He glanced back at the longboat which was approaching leisurely. Struan fascinated him. He admired him and loathed him—the master mariner who had conned ships on every ocean in the world, who wrecked men and companies and ships to the glory of The Noble House. So different from Robb, Glessing thought; I like Robb.
He shuddered in spite of himself. Perhaps there was truth in the tales whispered by sailormen the China seas over, tales that Struan worshiped the Devil in secret, and that in return the Devil had given him power on earth. How else could a man of his age look so young and be so strong, with white teeth and all his hair and the reflexes of a youth, when most men would be infirm and used up and near death? Certainly the Chinese were terrified of Struan. “Old Green-eyed Rat Devil” they had nicknamed him, and had put a reward on his head. All Europeans had rewards on their heads. But the Tai-Pan’s was a hundred thousand taels of silver. Dead. For no one would catch him alive.
Glessing irritably tried to ease his toes in his buckled shoes. His feet hurt and he was uncomfortable in his gold-braided uniform. Damn the delay! Damn the island and the harbor and the waste of good ships and good men. He remembered his father’s saying, “Blasted civilians. All they think of is money or power. They’ve no sense of honor, none. Watch your backside, son, when there’s a civilian in command. And don’t forget that even Nelson had to put his telescope to his blind eye when there was an idiot in command.” How can a man like Longstaff be so stupid? The man’s from a good family, well-bred—his father was a diplomat at the court of Spain. Or was it Portugal?
And why did Struan push Longstaff into stopping the war? Certainly we get a harbor that can anchor the fleets of the world. But what else?
Glessing studied the ships in the harbor. Struan’s 22-gun ship,
China Cloud.
The
White Witch,
22-guns, pride of Brock’s fleet. And the American Cooper-Tillman 20-gun brig,
Princess of Alabama.
Beauties, all of them. Now, they’d be worth fighting, he thought. I know I could sink the American. Brock? Hard, but I’m better than Brock. Struan?
Glessing pondered about a sea battle with Struan. Then he knew that he was afraid of Struan. And because of his fear he was filled with anger and sick of the pretense that Struan and Brock and Cooper and all the China traders were not pirates.
By God, he swore to himself, as soon as the order’s official, I’ll lead a flotilla that’ll blast them all out of the water.
Aristotle Quance sat moodily in front of the half-finished painting on his easel. He was a tiny man with gray-black hair. His clothes, about which he was incredibly fastidious, were in the latest fashion: tight gray trousers and white silk socks and black bow-tied shoes. Pearl satin waistcoat and black wool frock coat. High collar and cravat and pearl pin. Half English and half Irish, he was, at fifty-eight, the oldest European in the Orient.
He took off his gold spectacles and began to clean them with an immaculate French lace kerchief. I’m sorry to see this day, he thought. Damn Dirk Struan. If it weren’t for him there’d be no damned Hong Kong.
He knew that he was witness to the end of an era. Hong Kong will destroy Macao, he thought. It will steal away all the trade. All the English and American tai-pans will move their headquarters here. They will live here and build here. Then all the Portuguese clerks will come. And all the Chinese who live off Westerners and Western trade. Well, I’m never going to live here, he swore. I’ll have to come here to work from time to time to earn money, but Macao will always be my home.
Macao had been his home for more than thirty years. He alone, of all the Europeans, thought of the Orient as home. All the others came for a few years and then left. Only those who died stayed. Even then, if they could afford it, they would provide in their wills for their bodies to be shipped back “home.”
I’ll be buried in Macao, thank God, he told himself. Such good times I’ve had there, we all have. But that’s finished. God damn the Emperor of China! Fool to wreck a structure so cleverly constructed a century ago.
Everything was working so well, Quance thought bitterly, but now it’s over. Now we’ve taken Hong Kong. And now that the might of England is committed in the East and the traders have had a taste of power, they won’t be content with just Hong Kong. “Well,” he said involuntarily aloud, “the emperor will reap what he has sown.”
“Why so glum, Mr. Quance?”
Quance put on his spectacles. Morley Skinner was standing at the foot of the bank.
“Not glum, young man. Sad. Artists have a right—yes, an obligation—to be sad.” He put the unfinished painting aside and set a clean piece of paper on his easel.
“Quite agree, quite agree.” Skinner lumbered up the bank, his pale brown eyes looking like the dregs of ancient beer. “Just wanted to ask you your opinion of this momentous day. Going to put out a special edition. Without a few words from our senior citizen the edition wouldn’t be complete.”
“Quite correct, Mr. Skinner. You may say, ‘Mr. Aristotle Quance, our leading artist, bon vivant and beloved friend, declined to make a statement as he was in the process of creating another masterpiece.’ ” He took a pinch of snuff and sneezed hugely. Then with his kerchief he dusted the excess snuff off his frock coat and the flecks of sneeze off the paper. “Good day to you sir.” Once more he concentrated on the paper. “You are disturbing immortality.”
“Know exactly how you feel,” Skinner said with a pleasant nod. “Exactly how you feel. Feel the same when I’ve something important to write.” He plodded away.
Quance did not trust Skinner. No one did. At least no one with a skeleton in his past, and everyone here had something he wanted to hide. Skinner enjoyed resurrecting the past.
The past. Quance thought about his wife and shivered. Great thunderballs of death! How could I have been so stupid to think that Irish monster could make a worthy mate? Thank God she’s back in the loathsome Irish bog, never to darken my firmament again. Women are the cause of all man’s tribulations. Well, he added cautiously, not all women. Not dear little Maria Tang. Ah, now, there’s a luscious coleen if ever I saw one. And if anyone knows an impeccable cross of Portuguese and Chinese, you do, dear clever Quance. Damn, I’ve had a wonderful life.
And he realized that though he was witnessing the end of an era, he was also part of a new one. Now he had new history to eyewitness and record. New faces to draw. New ships to paint. A new city to perpetuate. And new girls to flirt with and new bottoms to pinch.
“Sad? Never!” he roared. “Get to work, Aristotle, you old fart!”
Those on the beach who heard Quance chuckled one to another. He was hugely popular and his company sought after. And he was given to talking to himself.
“The day wouldn’t be complete without dear old Aristotle,” Horatio Sinclair said with a smile.
“Yes.” Wolfgang Mauss scratched the lice in his beard. “He’s so ugly he’s almost sweet-faced.”
“Mr. Quance is a great artist,” Gordon Chen said. “Therefore he is beautiful.”
Mauss shifted his bulk and stared at the Eurasian. “The word is ‘handsome,’ boy. Did I teach you for years so that you still don’t know the difference between ‘handsome’ and ‘beautiful,’
hein?
And he’s not a great artist. His style is excellent and he is my friend, but he has not the magic of a great master.”
“I meant ‘beautiful’ in an artistic sense, sir.”
Horatio had seen the momentary flash of irritation pass through Gordon Chen. Poor Gordon, he thought, pitying him. Of neither one world nor the other. Desperately trying to be English yet wearing Chinese robes and a queue. Though everyone knew he was the Tai-Pan’s bastard by a Chinese whore, no one acknowledged him openly—not even his father. “I think his painting wonderful,” Horatio said, his voice gentle. “And him. Strange how everyone adores him, yet my father despised him.”
“Ah, your father,” Mauss said. “He was a saint among men. He had high Christian principles, not like us poor sinners. May his soul rest in peace.”
No, Horatio thought. May his soul burn in hellflre forever.
The Reverend Sinclair had been one of the first group of English missionaries to settle in Macao thirty-odd years ago. He had helped in the translating of the Bible into Chinese, and had been one of the teachers in the English school that the mission had founded. He had been honored as an upstanding citizen all his life—except by the Tai-Pan—and when he had died seven years ago, he had been buried as a saintly man.
Horatio was able to forgive his father for driving his mother into an early grave, for the high principles that had given him a narrow, tyrannical approach to life, for the fanaticism of his worship of a terrifying God, for the obsessive single-mindedness of his missionary zeal, and for all the beatings he had inflicted on his son. But even after all this time he could never forgive him the beatings he had given Mary or the curses he had heaped on the Tai-Pan’s head.
The Tai-Pan had been the one who had found little Mary when at the age of six she had run away in terror. He had soothed her and then taken her home to her father, warning him that if he ever laid a finger on her again he would tear him out of his pulpit and horsewhip him through the streets of Macao. Horatio had worshiped the Tai-Pan ever since. The beatings had stopped, but there had been other punishments. Poor Mary.
As he thought of Mary, his heart quickened and he looked out at the flagship where they had their temporary home. He knew that she would be watching the shore and that, like him, she would be counting the days until they were back safe in Macao. Only forty miles away, south, but so far. He had lived all his twenty-six years in Macao except for some schooling at home in England. He had hated school, both at home and in Macao. He had hated being taught by his father; he had tried desperately to satisfy him but never had been able to. Not like Gordon Chen, who had been the first Eurasian boy accepted in the Macao school. Gordon Chen was a brilliant scholar and had always been able to satisfy the Reverend Sinclair. But Horatio did not envy him: Mauss had been Gordon Chen’s torturer. For every beating his father had given him, Mauss gave Gordon Chen three. Mauss was also a missionary; he had taught English, Latin and history.
Horatio eased the knot in his shoulders. He saw that Mauss and Gordon Chen were again staring fixedly at the longboat, and he wondered why Mauss had been so harsh with the young man at school—why he had demanded so much of him. He supposed it was because Wolfgang hated the Tai-Pan. Because the Tai-Pan saw through him and offered him money and the post of interpreter on opium-smuggling voyages up the coast. In return for allowing Wolfgang to distribute Chinese Bibles and tracts and to preach to the heathen wherever the ship stopped—but only after the opium trading was completed. He supposed Wolfgang despised himself for being a hypocrite and a party to such an evil. Because he was forced to pretend that the end justified the means when he knew it did not.
You’re a weird man, Wolfgang, he thought. He remembered going to Chushan Island last year when it had been occupied. With the Tai-Pan’s approval, Longstaff had appointed Mauss temporary magistrate to enforce martial law and British justice.
Against custom, strict orders had been issued on Chushan forbidding sacking and looting. Mauss had given every looter—Chinese, Indian, English—a fair, open trial and then he had sentenced each of them to be hanged, using the same words: “
Gott im Himmel
, forgive this poor sinner. Hang him.” Soon the looting ceased.
Because Mauss was given to reminiscing freely in court between hangings, Horatio had discovered that he had been married three times, each time to an English girl; that the first two had died of the flux and his present one was poorly. That while Mauss was a devoted husband, the Devil still tempted him successfully with the whorehouse and gin cellars of Macao. That Mauss had learned Chinese from the heathen in Singapore where he had been sent as a young missionary. That he had lived twenty of his forty years in Asia and had never been home in all that time. That he carried pistols now because “You can never tell, Horatio, when one of the heathen devils will want to kill you or heathen pirates will try to rob you.” That he considered all men sinners—himself above all. And that his one aim in life was to convert the heathen and make China a Christian nation.
“What’s in your mind?” broke into Horatio’s thoughts.
He saw Mauss studying him. “Oh, nothing,” he said quickly. “I was just . . . just thinking.”
Mauss scratched his beard thoughtfully. “I also. This is a day to think,
hein
? Nothing in Asia will ever be the same again.”
“No. I suppose not. Will you move from Macao? Build here?”
“Yes. It will be good to own land, have our own soil away from that papist cesspool. My wife will like that. But me? Me, I do not know. I belong there,” Mauss added, filled with longing, and he waved a huge fist at the mainland.
Horatio saw the eyes of Mauss deepen as he looked into the distance. Why is China so fascinating? he asked himself.
He scanned the beach wearily, knowing that there was no answer. I wish I were rich. Not as rich as the Tai-Pan or Brock. But rich enough to build a fine house and entertain all the traders and take Mary on a luxurious trip home through Europe.
He enjoyed being interpreter to His Excellency, and his private secretary, but he needed more money. One had to have money in this world. Mary should have ball gowns and diamonds. Yes. But even so, he was glad he didn’t have to earn their daily bread like the traders. The traders had to be ruthless, too ruthless, and the living was too precarious. Many who thought they were wealthy today would be broken in a month. A ship lost and you could be wiped out. Even The Noble House was hurt occasionally. Their ship
Scarlet Cloud
was already a month overdue, perhaps a battered hulk careening and refitting on some uncharted island between here and Van Diemen’s Land two thousand miles off course. More likely at the bottom of the sea with half a million guineas’ worth of opium in her gut.