The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (55 page)

‘Shut up and let me think,' snarled Mother Liu. ‘I am surrounded by idiots. The biggest is apparently my own son. Leave that,' she snapped, pulling her girdle away from Su Liping's fumbling fingers.

Half dressed she hobbled to the door, Su Liping tottering after her. Their lotus feet made progress difficult, but Mother Liu's anger drove her forward and along the corridor at a trotting pace. She paused by one of the doors and put her eye to the spyhole. Inside the foreign boy was sitting on the bed, one leg manacled by a chain to the post. His face was alert, one hand to his ear. She became aware of a dull murmuring sound coming from outside the building. Mother Liu grunted, and moved on. At the end of the corridor a window looked out onto the square. It was high on the wall, so Mother Liu had to enlist Su Liping's help to get on to a bench, which allowed her the elevation to raise the paper-covered window on its hinges and peer outside. There was an immediate welling up of the roar of the crowd, and she could identify shouts, laughter and jeers.

Su Liping had climbed up beside her and pointed. ‘There they are, Mother, right below us. Do you see them?'

A large mob of layabouts had surrounded the Millward family, mocking them as they formed a half-circle on their knees in prayer. Mother Liu saw that each of the foreigners was holding up a cross apparently made of straw. The father, a tall, skeletal figure, with an unkempt yellow pigtail and beard, was muttering some sort of incantation in a reedy voice. There was a woman beside him looking up at him with a worried expression. Some of the children, ranging in all sizes from gangly youth to small toddler, had their eyes tightly closed, others were gazing round at the crowd in sheer terror. Strangely, half of them, including the parents, seemed to be wearing pebble spectacles, which glinted in the afternoon sunlight.

‘They look harmless to me,' said Mother Liu.

‘They were shouting at our house earlier. It is difficult to understand their funny Chinese, but the man was saying something about a lost son. Living here.' Su Liping looked at her mistress innocently.

‘Was he indeed?' answered Mother Liu. ‘You know that's nonsense?'

‘Oh, yes, Mother.'

‘Well, I'm not going to waste my afternoon looking at a bunch of mad foreigners praying, if that's all they are doing. Help me down.'

‘Oh, look, Mother!' screeched Su Liping.

Mother Liu glanced again, then froze. The tall skeletal man had reached into the folds of his robe and pulled out a large green bottle. He carefully poured what appeared to be some sort of brown liquid onto his cross. Then he passed the bottle to his wife who did the same. Reaching into his belt, the man extracted two metallic objects which he beat together in his hands. With horror, Mother Liu saw the first spark. Within moments the man's cross had ignited into a flame.

‘Get me down from here,' she screamed, pulling at a startled Su Liping's sleeve. ‘Get me down.'

In a moment she was hobbling at breakneck speed back along the corridor to where the curtain covered the secret doorway that led to the stairs.

‘Buckets!' she yelled, as she reached the next floor. ‘Buckets! Water! Quickly!' Doors opened and puzzled girls and a few startled clients emerged. One girl, stark naked, appeared like a nymph in a temple frieze flanked between two venerable but equally exposed old men, who were trying to cover their flaccid immodesties with their long white beards. A fat man dressed and made-up ludicrously in the costume of a female lead in Peking Opera was clinging to Chen Meina. ‘Don't just stand there!' screamed Mother Liu. ‘Find some buckets and water. They're threatening to burn the building down.'

It was not a sensible thing to say. There was, of course, immediate panic. The next thing she knew was that she was being pummelled and pushed along in a scrum of bare flesh and bedclothes down the narrow, circular wooden staircase that led to the ground floor, landing in a tumble at the bottom and bumping her head on a vase. Dazed, she heard the patter as bare feet ran into the courtyard, the screams and shouts fading outside.

With an effort she pulled herself to her feet. Su Liping appeared with two of the cooks, straining under the weight of a tub full of soap-sudded water. ‘Where shall we take this, Mother?' asked Su Liping nervously.

‘Follow me,' she muttered, somehow overcoming the sense of dislocation and dizziness caused by her fall. She led them into the room Ren Ren used as his office. Taking down one of the crude pornographic paintings that he had hung around the walls, she touched a hidden spring, and the panel moved aside. A few steps led them into a cellar, where sacks of flour and pots of rice wine were stacked in disorderly heaps on the flagstone floor. It was the storeroom of the noodle shop. ‘This way,' she called, pointing to another set of steps, which led up to a ragged leather curtain covering another doorway. The cooks and Su Liping strained behind her with the tub. The noise from behind the curtain was deafening. Mother Liu in her frenzy ripped it from its rails.

They stared in disbelief.

It might have been a scene from the opera,
Monkey in the Peach Orchard,
where the child acrobats playing Sun Wukong's anthropoid followers wreaked havoc in heaven. The little noodle shop was a tumble of struggling bodies, upturned tables and benches. The Millward children, like eels avoiding capture, were here, there and everywhere, dodging the leaps of the townsfolk who were trying to secure them, jumping over the heaps of struggling bodies that had fallen in the attempt. In the centre of the shop the tall figure of Septimus was wrestling with three burly porters, one of whom was hanging on his back with his arms around his neck, trying to pull him down. Laetitia was pinioned on the ground, flailing with a ladle in one hand, tugging with the other at the pigtail of the young, bare-chested man who sat astride her. Mother Liu was relieved to see that the firebombing with the crosses had apparently been only partially successful. Smoking rush torches lay everywhere on the ground, obviously having failed to catch light. A few flames licked up one wall of the shop, however, where a torch had fortuitously ignited a spilt barrel of gaoliang wine. Two of the waitress-cum-singsong girls who serviced the rougher clientele below stairs were bravely but ineffectually flapping at the small blaze with a tablecloth, at the same time kicking off the attentions of two of the smaller Millward children who were trying to bite their ankles. With more concern Mother Liu noticed that the struggle with Septimus was moving ever closer to the bank of open charcoal stoves, which were used to cook the noodles. If they were overturned there would be a disaster. There would be no controlling the conflagration then.

But with superhuman effort the panting cooks had brought the big tub up the stairs. They now excelled themselves by lifting the heavy wooden barrel with its dripping soapsuds to shoulder height, and with a shout hurled it forcefully, if unscientifically, upwards into the air above the struggling mass. Then they bolted, with a scared look behind them at Mother Liu, back the way they had come. Discretion was clearly the better part of valour when the prospect of incineration was concerned, even if this involved the possibility of incurring the wrath of Mother Liu.

Their missile, however, achieved its effect spectacularly. The tub seemed for a frozen instant to hang in midair. In the next, there was an explosion of water and suds, which descended like a cloud over the combatants, drenching one and all; it also incidentally extinguished with a hiss the little blue lick of fire climbing up the wall. Then, most decisively of all, the tub itself descended, directly onto the head of Septimus Millward. Mother Liu caught an instant of recognition in the magnified blue eyes behind the spectacles, as the doomed missionary felt the weight of the instrument of retribution falling on him from on high. It poleaxed him, then shattered into its component hoops, its fragments clattering down to cover his prone body.

There was a despairing cry of ‘Septimus!' from Laetitia, and a wail from the children, and that was effectively the end of resistance. It did not take long for the children to be secured, one by one, and to be held squirming in the arms of their captors. Mother Liu herself collared a tiny bespectacled girl, who was trying to hide behind the stove; she pulled her out by the ear, pinched her neck viciously, and thrust her towards a burly muleteer, who picked her up and held her kicking under his arm.

When Jin Lao and the
yamen
runners arrived, Mrs Millward and her children were corralled within a square of tables; Laetitia cradled the still unconscious body of Septimus on her lap, trying vainly to stop the flow of blood from the cut in his crown.

The townsfolk, who had been chattering and celebrating their victory, fell silent and moved aside to allow the venerable official and his guards to pass.

‘Well, well, Mother Liu, how you have been inconvenienced.' Jin Lao smiled.

‘I hope that you will take these incendiaries and punish them with the full weight of the law. Look what damage they have done to our shop.'

‘Yes, indeed. Ren Ren won't be pleased, will he? That women and children could be so violent! What is the world coming to?'

He was interrupted by an impassioned outburst from Laetitia who, seeing the presence of authority, began to plead in her broken Chinese.

‘Can anybody tell me what this barbarous woman is saying?' said Jin Lao. ‘If she is attempting to speak in a civilised tongue it is none that I can understand.'

A babble of voices greeted him from the onlookers, each with their own interpretation of what the mad foreigners had been saying.

‘I see that I am in a roomful of scholars,' he said. ‘You,' he pointed at a big, bearded man, who wore the leather apron of a tanner. ‘Do you understand what this woman is saying?'

‘She says her son's here, sir. Kidnapped upstairs in the brothel.'

‘Does she?' said Jin Lao. ‘I recall we executed some felons for murdering one of her children last year. Has she lost another?'

‘Same one, sir,' said the man. ‘Says he wasn't murdered after all. Kidnapped and brought to the brothel, sir. Of course it's stuff and nonsense. They're all mad, as anyone can see—but that's what she's saying.'

‘I see. Well, if that's the motive for the vandalism then I suppose that the matter should be investigated. Are you keeping a foreign boy in your establishment, Mother Liu?'

‘Of course not, Jin Lao, sir,' said Mother Liu sweetly.

‘I would be surprised if you were,' said Jin Lao, ‘especially a dead one, or a ghost. That would be very untidy,' he said pointedly. ‘I will have to come and inspect your house, of course.'

Mother Liu's eyes flashed angrily. ‘Surely that will not be necessary? You can't believe such malicious invention.'

‘Whether I believe it or not, the law must take its course,' said Jin Lao. ‘I will come to inspect your house tomorrow afternoon. Does that give you enough time … to prepare?' He smiled again.

This time Mother Liu also smiled. ‘Plenty of time, Jin Lao. I am sure that you will find everything perfectly in order—by then.'

‘I would expect nothing less,' said Jin Lao.

The Millward family, their hands bound, were shuffled out by the guards. Two of the townsfolk were deputed to carry the groaning Septimus on a stretcher. His head had been bandaged and a quick inspection by a local physician had confirmed that his wound was not serious. Jin Lao gave orders that they should be taken back to their compound, which would be guarded until such time as the Mandarin had decided what action needed to be taken.

Mother Liu, with a patience that she did not feel, eventually persuaded the curious crowd to leave the teashop with promises of free meals when the establishment was reopened. She satisfied herself that the damage was not extensive. Another hour was spent appeasing the angry customers in the brothel. The venerable twins were particularly irate. Standing in the courtyard in their birthday suits had not done anything for their dignity, and one had stubbed his toe in the stampede down the stairs. A promise of another game of Cat and Mouse Sharing a Hole, this time on the house and with a rather chagrined Su Liping, who was more attractive in every way than the sturdy Xiao Gen, finally placated them. It was nearly dark before she had finished—and she still had to deal with the foreign boy. She found herself cursing Ren Ren as she plodded slowly up the stairs to her private floor. Where was he when she needed him? And when had she ever needed him as much as today?

Her head throbbed. She wondered if she was getting too old for this sort of life. What she needed was a cup of tea, and maybe a pipe. Well, there would be time for that. She could handle the boy. It would not be the first time that the well at the bottom of the garden had been used for such a purpose. Somehow she would manage by herself. She had in the past. She only needed some excuse to lull his suspicions. A client waiting in one of the pavilions? A promise of freedom, perhaps? She would loosen the bricks on the side of the well; a hard push. Nobody would notice.

At the top of the stairs she had to pause to catch her breath. She hobbled slowly down the corridor, pausing again by Hiram's door. Wearily, she reached for the cover of the spyhole, and started when this slight pressure pushed the door wide open. Her heart thumping, she surveyed the empty room, and the broken chain.

The boy was gone.

*   *   *

‘Are you all right, Hiram?' asked Henry. Now that dusk had fallen and he was satisfied that there would be no pursuit, he had slowed his mare to a walking pace and they were threading their way through the lanes that wound towards the river and the railway camp. He was steadying Hiram on the pommel of his saddle. Perched behind him on the cruppers of the horse, her arms clinging around his waist and with a long cloak draped over her shoulders, was Fan Yimei.

‘I'm fine, sir, I guess,' Hiram replied. The boy was subdued but otherwise—on the surface at least—appeared none the worse for his ordeal.