Sighing, she rose for the ordeal of dressing. Despite her mother’s horror, she had ten days earlier, on her birthday, given up the kaftans that made her look so outlandish. Fronah believed the paraphernalia laid out on the bed would transform her into a European gentlewoman or, at least, the semblance of a young English lady. Though the costume was painfully constricting, she had resolved that she would henceforth wear no other clothes.
Turning modestly so that the concubine saw only her buttocks and slender back, Fronah slipped her shift off. Maylu handed her a linen chemise with broad straps. Fronah pulled it over her head, careful not to rumple her coiffure. Giggling conspiratorially, Maylu lifted the whalebone corset that would compress Fronah’s waist to seventeen inches.
Fronah held her breath as the concubine fitted the black silk garment with the scarlet ribbons over her hips and breasts. While the girl gripped the bedpost, Maylu pulled on the broad laces at the back. When Fronah gasped in pain, she deftly tied the laces.
The undergarments proliferated: thigh-length stockings supported by garters adorned with tiny green rosettes; lawn pantaloons that would peep coquettishly under the skirts; a cream-linen petticoat beneath the steel cage that held out her skirts; two more petticoats, one muslin, the other red silk; and a satin corset cover draped with cream Valenciennes lace. After Fronah had drawn on her pale-gray shoes that buttoned up over the ankles, Maylu covered her head with a cloth to protect her hairdo.
Teetering upon high heels and trussed by her undergarments, Fronah looked like a headless woman in a wax museum. Helpless, she waited for the concubine to slip over her head the dress confected by Shanghai’s leading ladies’ tailor. When all the buttons, bows, hooks, and eyes were fastened, Fronah regarded herself with delight in the mirror.
The skirt of dove-gray poplin, which billowed out from her thighs, was gathered by a cord above the hem. Trimmed with black braid and velvet rosettes, a hussar’s jacket hung open over a bodice cut low to show the lace-froth corset cover. Half an hour’s labor had transformed her into a rigid dummy. Even if it had been perfectly cut, which it was not, the dress would have been grotesque on a young girl.
Fronah crowned herself with a bonnet of lilac silk, which was trimmed with black braid and tied under the chin with lilac ribbons. Finally armored to sally forth, she momentarily regretted the comfort of her loose kaftan. But she firmly believed she was the image of a European gentlewoman. Yet she must not only look the part, but speak it.
During her first six years in Bombay, Fronah had acquired the rudiments of not only Hebrew, her parents’ mother tongue, and Gujarati, the language of her birthplace, but the English of the British rulers. She had also acquired a lilting Indian intonation, which the British scornfully called chichi. During ten years in Shanghai, her accent and her diction had become even more idiosyncratic. The dozen or so Jews of the treaty port did business with all, but met only each other socially. Fronah had grown up with the children of her father’s Baghdad clerks and associates. Shaped by their guttural accents, her English was further adulterated by pidgin and Shanghainese. The young girl sounded like a middle-aged babu, a pompous Bombay clerk who had been too long in China.
Fronah’s speech was a major obstacle to her determination to break out of the narrow Jewish circle. Her world was comfortable, even luxurious, but the exotic Gentile world was alluring. Though all unmarried women were much in demand, she could not move into that glittering milieu and meet dazzling young men when her speech provoked ill-concealed smiles. Since the English were dominant and the Americans were numerous among some three hundred resident foreigners, all nationalities except the chauvinistic French habitually spoke English. A Continental accent might be intriguing, but a chichi accent was an indelible stigma.
Chance—or Providence, as Fronah believed—had produced Dr. William MacGregor’s wife, Margaret. Lacking a physician of their own, the Jews patronized Dr. MacGregor, though he was attached to the Episcopalian London Missionary Society. He was pleased to attend the small Hebrew community. Damned even more certainly than Chinese pagans because they rejected their own Messiah, the Jews needed his spiritual ministrations even more than his medical attention. Still, William MacGregor, who was as tolerant as he was dedicated, did not proselytize actively.
He was delighted when Fronah confided that she wished instruction. He concealed his disappointment when she explained that she wished instruction in English rather than Christianity. William MacGregor laughed and told her he possessed neither the time nor the talent to teach her elocution and reading. Besides, it would be improper for a young lady to study with a gentleman. Fortunately, his wife, one of no more than a score of respectable foreign women in the Settlement, had been a teacher at home. That earnest Scotswoman yearned for intellectual employment more satisfying than desultorily studying Chinese, which was itself an eccentric occupation for a gentlewoman. Only the permission of Fronah’s father was required.
Sarah Haleevie felt that her daughter exposed herself to unimaginable dangers by venturing outside their own secure circle. Saul’s Chinese Jews were bad enough, but European Christians she feared in the marrow of her pious bones. Her husband’s broader vision saw great advantages to Fronah—and to the House of Haleevie—in her new studies, though he too was wary of the wife of a Christian clergyman. Still, Saul knew that his daughter, despite her willfulness, was deeply devoted to her Jewish heritage. Quelling his misgivings, he had granted his permission.
Fronah retied her bonnet’s lilac ribbons and stepped through the door of her bedroom. Her heart beat erratically under her new carapace—and she winced as the whalebone corset compressed her breasts or bit her waist with every movement. Exulting, nonetheless, in her appearance, she set out for her rendezvous with Margaret MacGregor, convinced that the bony Scotswoman with the carrot hair would open the door of an enchanted world to her.
Margaret just as eagerly awaited Fronah’s arrival in the small house provided by the London Missionary Society in the compound of her husband’s hospital. Tall and angular, she could not have carried off the elaborate dresses Victorian couturiers confected for the ideally rounded female form even if her husband’s pinched finances and the simple manner of life prescribed by their vocation had not required her to wear modest and plain garments. Nonetheless, her secret passion was the newly popular fashion magazines her aunt sent from Edinburgh. She looked forward with equal enthusiasm to teaching the petite Fronah to dress tastefully yet fashionably from the resources of Saul Haleevie’s apparently bottomless purse and to remolding Fronah’s manners and speech. The ambitious pupil had found a mentor who was just as ambitious.
CHAPTER 7
February 17, 1855
SHANGHAI
Salvos of fireworks had resounded throughout the hours of darkness, hardly subsiding as the revelers drifted toward their beds long after midnight. Reverberating among the shacks of the refugees, those barrages bade a joyous farewell to the calamitous year of the tiger and welcomed with hope the year of the hare. The thunder hailing the Lunar New Year, when every man is granted a fresh start, was particularly gratifying to the dispossessed on February 17, 1855. Bought with coppers hoarded for rice, the exploding fireworks not only vented the refugees’ rage at fate, but frightened away malevolent spirits bent on blighting the coming year.
After ritually cleansing their grimy shacks, the women of the refugees had for the first time refrained from smearing honey and opium on the lips of the wooden statuettes of Tsao Shen enshrined beside their cooking stoves. That annual ritual was performed to seal the mouth of the kitchen god before his journey to Heaven, so that he could not report the family’s transgressions to the higher gods. Instead, some had scourged him with rush brooms so that he would report the people’s fury at the afflictions of the past twelve months. The women had charged the kitchen god to warn his superiors that their images, too, would be punished if they did not halt their spiteful wickedness.
When pink sunrise streaked the gray tile roo
fs and the weathered brick walls of the South City, the barrages of fireworks rose again in a crescendo. When the crimson edge of the sun peeped over the eastern mudflats, all the guns of both the Small Swords and the Imperial Army roared a salute to the dawn of the New Year. The dogs tucked their tails into the grooves between their lean haunches and retreated beneath the shacks. When the cannon thundered and the muskets rattled, the white fog floating off the Hwangpoo was marbled with black-powder smoke.
On the flat roof of the house on Szechwan Road, Aaron and David Lee were holding their fire to salute the full sun. Less provident, Fronah Haleevie darted from parapet to parapet, her long hair streaming behind her. The skirts of the kaftan she had donned instead of a European dress in her eagerness to join in the raucous welcome to the New Year were gathered in her left hand to keep her from tripping.
Each time Fronah paused, a Lucifer match blossomed between her fingers to ignite one of the thirty-foot strings of firecrackers hanging like crimson banners from the parapets. Each densely braided string sputtered, sparkled, and rattled for five minutes before it finally vanished amid pennants of smoke.
The haze veiled the oval South City, still dark behind its walls. The eastern district glimmered tentatively, but shadows wreathed the spire of the Tongkadoo, the Roman Catholic cathedral just beyond the South Gate. Though the western district was still shrouded by night, brightness shone from the open square in its center to light the baroque teahouse and the Garden of Ease, the headquarters of the Small Swords.
After striving in vain for more than a year to retake the South City, the Imperial forces had two months earlier at last found an effective ally in the French. Consul C.N.M. de Montigny had taken the initiative by proposing the erection of a second wall along the northern arc of the Chinese city. Sallying from that fortification, French sailors and Imperial soldiers had been staging attacks on the rebel stronghold.
After a major assault was repelled at the beginning of December 1854, the allies had settled down to a siege of attrition. The first direct intervention by a foreign power in China’s civil war dwindled to an inconclusive duel between the quick-firing Minié rifles of the French, which were supported by batteries of breech-loading, rifled cannon, and the muskets, matchlocks, and horse pistols of the rebels, which were supported by a few smooth-bore, muzzle-loading cannon. But the Small Swords, cut off from supplies, were growing hungry in their fortress, which shimmered like a walled city in an old Chinese painting through the veil of smoke that covered the roof of the house on Szechwan Road.
When the sun glowed round and bright as a new copper penny through that veil, Aaron and David touched off their grenades. The aspirant Mandarins’ dignity dissolved into childlike glee. The normally solemn Aaron urged his brother to toss the giant firecrackers higher—and himself set off a rocket, which arched across the sky like a silver-and-orange comet. Young houseboys and amahs added their own fireworks to the pandemonium, mingling freely with the children of the house. All Chinese were equal, members of one great family—at least on such a joyous occasion. The youths and girls laughed and screamed, their eyes streaming from the acrid fumes that obscured the Chinese quarter.
Through occasional rifts in the billowing smoke, the South City glowed incandescent under clouds of crimson vapor. The radiance did not die when the brilliant sunrise gave way to a pale February morning. The eastern district was still luminous under shoals of dark smoke. The servants’ chatter subsided, and they gazed in astonishment at their families’ distant homes. Smoke coiled on the tile roofs like livid dragons, and leaping flames stained the low-lying clouds a sickly pink.
“It’s burning!” David’s words gave reality to their fears. “The South City—it’s burning!”
“We must help!” Fronah cried. “Raise the alarm!”
“Watch!” Aaron advised with sour realism. “That’s all we can do. Just watch!”
“We’ve got to raise the alarm,” David protested.
“Just watch!” Aaron insisted dourly. “Down below, they already know it’s a disaster.”
They watched in silence as the fire took hold of the timber buildings and leaped higher. The clouds over the South City were no longer pink but a slick, repellent crimson as the flames soared to touch them. The three watched in horror upon the rooftop behind the twin walls that cut off the South City. From their safe vantage point the spectacle was at once terrifying and fascinating.
The Small Swords attacked while the besiegers were still bewildered by the sudden conflagration. Knowing they could no longer defy slow starvation and massed cannon, the insurgents had put the torch to the eastern district just before dawn of New Year’s Day, when their enemies were least vigilant. Some two thousand men wearing red headcloths swarmed out of the gates, abandoning the residents and the refugees to the flames. The rebels’ short swords and long spears hacked paths through their enemies’ flesh. Many drove desparately toward the Taiping realm, though a hundred-odd struck toward the haven of the foreign settlement.
The watchers on the roof saw the enemies close with each other like animated toy soldiers. The hastily mustered Imperial units shredded beneath the steel blades to allow a wedge of Small Swords through their formation, then drew closer. Again and again the ranks of the besiegers opened and closed. Sword thrusts were glints of silver, and muskets’ reports were orange flares. The scarlet roses of cannon fire budded, flowered, and withered in seconds. When the French naval batteries belatedly came into action, their muzzles blossomed with giant peonies.
The main column of the Small Swords drove south toward the Catholic village of Zikawei and dispersed into the countryside on foot or in sampans on the silver lacework of canals and streams. Shoals of smoke covered the Imperial troops pouring into the narrow alleys of the South City to revenge themselves after the frustrating siege. The wounded and sick rebels trapped in the Garden of Ease behind the baroque teahouse were easier prey than their formidable fellows in the countryside. Besides, there was little profit in pursuing those fierce fugitives, while all the wealth of the South City now lay open to the Manchus’ troops.
When the remnants in the Garden of Ease surrendered, the Imperial force rendered them the justice rebellion merited. While fastidious officers fluttered their fans against the smoke, the soot-smeared soldiers did their duty. As each rebel was dragged into the square, an infantryman seized his hair and jerked his head forward. The executioner’s two-handed scimitar flashed in the murk, and the rebel’s head plopped onto the pavement. Some Small Swords still struggled, but most waited stolidly on flagstones already greasy with blood. Standing amid the severed heads, the executioners bemoaned the rebels’ lack of convenient queues. One hard pull on a queue and the culprit’s neck was stretched conveniently for the scimitar.
The Emperor’s troops killed greater numbers and did greater damage that day than the Small Swords had done in a year and a half. More than a thousand civilian men and women arbitrarily charged with rebellion were beheaded. Hundreds of coffins awaiting burial were pried open so that the corpses could be formally arraigned for rebellion. When rotting heads were severed from moldering bodies, justice was complete—and the Imperial Braves could get on with their looting.
Although distance blurred the atrocity, the shrieks and the stench reached the rooftop in the foreign settlement. However, Fronah and the brothers did not see the grisly finale. Saul had broken into their trance of horror and ordered them off the roof as the soldiers began to slaughter the insurgents captured in the Garden of Ease.
They had, nonetheless, seen for the first time the reality of the violence amid which they lived. Even David could not muster a defensive jest when Sarah scolded him for encouraging Fronah to watch the bloodshed. For two days, even David wandered subdued through the house on Szechwan Road, which stank of the smoke that filmed its white walls.
CHAPTER 8
February 20, 1855
SHANGHAI
On the afternoon of the third day of the Lunar New Year, C
.N.M. de Montigny, Consul of France, jubilantly ordered champagne in his drawing room behind walls pocked by bullets. He raised his tulip glass and sniffed the Dom Perignon, vintage 1843. Before sipping the golden-amber wine, he twirled his glass so that bubbles beaded its sides.
Consul de Montigny had much to celebrate. He had just been informed that the Mandarins would honor the promises they had made to win French assistance. He had previously not been wholly confident that the Chinese would keep their word. Since that confirmation would enrage the rest of the foreign community, de Montigny’s joy was complete.
The Consul reflected complacently that he had struck a great blow for the glory of France. He had sustained the power of the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church; Chinese converts and their priests were no longer in danger either in the Tongkadoo Cathedral just outside the South City or in the Catholic village of Zikawei, where lay the remains of the Ming Chancellor, Dr. Paul Hsü, the first great convert to the Faith. The Small Swords, who were allies of the twice-heretical Taipings, had been crushed.
De Montigny had, further, decisively demonstrated the might, the resolution, and the independence of France in the face of the other foreigners’ objections to his allying himself militarily with the Imperials. He had also cemented the special relationship between himself and the Mandarins, which promised a brilliant future for French trade.
The rewards were, moreover, not all spiritual, intangible, or deferred. The message the Consul had just received formally granted France the district lying between the South City and Yangjingbang Creek. Virtually unsettled except for the consulate and the premises of the jeweler Remi, the territory was in itself not particularly valuable. However, it bordered the Hwangpoo for seven hundred yards, and its acquisition more than doubled the previous five hundred yards of French river front. The wharfage was incalculably valuable.
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