Tai-Pan (6 page)

“That’s madness!” Robb burst out.

“It’s very wise. The navy’s not to enforce the order for a week: ‘to give the China traders time to dispose of their supplies.’ ”

“But then what do we do? Without opium we’re finished. China trade’s finished. Finished.”

“How much cash do we have, Robb?”

Robb looked around to make sure there was no one near and lowered his voice. “There’s the bullion in Scotland. One million one hundred thousand pounds sterling in our bank in England. About a hundred thousand in silver bullion here. We’re owed three million for the seized opium. We’ve two hundred thousand guineas of opium in 
Scarlet Cloud
 at present market price. There’s—”

“Write off 
Scarlet Cloud,
 lad. She’s lost.”

“There’s still a chance, Dirk. We’ll give her another month. There’s about a hundred thousand guineas’ worth of opium in the hulks. We owe nine hundred thousand in sight drafts.”

“What will it cost us to run for the next six months?”

“A hundred thousand guineas’ll pay for ships and salaries and squeeze.”

Struan thought a moment. “By tomorrow there’ll be a panic among the traders. Na one of ’em—except Brock, perhaps—can sell their opium in a week. You’d better ship all our opium up the coast this afternoon. I think—”

“Longstaff’s got to change the order,” Robb said with growing anxiety. “He’s got to. He’ll ruin the exchequer and—”

“Will you na listen? When the panic’s on, tomorrow, take every tael we’ve got and every tael you can borrow and buy opium. You should be able to buy at ten cents on the dollar.”

“We can’t sell all of ours in a week, let alone more.”

Struan tapped the ash off his cheroot. “A day before the order’s to be enforced, Longstaff’s going to cancel it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A matter of saving face, Robb. After the admiral had left, I explained to Longstaff that banning opium would destroy all trade. God’s blood, how many times do I have to explain? Then I pointed out that he could na very well immediately cancel the order without losing face and making the admiral—who is well-meaning but knows nothing about trade—lose face. The only thing to do was to give the order, then, to save the admiral’s face and job—
and his own
—to cancel it. I promised to explain ‘trade’ to the admiral in the meantime. Also the order will look good to the Chinese and put them at a disadvantage. There’s another meeting with Ti-sen in three days. Longstaff agreed completely and asked me to keep the matter private.”

Robb’s face lit up. “Ah, Tai-Pan, you’re a man among men! But what’s to guarantee Longstaff’ll cancel the order?”

Struan had in his pocket a signed proclamation dated six days hence that canceled the order. Longstaff had pressed it on him. “Here, Dirk, take it now, then I can forget it. Damme! All this paper work, you know—dreadful. But better keep it private until the time.”

“Would you na cancel such a stupid order, Robbie?”

“Yes, of course.” Robb could have hugged his brother. “If it’s six days and no one else knows for certain, we’ll make a fortune.”

“Aye.” Struan let his eyes drift to the harbor. He had found it twenty-odd years ago. The outer edge of a typhoon had caught him far out to sea, and though he had prepared for storm he could not escape and had been driven relentlessly into the mainland. His ship had been scudding under bare poles, taking the seas heavily, the day sky and horizon obliterated by the sheets of water the Supreme Winds clawed from the ocean and hurled before them. Then, close by shore in monstrous seas, the storm anchors had given way and Struan knew that the ship was lost. The seas took the ship and threw it at the shore. By some miracle a wind altered her course a fraction of a degree and drove her past the rocks into a narrow, uncharted channel, barely three hundred yards wide, that the eastern tip of Hong Kong formed with the mainland—and into the harbor beyond. Into safe waters.

The typhoon had wrecked much of the merchant fleet at Macao and sunk tens of thousands of junks up and down the coast. But Struan and the junks sheltering at Hong Kong weathered it comfortably. When the storm had passed, Struan sailed around the island, charting it. Then he had stored the information in his mind and begun secretly to plan.

And now that you’re ours, now I can leave, he thought, his excitement warming. Now Parliament.

For years Struan had known that the only means of protecting The Noble House and the new colony lay in London. The real seat of power on earth was Parliament. As a member of Parliament, supported by the power the huge wealth of The Noble House gave him, he would dominate Asian foreign policy as he had dominated Longstaff. Aye.

A few thousand pounds will put you in Parliament, he told himself. No more working through others. Now you’ll be able to do it yoursel’. Aye, at long last, laddie. A few years and then a knighthood. Then into the Cabinet. And then, then, by God, you’ll set a course for the Empire and Asia and The Noble House that will last a thousand years. Robb was watching him. He knew that he had been forgotten but he did not mind. He liked watching his brother when his thoughts were far away. When the Tai-Pan’s face lost its hardness and his eyes their chilling green, when his mind was swept with dreams he knew he could never share, Robb felt very close to him and very safe. Struan broke the silence. “In six months you take over as Tai-Pan.”

Robb’s stomach tensed with panic. “No. I’m not ready.”

“You’re ready. Only in Parliament can I protect us and Hong Kong.”

“Yes,” Robb said; then he added, trying to keep his voice level, “But that was to be sometime in the future—in two or three years. There’s too much to be done here.”

“You can do it.”

“No.”

“You can. And there’s no doubt in Sarah’s mind, Robb.”

Robb looked at 
Resting Cloud,
 their depot ship, where his wife and children were living temporarily. He knew that Sarah was too ambitious for him. “I don’t want it yet. There’s plenty of time.”

Struan thought about time. He did not regret the years spent in the Orient away from home. Away from his wife Ronalda and Culum and Ian and Lechie and Winifred, his children. He would have liked them to be with him, but Ronalda hated the Orient. They had been married in Scotland when he was twenty and Ronalda sixteen, and they had left immediately for Macao. But she had hated the voyage out and hated Macao. Their first son had died at birth, and the next year when their second son, Culum, was bom, he too became sickly. So Struan had sent his family home. Every three or four years he had returned on leave. A month or two in Glasgow with them and then he was back to the Orient, for there was much to do and a Noble House to be built.

I dinna regret a day, he told himself. Na a day. A man has to go out into the world to make what he can of it and himself. Is that na the purpose of life? Even though Ronalda’s a bonny lass and I love my children, a man must do what he has to do. Is that na why we’re born? If the laird of the Struans had not taken all the clan lands and fenced them and thrown us off—us, his kinsmen, us who had worked the lands for generations—then I might have been a crofter like my father before me. Aye, and content to be a crofter. But he sent us off into a stinking slum in Glasgow and took all the lands for himself to become Earl of Struan, and broke up the clan. So we almost starved and I went to sea and joss saved us and now the family’s well-off. All of them. Because I went to sea. And because The Noble House came to pass.

Struan had learned very quickly that money was power. And he was going to use his power to destroy the Earl of Struan and buy back some of the clan lands. He regretted nothing in his life. He had found China, and China had given him what his homeland never could. Not just wealth—wealth for its own sake was an obscenity. But wealth and a purpose for wealth. He owed a debt to China.

And he knew that though he would go home and become a member of Parliament and a Cabinet minister and break the earl and cement Hong Kong as a jewel into the crown of Britain, he would always return. For his real purpose—secret from everyone, almost secret from himself most of the time—would take years to fulfill.

“There’s never enough time.” He looked at the dominating mountain. “We’ll call it ‘the Peak,’ ” he said absently, and again he had the strange sudden feeling that the island hated him and wanted him dead. He could feel the hatred surrounding him and he wondered, perplexed, Why?

“In six months you rule The Noble House,” he repeated, his voice harsh.

“I can’t. Not alone.”

“A tai-pan is always alone. That’s the joy of it and the hurt of it.” Over Robb’s shoulder he saw the bosun approaching. “Yes, Mr. McKay?”

“Beggin’ yor pardon, sorr. Permission to splice the main brace?” McKay was a squat, thickset man, his hair tied in a tarred, ratty pigtail.

“Aye. A double tot to all hands. Set things up as arranged.”

“Aye, aye, sorr.” McKay hurried away. Struan turned back to Robb, and Robb was conscious only of the strange green eyes that seemed to pour light over him. “I’ll send Culum out at the end of the year. He’ll be through university by then. Ian and Lechie will go to sea, then they’ll follow. By then your boy Roddy will be old enough. Thank God, we’ve enough sons to follow us. Choose one of them to succeed you. The Tai-Pan is always to choose who is to succeed him and when.” Then with finality he turned his back on mainland China and said, “Six months!” He walked away.

Robb watched him go, suddenly hating him, hating himself and the island. He knew he would fail as Tai-Pan.

“Will you drink with us, gentlemen?” Struan was saying to a group of the merchants. “A toast to our new home? There’s brandy, rum, beer, dry sack, whisky and champagne.” He pointed to his longboat, where his men were unloading kegs and laying out tables. Others were staggering under loads of cold roast meat—chickens and haunches of pig and twenty suckling pigs and a side of beef—and loaves of bread and cold salt pork pies and bowls of cold cabbage cooked with ham fat and thirty or forty smoked hams and hands of Canton bananas and preserved fruit pies, and fine glass and pewter mugs, and even buckets of ice—which lorchas and clippers had brought from the north—for the bottles of champagne. “There’s breakfast for any that are hungry.”

There was a cheer of approval, and the merchants began to converge on the tables. When they all had their glasses or tankards, Struan raised his glass. “A toast, gentlemen.”

“I be drinking with you, but not to this poxy rock. I be drinking to yor downfall,” Brock said, holding up a tankard of ale. “On second thoughts, I be drinking to yor little rock as well. An’ I give it a name: ‘Struan’s Folly.’”

“Aye, it’s little enough,” Struan replied. “But big enough for Struan’s and the rest of the China traders. Whether it’s big enough for both Struan’s and Brock’s—that’s another question.”

“I be tellin’ thee right smartly, Dirk, old lad: The whole of China baint.” Brock drained the mug and hurled it inland. Then he stalked to his longboat. Some of the merchants followed him.

“ ’Pon me word, dreadful manners,” Quance said. Then he called out in the laughter, “Come on, Tai-Pan, the toast! Mr. Quance has an immortal thirst! Let history be made.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Struan,” Horatio Sinclair said. “Before the toast wouldn’t it be fitting to thank God for the mercies He has shown us this day?”

“Of course, lad. Foolish of me to forget. Will you lead the prayer?”

“The Reverend Mauss is here, sir.”

Struan hesitated, caught off guard. He studied the young man, liking the deep humor that lurked behind the sky-gray eyes. Then he said loudly, “Reve’n’d Mauss, where are you? Let’s have a prayer.”

Mauss towered above the merchants. He haltingly moved in front of the table and set down his empty glass and pretended that it had always been empty. The men took off their hats and waited bareheaded in the cold wind.

Now it was quiet on the beach. Struan looked up at the foothills to an outcrop where the kirk would be. He could see the kirk in his mind’s eye and the town and the quays and warehouses and homes and gardens. The Great House where the Tai-Pan would hold court over the generations. Other homes for the hierarchy of the house and their families. And their girls. He thought about his present mistress, T’chung Jen May-may. He had bought May-may five years ago when she was fifteen and untouched.

Ayeeee yah, he said to himself happily, using one of her Cantonese expressions, which meant pleasure or anger or disgust or happiness or helplessness, depending on how it was said. Now, there’s a wildcat if ever there was one.

“Sweet God of the wild winds and the surf and the beauty of love, God of great ships and the North Star and the beauty of home, God and Father of the Christ child, look at us and pity us.” Mauss, his eyes closed, was lifting his hands. His voice was rich, and the depth of his longing swooped around them. “We are the sons of men, and our fathers worried over us as You worried over your blessed Son Jesus. Saints are crucified on earth and sinners multiply. We look at the glory of a flower and see You not. We endure the Supreme Winds and know You not. We measure the mighty oceans and feel You not. We reap the earth and touch You not. We eat and drink, yet we taste You not. All these things You are and more. You are life and death and success and failure. You are God and we are men . . .”

He paused, his face contorted, as he struggled with his agonized soul. Oh God, forgive me my sins. Let me expiate my weakness by converting the heathen. Let me be a martyr to your Holy Cause. Change me from what I am to what I was once . . .

But Wolfgang Mauss knew that there was no turning back, that the moment he had begun to serve Struan, his peace had left him and the needs of his flesh had swamped him. Surely, oh God, what I did was right. There was no other way to go into China.

He opened his eyes and stared around helplessly. “I’m sorry. Forgive me. I know not the words. I can see them—great words to make you know Him as once I knew Him—but I cannot the words say any more. Forgive me. Oh Lord, bless this island. Amen.”

Struan took a full glass of whisky and gave it to Mauss. “I think you said it very well. A toast, gentlemen. The Queen!”