SQ 04 - The English Concubine (10 page)

When the meeting came to an end, the men walked to their carriages.

‘I don’t understand what is happening here,’ Cheng said. ‘It is much more complicated than I expected.’

Zhen contemplated Cheng. He was a decent man, it seemed. Certainly not as foul as Hong who dealt in the shipment of girls for prostitution and packed the coolie junks so tight that the men hardly had air to breathe. Zhen remembered his own voyage to Singapore very well. It had been difficult but not like now. The demand for berths out of China because of the civil war was vast. But how much should he be telling this man his business?

He was resentful, he knew, of the threats the man had made, being put in this difficult position. But Cheng was at least sixty-five years old and Zhen quite liked him. He was vulnerable and out of his depth here in Singapore.

‘You should have bid for Johor. You must tread carefully there. How much money can you put together? Hong certainly wants the farm in Singapore. He runs the traffic of the girls for the whorehouses and the coolie trade, both extremely lucrative. He has a lot of capital and will offer high. He wants to be the Shan Chu and will know you have thwarted him by backing me.’

Cheng listened carefully, grateful for this advice.

‘The joint farms were rented for $15,000 a month to Wei. The rent has not shifted for five years, but the price of opium has increased. I can continue to offer $ 15,000 for the Singapore farm, but more would return a poor profit until the price of raw opium comes down.’

‘If you can come to some agreement with Tay Ong Siang in Johor, that would be the best course. He hates Hong and Hong hates him. There’s bad blood between them. A woman. A young ah ku whom Tay wanted and Hong refused him. Something like that.’

‘Do you know Tay?’

Zhen got into his carriage.

‘I know them both.’

‘Will you speak to Tay? Persuade him to work with me if I get the farm?’

Zhen took up the reins but made no answer.

‘Please. You are the leader, he will listen to you.’

It went against the grain to be disrespectful to Cheng for he was a much older man. And Cheng’s voice had adopted a pleading tone.

‘If you get the farm I will speak to Tay. But first you have to get the farm. And I’m not sure that will be enough money.’ Zhen shook the reins and the horse moved forward.

Cheng mounted his carriage and the syce clicked the horse into movement. Zhen had been a good choice. He wondered now, with all the complications of the Singapore and Johor syndicates, the situation with the Temenggong, the English government and the complex relations between the Chinese, whether he would even be able to cope, at his age, with being the leader of the Kongsi.

He had Wei’s wealth, his plantations in Johor, his shops in Singapore, his mansion on Mosque Street. Alongside his own land and influence in Riau, he had a great deal. The position of Shan Chu fit Zhen and he wore the mantle of the Lord well. He was respected and knew everything about the town, knew all the right people.

He could do worse than have him as a son-in-law. It would kill two birds with one stone. His only unmarried daughter was eighteen. He had not married her away young because he loved her too much and he wished to have her at his side. But he was now a resident in Singapore and marriage to this man was an idea which he liked very much. Through marriage he would have the closest alliance to the Lord of the Kongsi who was also a wealthy man and who understood all this world which he found so difficult.

The last thing he wanted now was for Zhen to resign his post and return to this English concubine. He needed to speak to Wang. He settled back and watched the lush countryside go by. Life in Singapore was infinitely more interesting than Riau.

11

The incense swirled through the branches and long aerial roots of the banyan tree like the spirits of the wood. The cemetery overflowed with colours of gold and red and the odour of sandalwood.

It had been three years since Tan had died. Zhen and his family, alongside his mother-in-law, were at his gravesite for the ‘picking of the bones’ ceremony. The grave had been dug out by the two officers of the dead, and three Buddhist priests were chanting sutras. Overhead, yellow silk umbrellas shielded the gravesite from the sun.

Soon the coffin would be opened and the bones extracted and wrapped in a white cloth. From here, they would go to the temple where they would be picked clean of all remaining skin and dirt. The teeth would be removed from the skull for a legend said that, if the teeth are left in the body, then the spirit would consume its offspring. Red realgar wine cleanses the bones, then each bone is wrapped in tan paper and red string is tied to give the appearance of veins. Red translucent material is wrapped around the skull.

The bones duly prepared would then be placed from the feet upwards to the skull in an urn and reinterred with due ceremony in the ancestral gravesite. All this had been done two years ago for Noan. Zhen had found it unpleasant but this was the belief of his mother-in-law and the ritual had been carried out as required. The pyjamas of white which both she and he had worn for their vowing ceremony was black and rotten. Traditionally he would be buried himself in his own pyjamas and the cloth from which they were made would unite them again in death.

Zhen stared down at the heavy wooden coffin of his father-in-law but his mind was on the conversation he had had yesterday with Ironfist Wang. He had not been able, at first, to comprehend what Wang was saying, why he was even talking about Xia Lou. Then he understood. She had been to the ship of the English captain. She had spent several hours on board alone with this man.

‘Are you sure,’ he’d asked and Wang had nodded. He had taken the information from Cheng and checked with the boatmen on the harbour. They had told him. Wang had felt the shame and humiliation of such actions towards this man, his sworn liege, very acutely. He hated any woman who could do such a thing.

‘Shall I follow her, Master?’ Wang had said.

‘No, no. Leave her alone.’

Wang had bowed but he was not sure the Master knew what he was saying.

The priest intoned the prayers over the coffin as the men set about removing its heavy lid. Lian gazed quietly at the tomb of her mother nearby. She had hardly known this woman. A vague recollection of sweetness before she had been snatched away from life and her children, and Lian had been given to her aunt.

From that moment she had been separated from her sisters and brother. She barely knew the sisters at all. Their upbringing had been so completely different and they had been married away so very young. Lian thought it was terribly wrong to marry girls aged thirteen away to men twice their age. It horrified her. As for Kai, he was ten and the most self-centred, spoiled and pampered boy in creation, ruined by their doting grandmother. She felt utterly disconnected from this living family and closer to those lying dead in the ground. She had loved her grandfather who had visited often and played with her whereas, other than family occasions, she had rarely seen her grandmother at all for all her attentions were focused on her grandson.

Her eyes swivelled to her aunt. She looked quite reasonable today, her hair neat and stuck with the diamond pins she loved. She had been a beautiful woman, it was clear to see, but misery and gall had made her face bitter and stiff. Zhen stood to one side with the other men of the family and Lian saw the gaze Lilin shot at him. A gaze at once passionate and malevolent. Lian felt sorry for her aunt whose life seemed to have been one long tale of misery. The fate of her sisters and her aunt, the lot of Chinese women which she saw as so crimped and confined, had settled iron into Lian’s soul and she was determined she would not go the way of all these women. She took her example from Miss Sophia Cooke, the head of the Chinese Girl’s School, a woman filled with the spirit of freedom and education and from Charlotte, her father’s mistress, whose own life was of her choosing.

A great gasp went up from the womenfolk and a high pitched scream from her grandmother. Zhen awoke from his reverie and Lian swivelled her eyes to the coffin.

Her grandmother and old aunts began keening, their wails seemingly echoing off the great trunks of the banyan trees like canyon walls.

Baba Tan, instead of being in a state of advanced decomposition, was instead, reasonably well preserved. The clothes had rotted somewhat and the hands were skeletal but the flesh on the face was taught, stretched and somewhat sunken, but otherwise intact.

Zhen knew that it was because the heavy coffin had been prepared with seven coats of tung oil to preserve it and keep the water out. It was, consequently, dry. In its present state it would take years for seepage to occur and rot the flesh away. Zhen had a keen interest in English science and read the books from the Institution library but this was mere common sense.

But, for his superstitious mother-in-law, this was interpreted in a very different way. She saw at is as a condemnation of the original burial, a way of blaming the living for some misdeeds and of course immense bad luck.

The Buddhist priests took all this in their stride. They reassured the old woman and praised Zhen for the quality of the wood. She, nevertheless, threw venomous looks at her son-in-law. The head priest knelt beside the coffin and made a blessing. Then realgar wine was liberally sprinkled on the corpse from head to toe and poured around the body.

Lian turned away. She had been taught to understand that such rituals were pagan. Lilin stared at her dead father, unwaveringly, then suddenly began to laugh. It was so shocking that her mother turned and slapped her. Lilin stopped instantly.

The coffin lid was fitted into place and the gravediggers began refilling the grave. Three more years would go by before they came again by which time the wine would have done its job.

Offerings of food were made, candles and incense lit at all the graves, and bundles of hell’s notes and paper ingots thrown into the fire in the great urn. Lian lit the joss in her turn and bowed low to her ancestors’ tombs. She placed the tight bud of the lotus she had brought for her mother on her grave.

Lilin came up to Zhen to pay her respects and Lian watched, curious. Zhen acknowledged her but his body stiffened. That he could not bear to be near her was obvious. What had gone on between these two? She had loved her father with whom she had an easy and pleasant relationship but, since the business of marriage had been announced, she found him overbearing.

As they went down the hill, Zhen signalled to her and she went to him, bowing. Lilin followed them with her eyes.

‘Mrs. Manouk spoke to me of you as you asked her.’

Lian turned her eyes to her father’s, a bright flare of hope springing into her heart.

‘She has argued that a girl of your education and upbringing will not settle into the life of a traditional Chinese wife. She was eloquent but she understands nothing of the Chinese and our culture.’

Lian felt the flame die a little.

‘What did you answer her, Father?’

‘That I understood her desire to be helpful but that this business was my business.’

Actually Zhen had been appalled at Lian’s boldness. Xia Lou had raised the subject at the last dinner they would eat together for many weeks. She had asked him to reconsider, but what was there to reconsider. He had given way on Alex and Lily. This daughter was his alone. Now he was so angry at Xia Lou he was unreachable on this subject.

Lian’s heart sank.

‘Father, I want to obey you but Ah Soon is an opium addict.’

‘Many men are. Should they not have wives?’

Lian felt a coldness enter her. He was determined. She saw his implacability. Nothing she could say would change his mind. He was heartless and she hated him. What difference did it make what she said now?

‘You are a hypocrite. You do not marry. You live with the woman you love, a beautiful, intelligent woman who has her own independence. You do not take a wife you do not care for.’

Zhen pulled up abruptly and took her by the arm roughly. ‘How dare you?’

Lian looked at him boldly, unflinching. She had rather die or be beaten than go down this path.

‘What is not true? You love Miss Charlotte and do not marry another.’

Zhen felt a dagger blow to his heart. To speak of Xia Lou, now, when things had so rapidly become strained. He thought constantly of her eyes turned to this man, her hand in his and now the visit to this sailor, this Commodore Mallory. What had she said, what had she done aboard his ship? He turned to Lian in fury.

‘Silence. Am I not free to take another wife if I choose? If my children are so disobedient and wilful I had better have some different ones.’

Lian fell silent. Could this be true? Could it? When she knew he cared so much for Charlotte. She had always secretly admired his unwavering faithfulness to this English woman which was the Christian ideal, and despised the Chinese men who took wives and concubines willy-nilly.

His mother-in-law turned, darting a look of venomous disapproval over them both as if they and their unorthodox lives were the fault of everything. Zhen bowed to her with exaggerated deference and for an instant Lian felt their solidarity. She and her father always found common ground in their feelings of general annoyance at her grandmother. But his tone was icy.

‘You will not shame me,’ he said severely. ‘You will do as you are told. You will prepare yourself for marriage. You are fortunate even to know it or who will be your husband. Resolve yourself. You will marry Ah Soon. Now go and join your grandmother.’

Lian felt that her heart would break. She wanted to shout at him, scream and scream and scream. She hated him, hated them all.

But she knew it was useless and her grandmother would take her in and lock her up and everything would be worse. She turned away from him and walked down the hill.

12

Cheng watched from the upper windows as Zhen arrived.

This house, with its carved wooden shutters, its porcelain tiles, its graceful fountain courtyard, its opulent elegance was a far cry from the attap-roofed compound he had grown up in. Even now, his compound in Tanjong Pinang, whilst spacious and well-made, was nothing compared to this mansion.