The Unexpected Wife

by Caroline Warfield

  “Yes,” she replied softly. “Be safe yourself, Charles. I love you.”

  Chapter 38

  Charles sank to the floor, his back to the wall under the window, his head cradled on arms folded across his knees. How much more of this can I endure?

  “Charles?” the voice sounded stronger than usual.

  As long as I have to. “Yes, Julia?”

  “That was Sudbury’s chit, wasn’t it?” his patient whined.

  “Yes.” He didn’t move from where he sat, weary to his marrow.

  “No better than she should be,” Julia mumbled, attempting to sniff and failing. He couldn’t work up any more rage.

  “Charles?”

  “Yes.”

  “Talk to me please. I hate the silence and the dark.” She hasn’t spoken in two days. Why now? Zambak’s presence, he realized, disturbed her.

  “What would you have me say?” he asked from his corner in the growing darkness.

  “Tell me about my son. Tell me about Jonny.” Her voice sounded thinner and farther away.

  “No. Not again. Not tonight.” I can’t bear it.

  “Rand then. What happened to your gullible cousin? Did he really marry a red Indian?”

  Visions of Rand Wheatly and his family snug in their cabin in Upper Canada cheered him. “He married a woman of great courage and strength. A woman of character. He has become quite wealthy. Did you know that? They call him a timber baron.”

  “Nouveau riche,” she mumbled dismissively. “Stupid farm boy.” He let her drift back to sleep before going down to fetch Filipe.

  He had failed his son, though doctors assured him he could do nothing. He was failing Zambak. He could at least try to salvage her brother.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Two days, Your Grace. He left to stay with Mr. Jarratt two days ago. You never came back.” Mrs. Josie stood palm out. He greased it with coins, ran upstairs, threw the last of his belongings into a haversack, and fetched Zambak’s journal from under the floorboard. It was one more thing he could do: deliver their reports to her father. At least he could if he could get free of the dunghill that kept him in Macao.

  The Murnane tiara came next to hand, shooting beams of light from his hand. He tried to envision it in Zambak’s hair and failed. Emeralds would compliment her white blond hair far better. He briefly considered leaving it, but diamonds make useful bribes should it come to that. He reached deeper beneath the boards and pulled out two sleek percussion pistols and a bag of shot. There was no time to obtain a proper box. He added them to his haversack and set out to find Thorn.

  He found him readily enough on the steps of William Jarratt’s flamboyant mansion perched like a bird of prey uphill from the Elliots’. The marquess and the trader’s nephew dressed in evening clothes and, looking as if they planned an evening in one of London’s finer hotels, emerged from the house as he approached. Charles doubted very much they would seek anything respectable. Thorn’s clothing hung loosely on him, and Charles concluded the boy had stopped eating again, living instead on laudanum. In the lamplight, his sallow skin testified to dissipation.

  He bit back frustration and forced cheer into his words. A verbal battle with Hugo would be pointless. “Stepping out, gentlemen?” he asked sweetly. Too sweetly.

  Thorn blinked twice, slow to gather his thoughts.

  Jarratt had no such problem. He eyed Charles with the intensity of a fencer planning his killing blow and said, “There are delights to be sampled in Macao, Murnane. Care to join us?”

  “Alas, no. I have responsibilities. I would like a word with the Marquess of Glenaire, however. A private word.” He hoped the title might penetrate the haze around Thorn.

  Jarratt glanced at the boy and back at Charles. “Yes. One recalls the duchess is ill. Pity that.”

  Bile rose in Charles’s throat, and he fisted his hands to keep from attacking the man who left Julia in her filth in a deserted house to die. “Thorn, a word, please,” he said.

  Zambak’s brother looked at his supposed friend, and the brute nodded. “I’ll step away so you can have a little—family is it?—talk.” He sauntered toward a waiting carriage, leaving Charles alone with Thorn on the porch. Hugo leaned against the carriage door and watched them through hooded eyes.

  “Do you have any idea what’s happening here?” Charles hissed.

  “Quiet evening,” Thorn responded, looking confused.

  “Do you know about the murder?” Charles asked. He outlined Lin’s demands.

  “Hugo says Elliot won’t give in. Send in the navy first. Hugo says Lin is a, a—” Thorn scrunched up his forehead. “A paper dragon.”

  Charles bit down hard, frustration with the fool wreaking havoc with his self-control. Thorn, oblivious, went on cheerfully. “When the navy comes, we can expand trade. We’ll all be rich. Even my father will be impressed.” He patted Charles on the arm.

  Charles shook him off and leaned in until is face was inches from Thorn’s. “Listen to me carefully, Thorn. Lin is no paper dragon. He will enforce Chinese justice. He may not be able to do it forever, but he can, and he will make life hell for the British in Macao and the entire Pearl Delta while he’s doing it. He is on his way to Macao, and the Portuguese will bow to his wishes. They have to if they want to retain their city.”

  “Hugo says—” Thorn looked confused.

  “Be quiet and listen. No matter what the minions of Jarratt & Martinson tell you, remember this. Your sister is here. Whatever comes down on the city, she will be in danger. Do you hear me?”

  Thorn’s eyes widened, and he said nothing.

  “Do you hear me?” Charles repeated. Thorn nodded. “Your sister will need your protection.”

  “But you—”

  Charles overrode him. “I may not be able to help her when the time comes. I pray she stays close to Elliot, but you know Zambak as well as I do. She may put herself in danger. If I can’t get to her, she will be alone. You have an obligation—a duty—to protect her. Do you hear me?” Desperation gave his words force.

  Thorn looked toward Hugo Jarratt as if the man could help him sort out a confusing puzzle.

  “Coming, Glenaire?” Hugo called. “Delights await.”

  The powerful longing in Thorns eyes drove out all other thought, and Charles knew with certainty where they were going. Having reintroduced him to laudanum, the Jarratts planned to bury him in opium smoking next. Darkness seeped into his soul.

  “I have to go, Charles. Can’t wait the horses.” Thorn brushed passed him and hurried to the carriage with more animation than he had shown about anything else. Thorn, he could see with black despair, would be lost to them.

  Chapter 39

  Word came from Zhuhai just beyond the gates, brought by breathless runners to Charles Elliot’s door, that the commissioner had paused in his journey. That same morning, placards appeared across the city declaring in Chinese and Portuguese that, if Commissioner Lin were to hear that a Chinese citizen had murdered a foreigner, he would without hesitation order the murderer’s execution. His meaning was not lost on the Chinese and mixed-race residents of Macao—nor on the foreign community.

  Zambak haunted the lower rooms while men came and went, their loud voices echoing from Elliot’s study, and Clara Elliot fluttered about the place as if nothing unusual was happening. She kept busy in part by adding to her journals what she gleaned from The Chinese Repository and from nightly forays to pry open dispatch boxes. There was little enough of it. One detail appalled her. Elliot thought removing the British from Canton removed them from use as hostages again. It never occurred to him Lin would move on Macao.

  Elliot held the guilty sailors in the brig of the HMS Fort William anchored off Kowloon and prepared to put them on trial. Lin pretended not to hear his petitions and sent further demands tha
t they be handed over to Chinese justice.

  The day following the appearance of placards, frightened Macao hong officials huddled with their foreign counterparts. Word filtered to the Elliot mansion quickly. Commissioner Lin sent a formal edict reminding them that the prohibitions present in Canton applied to merchants in Macao as well, and the penalty for disobedience remained the same—death. He subtly made clear that he knew full well the extent to which the “treacherous barbarians” had held back opium and were plying their trade from Macao.

  When several traders came to talk to Elliot, he stood in the door and told them to “stop the nonsense until this blows over.”

  Zambak, sitting quietly in the shadow of a potted palm near his office, heard Elliot’s angry outburst when another petition came back unopened. “He can’t seize the property of British subjects with impunity, and he will not get custody of members of Her Majesty’s navy.”

  Replies from the Portuguese couldn’t have been clearer. They could not help and would not try. They meant to hold on to their colonial outpost and the British be damned.

  Zambak did not believe Lin’s wrath would blow over—or bend. They defied him, and he singled out the British to pay. Two more American firms had signed bonds demanded by Lin and publicly renounced the opium trade—the sincerity of which actions Zambak begged to doubt. Elliot had ordered the British not to sign, and the merchants had happily complied. Now Lin approached their doorstep. Elliot, she knew from the dispatches, had finally sent for the navy.

  Filipe came twice daily, only to run back to Charles with missives from Zambak in which political events mixed with desperate declarations of the heart. When asked about the situation in the little house, Filipe just shook his head sadly. No change.

  Three days after the edict, lightning shattered a massive tree in the Portuguese compound, and rain pounded the roofs of the city. As if in harmony, the political storm broke. Charles Elliot, wary of Lin’s intent and tired of waiting for the navy, suggested the British community take to their ships rather than risk a blockade like that at Canton. All his petitions for an audience had been refused.

  Lucy Ingram rushed in, dripping rain to spew terror and hugs all over Clara Elliot, who struggled to calm her own children before announcing she would be first to board her husband’s ship.

  “It will take a day or more, Captain Elliot,” Clara had declared. “I can’t just drag them out in their socks.”

  Zambak carried her small trunk down and placed it discretely next to the growing pile of Elliot luggage. She left her larger trunk to the mercies of servants and sought her bonnet. She would at least say good-bye to her missionary friends and perhaps glean some more sanely parsed information from Dan Oliver.

  She tripped running down the front walk, righted herself, and darted down the street. Unlike the eerie quiet of the previous several days, frantic activity now swirled around her. She turned toward the missionary compound, and a decision solidified.

  I’ll go to that blasted house when I’m done and send Filipe after my trunk. I will stay with Charles as long as it takes—whether he wants me or not. I won’t leave without him.

  When she reached the Rua dos Mercadores, crowds confronted her. Clerks and secretaries in British-style clothing walked toward the docks, and others went about their business, but the bulk of the seething mass tended north toward the Border Gate on the causeway connecting Macao to the rest of China. Small patrols of Portuguese soldiers made a show of keeping order.

  He’s coming. She stopped in her tracks. How can I turn my back on the arrival of the commissioner to Macao? After everything she had done so far, she refused to leave without seeing this act in the drama. She fleetingly considered a return to the Elliots’ to change to Chinese dress and swiftly rejected it. Within moments, Zambak had scribbled two notes and, with the help of a few small coins, dispatched one to the American mission compound and another to the little house near São Lourenço.

  Lin Zexu would come down the causeway with his retinue in full display. She didn’t plan to miss it.

  ~ ~ ~

  Deep in the night death lurked, its sound as familiar as its face. Charles alternately paced and sank into stolid waiting. What could be said had been said; what could not be reconciled had been endured. Selfish to the end, Julia neither begged forgiveness nor forgave him for the indebtedness his tenderness and care thrust on her. She took his ministrations with resentment and paid him back by clinging to life as long as possible.

  As her breathing grew shallower and shallower, each breath further from the last, Jonny’s last hours came to him, and he wept—not for the woman on the bed, but for the wreck that had been his marriage and for the boy, the one good thing that had come from it. He wept until he couldn’t and knew in his heart he had finally let go of his son and all that tied him to the past.

  She took a shuddering breath, and he murmured, “Try to find peace, Julia, if you can. You won’t find it here.” He rose to pace again, but silence spoke to him more loudly than words. There had been no other breath. He waited momentarily, and hearing no other, placed his hand over her eyes to make sure they closed and consigned her to God’s mercy. He pulled the sheet up over her head.

  He stood, a hollow shell, staring down at the bed until a voice brought him back to the world. “‘r Grace? I talk now?”

  Filipe hopped from one foot to the other in the doorway, casting wary glances at the bed. He had burst into the room the evening before and been summarily thrown out. Charles vaguely remembered one or two attempts to interrupt him later. He had turned them away.

  “Yes. Talk now. What’s so important?”

  “Lady Zam sent note.”

  Lady Zam. Emotion flooded into his emptiness, a torrent of yearning and desire, a bone-deep need to see, to touch, to possess. I have to tell her. I need— The boy’s words penetrated him finally. “What note?”

  “You didn’t want, so Filipe read it,” the boy went on, proud of the accomplishment. “I fetched her trunk, but she not come.”

  “What do you mean ‘come’? Where?”

  “Come here. She say to fetch trunk and meet here. I do, but no Lady Zam.”

  He cursed in three languages—two of which the grinning boy seemed to understand. “Why isn’t she at Elliots’?” he demanded.

  “Missy Elliot say Lady Zam is in her room, but I looked. Dresses everywhere. No Lady Zam. Missy Elliot say ‘Foolish girl will have to meet us at the dock. Go find her.’”

  “Did you?” Charles ran an agitated hand through his hair. “Of course you didn’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be dancing in the doorway. Where is this message from Lady Zambak?”

  Filipe dug around in his grimy shirt and pulled out a much re-folded paper.

  Charles

  Not to worry. Lin has begun his formal entry—you know his penchant for show—I will just watch a bit, duck into Knightons’ to say good-bye, and join you. The entire British community is packing to leave. Be ready.

  I won’t leave without you, you stubborn man.

  Zamb

  P.S. Have Filipe fetch the trunk that is by the clock in Elliots’ foyer. I will join him at your house.

  “See. My name,” Filipe said proudly, pointing.

  “Did you look for her at the mission school?”

  “Last night only. Not there. Not at house of mission lady.” He sobered. “‘r Grace, streets very bad last night. Gangs. Soldiers. Very bad.”

  Charles crumbled the note and considered the possibilities, some of them unthinkable. “Either she returned to the Knightons’ late and stayed there, or she returned to Elliot’s when things got dangerous,” he said, groping for his packed haversack behind the foot of Julia’s bed. Or Lin has her. He shoved several uglier thoughts aside, loaded both pistols, and shoved them into his belt.

  He bolt
ed to the door only to be brought up short by the sight of her trunk next to his front door. He flipped it open, hoping for a clue that might help him locate her but found only her neat and practical collection of traveling clothes. He smiled at the Manchu fabrics, reached under, and easily sprung the false bottom.

  I need to teach her better subterfuge. He whistled at the wad of money. Trust a Hayden. He returned a fourth of it and split the rest between his boot and haversack. He left her trinkets. The real treasure, her journals and notes, he put with the one in his haversack.

  The situation is moving in too many directions at once. “Filipe, take this blasted thing back to Elliots’. No! Better. Get it on Elliot’s own ship, HMS Reliance. Failing that, get it on any vessel of Her Majesty’s navy but not—and this is important—on a merchant ship. Am I clear?”

  He handed the servant bank notes and hoped he didn’t drop the trunk in the harbor and disappear onto the mainland. He couldn’t worry about it. He started out the door.

  “Where meet?” Filipe asked from behind him.

  “Pardon?”

  “After I take trunk. Where meet?”

  “Stay with the trunk. We’ll find you.”

  Chapter 40

  Night terrors never bedeviled Zambak Hayden; at least they didn’t until a city in chaos left her confused, lost, and utterly alone.

  There had been other westerners in the throng along the road toward the sea when Lin’s entourage came, banners flying and drums beating, to the Lin Fung Temple, and the great man himself stood to address them. She had been too far to hear his words, but she could guess them, and the unease that built around her confirmed her fears. The western barbarians would not be permitted to flout Chinese justice.

  She had edged away then, forced toward the coast and the fishing shacks along it. She moved confidently enough at first and quickly realized crowds made it impossible to go directly across toward the mission compound. Prudence dictated she get herself back to the Elliots’ mansion instead.