Bertie had time for everybody and the knack of seeing, somehow, what people really were about. The house was a fine building but it had not given him airs or made him forget the reason he had come to China in the first place. Every evening he had soup served at the back entrance, a huge, steaming pot that was distributed to the ragged crowd who assembled in anticipation at six o’clock.
‘I cannot sit down to my own dinner without seeing first to those less fortunate,’ Bertie said.
Everyone we had met so far in our adventuring considered the Chinese an untrustworthy race in general, and lazy. Bertie’s beliefs ran against this trend. He embraced every soul that he met. The man brimmed with forgiveness. I felt when I sat with him that he could see through me blood and bone, to my soul.
One day Robert went in search of a yellow camellia. The flowers were on his long list of highly saleable plants that he had most hoped to find in China. This colour was unheard of in Europe and yellow, he swore, always commanded a high price so when it was rumoured they grew near Ning-po he took his chances. Bertie and I spent the day on the mission’s terrace. Bertie had correspondence to deal with while I attempted to write to Jane. We fell, of course, to talking.
‘You are an adventurer, Mary,’ he said.
This made me sad. After all, I was not. I’d been forced to take this voyage.
‘Robert compelled me to come here,’ I admitted.
Bertie leant forward, his grey eyes soft. ‘Oh, I did not refer to your journey. Though it is quite extraordinary. No, my dear, I refer to your spirit. You strike me as brave. I hope you do not find me presumptuous, but, well, I am. My guess is that the reason Robert compelled you to accompany him is more to do with Robert than with you. My experience is that two hundred and fifty miles is in general enough to outrun any scandal.’
I laughed. ‘It was a scandal, all right. How did you know?’
Bertie shrugged. ‘What else?’ he said as he rang the bell on the table and ordered the maid to bring us some tea. ‘It is my job. Your sister must be very dear for you to bear it,’ he said.
I hesitated. ‘Bertie, would you, might you, confess me?’
Bertie tipped his hat, which on this afternoon was made of silk in the manner of a mandarin’s cap.
‘I should have to convert you first and I have no time for a baptism today,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps it would be more convenient to simply confide in me.’
I did not hesitate. Not even for a moment. It was as if I had been waiting for somebody to ask. In Chusan I had spent months alone with no one to talk to apart from Robert, who appeared intermittently in our dingy lodging house. To meet Bertie, with his easy manners and generous company, was like jumping into the ocean after months in the desert. I blurted everything, from my first meeting William to the day Robert and I left Hong Kong. I was so rapt in my own story, I confess, I almost forgot that Bertie was there. It was as if a tide was washing over me and I could not stop it.
‘Oh, I know,’ I finished, ‘it is a hundred sins all at once, Bertie. Adultery, illegitimacy, I have been headstrong and vain. And somewhere I must be proud too for I cannot say I truly regret it all. And Robert will have at me for admitting even the half. I have been utterly miserable.’
Bertie put his hand on mine.
‘He has dragged you three thousand miles on account of an illegitimate child and a talent for the stage?’
I burst into tears. Bertie made the sign of the cross before me.
‘Hush now,’ he said.
And as my tears subsided I had an overwhelming feeling of gratitude that Mr Thom had been called away and I was in Ning-po with someone who understood. To come so far and be listened to felt like flying—a smooth and fluid movement of the soul.
Once I had spoken of my story I found it difficult to lay aside the subject, I admit it. I felt different. Better. The mornings found me on the terrace sipping tea in the Chinese fashion, the leaves floating in my cup, with Bertie patiently listening before he started his religious duties for the day. It was extraordinary, I thought, that he showed no sign of his knowledge to Robert. In fact, if he was thick as thieves with me before breakfast he was no less cosy with Robert after dinner when they retired to the library to discuss horticulture.
‘And what of the mandarins?’ Robert asked him.
We had Chinese servants and we bought our supplies from Chinese merchants, but Robert was callow in the ways of the ruling classes and I had never met so much as one mandarin.
Bertie smiled and his eyes twinkled. He pulled several books from their places and made a pile of them on the dark table.
‘That is a start,’ he said. ‘But it is only by practice that you will come to understand. They are just men, like all of us, Fortune. Each an individual. They do what they must.’
It turned out that the mandarins were something akin to our own aristocracy or at least our English Ten Thousand—those in charge, those with the power and the money. They were drawn from two tribes with differences in their customs—the Han and the Manchu. The mandarins were known for their barbarity—even to their own people. During our time in Ning-po Robert spent several hours in the library every day and read almost every book on the shelves there.
It was in the library, in fact, that Robert kept his yellow camellias. The flowers had caused great excitement when he had found them, or at least, possibly found them, for Robert had bought the specimens for five dollars, but they were untested—the buds were tight as tiny cricket balls and the prized yellow flowers only a promise as yet unseen. He became quite obsessed, positioning and repositioning the plants each morning so they had the best light of the day. On one occasion when I came into the library, I found him searching with a large magnifying glass around the side of the buds for a mere wisp of yellow.
‘They are worth hundreds,’ he swore.
‘Only if they are yellow,’ I pointed out. ‘Robert, how could you be so foolish?’
Robert shrugged and settled back down to his book. ‘It is a wager. But I think they will be yellow as primroses. I hope so for then when they bloom they will be worth as much as all the tree peonies and azaleas I sent home together.’
Robert had struck a deal that when the flowers came out he would forward a further five dollars to the boy who had procured them on his behalf. One morning I heard the smash of glass as I sat reading on the terrace. I jumped up and ran into the library to find Robert red faced and furious beside the plant pot of offending blooms.
‘Damn!’ he shrieked, ‘the filthy, Chinese liar!’ He launched a book he had been reading towards the window, one pane of which was already shattered.
‘Robert!’ I shouted. ‘This is Bertie’s house! Calm down!’
‘Oh, I will pay for it, Mary. But damn it! Damn it to hell! These flowers are white—not yellow. Fetch me Wang, will you?’
With our servants dispatched to find the dishonest flower seller Robert’s temper eased. He sat on a wicker chair by the camellia, peering at the bloom with his magnifying glass as if inside the white there might be yellow petals yet to come. That evening none of us were surprised that neither Wang nor Sing Hoo could find the young vagabond who had taken Robert’s cash. He had left town swiftly with the money, no doubt delighted with his scam. Robert clearly thought this behaviour was representative of all Chinese citizens, but for my part, though I left it unsaid, if he had tempted a poor man with a fortune, who would blame the fellow for taking what he could?
‘Sorry, Bertie, about your windows,’ he said sheepishly over dinner. ‘I have instructed the repairs.’
‘Ah, the frailty of man…’ Bertie replied with a twinkle in his eye.
The afternoon after the camellias opened Robert, Bertie and I walked into Ning-po. We had not seen Bertie until after lunch that day for he had been in silent contemplation all morning, followed by his formal prayers, led at a nearby chapel. Bertie’s devotion fascinated me. Sometimes he would talk about the time he spent studying in Rome and how the grandeur of the V
atican, all Bernini’s angels and Caravaggio’s sinners, had seemed at odds to him with what he took to be his own mission. Down by the river we set aside the disappointment of the flowers and Robert and I listened to Bertie talking about the year he had spent in a seminary in Naples as we strolled along the unpaved streets. He talked about his mission in China. At last we stopped on the riverbank and stood staring at the curious bridge across the water. The tide was alternately so high and then so low that the city engineers had built a floating bridge that rested on huge boats. These rose and fell with the tidal flow, leaving the arches of the bridge always high enough for ships to pass underneath.
‘It is ingenious,’ Bertie declared in admiration. ‘It took them months to construct of course, but it is worth it in the end.’
Robert had not been put off his quest for the camellia. He regarded the moving bridge and the persistence required for its construction, as if it was a message.
‘I will try again,’ he mused. ‘It is out there, somewhere.’
We decided to linger for a while, so I set up my drawing stool and made some sketches. It occurred to me that at home we could build jetties on a similar model to allow ships to dock in tidal water. It was in my mind that Robert should send the drawings home to see if anything might come of the idea. Bertie meanwhile was chattering fluently to the small crowd that had assembled to inspect his outfit. He kept a supply of wooden crucifixes in a drawstring bag and gave them out like lucky charms. When I had finished he inspected each sheet, nodded approvingly and then helped to fold my stool. I had found myself all morning wondering what Jane would have made of Robert’s behaviour, for his temper had been monstrous. I had never seen him so passionate in London—taken up and bookish, certainly, but not with this fire in his belly—all over a flower.
When Jane had told me of Robert’s proposal, all those years before, I had questioned her.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked my sister, the day before she made her vows. ‘Do you love him at all?’
She cast me a glance. To her such questions were a mere annoyance. She wanted to be married. She wanted to be a lady. With Robert these things were possible.
‘Oh, Mary,’ she shook her head as if I was hopeless. ‘I am not afraid of Robert. He is not like that.’
An absence of terror seemed a strange basis for a marriage and at fifteen I was still not completely sure what Jane was talking about in any case. I followed my older sister down the aisle and stood by her side. And all I remember is that the bouquet was rosebuds and thistles—a spiky affair.
And now it was clear to me that Robert was like that.He had been that way since we left England. Unaccountably, he reminded me of my father, only with Robert it was I who bore the brunt of the man’s dark temper and Jane who was illuminated.
‘Well,’ Bertie said, ‘we can’t tarry here all day. We are close to a friend of mine who has an interesting garden. Shall we call?’
It transpired that Bertie’s friend was a mandarin named Dr Chang. It was characteristic of Bertie not to mention this until we were at the door. I think he must have planned it all along.
‘Less of books, Mr Fortune,’ Bertie smirked. ‘Here we are.’
Standing outside, with hardly a moment to consider what we were doing, I found myself both excited and daunted. There was no question that Bertie’s proposition was dangerous. In Chinese law the export of live tea plants is punishable by death. Robert’s proposed journey to Bohea and Hwuy-chow constituted a capital offence. Robert said that in the officers’ mess he had heard men argue over the Chinese tortures for hours—what was easier to endure and what might kill you soonest. There were tales of barbarous penalties. It made my skin crawl to know they hung men and women by the hair or by the thumbs for days, caged them in metal boxes in the dark, with only one tiny air hole or beat their suspects without mercy till their skin was completely raw. The year before, the authorities had found the body of a man who had died of over three thousand tiny cuts inflicted, they said, over three days and nights. In punishment for treason or murder, as well as this Death of a Thousand Cuts, or Ling Chi, there was slow smothering with wet cloths. The prospects at their very worst were terrifying.
While Robert’s mission was, I suppose, fairly widely known in the European community, there was no question of confiding it to a Chinese unless he could, of a certainty, like Wang and Sing Hoo, be paid for his allegiance. Even then, Robert still had not been explicit and continued to tell our men that this mission was to collect a variety of new plants on his journey. From his insistent questioning about tea production they knew that tea plants were included in this, but in the time that had passed since we left London, Robert had sent home seeds and cuttings from over eighty other varieties, so it was not yet clear to them that tea was the prize, the whole point of the journey.
On Dr Chang’s doorstep, I shifted from foot to foot. My hands were clammy. But with the fear there was also excitement. I knew more of China itself than I knew of her people and here was a chance to learn what the famed mandarins were really like. At first a smartly-dressed servant appeared. He peered at us, betraying only the slightest surprise to see three Europeans standing in the entrance, one of them a woman. I steadied myself, taking a deep breath. The man bowed and ushered us in, showing us through the entrance hall and across a courtyard into a pleasant reception room. He then disappeared and we heard shouting from within the compound. Bertie smiled gleefully. Our arrival was causing a small commotion.
‘I do love a rumpus,’ he beamed. ‘Don’t you?’
After a minute or two Dr Chang came. He was a small man with delicate features and was dressed in an embroidered blue robe, which he wore with black shoes and topped off with a cap. Chang’s face lit with delight at the sight of Bertie and he started into a babble of Mandarin that I could not follow. All my expertise was in the more widely spoken Cantonese.
‘Ah yes, he has heard of you, of course,’ Bertie beamed. ‘Bow, Robert. That is the way.’
Robert complied, bowing low and then, as if out of nowhere, there were servants bearing trays of tea and we all sat down in the garden, Dr Chang’s eyes sparkling as he took in the details of his guests.
It seemed that the Chinese community were as curious about us as I found myself about them. While we were drinking our tea on the terrace, another of the doctor’s friends came to call, and then another. Within half an hour we were seated in a veritable congregation of mandarins who had heard we were there and had consequently paid a social visit immediately. As each new guest arrived, Bertie managed a series of sly, cheeky winks in our direction. This I found comforting and I drew myself up, realising how much my experience at Drury Lane stood me in good stead. I imagined every detail of how I would like to appear in such a company and endeavoured to live up to this impression despite my quickening heartbeat. At once it became as natural as if I was often the only woman in a large company of potentially dangerous foreigners.
Conversation was stilted and slow, requiring copious translation, as the language of the mandarins is complex and difficult. It is so different from at home, where one’s fellow compatriots might have a different accent but at base everyone has the same words. Here, Chinese society fragmented into class groups, each with a language of their own. The sounds of each dialect has little in common with the others and this made communication difficult between the Chinese themselves, let alone with foreigners. I listened as one man spun my Cantonese words into new phrases while the others nodded, moving elegantly, their skin flawless and their eyes still.
The mandarins warmed to Robert’s occupation with plants. Most of them seemed to have a deep interest in their gardens and one or two had country estates where they grew food for their family’s use. The mention of a particular variety of plum, a drawing of baskets of peach blossom and even the cultivation of garden greens sparked animated discussions. At one point, during a heated conversation about the cropping of fruit trees, I realised that the hubbub was almost comical, given the
subject of our discussions were so mundane. I swear, these men were as passionate about gardening as Robert!
‘You see?’ Bertie whispered to me. ‘They are just like our own, dear middle classes at home.’
‘They’d kill us if they knew, Bertie,’ I whispered back.
He eyed me as if I was a child.
‘Mary,’ he chided, ‘and would our own, loyal, white men not kill a foreigner who had come to steal their secrets? Come, come. We have enforced our trade upon them. We have taken their ports under our own protectorate. It is to their credit they are receiving us at all.’
He was right, of course. The men were not evil, only dangerous. If we were ever to understand what was around us we must be more open to it. Bertie was giving us practice, that was all, and making our enemies into real men.
After we had said our long, formal goodbyes we jammed into separate rickshaws. Robert handed me up.
‘Well done. Very good, Mary,’ he whispered.
‘Nothing at all.’ I smiled down from my seat. ‘Thank Bertie,’ I said. ‘It was his idea.’
The bearers ran side by side. Many of the stalls in the marketplace were being packed away as we sped past and animals were scavenging for remains on the dusty ground. There were pools of spilled blood amid the discarded cabbage leaves and slivers of fish skin, but, I noticed, no smell, other than that of cooking in the nearby hostelries. I glanced back but Dr Chang had not followed us.
‘This place fascinates me. We must delve into it!’ I called over to Robert.
It seemed strange now that all our conversations about the mandarins to date had been on the subject of how to avoid them.
The Secret Mandarin Page 13