by Peter Tonkin
It was the last evening of Sally’s injury-extended furlough in Xianggang, and the simmering lust which had been intensifying between the apparently mismatched pair had ignited at last. These had been heady days for the all too recently down-and-out ex-naval officer who had seen his life reduced to ruins by the return of the Crown Colony to Chinese rule which he had so far refused to embrace. In little less than a month, under the wing of Twelvetoes Ho who had, it seemed, been saving him for just such an emergency because of his strange relationship with the Mariner family, Daniel had risen from utter destitution to rank, respect and responsibility.
Daniel knew he would have a secret meeting with a black cockerel soon in one of the Invisible Power Triad’s secret temples, but now that seemed less important than it had in the past. Now, of course, he had much more to lose if he displayed his ex-coastguard’s conscience — as he had done too often in the past at too much cost entirely. If his thoughts drifted towards classic literature, as they were inclined to do, they moved towards the erotic rather than the Faustian. With the breathtaking redhead supine on the bed before him dressed in only the bandaging needed to support her nearly healed hip, Miller was in his mind, not Marlowe or Mephistopheles. But he knew well enough to whom he had sold his soul. Even so, as he leaned forward, sliding the blades across each other with the whispering of a snake, his smile was unclouded and absolutely happy.
The bandaging was delicately cut and beginning to peel gently away from Sally’s extraordinary white marble skin when the lightest of scratching came at the door. Gathering a silken robe as black as Chinese ink round him, Daniel strode across the room. It was the same room in the Mariners’ house in Repulse Bay which the recently-widowed Robin had been unable to enter because it had been too full of the spirit of her dead husband. It bore no trace of either of them now, for all the Mariners’ clothes and chattels were in trunks in transit to Ashenden in England. But it was still Su-lin who stood there when the new master of the house opened the door.
Su-lin held a tray piled with her most perfect simple food. The new master had yet to develop a taste for anything too exotic. His stomach had existed for too long on simple mai to enjoy anything other than steamed vegetables and a little chicken or egg with his rice or noodles now, so Su-lin slaved to make the chop sueys, chow meins and foo yungs the best that had been tasted in the Middle Kingdom. For she liked her new master more than she approved of either of her recent gweilo overlords. The British lawyer Andrew Atherton Balfour had been kindly enough in his clumsy non-person way, and both the Mariners had been almost human; but none of these could compare with Daniel Huuk. He was a civilised person, not a gweilo; a bona fide member of the Middle Kingdom for all his mixed blood.
And, the gossip was — much of it passed to Su-lin by her brother who worked on one of the approved newspapers — that Huuk might well be a rising star in the twin worlds of legitimate business and Triad organisation. Gossip was all it would remain, of course, for younger brother Dung would never be allowed actually to publish such speculation. But why else had Twelvetoes Ho himself named the young man his new manager when the Invisible Power Triad bought the China Queens Company from the fleeing gweilo Mariners? Why else had the Dragon Head allowed him to occupy the house that had belonged to the former owners of the company? It was a mark of very high respect indeed.
And, thought Su-lin, it was right, just and proper that a man of such standing and estate should entertain a bedfellow as breathtaking as this gweilo made of white marble and red flame. Her own face would be immeasurably enhanced to be associated with the comings and goings of such fabulous creatures. And perhaps there might even, eventually, be the tiniest whisper that she, too, had tasted the pleasure … But this was an impossible dream, she knew. Oh, to be that little bit younger and more attractive. Aiyah!
As she handed over the tray, Su-lin strained imperceptibly to see over Daniel’s shoulder and was rewarded by a glimpse of the flames in question. Aiyah! The master’s private parts had better be made of asbestos when they came into contact with that particular hot seat of pleasure! And she was filled with a quiet contentment as she went back along the passageway and down the stairs that she had been careful to add garlic, ginger, ginseng, bear bile and just the tiniest hint of tiger’s blood powder to the fragrant sauces the lovers were about to consume.
Sally sat up, grunting slightly as her hip seemed to grate in its socket. ‘That smells wonderful,’ she growled, and her stomach growled quietly in unladylike agreement. She swung her legs round until she was seated on the side of the bed and then pulled herself erect as Daniel strode past her to place the tray carefully on the bedside table. The silk dressing gown brushed across the front of her body like a black moth’s wing and it suddenly became an absolute necessity to her that the bandage be finally removed. He had said he wished to do it himself, slowly and gently, for the elastic bandaging was coated with adhesive to keep it in place. But she, too impatient for gentleness or further foreplay, took the lower section which he had just cut open on her thigh and tore it upwards impatiently.
The sound of tearing made Daniel turn at once and, seeing her impatience, he gave a small smile of understanding. He reached for the ragged-edged cut in the topmost swathe, which revealed the pale, taut skin just below her navel. Two minutes later, her hips and buttocks tingled as though she had just enjoyed a very concentrated sauna. Wordlessly but welcomingly she fell back on to the already rumpled bed.
It was as well that Su-lin had thought to place the food upon little candle-fuelled warmers in case the meal was interrupted for any reason; the lids were not to be taken off the dishes for another twenty minutes and more.
*
The relationship reaching such a lingering peak of intimacy now had begun at the moment Daniel had replaced Sally’s hip joint but it had blossomed because of the dagger.
Sulu Queen, out in the deep water well away from the precipitous north-western walls of the Rifleman Reef, had experienced the tsunami itself as nothing more than a swell passing almost imperceptibly beneath her keel. It had been the massive millrace of the backwash around Tiger Island that had presented the true danger. But Daniel had proved more than seaman enough for the task. He had taken Sulu Queen north at flank speed until his watchkeepers and their instruments had informed him that the maelstrom had been calmed by the abyssal depths of the waters it was passing over. Then he had performed a Williamson turn and plunged back into the still-agitated seas, heading straight for Tiger Island.
Never in his wildest imaginings had he expected to find everybody from Luck Voyager packed snugly inside a Russian BTR-80 armoured personnel carrier. The machine had the capability of carrying advanced armaments including a 14.5mm cannon and a 7.62mm machine gun but it was all of a piece with the madness of the situation that the only weapon carried by the thing was an early medieval dagger of enormous proportions, breathtaking decoration and probably Indian manufacture. And that the only cargo should be a ton of treasure under the seal of Sir Francis Drake.
Daniel had locked the dagger and the treasure chest in the ship’s safe beside his bunk. As Sally owned the one and Daniel occupied the other, they came closer with a sort of magnetic inevitability. In his younger — naval — days, Daniel had been fascinated by weaponry. He looked at the dagger with the eyes of an expert and was happy to discuss at length with Sally what it was made of, what it was decorated with, where it had been manufactured and what it had been used for.
When the Sulu Queen pulled into Kwai Chung and the days of unloading and dealing with official officials and unofficial officials had passed, it seemed natural to Daniel that he should visit Sally, who was strapped up and under observation in the old Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in order to inquire after the dagger. And it had seemed natural, too, that he should accompany her to the establishments of the experts he trusted to get an opinion as to its provenance and worth.
*
The dagger lay on the occasional table under the window overlooking t
he statue of Tin Hau and the South China Sea beyond her as Sally and Daniel made love a couple of metres away, but only in photographic form. The actual dagger was locked in the vaults of the Xianggang and China Bank, for the blade was of silvered alloy beaten like the blade of a Japanese samurai sword, but at least a century older than the samurai; the handle was gold and all the settings and bindings were of gold claw and rope; the jewels were all massive rubies and the fist-sized pommel was the largest uncut diamond on record.
Already there was a lively debate at an international diplomatic level as to which countries’ national museums were going to enter the market for the fabulously priceless piece. The People’s Museum in Beijing had already unofficially opened the bidding at more than two million US dollars as part of their continuing drive to establish on every possible level that all the islands, rocks and reefs in the Spratley area were part of the Middle Kingdom.
It seemed to have occurred to no one except Daniel and Sally herself so far, that such a dagger must have had a sheath — a sheath fashioned and bejewelled to match its handle, not to mention its worth — and that the sheath was still somewhere on Tiger Island.
Half an hour after the bandaging came off, Sally lay contentedly propped against a pile of pillows with a little lotus-flower of porcelain held just below her chin. From this, ravenously, she was shovelling a breathtaking mixture of vegetables, chicken, eggs and rice into her mouth. The food was hot — she could only just hold the bowl — and every now and then a rice grain or a sliver of meat would tumble from her clumsy chopsticks on to the unprotected snowy slopes below. She would languorously lift her bowl aside to allow her partner, decorously but increasingly lingeringly, to lick away the offending morsel. Eating Chinese had often featured in the outer limits of foreplay for Sally but she had never realised just how close to the actual act it could get. But then she had never eaten Chinese with an actual Chinese before. Calculatingly, she let fall a fragrant cloud of foo yung and instantly regretted it — she had miscalculated the extra mass and heat afforded it by the hot sauce it contained.
Just as the burning morsel began to slide towards her left nipple, another scratching came upon the door and the cool tongue on which she was relying called, ‘Wait!’
Daniel swung himself away and crossed the room, picking up his gown on the way. This time he made sure that his wiry body completely covered the gap as he opened the door a crack. There was a whisper of Cantonese and then a fading scurry of footsteps. Daniel closed the door and turned. In his hand was a scrap of paper adorned with a black design. His face was as closed to her as the message on the paper. Suddenly the piece of egg above her heart went cold and her nipples tensed in fear. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
Daniel looked at her, his face still closed and calculating, then it split into a dazzling smile. ‘It is an invitation,’ he said. ‘An invitation from a new friend.’
‘Is it anything immediate?’
‘To a meal, sometime in the not too distant future,’ he said. ‘Chicken again.’
‘But it won’t,’ she said, raising her white lotus bowl, ‘it won’t stop you eating now?’
‘Nothing,’ he answered softly, ‘could stop me eating now.’
*
‘Hungry?’ asked Robin gently, rolling away from Richard. They had been snuggled together in silence since they had finished making love and she knew that he would be getting restless soon, wanting either a bite to eat or a cup of tea. The knowledge was at once familiar and new. She had known him, every bone, nerve and fibre of him, since she was fifteen; but the weeks they had just experienced had made him almost a stranger to her now. And the house was strange too, not to mention the freedom. They had not made love in the afternoon since before the twins were born, in the far, distant days before the Gulf War.
‘No,’ he rumbled gently, ‘but I think I’ll just pop down and make a pot of tea.’
Because the twins were away, back at school after a glorious half-term out at Summersend while their exhausted parents got to know each other all over again, they had no need to bother with dressing gowns or nightwear. He padded off through the door and off down the corridor towards the stairs; she rolled out of bed and stretched like a cat before wandering across to the big picture window overlooking the Channel a couple of hundred metres below. She stood letting the beauty of the scene and the almost inaudibly distant sounds that accompanied it seep like healing balm into her troubled psyche. If she made an effort to ignore the seductive radio, she could just hear the moan of the autumn wind, the rumble of the surf at high tide and the faintest ringing of church bells. It was the first evening after the clocks went back, sunset gathering unusually early; it would be full dark before evensong was finished down at the local church. Robin felt a little prickle of guilt; Richard was, after all, a church warden and they had not managed to get up and out in time for matins this morning.
But as she stood looking away across the darkening waters below her, with the vast arch of the sky reaching across from right to left before her, rose-pink on the Western Approaches rising to moon-glow white over France then settling to smoky darkness away towards the Goodwin Sands, Robin felt that God would probably be indulgent with them. They had been through so much. They had lost each other and found each other. Or found strangers with familiar faces. Now they needed time together more than anything else. Time together alone.
Oh, why could it not have been her instead of Sally bloody Alabaster who had been washed up with him on that desert island?
‘Now don’t be ungrateful, dear,’ she said aloud. ‘At least we’re all alive.’
Quietly, on the radio behind her, the concert they had been listening to subtly changed its tone. The ruggedly beautiful certainties of Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasia were replaced by the unfulfilled yearning of his Kol Nidrei. The exquisite but never resolved modulations of the cello rose and fell, perfectly in tune with her thoughts, seeking fulfilment and peace but seemingly never quite finding them. Distantly, in the shadowed depths of the silent house, the telephone chirruped. Richard answered immediately — probably on the kitchen extension. They had switched the bedside telephone bell off, not wanting the business bustle of the morning to spill over into their romantic afternoon.
And there had been a great deal of business. Because it was the Sabbath, much of it had been conducted to the background of the distant but clearly audible matins peal of bells. The sale of the China Queens Company to the Invisible Luck Consortium of Macau had been hailed as a masterstroke and seemed to have added greatly to the viable stock of Heritage Mariner. But even if Richard had come out of his Chinese adventure penniless in business terms, he would have been able to make things all right financially in terms of treasure trove. The treasure from Drake’s ship, claimed at once by the Queen to whose namesake the whole of Drake’s cargo had belonged, had been magicked through customs — even the labyrinthine customs of the Middle Kingdom — and reposed now in the vaults of Coutts and Company, Her Majesty’s bankers.
Under the laws of treasure trove, if it was proved that the find was random and fell within the purview of the British monarchy, then Richard was entitled to a percentage of it, although a relatively small one. The potential worth of a little more than half an Imperial ton of assorted Spanish silver and gold was so astronomical that a small percentage would yield him much more than Sally Alabaster could ever hope to realise from her dagger. And that would be welcome, for the Far Eastern venture had been disappointing. The possibility of receiving favoured company status in Xianggang under Chinese rule had seemed so promising; there had seemed to be a chance to build another Jardine Matheson; a Noble House for the twenty-first century. But it had come to nothing in the end and they had been lucky to escape with their lives and fortunes intact. Indeed, had they not been so closely associated in the past with Twelvetoes Ho who had earned his nickname as chief steward aboard their ships, then they would have been lucky to walk away at all. It seemed, during the last few years, that a
ll their legitimate endeavours — the attempt to ship Russian nuclear waste aboard the specially designed transporters Atropos and Clotho; the market for the Katapult sporting multihulls; even the trade in oil and tankers — had all been faltering. It was lucky that chance had given them one providential illicit card to play; but it wasn’t much to show for all that work and all those dreams. A little profit from Drake’s treasure chest would by no means come amiss.
The bedroom door whispered open behind Robin and the sound of Richard’s bare feet came padding across the expanse of bedroom carpet. The sound of an old song came, too. He was whistling it between his teeth as he habitually did if he was concentrating or deep in thought. It was ‘Annie Laurie’, she thought; no, it was the throbbing violin solo from the middle of the Scottish Fantasia they had just been listening to. She felt lightened by the lilting sound. She was a Borders girl born and raised, so the Scottish songs were close to her heart.
She wondered only vaguely who had phoned, actually possessing little of the psychic qualities her fey Scottish mother had enjoyed. She did not ask, therefore, but accepted the mug of tea Richard handed her and waited companionably for him to speak.
‘Look at that,’ he said at last.
She knew at once what he was talking about. There, low over the Western Approaches, the evening star had risen. The intense diamond light of Venus under the sun burned with eye-watering intensity immediately above the royal blue of the still Channel.
‘They used to be able to navigate by that in daylight,’ said Richard thoughtfully, telling her sealore she knew well enough but was happy to hear again.
‘I don’t know whether it’s the thickening of the atmosphere or a change in our eyes nowadays, but navigators as late as William Bligh’s time could see Venus in full daylight and navigate by her. I think he used the ability to get the Bounty’s cutter home, but I’m not sure.’