The Unexpected Wife

by Caroline Warfield

  Unlike the grimy settlement he passed through between the walls and the foreign quarter, Canton proper reflected money and quality. Behind its enclosure, the city huddled under low roofs; most structures, even those clearly the opulent homes of the hongs, did not reach the height of the massive walls. They skirted the Yuen-hua Academy, reputed to be the headquarters of the new high commissioner.

  A few impressive towers dotted the skyline, however. His guide pointed out the Flower Pagoda of the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees rising nine stories from its base and beautifully painted. Even taller, the minaret of the Huaisheng Mosque astonished him. He had not expected a Muslim edifice in Canton. It was, his guide informed him, a beacon for ships. A lighthouse?

  While they walked the streets, he counted eight main gates and two water gates along a stream leading down to the Pearl. They made their way north moving uphill to face yet another massive tower the guide called the Five Story Pagoda. When they came to the open field in front of it, the guide pulled back. The pagoda appeared to be a massive guard tower perched on the northern hill overlooking the city.

  “Forbidden, Your Grace. We cannot go close.”

  “This whole benighted expedition is ‘forbidden.’” The guard tower fascinated him, positioned as it was in the northern wall and provisioned with troops.

  “Heaven smiles so far, your worship. In the open ground too many soldiers.”

  The man had a point. However well his disguise worked so far, out in the open it might be harder. Yet, the sun dipped low in the West, putting his approach in shadow. Bowed head, submissive gait—it might work. He took several steps forward only to stop when a unit of troops came barreling down the hill in the direction of the river.

  People scattered in front of them like geese. “Where are they going?” he demanded.

  “The boats, your worthiness.”

  “Boats?”

  “Commissioner Lin has ordered destruction of opium warehouses.

  His mind reeled. Chinese or western warehouses? An attack on foreign property, inevitable though it may be, would constitute an escalation. How far will he go? What resistance will the merchants put up? He turned to his companion but found only empty space. The man had evaporated into the gathering mist.

  Alone in the growing dark, Charles had neither map nor interpreter in a city swarming with soldiers bent on destroying Western goods. He knew one thing; the factories—his only safety—lay to the south and west, toward the setting sun. He had no choice. He followed the troops.

  Chapter 25

  Dawn crept across the windowsill in the upper dining room when Zambak leaned on it, straining to see the city beyond its walls. Charles had not returned. She prowled the halls most of the night before collapsing into restless sleep until she awoke with a start, unable to shake feelings of dread.

  Peeking out to make sure the corridor was empty, she invaded his room, only to find it undisturbed. She picked up the miniature of his son Jonny from the dresser, hugged it to her breast, and collapsed onto his unused bed breathing in the scent of sandalwood and Charles, admiring the orderly arrangement—as neat and pragmatic as the man himself—and storing away what she learned about him in the treasure trove of memory. Try as she might, she couldn’t escape the realization she behaved like a lovesick schoolgirl.

  Dawn brought a painful admission. You want him, you ninnyhammer. You yearn for a married man—and he’s lost in Canton.

  Hunger drove her out to seek her breakfast and hope for word of the man. There was none. News of unrest in the city overnight increased her anxiety; Lin had begun to seek out and seize opium stores. Reduced to watching and waiting, she seethed with frustration. As the sun rose higher, she watched a steady trickle of Chinese moving toward the clinic doors from an upstairs window. Not one wore a deep green gown; not one had the telltale bearing of an English duke.

  She leaned her forehead against the window and squeezed her eyes shut, but the muffled sound of a drum forced them wide, and she stood up straight. A small party of official-looking men in formal court garb strode down the lane from the city gate, one carrying a document case.

  Another communication? She and Peters had worked out a response about the treatment of opium sickness and dispatched it late in the previous afternoon. She would not have expected a reply so soon. She set out for the clinic at a run.

  Zambak watched Peters bow to the commissioner’s messengers through the open door before she pulled back into the corridor. It was one thing to walk freely through the Chinese patients in the clinic—she’d been treating the poor wretches who came for their help after all—but quite another to parade herself in front of government officials. She owed Peters and Oliver that much discretion. She waited impatiently—one ear cocked to the conversation beyond the door—pulled at the sleeves of her embroidered jacket, and smoothed the pleats in her skirt several times before the party departed.

  Peters greeted her explosion into the clinic with a sardonic eyebrow and a weary gesture to follow him to his office. He called for Jian-bo, his most trusted assistant.

  “Lady Zambak, kindly sit. You will want to hear this.”

  She did, avidly watching when he opened the long narrow box and pulled out a long scroll, laying it across his desk.

  “A request for more information? Looks a bit wordy for that.” Something in his expression struck her as midway between amusement and exasperation.

  He pulled out a second scroll and lay it next to the first. The second contained not Chinese symbols, but English words. “Not even close. What you see here, my lady, is a formal letter to a sovereign.”

  “What sovereign?” she asked, eyes wide.

  “Yours.” He waited while she absorbed that information, too polite to mention that her jaw gaped.

  “It’s a letter to Victoria?” She squeaked out at last, too stunned to remember to use the woman’s title.

  “Aye. And he’s asked my help to make certain the English is clear and ‘respectful.’ The commissioner wishes to be seen as the renowned scholar that he is.”

  “From the looks of this, he needs help,” she replied, fingering the English document. “The attempt is hardly readable. How shall we go about this?”

  Peters sighed heavily but didn’t question her assumption of participation. Someone with knowledge of the queen and the English court could only help the process. He suggested they read through the current English version and then have Jian-bo read it to them, while the two of them discussed wording of the translation.

  Trouble surfaced almost immediately. “He’s implying the emperor speaks for all mankind,” she mused.

  “He believes he does. The emperor believes he has the mandate of heaven to do so.”

  Zambak asked his assistant to read the first few lines. “‘His heart is the heart of both heaven and earth.’ Heart or mind?” she asked.

  “The court translator wrote heart,” Peters replied. “Move on to the next.”

  “Dear God! Does he actually mean to say the kings of England have been respectful and obedient? That would be an enormous surprise to the queen, I can tell you that!” Zambak didn’t know whether to laugh or rise up on outrage on behalf of England itself.

  “Obedient or perhaps submissive. They’ve expected what few representatives have made it to the Celestial Court to kowtow to the emperor with unpleasant results.”

  “Kowtow? Doesn’t that mean bow? He would expect a foreign ruler to bow?”

  “Bow nose-to-carpet actually. On their knees. I doubt if they expect it literally. They assume it figuratively.”

  Outrage on behalf of womankind outran patriotism. “Victoria won’t accept lectures from Melbourne—or my father. A moral tirade from a Chinese commissioner? She wouldn’t take it from the emperor himself! As to the government and Palmerston . . .”

 
; “The concept of parliament would be lost on Lin, I fear. Let’s go through the meat of the thing.”

  The heart of the letter dealt with law and an expectation of rule by law. However much she might object to the tone and its underlying assumptions about power, she couldn’t disagree with the commissioner’s insistence that the law be obeyed. She couldn’t fault him for destroying contraband. Revenue agents in her country destroyed smugglers stores—when they found them. People died in those raids.

  Thinking about Lin’s edicts distracted her. Where the devil is Charles? The damned idiot probably threw himself into the operation just to watch it unfold!

  Peter’s voice pulled her back. “He seems to labor under the belief that the rulers of England, Scotland, and Ireland understand the evils of opium and refuse to allow it in their own ‘kingdoms,’ and assumes that your queen will, therefore, support his efforts to enforce the law in his own country.”

  “He has no idea,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose at the thought of the political complexities Lin glossed over: revenue from tea, rival political parties, the waning influence of the East India Company, the opium plantations in India, lobbying by merchant groups, limitations surrounding the little queen herself.

  “More than many Chinese, actually,” Peter’s countered. “He’s made an effort to learn, but yes, he doesn’t understand the constraints on Elliot’s authority nor the nature of your government. His moral points are correct however.”

  “He says the opium traders are—what does he call them? Rogues? Scoundrels? Pirates?”

  “Barbarians.”

  She thought of Jarratt. “I might agree with him on that one. He assumes opium is forbidden in the United Kingdom. Alas, it is not.”

  “No, nor in the United States. He would believe us to be mindless reprobates if he knew that.”

  “On some level, he would be right, at least about opium. Poppy juice is vile, and we allow it in every apothecary in the country. Even gin is more regulated. People give it to infants!” Thorn’s pain and his struggles overrode her misgivings about Lin’s worldview. “What shall we do with this thing?”

  “Clean up his English. Make sure we send him a translation as exact as we can make it.”

  “We can’t clear up his incorrect assumptions though, can we?” It wasn’t a question.

  “No, we cannot,” he replied.

  “The queen will be outraged!”

  “If she ever sees it. How would he have it delivered? Via Elliot? A military attaché? Your government would likely bury it.”

  “The fundamental demand is that the government cooperate in forcing the traders to turn over their opium stocks,” she said. “But of course the traders see it as taking their property and violating free trade.”

  “His men are destroying whatever they get their hands on, but they can’t get to the ships and won’t enter the factories. What will Elliot do?” he asked.

  “He forced the gunboats out of the river. Elliot might cooperate. He hates the stuff.” She doubted her words, even as she said them.

  “Elliot walks a fine line, and the English traders have friends in London.”

  “And a never-ending supply of opium from India, which Lin appears to understand quite well. Reread that passage, Jian-bo. I want to be sure of his meaning,” she said.

  The servant reread a lengthy passage that revealed Lin’s obvious knowledge about poppy cultivation and the regions of India in which it took place. Zambak repeated his “suggestion” that the queen order her subjects to eradicate the growth of poppy plants and “hoe the fields under to plant the five grains in its stead.”

  “Good, but alas futile, advice. Thorough as always,” she murmured. “Kill it at its source. The East India Company will laugh into its exquisite special reserve port over that.”

  “Perhaps,” Peters responded. “As I said, our task is to translate it as written. That is what the commissioner demanded. Do you wish to help or not?”

  She nodded and leaned forward. “You may be right. The queen will never see this.”

  He shrugged. “What would you do with it if you were Lin?”

  “He may be uninformed, but he’s no fool. He knows to go around the officials on the ground.” She considered the commissioner’s options for a moment. “He’ll publish it—make it an open letter and attempt to shame all of the traders into compliance.”

  “It won’t work. It will merely escalate the conflict.” He sighed. “We could refuse to help,” he said, but she knew he would not. How could we refuse a direct request from the highest official in Canton? They set to work.

  Hours later, she rose bleary eyed from the clear, pompous, and ultimately fruitless document they created. Peters planned to review, rewrite, and send the translation the next morning. She left sick at heart over escalating tensions. No word had come from Charles the entire day, and fear sat like a stone in her belly.

  A brief interview with her brother did little to improve her mood. He continued to see himself as a victim and complained about everything from the food to the overworked servants.

  “I’m bored here. The missionaries don’t hold with rum, and none of them will call me a skiff to the flower boats.”

  Mention of the flower boats sent a prickle of unease up her neck. On his feet, he could get up to mischief, and she had no excuse to keep him locked in. She had to get him out of Canton before trouble escalated, but she had no idea where Charles was.

  I need to find a way to keep him busy—to keep both of us busy.

  Chapter 26

  Twelve hours hiding behind a tanner’s workshop waiting for the cover of darkness gave Charles ample time to contemplate the folly of his actions. He couldn’t regret them, however, even though he couldn’t even understand the snatches of conversation that floated back to him.

  The soldiers he followed had led him far upriver from the factories to a massive warehouse, a beehive of activity. The sight alone had been worth his risk. Workers with dogcarts and sledges brought opium chests by the dozen, handing them over to officials. Charles watched those officials seal each one and mark it, a hedge against corruption he assumed. The quantity—and the monetary value—of the confiscated contraband staggered. The chests and workers appeared to come from the Chinese hongs. No obvious sign a Western firm had handed over opium stores showed itself, but he could not be certain.

  The activity had been so frantic, no one bothered to notice the odd man in the dark robe of a wealthy merchant. When he had seen enough, Charles meandered backward, ready to slip into the shadows of city streets. He didn’t dare walk along the open waterfront even though that would have been the most direct route back to the foreign factories.

  A shout called his attention back to a scene of horror. A man pulling a sledge had attempted to remove one ball of opium tar—a small fortune for a poor man—and slide it into his garments. The man still gripped the substance in his hand when soldiers knocked him to his knees and lopped off his head. The lull had been brief; the lesson, obvious. Work continued unabated.

  Even the summary execution of a thief hadn’t compared to the sight of troops dragging two merchants with chains around their neck to their doom two hours later. They marched with ceremony and panache that would not have been out of place at a coronation. He knew he would struggle to describe the crowd that followed once he got to pen and paper. He didn’t understand the mob’s shouts, but he suspected they demanded death to the perpetrators. Yet the mood belied the sort of blood lust that might accompany a public execution. Their eyes held fear and perhaps great sorrow. Many of these people welcomed the effort to stamp out opium even as the rapid flow of events alarmed them. The troops had carried out their mission swiftly and ruthlessly.

  An encounter with a lone soldier in a narrow lane, a knife fight that left both Charles and the soldi
er bruised and bleeding, convinced him stumbling around in the deep of night was a bad idea. He crawled into the foul-smelling alley, tore strips from his black shirt, and bound the slice down his arm as best he could. He slept little and that fitfully while he waited for morning. Dawn had come sharp and—by the time he roused—bright, so bright it seemed prudent to remain hidden and wait for the shadows of dusk.

  Why do costumes and derring-do always sound more amusing at the beginning? You’re too old for this nonsense. As he shifted his back for comfort, he doubted Zambak would be impressed. She would probably chide him for being a damned fool—unless, of course, she found the information he brought back as fascinating as he did. Zambak. Did I really tell her I wished she could come with me? She would have come without hesitation if she could have. That alone tells me my wits have gone begging.

  It had been equally unwise to allow himself sensual images of her in the night, but they had kept him warm and focused on return like a lodestone. When the sun dipped behind the Five Story Pagoda, he pulled the black hat down on his head, shook out his robes, and prepared to appear meek.

  Following the soldiers the previous night had another benefit. He had not been challenged when they went out the city gates. The harbor settlements outside the walls, a jumble of lanes lined with unpleasant businesses like the tanner’s, repulsive food shops, and dark hovels—what in London might have been seedy gin shops—lay between Charles and the factories, but no walls and no guards.