It was at Sung Lo Shan one bright day that we finally found the yellow camellia. We had passed many tea farms. Mostly they were smallholdings of four or five acres, a down-at-heel farmhouse attached. Near one of these Robert spotted a garden with an orchard and we decided to stop and take a look. The lady of the house, wizened and elderly, lived with her two sons and their families—ten of them crowded into a tiny space. They treated Robert like royalty, maintaining a hunched appearance throughout his visit and addressing him as ‘Your Eminence’. We stretched our legs in the garden, the children remaining silent, standing in a ramshackle line and eyeing Robert with awe.
And then I spotted it. To one side, grown quite by chance among the plum trees—a glossy-leafed camellia absolutely covered in yellow flowers. I recognised the plant immediately.
‘Robert,’ I said excitedly. ‘Look. It is your camellia.’
‘Oh, well done,’ he breathed. ‘Stay calm now.’
This made me smile. I was not quite so far gone that I was set to fit over a flower. He casually called the old woman over and said nonchalantly that the plant had caught the eye of his secretary and he would like to buy it. After some haggling, they settled on the figure of two silver dollars—a fortune for the family, but nothing compared to what it was worth in England. Under supervision Wang and Sing Hoo dug it up and placed it into a creaky old tea chest, which had been provided. On the way back to our lodgings it was the camellia that rode in Robert’s sedan, with him pacing behind, urging the bearers not to allow it to rock from side to side. We made a curious sight no doubt.
‘Be careful. Careful,’ Robert instructed the bearers testily, before turning to me and proclaiming, ‘Mary, it is a prize. A prize. Though I did not find it, Mary. You did. And it is a treasure.’
That night we stayed up past midnight taking cuttings and pressing one or two of the custard-coloured flowers. Robert examined the plant minutely, making plans for when he could collect the seeds.
‘This plant is important then?’ I asked.
‘Of course. It is on my list of the ones most likely to sell well. It is beautiful though, is it not? We have camellias in yellow now! Who would have thought it? I had hoped to find one but I had not been sure.’ His eyes were gleaming.
Our stock of plants was growing. Also in Robert’s care were a beautiful white gardenia, which smelled of paradise, a sunny, double yellow rose, some cotton plants he had found sown between the tea, a white glycine and some dwarf trees, which in the end, he decided not to keep, as at home these were considered in bad taste and are most unfashionable. The yard of the inn had rich soil and Robert kept the specimens in sundry pots. This transformed the barren courtyard into a thriving nursery so that after a fortnight or two the tumbledown building looked quite attractive from the outside.
Best of all, to our amazement, the local tea farmers welcomed Sing Wa and were completely open about their business, allowing us access to the farms and the processing rooms where the tea was dried and treated. We had not been sure how they might react but in the event it was easy for us, and the men were unfailingly generous, probably due to the lack of soldiers in the area. The Chinese military was notoriously fierce and punishment was uncompromising for common men and mandarins alike. Free from any direct threat, Wang presented Robert as an eccentric, rich Northerner obsessed by tea, who wished to set up plantations on his own land. The farmers had little to do with mandarins, even those in the area (who seemed both few and distant), and they were honoured to have the chance to meet a fine gentleman, especially one so keen to learn their art. We paid a silver dollar or two, greasing palms, smoothing our way.
‘Thea viridis,’ Robert muttered, almost as if it was a prayer.
We had missed the crops being gathered for the first two harvests of the year—the first, tiny, precious leaves in April, which commanded extraordinary prices, and the second, in May, which was the main export crop and had been processed before our arrival. The final gathering, however, was of the lowest quality, picked for the Chinese market and that was underway. We watched like hawks.
All this time, recovered from his beating, Sing Hoo was in good spirits. Hwuy Chow was his home province and he admitted that it was good to be back among everything that was familiar to him. He proposed to visit several of his relations who lived to the south and west of Hwuy Chow Foo, not as far as Mo-yuen. This would take several days’ travel and Robert put off the trip, saying he would give Sing Hoo leave to organise a visit towards the end of our sojourn when the work was done. Meanwhile the man struck up a liaison with a maid. One day we arrived back from the tea farms earlier than expected to find him idling with her, a peony in her hair. Robert was furious—such behaviour in London, after all, would throw both parties on the streets. I laughed, ordered tea and dismissed them from our presence.
‘Heavens, Robert, let them have their fun,’ I said. ‘He has done far worse than this and got away with it.’
‘If we did not need him he would be gone,’ Robert replied irritably. ‘I hope that peony was not from one of my plants.’
On another occasion, arriving again early, we disturbed Wang in Robert’s room with two men who, we surmised, had paid to see the great mandarin’s quarters. They fled on our arrival, leaving Wang shamefaced and Sing Hoo smug. The see-saw of their fortunes seemed to have one up, one down at all times. I knew Wang bargained rice sometimes and had seen him spirit away smaller items though, of course, Sing Hoo was far worse. This time, Wang, to his credit, apologised though he did not disclose the amount of money he had gained from the transaction. Robert blustered but he took no action. The offences were trifling and he had too much else on his mind. The profusion of information seemed to leach his attention and mine. Between us we filled notebooks with drawings and descriptions.
Quite apart from the tea, the colours of some of the hillside flowers were beautiful—green, glossy leaves with deep purple and red petals, the light musky scent of which belied their brazen, exotic colours. Other times the leaves were pale lime and framed lacy, delicate, white blossoms tinged with peach and pale rose. These smelt of the fruit yet to come. I wished I had a greater palette in my watercolour boxes to capture everything.
One night Robert arrived back at the inn with a bottle of rice wine that he had Sing Hoo take to the stream to chill. He was excited, unable even to sit down at first, pacing around the room, full of energy.
‘I have bought boxes of tea seeds,’ he announced, almost incredulous.
It was exactly what he had hoped for. All the plans were coming together.
‘How did you manage it?’ I asked.
Tea seeds were like gold dust in the region and their sale was highly restricted, but Robert had befriended a farmer and had sealed the matter by claiming they were for his ‘estates’ in the North and he could not leave without having them, no matter the price.
‘It will take two months,’ he declared, ‘but the man seems reliable.’
The boxes were to be ready after the harvest and the farmer had given Robert clear instructions about how they should be treated. The seeds were to be sown allowing four feet between each shrub for the optimum yield. Robert, naturally, thrived on these details. From the tea gardeners he found, at last, the answers to the questions he had written in his notebook at the beginning of the trip.
‘It is fulfilment, Mary. Completion,’ he said eagerly, and this delighted both of us. Robert’s mission was rapidly becoming a resounding success.
For my own part, I found myself drawn to the land. We were now set to stay a while and I resolved to enjoy it as if I were on a holiday. The clean air of the beautiful green hills rolled for miles. The sunsets were silent explosions of turmeric and syrupy flame. There was a serene simplicity to this place that reminded me of endless childhood summers. I wondered how I had ever lived in a city the size of London, in a city where it was so grey, and in such close proximity to people. Here I spent the majority of the time on my own by choice. It no longer even surpris
ed me to see the man who stared back from the small looking glass in the corner of my room or who was reflected when I leaned over the still clear water of a hillside pool. It is strange that what seems at first alien becomes second nature in the blink of an eye.
I wished Jane could see this place, though I don’t expect she would have taken to it quite as keenly as I. There was part of me that was still childish—that still wanted to swim in the pond down the hill and eat blackberries on the way home until the juice stained my chin. Even at the age of eleven Jane had berated me.
‘A lady never rushes her food, Mary,’ she scolded.
‘Exactly,’ I said, not slowing down with the berries one bit.
I wondered if Henry would like it here—now well past his first birthday, no doubt plump and, I hoped, happy. I was sure he would. But I did not dwell on him or indeed on my sister either, and though I thought of my loved ones often, the disturbing dreams stopped and there was no longer a gnawing sensation of regret or discomfort. I found a lightness in Hwuy Chow Foo that allowed me to let them go more easily for a while.
Some afternoons I walked away from the farmed land towards the trees on the horizon. There I climbed up and rested among the shady branches to watch the harvesting far off in the distance. One day I happened upon a pool and jumped in to swim in the icy water, my skin tingling with the cold, my ponytail loose and fanning out behind me like a dark cloud. It was beautiful—a place of heady, simple pleasure.
When the tea was harvested, it was sent to be dried. This took several days and every available space was taken over—cottages, barns and outhouses filled with each man, woman and child, all playing their part in the process.
Robert rose early. He followed the bamboo baskets, brimming with greenery, down to the shallow, iron drying pans, which were set up indoors over furnaces. The barns and cottages were smoky as there were no proper chimneys, only a tiny flue installed in each premises. Even the walls smelt musky.
When the harvested tea arrived the leaves were tossed lightly over the heat for five minutes and then rolled by hand, three or four women to a table. Their nimble fingers danced over the foliage twisting it again and again until a green juice was extracted and the leaves were only a quarter of their original size. Then the tea was left to air outside, shaded if the sun was high and hot for, we were told, it must be done gently.
Once this process was complete the leaves were tossed back into the pans and stirred using bamboo brushes for an hour and then left in flat baskets over charcoal. The tea by this time was not a bright, live green any more, of course, but for their own use the Chinese did not add any additional colour and in this regard they disdained the green tea to which we were accustomed—the kind made for export.
Robert stood over the packing cases watching the even, small leaves of better quality being trod into the boxes by children wearing straw shoes. The farmer was encouraging them to pack in as much as possible. When he spotted here and there an area he felt had not been properly bedded down, he pulled the child across the box to see it was done correctly.
‘And of green tea?’ Robert asked, ‘like the gweiloh prefer?’
The man snorted. ‘The salesmen add dye,’ he said. ‘My brother went down to Shanghae once with a big harvest. He sold it to a merchant and stayed to help with the colouring. When he came home his hands were blue.’
‘Blue?’ Robert tried to question further, but the man knew no more.
‘Blue for the foreign barbarians,’ he confirmed.
It was a puzzle, though after two weeks of persistently asking every farmer he talked to, Robert was able to procure some samples of the dye. He packed them carefully to be sent to London for analysis. It was some months, of course (and by then we had moved on) but we found out latterly that it was Prussian blue and gypsum that were used. The tea also contained a dye of which Robert had not heard before. It was made from a Chinese plant with beautiful blue flowers, which grew in the foothills.
‘Isatis indigotica,’ Robert chose its name.
It had not been known at home before. Robert, of course, took cuttings and collected seeds.
‘This is easy money,’ he commented ecstatically, for to find a new species with such a clear application to business was a boon.
Our rooms came to resemble large potting sheds. We pinned drawings to the walls, nurtured seedlings at the window and dried herbarium specimens at the fireside. Boxes piled up full of seeds and heavy papers with specimens between. One evening I counted over a thousand drawings I had made. I packed them in folios, each clearly marked and cross-referenced. In the end there were a total of twenty boxes, like wooden packing trunks, that housed all our goods. Six were filled with carvings that Robert had come across, for up in the hills he had found a mason, working only over the winter months, who wrought extravagant statues, mostly of trees. These were magical, elegant pieces so fine and perfect that they seemed almost like dancers striking a pose. We heard later they had made excellent prices at auction at Turnbull’s on the Strand. We wished we had bought more.
To occupy myself over the weeks while Robert laboured, I became interested in scents, making flower oils and combining them in small flasks in different combinations. I fancied myself quite the olfactory chemist and set up a room near the courtyard as my workshop. I installed a long wooden table, some cupboards, mixing bowls and all the apparatus for extracting the oils. In the morning I picked wild flowers and herbs in baskets and even employed three women to help, showing them my preferred plants and then sending them to the hills to pick enough for me to work with. From these I extracted scented oils as my mother had done when I was a child, for where we lived there were meadows of thyme, lavender and mint, which the local women picked and processed for the apothecary in the town nearby.
I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day—the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment—sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base. As the harvest proceeded I made oil from peaches, apples and melons that added sweetness to my concoctions. Sometimes the scent of the rooms was overwhelming, on a hot day especially.
Robert chose from my collection a gentle, plummy oil as his own and added it to his shaving water. The fragrance lingered. On my part I preferred roses and peaches mixed so that the scent of the flowers just crept up on the scent of the fruit.
Then, one day, some weeks after we had arrived, I was walking back from an excursion on the hillside. I had been lost for some time in my olfactory experiments and was so at ease with life in Hwuy Chow Foo that I was surprised that when I saw the man in the distance, he so drew my attention. My heart began to pound. Although dressed like a Chinaman, I could see from half a mile that he was European. The way he moved was so different. His whole body jerked as he hammered solidly down the hill towards the road. Excited, I began to run in his direction, clasping the basket of herbs I had picked to my chest, ready to drop it if need be. Here was a compatriot—who was he? What was he doing here? And would he bear news? I had not realised I had so missed the company of my countrymen. I did not want to shout, just in case someone heard me screaming in English or in case, just in case, I had imagined the man and he wasn’t a European at all. At length he spotted me and I waved to signal to him to stop. He nodded and waited on the track.
‘Waiyee,’ he greeted me as I approached.
And then the sport of it struck me and I greeted him in Cantonese to see if I might get away with the ruse.
‘Where are you from, sir?’ I asked, carefully modulating the tenor of my voice to sound more male, forcing myself not to stare too closely at his appearance, for in China this would be considered unforgivably rude.
‘The hills,’ he replied. ‘Are you in trouble? Do you need my help?’
Even in a tongue as foreign as Cantonese I could hear his accent was from th
e North of England—near Liverpool or Cumbria perhaps. His manner was straightforward and he was not the least bit threatened by me, which must be unusual, I thought. Any white man approached so forwardly by a Chinese would be forgiven for being on his guard, but this fellow was at ease completely. I got the impression he was tired—he was a big chap and wore a beard but there was something about his demeanour that made me feel he was truly exhausted. I immediately felt guilty at trying to trick him. He had asked me if I needed help but my instinct was that he was the one who needed assistance or, at the very least, some respite.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, raising my voice to its normal pitch and coming clean. I was so glad to encounter a fellow gweiloh and was itching to hear his tales. ‘I could not help but see if you could tell that I am not Chinese at all. My name is Mary Penney.’
His face lit up. On hearing me speak English he took on the expression of a ten-year-old boy.
‘My God,’ he peered, ‘you’re a woman?’
I laughed.
‘Yes, and very pleased to meet you, sir,’ I held out my hand. ‘Who are you?’
‘Edward. Father Edward.’
‘One of Bertie’s priests!’ I shouted gleefully, and I was so excited I flung my arms around the poor fellow, who seemed quite bemused by my enthusiasm.
‘You must come back to our lodgings,’ I insisted. ‘My brother-in-law is there—he will be delighted to make your acquaintance.’
The Secret Mandarin Page 19