The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (11 page)

‘We thought his Japanese connections might be particularly useful, sir.'

‘Have it your own way, Pritchett, have it your own way. As for this incident in Fuxin, get him to send a report. But confidentially. The official line remains that this was a minor riot.'

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.'

‘And make sure I see the Hendersons as soon as they arrive in Peking.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And no more scaremongering about Boxers.'

‘No, sir.'

‘All right, Pritchett, off you go. You have a long ride back. And, Pritchett, thank you. You're a good man.'

Sir Claude sighed. Although there were still pools of pale sunlight on the plain, dusk was settling in the hills. The first lamps had been lit in the house, and the yellow glow behind the latticed windows was warm and inviting. His cheroot had gone out. He fumbled in his pocket for matches but found that his box was empty. A mosquito was whining close to his ear. ‘Damn,' he mouthed silently, and turned to go in.

*   *   *

The engine was belching white smoke against the pale blue sky as Tom and Helen Frances waited by their mound of trunks and parcels on the makeshift wooden platform. Henry Manners had travelled ahead of them and should by now have organised the horses, mules and escort to take them on to Shishan, but there was no sign of him. For now they seemed to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. There was a shabby clay-walled village at the bottom of a gully a hundred yards off. A thin spiral of smoke rising from a flat roof showed Helen Frances that it was inhabited, but the only other sign of life she could detect was a dog worrying at a sheep bone on the bare ground at her feet. Beyond the cooling engine, the railway bed had already been dug and the line of black-brown earth curved to the horizon as far as they could see. Neither the steel tracks nor the sleepers had been laid, however, so the railway stopped here. While Tom was pacing the platform impatiently, worried by Manners's nonappearance, Helen Frances only felt excitement. A strong wind was blowing, the scent of the grassland was fragrant in her nostrils, and she enjoyed a delightful sense of abandonment on this empty plain.

She had also enjoyed the three-day rail journey from Peking. The carriage, with its sitting room and private sleeping compartments, its kitchen and its dining room, complete with a dozen servants and cooks and attendants waiting on them, had been luxurious beyond imagination. Manners had arranged the private car for them through his position in the railway company. It had been hitched on to the end of the regular train to Tientsin. After Tientsin they had been given their own locomotive to take them to the end of the line. Helen Frances had never experienced such royal treatment in her life. She and Tom had played endless games of ludo and halma in the day room, and dined off silver plate like princes in the evening. The landscape had been largely flat and uninteresting, but there had been considerable excitement on the second day when they had slowly shunted by the Great Wall, the remains of its battlements and crenellations stretching up in inconceivable angles along the jagged mountain ranges. They had then descended to the coastline, the railway track curving round the Gulf of Chih-li. The blue sea and the small pines on the headlands had made beautiful pictures framed by the curtains of their windows as they passed.

Tom had been charming and attentive, keeping her amused with a stream of jokes and stories. This was actually the first time that she had ever really been alone with him, but he had been very sweet and proper, seeing her to the door of her sleeping compartment each evening, sealing the day with an embrace and a decorous kiss. He had not attempted anything more, which was no surprise. He took his responsibilities and her honour as seriously as life itself. She had caught herself wondering what it would have been like to travel alone in this luxury with Henry Manners. Would he have been quite such a gentleman? A young lady all alone and defenceless. The panther and its prey. She wondered why he had not chosen to travel with them on this first stage of their journey. She remembered one of the gossips in Peking speaking disapprovingly of his friends, the Customs boys, and what she called their harems of scarlet women. She knew that Manners had also taken a private company carriage. She had the wicked thought that he might not have been alone, after all. Had he spirited aboard an exotic Chinese courtesan in a blue silk gown, jade pins in her lustrous hair, with long red-painted fingernails and tiny feet? She could picture a doll-like creature sitting on Manners's knee while he contemplated her sardonically, his shirt unbuttoned, a cigar in his lips, a balloon of brandy swilling in his hand. She had blushed at her own lurid imagination, looking at Tom's open, cheerful face absorbed in an adventure in
Blackwood's
magazine, and shaken her head.

She knew that she was in love with Tom. She had been ever since that evening on the Indian Ocean, after the fancy-dress ball, when they had stood together on the top deck under the stars, the faint music of the orchestra mingling with the wash of the waves, the two of them enveloped by the blackness of the night and the phosphorescent sea. They had been told to dress as Shakespearian characters, and Helen Frances had chosen Othello and Desdemona. She had suggested daringly, and Tom had agreed, that they reverse the roles, so she had appeared in tights, doublet and shoeblack as a petite, exquisite Othello, while big Tom, draped in a stuffed dress made out of a curtain, with the end of a cleaning mop on his head as his flowing locks, and bright red lipstick daubed crookedly on his face like a French clown, had stolen the day as an outrageous parody of fair Desdemona. Naturally they had won the first prize, and somehow Tom had won her heart in the process. She had not been surprised when he had proposed, clumsily, almost apologetically, that night on the deck, and looking into his anxious eyes in the hideously painted clown's face, she had been overcome with tenderness, and accepted. He had kissed her and in doing so smeared his face with shoe black, and they had sat on the deck and laughed and laughed, holding tightly to each other's hands.

Of course, he had been overwhelmed with guilt and anxiety the next day about what her father and her aunt would think. He had agreed to escort her. Had he betrayed his trust? Had he taken advantage of his position? She had told him that certainly he had, and she was delighted by it. This had filled him with greater gloom, and she had laughed merrily at his predicament. As the weeks progressed he had recovered his cheerfulness, and now seemed quite happy at the prospect of asking her father formally for her hand. She, on the other hand, had never felt any qualms. Since the ship had left the quay in Southampton in a cloud of seagulls and spray it was as if her previous life had dwindled to the size of her aunt waving on the shore, and then vanished into memory. Reality now was the sensation that every new day brought her on this long, so far uncompleted journey. Even the first exciting weeks of the voyage, the squalls in Biscay, the strange Rock of Gibraltar looming out of the mist, the dolphins and flying fish in the Mediterranean, the lines of camels silhouetted against the desert as they passed through the cauldron of the Canal, the spice market at Aden, sights and sounds which, at the time, had electrified all her senses seemed now to belong to a vague distant past, so much had happened since. Bombay. Colombo. Penang. The spice islands in the golden setting sun. Hong Kong. Shanghai. Tientsin. Peking. She lived from day to day in a perpetual, thrilling present, and Tom was part of that present, so it seemed quite natural, almost inevitable, that she should love him. She had no fear of her father. She remembered him vaguely from when she was twelve, and he had arrived at her aunt's cottage, larger than life, showering presents. It had been the first time she had seen an adult cry. Hugging her, laughing and crying, all at the same time, big salt tears had streamed down his red face, past his swelling nose, into his thick moustache, while his booming voice roared into her ear, ‘My girl. My darling girl.' After only a few days he had disappeared again. But she remembered him as a warm, loving, comfortable presence, smelling of boiled beef and tobacco, and she, too, had cried inconsolably when he was gone. She felt confident that he would like Tom, or that she could make him like him. But that was days away in the far future. Today she was happy to be standing on a wooden platform in the middle of a desert plain, waiting for Henry Manners to come with the horses. This was the exciting reality of the moment.

It was strange, though, she thought, as Tom paced up and down, and the wind roared in her ears. She had never had the sort of fantasies about Tom that she did about Henry Manners. Tom, of course, had always conducted himself entirely properly. Beyond the rare—sweet—embrace and kiss, when she loved to melt into the protection of his arms, there was never any question of a physical relationship before marriage. She knew what would happen when they were married, and she looked forward to it, or she thought she did, or would. The truth was that she had not considered it, the act, very much, if at all, until she had seen Henry Manners's muscles and sinews flowing under his tweed jacket, his thighs gripping his horse on the Peking plain. And now, especially when she was alone, she seemed to think of nothing else.

Of course she was no naïve. She had touched herself in the past, at school, and felt the intense heat and pleasure in her belly and her loins, but that sort of arousal seemed mechanical, and she had learned to resist the temptation. It seemed an improper, if not unnatural, thing to do, and she did not like to join in the whispering and giggling of the other girls in the dormitory who were doing the same and more to themselves and each other, even though she could not help but overhear them, and pulled the pillow down over her ears. Each night since the Saturday of the picnic, however, she had woken with the same heat and moistness between her legs that she remembered from her schooldays, and a new warm tingle in her belly and breasts. She told herself that it was all right. She had been dreaming about Tom. It was natural for her unconscious mind to anticipate the sensations of the wedding night; but as often as not it was Henry Manners's face she saw when she closed her eyes, and then she would lie awake in the dark, trying desperately to superimpose Tom's face on it. She told herself that she did not even like Manners. He was a bad hat, to use Tom's silly phrase. A philanderer, a man with a past. She wished she were more experienced, wiser in the ways of the world. She doubted that someone as assured as Countess Esterhazy had ever had these doubts or anxieties. But, try as she would, she could never get Manners out of her mind. ‘The sooner you get married, my girl, the better,' she said to herself, in a vague imitation of what she remembered of her father's voice.

‘What was that?' asked Tom.

‘Nothing. Talking to myself.'

‘Watch it. First sign of madness. Where the devil is he? You wouldn't have thought that a chap like Henry Manners would be unreliable.'

‘Certainly not. He's a paragon, isn't he?'

‘What's the matter with you, HF? Sometimes I get the feeling you don't really like Manners. We're rather dependent on him now, you know.'

‘Don't worry, Tom, he'll come. Paragons always do.'

‘There you go again.'

‘Mr Manners is fine, Tom. I'm only sorry that the two of us won't be alone any more. I've enjoyed the last three days being with you. I'll miss you.'

‘Oh, you delightful muffin,' said Tom. ‘Here, let me give you a hug.'

And it was while they were hugging on the platform that Henry Manners and the mule train appeared, at a canter, in a cloud of grey dust. Helen Frances lifted her head from Tom's shoulder and looked straight into Manners's laughing blue eyes. He raised his hat ironically in the air, steadying the neck of his twitching horse with the other hand.

*   *   *

They adapted rapidly to the rhythm of the caravan. A string of eight pack mules carried their luggage, and the provisions for the journey. Manners had hired six mounted porters who also served as armed guards. Helen Frances thought they looked fearsome when she first saw them. They had gnarled, weatherbeaten faces, straggly moustaches and fierce, slit eyes above wide brown cheekbones. They wore knee-length padded coats, leather boots and fur hats, with long rifles strung on their backs and knives in their belts. Their queues were greasy with animal fat. They wore them coiled under their hats, or sometimes curled around their necks. She told Tom that they reminded her of Ali Baba's thieves. As she got to know them, however, she had become impressed by their gentleness and humour. Each night, round their separate campfire, she would watch them as they passed a flask of white liquor between them, smoked long pipes and sang mournful songs of haunting melody. Lao Zhao, the head man, appointed himself her personal guardian and groom. He would help her in and out of the saddle at each stop (not that she needed help: the Mongolian ponies were tiny), bring her extra helpings of noodles and mutton, unload her boxes and put up her tent, or drape a rug round her shoulders when a cold wind blew. All the time he chattered and laughed, his mobile face contorting into the oddest grimaces and humorous expressions. Of course she could not understand a word of what he was saying, but she knew he was friendly, and after the first day she became comfortable with his attentiveness.

For two days they rode over grassland and salt flats, and saw little sign of human habitation. Sometimes they would come across a shepherd with a flock of straggly sheep or a herd of goats. Lao Zhao would hail them and there would be a protracted bargaining session, from which he would come away with a sheep or a lamb for supper. Manners and Tom, riding ahead, would keep an eye open for game. Manners shot a bustard from his saddle, pulling the rifle from its holster, aiming and firing at the speck in the sky in one fluid movement. On another occasion, he spotted the spoor of wild deer. He and Tom, with one of the porters, galloped out of view, returning three hours later with a small ibex hung over Manners's saddle.