The Baronet Jung Lu brought the new Emperor to the bier of his predecessor at the beginning of the double-hour of the monkey, three in the morning of January 13, 1875, by European reckoning. His mother, who was Yehenala’s younger sister, unloosed his clutching arms from her neck and set him on his feet. Encumbered by his heavy metallic-brocade Dragon Robe, the round-faced child knelt weeping in bewilderment before the powdered corpse clothed in the golden Dragon Robe of Longevity.
His reign would be called Kwang Hsü, Brilliant Beginning, Yehenala decided, watching the child, who was of her own blood, perform his first duty as Emperor. This nephew, now her adopted son, she would train better than she had the son of her own womb. He would grow up strong in body and mind to reign as a truly great Emperor. Intensive tutelage was obviously essential—the more protracted the better.
Thank Heaven, she reflected, for the Mandarin Li Hung-chang. He had backed her when she and the Dynasty required his support most desperately, and he would be richly rewarded. Above all, she thanked Heaven for the Baronet Jung Lu’s devoted love. Without Jung Lu, she could never have accomplished so much all these years. Pray Heaven he would stand behind her for many years to come.
She had not wished to impose her will on the conclave, she told herself, any more than she had wished to assume the burden of supreme power in the beginning. However, perilous times demanded firm rule, and she was manifestly the only member of the Imperial Family who possessed the requisite decisiveness. If she had not asserted her will in the past, the barbarians and the rebels would have destroyed the Sacred Dynasty. If she had not acted decisively tonight, the feuding factions of the Court would subsequently have come into armed conflict—and the Manchu Empire would have splintered into anarchy.
She could not simply shrug off the burden Heaven had laid upon her frail shoulders. She had previously temporized with the barbarians, but she would stand up to them in her new regency. Never wavering from the traditional verities and virtues, the Empire would wax prosperous and strong under her resolute hand during the decade and a half before the Kwang Hsü Emperor came of age. Afterward, perhaps, she could retire as she had always wished. She was only forty, thirty-nine as the barbarians calculated, still young enough to enjoy the pleasures of private life. Though she could not evade her responsibilities, she must resume the reconstruction of the Summer Palaces to provide a fitting sanctuary for her old age. A myriad other matters also required her attention now that the reins of power were, once again, firmly in her hands.
Would she ever feel that she was justified in laying down the burden of responsibility? She hated that burden, although fools believed she delighted in her supreme power. Would she ever be able to pass it on?
She did not know. She simply did not know.
CHAPTER 78
January 14, 1875
THE GULF OF POHAI OFF TAKU BAR
The teak paneling of the owner’s cabin groaned as the S.S. Keelung, the pride of the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, pitched in the long swells reaching into the Gulf of Pohai from the coast off Tientsin. The crashing of the waves from the North China Sea against her square stern was subsiding as the rage of the wind declined. The big paddle-wheeler no longer quivered in every plank as she had when her prow smashed into mountains of water that seemed as unyielding as granite. The shutters protecting the portholes had been taken down earlier that morning, and the drab light of the northern winter dyed the opulent furnishings with a gray patina.
Fronah gratefully watched her amah pack the two big steamer trunks for disembarkation. She had been ashamed of her terror at the height of the gale. But the gruff Scots captain and the laconic Down Easter from Maine who was the first officer had both assured her that only a fool would have been unafraid. Did she think, they asked, they weren’t frightened? Did she think the Keelung would have put into Tsingtao for refuge if the danger from the storm had not been overwhelming? The voyage, which should have taken five or six days—no more than eight even in rough winter seas—was entering its third week on January 14, 1875.
She was delighted that today would see its end. She had been disappointed at spending New Year’s Eve in storm-whipped waters, bereft of the pleasure she usually took in the festivities that bade farewell to the departing year and, far worse, deprived of Gabriel’s anticipated company for the celebration. She yearned to reach Tientsin. The voyage had been both frightening and dull.
She was not diverted by the officers’ attentiveness to the solitary female who occupied the arc-shaped suite directly under the bridge. A privilege had, for once, been accorded her not because she was Saul Haleevie’s daughter but because she was the guest of David Lee, chief of the secretariat of the Mandarin Li Hung-chang, Viceroy of Chihli, Superintendent of Trade for the Northern Ports, and the effective owner of the China Merchants’ Steamship Company. Since she was traveling as Mrs. Henriques—for the last time, she prayed—the officers did not know she was the daughter of a major stockholder in the line.
David rather than Gabriel had replied to her message that she would sail on the Keelung after ensuring that the children’s home and the language school would function smoothly during her absence, while her parents had been delighted to take in Judah, who was his grandfather’s confidant in all business affairs. David’s message had taken the same curious route as her own: by the new telegraph lines for short distances and by mounted courier between the stations. Acknowledging her message, her brother had added, as if by afterthought, in taut telegraphese: COMMODORE HYDE ALSO HOPES WELCOME YOU BUT MUST REPEAT MUST PROCEED KOREA SEVENTEENTH JANUARY.
Fronah was nonplussed by both that curt injunction and David’s signature. Gabriel must naturally go where directed by the Mandarin, she consoled herself. It was less consoling that he apparently did not wish to appear to sponsor her visit. Since Gabriel was ordered to Korea, the delay occasioned by the gale was doubly irksome. They must, above all, meet again now, not later. The beginning of the new year was the auspicious time, she told herself, superstitious as a Chinese maid-servant poring over her horoscope.
She would, Fronah resolved, go with Gabriel to Korea even if they could not marry before the trip. But the decision was not hers, she realized with dismay. She would go with him if he wanted her to—just as she would marry him if he chose. It was galling to be completely dependent upon someone else’s will, even Gabriel’s. Not only where she would spend the next few weeks, but how she would spend the rest of her life rested entirely with the man who had been her devoted lover before her own capriciousness drove him away. Yet she knew that she was her own woman—and always would be, even if he demanded that they live in the United States some day.
Would Gabriel already have made up his mind one way or the other? She did not believe so, and she knew that he would not have decided upon marriage. She only prayed that he had not decided against marriage.
For perhaps the fiftieth time, she unfolded his much-creased letter and reread his equivocal words. At least there could be no doubt about his love. But could he overcome his doubts about himself, as well as his doubts about herself?
A sharp rap on the cabin door interrupted Fronah’s ten thousandth retracing of the circles in which her thoughts had been whirling for weeks. She admitted the first officer, whose long face bore a patronizing smile.
“Cap’n MacFarlane presents his compliments, ma’am,” the Down Easter said. “He wonders if you’d care to come to the bridge. We’ll be making our landfall on the new Taku Fort in an hour or so. The fishing junks are coming out, and they’re well worth seeing the first time.”
Content in her anonymity, Fronah felt it would be ungracious to tell the young man that she had already seen more junks than he would ever see. Let him think she was a newcomer to China who had never seen a fleet of Chinese vessels, much less sailed up the Long River on a black smuggling junk.
Captain MacFarlane was heartily welcoming when she climbed the varnished ladder to the bridge, which was built near the bows in the new
fashion. The wheelhouse sparkled, its wood bright and its brass fittings gleaming. The Chinese quartermaster at the teak wheel as tall as himself was steering the Keelung’s white prow through a school of junks. Their red-and-blue paint faded and their bows frail in the gray-green waves, the brave junks made her throat ache.
“A beautiful sight, Mrs. Henriques, isn’t it?” The Captain was courtly. “But I wouldn’t go to sea in a junk for a year’s pay.”
No, Captain, Fronah thought, you wouldn’t. And you shouldn’t. You probably couldn’t bear it, master mariner though you may be. Every helmsman in that fleet knows more in his bones about the winds and the waves than you’ll ever know with all your machinery and your chronometers. They are real sailors. They respect the power of the goddess of the sea, but they are not afraid.
She was startled by her passionate advocacy of those sailors. Perhaps she was, as her father charged, too deeply committed to China and the Chinese.
“Now that’s odd,” the Captain said. “A man-of-war, obviously, but showing some queer signal flags. Very odd. Care to have a look, Mrs. Henriques?”
Fronah took his binoculars and adjusted them to her eyes as Gabriel had taught her. The angular side-wheeler was as awkward as the old Mencius, Gabriel’s first command, though much larger than that makeshift river gunboat. The rigging, Fronah saw in the wavering circle of the lenses, was festooned with scarlet bunting.
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” the first officer exclaimed. “Dressed all over in red. And damned if she isn’t … I’d swear she’s flying a commodore’s pennant.”
Fronah’s heart turned over in her breast. She had always thought it was only a figure of speech, but she felt her heart jump.
“Must be some Chink holiday,” the Captain observed. “Damned unseamanlike. But the heathen’ve got some strange ways.”
The Chinese quartermaster moved the wheel minutely, his face heavily impassive.
“She’s coming up fast, Cap’n,” the first officer volunteered. “Must be bustin’ her boilers. She’s in one big rush.”
“She’s also flying a proper signal, Mister.” The Captain strove to steady his old-fashioned brass telescope. “Can you make it out?”
“No, Cap’n, not yet. Just a minute, though. Yeah, she’s flying: Heave to. I wish to board.”
“The devil with that!” the Captain swore. “We’re already badly delayed. Mister, I won’t stop for a Chink gunboat.”
As the boxy vessel drew close, freshets of spray broke over the windows of her wheelhouse. The Mencius, Fronah remembered, had provided no such protection against the elements.
“She’s Chink, all right,” the Captain said curtly. “Maintain course and speed. I’m not stopping for some Chink tomfoolery.”
The warship cut in front of the Keelung, urgently lowering and rehoisting her signal flags to ensure that they were seen. When the big steamer plowed ahead, a signal lamp winked imperatively.
“Morse in English,” the first officer reported. “She’s making: Obey my order! Heave to!”
“Maintain course and speed,” the Captain repeated.
A puff of smoke drifted from the gun on the warship’s prow, and a spurt of water rose fifty yards in front of the steamer.
“Shot across the bows, Cap’n,” the first officer said conversationally. “Guess she means business. Guess we’re stopping for the Chink tomfoolery.”
“Slow engines,” the Captain ordered. “Put her into the wind.”
Fronah scrutinized the big gunboat through the binoculars. A Chinese crew was clustered around the long gun on the prow, and Chinese sailors were hoisting a small boat out on its davits. Those scarlet flags, she pondered, they were unusual. The blurred circle of her binoculars shifted to the enormous banner streaming beside the tall smokestack. It was emblazoned in gold with a stylized ideogram, which she could not quite read through the wavering binoculars.
“Holding us up like this,” the Captain grumbled. “It’d better be damned important.”
“It is, Captain, it is!” Fronah thrust the binoculars at him. “It’s damned important, I promise you. Damned important!”
The officers watched in astonishment as she scrambled down the ladder to the deck, heedless of her flying skirts. While the captain grumbled, the emblem on the great banner had resolved itself into the double-hsi, the twofold-joy ideogram symbolizing weddings and connubial bliss. Fronah had also glimpsed an officer wearing a blue uniform and a white cap striding toward the small boat hanging from its davits. She could not distinguish his features, but he walked with Gabriel’s assured tread on the pitching deck.
Fronah stood at the rail of the Keelung beside the open gate through which the sailors were lowering a Jacob’s ladder. She willed the small boat to dance faster over the waves. But she already knew, and her heart leaped again.
He had made up his mind. Only Gabriel would have flaunted that bravura banner, the old Gabriel she loved. Had there ever been a more ostentatious proposal of marriage? Every man on the gunboat must know why their barbarian commodore was flying the double-joy ideogram. He would never have hoisted that signal if he were not absolutely certain of his own mind. He trusted her, and he wanted her, or he would not be proclaiming his intention of marrying her—just as she was now utterly sure of him.
Fronah bridled for an instant. Perhaps he was too sure of her. The next instant, she smiled. He had every reason to be sure of her.
The small boat was a bobbing cockleshell at the foot of the towering side of the steamer. The officer in blue swung onto the rope ladder and began to climb slowly, fending off the ship’s planking with one hand. Fronah bit her lips in fear. The ladder was frail, and the steamer was pitching violently. She almost wanted to shout at him to go back, but her voice would never carry over the wind. Suddenly she knew that the Commodore of the North China Fleet would be in no hurry to leave China for his own country. She also knew that he would be firm, but never domineering or, worse, negligent toward her.
His head down, the officer struggled up the rungs—for hours, it seemed. Only when his cap, miraculously still secure, was level with the deck did he raise his head. Fronah saw Gabriel smiling at her as he pulled himself through the railing, and she stepped forward.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Imperial China Trilogy
May 28, 1900
Mary Philippa Osgood was four weeks removed from the twentieth birthday that would, by the rigid standards of the late Victorian era, transform her from a young woman into a spinster. Never during the preceding nineteen years and eleven months had she been as acutely aware of her own body as she was at 8:15 on the morning of May 28, 1900. Dancing across the ruffled Pearl River Estuary, the gusts that swelled the vestigial sails of the Orion molded her ankle-length dress to the curves of her bosom, her hips, and her legs.
Before leaving England seven weeks earlier, she had bought a new dress for £5, her Aunt Margaret’s generous going-away gift. The motherly wife of the major commanding the home depot of the Royal Wessex Fusiliers had helped her select the long-wearing dark blue serge the Stepney mercers recommended as “eminently suitable for summer.” But the “lightweight” fabric was a sackcloth torment in the 92° heat and 93 percent humidity when the Orion left the fresh sea air behind on entering the western approaches to Hong Kong.
She had daringly discarded her camisole along with two of her three petticoats, and she wore her lightest stays. The major’s wife had confided that the corsets suitable for the English summer could be agonizingly confining in the faraway, subtropical Crown Colony. Nonetheless, Mary was uncomfortably aware of her nipples’ swelling under the chafing serge. Perspiration dripped between her full breasts, trickling down to tremble on the secret tendrils of hair that covered the parts she thought of as “the place between my thighs.” Though she remembered shameful dreams, she had never known such intense awareness of her body before this voyage. Was this, she wondered uneasily, the spell of the sensuous, sinful East? She was profoundl
y conscious of being a woman, not only a woman in all her parts, but a white woman surrounded by men of color.
Soft-padded fingers grasped her elbow to steady her against the ship’s motion with excessive concern, though her own hands gripped the foredeck rail. The pressure was light and deferential, but, she felt in her heightened awareness, somehow predatory. Abruptly, her North Country common sense asserted itself. She laughed at her fancies and brushed back a tendril of red-gold hair. The gesture strained her breasts against the light serge, and her companion caught his breath.
“Miss Osgood, there it is, just over the horizon. You can see the loom against the clouds.”
Hilary Metcalfe’s deep voice recalled her to a reality different from any she had known. Orion was steaming among rocky islets veined with emerald vegetation, which lay upon the wind-brushed sea like meteorites. In the distance on her left a wisp of smoke rose, and a dark shape that might have been a small craft bobbed beneath an elongated, vertical shadow that might have been a sail. She saw no other sign of human life. Yet her nostrils were assailed by unfamiliar odors that swamped the clean tang of the sea: wood-smoke and incense; an unpleasant mustiness and the reek of corruption; a nauseatingly fecal stench and a garlic-laden, many-spiced scent.
“The fragrance of the East, essence of the Orient,” Metcalfe rumbled in her ear. “They call it Hong Kong—the Fragrant Port. There’s the stench of decay, of course, but mainly the effluvia of the chief Chinese occupation—eating. There’s wood-smoke, garlic, coriander, anise, vinegar, oyster sauce, dried fish, and barbecued pork. And, over all, dark brown, pungent soy-sauce.”
She had learned early in the voyage that Mr. Metcalfe was a pedant. She knew the type well, for she had earned her keep as a governess since her mother’s death two years earlier. As she would not a few months earlier, she applied the word to a man who seemed venerable at fifty-six. The journey had taught her that she was quicker, more forceful, and more perceptive than most young women in the sixty-second year of the reign of Her Most Excellent Majesty, Victoria, By the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and of Her Other Realms and Territories over the Sea, Queen; Empress of India; Defender of the Faith. She guarded her knowledge of her capabilities, and she could flutter her eyelashes as fetchingly as the most helpless Victorian miss. Besides, she had learned much from Hilary Metcalfe, who was neither patronizing nor importunate. She had also learned that she could bend Metcalfe and the ship’s officers to her wishes, not only by feminine guile, but by calm persistence.
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