Fronah shuddered when his fingertips found the lips of her delta. She shuddered violently, her body arched like a drawn bow, and she groaned in ecstasy. She shuddered again and sighed profoundly. Then she lay quiet for a moment.
“Now!” she cried an instant later. “Now! Come into me, my darling!”
Fronah’s arms and legs encircled Lionel, pressing him deeper into herself. Her feet clasped his buttocks, and her nails raked his back. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was slack in the firelight. She stiffened again. An even more profound shudder wracked her, and she was borne upward on the crest of the most overwhelming sensation she had ever known. When she screamed repeatedly, he too found release.
Lionel lay spent beside her for several minutes. Silent in repletion, Fronah stretched languorously, shameless in the ruddy glow that bathed her naked body. She felt joyously abandoned, a wanton courtesan lying with an ardent lover, rather than a long-neglected wife finally fulfilled. They were true, the supernal joys of which the poets sang. For the first time in her life she had experienced that supreme exultation.
“You’re back?” Her whisper was an affirmation rather than a question. “You’re really back, Lionel?”
“Of course, my darling. I’m here, aren’t I? And I’ll be back as soon as I can—to stay all our lives.”
She reached out and smoothed his hair languorously, hearing his tone but not his actual words. An instant later she stiffened and demanded: “What are you saying? And why the uniform? Why did you come so stealthily, so late at night? What do you mean you’ll be back as soon as you can? In the morning? Tomorrow?”
“A little longer than that, I’m afraid,” he replied cautiously. “You see, I’ve learned something about loyalty.”
“Loyalty?” she echoed dully. “What does that mean?”
“Loyalty to you, above all. There’ll be the devil to pay if my visit comes out. That’s why the stealth. For your protection—and my own, I’m afraid.”
“My protection? Yours? Why on earth? We are in the Foreign Settlement, you know. Whatever you’ve done, you’re safe here—beyond the reach of the Chinese.”
“My dear, I can’t just desert the Taipings, as you may have gathered.”
“And that’s what you mean by loyalty? You’re still tied to the rebels?”
“I’m afraid so. Just for a time, a very brief time, of course. There’s a splendid chap called Lindley. A rough diamond, a sea captain, you see. I’ve grown quite fond of him though he’s not my … our … kind of person. He has a Portuguese wife in Macao, probably half-caste. But he’s been a good friend.”
“Please, Lionel, get to the point. You’re tormenting me.”
“Perhaps it would have been better if I hadn’t come. But I had to see you. I love you so. But to the point: Lindley’s in command, and we’re going to seize the Firefly at two this morning. Then we’re sailing her to Soochow.”
“You’re mad, Lionel!” Fronah exploded. “Even if you’re not killed, you’re fighting for a hopeless cause. The rebellion’s certain to be crushed. Another year at most, and it’ll be all over. The Heavenly Kingdom is finished, Lionel, finished!”
“By no means, my dear. It’s just beginning again. A new spirit is waking.”
He was talking nonsense, she knew. Perhaps he too knew it in his heart, though she thought not. Whatever he truly believed, she could not force him to face reality in the few minutes he had granted her after their long separation.
“But I promise you with all my heart,” he swore, “I’ll be back very soon—this time to stay all our lives.”
He had been dressing while they talked. Before she could protest again, he bent down to kiss her. The glass beads jangled, and he was gone while his promise still hung in the air. She pulled her dressing gown over herself and pondered the future as best she could. Above all, he had come back. And he had proved that he loved her—with his body and his heart. He would return again to stay, and all would be well with them all their lives.
She was warmed by his steadfastness to his cause. The zealot he had become was more manly than the schemer she had married. Since he was equally devoted to her, she could wait for him to return again—very soon. He would be steadfast—and she would wait.
She loved Lionel, she realized, not Gabriel Hyde. The spark that had leaped between the American and herself had been ignited by strain and fatigue. Of course she loved Lionel. He was the father of her son, and she had always loved him.
When the fire began to sink, Fronah finally stirred. She slipped into her dressing gown and sat, arms clasped around her knees, gazing at the embers.
When the embers began to die, doubt ruffled Fronah’s euphoria. Though he had said he loved her, he had left her again. Yet, she assured herself again, he had conclusively proved his love. She had never before known utter physical and emotional exultation. It must have been the same for him after their long separation. She reproached herself for her imaginary fears. What kind of woman was she who was never content but always questioning?
Yet, she wondered when would he—when could he—return to her? If the civil war were greatly prolonged before a final Taiping victory, as he believed, it could be years before they lived together again. If the Imperial forces were soon victorious, as she believed, he could be a hunted fugitive unable to reach the sanctuary of the Foreign Settlement—or even barred from its safety.
Fronah sighed, almost regretting that Lionel’s passion had shattered her cool self-sufficiency and reawakened her womanhood.
CHAPTER 60
The Night of December 4–5, 1863
SOOCHOW
“The past weighs too much upon us Chinese,” Aaron Lee mused aloud, gazing at the campfires of the Ever Victorious Army on Tiger Hill northwest of the walls of Soochow. “The past is a crushing burden, which bows our shoulders and forces our eyes down. We cannot see the future, and we can hardly see the present.”
“You’re a philosopher tonight, Aaron,” Lionel Henriques’s opium-ravaged voice rasped. “Why so pensive?”
“It’s the end of an era, Lionel, the last hours of the Heavenly Kingdom. Tomorrow will be a gray day. We Chinese will wear the Manchu queue for a while longer, perhaps a long while. I won’t give up urging you to come with me, you know.”
“Desert? At this late date? I’m afraid not, Aaron. It’s too late, much too late for me.”
“And Fronah? What of my sister, Lionel? You’ll desert her?”
“Not forever, Aaron, I promise you. You see, I believe you’re wrong. The Heavenly Kingdom is not finished, not by a long shot. Soochow may fall, but that will be only an incident. The Taipings must win. And I must stay with them. Some day I’ll go back to Fronah. And in the meantime, she’ll manage. I never saw her more in control.”
“You’re condemning my sister to misery,” Aaron protested. “For years she could be neither widow nor wife.”
“She’ll manage, not like a Chinese lady. She can always divorce me. Besides, it may be too late for Fronah and me. Sometimes I’m afraid it’s all over with me, anyway.”
“I don’t understand you, Lionel. When you came back two weeks ago with the Firefly, you were bursting with hope. I never saw you so optimistic. You were certain we’d hold Soochow and then strike back. You were bubbling about your future with Fronah. What’s gone wrong, my friend?”
“That was two weeks ago, and a lot’s happened.” The Englishman evaded the question. “But my affairs are a bore. Tell me why your fascination with the queue. I never knew anyone to hang a weighty historical thesis from a rope of hair.”
“I’ll be wearing the queue again tomorrow,” Aaron said dolefully, “though I hate it.”
Impelled by his duty to his family, the only absolute imperative he knew, Aaron Lee was determined for his sister’s sake to probe the Englishman’s mood to its murky depths. His brother-in-law was heavily melancholy—and not only because he had been smoking heavily since his return from Shanghai, careless of the danger of retr
ibution from the remaining zealots among the Taipings, led by the incorruptible Disciple King.
He would have the truth out of Lionel yet, and he would persuade Lionel to go over to the Imperial camp with him. With Taiping resistance crumbling amid internal dissension, the Manchus’ standing offer of amnesty was their only hope of safety, perhaps their only hope of life. He had learned how to deal with his brother-in-law, never straightforwardly but always indirectly—as the foreigners believed Chinese always behaved. He therefore allowed himself to be diverted by Lionel’s question about the queue.
“Maybe it’s an obsession with me,” Aaron admitted. “But just imagine: the Russians conquer England and decree that no Englishman may wear his normal clothing but only the Russian blouse—and every Englishman must shave his forehead and braid his back hair into a plait like a common sailor. For more than two centuries, no Chinese wife has seen her husband as God made him, but always disfigured by the barbaric hair style of a primitive tribe. Father and son look away in shame from the symbol of racial humiliation by the Manchus that both wear. It’s sinful, a distortion of nature.”
“What about foot binding, Aaron? That distorts nature violently. Hurts like the devil, too.”
“Somehow, Lionel, I can’t imagine marrying a woman with big feet. Ladies are proud of their golden lilies, and men like them. Besides, the Manchu women don’t do it. Foot binding’s not a foreign atrocity.”
“It all sounds a bit metaphysical to me. At any rate, you’ll soon be wearing the queue again. How do you square that?”
“I’ve got no choice. Why die for a forlorn cause? I can only revenge myself for the injustice to my father by changing the Confucian system from within. And David’s letters say his Mandarin is open to change.” Aaron returned to the attack. “But there’s nothing for you here. The Taipings are finished. Come with me tonight. After tonight it’ll be too late.”
“We’ll see, old chap.” Lionel remained evasive. “By God, it’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”
They stood on the ramparts of the Water Gate, the keystone of the intact defenses of the most beautiful city in China. Lying on the shore of Tai Hu, the Great Lake, amid a lacework of waterways segmented by the Grand Canal, Soochow was like Venice, an amphibious metropolis, half aquatic and half terranean. Cargo vessels did not unload outside the walls as at other Chinese cities, but poled into the center of Soochow on the network of internal canals.
The Water Gate was therefore the strong point of the defensive walls that had grown around the metropolis long before the birth of Christ. Lionel looked down upon an inverted ziggurat of ingenious complexity, a watery fortress with many interior walls pierced by enormous sluice gates. Silver in the moonlight, that internal watercourse frequently struck off at right angles, elsewhere almost doubled back on itself. The cargo vessels following that zigzag channel were always under the weapons of the guards on the walls that overlooked its entire length.
That defense against a water-borne attack was superfluous that night. The Imperial armies closing on the city under the Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s personal command were unlikely to strike at the Water Gate, since not even their modern cannon would breach the medieval walls. But the enemy’s overwhelming strength would overwhelm Taiping resistance. Besides, there was a whiff of treachery in the night air. Betrayal would not strike through the Water Gate, but would seep through the walls themselves. Too many otherwise inexplicable incidents during the past week, too many Imperial attacks on weak points, which just failed of their objectives, had demonstrated that some Taiping leaders were conspiring with the Imps.
Lionel did not know his brother-in-law’s precise role in the machinations he sensed. But Aaron had told him he was in communication with his younger brother David, aide-de-camp to the Imperialist general. The spy had just revealed that he expected the denouement of the plot within the next twenty-four hours.
Yet the web of treachery his brothers-in-law were spinning seemed almost superfluous when Lionel Henriques looked down from the crenelated Water Gate upon the massive enemy dispositions. On Tiger Hill lay the encampment of the Ever Victorious Army commanded by Colonel Charles George Gordon, a fanatical Christian who was determined to destroy the fanatically Christian Taipings for his own glory—and profit. The battle flags were arrayed near the White Pagoda, which had stood for more than a thousand years above the underwater grotto where the king of the feudal state of Wu, the founder of Soochow, was reputedly entombed. The spear-straight rows of yellow campfires in the clear night would, in any event, have revealed the bivouac of the Ever Victorious Army, the assault force of the Mandarin Li Hung-chang.
The Army of Huai ignored such military protocol, despite the Mandarin’s enthusiasm for Western weapons and Western tactics. The fiery dragon campfires of the Chinese army, which was armed chiefly with swords and spears, though stiffened with cannon platoons and rifle companies, writhed across the landscape where Chinese soldiers had clashed for more than two millennia.
Lionel had not trembled when the Mandarin arrived twelve days earlier to take personal command of the Imperial armies. He was not so deeply impressed by the Imperial Commander-in-Chief’s prowess, although his wife had, he somehow knew, come to feel near-awe for her chief. The Englishman had, however, been plunged into despair four days earlier, when the Loyal King withdrew from the city he loved above all others. Nanking was also threatened, and it was imperative that the Taiping Commander-in-Chief return to direct the defense of the Heavenly Capital. Lionel felt a presentiment of disaster as the Loyal King rode northwest with a small escort, leaving the defense of his beloved Soochow to the Disciple King.
That lesser Taiping commander was a soldier of renown, a true believer and a true hero, as the Englishman had learned on the battlefield. But he possessed neither the strategic genius nor the supernal valor of the Taiping Commander-in-Chief. The Disciple King was, moreover, embroiled in a personal dispute with his deputy, General Kao Yung-kwan, whose given name with nice irony meant Eternal Magnanimity. That sly scoundrel commanded the loyalty of the seven chief Taiping field commanders. Water-veined Soochow was hardly secure in the keeping of the Disciple King and the Eternally Magnanimous General.
Lionel’s journey into despair had begun even before the Loyal King’s departure. Inspired by his ardent countryman Captain A. F. Lindley, he had exulted when the captured gunboat Firefly evaded Colonel Gordon’s pursuit ambushes to reach the Great Lake. He had shared Lindley’s belief that Gordon’s Ever Victorious Army could be countered by a Loyal Faithful Auxiliary Legion—commanded by foreign officers, armed with foreign weapons, and deploying two foreign gunboats.
Despite the Loyal King’s support, the Faithful Legion would never defeat the hypocritical Gordon. Competent foreign officers could be found neither among the mercenaries already serving the Heavenly Kingdom nor in Shanghai. Few gentlemen fought under the banner of the Taipings, who, perforce, recruited their mercenaries among deserters, the sweepings of the Foreign Settlement. Finally, the Firefly had no support, and sending a single gunboat against the enemy flotillas was suicidal. With the Firefly withdrawn to Wuhsi on the Long River, the Faithful Legion was defeated before it put a single soldier into the field.
Too many similar disappointments during more than two years of service with the Taipings had frayed Lionel Henriques’s nerves. His reluctant reaffirmation of his love for Fronah had rent his spirit.
He now knew that he loved his wife and was deeply concerned for her happiness. But his treacherous flesh shrank from her, and he recoiled from the irksome responsibilities of matrimony. Since God had not made him to live with a mature woman, Fronah frightened him.
Immersed in his thoughts, the Englishman barely heard his brother-in-law urging him to defect to the Imperialists. As they descended from the Water Gate and walked toward the Garden of the Humble Administrator for the conference the Disciple King had summoned, Lionel Henriques’s mind was further confused by the excess of opium he had consumed during the pa
st week. Arrogantly detached, his consciousness soared above the besieged city and marveled at his concern with such transient matters as war and marriage. At thirty-nine, he was weary of change. He almost felt his life was over.
The metropolis through which they walked mirrored his nihilism. No longer did the four-foot-wide lanes between wooden buildings or the bridges arching over canals silvered by moonlight resound to the tread of uniformed men and women. The troops were on the city walls, and the occasional lictor warming himself over a minuscule fire glanced incuriously at them.
The Household Guard of the Disciple King slouched indifferent before the main gate of the Garden of the Humble Administrator. Hardly looking up from his New Testament, a sergeant waved them through the crimson arch. They walked unchallenged under the crooked boughs of bare trees toward the palace near the dragon-head Mountainview Tower, where the Loyal King had planned his offensives against Shanghai. Admitted after a cursory glance, they joined the thirty-odd staff officers waiting in the anteroom for the generals’ dinner to end.
Framed by the circular moon gate of the entrance hall like a proscenium arch, the eight generals led by the Eternally Magnanimous Kao were sipping tea with the Disciple King. Their gaudy robes enhanced the theatrical effect, as did the fires in the coal braziers, which alternately illuminated them and obscured them with shadow. At the head of the oval formed by ebony chairs, the Disciple King’s throne stood on a low dais. His square face was tense under its gold-filigree headdress, and his gestures were emphatic.
“The generals are parleying with Gordon,” Aaron whispered. “The Magnanimous Kao is planning to save his skin and his gold by delivering Soochow to that other righteous Christian warrior.”
“And Gordon will be richly rewarded,” Lionel replied bitterly. “He’ll protest he doesn’t want a thing. But he’ll take everything he can get so as not to offend the sensitive Orientals.”
Mandarin Page 57