The Cloud Leopard's Daughter

by Deborah Challinor

  ‘Wong Bao Wan, where is she?’ he demanded.

  ‘I recently asked you the same question, if you care to recall,’ Rian replied smoothly. ‘Is she not with you?’

  Yip Chun Kit looked livid. ‘No, she is not. She is aboard your ship.’

  ‘Is she really? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do not play games, Captain Farrell. She is my property and I am preparing to fetch her back as we speak.’

  Kitty burst out, ‘She is not your property! How dare you!’

  ‘You’re not doing any such thing,’ Rian said. ‘English law trumps Chinese law in Hong Kong, and if Wong Bao were on my ship she’d be under my protection and the aegis of the British government. You’re wasting your time.’

  Yip opened his mouth to retaliate, but just then his name was called to enter the ballroom. He contented himself with waving his fist under Rian’s nose, turned on his silk-slippered heel and strode off.

  ‘That was unpleasant,’ Kitty muttered, fanning herself even more energetically and smiling at those nearby who were continuing to stare.

  ‘A little awkward,’ Rian agreed. He waved over a servant and helped himself to two glasses of fruit juice from a tray. ‘I knew we shouldn’t have come. And I’m not bowing all the way in there. I don’t do bowing.’

  They’d been told they must approach the emperor and the empress dowager in a position of submission, that is, slowly and with their heads deeply bowed. Kitty wondered how they were supposed to achieve such an entrance without bumping into anything or, worse, walking straight into the empress dowager herself.

  And then finally, after a further hot, stuffy half hour, their names were called and they were in the ballroom, and there was Cixi surrounded by dozens of Chinese and British officials, sitting on a throne-like chair and wearing the most glorious silk costume Kitty had ever seen. In bright yellow patterned with gold thread it fell loose from her neck to her ankles and had very wide sleeves and deep borders of maroon, green and black. The robe had a tasselled hem also of gold, and Cixi wore a long rope of pure white pearls looped several times through the robe’s front fastening. Her black hair was pinned up and pomaded, and she wore an extraordinary and weighty headdress of pearls, precious stones and silk flowers. On her feet (unbound as she was Manchu) were six-inch-high bejewelled platform shoes, and on the small and ring fingers of both hands she wore six-inch-long gold filigree nail protectors. She also wore rings, pearl and jade bangles, and pearl earrings.

  Her face was tastefully made up with white powder, rouge, and just a touch of lip colour. It was unlined and she didn’t look as if she smiled often. Kitty decided she might be in her late twenties.

  She certainly wasn’t smiling now.

  She stared down at them rather imperiously, waiting for their names to be announced.

  Beside her sat her young son, the Tongzhi Emperor. His costume was almost as ornate as his mother’s and, although he held himself with the bearing of royalty, Kitty could see that underneath it all he was just a little boy. She wondered if he’d rather be outside playing on the grass.

  At last, Governor Robinson got round to it. ‘Your Highness, Captain and Mrs Rian Farrell.’

  Cixi’s finely arched eyebrows went up slightly, but that was the only indication she’d heard.

  Rian nodded his head slightly, the closest he could force himself to a proper bow. ‘Your Highness, thank you for receiving us. I beg leave of you to make a request. It is my wish that you formally appeal to the British government to cease importing opium to China.’

  Kitty gaped at him. Where the hell had that come from?

  A dreadful, ringing silence fell across the room. All British eyes turned to Rian.

  Kitty felt her face begin to burn.

  A Chinese official translated for Cixi, and a shocked murmuring came from the Chinese.

  Cixi stared at him, her expression unreadable. Then she said a single word.

  The official translated back. ‘Next.’

  Rian and Kitty were then personally, and rapidly, escorted from Flagstaff House by a livid-faced Governor Robinson.

  ‘For God’s sake, Rian,’ Kitty whispered, ‘what were you thinking?’

  He shrugged. ‘Lee Longwei seems to know everything that goes on here. I thought it might help with Amber. I took a punt.’

  Outside the governor hissed at him, ‘You’re a disgrace to the British nation, Captain Farrell. You have just embarrassed yourself, the emperor, Madam Empress Dowager, her officials, and every British citizen here in Hong Kong. I would greatly appreciate your immediate departure from the colony.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Rian replied as he and Kitty walked off.

  ‘Well, she could hardly agree to it, not there in front of everyone,’ Kitty said, ‘even if she did want the opium trade stopped. It was hardly the place and time to raise the matter, was it?’

  ‘Not really.’ Rian ripped off his silk cravat and stuffed it in his pocket. ‘God, this whole bloody thing is hopeless.’

  ‘With Longwei?’

  Rian nodded. ‘I can’t talk to Robinson again, obviously, not after that, and the country traders will be spread across the ocean between here and West India, and anywhere else in the world they might be contracted to ship. It would take months, if not years, to track them all down. And what would I say to them? “Look, would you mind not transporting opium to China any more? There’s a pirate there who doesn’t like it?” What would be the point? Opium’s their most lucrative cargo. And as for telling the British customs officials at Shanghai to stop letting the stuff through, I’d probably spend the next ten years in gaol.’

  ‘So we’re not going to Shanghai?’ Kitty asked.

  Rian stopped walking and turned to her. From his expression she knew they weren’t. She knew it anyway. Approaching the British customs officials would be a complete waste of time, like all of Longwei’s demands.

  ‘Is it a game he’s playing?’ she asked. ‘Giving us these silly, impossible tasks and sitting back to watch us fail?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t.’ Rian stared at his boots for a moment. ‘I’m sure he does want the opium trade to stop – he does seem to hate it – but it’s hopeless. He must know that. They’ve lost two wars trying to stop it.’

  ‘He’s not . . . mad, is he?’ This was a horrible thought, and one that had been nibbling unpleasantly away at the back of Kitty’s mind. If he was mad, anything could happen to Amber.

  Rian started walking again. ‘You’d assume so, given what he’s told me to do, but I don’t think so. At least, he doesn’t seem mad when you talk to him. And could a mad man successfully command a fleet of fifty ships and a thousand men?’

  ‘Possibly, yes. You couldn’t be sane, could you, to choose to make a living from sailing around plundering and murdering?’

  ‘I’m not sure if people like Longwei see the death they cause as murder. More like collateral damage. Does the British government consider the death of Chinese from opium addiction to be murder? I wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Are you sticking up for him? He has our daughter, Rian!’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m just trying to understand him. If I didn’t know better I’d say he was trying to tackle the situation with diplomacy. Which, in my experience, is very unpirate-like.’

  ‘Do you know better?’

  Looking slightly surprised to admit it, Rian said, ‘No, I don’t, actually. I don’t know better. But perhaps I should. He had a formal education, you know. In England.’

  ‘Did he?’ Kitty was obscurely pleased – that at least solved the mystery of Longwei’s excellent English.

  ‘I gather he disliked it there.’

  ‘Oh. Did his parents send him?’ Kitty wondered what a pirate’s parents could possibly be like.

  ‘No idea. I didn’t ask.’

  They walked on a little farther. The weather was pleasant, not too warm, and neither considered hailing a sedan chair. Being transported by the power of another hum
an was nothing like riding in a coach and Rian hated them, and they made Kitty feel like some kind of grand, white-skinned queen and left her feeling vaguely shamed.

  ‘So we’re not going to do all those things he’s asked?’ Kitty said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will he find out?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Then what are we going to do?’

  ‘Let me think about it.’

  *

  Israel sat at the mess table, his hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had grown cold, listening in appalled amazement to Rian recounting what had happened at Flagstaff House.

  If he’d been there, if he’d been given the task of speaking to the Empress Dowager Cixi and her kid, he wouldn’t have cocked it up the way Rian so obviously had. No, he wouldn’t have even bothered with the opium business, because who cared if a million more Chinese lay around and smoked themselves to death. Cixi probably didn’t either. They were useless anyway, once they got a taste for it. He would have got straight to the point and demanded that she send her navy – what there was left of it – after Lee Longwei to capture him and his motley bloody crews and bring them and Amber back to Hong Kong, and hang the bloody lot of them.

  Not Amber, of course. He hadn’t seen her when they’d gone to Hung Shing Yeh Bay, much to his annoyance, but Tahi had said she looked well. He was probably lying, too ashamed to admit his wife had been raped by Christ knew how many filthy, stinking pirates. No, that wasn’t true, he knew it wasn’t, and thank God, too. Kitty and Bao had both said she’d seemed fit and, if not happy, then at least unharmed. He believed Kitty, and had always liked and admired her, ever since he’d met her in Melbourne when he’d been a scruffy boy working in a hotel stable, though he wasn’t so keen on Rian. The rest of the crew thought the sun shone out of his arse, but they couldn’t see what he, Israel, could – that he was a bad-tempered Irish bastard who thought he was better than he was – because he usually got them out of the shit. Usually, not always. Sometimes it was his fault they got in it and it was Hawk who sorted things. Or Miss Molly Simon, or even Kitty. He did like the way the crew worked together like a family, which he’d never had himself, but sometimes he felt like he was on the outside of it and he could never work out why.

  What might have happened if Rian had really died at Ballarat and Kitty had married Daniel Royce? He’d liked Daniel. He’d been a really decent man and it’d been terrible when he’d died. He’d thought he might bawl himself to death, but then he’d only been eleven. Kitty had liked him, too. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have done what she did with him. When Rian had been found not dead, and hadn’t done everyone a favour by dying of his wounds, Israel had hoped they’d have an enormous fight and Kitty would leave him and go off with Daniel, and he would go with them, and there had been a fight, lots of them, but quiet icy ones, and instead Daniel had died and eventually things just went back to normal.

  For a few years they’d sailed the seas and Amber had been all his, though she hadn’t known that because he’d been too embarrassed to say anything to her. During that time, he’d mutated from an ordinary boy with carroty hair to an unattractive youth with pus-filled pimples, long skinny limbs, hair like a red squirrel’s, and awful-smelling sweat. It had been a nightmare though Amber, who’d gone from pretty girl to glorious beauty without so much as a day of acne, hadn’t seemed to notice. But he’d eventually decided why would she? She had to look at Pierre’s ugly, wrinkled face, Gideon’s terrifying coal black one, and Hawk and Ropata’s colossal noses every day. But by the time he’d grown even taller, and his body had filled out pleasingly, and the pimples had vanished, his hair had turned a decent colour and he no longer smelt like cheese and filthy socks, Tahi was sailing with them.

  Tahi had become his best friend. They were similar in age and they had a fair bit in common. Tahi’s mother had died giving birth to him and Israel could barely remember his; Tahi hadn’t known his father and Israel’s had shot through soon after he was born; and they were both in love with Amber. Israel, however, had kept that last shared particular to himself.

  He didn’t feel Tahi deserved Amber. For a start, just because you’d known someone most of your life didn’t mean you were the one they married. He understood that Tahi and Amber had been friends since they were about four or some ridiculous age – how can a boy even be a proper friend with a girl at the age of four? – but that was like saying kids that grew up in tenements next to one another should get married, and most of them didn’t, did they?

  Also, he’d spent more actual time with Amber than Tahi had. He’d joined the Katipo early in 1855 and Tahi hadn’t come aboard until 1857, which meant that he, Israel, had spent two whole years more than Tahi virtually living with Amber, so he knew her better. He knew what made her laugh, though not what made her cry – she hardly ever seemed to cry – and what annoyed her (lots of things), and what she liked to eat. He could make her happy: he knew he could.

  And it wasn’t that he didn’t like Tahi – he did, most of the time. But he was in the way and when something got in the way, well, you just had to move it. Tahi was odd, though, with his visions and strange dreams. Pierre was the same. Israel didn’t like that sort of thing. They said Tahi got it from his mother. He often wondered if Tahi could see what was going on in his head, but had decided he mustn’t be able to because he’d never said anything. He’d always been good old cheerful, friendly, Tahi.

  There’d always been this assumption that they would get together, Amber and Tahi, which had privately enraged Israel, but he’d been happy to bide his time until a chance came for him to step in and take her off him. Tahi, though, had actually shown some balls and started sleeping with her. And then Rian had caught them at it and now they were bloody well married.

  It had definitely been a fly in the ointment and had upset him badly to the point that he might have let things slip a bit, and he suspected those two old busybodies Haunui and Ropata might have noticed he wasn’t happy about the wedding. He was particularly wary of Haunui, the interfering old woman. Being Tahi’s grandfather he was always flapping his big brown ears and poking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted, and Israel had caught him watching him sometimes when he thought he wasn’t looking, with one of his ‘I know what you’re up to’ looks on his ugly, tattooed old face. I bet you bloody don’t, Israel had thought. Haunui would have talked to Ropata because they were as thick as thieves and anyway Maoris always stuck together, and probably Tahi as well, though Tahi had never said anything. Israel steered clear of Haunui and Ropata now, but they’d been watching him, he knew it.

  But it didn’t matter whether Amber and Tahi were married or not because the perfect opportunity had just landed in his lap. Rian was never going to be able to stop opium coming into China, that was obvious. The idea was possibly one of the stupidest Israel had ever heard. Lee Longwei must be mad.

  He had a much better plan, and while Rian and the rest of them were sitting around with their thumbs up their arses, he was going to put it into action and rescue Amber himself.

  But he wouldn’t be bringing her back to the Katipo.

  *

  Israel adjusted the sail on the sampan, wondering if perhaps he should have chosen a bigger vessel. The wind had picked up even though it was still early morning and was tossing the little boat about on the waves as though she were no more than a cube of balsa wood. Too late now, he supposed. He eyed the low, dark clouds to the north, hoping that the wind stayed due west and wouldn’t swing around to the south. The last thing he needed was rain. He was following the western curve of Hong Kong Island as closely as he dared without running aground, negotiating Sulphur Channel between Green Island and Hong Kong, and calling on Saint Nicholas, patron saint of sailors, for guidance. He was a good sailor, had paid attention and worked hard aboard the Katipo, but a sampan was an odd little vessel and he was about to strike relatively open sea.

  Also, he was worried that Longwei and his crews might have moved from Hung
Shing Yeh Bay and that he was making this perilous bloody trip for nothing. He knew there was a way of getting a message to him, and that it would have been smart to do that before he’d come, but asking Rian how to pass on a message was out of the question, and anyway he couldn’t wait. He had to do it now, before Rian decided to make some sort of move himself.

  Sailing out of the channel the full force of the wind hit the sampan and sent it scudding across the top of the waves. The tiny boats really weren’t built for the open sea. Everything was soaked and Israel could feel an unpleasant rash developing on his backside, but it was a small price to pay.

  The bit he was dreading was crossing from the south-western aspect of Hong Kong Island to the northern tip of Lamma Island. If he managed – survived – that, he should be fine, following the western coastline of Lamma Island around to Hung Shing Yeh Bay. And if he got all the way there, they should be able to get all the way back.

  He was quite shocked, and a little exhilarated, by the speed of the sampan. He had to tack frequently and was worried about the strength of the thing: it might just fall apart in the middle of the ocean, unused to such violent activity. He’d not had time to examine how it was made, he’d been in such a hurry to steal it.

  The wind from his back died off a little as he rounded the end of Hong Kong Island and headed for open sea, but then he was hit from the east by another stiff breeze, so had to adjust the sail again and pull hard on the tiller constantly. His arms would be killing him tomorrow. He thought of tying the tiller, but then worried about having to change direction suddenly. He settled down on the hard wooden seat and steered towards Lamma Island. The fact that he could see it helped.

  Nothing untoward happened during the crossing, except that several fish leapt into the sampan. Israel left them there; he watched them flop about on the bottom boards, gasping, their movements slower and slower until they finally died, then he tossed them overboard.

  When he reached the northernmost tip of Lamma Island he veered to the west and followed the coast around to the headland concealing Hung Shing Yeh Bay. His arms could barely move, his ears and lips were frozen, and his backside felt as though it were on fire. If Lee Longwei wasn’t there, he didn’t know what he’d do. He’d . . . well, he’d have to turn around and go back, he supposed.