob’s death and tried to solve the mystery that sometimes seemed within his grasp, but in other moments felt as wispy as the clouds that shrouded the peaks of the Fragrant Hills. He was anxious to return to his pavilion and press on with his investigations, following up on the young reporter’s clues.
“Why don’t you stay here and enjoy the spring?” Polly proposed to Antonio over breakfast. “With all the troubles in Peking it might still be the safest place for us all.” Chris was enthusiastic as well. He could do a story about the pavilions of the Fragrant Hills pillaged and burned by the allied troops just a few decades ago, although it was doubtful if the editors would print anything about Western mischief in China. Antonio turned down Polly’s offer, much to her dismay, but promised to come and celebrate her “first step to the grave” fortieth birthday at the Legation.
On his way down the slopes he saw wild peonies budding in the tall shrubs, the flower of honor, known to calm passions and bring riches. The Yongding River wound through the woods in a silken sash, the sun chasing it down. Peasants had started a fire of dry leaves, and the blossoming apricot trees glowed like giant lanterns hung from the peaks. The driver of the mule cart
started to sing in his coarse voice. He felt Fumi’s hands holding onto him … in spring the pulse beats like the strings of a lute … heard her sigh as she laid her head against him.
On his return, Antonio found that imperial troops had entered the Summer Palace and camped in the gardens surrounding the lake. Kansu soldiers thronged the palace grounds, dragging their field guns behind them. The “Savages,” as the Moslem fighters from the northwestern Kansu province were called, were the empress’s favorites, decked out in black and blue with ammunition and provisions strapped to their backs like pack animals. The few who had managed to settle into their posts inside the palace were sleeping in tents, cradling their rifles like wives. The stink of unwashed soldiers mixed with rotting scraps and manure, and as Wangsheng weaved his way past the throngs to lead Antonio to his pavilion, they heard a volley of gunfire welcoming the troops from the Terrace of Heavenly Clouds.
The cavalry guard hadn’t taken the invasion too well, the horses refusing to budge from the stables that the Savages intended to occupy for the pigs, goats and chickens they’d robbed from peasants during their long march into Peking. The chief eunuch was nowhere to be seen, having fled his charge of keeping order to accompany the dowager and her closest advisors to the Forbidden City, from where she was rumored to be following the movement of foreign troops. The boatmen had fled too, along with the gulls after the soldiers had raided their nests for un-hatched eggs. The terrace by the lake had turned into barracks, the marble bridge was packed with sandbags to serve as gun turrets, the giant incense burners mounted with Krupp canons against enemy attack. The empress was yet to forget the allied invasion of her favorite palace during the opium wars, and the Kansu savages had been commissioned to thwart its recurrence.
The soldiers had stayed away from the private pavilions, but their very presence had caused Wangsheng and his nephew to panic. The Savages might go after eunuchs just to pass the time, to have some fun before the killing started. Tian had locked himself up in the kitchen, singing to his favorite songbird, and refused even to come out to the courtyard, with both attendants deciding to buy the inferior produce brought in daily by donkey carts, rather than risk going out and scouting the markets.
Within moments of arriving at the pavilion, Antonio shocked them by asking for his chair and bearers. The empress might still decide to side with foreigners against Boxers, he tried to reassure his attendants, and the Savages could well turn out to be their saviors. In any event, the Tsungli Yamen had vouched for the safety of all foreigners and it’d be foolish of soldiers to stop him on his way in or out.
Wangsheng grumbled all along the way to Hong Kong Bank, following his master on his sedan, glancing fearfully at every soldier they passed. He was foolish to panic, Antonio kept telling him. There were no signs of disturbances on the streets. Bands of urchins had gathered around the soldiers and examined their weapons openly, touching them even to see if they were real.
Mr. Pinchback, looking relaxed behind his banker’s desk, agreed with Antonio. The Orientals were quick to panic. Over his long career in the East, he had found them to be wise during peacetime and infantile in a crisis. “Unlike us, rock steady in war and barmy otherwise!” He thought Polly had sent the Portuguese doctor over to examine his troublesome acne, and seemed surprised when Antonio brought up Jacob.
“He died much before you arrived. Couldn’t have saved him, I’m afraid!” He looked sternly at Antonio. “As a banker, I can’t betray the fiduciary trust of my clients, even a dead one like Jacob. But I can tell you all about his fantasies.”
Mr. Pinchback waited for Antonio to answer, then wetted his lips to start. “Jacob de Graff had won a jackpot with his Bibles. They were cheaper to print in China than in England, say, and ship over. Churches in Europe and America were falling over themselves to have him do their job for them, ready to pay for more machines, more paper, more of anything he needed. If a proper businessman, he’d have slept soundly, but the mathematician in him kept him awake at night.” He paused to straighten a pile of papers on his desk, then went on. “Jacob had figured out a way to adapt his Koenig machine to produce Chinese books much faster and in larger numbers than using traditional ways. He didn’t just want to print more Bibles, but to reproduce classic Chinese texts. He was dreaming the dream of emperors, getting a group of scholars to translate the Analects of Confucius, Sunzi’s Art of War, the Four Great Books of the Song, and many more. He wanted to enlighten the world about our yellow brethren and stop the sharks from forging old manuscripts for grand profit.” Mr. Pinchback followed Antonio’s gaze to the row of banker’s seals on his desk. “It was typical of Jacob to dream foolish dreams. I didn’t mind at all, as long as he could guarantee payment for the printing presses from his Bible sales. His business was sound, not his fantasy, but I didn’t expect …”
Antonio cleared his throat and leaned forward on the desk. “You didn’t expect that he’d die so soon?”
“More than that.” Mr. Pinchback rose to part the curtains and looked down from his window. “I didn’t expect his fantasy would attract such powerful enemies. News of his plans had leaked out and threatened the mandarins and their agents. It wouldn’t be possible to pass on a fake manuscript as the real one anymore if he succeeded. Jacob’s scholars would catch the rotten ones. With thousands of genuine copies and translations available, the market for so-called originals would suffer too, hurting the thieves, and all those who claimed monopoly over the Chinese and their books.”
Antonio picked up a seal and turned it over in his hand, then asked, “So he didn’t commit suicide.”
“Suicide!” Mr. Pinchback looked genuinely surprised. “Which fool told you that? Our Jacob was a true believer, if ever there was one. His zeal was the zeal of apostles.” Sighing, he returned to the desk. “We don’t get too many clients like that in the bank.”
Should I ask him who Jacob’s enemies were? Antonio wondered if Mr. Pinchback would give him a straight answer, then decided to ask a fiduciary question instead. “What happened to the machines?”
“Thank God for telegraph! We were able to intercept the ship carrying the Koenigs in Bombay port and had them offloaded. Luckily there were ready buyers in India, those who’d caught the printing fever even earlier from the ‘Indian Jacob,’ the Baptist William Carey of Serampore.”
“And his house?”
“He left no will, of course. His sister had already returned to Holland and with no relative here, his friend, your friend, could’ve claimed his “missionary’s fortune,” But then she disappeared, fearing his enemies would kill her too.”
Antonio unbuttoned Pinchback’s cuffs and rolled up his sleeves to examine with his finger the goose bumps on his arms, then advised him to wash them without soap and use a light tincture of sulphur to dry and exfoliate the skin.
“Where did I get it from?” The banker seemed nervous. Antonio assured him that it wasn’t an infection he could’ve picked up somewhere or from someone. Acne Vulgaris didn’t have a known cause, it could well have been hereditary, the infection of his parents.
Antonio found Wangsheng and Tian sitting solemnly in the courtyard when he returned from Hong Kong Bank. Someone had gone through his things with a fine-tooth comb. A theft was as rare at the Summer Palace as a secret affair. The two were napping inside the kitchen all afternoon, and had woken to the sound of feet rushing about the courtyard. The soldiers had arrived, they thought and bolted the kitchen door.
The surgical box had been emptied onto the bed, the instruments heaped up in a pile. His traveling case had been dragged out from underneath the clothes rack and left on the floor with its lid gaping. The thief hadn’t shown much interest in his clothes, except to rifle through the flaps of the sacklike robes that Joachim Saldanha had left behind, turning them inside out to search for things that might be hidden or left behind by mistake. His medical drawings and notes had received the most scrutiny, the pages flung about the room to resemble a captain’s coupe after a storm.
Nothing had gone missing, not even the silver wine bowl presented to him by the departing Patty and her fiancé.
He put the instruments back into the box, counted them to ensure that none were missing then left it to the attendants to straighten up the mess. The soldiers might be responsible, he thought, although their callous abstinence made him wonder. Maybe they were looking for precious things, believing the pavilions to be full of gold and jade, even opium.
Although Fumi hadn’t visited him for a few days, Antonio started to worry about her safety. How would she come to the pavilion now? He imagined her surrounded by a band of Savages. The soldiers might stop her, assault her even; she could be raped, they might cut her hair and turn her into a camp whore. As he lay fretting on the bed, Wangsheng knocked on the lodge’s door to announce a visitor.
A young man, a deputy prince at the dowager’s court, sat on the walnut bench under the plum tree, looking like a young student at the academy for civil servants. Antonio exchanged pleasantries with him. “The empress doesn’t wish to disturb her guests,” the deputy prince said calmly, sounding wiser than his years. “The soldiers have strict orders not to enter the private pavilions. But they might trouble you with their loud manners and gunfire. The troops will leave as soon as things return to normal.” He smiled politely, and offered Antonio a box of French bonbons, the empress’s favorite.
“Would you like me to go away?” Antonio wondered if the man had come to give him a farewell gift.
“You can leave if you like, but it might be better if you stay,” his visitor replied. “The palace is safe. It might even be the safest place in Peking. The empress has invited all foreigners to come over and some have arrived already.”