The Secret Mandarin

by Sara Sheridan

  ‘Here,’ Robert offered and he pulled me into his arms. ‘Come on,’ he said, and carried me to my room, laying me on the bed. ‘I cannot believe you made it over the hills and that the front step of the inn defeated you!’

  We inspected the injury and, after moving my foot one way and another, realised that there was thankfully no breakage. I lay back and was glad that I was safe at last and that we had nowhere to go.

  ‘I will bind it,’ Robert offered. ‘You must rest and in a day or two it will be fine. You only knocked it, that’s all.’

  I had no objections to resting. He must have been as exhausted as I was but he found some muslin to use as a bandage and carefully wrapped my foot and ankle so they were supported.

  ‘Thank you,’ I breathed.

  ‘Do you think you can sleep?’

  I giggled and nodded. I was glad to be lying on a proper bed at last and I could already feel I was slipping away.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Mr Fortune,’ I murmured.

  I slept for two days. When I woke they brought a tray of food. The stove in the corner of my lodging had been stoked and my luggage brought up. I ached when I moved but thankfully my foot was no worse than any other part of my body and I was ravenous. As I ate sitting up in bed there was a knock at the door and Robert entered. He had on fresh clothes and had made his toilet, looking fine, I thought, with a thin moustache in the Chinese fashion. When I moved I could feel the pearl he had given brushing against my skin on its thin gold chain. I was delighted to see him.

  ‘I can scarcely believe we are here,’ I cried out. ‘We shall have black tea and in abundance. And the food is fine. Here,’ I gestured a small bowl towards him with some kind of fish cooked in spices.

  Robert waved it away. ‘I have eaten. And eaten.’ He smiled. ‘I am glad to see you up. Since we arrived it has hardly rained at all. Not a drop. The soil is draining already. Are you well, Mary? How is the injury?’

  I nodded. ‘My foot is much better. A few days’ rest and I will have recovered. How are the men?’

  ‘Mostly drunk,’ Robert admitted. ‘They leave to go back in the morning. They think now the ice is almost melted and with less to carry they will be home in six weeks, in time for the second harvest. I have paid them a bonus, reminded them of the danger if they report us, and, all in all, they seem well pleased. They want to get back to their families now.’

  ‘I could not imagine another step, I swear,’ I said. ‘Harvest or not.’

  ‘We will rest,’ Robert promised. ‘There is much to see here in any case.’

  ‘More specimens?’

  ‘Oh, perhaps. But the hill itself will be a find. They say there are legends of lost spirits. I want to climb it.’

  I cast a glance outside at the mountain. It was a lovely view—the slopes were green and the day bright.

  ‘Robert,’ I said. ‘I just want to sleep.’

  He took away the tray and I lay back on the cushions and closed my eyes. Robert sat by the window and I heard a book open as he settled to read. I could smell the plummy oil he used. His favourite. He could take Wang, I thought sleepily, and climb the mountain. I would wake later and we could dine then. I was already looking forward to it. I pulled the satin quilt around my shoulders and as I slipped again into unconsciousness I thought I heard him murmur something. Sweet dreams or somesuch. Then I heard him adjusting the position of his chair. He is going to watch over me, I realised as I drifted off. He is going to sit here while I sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  When I woke again it was dark, my room was empty and the hostelry silent. I crept out of bed barefoot, pulled a blanket around my body and sat by the window. I pushed back the screen and the view took away my breath. The full moon was low, silver and bright. Beneath it Wuyi Mountain was lit up, all green shadows. The scene was perfect, nothing out of place. There was not a breath of wind, so the faultless landscape stood unmoving and silent. The town seemed deserted. The houses and shops were closed for the night and there were no lights from any of the buildings and no one abroad on the streets. Everyone was asleep.

  ‘It’s magical,’ I whispered under my breath.

  In the morning the coolies rose with the sun. Our settlement lay along the Great Imperial Road and as soon as light dawned the thoroughfare burst into life with frenetic activity. It was easily as busy as Piccadilly.

  Early, a maid came into my room to stoke the iron stove and, finding me awake, she hastened to fetch tea. This was different from the black tea one might expect at home, I noticed, and upon enquiry I found it was known as Luckcha and was a mixture of the green and the black varieties. Commonly used in the region, it was never produced for export outside its borders and was quite unknown even elsewhere in China. Robert had clearly procured pure black tea for our use the other day but when I asked her the maid knew nothing of it. The Luck-cha was pleasant enough, however, and it suited me well. After all, I was between green tea and black tea myself.

  After the maid left I hastened to make my toilet—finding a razor and shaving my head again, I sorted through the clothes laid out behind the screen and found something clean and suitable for the day. Then I donned a cap and a coat and, checking myself over in the small glass, I resolved to explore the settlement for myself.

  It was cold outside but there was spring in the air. On the street, bright braziers were already alight and the shops and stalls were opening. I followed the dirt-paved thoroughfare, setting off in what seemed the most promising direction. As I strolled through town the buildings became larger and I found a Tsin-Tsun, a tea market, among the warehouses. This was an open marketplace with a small raised platform such as is often found in cattle markets at home. It was too soon in the season for even the earliest crop but still there seemed a good deal of trade in sealed boxes, which I assume were packed with seeds.

  I passed through the warehouse district and, buying a bun from a stall with rickety bamboo wheels, I carried on my journey to the edge of town where the tea fields started on the slope of the mountain. The soil, I noticed, was very clay and a browny, yellow colour. Such a location was well suited to the cultivation of tea and the plants were coming along well, given the harsh winter they (and we) had endured. I noted that the drainage seemed excellent, given the conditions, and then I laughed at myself, for in my head I sounded like Robert. I licked the last crumbs from my fingers and proceeded to climb the hill a little way. The town receded and became quite picturesque, the smoke from its fires snaking upwards in pretty spirals. Bohea was certainly charming.

  As I climbed I tried to make out our lodging house and to ascertain which window was my room. I found a large, flat stone on the path and sat to contemplate the settlement. Up on the hill one or two women were checking their crops but it was too early for the harvest and they merely nipped a dead bud here and there and moved on through the rows of plants. As I had seen in Chusan, one was carrying her baby all swaddled and bound round her with a long, brown cloth. Another kept her hands busy, weaving a length of matting from rushes she carried in a bag over her shoulder, only stopping now and then when she had need of her agile fingers to tend to a plant.

  At length I walked back down and picked my way through the crowded streets to our lodging. Robert was up, eating fried eggs and sipping tea. As I entered, Sing Hoo placed a steaming cup in my hands and I wound my cold, pink fingers around it.

  ‘Good morning,’ I greeted Robert. ‘I have been on the lower slopes this morning.’

  ‘Did you see?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were in the tea fields? What did you notice?’

  ‘That the women of Bohea are never idle,’ I joked.

  Robert slurped his tea. This habit of his used to annoy me, but curiously I had become accustomed to it.

  ‘I realised yesterday,’ he said. ‘It took me a while too. Mary, it is extraordinary. They are the same plants. Exactly. I can find not one single variation from Hwuy-chow. Last night I cut up the roots,
only to be sure that there wasn’t any difference there. It’s thea viridis. And all this time we believed there to be two species. But the difference between green and black is only in the processing. That is all.’

  I cast my mind’s eye back to my stroll on the slopes—of course the plants looked similar but I had not truly examined them.

  ‘But then,’ I concluded, ‘we are here for nothing. For no reason at all.’

  I sank down beside the table in a state of distress. I felt completely despondent—our long journey had been endured only for this.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Robert said cheerily. ‘We are here to see what they do with these plants that results in tea that is so very different from the green variety. But it’s true we will need little for the herbarium. Most of our time will be spent in the factories. I have had our sedans brought around and yesterday I sold the mules.’

  ‘How long have we been here?’ I asked, suddenly aware that I felt most disoriented.

  Robert’s eyes became gentle. ‘Oh, Mary,’ he said, ‘this is our fifth day.’

  As well as spending long hours at the local tea factories, Robert quickly made it his business to investigate the military garrison in the area, which was based over twenty miles from Tsong-gan-hien, away from the main stretch of farming land. The military presence in Bohea was far greater than we had had to endure before but it also seemed more self-contained, for the garrison did not use the town’s facilities. Under the cover of an excursion with both Wang and Sing Hoo by his side, Robert collected plants from the fields around the barracks and returned with excellent drawings of the buildings and the means to calculate the numbers of men and horses, as well as the level of armament at the garrison’s disposal. In Hong Kong they had very little detail available about the military this far inland and were not sure how the Chinese supply lines operated so Robert’s information was no doubt invaluable, although here, certainly, the soldiers’ main function appeared to be to keep the peace and enforce the law. The barracks was not at battle stations and, as far as we could tell, was not directing either troops or supplies towards the coast. By now, of course, Robert and I were both more confident in our disguises, and, having come through so much and having scared Wang and Sing Hoo sufficiently with our past experience, we felt ourselves equal to handling a garrison at a good distance. A wary kind of confidence in our survival had become the habit and, though it was more dangerous in Bohea than in Hwuy-chow, we were circumspect.

  One day, highly excited, Robert returned from a surveillance expedition to the north of the garrison.

  ‘There are soldiers’ houses up by the river. I cannot work out what on earth they are used for,’ he said.

  ‘We could take a stroll nearby,’ I suggested.

  Robert hesitated. Thus far he had kept me well away from his espionage activities. While I guessed what he was up to and often saw his drawings or calculations, I still had no idea of the details—who the intermediary was who received his reports, or the precise meaning of his coded letters.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ I assured Robert. ‘But a stroll by the river together can do little harm. Please take me with you this time. It will be exciting.’

  We set off the next morning, taking Wang and some bearers, for it was best to travel by sedan chair on these longer journeys. It took two hours to reach the spot and, sure enough, there were a dozen strange conical huts scattered along the riverbank.

  ‘Ping,’ the chief bearer announced.

  Soldiers. But there were no soldiers to be seen. We ordered to be set down and, taking Wang, we wandered in the general direction of the little settlement, discussing loudly the kind of plants we hoped to find. There was no activity around the huts—no coming or going and no sign of any cooking facilities or other habitation. The bearers settled down to wait, unimpressed by our little show. They drank some water from the stream and crouched by the sedan chairs in the shade while we walked on, picked some wild flowers and circled the huts at a distance.

  ‘It is eerie,’ Robert said. ‘There is not a soul. Do you think they are storage huts?’

  ‘It is odd to store supplies so far from the garrison and with no guard,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You stay here,’said Robert. ‘Dig up that plant.’ He pointed randomly to a berberis bush, which was growing a few yards away.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I whispered nervously, realising that he intended to approach the huts.

  He turned and gave me a stern look.

  ‘Keep a look out, Mary, and get off sharp if you have to.’ He winked and proceeded carefully towards the river, disappearing from view.

  Wang began to move the soil around the berberis. The buds were formed and already they smelt lovely. I stood over him as he worked, in what might be termed a supervisory position, and glanced intermittently towards where I had last seen Robert. The place was indeed deserted.

  To my relief, after ten minutes Robert reappeared, tearing up the hill towards us. He had a broad smile on his face.

  ‘Mary,’ he said gravely, when he arrived, ‘do you think that the word for soldier might have another meaning too?’

  ‘Why? What did you find?’

  ‘Nothing Pottinger will care for! They are full of ice. Quite clever, in fact. The stuff must be brought down from the hill in the winter and then stored. There are troughs at the back for the melt to run off into the river. They are crammed with blocks cut from the hill over the winter.’

  ‘Blocks of ice?’

  ‘Yes. And there is a seal on the door, like a coat of arms. The huts belong to a mandarin family.’

  Our eyes locked and we laughed. Wang regarded us plainly as if we were mad.

  ‘Wang,’ I asked him, ‘did you know these were not soldiers’ huts?’

  Wang nodded. ‘Yes, Master. They are for ice.’

  Even as he pronounced it, the two words were so similar that it was obvious where our mistake had come from.

  ‘And you thought we wanted to see these ice houses? Full of ice?’

  Wang looked vacant. ‘Yes. Masters always want to see everything Chinese. Masters like Chinese.’

  I hesitated. I took his point. Such was our interest in the mundane details of Chinese life that it must have seemed not the least bit strange that Robert was excited at the idea of viewing storage houses for the local estate.

  Robert smiled. ‘We have wasted our day today.’

  ‘Well,’ I remarked, ‘not if we remove this berberis. Look, Robert, it is quite exceptional.’

  And between us we dug the plant from the soil and carried it back to where the sedans were waiting.

  On our journey back to town we passed half a dozen officers riding towards the barracks. They nodded curtly as we passed, and Robert adopted the haughty expression that had served Sing Wa so well. Ordinary Chinese men were always nervous of soldiers, and our bearers stiffened as soon as the riders appeared. I kept my eyes straight ahead and did not acknowledge the men. We later learnt they had arrested some poor soul at the tea market and beaten him soundly for purporting to have tasted Dragon Well, the Emperor’s own tea. Perhaps it was for the best that we had gone to see the ice houses that day and we scarce saw a soldier other than that.

  Wang, having done his duty with regard to unpacking our things and settling us in, now requested permission to visit his family. We were stationed at quite some distance from his village, which he had pinpointed on our maps as being, by our reckoning, perhaps a week’s walk and would take him across the path of the Wuyi River. Robert was not keen to give the man leave of over a fortnight, but to me it seemed only fair.

  ‘Sing Hoo has given us far less service and we let him go home,’ I pleaded.

  Robert adopted an amused expression. He was not in the habit of caring about people. It is not that he was deliberately unkind, he simply did not make human considerations.

  Over dinner, some days after the outing to the ice houses, we came to discuss it.

  ‘Do you thin
k Wang will return if we give him leave?’ Robert threw his hands in the air. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said solemnly. ‘If he gives his word, I think he will. Just as you would. And if you are so worried perhaps we should accompany him as we did with Sing Hoo.’

  ‘A fortnight at least, Mary. How can we?’

  ‘Well, I could go.’

  Robert stared forlornly at the map.

  ‘Alone?’ he said.

  ‘No. With Wang, of course. And an entourage.’

  Robert considered this. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘If anything happened to you…’ His voice trailed.

  ‘We should send him with gifts then, and some men to make him look grand. Give him an outfit, perhaps.’

  ‘It is,’ Robert raised his eyes heavenwards, ‘as if you are staging an Easter pageant, for heaven’s sake. Must you look after everyone?’

  We argued on over the meal and it was only in the hallway at the very end of the night that Robert finally agreed that Wang could be given leave to make the trip. He was equitable by nature, only sometimes he took coaxing.

  ‘All right. The man can go,’ he said.

  ‘He will thank you the rest of his life for that, Robert. Imagine being so close and not going, poor Wang. In the rush to change the world I would hate to think that he was trampled.’

  Robert paused for a second.

  ‘You know, Mary, in making me do all this, you make me a better man.’

  He spoke slowly and then he bowed, acquiescing to me. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense,’ I dismissed him, ‘don’t beatify me for something that should be normal. Your conscience would never let you behave any other way, if only you thought about it.’

  I smiled though and, I admit it, felt rather saintly.

  The next day Robert made the arrangements, sending Wang with a couple of local men who would certainly want to return to their families. I noticed that in giving Wang the good news Robert emphasised the bonus the man would receive when we reached the coast at the end of our journey.