SQ 04 - The English Concubine (12 page)

13

‘Wake, Miss Lian, wake up.’

Lian felt her shoulders being shaken and opened her eyes to see her old maid trembling by the side of the bed.

‘Ah Fu, what …’

‘The mistress. Come quickly.’

Lian yawned. What on earth? What time was it?

Ah Fu’s voice was filled with fear and the hand which she extended trembled. Lian and Ah Fu were as close as mother and child, for without her Lian knew her life in this house would have been infinitely worse. She had been raised by Ah Fu, an old woman now, but a girl once who had been brought from China as a bondmaiden and raised in a Hokkien merchant’s home. She, not being pretty, was perhaps saved from the brothel and passed from place to place, sold on each time until finally she had come to rest in the house of Baba Tan and given into the service of Noan, the eldest daughter. When Noan had died, she was given Lian to care for, moved into the household of Lilin, and poured her love onto the little girl.

Lilin paid no attention to Lian unless she wanted something. Approval, perhaps, as she paraded the streets with her little girl and received the smiling murmurs of the other women. Love, or at least its false outward expression. Respectability, for married women without children were pitied and secretly despised and since she had driven away her husband, a fact which everyone knew, Lian had been the bedrock of this respectable life. But neglect was her usual attitude and Ah Fu had taken her and kept her sane.

Lian rose and followed Ah Fu’s candle. Two other maids emerged from the darkness and joined them. Together they went towards the light which glowed in the bedroom of Mother Lilin.

She turned into the room and put her hand to her mouth. Lilin floated on a pool of red-stained silk bed clothes. Ah Ma was by one side of Lilin, wrapping a bandage around her left wrist. Lian rushed forward.

‘Is she dead?’ she cried, and the housekeeper shook her head.

‘Alive.’

She looked at one of the maids who was hanging back, her mouth opened, half terrified. ‘Water,’ she said. ‘Lots of it. Hurry up, silly girl.’

‘A doctor …’ Lian began but the housekeeper looked up sharply.

‘She will live. No doctor. No scandal. Your grandmother will have my head.’

Lian knew Ah Ma was the spy her grandmother kept in the house. She had not kept this fact a secret. The woman was sensible, sanity in an insane house and was kind to her.

Ah Ma finished the bandage, which was itself now stained with blood.

‘Xiao Lin heard her screams,’ the housekeeper said. Xiao Lin was Lilin’s maid and slept in the room next to her, always on the alert for some change of mood in her volatile mistress.

‘She had the guts only to slash one wrist and then set up a hue and cry. Perhaps it would have been better if …’

The housekeeper did not finish the sentence and exchanged a glance with Lian.

Ah Fu came up to Lian and put an arm on her shoulder. Lian took her hand and together, all the women looked down at the white drained face of this crazed woman. In this house of women, all sympathised with Lian and none wished to lose their place. Here, within reason, they did as they pleased for no man lived in the house to order them about. Their job, they knew very well, was to keep Lilin quiet and stifle any scandal.

‘If my grandmother knows,’ Lian said, staring at Ah Ma, ‘she will tell my father and then he will be forced to do something.’

Ah Ma rose from the bed as the maid brought water. Ah Ma and Lian raised Lilin, forcing water down her throat. She spluttered but drank.

‘Go back to bed,’ Ah Ma whispered. ‘I will take care of this.’

The next morning when Lian woke, she went instantly to Lilin’s room. She was half-conscious only and Lian knew Ah Ma had given her opium pills. Xiao Lin was applying a paste of tamarind and honey to the wound. Lian went forward. The slash which had bled so copiously seemed like nothing, but that thin line was like a mark in the sand in Lian’s life.

How long before it became known that Lilin was suicidal? Ah Ma, Ah Fu and the upstairs maids would not tell, she was sure, but the cook and his young boy, the scullery maid and the syce, all the others would wag their tongues. Such delicious news would go from the house through the hawkers and tradesmen who called and within a day or two to the ears of her grandmother.

The news about her father had come to her in just this way. The servants told the cooks who told the seller of noodles who told their supplier of wood who liked one of the housemaids. Like a long siren’s song it reached the ears, of course, of Ah Fu, a woman so enamoured of gossip her very life seemed to depend on it.

Her father had visited the house of the old man Wei Sun Wei, where there was a young girl, the pretty daughter of the son-in-law Cheng, who spoke Chinese though she was from Java, or looked like it, and she had played music for him and kowtowed before him and there was talk all over the house that she would be his bride, for otherwise why had the father shown her to him, which was really a scandal anyway. Lian recalled her father’s words at the graveside of her grandfather.

Am I not free to take another wife if I choose?

‘Ah Fu,’ she said as they walked towards the Institution. ‘After school I will go to visit with Miss Xia Lou.’

Ah Fu smiled. Her teeth were like a picket fence with one or two railings missing. Ah Fu loved to visit this English house. She had a friend in one of the cooks and she would eat sugary English cakes and drink tea and find even more wonderful gossip about the European town.

Accordingly, that afternoon, Lian and the old woman turned their steps to North Bridge Road and Lian rang the bell. The Indian majordomo despatched Ah Fu to the kitchen, showed Lian to a chair in the hall and went in search of his mistress.

Lian could barely contain herself. She felt this might be her last hope and her hand shook with anxiety.

Within a few minutes he returned and she followed him into the garden, her legs wobbling with nerves.

‘Lian.’ Charlotte rose. She could see the girl was distressed. Her body was shaking and her face was covered in sweat.

‘My dear, are you ill?’

She took Lian’s hands and helped her to a chair. Lian took deep breath and threw a beseeching look at Charlotte.

‘I cannot marry him. He is addicted to opium, he consorts with women in the town, he is a degenerate.’

‘You talk of Ah Soon. I know this. It’s a terrible thing.’

‘I beg of you. You must speak to my father again. Please.’

Charlotte shook her head and Lian’s heart fell.

‘Lian, my dear, it will serve no purpose. It is all I can do to convince him how to act with Lily and …’ Charlotte held her tongue. She had almost spoken of Alex.

Tears welled in Lian’s eyes and she put her hands to her face in utter despair.

‘Oh, my dear, I’m sorry. At the moment my relations with your father are … well … perhaps not … There are some things.’

‘So it’s true?’ Lian asked, staring at Charlotte and wringing her hands.

Charlotte frowned. ‘True? What’s true?’

‘That he will marry that girl, the Javanese daughter of the merchant Cheng. She is to be the new bride he spoke to me about.’

‘Your father spoke of taking a wife?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Lian’s agitation increased and she made as if to rise then sank back to the chair. ‘I am doomed. He will think nothing of marrying me off as quickly as possible so he may get on with his new family.’

Lian burst into tears, her entire being concerned so entirely with herself, she thought of nothing else.

Charlotte was so shocked she could neither move nor think. She stared at Lian and time seemed to slow.

‘If you do not help me, I will kill myself.’

Something in the hushed tone dragged Charlotte’s attention back to the young girl. She put her hand to Lian’s.

‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t say such things.’

Suddenly Lian rose. She turned and ran into the house. Charlotte watched her go, feeling like a ship that had come loose from its moorings and set adrift, ragged and aimless, far out to sea.

For days Charlotte tried to make sense of what Lian had said. She had no reason on earth to suspect Zhen. In all the time they had been together he had never lied to her. But she could not speak to him and dared not go to his house. And he had not replied to her letter. There had been no communication between them for almost ten days and she felt the strain of it and a deep, dull resentment.

Her heart grew heavy and she more distracted until one morning, as massed clouds gathered in the south, her eyes fell on an article by the editor fulminating about the state of Chinatown and the evils of human trafficking, especially the degrading spectacle, in one of her Majesty’s colonies, of young women forced into prostitution. She remembered that Zhen had told her Qian had moved to Hong Kong Street, where he ran some of these brothels.

Prostitution was so commonplace on the other side of the river that hardly anyone gave it a thought. Miss Cooke took in prostitutes who, through their diseases, had been abandoned to their fate. Some ran away, from time to time, but Charlotte knew it was a dangerous thing to do. Many were murdered by the thugs.

She wanted to get to the bottom of this gossip about Zhen’s marriage and at the same time she wanted to speak seriously to Qian about Lian and Ah Soon. These were the reasons which impelled her to rise and take up her hat. But she was curious too and longing, hoping, to see Zhen.

She left the syce at the corner of South Bridge Road. He made a small objection but quickly relented. He did not want to go into the town where the cholera killed you in three days. She walked slowly down Hong Kong Street which was lined with low taverns cheek-by-jowl with opium dens and brothels. Two beggars approached and tugged her gown and, alarmed, she moved away. A gaggle of little children with filthy faces and clothes wiped their noses, pointed and ran away. Two men lay, cadaverous, down a filthy alley. The smell of effluent was strong and rubbish lay strewn the length of the street and in the drains. She had not been in this street in her life, rarely now ever came to Chinatown. It was degraded and foul and she regretted her unconsidered decision.

Min fanned herself and watched Charlotte from the verandah of the Heaven’s Gate brothel. She knew exactly who this woman was. Min had been crazy for Zhen when he first came to her brothel and he had saved her life after she had been half beaten to death by an English sailor. He had secured her release from the
kwai po
through a combination of bullying, influence and money, and she had gone to Malacca as a
tap tang
, a free agent. She had served Qian in the brothels there and made a great deal of money. Enough to give up the life but when Qian had fallen on hard times, Zhen had sent for her and she had remembered her obligations to him and returned to take charge of Qian’s four ah ku houses.

Her obligation to him and Qian was therefore deep and not just because she had burned the yellow paper and sworn an oath to the kongsi. They had saved her from the ultimate degradations of such a life.

As a dirt-poor girl of fifteen, she had been sold by her parents to the dealer and shipped to Canton along with thousands of others. This sale condemned her to a life of sexual slavery from which there was little chance of escaping, except by death. It was in Canton that she, along with hundreds of other virginal young girls had been turned over to the highest bidder and been deflowered not too gently by a fat old Mandarin. She had been terrified and cowed, as they all were, surrounded by heavy-set thugs.

Having made the first part of his money from her, the virgin price, the pimp then sold her on for shipment to Singapore where she had been forced to have an abortion, a job so botched, there had been no more pregnancies. A small mercy she supposed, growing hard in this relentless life. For two years she had served in a
loh kui chai
, a high-class brothel in Smith Street reserved for the well-off Chinese tradesmen and merchants who could pass the night with their favourite. Then she had been moved to the brothel for the foreigners, ones with money, the government officials and officers of the regiment for she was still pretty and only seventeen. These establishment were, at least clean, but she had got the pox, of course, all the women had it and she had successfully concealed it. The pox could mean you were sold on down instantly into the lowest class brothels, or even simply murdered or abandoned.

After a time she had been put down to the second-class brothel. Here she had met Zhen and ultimately been saved from what followed. Usually, after six years, women like her were moved along, to the very low-class coolie brothels, the
pau chai
, firecracker brothels, so named for the swiftness with which the prostitute dealt with her clientele of drunkards, poor coolies, sailors and soldiers. Within a couple of years they were sold out of Singapore and moved to Malaya or Borneo, or the Indies and as they aged, to lower and lower places, the huts on the plantations of gambier and pepper and the tin mines until they were worn out. The women were never free, always indebted to their owners, until they died of disease or despair.

There was always a steady stream of new young women arriving to replenish those moved on. As a
kwai po
with a decent heart, Min tried to mitigate to a certain extent the misery of the girls in her charge, but there was only so much she could do. She trained them in the life and if they didn’t work, they were moved on or beaten. They were like dust, carried on the wind and their graves could be anywhere.

Min could see the Mah Nuk woman was distressed. Doubtless her blue eyes never saw such sights in the quiet spaces of the European town. What she was doing here was a mystery, but she was Zhen’s woman so Min rose and went down the stairs. She whispered to one of the samseng slouching in the verandah and he raced away.

‘Can I help you?’ she said in Malay and Charlotte turned.

The woman she saw was Chinese, slight and dressed in a colourful baju and sarong. Her face had been hurt at some stage and the scars were obvious.