Shanghai (10 page)

The
Cornwallis
turned into the wind and dropped anchor. Five other ships followed suit. Gough shouted “Port side gun ports!” and “Siege flags!”

The ports slammed open and battle flags raced up the bowsprit. All around him Richard watched the men of the Royal Navy preparing their positions for battle. He felt his heart race. For a brief moment he wondered where Maxi was, but then he cast aside his concern. If there was anyone who could look after himself in a fight it was his brother. No doubt he was readying his irregulars to lead Her Majesty's troops into battle.

Richard flinched when the first cannon roared beneath his feet. Then over a hundred cannon from five different ships brought the wrath of the British navy to bear on the gingall emplacements that were intended to guard the mouth of Q'in She Huang's Grand Canal. For three hours, without cease, the British shelled the Manchu batteries, and when they fell silent the gunners raised the angle on their weapons and bombarded the walled city itself.

Then, without warning, the guns fell silent. At first Richard couldn't tell, since his hearing had left him
hours earlier. A sharp slap across his back caused him to spin around. “You're to prepare yourself for a landing in General Gough's party,” mouthed the adjutant. Richard looked down. Below him the water was quickly filling with shuttle boats heading toward the shore. Richard thought he could make out the red kerchief that Maxi always wore around his neck on days of battle. Naturally he was in the lead boat, almost at the rocky beach. Maxi was always first to a fight.

A half hour later, seven hundred mariners and armed seamen formed ranks on the shoreline just east of Chinkiang. For some of them it was the first time their feet had touched the sacred soil of the Celestial Kingdom. Shortly afterwards, the horses were brought to join the infantry, and a man from Maxi's irregulars came running up to General Gough.

“It's clear, General, from here to the city. Not a single battery is left, sir.”

The man's English was so highly accented that Gough turned to Richard. “What language is he speaking?”

“Farsi-accented English.”

“English?”

Richard repeated the irregular's message in his impeccable English, then asked the man in Farsi, “And the city?”

“The gates are closed and barred. No sign of them coming out to meet us in the field.”

Richard translated, and Gough asked, “Anything else?”

The irregular looked to Richard and said in Farsi, “Your brother suggests that you tell your British friends to take a close look at the Chinese weapons. There are some surprises.”

Richard passed this on to Gough, who turned to a lieutenant and issued an order.

An hour later they were on a battery emplacement hill examining two pieces of Chinese artillery.

“Sir?” Richard asked.

“They're clever. Look at the pivot on that gingall. The weapon itself is poorly constructed and only a little more effective than their shields with the savage pictures and the character writing painted on them.”

Richard's ability to read Chinese characters was limited, but he knew the characters on the Chinese shields had epithets like “Thief's Judgment,” “Red Hair Tamer,” and “Subduer of Foreign Devils.” He didn't think it was worth telling Gough.

Gough knelt and looked at the iron apparatus on the back of the narrow-barrelled gingall. Two corners of a metal triangle were bolted to the back of the weapon while the third was welded to a large metal ring.

“It's a pivot apparatus,” Gough said as he circled the thing. “Take a large spike and hammer it through the ring into the ground, then the gun can be moved on an arc by as few as two gunners. Look at the wheels. They can be set forward and back or in a curve left to right. We need five men to change the basic positioning of our cannon. This is a legitimate advance. Lucky they don't use them strategically or we'd have lost a ship, maybe two.”

A lieutenant ran up and saluted. “Sir, the monkeys' handboats are in the western cove.”

Richard bridled at hearing the Chinese referred to that way, but he let it pass.

In the western cove Richard watched Gough once again admire the ingenuity of the enemy. In the water, close to the shore, were seven sleek boats with side wheels. “They're hand-powered,” the lieutenant said as
he showed Gough how a single man could move the boat with a simple arm motion.

Again Gough quickly realized how fortunate they had been. “If they'd filled these with pitch and then set them ablaze …” He didn't need to say the rest. Fire on a wooden sailing ship was a frightful thing, and clearly these small boats would have been hard to stop. “If they'd known where our magazines … well, they didn't,” he said, but Richard noted a strong hint of both fear and respect in the man's words.

When Gough turned from the cove he was surprised to see Maxi standing on the rise beyond the beach, clearly waiting for him, his kerchief just slightly redder than his hair.

Gough accepted the man's worth, but he was a gentleman, and this Persian was … was a Persian. “Report,” he ordered.

Maxi smiled. “The city's silent, but I'd watch your flanks as you approach the walls.”

“Sir!”

“Sir,” Maxi added grudgingly. Richard noted the pulsing vein in his brother's forehead, like a thick worm caught beneath the flawless pale skin.

“No resistance?”

“No resistance yet … sir.”

Gough dismissed the Persian.

Maxi turned and headed back the way he had come.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY, on the morning of July 21, 1842, General Gough led two full brigades of his men confidently toward the walls of Chinkiang.

As they got within sight of the walls his adjutant said, “There seems to be no defensive positioning at all, General.”

Gough didn't like it, but he didn't know what else to do. He needed to secure the mouth of the Grand Canal if he had any chance of forcing the Emperor to the treaty table. Still, the silence was disconcerting, and his own private alarms were ringing like the church bells of his home parish on Easter morn.

He turned back toward his ships and bit his lip, drawing a thin line of blood. Then he reminded himself that he couldn't afford to return to England empty-handed, since he had invested what was left of his family's dwindling fortune in the possibility of plunder from this expedition.

“Should we move the brigade forward, sir?”

The land in front of them was hard-packed clay, with grass growing to the height of a man's waist in the distance; to the left were flooded rice paddies. On the right was a grove of tropical trees. Gough didn't like the trees. Even as a child he'd feared the woods. The most frightening threat in his family was to be thrown to the woods—to be “bewildered.”

“Divide the brigades in two,” Gough ordered. “I don't want a flank exposed to the trees.”

Commands were given, and the well-trained men responded quickly, with bayonetted rifles at the ready. In the distance the walled city was perhaps two miles off.

The men proceeded carefully, awaiting a response. But there was none. Closer and closer to the walls of the city the troops advanced, in perfect formation.

Suddenly, within two hundred yards of the city walls, Manchu bannermen appeared from the water of the rice paddies.

The brigade wheeled to face the onslaught and weathered the first assault. Casualties on the front rank were high, but the second and third ranks held ground. The bannermen retreated toward the city, but Gough hesitated to follow, fearing that he would expose a flank as he advanced. Before he could consider his options a second wave of bannermen threw themselves at his troops—this time from the tall grass. The battle rapidly degenerated into hand-to-hand combat, and the superior agility of the Chinese fighters almost took the day. Finally Gough called in his cavalry, and the Chinese retreated toward the walled city.

Gough rallied his men for an attack on the walls only to have a third wave of bannermen attack, this time from the woods. This was followed quickly by a full frontal attack from the central gate of the walled city.

Neither side gave ground. No quarter was asked for or given. And when the sun finally headed toward the western horizon not a single Chinese soldier was left standing. Not one had run. Everyone had fought to the death. Gough's superior weaponry and military tactics had finally prevailed—although without the surprise attack by Maxi's irregulars from deep in the forest the battle may well have ended British aspirations in the Middle Kingdom.

Gough took stock of his decimated troops and noted the hundreds of swooping vultures that hovered overhead. He ordered burial parties for the dead, then shouted to Richard, “Follow me.”

Richard did his best to sidestep the bodies but found his boots quickly slicked with human gore. Looking toward the city he saw Maxi through the gunpowder fog and the fading light. Maxi was on the top of a western wall waving his fire-red kerchief. Gough
pointed his troops toward Maxi. His men found the advantageous position that Maxi had marked and scaled the walls. Richard followed them.

Once inside the walls the troops re-formed their ranks and moved slowly toward the centre of the city.

Richard knew immediately that something was very wrong.

The city was ghostly quiet. The Chinese were a noisy people at the best of times; this silence was—it was unChinese—unAsian.

It was the first thing that had struck Richard when the family arrived in Calcutta: the noise—the constant racket. But it wasn't the noise that bothered Richard. It was the words coming from his father's mouth that he heard above the yelling and shouting of the Calcutta alley in which they lived.

“You'll see, soon the Vrassoons will honour their promise to me,” he had said.

“Why will they do that, Papa?” Richard asked sharply.

“In return for a favour I did for them a long time ago, when you were just a little boy …
boychick.
”

“What kind of favour could you do for the Vrassoons? You don't have anything the damnable—”

“When you're a man you'll understand the hard choices a father has to make to provide for his family. Now go play.”

Richard hated his father at that moment, but rather than lash out, he wrote.

J
OURNAL
E
NTRIES—
S
EPTEMBER AND
O
CTOBER
1828

After two weeks of desperation, with nowhere to live and no money to buy food, the great and powerful Vrassoons deigned to let my father be a night watchman at one of their warehouses. For a night watchman's job we had trudged across desert and mountain! For a night watchman's job we had ruined our mother's health! I couldn't believe it.

With little more than a lean-to at the end of the stinking alley in which to live, Maxi and I spent our days in the open. My olive skin turned black beneath the baking sun, but Maxi's White Russian skin turned red to match his flaming hair—then shredded in long snakeskin wisps, which we quickly discovered were of real interest to the locals.

Maxi would approach a crowd and then I would announce, in Hindi, “
Mera Bhai khud ki chamri cheel raha hai
.—My brother is going to skin himself alive.
Kuan itna himmatwala hai jo ek admi, ek larke, ko khud ko chulte huai dekhe sakta hai!
—Who's brave enough to watch a man, a boy, skin himself alive? Step up and watch! Step up! Step up! How much is it worth to see this boy skin himself in front of your eyes?”

Trinkets of money tinkled into my outstretched hand. When I had as much as I could from the crowd, I would pocket the cash and step back. Maxi would then take off his shirt and pants and stand almost naked—redder than a sunset. Then slowly he would niggle an edge of skin from the top of his hairless chest and pull it slowly down his body, all the while screaming as if he were in terrible pain. Finally he'd rip off the strip and hand it to me. I would hold the length of skin aloft and call out, “
Kuan lal larke ki chamri ke daam dega? Calcutta ki sabse acchi chamri—
Who'll pay for the red boy's skin? The best skin in Calcutta. Fresh skin from a red boy will cure any disease. It will bring happiness to a bad marriage. Make the weak strong, the blind see, and the limp strong like a donkey with a new mare. Eat it raw, brew it into a tea, cook it with your rice. Anyway you want, it will bring you joy.
Isse jyada kya iccha kar sakte ho? Mai kis ke boli laga raha hoon is lal larke ke chamri ki—ya jo kushhali yeh malik ko lekaraigie?
—What more could you ask? What am I bid for the red boy's skin—for the happiness it will bring the owner?”

“You've really picked up the lingo, brother mine,” Maxi whispered in Farsi.

“You have the gift of skin, me of tongues, Maxi,” I whispered back while I continued to hold up the skin and collect bids. As I did I realized something important—how much a
man would pay for happiness, even a moment of happiness, even the illusion of the slightest possibility of happiness.

Most days Maxi and I played a game we called “spy.” Through the bazaars, down by the sacred river, into and out of offices and factories and private homes, we learned Calcutta by “spying.”

As the weeks passed, Maxi noticed that I concentrated the “spying” on one point in the vast city.

“Here again, brother mine?”

“You don't like offices? It's where money's made.”

“I'm more interested in where money is spent.”

That you are, Maxi, that you are, I thought, remembering our spying in what I thought of as the “harlot district.” We were not ignorant of sex, but transvestite boy whores and castrati whores were new ideas to us—and somehow fascinating to Maxi.