Crawling Between Heaven And Earth (12 page)

Students marched up and down in Trafalgar square. It was known as the heart of London. Though to Lin the place looked much like any other square around the older houses having long been demolished and immense, crumbling cement sky scrapers built in their place.

But it had been named after the battle in which the French had been stopped from taking over all of Europe, like new Mongols.

As such, it had symbolic value as the most English of all squares.

Students descended on it, with signs, with chants, with an improvised p.a. system. Day and night they marched up and down.

Emma was one of the leaders the leader of one of the two factions involved in this.

Lin brought her soap and food and, sometimes, stayed and listened to her, kept her company.

But never too long. Never long enough. They couldn't afford to have the cameras pick him up. The government would claim Chinese agitation.

And the cameras were coming: from Russia, from China, from the newly freed France, and Iberia, and Germany, even.

Filming the demonstrations, the yelling.

"Each day the government endures it," Emma said. "It's a sign that they're weakening. We will win, Lin. I can feel it. And then . . .." She smiled at him. "Maybe you won't need to go home."

He nodded, handing her a bag with onions and cucumbers, all he'd managed to buy in the hotel.

The entire city seemed to be under siege, troubled, and the influx of camera crews had stressed the already fragile supply lines. "There is hope," she said. "See, there is hope. We can win."

Maybe they could have. Maybe. But the government didn't relent. It talked of mercy to the students if they surrendered, but not of giving in to their demands. Government men explained to the foreign crews that this was all a misunderstanding.

"I don't know Lin," Emma told him, sounding exhausted. "Every day more and more students leave. They're tired. They thought it would be easy. Quick. Now . . .." Smudges of tears showed on her face. "I tried to convince them to retreat by May

25. Leave the square, having made our point. I think we could do that."

"And?" he asked.

"Mark," she said. Mark was the guy from the club, the leader of the nationalistic faction that wanted the vote so they could deny it to anyone else. "He says we can't retreat without having won some points."

Lin held her arm. It felt very thin after almost a month here, on the barricades. "Forget this," he said. "Forget all this. Come with me. Come home with me. Marry me."

"Oh," she looked at him, her sky-blue eyes filled with tears. "I can't Lin. It's my land. It's my battle. I can't run away." He walked away feeling defeated. He'd always thought Englishmen were like sheep. But Emma wasn't. More the pity. Emma wasn't.

He woke up with the phone ringing, and reached for it, without seeing.

"Pack up, Lin," his boss said. "Pack up. We're going home."

"Beg your pardon?" He couldn't go home. Not without Emma.

"We're going home. They've brought out the tanks, and Dragon Clouds Unlimited is pulling everyone back home. They don't want to risk the lives of Chinese nationals."

"Tanks?"

He turned on the light. He turned on the TV, but nothing was playing on any of the stations, nothing except a static pattern and a droning music.

Lin ran out of his room, to the elevator, down the darkened streets to Trafalgar square.

Two blocks away he heard screams, cannon booming and the staccato stuttering of machine guns.

He could swear he smelled the blood.

But a police cordon stopped him. Shock police, armed, though no one seemed to be trying to break through.

They identified Lin as a foreigner, as a Chinese, and escorted him meekly back to his embassy, from whence he was shipped home by the next plane.

He didn't manage to go back until two years later, when it had all calmed down.

Two years later working for a new employer.

The images of the massacre in his mind tanks advancing on unprotected Englishmen the images he'd seen on TV at home, he went to Trafalgar square.

There were no blood stains on the pavement. Britain's government, still holding on to the ideological remnants of communism, had become in all but name a free-trade society.

Dark cement giants still surrounded the square, but they'd been painted bright colors. Tourists ambled amid street vendors.

And yet, Britons still couldn't vote, and from the interior stories of brutality and dark prepotence leaked, now and then.

Lin wondered lost in the square, as if he were in a foreign world.

He'd had an agency looking for Emma, for any trace of her. They found nothing save that she was missing, presumed dead in the Trafalgar square massacre.

The detective had rescued one thing, though Emma's book of sketches. He'd sent it to Lin in Hangchow. It had arrived just before Lin left for London.

Opening it, Lin had been surprised. The pictures were unmistakably of England: there were the old monuments, the trees that seemed to hug the ground, the rolling hills.

But it was an England of cottages and pretty little towns.

An England as England could have been? As Europe could have been without the Mongols?

Lin didn't know. But he carried the notebook around with him as he set about establishing an office for the international organization that monitored human rights abuses.

To prevent the Mongols from continuing to destroy everything in their path a thousand years after their defeat.

He would work for this small agency against overwhelming evil.

This would be his gift to Emma.

While doing research for my novel Ill Met By Moonlight, I came across everything that was happening around the time this story is set. The biographer was sympathetic to Judith and her strange marriage, but I started wondering how all of it made her straight-laced sister Susannah feel. In fact, how would Susannah, married to the very religious Doctor Hall feel about her eccentric family life?

Susannah Hall stood in her spacious, oak lined front hall, and looked through the little, thick glass squares amid the lead panes.

Her husband, Dr. John Hall, was late from his round of visiting his patients around Stratford. Susannah had given dinner to their daughter, five year old Elizabeth, and sent her to bed, and she'd set the mutton joint in the kitchen, close enough to the fire to keep it warm. Jane, the kitchen wench, had gone to bed, also.

Blurred through the window, Susannah saw the square building of the Guild Chapel, stark and dark-looking, under the grey sky of late March. Just out of sight, out of the corner of her eye, to the left, she saw a glimmer of light, no doubt from the many tapers lighting up the hall of New Place and shining through the big windows onto the street.

When Susannah had been a child, she and her brother and sister had lived, with their mother, in a much more modest house, in Henley street, and made their own tapers of mutton grease. Her father had lived in London, and who knew how or in what conditions. The only joy the little house had known came with her father's sporadic visits, his stories of London, of the theater.

Now, Hall Croft, where Doctor Hall had brought Susannah when he married her was yet a different type of house—large and spacious, but sparely ornamented. No painted cloths on the walls, such as had graced her parents' home. No colorful cushions. Only, everything cleaned and polished and right, beauty coming from a preservation of order and Spartan organization, rather than from that excess her father's house now displayed.

Susannah looked at the light, and thought why it must be so, that her father would only come back to Stratford when it was too late, when she'd already grown up fatherless. Now, he'd come and be the gentleman of New Place, and draw everyone's eyes in Stratford to his magnificence.

But Susannah remembered a childhood of much-mended skirts, of bare feet in cold weather, of scant food, of darkened rooms and, always, always, of longing for her father's visits, for his presence.

She took her hand to her hair, the hair so much like her father's had been—those thick, dark curls—only hers confined in a bun and worn beneath a proper bonnet, as befit a doctor's wife.

Her attire was also what a doctor's wife should wear—thick, clean, dark bodice and skirt over a high necked, long-sleeved shirt—and it molded her still-slender, spare figure gracefully enough, but modestly, bespeaking at once both her station in life and her husband's strong puritan beliefs.

Coming from a house where religion had never been underscored, Susannah had to learn her husband's ways, learn to accommodate to his manner of thinking. And perhaps that was right. Surely, that was why her father had encouraged her to marry doctor Hall, eight years her senior.

Her own parents were mismatched in age the other way, and where had that led? At least . . .. Susannah wrinkled her brow at the pouring rain outside, at the deserted street. At least her mother didn't seem to mind his absences, but she was happy enough to have him near her now.

Just as Susannah was happy with John Hall. At that moment she caught a glimpse of him, the sound of hooves in the rainy street outside, and then of John dismounting by their garden gate up front, and John leading the horse around the side of the house to the stables and the stable boy who would attend to it.

Presently, John came in through the front door, into the dark-paneled hall of Hall Croft, where nothing but the well-made oak trunks and the two nicely crafted benches proclaimed the distinction of the inhabitants.

He removed his hat to reveal his short salt-and-pepper hair, that matched his chest-length beard, and hung from the wall peg the broad cloak that had protected his black suit.

Looking at Susannah, his blue eyes seemed to grow harder, more focused. This was ever the way, as he examined her, head to toe for a sign of the disarray, the madness, as John called it, that her family had carried and given to her. Drunk with her mother's milk, John said, that slovenliness, that natural untidiness.

Usually, after John inspected her that way, his eyes would soften, and he would say something kind. Not this time. Having looked Susannah over, head to toe, he turned in silence, and closed the door upon the pouring rain, before looking at her again and asking, "Have you dinner for me?"

Susannah, confused, scared, wondering what she could have done to displease, mentally reviewed her clothing. It was clean and new, and she'd put her hair back so that not the smallest corkscrew of curl escaped the dark bonnet. She didn't dare run her hands around the bonnet to verify its arrangement, and she didn't dare, likewise, examine her other clothing.

Instead, she bowed and said, "By the fire. Take you a seat by the table, and I'll serve you."

Serve him she did and sat down in the dining room, across the dark, polished oak table from John's patriarchal splendor. While he said grace upon his meal, he looked so like the gods depicted in the books her father probably shouldn't have shown her—it probably wasn't good for her soul—but had shown her, anyway, when she was just a child. Powerful, strong, protective. Like that god, it was with the thunderbolts.

He ate in silence, slicing his meat with his knife, and taking the ale when she refilled his cup.

He did not talk, until the food had been consumed and the table cleared, and then he sat, his broad, generous lips pursed in distaste.

"Have I done ought to displease?" Susannah asked, her voice trembling.

At that John sighed, and his eyes did soften for a moment. His strong, square hands clenched, one on the other, on the polished, dark oak table. "Your family," he said.

He was silent a while, while she waited for the word of condemnation or reprieve. She had been so lucky to marry John. Oh, her father had money, but no more. That a man like John should have condescended to marry the daughter of a lowly actor and play maker. And yet, sometimes she felt as if her family were like a sword hung upon her head, ever ready to fall and destroy her marriage.

"Your sister's unfortunate marriage," John said, the word echoing off Susannah's thoughts. "To a tavern keeper, and yet that isn't all . . .."

Susannah's heart clenched and she lowered her head to look at the pattern of the grain within the oak of the table. Judith's marriage had been a point of contention for the two weeks since Judith had taken the liberty of marrying a tavern keeper seven years her junior and marrying him during Lent with no special dispensation. Thomas, Judith's new husband, had got excommunicated for it, and would have had to fulfill painful penance indeed, safe his new father-in-law had intervened and paid a heavy fine on his behalf.

Such it always was, of course. Since Hamnet, the favored son, had died at eleven, Judith, his twin, had stepped into the void and received all of the affection. While Susannah, well-behaved Susannah got very little attention from her father, very little praise for her pains—as much, indeed, as the prodigal's brother had ever got from his stern father.

If Susannah had run off and married a tavern keeper, she'd have been disowned faster than thought could turn upon the word.

She saw John look at her clenched hands, and shook her head, then raised properly penitent eyes to her husband. "Is there worse?" she asked. "About my poor sister and her unfortunate match?" Susannah herself had avoided going out into the market for these two weeks, and her stern look had stopped any gossip on the serving wench's lips.

John nodded. "There's the babe."

"The babe?" Had Judith delivered herself of a babe only two weeks after marriage? Susannah felt her cheeks color. Well she knew that she, herself, had been born only five months after her parents marriage. Well she knew what was on John's mind, even when he didn't mention it. But must Judith bring it home to her, now, the shame of her birth? She stared at John feeling as if the house, with its broad architrave, its dark paneled walls, the clean rushes on the floor, the broad hearths, as if all of it might come crashing down around her head, any moment.