A Sunless Sea (34 page)

Neither Monk nor Rathbone responded, not knowing how to. And the depth of Gladstone’s emotion seemed to make it not only unnecessary but intrusive.

As if recalling himself to their presence he began again.

“It might have started in our own minds as a reasonable trade. Indeed there are those who argue that had we not supplied the Chinese from India, then others would have done so. The French and the Americans are involved.”

“Is that true?” Rathbone asked, then wished he had kept silent. He should not have interrupted the prime minister.

Gladstone looked up at him momentarily. “Yes, but a specious argument. One man’s sin does not justify another’s.”

“And the wars, sir?” Monk asked.

“Against the Chinese, of course,” Gladstone replied. “They tried to reason with us to prevent us selling opium, with argument, trade tariffs, very little diplomacy. Even the emissaries of the queen were treated as if they were servants bringing tribute from some subject princeling.” He was so affronted he found it difficult to say the words. “As the most powerful nation on earth, we did not respond well to such insult. Tempers were controlled with difficulty.” He lowered his voice. “Or not at all.”

Rathbone could imagine it, but he did not speak.

“There were incidents of violence,” Gladstone continued, “some of them bestial beyond belief, and we are not free from blame. Although I cannot imagine that we descended to such things as I have heard tell.” He shook himself very slightly. “But that is not an excuse. We have dealt with savages before, and we should not assume that because a man can create exquisite beauty or invent such blessings for mankind as
paper and porcelain, even gunpowder with all its uses, that he is a civilized creature in his soul. And whatever he is, it does not excuse us from our own duty to God as Christian men.” His face was dark with anger and his body shook.

Rathbone looked across at Monk and saw the pity in his face, and also a degree of confusion.

Gladstone regained his self-control and went on with his lesson. “Incident after incident escalated until the Chinese confiscated thousands of pounds of opium, an act in which they were justified. Some deny this, but it is the truth. It was a contraband substance, smuggled into China by us. The Royal Navy attacked. The Chinese ships were small, and their weapons and armor medieval. Our broadsides sank them, drowned their sailors with barely any loss to us. We attacked the land fortifications at river mouths, bombarded city walls, and the women and children sheltering within them. Our ships—such as
Nemesis
, which was steel-hulled, and a paddle-wheeler, independent of wind and tide—were beyond their power to fight. Some of them had primitive firelock guns; others merely bows and arrows, God help them. Our victory was total.”

The enormity of it slowly took shape in Rathbone’s mind.

“Three hundred million people,” Gladstone went on quickly, as if in haste to get the entire tale out. “We made them ransom their own port of Canton for six million silver dollars. By 1842 we controlled Shanghai, and the whole mouth of the Yangtze River, and we forced on them one shameful treaty after another. We took from them the island of Hong Kong, and the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai, and Mingbo, and nine million dollars, which is nearly two million pounds in reparation for the contraband opium they had seized and destroyed.”

He shook his head. “That was only part of it. There were other concessions as well. In 1844, France and the United States exacted the same concessions, but that does not excuse us. It was our war, our weapons and our greed that began it and forced it to a conclusion.”

Finally he faced Rathbone and Monk. “The Second Opium War, a few years later, was no better. Again we grew rich on the ruin of another race. France, the United States, and this time Russia as well joined us
in war and plunder. But we played the major part, and most certainly took the largest gain in treaties, and seizures of further ports along the coast. All the while we continued to sell opium to a wretched people, who were drowning in a sunless sea of addiction. It is an episode of appalling shame, and you will find many who would deny it.”

Rathbone cleared his throat. “And the Pharmacy Act will regulate the sale and labeling of all medicines in Britain, and prevent them being sold by people who have no medical knowledge or skill?”

“It will,” Gladstone agreed. He looked from one to the other of them. “Mr. Wilkie Collins, a writer of considerable skill and, more important, a great reputation, is a keen supporter of the bill, but it was Dr. Lambourn who was going to provide the professional evidence. His death was a great blow; his discredit an even greater one. But we will surmount it, I promise you. However, I would dearly like to know what it was that he discovered that would make anyone wish both to kill him and then to discredit him. Perhaps, gentlemen, we need to know.

“Sinden Bawtry told me the report was too ill-conceived to be of use and that out of respect for Lambourn’s memory it was destroyed. I believed him at the time, but what you have said has caused me grave doubt. I have known Bawtry for some years, a man of skill, intellect, and great generosity to the country. Even so, he may have been deceived. There are ugly truths that Dr. Lambourn might have uncovered accidentally in his research.”

Gladstone smiled with bleak goodwill but no pleasure at all. “Do what you can to save Mrs. Lambourn,” he urged. “I shudder to think of our shame exposed in the courts, but it would be doubly evil to conceal it by sacrificing an innocent woman. To do so would be to defile not only our trade but our justice as well. But I warn you, it will earn you some bitter enemies, Sir Oliver. Do what you can, gentlemen. And keep me apprised. Good day to you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rathbone said gratefully.

O
UTSIDE, IN THE SOMBER
dignity of Downing Street, Rathbone turned to Monk.

“I’m not sure if this makes it better or worse. Nothing is what I
thought it was. I had assumed a clever but deeply flawed man whose distorted sexual appetites had finally ended his life in tragedy and suicide; and a wife whose grief and sense of betrayal had driven her to an obscene revenge. Instead it now seems we have a remarkable man whose only flaw was to leave his opium-addicted wife without the formality of a divorce. He lived with the woman he truly loved, without deceiving her as to her situation. Out of compassion, or sense of duty, he maintained support for his wife both financial and emotional.

“He could not be misled or bought off from writing a report on the dangers of opium use without restrictions, and was murdered for his courage. His widow, or apparent widow, loved him enough to risk her own life to redeem his reputation. His wife was not a prostitute at all, as assumed, but a woman supported by one decent man who asked nothing whatever from her. Is anything the way it appears to be?”

Monk shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Rathbone thought of other times in his life when suddenly nothing turned out as he had expected. The familiar had unaccountably become alien and all his confidence was swept away. Did that happen to everyone?

He kept pace with Monk, their footsteps all but silent in the quiet street.

“This close to a verdict, it may be impossible to turn things around, and that frightens me,” Rathbone went on. “Someone has committed two murders. I can’t believe that Lambourn’s death and Zenia Gadney’s are not connected. Amity Herne has lied on oath, but I don’t know why. Is it enmity against her brother, or against Dinah, or to justify her husband having condemned Joel’s report? Or does she have some vested interest in blocking the bill herself?”

“I don’t know, either,” Monk admitted. “But Gladstone is right. No one is going to like us for opening up the horror of the Opium Wars!” He stopped in the street and stared at Rathbone. “But you’ll do it!”

“Oh, yes,” Rathbone said. Then, the moment the words were past his lips, he wondered if he had just committed himself to ruining his career.

M
ONK WAS DEEPLY SHAKEN
by what Gladstone had told him. Perhaps before his amnesia he had been aware of at least some of the shame of Britain’s part in the Opium Wars, but not the depth of the greed. The violence of it and the duplicity horrified him. There was arrogance in the assumption that any country had the right to smuggle such a poisonous substance to a less technically advanced people, and by weight of superior weaponry, conquer them. Then on top of all that, they had demanded reparation for what had been the results of their own savagery.

Had Britain been the victim, not the attacker, he would have burned with outrage at it. He would have condemned the invaders and thirsted for revenge.

But it was his own people who had been the barbarians, the people he had believed to be civilized, to have carried some core of honor, and a better system of beliefs, to races with a dimmer sense of what was right and with laws less just.

He sat in the glow of the firelight in his own house with the familiar pictures on the walls of the parlor, the books he had read and loved on the shelves. Scuff was asleep upstairs. Quietly he related to Hester what Mr. Gladstone had told him.

Eventually he stood up and turned on the lamps, watching her face as she listened to him. He saw the sadness in her as he described some of the details, although he did not include them all. Did she feel as ashamed as he did? She did not look as surprised as he had expected her to.

“Did you know all this?” He could not help asking her.

“No,” she said quietly. “But I have seen ignorance and stupidity before. To begin with, I tried not to believe it, or to find excuses, or reasons why it was not the way it seemed. In the end I had to accept that most of it was true; some of it was even understated. People lie to conceal their mistakes, and then make even worse ones to cover the lies.”

She looked at him with anxiety and a strange gentleness, as if she would have protected him from it. “Once I used to imagine that those in power were different, but most of them aren’t,” she went on. “No one likes to admit that their own people can be as greedy and cruel as any foreigners. We perform all kinds of contortions of the mind to make a reason why it isn’t really the way it looks, but we only fool the people who want to be fooled.”

“Maybe I knew, and forgot,” he said, thinking back to his struggle to learn about himself, to piece together the evidence of what kind of a man he was, the good and the bad. There was so much then that it would have been more pleasant to deny. Some of it—small cruelties, unnecessary ones—he had in the end been unable to avoid, and had learned to face, and regret. But there was a kind of comfort in that—honesty could be its own healing.

As if reading his thoughts, or perhaps thinking back and tracing the same path, Hester smiled at him. It was a moment of understanding that was amazingly sweet. All pain was shared, and melted away into something calmer.

He reached out and touched her gently, and her hand closed over his.

The silence came to a natural end.

“Do you think that Joel Lambourn discovered something during his research that was to do with more than the damage opium can cause if used without knowledge?” she asked. “Something outside that altogether, and far more dangerous?”

Monk had been puzzling about that himself. “I don’t see why his research would matter so much if all it contained was figures of opium misuse, deaths of children, and perhaps of addicts here and there,” he answered. “It might delay the Pharmacy Act a year or so, but other people will eventually find the same evidence. And there are other medicines that should be regulated as well. Opium importers will have to deal more honestly; apothecaries will have to take more care, measure and label acceptably. Many small traders will have to stop selling it. Thousands of people will lose a few pennies a week. Would any one of them murder Lambourn for that? And also murder Zenia Gadney in such a hideous way?”

“No,” she said gravely. “We have missed something. Or someone. Someone who has far more to lose than a small profit.”

“Gladstone suggested there were details that might ruin some people, if they came to be known,” Monk suggested, searching for an answer that made sense. “Is there some atrocity that Lambourn could have exposed that would ruin a reputation?”

Hester shook her head a little. “Why would he? He didn’t need to go into details of the smuggling or the violence to prove that opium in patent medicines can kill people because they don’t know what the dosage is. And isn’t that all he wanted to prove?”

“Perhaps he found out something else by accident?” Monk’s imagination was racing. His own ignorance appalled him. “Someone could be lying to hide … whatever it is … because they know humiliation is a bitterly painful thing to bear. Some people would rather die than be shamed—in fact, many people.”

“I know,” she said very quietly.

He watched her face, the sudden deep sorrow in it, and remembered too late that her father had committed suicide rather than bear the shame of the debt he owed because Joscelyn Gray had swindled him out of his money. That was the first case he had dealt with in his new life, which had begun after the amnesia. It was the case in which he and Hester had met, and he had not even thought of it in his talk of shame and suicide. He could not believe his own clumsiness.