Tai-Pan

by James Clavell

  “Why?”

  “He’s an Irishman. Cunnington’s been the spearhead of most of the Irish legislation for the past fifteen years, and directly responsible—all Irishmen feel—for our disastrous Irish policy. That’s the key to Whalen—if we can find a way to exploit it.” Skinner chewed an ink-stained thumbnail.

  Lim Din and another servant returned with plates of cold meats and pickled sausages and sweetmeats and cold pies and cold tarts and huge tankards of chilled beer, and champagne in an ice bucket.

  Skinner smiled greedily. “A feast fit for a millowner!”

  “Fit for a publisher-owner! Help yoursel’.” Struan’s mind was racing. How to twist Whalen? Will the Whigs fall from power? Should I switch my power to the Conservatives now? Stop supporting men like Crosse? By now word will be back in England that The Noble House is still The Noble House and stronger than ever. Do I gamble on Sir Robert Peel?

  “When you publish this dispatch, a panic will hit everyone,” he said, closing in for the kill.

  “Yes, Mr. Struan. If I wasn’t utterly opposed to letting Hong Kong go, I’ve the future of my paper to think of.” Skinner stuffed more food into his mouth, and talked as he chewed. “But there’re ways of presenting news and other ways of presenting news. That’s what makes newspaper work so exciting.” He laughed and some of the food dribbled down his chin. “Oh yes—I’ve the future of my paper to think of.” He turned his full attention to the food and ate monstrously.

  Struan ate sparingly, lost in thought. At last, when even Skinner was replete, he stood and thanked him for the information and advice.

  “I’ll inform you privately before I publish the dispatch,” Skinner said, bloated. “It’ll be in a few days, but I need time to plan. Thank you, Tai-Pan.” He left.

  Struan went below. May-may was still tossing in her sleep. He had a bunk made up in her room and let himself drift into half sleep.

  At dawn May-may began to shiver. Ice was in her veins, in her head, and in her womb. It was the fifteenth day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  May-may lay fragile and helpless as a baby under the weight of a dozen blankets. Her face was gray, her eyes ghastly. For four hours her teeth chattered. Then abruptly the chills changed to fever. Struan bathed her face with iced water but this brought no relief. May-may grew delirious. She thrashed in the bed, muttering and screaming in an incoherent mixture of Chinese and English, consumed by the terrible fire. Struan held her and tried to comfort her, but she didn’t recognize him, didn’t hear him.

  The fever disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Sweat gushed from May-may, drenching her clothes and the sheets. Her lips parted slightly and she uttered an ecstatic moan of relief. Her eyes opened and gradually began to focus.

  “I feel so good, so tired,” she said feebly.

  Struan helped Ah Sam change the soaking pillows and sheets and clothing.

  Then May-may slept—as the dead sleep, inert. Struan sat in a chair and watched over her.

  She awoke after six hours, serene but depleted. “Hello, Tai-Pan. I have Happy Valley fever?”

  “Aye. But your doctor’s got medicine to cure it. He’ll have it in a day or so.”

  “Good. Very good. Dinna worry, never mind.”

  “Why’re you smiling, lassie?”

  “Ah,” she said, and closed her eyes contentedly and settled deeper into the clean sheets and pillows. “How else can you dominate joss? If you smile when you lose, then you win in life.”

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “Fine. Dinna worry.”

  “I have no worries for me. Only you.”

  “What do you mean?” Struan was exhausted by his vigil, and anguished by the fact that she seemed thinner than before, wraithlike, her eyes deeply shadowed. And aged.

  “Nothing. I would like some soup. Some chicken soup.”

  “The doctor sent some medicine for you. To make you strong.”

  “Good. I feel fantastical weak. I will have the medicine after soup.”

  He ordered the soup and May-may sipped a little, then lay back again.

  “Now you rest, Tai-Pan,” she said. She furrowed her brow. “How many days before next fever?”

  “Three or four,” he said miserably.

  “Dinna worry, Tai-Pan. Four days is forever, never mind. Go and rest, please, and then later we will talk.”

  He went into his own cabin and slept badly, waking every few moments, then sleeping and dreaming that he was awake, or almost asleep and getting no rest.

  The dying sun was low on the horizon when he awakened. He bathed and shaved, his brain jumbled and unclean. He stared at his face in the mirror and did not like what he saw. For his eyes told him that May-may would never survive three such battles. Twelve days of life remained for her at most.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Aye?”

  “Tai-Pan?”

  “Oh, hello, Gordon. What news?”

  “None, I’m afraid. I’m doing everything I can. How is the Lady?”

  “The first attack has come and gone. Nae good, lad.”

  “Everything’s being done. The doctor sent some medicine to keep her strength up and some special foods. Ah Sam knows what to do.”

  “Thank you.”

  Gordon left, and Struan turned again to his reflections. He groped agonizingly for a solution. Where do I get cinchona? There must be some somewhere. Where would Peruvian bark be in Asia? Na Peruvian bark—Jesuits’ bark.

  Then his vagrant thought exploded into an idea. “For the love of God!” he shouted aloud, his hope quickening. “If you want horseflies, go to a horse. If you want Jesuits’ bark—where else, you stupid fool!”

  Within two hours China Cloud was ripping out of the sunset-painted harbor like a Valkyrie, all sails set but tightly reefed against the thickening monsoon. When she broke through the west channel and hit the full force of the Pacific swell and the wind, she heeled over and the rigging sang exultantly.

  “Sou’ by sou’east!” Struan roared over the wind.

  “Sou’ by sou’east it is, sorr,” the helmsman echoed.

  Struan peered aloft at the shrouds, etched against the implacable coming of night, and was chagrined to see so much canvas reefed. But he knew that with this easterly and with this sea the reefs would have to stay.

  China Cloud came onto the new course and gained way into the night but still fought the sea and the wind. Soon she would turn again and have the wind astern and then she could run free.

  After an hour Struan shouted, “All hands on deck—ready to ware ship!”

  The men scurried from the fo’c’sle and stood ready in the darkness on the ropes and hawsers and halyards. “West by sou’west,” he ordered, and the helmsman swung the tiller wheel to the new course and the clipper swung with the wind. The yards screeched and strained to leeward and the halyards howled and stretched and then she was on the new course and Struan shouted, “Mains’l and top ta’ gallants reefs let go!”

  The ship tore through the waves, the wind well abaft the beam, the bow wave cascading.

  “Steady as she goes,” Struan ordered.

  “Aye, aye, sorr,” the helmsman said, straining his eyes to see the flickering light of the binnacle and maintain a steady course, the wheel fighting him.

  “Take over, Cap’n Orlov!”

  “It’s about time, Green Eyes.”

  “Perhaps you can get more speed,” Struan said. “I’d like to be in Macao forthwith!” He went below.

  Orlov thanked God that he had been prepared, as always, for instant departure. He had known the moment he saw the Tai-Pan’s face that China Cloud had better be out of harbor in record time or he would be without a ship. And though his seaman’s caution told him so much sail at night in such shoal and rock-filled seas was dangerous, he shouted exultantly, “Let go reefs fore-royal and upper top ta’ gallants,” and reveled in the freedom of being at sea and in command again after so many days at anchor. He inched the
ship a point starboard and let go more reefs and drove her relentlessly. “Get the for’ard cutter ready, Mr. Cudahy! God knows, it better be ready when he comes on deck—and get the pilot’s lantern aloft!”

  “Aye, aye, sorr.”

  “Belay the pilot’s lantern! We’ll not get one at this time of night,” Orlov said, correcting himself. “I’ll not wait for dawn and any shark-guts pilot. I’ll take her in myself. We’ve urgent cargo aboard.”

  Cudahy bent down and put his lips near Orlov’s ear. “Is she the one, sir? The one that he was after buying for her weight in gold? Did you see her face?”

  “Get for’ard or I’ll have your guts for the felt of my trousers! And keep your mouth shut and spread that word, by the blood of Christ! Everyone’s confined to ship when we reach Macao!”

  “Aye, aye, me foine Captain sorr,” Cudahy said with a laugh and stood to his full height, towering over the little man he liked and admired. “Our mouths are clams, by the beard of St. Patrick. No fear of that!” He leaped down the quarterdeck gangway and went forward.

  Orlov strode the quarterdeck, wondering what all the mystery was about, and what was amiss with the tiny, shrouded girl the Tai-Pan had brought aboard in his arms. He saw the thickset Chinese, Fong, following Cudahy like a patient dog, and he wondered again why the man had been sent aboard to be trained in the ways of a captain, and why the Tai-Pan had put one of the heathen aboard each of his clippers.

  I’d like to have seen the girl’s face, he told himself. Her weight in gold, yes, so the story goes. I wish—oh, how I wish I was not as I am, that I could look into a man’s face or a woman’s face and not see revulsion, and not have to prove that I’m a man like any, and better than any afloat. I’m tired of being Stride Orlov the hunchback. Is that why I was afeared when the Tai-Pan said, “In October you’ll go north, alone”?

  He looked moodily over the gunnel, at the black waves rushing past. You are what you are and the sea’s waiting. And you’re captain of the finest ship in the world. And once in your life you looked into a face and saw the green eyes studying you just as a man. Ah, Green Eyes, he thought, his misery leaving him, I’ll go into hell for the moment you gave me.

  “Avast there, you swabs! Bend smartly on the top ta’ gallants ho!” he shouted.

  And his order sent the men scurrying aloft again to grasp more power from the wind. And then, when he saw the lights of Macao on the horizon, he ordered the sails reefed and eased his ship cautiously—but always with the maximum speed—into the shallow harbor of Macao, the leadsman calling the fathoms.

  “Fine seamanship, Cap’n,” Struan said.

  Orlov spun around, startled. “Oh, didn’t see you. You sneak up on a man like a ghost. Cutter’s ready to go alongside.” Then he added nonchalantly, “Thought I might as well take her in as wait till dawn and a pilot.”

  “You’re a mind reader, Captain.” Struan looked at the lights and at the unseen city, low on the water but rising to a crest. “Anchor at our usual mooring. Guard my cabin yoursel’. You’re na to go in—or any. Everyone’s confined to the ship. With a tight mouth.”

  “I’ve already given those orders.”

  “When the Portuguese authorities come aboard, apologize for not waiting for the pilot and pay the usual dues. And the squeeze to the Chinese. Say I’m ashore.”

  Orlov knew better than to ask how long the Tai-Pan would be gone.

  Dawn was nudging the horizon when China Cloud moored half a mile from the still undiscernible wharves on the southwest harbor. This was as close as she could safely come; the bay was dangerously shallow and therefore almost useless—another reason Hong Kong was an economic necessity. As he hastened the cutter to shore, Struan noticed the riding lights of another clipper to the south: White Witch. A few smaller European ships were at anchor, and hundreds of sampans and junks plied their silent way.

  Struan hurried along the jetty still rented by The Noble House. He saw that there were no lights on in their vast company residence which was also leased from the Portuguese. It was a colonnaded mansion, four-storied, on the far side of the tree-lined praia. He turned north and walked along the praia, skirting the Chinese customshouse. He cut through a wide street and began climbing the slight hill toward the church of São Francisco.

  He was glad to be back in Macao, back in civilization amid cobbled streets and stately cathedrals and gracious Mediterranean houses and fountained praças and spacious gardens—sweet-smelling with their abundance of flowers.

  Hong Kong will one day be like this, he told himself … with joss. Then he recalled Skinner and Whalen and malaria, and May-may aboard China Cloud, so frail and so weak and another fever due in two or three days. And what about Blue Cloud? She should be home soon. Will she beat Gray Witch? Or is she a thousand miles astern at the bottom of the sea? What about all the other clippers? How many do I lose this season? Let Blue Cloud be first! How is Winifred? And is Culum all right, and where’s Gorth, and will it be today that there will be a reckoning?

  The city was still asleep in the dawn. But he could feel Chinese eyes watching him. He crested the hill and crossed the beautiful Praça de São Francisco.

  Beyond the praça northward, at the highest point of the isthmus, were the battlements of the ancient fort of São Paulo de Monte. And beyond this was the Chinese section of Macao: narrow alleys, and hovels built on hovels, crusting the north slope of the hill and falling away.

  For half a mile farther there was flat land and the isthmus narrowed to barely a hundred and fifty yards. There were gardens and walks and the emerald of the small racecourse and the cricket ground that the English had developed and sponsored over the centuries. The Portuguese did not approve of racing and did not play cricket.

  A hundred yards beyond the cricket ground was the wall where Macao ended and China began.

  The wall was twenty feet high and ten feet thick and stretched from shore to shore. Only after the wall was built three centuries ago had the emperor agreed to lease the isthmus to the Portuguese and allow them to settle on the land.

  In the center of the wall’s length was a portaled guard tower and a single majestic gate. The gate to China was always open, but no European could set foot through it.

  Struan’s boots sounded loud as he hurried across the praça and opened the tall, wrought-iron gates of the bishop’s palace and walked through the gardens that had been tended for three centuries. One day I’ll have a garden like this, he promised himself.

  He crossed the cobbled forecourt, his boots clattering, and went up to the huge door. He pulled the bell and heard it echo within and pulled it again and again, insistently.

  At length a lantern flickered past the downstairs windows and he heard footsteps approaching and a stream of querulous Portuguese. The door opened.

  “Bom dia. I want to see the bishop.”

  The half-dressed, half-asleep servant stared at him without recognition and without comprehension, then spouted another stream of Portuguese and began to close the door. But Struan shoved his foot in the door, pushed it open, and walked into the house. He turned into the first room—an exquisite, book-tiered study—and sat in a carved-backed chair. Then he let his eyes fall on the gaping servant. “The bishop,” he repeated.

  Half an hour later Falarian Guineppa, Bishop of Macao, General of the Church of Rome, strode imperiously into the room that Struan had commandeered. He was a tall patrician who carried his fifty years youthfully. His nose was Roman-beaked, his forehead high, his features well used. He wore a magenta skullcap and magenta robes, and around his taut neck hung a bejeweled crucifix. His black eyes were sleepy and hostile. But when they fell on Struan, the anger and the sleepiness vanished. The bishop stopped on the threshold, every fiber of his being alert.

  Struan stood. “Good morning, Your Grace. Sorry to come uninvited and so early.”

  “Welcome in the name of God, senhor,” the bishop said pleasantly. He motioned to a chair. “I think a little breakfast. Would you join me?�
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  “Thank you.”

  The bishop spoke curtly in Portuguese to the servant, who bowed and hurried away. Then he strolled slowly to the window, his fingers on his crucifix, and stared out at the rising sun. He saw China Cloud and the clusters of sampans surrounding it in the bay far below at anchor. What emergency, he wondered, brings the Tai-Pan of The Noble House to me? The enemy I know so well but have never met. “I thank you for such an awakening. This dawn is very beautiful.”

  “Aye.”

  Each man assumed a civility that neither felt.

  To the bishop, Struan represented the materialistic, evil, fanatic Protestant English who had broken the laws of God, who—to their everlasting damnation—had denied the Pope as the Jews had denied Christ; the man who was their leader, and the one who had, almost singlehanded, destroyed Macao, and with Macao, Catholic domination of the Asian heathen.

  To Struan, the bishop represented all that he despised in the Catholics—the dogmatic fanaticism of self-castrated, power-seeking men who sucked riches from the poor in the name of a Catholic God, drop by bloody drop, and from the drops built mighty cathedrals to the glory of their version of Divinity, who had idolatrously set up a man in Rome as Pope and made the man an infallible arbiter of other men.

  Liveried servants obsequiously brought silver trays and hot chocolate and feather-light croissants and fresh butter and the sweet kumquat jelly for which the monastery was famous.

  The bishop said grace and the Latin increased Struan’s discomfort, but he said nothing.

  Both men ate in silence. The bells from the multitude of churches tolled matins, and the faint, deep-throated litany from the chorus of monks in the cathedral filled the silence.

  After chocolate there was coffee from Portuguese Brazil: hot, sweet, powerful, delicious.

  At a motion of the bishop’s hand a servant opened the bejeweled cigar box and offered it to Struan. “These are from Havana, if they please you. After breakfast, I enjoy Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘gift’ to humanity.”