Mandarin-Gold (33 page)

'No. He wants to use this as an excuse for stopping all trade again. He probably knows that more mud is getting through.'

'That is true, captain,' agreed Gunn, lighting a cheroot. 'With a hundred odd miles of coast, and most of it empty, the Chinese cannot patrol it all. And, of course, most of the patrols take bribes from us. We pay them more for keeping out of sight on one night than the Celestial Emperor pays them for six months' vigilance!'

'It is an evil trade,' said Elliot sadly. 'You are making a lot of money at it now, Gunn, but it is like a debt. The interest payable on this will last for a hundred years.'

'Well, we will not be here to see that, will we?' asked Gunn easily. 'Now, what will happen about this villager?'

'It is impossible to guess. I put six of the rioteers up on a charge of murder before a special court in a merchantman, but they have all been acquitted. I couldn't really expect any other verdict, but at least I have done my best to find the man responsible before Lin carries out some retaliation. What I intend to do now is to get every Englishman and all their families away from here.'

'You mean we will leave Macao?'

'Yes. This is a totally indefensible position if there is any trouble. We are living here in luxury, with our tropical gardens, our fish "ponds and ornamental trees and dozens of servants each — and we are all naked to any attack by the Chinese.

'My feeling is that Lin will now sail here with a show of force. Then another unfortunate incident will occur — either by accident or intent — and God knows how that will end. As a precaution, I am going to order everyone to sail down to Hong Kong. They will be safer there.'

‘I do. At the least, Lin will wish to take hostage some British subject, and then maybe he will kill him when we cannot produce a culprit for him, on the basis of a life for a life. And we could do nothing to stop him. Nothing at all.'

'My God!' exclaimed Gunn indignantly. 'What a disgraceful position for Englishmen to be in!'

'I agree, doctor, but you and your fellow traders have helped to bring us to this pass. So now you must help us to escape. I want all your ships, and every Portuguese ship you can lay your hands on, to be here this afternoon. Every schooner, lorcha, clipper, gig - anything capable of carrying passengers or their belongings.'

'We are running away,' said Gunn sadly.

'Only to come back,' replied Elliot optimistically.

The Parsee nodded a greeting to his son-in-law, and indicated that he stand next to him at the window overlooking the bay, now filled with a flotilla of fleeing vessels.

'Do you think they have gone for good?' asked Bonnarjee uneasily. He did not relish the prospect of being abandoned in this tiny enclave off the China coast. The British understood the need for trade and profits; these were also matters dear to his heart, but the Chinese were not concerned with them. He feared them with their hairless bodies, their bland, smiling faces, their endless courtesy, even when insulted.

'The English are a strange people,' the Parsee replied. 'Not unlike us in some respects. They may lose many battles, but in the end they win the war.'

'There has not been a war,' said Bonnarjee quickly. 'Not yet.'

'You are wrong, my son,' said the Parsee. 'The East has been fighting the advances of the West for two hundred years, as a maiden fights a passionate lecher who disgusts her. There has been war here in all but. fighting, the War of the Iron Rats, I call it. The Barbarians against the Sons of the Celestial Kingdom. And soon, I regret to say, there will also be fighting.

'The Chinese will lose because they are inflexible. They are like those .animals of ancient days that could not adapt themselves to change. Now if His Excellency Lin would have met that very gentlemanly Captain Elliot, they could both have easily agreed to solve their differences. And think what they could have
achieved! But, now If only. If only!'

'When is Lin due here?'

'Within minutes. He arrived on the other side of the island some time ago.'

Down on the Praya, the head of a long procession was already appearing. It consisted of Portuguese troops — Goanese, half-breeds, negroes — in odd snatches of uniform and cast-off clothes — all marching as smartly as they knew how. Their officers rode on horseback and behind them came Chinese beating brass gongs, and others holding banners, and then two lines of Chinese troops carrying bows and quivers of arrows, and fuse matlocks, wearing quaint outfits based on the uniforms favoured by European armies two hundred years earlier.

Behind them again the Viceroy's magnificently lacquered sedan was borne high on the shoulders of eight bearers, with the Portuguese Governor of Macao riding at his side. They paused at the brow of a hill to meet a deputation of local Chinese magistrates who wished to demonstrate their loyalty to the Celestial Throne by setting out a row of presents; silver tankards, bullocks with scarlet ribbons in their horns, pigs newly scrubbed and ready for slaughter.

'What are they going to do?' asked Bonnarjee.

'I will tell you exactly,' the Parsee replied. ‘They will drink many bowls of tea together. Then they will visit some landmarks of the city. Guns will fire in their honour. Fireworks will explode to drive off evil demons. Local Chinese residents will bring out all manner of festoons and scrolls proclaiming their loyalty. They will then take these presents — and they will all go home.

'And nothing whatever will have been achieved. Nothing at all. For this is purely a visit to threaten the British — and they are not here to see it...'

The Emperor sat on his hill-top in Jehol, beneath the shade of a willow tree, his usual table with the crystal bowl containing three goldfish placed before him. The weather was changing,- and growing cooler; every day, like every year in an old man's life, was a little shorter than the last. Soon he would have to return to the stench of Peking, and this fresh place would be only a dream of past pleasure; a hope for future summers. Then far away, along the secondary road, he saw the familiar tell-tale smudge of dust which meant a messenger was approaching. Inevitably, this implied bad news to cloud a day already tinged with autumn.

Within minutes, the young man of noble birth, who now regularly brought him tidings from Canton, knelt before him and presented his Scroll.

The Emperor began to read. So Lin had forbidden the Barbarians to trade because they had not punished a guilty Barbarian sailor. That was good. But what was this? The Barbarians had withdrawn from Canton and Macao. What if they did not return? After all, they had been forbidden to trade, and so they had no reason to come back, for trade was their life.

What if they obeyed this order after generations of insolently disobeying such Edicts? How would his kingdom then be rid of its tea and silk and rhubarb? More disquieting, from a personal point of view, if there was no trade how would, he replace the Imperial levies and dues and taxes which the Hoppo zealously collected from these traders and forwarded to him? Obviously, if they conducted no trade, there could be no taxes. He would lose a vast proportion of his income, and this at a time when the value of money was falling every day.

'We would know
your
views of the situation,' he said gently. 'You are young. You are not corrupted by bribes or softened by riches made by other men's sweat. Speak! It is Our command!'

The young man swallowed; fear and awe scattered his thoughts like swallows on a summer breeze.

'Your Most High Exalted Majesty, the Barbarian ships
have
gone. Relations in Macao also tell me the Barbarian womenfolk and their children were very sad to leave, for they have no plans for returning.'

'I do not know, Your Majesty, for His Excellency, Special Commissioner Lin, has ordered that no-one, whether official or civil at Kow-loon, must sell supplies to the Barbarians so that they may be put in fear, and become willing to pay tribute.

'He realizes that the Barbarians, out of hunger, may attempt to land and purchase provisions by force. He has therefore made a personal proclamation to all the gentry and elders and shopkeepers and inhabitants of the outer villages along the coast, allowing them to buy arms and weapons. He has given permission for
anyone
to fire on the Barbarians should they land, even to collect water. They can kill them or take them prisoner.'

'None of this is in his report,' said the Emperor suspiciously. These proclamations sounded uneasily on his ears. The Barbarians were a proud and wayward people; empty threats to them would achieve nothing.

The flotilla of little ships bobbed like floating stepping stones between Hong Kong Island and the mainland. Barrels of lime juice and drinking water were lashed to the decks. On some vessels the crews had wisely taken pigs and chickens as well as crates of dried biscuit, sacks of flour and rusks. The unfamiliar farmyard sounds of these pigs and poultry and the cries of little children, fractious in the heat, drifted over the water to the villagers.

Gunn, aboard the
Hesperides,
surrounded by his clerks and their families, brooded on a letter home. What could he tell his parents about the present situation that would not alarm or distress them?

In the years he had been away from home he had grown so far away from them and their small safe life on the Kent coast that almost the only things they still had in common were shared memories of the past; and with the passing of each year even these faded.

When he had left home, he had been a newly qualified doctor starting his first job aboard ship; now he was a rich merchant. With the mandarin whose son he had successfully treated for pox, he had taken over Rona-Lloyd and absorbed the company into Mandarin-Gold. What could his parents know of such complicated business arrangements? They were quite beyond their comprehension and so he deliberately told them little of his achievements, lest he should confuse them or they might think he was boasting.

And yet, without boasting at all, he had succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. In a few years he had risen from the post of ship's surgeon aboard a second-class merchantman to become one of the most influential traders east of India.

As he sat now in his cabin, portholes pegged wide open, a glass of claret in his hand, he thought how strange life was that it allowed such a change and so quickly — and all through peddling a drug about which he had known nothing, apart from its medicinal qualities, before he arrived in the East. And if Marion had not gone away with her shopkeeper, he might still have been as naive as he was then.

He wondered what she was doing, where she was, how his parents looked. He wrote to them by each mail boat, as he was trying to do now, and he read their letters, but between them was this unexpected and unwished for gulf of experience and wealth as wide as the gulf that had separated Dives from Lazarus in the Bible story he had heard at Sunday school aeons of time ago.

He must go home, and see them before it was too late, for after they died there would be no reason to return. He still thought of Herne Bay as home, yet here was his home if it were anywhere. He was highly regarded by other merchants and accepted as one of the most successful men in commerce. And once accepted, Gunn had held his share of the coast trade — and then had branched out into other areas of speculation.

He was turning his attention to more legitimate trade, shipping tea and spices, lending money, at high interest rates, generally broadening the base of his operations, just in case China did suddenly open up its frontiers.

For local politics to impinge seriously on profits was a hazard he had never anticipated.

He felt in some measure responsible for these pathetic Goanese clerks and their families aboard his ships. But why had none of them ever sought to branch out on their own as he had done? Why would they rather remain subservient to him? They sought security under his authority, of course, but really he could guarantee them nothing they could not have secured for themselves, and on far better terms.

Captain Elliot's gig bumped against the
Hesperides,
and scattered Gunn's thoughts. He put away his paper and ink as Elliot came aboard.

'What's the news?' Gunn asked him.

'The Reverend Dr Gutzlaff is visiting the war junks near the shore, carrying two letters to the Chinese admiral. The first is a request for water, and the second, for food.'

'Your brother in holy orders, the Reverend Dr Gutzlaff, is attempting to persuade the Chinese to give us food and water. You speak the dialect as well as he does. Pray put off in the longboat. Gutzlaff is visiting the junks on the starboard side. You approach those on the port side.'

'What about an escort?' asked Mackereth fearfully.

'There are two navy ships due from India,' Elliot explained; he was sorry for the wretched man. 'The Governor-General is sending the
Hyacinth,
an eighteen-gun frigate and another frigate,
Volage,
with twenty-eight guns.'