“The men of the Ever Victorious Army have braided the white ribbons of mourning into their queues, Majesty. Their barbarian general, Ward, died of his battle wounds two weeks ago.”
“Who commands the Ever Victorious Army now?”
“Another barbarian, also an American. His name is hard to pronounce. Something like Bu-erh-ge-way. However, Majesty, one barbarian is much like another. Like chopsticks, they’re useful, but hard to tell apart.”
“Some chopsticks are bamboo, Jung Lu, others silver. Ward was difficult, but a faithful servant of the Dynasty, though he refused to grow a queue, We shall honor him with a Commemorative Rescript and posthumous promotion.”
“Your Majesty is, as always, almost excessively benevolent, as ever maternal in her concern for her subjects.”
“How will Ward’s death affect the situation?” she asked. “Will the Ever Victorious Army still fight well?”
“One hopes, but who can tell? Soon, Majesty, we can dispense with barbarian officers. Only the barbarian weapons make them formidable. Neither their courage nor their tactics are outstanding, only their weapons. The Peking Field Force is already becoming skilled with barbarian weapons under Manchu and Chinese officers.”
“We must have more barbarian weapons, Jung Lu. Not only muskets and cannon but gunboats. For a time, it may be necessary to tolerate barbarian officers. But it would be better if We crush the Long Hairs without too much barbarian help. The campaign goes well?”
“Your Majesty’s forces are going over to the offensive. But the rebels hold many provinces with vast numbers of fanatics. I fear the struggle will be long and hard.”
“Prince Kung says the same,” she observed. “But victory is inevitable, is it not?”
“With barbarian arms, Majesty, victory is inevitable.”
“Well, We shall get more barbarian arms.” She nodded emphatically. “But let’s talk of more pleasant things. As I recall, you prefer crystallized lotus stalks to red-date cakes, don’t you, Jung Lu.”
Yehenala took the lid from the octagonal orange box at her side. Frowning in concentration, she selected three translucent filigree circlets from the compartmented interior. Jung Lu bowed to acknowledge the honor of receiving the sweetmeats from her fingers.
“Tonight?” he whispered when their heads were close together. “Tonight, Nala?”
She pondered for twenty seconds, her forehead creased in mock concentration to tantalize him. It would be possible, since Little An had prepared a new secret way into her palace.
“Tonight!” she whispered. “Tonight, Jung!”
CHAPTER 55
November 18, 1862
SHANGHAI
The squad of Foreign Settlement Constabulary nervously fingered the frogs of their semi-foreign-style tunics and stamped their thick leather boots importantly. Their corporal nonchalantly twirled his wooden truncheon, but his bravado failed to conceal his uneasiness. He was deeply worried by both the volatile temper of the white-skinned devil who was his inspector and the uncertain temper of the crowd. Newcomers constantly joined the throng of refugees, which had already spilled out of narrow Yuehtung Road into Broadway. He would be severely reprimanded if he did not keep that boulevard along the Hwangpoo River clear for pony traps, man-drawn wagons, and bullock drays.
Formerly the chief thoroughfare of the American community, Broadway remained the major artery of the territory north of Soochow Creek that the Americans had two months earlier joined to the British territory south of the creek to form a unified Foreign Settlement. A single municipal government with uniform laws, flexible enough to adapt to Chinese practices, was necessary for the rapidly expanding treaty port. A unified police force was also necessary to control the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Taipings who found asylum in the Settlement. The French had jealously retained autonomy in their concession between Yangjingbang Creek and the South City when the Anglo-Saxons finally rose above their mutual rivalry. The French retained the right to cooperate—or to interfere—when it pleased them.
Differences among the barbarians did not interest the corporal, who was concerned only to keep his spotless record and his expensive uniform unstained. The Settlement Constabulary were proud of their royal-blue tunics with choker collars and silver-metal insignia, which were so new the tailors’ creases had not yet yielded to their wives’ coal irons. Their peaked caps with white covers still creaked stiffly on the queues neatly coiled beneath them. The caps were particularly costly, and some would be damaged if the ragged mob became violent.
The corporal pondered his next move. If he were still serving under the green banner of the Chinese Armies of the Manchu Dynasty, he would not have hesitated. He would either have charged the throng or sauntered away. But that white-skinned devil of an inspector had been most explicit. The task of the police was to preserve the public peace. The constables were neither to provoke clashes nor to ignore disturbances in the hope that the miscreants would injure only each other.
The corporal sighed in exasperation. Sometimes the barbarians’ thinking was virtually impossible to comprehend. Still, he had enrolled in the Constabulary to fill his family’s stomachs, and he would not break their rice bowls by disregarding orders.
Yet he remained irresolute. He could not fathom the mood of the crowd composed of tattered countryfolk and equally tattered artisans from provincial towns. All were obviously refugees, nan-min, “people who faced hardship,” and all were accompanied by children. Stooped grandmothers hobbled along with infants clutched to their meager bosoms. Wiry fathers and wind-burned mothers led toddlers, while cocky boys and shy girls carried sobbing babies. As people pushed toward the head of the disorderly queue, scuffles flared and died. Although their unsanctioned assembly implicitly threatened the peace, the refugees’ temper was not belligerent. Some looked as if they had just seen the first ray of spring sunshine after a gray winter. Others stared desolately into their neighbors’ faces, seeking consolation in the eyes of strangers as miserable as themselves in this alien world.
Perplexed by his orders and puzzled by the throng’s behavior, the corporal acted as he never would have under the green banner of the Great Pure Dynasty. Ordering his men to stand fast, he strolled toward the crowd, himself almost as astonished as the refugees that a man in uniform should approach them in peace. The throng and the policeman stared at each other across a barrier no less impassable for being invisible. The corporal occupied a secure position in life, sustained by the status and the wages his foreign sponsors bestowed. The refugees were the flotsam of the great rebellion, exercising no more control over their fate than the shattered timbers of a foundered ship.
For a full minute, the refugees stared in blank-faced fear at the corporal, who smiled placatingly. After a few minutes, the refugees ignored his menacing uniform and resumed their agitated talk.
“I know it’s hard to believe, but barbarians are capable of any folly,” observed a man who had from the cut and fabric of his tattered coat been a well-to-do craftsman before the tide of Holy Soldiers swept him from his home. “And there’s no alternative. What can we do for them now?”
“It’s true, I tell you!” An old farmer with his year-old grandson cradled in his calloused hands was vehement. “They’re mad, but what choice have we got? We’ve got to give up the children!”
“But everyone knows the barbarians do horrible things,” the craftsman’s wife objected. “The white-skinned devils want to make them little barbarians. They soak Chinese children in water and mumble barbarian spells over them. Afterward, they’re not Chinese any more. They’re barbarians.”
“Better a live barbarian than a dead Chinese,” her husband replied grimly. “Besides, that’s nonsense. The Emperor would never let them.”
“What is it, old fellow?” the corporal asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The word went around our camp this morning, sir,” the grizzled farmer answered. “They say a barbarian lady is taking in needy kids. Gi
ves them food and clothes. Even teaches them a few ideograms and some passages from the Classics.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.” The corporal paraded his superior knowledge. “They do crazy things, the barbarian devils. But that’s not possible. A barbarian lady teaching ideograms and the Classics!”
It would not be wise, the policeman felt, to tell the wretches that the rumors might be true. He had even heard of the Jesus disciples’ buying children to bring up in their macabre religion, which worshiped a man dying in agony on a wooden cross. But his job was to keep the peace, not to encourage them to fight to reach the front of the queue. What could one expect of men so desperate they wished to give their sons away, leaving none to perform the ancestral rites essential to ensure the tranquillity of their spirits in the after-world?
He felt a pang of conscience. When he put on the barbarian uniform he had not sworn to deceive his own people for the benefit of the white-skinned devils. But if a riot erupted, he could find himself disgraced, impoverished—and, perhaps, struggling to give away his own sons.
Raucous shouts rolled into Broadway from the narrow mouth of Yuehtung Road. The corporal expected the din to die down like the previous scuffles. But the tumult rose louder, and he heard the thud of blows. When women screamed, he waved his arms imperatively and trotted toward the intersection. His men followed, slashing a path through the combatants with ebony truncheons.
Restraint was no longer advisable. If they were to preserve themselves from the refugees’ fate, the constables had to reach the center of the disturbance. As the throng opened before the flailing truncheons, the corporal forced his way toward the head of the queue. He must find out for himself what was happening.
Coals burning in bronze braziers cast their light on the drawn curtains that cut Fronah Haleevie off from the desperation in the streets that ashen autumn afternoon. Unaware of the rumbling outside as the refugees pushed toward her door, she proudly showed her brother David the school desks installed against the day her thirty-five orphans began their studies.
The concubine Maylu had insisted on climbing to the third floor on her bound feet. She considered herself as much responsible as Fronah for the children’s home created in the tenement that was Saul Haleevie’s contribution to his daughter’s happiness—and his propitiatory offering to the God who had made him wealthy amid such great poverty. Maylu considered herself wholly responsible for the halting progress Fronah had made toward health since reluctantly accepting David’s challenge three months earlier.
The girl was definitely improved. Her hands were no longer like chicken claws. Her cheeks had not regained their glow, but were no longer like soiled parchment in color and texture. She even smiled, though it was more than a year since the concubine had heard her laugh spontaneously.
Maylu would not be content until Fronah was again as buoyant as the sparkling thirteen-year-old she had met after the suicide of old Mistress Lee, Aisek’s mother. The concubine banished the memory of that death and her man’s exile from her mind. She would today concern herself only with Fronah and the surprise she had arranged for Fronah.
David’s plan to awaken Fronah from her morbid preoccupation with herself by engaging her interest in the children’s home had succeeded brilliantly—as far as it went. But it was, unfortunately, too easy for her. Saul Haleevie had not only furnished the tenement lavishly, but had hired ten Chinese women to staff it. Fronah’s charges were too few, too young, and too docile under the amahs’ stern eyes to make strenuous demands on her. Still shielded by her father’s wealth from the normal pressures of human life, she was slipping into pallid self-satisfaction with a minor accomplishment. She was comfortable but not inspired.
Maylu had, therefore, whispered to a few refugees a day earlier that the foreign lady would no longer restrict her beneficence to thirty-odd orphans, but would accept perhaps a hundred needy children. Still, Maylu congratulated herself, she was by no means a fool, even if Fronah sometimes reproached her for flightiness. She had wisely invited David to visit them today. The authority of a Mandarin of the Seventh Grade would ensure that the refugees behaved with decorum. If the throng got out of hand, David would simply summon a detachment of Imperial Braves. She knew neither that a Mandarin of the Great Pure Dynasty had no authority in the Foreign Settlement nor that Manchu troops might enter only on invitation.
David made a show of his interest in the schoolroom. He exclaimed at the scrolls exhorting youth to pursue knowledge, and he diligently examined the writing brushes, inksticks, and inkstones laid out for infants who would not touch them for years. Pleased by Fronah’s interest, he was appalled by her lack of realism.
She had, however, taken up his challenge. Her condition had, at least, not deteriorated, though he could see only minimal improvement. But what did this pretty doll’s house have to do with refugee camps stalked by hunger and disease? He had not planned that Fronah should immure herself in a fantasy realm peopled by eager servants and well-brushed infants.
The young Mandarin was not only dismayed but bored. He twitched a curtain open and saw leaden mist pressing against the windowpanes.
Glancing down, he was surprised at the crowd overflowing the road. All the streets of the Foreign Settlement were nowadays thronged with thousands of refugees, some listlessly seeking employment, some merely wandering, rather than remain in their fetid hovels. But the hundreds of men and women jamming Yuehtung Road were not moving. They looked up at him and muttered menacingly. David opened the casement window curiously.
“Gracious Lord!” an alert father shouted. “Take my son. Save my son, Your Honor!”
“Take our children!” The crowd began to chant. “Gracious Lord, save our children!”
“What the devil is this nonsense?” David exclaimed.
Fronah craned out the window beside him while Maylu shrugged with ostentatious innocence and said, “Stupid, ignorant common people. They must be mad.”
When the refugees saw that the benevolent barbarian lady actually existed, they were suddenly still. An instant later, an enormous sigh drifted upward. The crowd pressed against the barred doors, the foremost pounding on the heavy teak panels. Since even the benevolence of a barbarian lunatic must have its limits, only the first to plead with her could hope to win admission for their sons or daughters to this children’s paradise.
David watched unmoving for almost half a minute. He was afraid for Fronah and Maylu, afraid even for himself. He had conquered fear on the battlefield, but the pleas of parents eager to save their children by giving their children away terrified him. These people were beyond hope for themselves in this world or the next. Why else surrender the offspring who were their passports to immortality? Broken only by the thudding of fists on the door panels and the wailing of babies, the refugees’ silence was more menacing than the din of battle.
“David, we must stop them,” Fronah asserted. “They’ll break the door in if we don’t go down and stop them.”
“I’m afraid they will, Fronah,” he answered. “And I don’t see any way we can stop them.”
“I must talk with them, David. I must explain I can’t take so many, though, perhaps, a few more.”
“How can you talk to them?” he demanded. “Would they listen to you or to me—to anyone? Before anything else, we must get your orphans out through the trap door to the roof.”
“David, I can’t just run away. Somehow they’ve got the idea I can help them. I must talk with them. It’s my responsibility, since I seem to have aroused their hopes.”
The young Mandarin glanced sharply at his sister. He had not heard such determination or such urgency in her voice since her swine of a husband deserted her. Three stories beneath them, the door was creaking under the refugees’ assault.
“Later, Fronah!” He grasped her arm. “First get the babies out.”
“Not later, David, but now!” Fronah insisted. “I’m going down. I must see them. You can’t do it for me, not you or Maylu, or Papa, i
f he were here, but I myself. Whatever gave them the idea, only I can deal with them now.”
She shook off his hand and turned to the narrow staircase to find it blocked by amahs carrying their charges. Determined to escape to the roofs of the adjoining buildings, Fronah’s staff had not waited for instructions. As David helped the amahs toward the trap door, he praised them for not abandoning the orphans.
Enraged at David’s callousness, Fronah seethed at her own helplessness. She returned to the window and heard harsh grinding as the door panels began to give beneath the refugees’ battering.
If it were not turned, the mob would soon break in and sack the children’s home. If they destroyed that sanctuary, not only her privileged orphans but she too would suffer a grievous loss. She realized that she cared desperately for the home and for the helpless children. She was not, as she had thought, dead to all feeling. The duty she had undertaken somewhat reluctantly now commanded her totally.
“The dam’s burst, Fronah.” When David spoke to her rigid back, she thought for an instant he meant the dike that had pent her emotions. “We’re beginning to break the Taipings, but refugees are still pouring into the Settlement. The flood had to touch you and me sooner or later.”
“It has, David, it has!” Her intensity startled him. “The babies … my babies … they’re all safe now, aren’t they? Maylu’s with them? Then I must go down and talk with these poor people!”
“It’s dangerous, damnably dangerous. Who knows what they’ll do? I can’t let you, Fronah.”
“I’ll go alone, then.”
“All right, I’ll go with you. I’m not wearing my bird of rank, but I’ve got my gold-button hat. The staircase is narrow. I think I can hold them.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll say.” The flashing smile he had thought vanished forever lit her face. “But I’ll think of something.”
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