The foreigners were the key to suppressing the Long-Haired Rebels because of their power, the Mandarin pointed out, and the key to the regeneration of China because of their science. Since almost all foreigners were ignorant of Chinese, it was necessary to make reliable information—and the official viewpoint—available in English. It was essential to conduct hsüan-chuan, as he called propaganda, a concept learned from the Jesuits of Zikawei, whom he sometimes employed for their French and German. Who, he asked rhetorically, was better fitted for that task than Fronah herself?
The hour was drawing close to midnight, and the street noises were dying. The room was silent except for the tinkling of the glass beads in the breeze off the terrace and the hissing of the coal she had absent-mindedly thrown on the fire. It was better to work than to brood, and she had much work to do. She restlessly poked the fire and added another shovel of coal before taking up her pen again:
After the temporary withdrawal of the Chung Wang, the Loyal King, to defend Nanking in the early autumn of 1862, the operations of the Long-Haired Rebels in Su-Fu Province, as the Taipings call the territory from Soochow to the coast, were commanded by the Mu Wang, the Disciple King. With the parallel withdrawal of all foreign forces to Shanghai in late October, the Great Pure Dynasty’s offensive was conducted solely by the Mandarin Li Hung-chang, Governor of Kiangsu Province and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Huai. Besides that force of more than fifty thousand, the Mandarin commanded the Ever Victorious Army, some five thousand strong under its new general, the American Henry Burgevine.
The Disciple King reorganized his numerically superior forces and took the offensive at the end of October 1862, ambushing a flotilla of troop junks on the Grand Canal. The Mandarin Li Hung-chang thereupon took the field to direct the counteroffensive personally. On the 3rd of November, the rebels withdrew in disorder. After that decisive victory, the initiative passed to the forces of His Imperial Majesty, the Tung Chih Emperor, where it has remained.
All was, however, not harmonious in the Imperial camp. The freebooter Henry Burgevine was not the man his slain predecessor and compatriot Frederick Townsend Ward had been.
Fronah wondered how frank she dared be. Her chief had casually reminded her that he must appear in a good light if his propaganda were to win foreign support. Not only the Imperial cause but the Mandarin himself must be painted attractively since he was best suited by his natural talents and his good relations with the foreigners to be the savior of the Dynasty.
The Mandarin would not, she assumed, object to her depicting Burgevine’s true character. But it would not do to reveal Li’s own calculations too clearly, for he would only strike out the offending passages when David translated her English for him. If he did not trust her judgment, he would not have granted her the vital assignment. Still, he trusted no one entirely except his two younger brothers.
Burgevine, she recalled, had protested when ordered to lead the Ever Victorious Army to Nanking to join the protracted siege the Viceroy Tseng Kuo-fan was slowly closing on the Taiping capital. He would not march, the American declared, unless the substantial arrears of pay due his men were immediately made up. Jealous of the praise accorded the Chinese generals of the Army of Huai, he also resented the appointment of a Royal Navy captain as the Mandarin’s chief of staff.
Her chief would certainly not object to a frank account of Burgevine’s pettiness and insubordination. But, she feared, he would not approve of an equally frank account of his own astute handling of the foreign powers according to the secret strategy outlined in his private papers.
The Americans were taken up with their own civil war, the Mandarin calculated, and were no longer a significant force in China. He neither feared the Americans’ interference nor looked for the Americans’ assistance—not even to balance their cousins and rivals, the British. He distrusted and feared Russia because she was China’s closest neighbor—and because she had two centuries earlier been the first European power with which China fought a war.
Align with the distant power, but be wary of the neighboring power, the ancient strategists had advised. The Mandarin had accordingly declined the proffered assistance of three Imperial Russian warships, just as Prince Kung had rejected Russian arms and advisers for his Peking Field Force. He would rely instead upon the British for whatever foreign assistance he required. Since Anglo-Russian rivalry was even more virulent after the Crimean War, the implicit threat to call in the Russians would ensure Britain’s good behavior. The French he did not take seriously.
Fronah began to write again after reluctantly concluding that she must trust to future historians’ perspicacity to discover her chief’s brilliant diplomacy:
Burgevine was a trial to his superiors:
His erratic handling of a near-mutiny on January 3, 1863, tried the Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s patience greatly. The mutineers barricaded themselves inside Sungchiang, the headquarters of the Ever Victorious Army, and threatened to sack the city. They swore they would slay all Imperial officials there and join the rebels if the two months’ arrears of pay they claimed were not immediately forthcoming. Telling his men he was already buying their food from his own pocket, Burgevine promised full payment within three days. He then rode to Shanghai to confront the merchant Takee, once Frederick Townsend Ward’s father-in-law and still the Imperial Government’s paymaster for the Ever Victorious Army.
Takee, who had embezzled that pay, agreed to send funds to Sung-chiang by motor launch. The craft steamed away from its pier only to tie up again around a bend in the stream. The money was returned to Takee’s godown.
Discovering that duplicity, Burgevine stormed into the godown. After beating Takee to make him open his safe, the American seized $40,000.
The attack on a Chinese subject forced the Mandarin to relieve Burgevine of his command. Released from close arrest by the Mandarin’s lenience, Burgevine went to Peking to demand reinstatement. But his arrogance and insubordination were obvious to Prince Counselor Kung, who rejected his demand.
Fronah feared digressing, but she was fascinated by the fate of the American freebooter. Accordingly, she continued:
Despite pressure from some ambassadors in Peking, Burgevine was not reinstated. He thereupon showed his true colors. On August 2, 1863, two hundred foreign mercenaries under his leadership seized the armored steamship Kajow in Shanghai and sailed for Soochow to join the Disciple King. Burgevine later participated in the rebels’ attack on a key city defended by the Ever Victorious Army under its new commander, British Major Charles George Gordon, who feared that Burgevine’s former subordinates might join him in the Taiping camp. But they did not.
On October 16, the Loyal King and the Disciple King released Henry Burgevine from their service—after he purchased a cargo of wine with funds provided to buy arms. Having stealthily returned to Shanghai, he has for the past month been skulking in the Foreign Settlement, where he is beyond the reach of Chinese justice.
So much for Burgevine, whom Fronah found personally repellent. Major and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Charles George Gordon, brigadier general in the Imperial Chinese Army, was another matter. The sapper officer combined religious fervor, which made him the darling of the missionaries, with self-seeking calculation, which did not endear him to the Mandarin Li Hung-chang. His Christian conscience led him to denounce the brutality and treachery of his Chinese allies; his personal ambition led him to campaign strenuously for honors and promotion while pretending indifference to earthly rewards.
Gordon’s chief accomplishment was to reinforce the lesson her chief had already learned: Led by competent officers and equipped with modern arms, Chinese troops were almost as effective as European regulars. Praising Gordon highly would not only displease the Mandarin but distort reality. The Ever Victorious Army was a small assault force, which was quite successful in that limited role. But the Army of Huai bore the brunt of the fighting.
Fronah regretfully decided that it would be impolitic to touch on Gordon�
�s double-dealing. The Mandarin would not risk an open breach with the British officer, since it could lead to a diminution of British support.
The morals of foreigners in China were notoriously as lax as the Chinese corruption those foreigners piously decried. She was nonetheless astonished by a spy’s copy of an intimate letter from the Disciple King to Gordon. If you have more rifles, cannon, and other foreign goods to sell, let us carry on our normal business, the rebel commander urged. The pietistic Englishman was not only winning renown but receiving a handsome salary—as well as lavish bonuses—for fighting the Taipings. He was also making handsome profits by selling the rebels weapons that killed his own men.
For the next hour Fronah covered successive pages with accounts of battles and massacres as well as stratagems and deceit. She then realized that she could bring her narrative to the present moment, the early winter of 1863, by summing up its complexities in a few sentences:
Despite the courage and skill of the Loyal King, the rebels were driven back on their stronghold of Soochow. The Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s leadership, enhanced by his growing mastery of Western military techniques, was decisive. The Heavenly King recited his solitary prayers for divine succor in his palace in Nanking while the power and the resolution of the Heavenly Kingdom decayed. The Taiping monarch acknowledged in an admonitory decree that his realm was crumbling because his subordinates “committed evil deeds and turned away from the truth.” From generals to privates, virtually all Holy Soldiers looted, the decree lamented, totally ignoring the divine injunction to aid the common people rather than oppress them. Meanwhile, the tide of battle flowed inexorably toward Soochow, the chief outpost defending the Heavenly Capital at Nanking.
Neither the fanaticism nor the tenacity of the Taiping rebels should, however, be underestimated, though Soochow appears to be on the point of liberation from …
The steel nib halted, and Fronah listened intently. Perhaps her fatigue deceived her, but the tinkling of the glass beads in the French windows seemed to have stopped for an instant and then resumed more loudly. Despite the new Foreign Settlement Constabulary, the influx of refugees into the frontier town had brought a wave of violent robberies, and the aged Bannermen who guarded the compound sometimes slept at their posts. Irritated by her own fancies, she repressed her fear to pick up the thread of the narrative. The strings of beads jangled harshly, and she glimpsed movement among them.
Her eyes dazzled by the light, Fronah stared at the black oblong of the French windows. A darker shape loomed in that darkness for an instant and then vanished. Convinced that she had seen a phantasm of her own exhaustion, she looked down at the manuscript again.
“Fronah?” a man’s voice whispered. “Fronah, I’m coming in.”
Her involuntary cry was muffled by the yellow velvet hangings, and the servants’ quarters were far away. She screamed again when the man stepped through the screen of beads. Astonishment held her immobile as the dark figure moved into the circle of light around her.
Fronah stared at the features she had sometimes feared—and sometimes hoped—she would never again see. In the radiance of the oil lamp, her husband’s eyes were dark pits above the jutting cheekbones that dominated his haggard face. His hair was tarnished with gray, and his pale lips were thin. She shrank from the man she had once thought she loved above all other men.
“Well, the prodigal returns.” His voice was lower, its timbre harsher. “Fronah, I promised—and I’ve come back to you.”
Gripped by shock, she stared at the apparition in naval uniform. When Lionel grasped her shoulders, she felt the familiar pressure of the gold signet ring on his little finger. She could not respond, though reason and expediency told her she should forgive him for Judah’s sake, now that he had finally returned. His long absence remained an intolerable affront, while the ghastly scene with the little girls at Old Mother Wang’s played itself again before her eyes against the backdrop of his drawn face. Repelled by her immobility, he dropped his arms to his sides.
“Lionel!” she demanded incredulously. “It’s really you? You’ve finally deigned to come back?”
He grasped her shoulders again. His lips were cold on her forehead, a hard oval against the bone. She felt little when he pulled her close, but the brass buttons on his jacket hurt her breasts.
“There, there,” he murmured. “That’s my good girl. It’s all right, my dear.”
More like a nanny comforting a startled child than an eager lover, the discordant thought intruded on her confusion. She leaned away, though still encircled by his arms. He forced his mouth down on hers, and his lips were harsh, his skin brittle and dry as paper.
“Lionel!” She broke away. “Let me be for a moment.”
“I dared to hope for a warmer welcome, though I know I don’t deserve it,” he pleaded. “By God, Fronah, I missed you desperately.”
“I wish I could welcome you warmly, but … but I’m not a saint. It’s such a shock after so long … after I’d all but given up hope.” As dispassionately as she could, Fronah studied the man who was her husband and the father of her son. Part of her felt that she should hate him—and drive him out. Another part, perhaps the better part of herself, demanded that she must welcome him—not solely—not, perhaps, primarily—for her own sake, but for Judah’s. Her son needed a father, and this man with the sunburned ruddy face above the choker collar was her son’s father. The planes of Lionel’s cheeks were harder and flatter, more assertively masculine than she’d ever known them. She saw that a gray cast lay under his tan, and the pupils of his light-blue eyes were abnormally contracted. Even when they looked directly into her own, those eyes seemed distant.
“Are you ill, Lionel?” she asked. “You don’t look well.”
“It hasn’t all been beer and skittles, but there’s nothing seriously wrong with me. Actually, it was deuced rough at times. But I’m fine, I assure you, except for needing you and wanting you. God, Fronah, I do love you—and I want you so much.”
“You’ve really changed, haven’t you?” she marveled. “You’ve never talked that way to me before.”
“I have, I assure you,” he declared fervently. “All the time with the Taipings, I could think only of you, my darling.”
“You truly feel that way? You truly want to come back to me for always? No more …”
“I do, Fronah. I’ve thought very hard—and that’s what I want above all else. Do you think you could possibly … possibly forgive me and …”
The frost of suspicion clouded her mind. He had changed so greatly he hardly seemed the same man. The cool and aloof patrician who had accepted her devotion with offhand assurance was pleading with her like an eager boy. But it had been a long time, and men did change. Why could she not quite find it in herself to believe him—as she wanted to?
“Tell me, Lionel, you seem so altered,” she probed. “Is it really true? Have you changed in all your ways?”
“You mean the opium and the … ah … other thing?” he replied as forth-rightly as he could. “All my evil habits?”
“Yes, I do. That’s just what I mean.”
“I’ve truly changed in every way,” he lied evenly. “That sort of thing is all over now. I’ve learned what’s important.”
“And that is?”
“I only want to come back to you—and to be with you. Always … for all our lives.”
“Oh, Lionel, I so want to believe you.” The frost was slowly melting. “If only I could.”
“You can—and you must,” he insisted. “Why else should I come back now? It’s not my debts, you can be sure. Your father’s paid them all. Everything … the only thing … I really want in this world is you, Fronah.”
“Oh, Lionel!” The frost shattered under his unprecedented candor. “Then that’s what I want.”
She pressed close to him and raised her face to his. His lips responded ardently to hers, and he whispered endearments into the soft hollow of her neck.
Lionel had
hoped—and feared—it would come to this. He truly cared for Fronah, and he sincerely felt that he must be true to the responsibility for her happiness he had undertaken with their marriage vows. He was not insensible to the practical advantages of being restored to her favor, standing well in her affections—and enjoying her wealthy father’s esteem. Nonetheless, he had been impelled to this stealthy return at midnight by genuine affection.
He cared for her truly, but not that way. He suppressed a shudder when she unbuttoned his jacket and laid her palm against his chest. His flesh prickled when her hand crept round to stroke his back, but he slipped his own hand down to caress her buttocks under the red velvet dressing gown.
He cared deeply, though not that way. Although Fronah was finely drawn, she was still far too fleshy for his taste. Her lips were too rounded and her breasts too full. His flesh was repelled, but his will subdued his revulsion. He closed his eyes and strove to convince himself that she was lissome, barely nubile. Yet she smelled like a grown woman: those rank juices he detested. Pressing soft and heavy against him in the satin nightdress was the gross body of a grown woman.
“Fronah, the servants,” he protested, despite himself. “Should we really?”
Fronah was avid after her long deprivation. Having overcome her own doubts, she did not sense the infinitesimal revulsion he could not quite suppress. She gave herself wholly to her husband, convinced insofar as she considered at all, that his reserve arose from shyness and, perhaps, guilt. Hungry for his love, she was unaware of his reluctance.
“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Only be quiet—and love me.”
When they lay naked on the silk carpet before the fireplace, she twisted and turned, caressing him with her entire body as she never had in the past. Despite his revulsion, Lionel was inflamed by her ardor. He joined almost without restraint in the mingling of their limbs, and his hands played over her thighs and breasts.
Mandarin Page 56