“He’s one of us—a Jew, a Levi. And he’s in desperate trouble. An abomination, they call it, though they won’t say exactly what. I’ve looked into it. An abomination is the worst possible crime under Chinese law. It could be treason. It could be … God knows what! But the punishment is death—terrible torture and then death.”
“I thought you were getting somewhere. Didn’t you feel he’d soon be free?”
“I’m getting nowhere, I fear. Samqua, the Intendant, talks encouragingly, but that means nothing at all. He wants to keep me hoping, and he wants to drag the case out. After all, he’s making a tidy sum. He’s milking me, of course, but he’s clever. He never demands too much. If I stopped paying him off, then there’d be a quick decision. And Aisek could lose his head.”
“I am sorry, Saul. I do like Aisek, really. You know, I never dreamed it could actually end so horribly. You did get Aisek moved, didn’t you?”
“To a cell by himself, yes. And he gets decent food as long as I pay ten times its worth. The guards don’t beat him any more. He’s not tortured to make him confess some unknown crime. They’ve taken the cangue off his neck. Even struck off his manacles. But, after all, it’s his money paying for it.”
“How can you say his money? It’s our money you’re pouring out, isn’t it? Sometimes, the way you turn words around, sometimes you’re too clever for me—and for yourself.”
“No, my love, it’s really his money, not ours. After he was arrested, the Mandarins confiscated everything they could lay their hands on. Aisek’s houses, his trade goods, his art collection, even his furniture. They left him nothing.”
“Just what I said. If they took everything, it’s our money that’s paying.”
“Not quite, my dear.” Saul smiled. “I grabbed everything belonging to the partnership. Half, of course, was his. I also moved everything I could from his houses before the bailiffs got there. It was the only way to salvage something for the boys—and for Aisek. They can’t touch my belongings, you know. We’re British-protected, so the Chinese can’t touch us.”
Saul no longer marveled at the extraordinary position foreigners had occupied in China since the Treaty of Nanking ended the Opium War thirteen years earlier. Not only was the rocky island of Hong Kong ceded outright to Britain, but for the first time non-Chinese were permitted to reside in five treaty ports, among which Shanghai was the foremost. The interlopers also enjoyed privileges no other sovereign state granted to aliens.
Saul no longer thought it strange that the property of a Chinese accused of violating Chinese law could be preserved from confiscation by the Chinese authorities because a foreigner fraudulently claimed that property. That anomaly arose from the “extraterritorial” rights granted the outlanders under duress, the right to govern themselves by their own laws. The foreigners enjoyed complete immunity from Chinese law. As long as a foreigner claimed certain goods as his own, the Mandarins could not touch those goods, though they knew he lied.
Rutherford Alcock, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul, had already told Saul that he would not countenance open defiance of the Mandarins’ authority over a Chinese subject. He would, however, block Chinese intervention as long as Saul maintained that the property was his own, since failure to protect any British property could imperil all British property in China.
The Consul exercised his great powers with great discretion and great concern for legality. Only after striving for years to work with the Imperial Customs had he finally concluded that trade would wither under the Mandarins’ extortions. Only in July 1854, seven months earlier, had the consuls, led by Rutherford Alcock, taken over direction of the Chinese Maritime Customs. With the reluctant acquiescence of the hard-pressed Intendant Samqua, foreign commissioners and inspectors now administered the Customs efficiently. Moreover, the dues were scrupulously earmarked for the Chinese government.
The consuls were not concerned with the savage blow they had dealt the Empire’s sovereignty when the Ching Dynasty’s existence was threatened not only by the Taiping rebellion but by natural disasters and universal corruption. Rutherford Alcock felt he had judiciously buttressed the status quo, just as Saul Haleevie felt his evasion of Chinese law justly preserved Aisek Lee’s possessions.
“Another thing, my dear.” Sarah broke into Saul’s reflections. “This mock engagement to Aaron. He is Chinese, even if you insist he’s also Jewish. It’s a public scandal. You must put an end to it immediately.”
“I can’t, Sarah, not yet. Everything I said about Fronah’s visits to Aisek applies—even more strongly. Samqua is quite happy to be deceived as long as it’s profitable for him. But he’d be furious at being shown up—and it would go very hard with Aisek.”
“Aisek! Always Aisek! Don’t you care what you’re doing to your daughter? It’s bad enough what she does to her reputation by her wildness. But this crazy engagement! Mrs. Elias was saying the other day …”
“Exactly what was Mrs. Elias saying?” Saul’s tone was hard. “It could also go very hard with young Moses Elias. I won’t have my employees gossiping about my daughter. Tell Miriam Elias to keep her worries to herself. I can look after my own family without her help.”
“Never mind, Saul. It was only a few words, and she won’t say any more. But you must do something about this crazy engagement.” Fearing his anger, Sarah retreated with a parting shot: “And I don’t know what the Khartoons will say about all this!”
“All what, Sarah?” Saul’s self-control was ominous. “What?”
“Oh, not the engagement. You’ll take care of that, I know.” Sarah blundered deeper into the minefield of Saul’s anger. “But the partnership with Aisek … and trading on your own. Old Solomon Khartoon won’t like it at all. Saul, what are you doing to us? When the old man hears …”
“When the old man hears, it’ll all be over.” Saul bridled his temper. “As long as profits don’t fall, the old man won’t say anything. As long as he gets his porcelains, teas, and silks, he’ll be happy. Anyway, Sarah, I’m not an employee. I’m an independent manager. It’s agreed I can do business on my own account. I’m not a clerk working for the Khartoons, you know.”
“Of course, dear,” Sarah soothed him. “And for the rest, I’m sure you’ll work it out.”
“Of course I will, Sarah.” Saul was pleased at having postponed the inevitable confrontation with his wife. “You’ll see. It’ll all work out well.”
The chanting of male voices rolled down the long corridor from the junior clerks’ office into Fronah’s bedroom on the second story of the house on Szechwan Road. The iron-bound door that led to the counting house above the small godown reserved for particularly valuable goods was normally bolted to keep the family and the firm apart. He might live over the shop, Saul declared with patrician hauteur, but he would not permit its bustle to disturb his wife and daughter. Ladies should not merely be untroubled by business, but should be unaware of business. However, the iron-bound door had been unbolted a few months earlier to give Aaron and David Lee easy access from their bedroom to their new schoolroom.
Perched on the yellow silk counterpane, her bare legs dangling against the organdy frill that concealed the bed’s rosewood frame, Fronah listened with half an ear to the rumble of the youths’ voices. They were reciting classical texts in the traditional forced rhythm, as they would every day until they took the civil service examinations. Only constant repetition, called pei-shu, turning one’s back to the book, could fix the passages indelibly in one’s mind. In a few years’ time, the boys would be locked into individual cells for days with rice cakes, drinking water, paper, ink, and writing brushes to compose essays that would shape their lives. Obsessive diligence was normal among aspirant Mandarins.
Fronah heard their tutor’s reedy tenor interjecting comments. The sons of a felon awaiting trial were not welcome at the private academies of letters, which prepared young men for the civil service examinations that would open to one in every two hundred candidates the door to
the honors, wealth, and power enjoyed by Mandarins. Saul had therefore found the tutor and provided the impromptu schoolroom. He felt it was no particular favor to shelter his partner’s homeless sons if he did not assist them toward an official career. To be a merchant was fine, their father had often said, but it was glorious to tso kuan, serve His Imperial Majesty as a Mandarin.
A merchant could amass greater wealth than all except a few of the most senior among the forty thousand Mandarins who ruled two hundred million subjects. A merchant could also exercise great power, provided he did so discreetly. Times were changing, and businessmen were no longer relegated to a stratum of Confucian society beneath officials and farmers, though above the despised soldiers. In the new order shaped in part by foreign incursion, merchants, like soldiers, were too important to be denied respect. Some merchants, like the Intendant Samqua, could even cross the social gulf by purchasing official posts and Mandarin’s rank from a government desperate for money to pay the armies fighting the Taipings.
Nonetheless, it was best to become a Mandarin through the examinations. Not merchants but Mandarins were the wealthiest men in China, aside from Imperial princes and the avaricious eunuchs who were the Emperor’s closest associates. Not merchants but Mandarins were surrounded by almost regal pomp and held thousands of lives in their palms. All Chinese dreamed of the day their sons would put on official robes.
Fronah instinctively understood Aisek Lee’s ambitions as she bent her head to allow his concubine Maylu to brush her long hair. Unlike most foreigners, she grasped Chinese aspirations intuitively. Unlike all other foreigners except a few savants, the girl, who had celebrated her sixteenth birthday ten days earlier, spoke both Shanghainese and Mandarin, the Officials’ Language. No one wrote the spoken language, but she could read—and, with effort, write—the elided literary style. She knew the texts Aaron and David were reciting that morning, though she no longer participated in their increasingly abstruse lessons. Encouraged by her father, she had studied with them for several years—defying both her mother’s misgivings and Chinese suspicion of learned women.
“Ai-yah, tung-le …” Fronah protested when the bristles bit into her scalp. “That hurts, Maylu.”
“So tender, Small Lady?” the concubine teased. “I’ll be more careful. Go back to your profound thoughts.”
Fronah gave herself languorously to the caresses of the ivory-backed brush. Red highlights glinted among her chestnut waves in the candlelight reflected from the mirrors on her vanity table. Fragrant with sandalwood, the bedroom was shielded by violet silk curtains lined with fleece. The flames in the white marble fireplace were so hot she wore only a shift scooped low over her breasts. The white lawn tautened when she twisted her body, and her nipples pressed against the light fabric. The hem rucked up, half-exposing the dark triangle between her thighs. Luxuriating in Maylu’s slow brush strokes and Maylu’s spiced gossip, Fronah stretched sensually.
“Small Lady, some day you’ll delight and madden every man who sees you,” the concubine whispered lubriciously.
Fronah did not respond to the insinuating flattery, which normally evoked visions of raptures on silken sheets with astonishingly handsome gallants. Her thoughts veered toward the glorious future she planned, and she reproached herself for not rising earlier to join the boys’ lessons. If she were to play the brilliant role she envisioned, she must learn as much as she possibly could of Chinese as well as Western culture. But the meanderings of the twelfth-century sage Chu Hsi on the nature of the observation of nature were too abstruse for her.
“Tell me again, Maylu.” Fronah’s thoughts were skittish. “Do you really, you know, you told me last week, with his … and your …? Do you? Have you really?”
“Not often, Small Lady. But I, perhaps, a few times. Perhaps more than a few times. And the pleasure … the exquisite pleasure. I remember once …”
Fronah giggled. Her mother would be horrified if she could understand her conversations with the thirty-one-year-old former courtesan.
Kind despite her occasional asperity, Sarah Haleevie had welcomed the company of another woman, though they had only a few words of pidgin in common. Besides, Maylu was quite respectable. No longer a courtesan, she had taken the place, though not the full status, of Aisek Lee’s wife. Concubinage was an honorable state by Chinese law and custom.
Sarah had been pleased when Maylu made herself useful and then indispensable. Never asserting her own will and never clashing with the mistress of the house, Maylu had brought the twelve servants into line. No longer were the Haleevies plagued like other foreign families by slipshod work or the servants’ taking excessive “squeeze,” their tolerated cut on every expenditure of the household. Since Sarah could not control the evasive houseboys or the sly amahs, the household had before Maylu’s arrival never met her standard, which was, quite simply, perfection. Sarah was therefore grateful to the Soochow woman.
She was grateful, too, when Maylu taught Fronah the Chinese way in the feminine arts of cuisine, needlework, and painting. Maylu’s further instruction would have horrified Fronah’s mother. But her decorous manner—and their lack of a common language—concealed the concubine’s frivolousness. Aside from her devotion to Aisek and his sons, Maylu was light-minded, and her talk was salacious.
“But no more naughty words. I must talk of serious matters, your mother commands,” Maylu reprimanded herself halfheartedly. “You know they’re saying it won’t be long now? The barbarians will soon attack the South City again.”
“Why now?” Fronah wanted to hear what the Chinese were saying, though she knew from her father that the rebels’ provocations—and the Imperial Government’s promises—had convinced the foreign community that the Small Swords must be smashed.
“It’s funny, Small Lady. First the barbarians say they hate the Small Swords. Then they trade with the Small Swords, even smuggle them muskets and cannon. Now everything’s changed again. The barbarians are hard for an ignorant woman to understand.”
“What else are people saying, Maylu?”
“They say Intendant Wu—that bloodsucking devil you call Samqua—gave the French much money and soon there’ll be a big attack, a final attack. It’s very peculiar. The barbarians are all different, and the French are the worst. They’re bloodthirsty for their God, their Lord of Heaven.”
“I’ve told you before, Maylu, it’s very simple.” Fronah again strove to enlighten the concubine. “The French hate the Taipings, while many English love them—and for the same reason. They all think the Taipings are Protestants. The Small Swords say they belong to the Taipings, even if the Taipings say they don’t because the Small Swords worship idols and kill animals in their rituals. Above all, the Taipings hate the Catholic religion because the Catholics have idols in their churches, and the Taipings hate all idolaters. So the French join with the Imps—with Samqua—to fight the Small Swords.”
“I’m sorry, Small Lady, it’s just too complicated, too much for an ignorant woman. But everyone says the big battle will come soon. The sooner we get rid of the rebels, the better!”
“You want to get rid of the Small Swords, Maylu? I thought you hated the Imps and liked the Small Swords because they’re Uncle Aisek’s friends. And the Imps have done terrible things to him.”
“I do. I hate Samqua and all the devilish Mandarins of Shanghai. If the Emperor only knew, they could never treat my poor man so. But the Emperor is far away. He is so high he can’t know the evil things his servants do.”
“You’re always saying the Emperor is the father of all. How can he not know? Anyway, why do you hate the Small Swords?”
“They promised so much, but made the people suffer more. If no Small Swords had come to Shanghai, my man wouldn’t have visited them and wouldn’t have been captured.” Bored with politics, Maylu reverted to spiced gossip. “Besides, the Small Swords have women with them, even one woman leader. And you know what they do with the men—sometimes two or three men at once. They’re sha
meless hussies. They should be wiped out, strangled. No! Beheaded after slicing with a thousand cuts.”
“Just when I think I understand you, you change completely.” At times all Chinese baffled Fronah—even Aaron and David.
“You don’t understand everything, not yet, Small Lady,” Maylu chided. “You must be patient and study hard. Chinese people aren’t like Europeans or Jews, even if my man is Jewish too. Now your hair—it’s all fixed, just like the picture in your magazine.”
Maylu stepped back to admire her creation as Fronah darted eagerly to her vanity table. The triple mirrors reflected the “coiffure for a young lady with long tresses” depicted in her borrowed copy of The Lady’s Gazette of Fashion. Maylu’s hands were deft in Chinese hair styles, which were as elaborate as Victorian Englishwomen’s. Parted from forehead to nape, Fronah’s hair was parted again, crosswise from eartip to eartip. The front was combed up in a double pompadour, while the back was plaited into many three-strand braids coiled together to hang in plump whirls over her neck. Crowned by a triple bow of mauve velvet, the coiffure was to her eye just like the fashion plate.
Over her mother’s objections, Fronah had recently given up the flowing hairdo of a Baghdad maiden as too childish—and too alien. But she could not alter the face she studied disapprovingly in the mirror. Sadly, the features were not at all like the prim, snub-nosed model with the minute chin and the tiny mouth. Her eyes were too large and too brilliant; not only too dark but too liquid. Quite unlike the insipid model, whom she thought perfection, Fronah’s mouth was wide and generously curved. Her coloring was vivid, and her slender nose was delicately arched. Besides, her face was not plump, but molded over delicate cheekbones.
She could only do her best with the face God had given her. If she could not move men by her beauty, she would move them by her intelligence, her learning—and the voluptuous body God had also given her.
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