by C. S. Harris
“I’m glad they’re dead,” she told Hero, her face set hard. “Does that sound horrible? The only reason I agreed to marry Forbes was because my father told me he’d take away my baby if I didn’t. Forbes promised that if the child was a girl, he’d raise her as his own.” She paused to draw a shaky breath. “You know the survival rates for infants left to the parish or given to foster mothers; they almost all die. I realized there was no way I could save a son. But if by marrying Forbes I could save a daughter, I decided it was worth it.” She twisted her hands together, her head bowed. “Of course, it was all a lie.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hero, her heart breaking for the desperate young girl this elegant woman had once been.
Kate’s head came up, her eyes fierce. “I’ve hated Forbes for eighteen years. Hated them both. I feel like a hypocrite, wearing black for them.” Pushing up, she went to stand at the window. Outside, the day was sunny and warm, with just the hint of a breeze. From the distance came the laughter and shouts of children playing around the square’s water basin. “No one’s found any trace of Nicholas’s child?”
“I caught a glimpse of her this past week, when I was interviewing a blind musician in Clerkenwell Green. And in thinking it over, I’ve realized I may know how to find her.”
Tuesdays for Leicester Square, Alice had said. Wednesdays for Clerkenwell. It could simply have been a coincidence that Ji had reportedly been seen in Leicester Square on the same day Alice always played there. But the more Hero thought about that morning on the green, the more she’d become convinced that Alice had been lying, that the blind woman and Ji had been there together. So far Calhoun’s attempts to track down the hurdy-gurdy player had been unsuccessful. But tomorrow was Tuesday. . . .
Kate turned, and Hero saw the leap of hope in her eyes. “You do? Even before Forbes died, I was determined to find a way to care for her. But now I can do whatever I want and I want that child more than anything in the world. Can you take me to her right away?”
“Not right away,” said Hero. “But I have an idea. . . .”
* * *
Tuesday, 21 June
Early that morning, Ji helped Alice set up in her favorite spot in Leicester Square, then moved a ways apart—close enough to protect Alice’s cup from thieves but not so close as to attract attention. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Ji began silently reciting sutras. She prayed, first for the man she had so shamefully wished would be reborn as a hungry ghost. Then she prayed for Hayes.
It was the twelfth day after his death. If Ji were in Canton, she would be burning incense and giving cloth to the monks on Hayes’s behalf. But she wasn’t in Canton. Never again would she smell its sweet plum blossoms or see its gentle waterways, and that hurt. But it didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as the knowledge that she would never again see Hayes.
When Ji was a little girl in Canton, she used to stare at the faces of random women in the street, looking for the faintest suggestion of a resemblance—the arch of a brow, the curve of a lip. And she’d wonder, Are you my mother? Are you the one who conceived me after lying with a man your family considered a ‘barbarian’ so that when I was born, they took me from your arms? Were you horrified when you looked down at my face and saw the truth of your shame written there for all to see? Were you relieved when they carried me away to leave me on the banks of the Pearl River to die? Or did you cry out and grieve for your loss? Do you miss me still, the way I miss you? Do you search the faces of the little girls you see in the street, hoping against hope to find me?
“Oh, Ji,” Hayes would say, holding her close, “I’m so sorry.”
He could have lied. He could have told her that she was his child, that she’d been born in love to that woman who’d died in childbirth just hours before Hayes—devastated and wishing for his own death—had stumbled upon an abandoned, wailing infant on the banks of the river. But instead he had told her the truth: that his child had died along with her mother. That was his way.
“Even a well-meaning lie can sometimes cause incalculable harm,” he was always telling Ji. She had seen the look on the face of Hayes’s friend Jules Calhoun when Hayes told the story of his escape from Botany Bay. About how he’d killed the ex-soldier caught up in the floodwaters with him, and then bashed in the man’s face so that everyone would think it was Hayes who had died. Another man might have lied and said the soldier was already dead. But not Hayes. Years later, he was still reciting mantras for the benefit of the man he had killed.
Ji let her head fall back, her gaze blurry with unshed tears as she stared up at the gray English sky. “I miss you,” she whispered.
Swallowing hard, she lowered her gaze to scan the crowd in the square, looking for potential trouble. That was when she saw him—Hayes’s friend Jules, standing at the corner of Cranburn Street. And there, nearby, was the awe-inspiring woman from the Red Lion, Grace Calhoun.
The more she looked, the more familiar faces Ji saw. The man from the Turkish baths whom Hayes had pointed out to her as an old friend. The extraordinarily tall gentlewoman who’d been interviewing Alice the day those men tried to grab Ji in Clerkenwell Green. And that other lady, dressed now in the severe black that Hayes had explained Englishwomen wore when in mourning. Ji recognized her as the woman they’d watched from a distance in St. James’s Square—the one Hayes told Ji he’d once loved.
That he still loved.
The woman in black came closer. She stood for a time listening to Alice play her hurdy-gurdy before stooping to drop some coins in the tin cup. Then she turned and walked right up to Ji.
Ji rose shakily to her feet, ready to run.
“Do you know who I am?” said the woman.
Ji studied her pale face and yearning eyes. “Yes.”
“Once, long ago, I loved your father. I—” The woman’s voice cracked, and she had to start over. “I love him still. I’m told he came back to England, hoping to find someone to care for his daughter when he died, and I would be honored if you would allow me to do that. For his sake, and for yours.”
Ji felt a breeze kick up cool against her face. Heard a child laugh and a dog bark somewhere nearby. It would be so easy to let this woman go on believing a lie. So easy. But even a well-meaning lie could sometimes cause incalculable harm.
It was the hardest thing Ji had ever done, but somehow she forced herself to say, “I’m not his daughter. Not really. He adopted me after he found me abandoned by the river the day his real daughter and her mother died. People think he named me Ji because it means ‘good fortune’ and I was lucky he found me. But he always said I was his good fortune because I gave him a reason to keep living.”
Ji saw the woman’s chest jerk with a quickly indrawn breath and knew just how much her words had hurt the woman—that she’d been holding on to the comforting thought that a part of Hayes still lived, and Ji had just taken that away from her. Then the woman gave a strange smile and shook her head. “If he adopted you, then he loved you and you are his daughter. That’s all that matters. Will you let me do this, for him?”
Blinking hard against the threat of tears, Ji glanced over at Alice, who was no longer playing her hurdy-gurdy and was instead simply holding it and listening to them. “What about Alice? We’ve been taking care of each other.”
“Ach, child,” said Alice quickly, “don’t you be worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”
“If Alice has been taking care of you, then I think it’s only fair that we continue to take care of her.” The woman held out her finely gloved hand. “Will you let me? Please?”
For one suspended moment, Ji hesitated. Then she reached out and felt the woman’s hand close protectively around hers.
Historical Note
T he Allied Sovereigns’ visit to London in June of 1814 was, if anything, even more of a whirlwind of activities than depicted here. I have tried to stay as close to the actual schedule as possibl
e, although I shifted a few events. The reception at Carlton House was not held on the evening of 9 June, and the barge expedition down the Thames started earlier in the morning.
The barges on the Thames were the stretch limos of their day. For a good six hundred years, virtually every guild, official organization, and wealthy family had its own elegant barge, complete with a liveried crew. On the Thames side of Somerset House, you can still see the arched entrances to the building’s old barge house, and several surviving examples of the carved, gilded barges are preserved at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
The British East India Company was basically an example of capitalism run amok. A joint-stock company with its origins in a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I, it eventually turned into an empire-building enterprise with the right to acquire and rule territory, raise an army and navy, make war, and mint money. By Sebastian’s time the company controlled most of the Indian subcontinent and had an army of more than a quarter of a million men (twice the size of the British Army). It was when the Directors of the company ran into financial difficulties in the eighteenth century that they convinced Parliament to pass the Tea Act of 1773, which of course helped spark the American Revolution. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 led to the end of company rule in India, with the Crown taking direct control of what then became the British Raj.
The Canton System and the East India Company’s trade with China were essentially as described here. One of the most helpful books I read on the subject was Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845.
Both the process for producing tea and the plants themselves were once closely guarded Chinese secrets. The East India Company did eventually manage to send in spies to discover the secret to tea production and steal some of the plants. They then began to grow their own tea in India and what was at the time called Ceylon.
The story of Britain’s role in the production and spread of opium use is sordid. By forcing Indian farmers to produce opium rather than wheat, the East India Company did cause massive famines. The worst was in 1777, but smaller famines continued to occur throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than carry the opium in their own ships, the company sublet the operation to what were called “country traders”—private ships used to smuggle the opium from India to China. The silver thus earned was then used by the company to buy the Chinese luxury goods they shipped back to Britain. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, addiction levels in China had soared and were becoming a huge problem. When the Qing dynasty finally moved decisively to put a stop to the smuggling, Britain declared war on China—twice. As a result of what became known as the Opium Wars, the Chinese government was forced to legalize the opium trade. The Opium Wars also helped to spur a wave of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast of the United States. And yes, they brought opium with them.
Hero’s interviews with street musicians are based on the reports of Henry Mayhew. Most street musicians of the time were either blind or of foreign birth.
The character Mahmoud Abbasi is loosely based on a man named Sake Dean Mahomed, a former captain in the East India Company who ran what is believed to have been the first Indian restaurant in London. The Hindoostane Coffee House opened in George Street in 1810 but was forced to close the following year, after which Mahomed went into the “shampooing” business. Turkish-style baths became increasingly common in the late Regency (one opened near Jamie Knox’s old tavern at Bishopsgate churchyard in 1817), although it was under the reign of Victoria that they really exploded when they were widely recommended for “medicinal purposes.”
British use of Lascars continued well into the twentieth century. There were more than fifty thousand Lascars working on British ships at the outbreak of World War II, and when I took a P&O ship from Australia in the 1970s, the ship’s crew was still almost entirely Indian or Goan. Many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indians who ended up in Britain took local wives, with their children being absorbed into London’s population. There were no legal restrictions on mixed-race marriages in nineteenth-century England, and in 1817 a magistrate of the Tower Hamlets wrote with “disgust” about the number of local white women marrying Indian seamen. For an interesting firsthand look at the life of a half-Indian, half-British man growing up in nineteenth-century London, see Albert Mahomet’s From Street Arab to Pastor.
There was a ship called the Earl of Abergavanney that struck the Shambles off the Isle of Portland in a dense fog, but that was in 1805 and it sank. Its captain, John Wordsworth, was a brother of the poet, and he went down with his ship.
The medieval church of St. Dunstan-in-the-East managed to survive the damage of the Great Fire of 1666, but some of the repairs were done badly. By the early nineteenth century, the weight of the roof had forced the walls seven inches out of perpendicular. In 1817, it was completely rebuilt in a similar style, only to be heavily damaged by bombing in World War II. Rather than tear it down or rebuild again, the ruins and the churchyard were turned into a lovely park that can still be found today near the Tower of London.
About the Author
C. S. Harris is the USA Today bestselling author of more than two dozen novels, including the Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries; as C. S. Graham, a thriller series coauthored with former intelligence officer Steven Harris; and seven award-winning historical romances written under the name Candice Proctor. A respected scholar with a PhD in nineteenth-century Europe, she is also the author of a nonfiction historical study of the French Revolution. She lives with her husband in New Orleans and has two grown daughters.
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