Tai-Pan (80 page)

Cudahy bent down and put his lips near Orlov’s ear. “Is she the one, sir? The one that he was after buying for her weight in gold? Did you see her face?”

“Get for’ard or I’ll have your guts for the felt of my trousers! And keep your mouth shut and spread that word, by the blood of Christ! Everyone’s confined to ship when we reach Macao!”

“Aye, aye, me foine Captain sorr,” Cudahy said with a laugh and stood to his full height, towering over the little man he liked and admired. “Our mouths are clams, by the beard of St. Patrick. No fear of that!” He leaped down the quarterdeck gangway and went forward.

Orlov strode the quarterdeck, wondering what all the mystery was about, and what was amiss with the tiny, shrouded girl the Tai-Pan had brought aboard in his arms. He saw the thickset Chinese, Fong, following Cudahy like a patient dog, and he wondered again why the man had been sent aboard to be trained in the ways of a captain, and why the Tai-Pan had put one of the heathen aboard each of his clippers.

I’d like to have seen the girl’s face, he told himself. Her weight in gold, yes, so the story goes. I wish—oh, how I wish I was not as I am, that I could look into a man’s face or a woman’s face and not see revulsion, and not have to prove that I’m a man like any, and better than any afloat. I’m tired of being Stride Orlov 
the hunchback.
 Is that why I was afeared when the Tai-Pan said, “In October you’ll go north, alone”?

He looked moodily over the gunnel, at the black waves rushing past. You are what you are and the sea’s waiting. And you’re captain of the finest ship in the world. And once in your life you looked into a face and saw the green eyes studying you just as 
a man.
 Ah, Green Eyes, he thought, his misery leaving him, I’ll go into hell for the moment you gave me.

“Avast there, you swabs! Bend smartly on the top ta’ gallants ho!” he shouted.

And his order sent the men scurrying aloft again to grasp more power from the wind. And then, when he saw the lights of Macao on the horizon, he ordered the sails reefed and eased his ship cautiously—but always with the maximum speed—into the shallow harbor of Macao, the leadsman calling the fathoms.

“Fine seamanship, Cap’n,” Struan said.

Orlov spun around, startled. “Oh, didn’t see you. You sneak up on a man like a ghost. Cutter’s ready to go alongside.” Then he added nonchalantly, “Thought I might as well take her in as wait till dawn and a pilot.”

“You’re a mind reader, Captain.” Struan looked at the lights and at the unseen city, low on the water but rising to a crest. “Anchor at our usual mooring. Guard my cabin yoursel’. You’re na to go in—or any. Everyone’s confined to the ship. With a tight mouth.”

“I’ve already given those orders.”

“When the Portuguese authorities come aboard, apologize for not waiting for the pilot and pay the usual dues. And the squeeze to the Chinese. Say I’m ashore.”

Orlov knew better than to ask how long the Tai-Pan would be gone.

Dawn was nudging the horizon when 
China Cloud
 moored half a mile from the still undiscernible wharves on the southwest harbor. This was as close as she could safely come; the bay was dangerously shallow and therefore almost useless—another reason Hong Kong was an economic necessity. As he hastened the cutter to shore, Struan noticed the riding lights of another clipper to the south: 
White Witch.
 A few smaller European ships were at anchor, and hundreds of sampans and junks plied their silent way.

Struan hurried along the jetty still rented by The Noble House. He saw that there were no lights on in their vast company residence which was also leased from the Portuguese. It was a colonnaded mansion, four-storied, on the far side of the tree-lined 
praia.
 He turned north and walked along the 
praia,
 skirting the Chinese customshouse. He cut through a wide street and began climbing the slight hill toward the church of Sao Francisco.

He was glad to be back in Macao, back in civilization amid cobbled streets and stately cathedrals and gracious Mediterranean houses and fountained 
pragas
 and spacious gardens—sweet-smelling with their abundance of flowers.

Hong Kong will one day be like this, he told himself . . . with joss. Then he recalled Skinner and Whalen and malaria, and May-may aboard 
China Cloud,
 so frail and so weak and another fever due in two or three days. And what about 
Blue Cloud?
 She should be home soon. Will she beat 
Gray Witch?
 Or is she a thousand miles astern at the bottom of the sea? What about all the other clippers? How many do I lose this season? Let 
Blue Cloud
 be first! How is Winifred? And is Culum all right, and where’s Gorth, and will it be today that there will be a reckoning?

The city was still asleep in the dawn. But he could feel Chinese eyes watching him. He crested the hill and crossed the beautiful Praça de São Francisco.

Beyond the 
pra
ça
 northward, at the highest point of the isthmus, were the battlements of the ancient fort of São Paulo de Monte. And beyond this was the Chinese section of Macao: narrow alleys, and hovels built on hovels, crusting the north slope of the hill and falling away.

For half a mile farther there was flat land and the isthmus narrowed to barely a hundred and fifty yards. There were gardens and walks and the emerald of the small racecourse and the cricket ground that the English had developed and sponsored over the centuries. The Portuguese did not approve of racing and did not play cricket.

A hundred yards beyond the cricket ground was the wall where Macao ended and China began.

The wall was twenty feet high and ten feet thick and stretched from shore to shore. Only after the wall was built three centuries ago had the emperor agreed to lease the isthmus to the Portuguese and allow them to settle on the land.

In the center of the wall’s length was a portaled guard tower and a single majestic gate. The gate to China was always open, but no European could set foot through it.

Struan’s boots sounded loud as he hurried across the 
pra
ça
 and opened the tall, wrought-iron gates of the bishop’s palace and walked through the gardens that had been tended for three centuries. One day I’ll have a garden like this, he promised himself.

He crossed the cobbled forecourt, his boots clattering, and went up to the huge door. He pulled the bell and heard it echo within and pulled it again and again, insistently.

At length a lantern flickered past the downstairs windows and he heard footsteps approaching and a stream of querulous Portuguese. The door opened.

“Bom dia.
 I want to see the bishop.”

The half-dressed, half-asleep servant stared at him without recognition and without comprehension, then spouted another stream of Portuguese and began to close the door. But Struan shoved his foot in the door, pushed it open, and walked into the house. He turned into the first room—an exquisite, book-tiered study—and sat in a carved-backed chair. Then he let his eyes fall on the gaping servant. “The bishop,” he repeated.

Half an hour later Falarian Guineppa, Bishop of Macao, General of the Church of Rome, strode imperiously into the room that Struan had commandeered. He was a tall patrician who carried his fifty years youthfully. His nose was Roman-beaked, his forehead high, his features well used. He wore a magenta skullcap and magenta robes, and around his taut neck hung a bejeweled crucifix. His black eyes were sleepy and hostile. But when they fell on Struan, the anger and the sleepiness vanished. The bishop stopped on the threshold, every fiber of his being alert.

Struan stood. “Good morning, Your Grace. Sorry to come uninvited and so early.”

“Welcome in the name of God, senhor,” the bishop said pleasantly. He motioned to a chair. “I think a little breakfast. Would you join me?”

“Thank you.”

The bishop spoke curtly in Portuguese to the servant, who bowed and hurried away. Then he strolled slowly to the window, his fingers on his crucifix, and stared out at the rising sun. He saw 
China Cloud
 and the clusters of sampans surrounding it in the bay far below at anchor. What emergency, he wondered, brings the Tai-Pan of The Noble House to me? The enemy I know so well but have never met. “I thank you for such an awakening. This dawn is very beautiful.”

“Aye.”

Each man assumed a civility that neither felt.

To the bishop, Struan represented the materialistic, evil, fanatic Protestant English who had broken the laws of God, who—to their everlasting damnation—had denied the Pope as the Jews had denied Christ; the man who was their leader, and the one who had, almost singlehanded, destroyed Macao, and with Macao, Catholic domination of the Asian heathen.

To Struan, the bishop represented all that he despised in the Catholics—the dogmatic fanaticism of self-castrated, power-seeking men who sucked riches from the poor in the name of a Catholic God, drop by bloody drop, and from the drops built mighty cathedrals to the glory of their version of Divinity, who had idolatrously set up a man in Rome as Pope and made the man an infallible arbiter of other men.

Liveried servants obsequiously brought silver trays and hot chocolate and feather-light croissants and fresh butter and the sweet kumquat jelly for which the monastery was famous.

The bishop said grace and the Latin increased Struan’s discomfort, but he said nothing.

Both men ate in silence. The bells from the multitude of churches tolled matins, and the faint, deep-throated litany from the chorus of monks in the cathedral filled the silence.

After chocolate there was coffee from Portuguese Brazil: hot, sweet, powerful, delicious.

At a motion of the bishop’s hand a servant opened the bejeweled cigar box and offered it to Struan. “These are from Havana, if they please you. After breakfast, I enjoy Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘gift’ to humanity.”

“Thank you.” Struan chose one. The servants lit the cigars, and at a sign from the bishop they left.

The bishop watched the smoke spiral. “Why should the Tai-Pan of The Noble House seek my help? 
Papist
 help?” he added with a brittle smile.

“You can wager, wi’out odds, Your Grace, that it’s na sought lightly. Have you heard of cinchona bark? Jesuits’ bark?”

“So. You have malaria. Happy Valley fever,” he said softly.

“Sorry to disappoint you. Nay, I’ve na malaria. But someone I cherish has. Does cinchona cure malaria?”

The bishop’s fingers toyed with the huge ring on his middle finger, then touched his crucifix. “Yes. If the malaria of Happy Valley is the same as the malaria that exists in South America.” His eyes were piercing. Struan felt their power but stared back as relentlessly. “Many years ago I was a missionary in Brazil. I caught their malaria. But cinchona cured me.”

“Do you have cinchona here? In Macao?”

There was a silence, broken by the clicking of the fingernails tapping the cross, reminding Struan of the Chinese doctor tapping May-may’s wrist. He wondered if he had judged correctly—about the bishop.

“I don’t know, Senhor Struan.”

“If cinchona can cure our malaria, then I’m ready to pay. If you want money you can have that. Power? I’ll give you that. If you want my soul you can have that—I dinna subscribe to your views, so that would be a safe exchange. I’ll even gladly go through the form of becoming a Catholic, but it would be meaningless, as you know and I know. Whatever you want I’ll give you if it’s in my power to give. But I want some of the bark. I want to cure one person of the fever. Name your price.”

“For one who comes as a supplicant, your manners are curious.”

“Aye. But I’m presuming that, irrespective of my manners—or what you think of me or I think of you—that we have the means of a trade. Do you have cinchona? If you have it, will it cure Happy Valley malaria? And if it does, what’s your price?”

The room was very quiet, quiet overlaid with movement of minds and wills and thoughts.

“I can answer none of those questions now,” the bishop said.

Struan got up. “I’ll come back tonight.”

“There’s no need for you to return, senhor.”

“You’re saying you’ll na trade?”

“I’m saying that tonight may be too soon. It will take time to send word to every healer of the sick and to get a reply. I will get in touch with you as soon as I have an answer. To all your questions. Where will you be? 
China Cloud
 or your residence?”

“I’ll send a man to sit on your doorstep and wait.”

“There’s no need. I will send word.” The bishop remained seated in his chair. Then, seeing the depths of Struan’s concern, he added compassionately, “Don’t worry, senhor. I will send word to both places, in Christ’s name.”

“Thank you.” As Struan was leaving, he heard the bishop say, “Go with God,” but he did not stop. The front door clanged behind him.

In the stillness of the little room the bishop sighed deeply. His eyes saw the bejeweled crucifix that hung at his chest. He prayed silently. Then he sent for his secretary and ordered the search to begin. Then, alone once more, he split himself into the three persons that all generals of the Church must simultaneously be. First, the anointed Peter, first Bishop of Christ, with all that that spiritually implied. Second, the militant guardian of the Church temporal with all that that implied. And last, just a simple man who believed the teachings of a simple man who was the Son of God.

He settled back in his chair and let these facets of himself argue one with another. And he listened to them.

Struan walked up the marble stairs of the company residence, fatigued yet strangely at peace. I’ve done all I can, he thought.

Before he could open the door it was flung wide with a flourish. Lo Chum, the majordomo of the servants of The Noble House in Macao, beamed at him toothlessly.

He was a tiny old man with a face like ancient ivory and a pixie smile, and he had been in Struan’s service ever since Struan could afford a servant. He wore a neat white smock, black trousers and rope sandals.