Daughters of the Silk Road: A beautiful and epic novel of family, love and the secrets of a Ming Vase (27 page)

‘Lot Forty-Two’, began Michael, his voice calm and cool. ‘A rare example of early Xuande Ming China, signed by Shendu. We have provenance. The details are all in the insert in the catalogue and have been online. The piece was owned by the Kaerel family based in Amsterdam, who were part of the Dutch East India company who brought a huge amount of Ming into Europe. This piece pre-dates that. We have a painting up here on the big screens now, painted in 1464, of a merchant’s daughter in Bruges. Her name was Margarethe Haas, and she is shown here with her betrothed, Cornelius van Vaerwye; it’s the school of Van Eyck. You will see the vase – at least it appears to be the vase – in the centre of the painting. The piece came from the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen. Some of the finest examples of Ming China were produced at that time, under the rule of Emperor Xuande. The decoration is particularly fine, with the dragon motif – just three claws on the dragon, indicating it was a gift for a foreign ruler. So, what am I bid? I have bids here with me for thirty-five million Hong Kong dollars. Who will give me forty million?’

Jeremy in London leapt to his feet and shouted, ‘Yes!’ He glanced down excitedly at Miranda, who sat transfixed by the big screen in the saleroom showing Michael Hennessy on the stage in Hong Kong. ‘Forty million!’ shouted Jeremy. ‘How much is that exactly?’

The young man from the porcelain department took out his phone and made a quick calculation.

‘Nearly three-and-a-half million sterling; I’ll get the guys round the back to put up an automatic calculator so you can see what it is in real money.’ He disappeared behind the big screens in the saleroom.

The bidding went fast, the Internet and telephone bidders scarcely able to keep up with one another. They were constantly dialling clients. ‘Hello, this is Maddie from Anstruthers. Can you confirm your name to me? We are on Lot Forty-Two now. Can you stay on the line? Bidding’s at sixty million Hong Kong dollars now. Would you like to place a bid?’

Hennessy spoke clearly into the microphone on his lectern, his eyes constantly scanning his screen for Internet bids and restlessly searching the room and the line of telephone bidders. ‘Seventy million on the Internet – bid nice and swiftly in Spain, would you, there’s a bit of a time lag; seventy-five million, with me in the room – thank you; eighty million, it’s a Hong Kong buyer with Geoffrey on the phone.’

‘Ninety million, Sir,’ called one of the phone bidders.

‘Thank you,’ said Michael. ‘One-hundred million now though, with me here, flesh and blood.’

The bidding rose inexorably.

‘Three-hundred million on the phone, with you, Carlotta.’ He stared at the girl, who was frantically talking to her client in fluent Chinese. ‘I’ve got three-hundred-and-fifty on the Internet, are you bidding again, Carlotta?’

It appeared that the bidding had come down to two clients: one on the phone and one on the Internet.

The room had fallen silent. The coffee cups had been put down on the carpeted floor and the hundred or so possible buyers sat in rapt attention as Michael Hennessy conducted one of the biggest and most expensive sales of porcelain that had ever taken place.

‘Three–hundred-and-fifty million now, on the Internet. Are you bidding, Carlotta?’ She held her hand up to Michael as if asking him to pause. She was clearly listening to her client. ‘This is beginning to drag rather,’ Michael said, with courageous insouciance.

Carlotta flapped her hand and almost shouted, ‘Four hundred million.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hennessy calmly. ‘Are we all done then? At four-hundred million Hong Kong dollars… Going once… Going twice.’ He brought the gavel down so hard on the lectern that his screen rocked.

The room erupted into furious applause. Michael Hennessy leant on the lectern; he felt as if his legs were going to buckle beneath him. Jonnie Chambers sidled over to him and gently took his arm.

‘Well done, old chap,’ he said, guiding his friend and colleague to a nearby chair. ‘A master class, if I might say so, in how to do it.’

The phone bidders were congratulating Carlotta, who was still attached almost umbilically to her mobile phone and her Chinese client. But she nevertheless accepted kisses on the cheek and pats on the back. Finally, her duty completed, details noted, she put down the phone. Michael came across to her.

‘Well done, Carlotta. Good work.’

‘Thank you, sir, and well done yourself. That was fantastic!’ For the first time that day, she allowed herself a huge smile.

Back in London, Miranda sat in complete silence, clutching Georgie’s hand. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Jeremy was virtually dancing round the room.

‘I simply cannot believe it… Four-hundred million Hong Kong dollars; that’s thirty-four million fucking pounds!’

‘Jeremy!’ said Miranda’s mother. ‘There’s no need for that sort of language!’

‘Sorry, sorry, but I mean it’s unbelievable.’

‘It certainly is,’ said Miranda’s mother, almost as if she disapproved of such reckless inflation.

‘Say something,’ said Jeremy desperately to his best friend.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ said Miranda. ‘It’s just incredible. I can’t take it in. It just seems impossible… Like a dream and I’ll wake up tomorrow and I’ll have an electricity bill that I can’t afford to pay and nothing will have changed.’

‘Darling,’ said Miranda’s mother. ‘
Do
you have an electricity bill you can’t afford to pay? Why haven’t you mentioned it before? We can help you; you can always come to us.’

Miranda looked kindly at her mother. ‘I know, Ma, I’ve always known, but I wanted to do it myself. To show you that I might have married a useless husband, but I was all right. G and me, we’re all right.’

Georgina stood up and hugged her mother from behind. She whispered into her ear, ‘we’re all right, Ma – you and me. We’re more than all right – we’re brilliant!’

‘And to think that vase stood on our hall table all those months,’ said Miranda. ‘Me using it for flowers, and G knocking it with her coat each day. It could so easily have been broken, destroyed. But it survived. It’s survived all those years; over six hundred years of people using it, painting it, plonking things in it. It really is a kind of miracle, isn’t it? The dragon vase that was meant for a king landed up in Sheen with me and G…’

‘Champagne!’ said Jeremy. ‘We must have champagne.’

The young man from Anstruthers leapt to his feet.

‘Yes, of course. Please, how rude of me. I’ll go and see what I can find.’

‘Thank you,’ said Miranda, ‘and we must raise a toast to dear Great Aunt Celia without whom none of this could ever have happened.’

‘And to Charlie,’ said Georgie.

‘Oh G, don’t mention him at a time like this,’ said Jeremy.

‘No, because if he hadn’t nicked it, we’d never have known it was valuable, so we have him to thank really, don’t we?’

‘Stolen, Georgina,’ said Miranda’s mother. ‘Not nicked!’

The young man from Anstruthers reappeared with a tray of champagne for the sellers. He handed the glasses around.

‘To Great Aunt Celia,’ said Jeremy, raising his glass to the group in a grand gesture.

‘And to Charles Davenport,’ said Miranda. ‘Alias Simon Manning, alias… Who knows?’

‘Did Michael Hennessy ever say what had happened to him?’ asked Jeremy as he sipped his Bollinger.

‘No – but if I know Charlie, he got away somehow.’

T
he painter dipped
his fine sable brush into the deep cobalt-blue underglaze. The vase, a storage jar intended for the palace, stood nineteen inches tall. Decorating it would take a great deal of skill, and the artist was not experienced in the painting of porcelain. He had done some good work on silk and paper; he had recently completed a charming illustration on silk of gibbons playing in a garden. The painting hung now in the bedchamber of his favourite wife. The gibbons were her particular playthings, purchased for her only recently, and he had completed the painting as a gift so that she could relish their playfulness even as the gibbons themselves slept.

T
he painting
of porcelain was a departure. He knew that no errors were possible. The jar, which he was to paint, had been simply air-dried. Any paint that was now applied would seep indelibly into the surface. Once the design had been applied, the piece would be fired in the kiln. The painter knew that only after firing would the final colours be revealed. There was an almost magical alchemy that took place between the cobalt and the heat of the fire. Sometimes, after firing, the blue became dark and intense, almost black. At other times, the colour was paler, the colour of the sea or the sky. It was crucial that the painter applied the colours in such a way as to enhance the final design.

A
round the top
of the jar were four Kirtimukha, hideous monstrous faces that had their origins in Indian and Chinese mythology. The myth told of a monster who willingly ate his own body to please Lord Shiva. The god, pleased with the monster’s sacrifice, gave it the name ‘Face of Glory’; they were only used to symbolise the presence of a deity – perhaps at the pinnacle of a temple or, as in this case, on a piece of porcelain intended for a royal recipient. The artist was pleased with the Kirtimukha; in particular, he like the way their eyes bulged expressively from their hideous faces.

B
ut the centrepiece
of this jar was to be the dragon. And it was this that gave the painter the most cause for concern. He wanted it to appear animated and ‘on the move’ as it snaked through the sky, surrounded by little undulating clouds, its tail almost catching up with its face. Every part of the dragon must have an inherent energy. Its scales would be shaded with underglaze, dark through light, so they appeared almost to stand proud of the dragon’s lashing back and tail. His three-pronged paws were tipped with just enough glaze to create a dark ‘nail’ bed from which the white sharp claw emerged. Its beady eyes were alert and all-seeing. Above all, the painter wanted the dragon to be free, flying through the sky for evermore, bringing luck and good fortune to all who saw him.

P
ieter Kaerel sat
in his workshop in Delft painting tiles. He had an order for over one thousand tiles to be sent to a house on the Herengracht in Amsterdam. The house was being refurbished and tiles were required for all of the fireplaces, around the range in the kitchen, and in the laundry room. Each one would be individually painted with a design slightly different from the other.

The finished tiles stood on shelves around Pieter’s workshop. There were pictures of fishermen holding rods, hunters with their dogs and labourers resting beneath the shade of a tree – all pastoral scenes that reflected country life in Holland. There were fishing boats, and fishermen holding their catch aloft. There was even a galleon in full sail. Pieter had painted something similar for his own mother many years before. Their father had been a merchant who had died at sea, in his ship,
The Flying Dragon
, and he made the tile as small memento for her. It was the first tile he had created completely by himself without the help of his uncle Frans. His mother had wept when he brought it home.

But Peter’s favourite subjects were animals: dogs running, dogs lying in the shade of a tree, cats snoozing, ducks splashing in the water, and geese diving, their feathered backsides uppermost, the water spraying out around them. He loved to paint horses, especially big field horses pulling a cart; he had even painted an elephant once – the image copied from a book that his mother had given him. All the tiles were meticulously decorated, their corners embellished with a simple flower motif that joined almost seamlessly with the tiles on either side, creating a flowing kaleidoscope of images.

The house on the Herengracht would also have a set of twelve tiles which, when joined together, created one complete scene. They depicted a large whale thrashing about in a choppy sea. This was a tricky job, for each tile had to line up exactly with its neighbour to complete the illusion. Pieter had already thrown away thirty-six tiles in his attempt to create this centrepiece.

Pieter’s sister Isabel wandered through from the office next door. She had recently married a potter named Floris, and was pregnant with their first child.

‘Hans, I am going now. I need to get back to Mama. Shall we see you a bit later?’

‘Yes, yes. I’ll be back in time for supper. I just want to finish this. I’ve still got over five hundred to go. I’m going to have to get Cornelius, and perhaps Floris, to help, I think. Do you think he’ll have time? His painting is very good these days. They want these tiles by the end of the month.’

‘I’m sure he can help. The job he’s working on is almost finished.’ She threw her cloak around her shoulders.

‘It must be a huge house to need so many tiles,’ said Isabel.

‘Yes, they are a wealthy merchant family – part of the VOC. Oddly, we share the same name. Johan Kaerel – it’s his house. Maybe we’re related?’

‘I somehow doubt that, don’t you?’ said Isabel.

‘Yes, I suppose there are lots of people called Kaerel. See you later.’

Isabel arrived home just after dark. Her mother had already lit the gas lamps, and the house emanated a warm glow as she walked down the cobbled street.

‘Hello, Mama,’ she called out as she hung her cloak on the pegs by the door.

Her mother, Maria, emerged from the basement kitchen.

‘Hello, Isabel. Supper won’t be long. Are Floris and Pieter coming soon?’

‘I expect so,’ said Isabel. ‘Pieter’s just finishing a sequence of tiles for that big house in Amsterdam.’

‘Oh? What house?’

They went into the sitting room. The fire was lit, and mother and daughter sat companionably together, their chairs facing one another.

‘You know, the one on the Herengracht,’ said Isabel, sitting down heavily. ‘Gosh, I’m tired. The baby is getting heavy.’

‘I didn’t know he was doing a job there,’ said her mother, picking up her sewing.

‘I’m sure we told you. He’s got the same name as us. Isn’t that odd?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Maria.

‘Kaerel.’

Maria smiled a little to herself. ‘Oh, that’s a coincidence, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think we’re related?’ asked Isabel.

‘I doubt it,’ said her mother. Maria looked up at the Ming vase that stood on the mantelpiece. It glowed in the flickering firelight. She thought then, as she often did, of Hans. His death, so many years before, had been such a terrible tragedy. The news of the ship going down in the Indian Ocean with the loss of all on board had been almost impossible to take in. For many weeks, even months, she had been sure that a mistake had been made; that he would turn up one day, walking down the streets of Delft. That he would return for her and the children.

After they had been sent away from Amsterdam, Maria’s mind had been filled with so many different dreams of what their future might hold. She lay in bed night after night wondering what would happen when he returned from his travels. Her dearest hope was that he might marry her. But this would necessitate the disappearance of Antoinette. She would fantasise on these long, lonely nights that perhaps Antoinette might die. He would find a way of explaining the children to everybody. He could adopt them perhaps, passing them off as someone else’s. But Antoinette did not die. Sometimes she dreamed of Hans writing to her from some faraway land, begging her to bring the children and join him. Together they would make a new start on some tiny island in the South China Sea. Or perhaps back in her homeland of India. But no letter came. What she never imagined was Hans dying; Hans drowning; Hans never coming back.

He was true to his word though and had made sure she was well provided for. She was able to buy a modest but comfortable house in Delft with the money Hans had given her. She changed her name to Maria; so many people didn’t understand the pronunciation of Mori. It just seemed easier. Pieter and Isabel both learned to read and write. Isabel studied French and was delighted when Frans bought her a spinet for her tenth birthday; she practiced assiduously, and often played at their small family gatherings. Pieter worked hard at his apprenticeship and had real talent as a potter. By the age of twenty-one he had his own workshop and his own commissions. He had even been invited to England to lay a tiled floor at a priory in Hampshire.

Mori often thought of her own mother. She still kept the little rag doll and the chemise. The chemise had been carefully laundered and mended and lay in a drawer in her bedroom. The doll sat on the lace pillow of her bed each night. She had made a similar one for Isabel when she was a little girl, and was making one now for Isabel’s child. Two sets of clothes for the doll lay on the little side table next to her chair; a blue dress edged in lace if the baby was a girl, or red trousers and a shirt if Isabel’s first born was a boy.

She wondered sometimes about the myths surrounding the vase. Hans had said he did not believe that it brought luck to the person who cared for it. He told her it was simply a beautiful thing; a valuable thing; and something that should be used to inspire potters and painters. ‘We make our own luck,’ he had told her often. ‘Remember that, Mori. You have made your own luck. When you decided to leave Carlos all those years ago, you made your own luck.’

It seemed to her that she had been fortunate in so many ways. Hans was right. She could have died with her mother so many years before. She could have been killed at any time by her captors, or by Carlos. Hans had rescued her and that surely was good luck. He had loved her and that had been her good fortune. And she had two beautiful healthy children who reminded her every day of their father. Surely, no one could have had more luck than her – little orphan Mori from Goa, now Maria Kaerel from Delft – householder, mother, soon to be grandmother, living a productive and happy life in a beautiful town in Holland.