Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  A nine-paneled screen covered with fine yellow silk stood behind the Dragon Throne. Two silhouettes were visible through the gauzy fabric like female characters in a shadow play. On the left-hand throne sat Niuhura, the senior Empress Dowager, newly consecrated Tzu An, Maternal Tranquillity, and on the right, Yehenala, consecrated Tzu Hsi, Maternal Auspiciousness. For the first time in the annals of the Manchus, women were dominant at an Emperor’s coronation. They were the child monarch’s Regents in the position previous dynasties had called chiu-lien ting-cheng, listening behind the screen and administering the state.

  When Prince Kung glanced at those shadows, his eyes lingered on Yehenala. Perhaps, the Prince Counselor pondered, he had yielded too much power. All major decisions, even military decisions, were to be considered by himself and the other Grand Chancellors after the Empress Dowagers had dealt with them. Imperial Edicts would be affirmed by the Grand Chancellors after they were drafted by the Empresses’ secretariat. Every official proceeding to a senior provincial post would, as specified by Dynastic Law, report in audience to the child-Emperor. The Empress Dowagers would sit behind their translucent screen, Niuhura comfortably silent while Yehenala asked sharp questions and issued peremptory commands.

  Even the reign name was altered, ostensibly to repudiate the usurpers, who had called the child-Emperor Chi Hsiang, Propitious Omen. The ideograms Tung Chih would seal official documents and validate the currency.

  The people were already saying that Tung Chih, literally Common Rule, really stood for Coequal Government—government by the two Empress Dowagers. Elided from the classical phrase tung-kuei yü chih, Tung Chih was actually intended to express the common desire of the Dynasty and the people to restore order and revive the grandeur of the Great Empire. Unfortunately, the people believed it asserted the Dowagers’ supremacy.

  Behind the screen, Yehenala smiled in undisguised triumph. She had at twenty-six attained far greater glory than the small girl in the little house on Pewter hutung had ever imagined. She had attained the power of which she dreamed when she was a junior concubine slavishly serving the depraved former Emperor. The docile Niuhura was no impediment to her will, and she would play the compliant Prince Chun off against the proud Prince Kung. If the Baronet Jung Lu’s arrogance impelled him to foolish demands, she would naturally discipline him. But his devotion was still unblemished, and she would continue to enjoy him—discreetly.

  She had also ensured her personal wealth. Some twenty million taels amassed in Peking by the archconspirator, the executed Assistant Grand Chancellor Su Shun, were already forfeit to her private purse. Her chief eunuch, Little An Hai-teh, was now en route to Jehol to determine the extent of the further treasure Su Shun had secreted in his new palace there. She was, however, already the richest individual in the Empire.

  “Wan sui! Wan wan sui!” The courtiers acclaimed her son, the Tung Chih Emperor, who nodded on the golden Dragon Throne. “Ten thousand years! Ten thousand times ten thousand years!”

  Yehenala was confident that she would enjoy great longevity amid Imperial splendor. She would have much time to set the affairs of the Empire in order. She would humble the barbarians, though she would not disdain their ingenious mechanical devices. And she would crush the Long-Haired Rebels. Who but she had earlier arranged the appointment as commander-in-chief of the Viceroy Tseng Kuo-fang, who was already moving decisively against the fanatical rabble?

  Unparalleled peace and unprecedented prosperity would bless the Great Pure Dynasty, since many decades of unchallengeable power lay before her. He was a good lad, her treasure. Even after he came of age, he would dutifully attend to his mother’s wise counsel.

  CHAPTER 46

  February 3, 1862

  SHANGHAI

  Though he had promised his wife he would put business worries out of his mind for their daughter’s birthday party, Saul Haleevie smiled ruefully as he trimmed his beard with nail scissors before the small mirror on his dresser. Sarah had sworn in return that she would refrain from smothering Fronah with mournful solicitude, which actually made the girl more unhappy. His wife’s eyes were overbright, and the minutely crinkled skin around them was pink. She had been crying again, he saw angrily. Neither the belladonna drops nor the trace of cosmetic applied after cold compresses could completely conceal the marks of her tears.

  Sarah twirled for his admiration in the silver-embroidered cream-satin kaftan she considered more fitting to her forty-three years than the bright patterns she had worn for festive occasions in her youth. The swirling hem revealed cream-satin shoes with silver bows tied at the instep. She had grudgingly adopted two-inch heels a year earlier because Fronah insisted she would be even more graceful if her slight stature were enhanced. Now she would never be without them.

  “You’re beautiful, my dear,” he said. “Anyone would think you were twenty-three, certainly not the mother of a daughter that age. Remember, she’s still young and strong. Her life’s in front of her.”

  “Don’t, Saul, please don’t,” she replied. “Don’t be too jolly. It’s enough if I don’t cry.”

  “It’s not an absolute disaster. Now smile for me.”

  “If you’ll smile, too. You’re as solemn as an old rabbi on Yom Kippur.”

  He actually smiled spontaneously at that flash of her old spirit. They could not grieve constantly over Fronah’s unhappiness. Neither could he tell Sarah that he hated the color of silver nor, certainly, why. She had, this once, not questioned his vague explanation that he was worried because trade was slow and old Solomon Khartoon was demanding higher profits.

  He could not tell Sarah that he hated silver because of Lionel Henriques. Her admiration for the Englishman had turned to detestation when he deserted Fronah to join the Taipings. Her detestation would turn to hatred if Saul told her the true reason for his worry. He was struggling to meet the extortionate 20 percent penalty interest the Englishman had secretly promised should the silver borrowed in Hong Kong to expand the firm’s operations not be repaid in full after five years. Compared to that burden, paying their son-in-law’s debts had been a featherweight. Saul did not want his wife to hate the Englishman, since he still hoped, against his own wishes, for a reconciliation.

  Six months after his disappearance, Lionel had still not sent Fronah a single word. Only through Aaron’s infrequent and cryptic messages to David did the Haleevies know their son-in-law and their adopted son were still alive. Amid the renewed turmoil as the Taipings resumed the offensive against the coastal provinces, the fugitives were doing well. As chief secretary to the Taiping Commander-in-Chief Li Hsiu-ching, who was called the Loyal King, Aaron drafted orders and proclamations. He also commanded a battalion of Holy Soldiers in action. When not serving with the Taiping artillery, Lionel acted as an adviser on foreign trade to the Heavenly Kingdom’s Ministry of Finance. The Taipings would need all the help God could give them, Saul ruminated, with a financial adviser who was not only a thief but a fool as well.

  The merchant looked hard at himself in the mirror. His russet hair was streaked with gray, and his high forehead was deeply lined. Almost forty-seven, Saul Haleevie should have been contemplating his fortunes already established, and he should have been anticipating the arrival of more grandchildren. He was instead struggling desperately to meet the debts the profligate Lionel had laid upon him—and he was riven by anxiety for his lonely daughter and her son.

  He could forgive the profligate for his irresponsibility, even for the deceit that had concealed the rising scale of interest. Though it would gall, he could forgive Lionel those transgressions if it would make Fronah happy. But he could not forgive himself for failing to guard against the plausible Englishman’s malfeasances. Lionel was devoid of moral sense, just as some men were incapable of distinguishing certain colors. He could not hate the runaway.

  A little earlier, Lionel might have been useful to Haleevie and Lee in the Taiping camp. His scapegrace son-in-law had, however, joined the Taipings just as Saul had
cut off his own dealings with them. After the British and French aligned themselves with the Manchus against the Heavenly Kingdom, Saul considered the insurgent regime doomed.

  “We’ll be late if we don’t hurry, Saul,” Sarah warned. “Stop trimming your beard and come along. It’s already a perfect patriarch’s beard.”

  “Some patriarch! I can’t even control one imbecilic son-in-law—not to speak of a stubborn daughter.”

  “She’ll agree in time, Saul, and call the baby Judah Haleevie-Henriques. Just give her time.”

  Saul and Sarah were late for the small birthday party to which Fronah had agreed instead of the gala reception they wanted to show that the Haleevies still held their heads high. But they were not the last to arrive. As they approached the ill-omened Nest of Joy through a garden draped by fog that February evening in 1862, they heard the clatter of a pony trap on Szechwan Road. Gabriel Hyde joined them at the door, his coat bedewed by drizzle and his face drawn. He stood long watches on the Long River as the Taipings became more aggressive each day.

  “Evening, ma’am, Mr. Haleevie,” the American said. “A nasty evening. I’ll try to contribute to the gaiety of this joyous occasion.”

  “Do, Gabriel,” Sarah urged. “Try hard. But it’s not a joyous occasion, even though Fronah is still young enough to remember her birthdays. I remember, when she was a little girl, how she loved birthday parties.”

  “He’s not interested in your memories, Sarah,” Saul chided. “Of course, Gabriel, she’s sad. It’s her first birthday without her husband.”

  “Well, she had birthdays before she met Mr. Henriques,” Sarah observed with uncharacteristic spite. “And, God willing, she’ll have lots more. Probably better without him.”

  Gabriel Hyde was pleased when Lao Woo, the undersized number-one boy who had replaced the portly Lao King, opened the door and relieved him of the need to reply. He understood Sarah’s bitterness, but he was surprised by her frankness. In his exhaustion he had almost ignored the invitation delivered when the Mencius tied up two hours earlier. However, his duties had kept him from seeing Fronah for two months, and he could not slight her when the Settlement was buzzing about her virtual withdrawal from the social life she had loved. How badly, he wondered, was she taking the first major disappointment of her pampered existence?

  He had never thought Fronah capable of deep feeling. He believed her emotions were vehement, shallow—and transitory. A half-year after the shock, he would have expected her to have recovered much of her ebullience. But the enduring effect must be profound if her normally discreet mother spoke so forthrightly before an outsider like himself.

  “Mama! Papa!” Fronah hugged her parents. “I thought you were never coming.”

  “Congratulations, darling.” Sarah proffered a scarlet parcel tied with silver ribbon. “Many happy returns.”

  “Gabriel!” Fronah smiled. “Now I’m really happy, even if I am getting old. You’ve been neglecting me lately.”

  “How could I, Fronah my dear?” He played to the light mood for which she was obviously striving. “Blame the Taipings, not me. Only duty could keep me from seeing you.”

  “… ‘Loved I not honour more,’” she quoted with gentle irony, her fingers stripping the wrapping from her parents’ present. “I can’t forgive the Holy Soldiers, but I’ll forgive you.”

  While she peeled away the scarlet paper, Gabriel reproached himself for his tactlessness. Though one should not speak of rope in the house of the hanged man, his greeting had referred to the Taipings, to whom Lionel Henriques had fled. Still, Fronah was as clever as he thought her. Unlike her mother, she would not speak bitterly of her husband, but neither would she avoid any mention of the insurgents, who were the topic of the day.

  “Oh, Papa, it’s lovely.” Fronah impulsively raised the disc of shining tsuifei jade to her lips before clasping the gold chain around her neck. “It’s beautiful, absolutely perfect.”

  The pendant was beautiful, the American agreed, perfectly simple, obviously ancient, and exquisitely carved with a phoenix. Gabriel would have expected Saul to console his daughter with a showy present, perhaps a diamond necklace, which he could well afford. But Saul—or, perhaps, Sarah—had chosen a gift whose intrinsic beauty overshadowed its substantial monetary value.

  The chastened American conceded that he had once again erred in his assessment of the merchant’s complex character. He had apparently also erred in concluding from her mother’s outspoken bitterness that Fronah was stricken by Henriques’s desertion. Perhaps she was more resilient than he believed. His dark-blue eyes hooded by exhaustion, he watched Fronah move among the ill-assorted guests in the drawing room, where the turquoise watered-silk wall covering set off two enormous Ming-yellow vases.

  Her manner was, perhaps, a shade too bright for a truly self-assured hostess. He had always considered Fronah’s spontaneity her greatest attraction. When she was happy, she was unabashedly joyous; when she was sad, she was enveloped by gloom. Perhaps her forced gaiety tonight showed that she was belatedly maturing, for society required women to dissimulate more than men.

  She had never been more attractive physically. Her features were finer and more sensitive, molded by the hollows beneath her cheekbones, which made her eyes appear larger. Her wrists and hands were thinner, and her gold wedding band flashed on an almost excessively slender finger.

  She darted like a gold-plumed cockatoo, but she was attired like a gray wren. Though the nuances of feminine clothing were beyond Gabriel Hyde, he realized that Fronah’s dress was virtually unadorned. Only a few bands of lace decorated the wide skirt and the demure bodice, while the restrained colors hinted of mourning. The silk was dove-gray, albeit with a silvery sheen, and the braid trimming the neckline was, like the broad sash, violet moire. Only her shimmering new pendant and her amethyst bracelet relieved the faintly funereal effect.

  “You remember Sammy Moses, don’t you, Gabriel?” Fronah asked. “Papa’s old apprentice, you’ll recall. You haven’t met his wife, Rebecca, I believe. Nor her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin.”

  Gabriel acknowledged the introductions with weary courtesy. Malcolm Wheatley, the sixty-one-year-old taipan of Derwents, was floridly genial, though his French wife, Nicole, who was thirty years younger, assayed the American speculatively. Derwents was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, largely because of Lionel Henriques’s peculation and his baseless assurances that Samuelsons would rescue the firm. Malcolm Wheatley apparently believed that Saul was anxious to make amends—and obviously hoped that the immense wealth rumor attributed to the nonexistent “Hebrew Combine” would shore up his falling house.

  The American nodded to Moses Elias, Saul’s chief clerk, and to his wife, Miriam, Sarah’s confidante. He bowed to Whitney Griswold of Russell and Company. Dr. William MacGregor cocked a quizzical eyebrow when his red-haired wife Margaret greeted the American with open delight. They agreed to meet for a round of whist as soon as Gabriel’s duties allowed.

  The men’s talk inevitably dwelt on the renewed Taiping threat, and, for once, the women listened intently. Some three hundred thousand Holy Soldiers under the Loyal King himself were closing around the treaty port, despite the promised commitment to the campaign against the Taipings of the British and French forces withdrawn from Tientsin and Canton. Wheatley and Griswold confidently predicted that the insurgents would be routed if they challenged the European armies. They praised the Ever Victorious Army, the Manchu-paid force of Chinese and Filipinos led by foreign adventurers. The army’s commander, Gabriel’s fellow townsman, Frederick Townsend Ward, had been miraculously transmuted from a renegade into the savior of Shanghai. A few months earlier the same men had condescended to Ward and to Gabriel himself as mercenaries serving the barbarous Manchus.

  Gabriel did not, however, share their confidence in the outcome of the next battle for Shanghai. The Loyal King had learned from his repulse by the foreign soldiers, whom he had expected to welcome him eighteen months earlier. The
Taiping Commander-in-Chief had recently issued a proclamation in which David Lee saw his brother’s hand. Anticipating no assistance from the foreigners, the Loyal King asserted his implacable intention of liberating the treaty port from the Manchu Imps. He urged the foreigners to remain neutral; the Ching Dynasty’s Chinese troops he counseled to submit, rather than die for the alien oppressors; and the common people he advised to await their liberation quietly—and without apprehension.

  The Chinese populace, swollen by a hundred thousand new refugees, had little choice but to remain quiet—and apprehensive. If the Holy Soldiers took the city, they would, presumably, be allowed to live in peace—if they submitted to the Taipings’ militarized theocracy. If the Manchus won, civilians could expect to suffer the customary slaughter, rapine, pillaging, and arson at the hands of the undisciplined Imperial soldiery—unless the foreigners elected to defend not only their own Settlement but the South City against the vengeful victors.

  The American rubbed his forehead wearily, but his face brightened when he saw David Lee, the quail of a Mandarin of the Eighth Grade bright on the breast of his orange robe. The Haleevies’ adopted son, who was serving as a deputy magistrate in Huating Prefecture, broke away from the two rotund Chinese merchants in blue damask jackets over long gowns whom he had been shepherding through the alien throng like a powerful sheepdog.

  “Gabriel!” he said buoyantly. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  They impulsively clapped each other’s shoulders, though that display of affection was alien to both their cultures. Gabriel smiled at the enthusiastic rush of David’s words. Most foreigners were surprised at the young Mandarin’s “un-Chinese” ebullience—and astonished at his idiomatic English with its slight New England accent. Even now, after their shared captivity and campaigning, the American was himself occasionally startled by David’s abrupt oscillation between Chinese and Western behavior.