SQ 04 - The English Concubine (30 page)

Charlotte put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh no. Poor boy. Poor Lian.’

‘That is not why I’m here.’

Charlotte rose, agitated, sensing, in some ill-defined way, disaster. ‘Why are you here? Just tell me.’

‘Lian was pregnant. Two months or so. But the child was not Ah Soon’s child. It was Alexander’s.’

Charlotte reacted as if she’d been shot. She jumped back and her hand flew to her throat. She shook her head. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. She was married to Ah Soon.’

‘Yes, but somehow or other they contrived to come together … and more than once, I think. Lovers are most adept at deception.’

She blushed again knowing the import of his words. ‘You cannot know that. How can you know that? She’s pregnant. It must be Ah Soon’s child.’

Zhen stood. ‘No, Xia Lou. It was Alexander’s. There were letters between them. Love letters. He was planning to bring Ah Soon and her here, to keep her here, for himself.’

Charlotte’s eyes flew to the river and the invisible house. Was that possible?

‘He would not have done that if she was not already his, if the child was not his.’

‘No, no. Think what you’re saying.’

‘Yes. I told her.’

Charlotte stopped moving and she opened her eyes in shock. ‘You told her?’

‘I told her she was Alexander’s sister.’

Charlotte felt her face being to crumple and she looked at him beseechingly. ‘She … You said, she was …’

‘She was pregnant. She is no longer.’

‘Oh Zhen.’

She rose, the horror of what he was intimating striking her. He stepped forward and caught her in his arms. She began to wail. Amber, halfway to the river, turned. Zhen held her to him for a moment, then she pushed him away violently.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘She is not dead,’ he said. ‘She jumped from the cliff but she is alive. The baby is dead and she had terrible injuries, but Dr. Cowper operated and we used our medicines and we saved her. Together we saved her.’

‘Oh Zhen,’ she said and he wanted to hold her but she stood away from him and hugged her gown to her body. Amber watched from a distance. She had better stay away. Something emotional was going on. She turned and continued down to the river, fanning herself.

‘Now you must tell Alex. He loves her, make no mistake. He loves Lian as I …’

He could not continue. Charlotte shook her head.

‘No, I can’t tell him. He will hate me.’

‘Enough. Enough. It should all have been done years ago when we had the chance. This is your fault. Not mine. Yours. I wanted to tell him when he was a boy, when I had a chance of being his father.’

Charlotte stared at him and suddenly shook her head violently.

‘No, no. He wouldn’t have believed you. He would have hated you.’

‘You don’t know that. You never gave it a chance. We could have told him when he came back from Scotland. Then when he was grown and before they had met once more. I warned you. But you are stubborn and it has led to this dreadful …’

Suddenly Zhen could not go on with this interminable argument.

‘You have to tell him about Lian. You have to tell him who he is, why she jumped off a cliff.’

Charlotte slumped into a chair. ‘I thought … I thought …’ She looked up at him. ‘I haven’t the courage.’

‘Then I’ll tell him. It must all come out. No more lies.’ He turned and looked down the grounds. Amber suddenly reappeared and by her side was Alex.

Charlotte saw them too and began to shake.

Zhen strode away. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, his tall figure moving swiftly over the grass. In a moment he would be there and everything would be irrevocably broken. She rose and ran inside the house, too cowardly to watch.

She stayed in her room and sat, just sat. She heard a great shout of anguish and she knew. She put her face in her hands and cried. Then she rose in a frenzy of concern and looked down to them.

Amber was nowhere to be seen. Alex was on his knees, collapsed. Zhen’s hand was on his shoulder. It was like a tableau, silent and still, but she knew it heralded the storm.

40

‘He has gone to the hills,’ she said, ‘up to Buitenzorg. Flown away. Couldn’t bear to be around me.’

Zhen sat opposite her. Charlotte sat quietly. Her fingers held a square white box. He glanced at it and frowned. ‘He took it badly but he has to find a way to understand it.’

They were on the verandah of her house. He was staying with the Kapitan Cina of Batavia, whose son was married to his eldest daughter. When he had told Alex, the boy had rushed away from him, run with all his heart down to the river. Charlotte could not speak to Zhen and he had departed.

Now two days later Zhen had returned, desperate to help her and make one last request. She looked at him. ‘He no longer wishes to stay at Brieswijk. Sell it, he said. Sell everything and go to hell.’

‘He had to know.’

‘Amber is distraught. I told her because he would not. He left without a word to her.’

She stopped touching the box and drew the shawl more closely around her shoulders.

‘It has been hard. I’m sorry, Xia Lou. But at least there are no more secrets between any of us.’

Charlotte gazed down to the river. ‘The young girl?’

‘I don’t want her. That is the truth. But if you will never want to come to me again …’ He spread his hands.

She nodded. Her face showed him nothing. Strangely she was the one who showed nothing, as if they had changed places.

‘Ever the pragmatist. It’s an admirable Chinese trait.’

Zhen’s rose and stood in front of her. Her took her by the shoulders and gently pulled her to her feet. He locked his eyes to hers.

‘I have been constant. I have been the constant heart. You are always filled with fear. We can be together again. I offered once before to marry you and you refused for fear of Alex. But that is done with now. They must make their own road now they know the truth. But you and I, we can marry and help Alex and Lian get over …’

Charlotte pulled herself away from his hands. She took the white box and placed it in his pocket. He looked down.

‘Alex is lost to me and you.’

‘Come back,’ he said. ‘For me alone.’

He took the box and opened it. Inside lay the necklace he had given her twenty years ago. A perfect pearl under a latticed silver mount shaped like the upturned eaves of a Chinese temple on an entwined rope of red silk threads.

She gazed away from him into the gently waving branches of the tamarind grove.

‘I will marry Edward,’ she said calmly. ‘He has asked me.’

There was no sound and after a moment she turned. He was not there. She sat heavily on a chair and hung her head.

Amber came onto the terrace, her face contorted with grief. ‘He hates me too. He hates you and now he hates me.’

Charlotte straightened her back and looked at Amber. ‘This is not about you, child. It goes far back.’

Amber came forward in a swift movement, drew back her hand and slapped Charlotte’s face. ‘You are evil,’ she said. ‘You put us together knowing he would never love me. Knowing he loved his own sister.’

She ran away into the house.

Charlotte watched her. She was a child in love. Sixteen, pregnant and heartbroken. How could she explain all this to Amber? It was her fault. They were all right. Her stubbornness and her fear had caused this.

She grew suddenly deathly tired. At her age this pregnancy was taking its toll. She remembered Shilah. Perhaps she would die giving birth to this child. Perhaps that would be right. She smiled. Come what may. She no longer cared.

A long shudder passed through her body as if the hand of death had truly been placed on her shoulder and she cried out.

‘Zhen,’ she said.

Why had she let him go? She didn’t want to die. He was right. They could be together. The pain stabbed her so suddenly it took her breath away and she stood, her hand to her back. A second knife thrust to her guts and she leant against the table and cried out.

She looked down. A bright red stain spread slowly on her dress and she collapsed to the floor.

41

Charlotte touched the two statues on the plinth.

‘This is really a very good likeness of you and Mariam.’

Takouhi smiled.

‘I feel rather foolish, coming to church and gazing on my image. Still they aren’t
inside
the church anyway. That feels like blasphemy.’

‘You and Mariam have donated a great deal of money to the church and to the poor and destitute Armenians through the Haykian foundation. The Armenian community naturally wanted to thank you.’

‘And I thank them. Come, let’s go back to Nordwijk. To the Salon des Glaces. The newspaper reports a shipment of ice. And Pascal’s advertises un grand deluge de chaussures.’

The carriage took off at a clip up Koningsplein West.

‘You will be all right here?’

Takouhi held her hat and gazed about her.

‘I shall do very well. I have friends all around me. My old house is now like new. To tell the truth, at my age I prefer it to that huge house.’

‘Yes, you’re quite right. My agent has let Brieswijk to a very grand man. Albertus Jacobus Duymaer van Twist who is to be Chief Counsellor to the Raad van Indie. He will come with Mevrouw van Twist and half of his dozen little van Twists. Perhaps he has allowed himself to be deprived of the great and sophisticated pleasures of Amsterdam because he has heard that, here in Batavia, the strictures on keeping only to his lady wife alone, are not so onerous as in Holland.’

‘Men have been coming here for that for centuries. And Madame van Twist will forget all about the little nyais when she realises that, as inferior in all the land only to the Governor General’s wife, she can play the lady of the manor in grand style.’

The two women smiled. Takouhi put her arm in Charlotte’s.

‘Still nothing about Alex?’

‘No. Nothing. Disappeared. The servants at Buitenzorg say he never went there.’

‘When he has done with grief and anger, he will come back.’

Charlotte nodded. ‘Perhaps. I have accepted my guilt. I only wish I could apologise to him.’

At the Salon des Glaces, they waited. All the seats were taken, the place overflowing. When ice arrived in town, it was always bursting with women and children. The owner, Georges Pouligner, came rushing forward, bowing.

‘Mesdames, soyez les bienvenues.’ He signalled to a waiter and in an instant a table and two chairs had been placed in the shade of the large fig tree which stood before the house. A snow-white cloth flew over it and silver cutlery and a vase of flowers quickly adorned it.

Takouhi and Charlotte sat.

‘Vanille,’ he said, ‘ou chocolat. Sorbets de fruits, aussi.’ They placed their orders and he bustled away.

‘He is keen to pack us in whilst the ice lasts.’ Takouhi smiled.

‘We are very well placed here to observe the rest of the town. It is my new pastime.’

‘How does Amber?’

‘Not well. She cries a lot. But at least she will talk to me now and I’ve tried to explain my actions.’

‘Give her time. Four months is not so long to get over such things. Especially with a baby growing inside her.’

‘Yes. We will go back to Singapore when the affairs of Buitenzorg are completed. That has taken longer than Brieswijk, but the agent says he has a buyer and at a good price. I shall set half the money aside for Adam’s heritage. He will certainly never come out here. It’s pulpits, not plantations, that interest him.’

Charlotte glanced at Takouhi. ‘Do you mind? Losing all this which was Tigran’s heritage.’

‘Oh, you know. I went up there a year ago. It’s beautiful but it reminds me too of my own father and his cruelty to my mother and me. It was him, not Tigran, who made it. I can do very well without it. It might as well go to someone who will care for it.’

‘Yes. Matthew seems to have the trading house in hand. I have made it all over to him and Nicolaus’s family. As for the fleet, well, many of the ships are coming to the end of their life. My fleet manager can sell them, one by one, for coastal vessels.’

Takouhi nodded. ‘It is good to get things settled. And Brieswijk will stay in the family for Amber’s children. And perhaps Alex may return.’

The two women gazed at each other.

‘What of this Edward you spoke of and his suit?’

‘Oh, dear Edward. But that was so impossible. I thought I could go back and recapture something with him. Some sort of spurious respectability. But it would be a disaster for him and for me. We are too changed. I have written to tell him and make my apologies. I believe I led him on for the most selfish reasons.’

Charlotte touched the huge bulge of her belly.

‘And of course this was an unsurmountable obstacle.’

Takouhi nodded a greeting to an acquaintance, an admirer, who bowed to her.

‘You had a scare. But all is well now. Must you go back to Singapore, though? So much pain over there. I could never go back.’

‘For a time I must. Amber wants to live with her father. Teresa has returned to him, did you know? They are all a little family again.’

Takouhi smiled. ‘No! After all that divorce business. Well, perhaps it’s for the best.’

‘Robert can’t live without a woman taking care of him. He always truly cared for Teresa and, despite everything, she is mad about him. I foresee more children. Amber will be well placed there to have her baby and raise it in the bosom of the da Souza family.’

The ices arrived with a flourish carried by M. Pouligner himself.

‘Then I must rent out the North Bridge house and, at some point, book a passage on the P&O. A visit back to Scotland is called for. Jeanne has not been well.’

The women put spoons into the ices and savoured the cool sweet taste.

‘Will you come back?’

Charlotte met Takouhi’s eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said and put her hand into her sister-in-law’s.

Takouhi gripped it then released it. ‘And what of the man, the Chinese man you have rejected so many times.’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘He is doubtless married now. I think I should leave him alone.’

Takouhi’s eyes fell to Charlotte’s bulging belly. ‘The child will be born in Singapore unless you mean to have it on the high seas. It is his child. Do you mean to repeat the same old story?’