There Will Be Phlogiston (33 page)

The truth is, Dil, I don’t begin with two
people.

I begin many years ago with two empires: one
celestial, one industrial. My father was dispatched to China
sometime in the 1830s, to support the chief superintendent of trade
in securing British interests in the Far East. I was born in
Guangzhou—Canton to the Europeans—in 1839, in the Thirteen
Factories. I never saw the interior of the city itself—it’s
forbidden to the
fang-qi
, which is the name the Celestials
have for foreigners. I believe it means “outlandish devil” or
something very similar. But my only real experience of
Canton—which, I believe, some of the airmen called the city of
boats—was passing through it as I left the Celestial Kingdom behind
me. I was fourteen, and Lord Wolfram had decided—or been
required—to claim me.

I was taken to Hong Kong shortly after the war—early
in 1843, I think. I don’t know for certain, I’ve had to construct
this history from papers and fragments of other people’s memories.
Before my father’s summons came, I lived behind the white walls of
Headquarters House in the care of the general officer commanding.
He was . . . not unkind. But so much of life was distant to me:
something on the horizon, shown to me in pictures, or written about
in books, caught on the edges of conversations between strangers.
It was not until my return to Canton, standing on the skydock,
waiting to be taken to a place called England, that suddenly
everything was real: life in all its ugly-beauty-truth, the junks
and the lorchas, the sampans and the lantern-strung flower barges,
all jostling with the European clippers on the muddy brown waters
of the Pearl River.

Lord Wolfram had sent an airship because it was too
close to typhoon season and the seas might be treacherous. We left
at first light, when the whole sky was flame. Oh Dil, you’ve never
seen a sunrise, or a sunset, til you’ve been in the East. I’d
watched from my windows, but this felt like the first and only one
I’d ever truly seen. My last, most vivid memory of Canton: slashes
of gold and scarlet falling in searing benediction over the river,
the mountains, and the jumble of curling, ochre-tinted roofs.

I . . . I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m telling this
well. It’s very confused.

Naw, ’tis all good. I just like listening to you
talk. I’m kinda fuddled though. Cos I don’t know nowt about no war,
and I think you said you was born in thirteen factories which is
like seriously hard-core.

Oh dear . . . No, the Thirteen Factories is the name
of the foreign quarter in Canton. The buildings aren’t actually
factories like in Gaslight. They’re warehouses and trading posts,
with apartments above. They were built so close to the river that I
saw them as the airship was leaving. They reminded me of where I
had lived in Hong Kong, strange and square and regimented. I had
envied the other houses, so brightly coloured, with their curving
roofs and ornamental dragons. The airship captain pointed out the
New English Factory, where he said my father had most likely
stayed.

The place where I was born. Where my mother
died.

But I remember nothing, almost nothing, and nobody
ever spoke to me about it. They talked to each other, whispered
sometimes, and the major general wrote a lot of letters. That was
how I knew she was dead. They called her a poor woman, but they
didn’t say it kindly.

She had been waiting for him. At the end of the war.
Watching out for his sails on the horizon. But he never came back.
I don’t know if he’d ever intended to.

Sometimes I think there must have been something of
love in it. Something like love anyway. The first thing—indeed, the
only thing he said to me—when I arrived in England, before he
locked me away behind high walls and wrought iron gates, was that I
looked like her. It’s a strange thought, Dil, to know you look like
someone you’ve never seen, and hardly anyone remembers.

I used to search for her in the mirror. Perhaps my
eyes were like her eyes, or my hair as dark as her hair had been,
but it’s easier to see him. In Hong Kong I knew I was
fang-qi
. And in Gaslight, in my father’s home, I was
fang-qi
still. Lady Wolfram screamed the first time she saw
me.

As for the war, I don’t know much about it. I think,
like everything else, it was about trade, and English merchants
smuggling opium into Canton. I know there was a blockade—several
blockades—and that Lord Wolfram was in command of the British
fleet. I sometimes wonder if he had always expected, or perhaps
intended, war. His own ship—a breathtakingly beautiful Blackwall
frigate called the
Victoria
—

What’s that little smile all about then?

N-nothing. I mean . . . well . . . you’ll see.

Aww, you pricktease.

I don’t mean to be.

’
S’okay. I reckon the best stories kinda do that.
Sorta seducing you along with ’em, giving up their secrets one by
one.

I-I’ve forgotten what I was saying.

Your dad’s ship.

Oh, yes. You see, the Pearl River is very shallow,
and the current flows east to west, so it’s difficult to traverse.
But Lord Wolfram had secretly commissioned a ship from Gaslight, a
vessel of steam and iron and will he called the
Nemesis
. She
was a lot smaller than the ships of the line, with a shallow draft,
and she could navigate the mud flats and sandbars in defiance of
even the wind. The Celestials called her a demon, for wherever she
went, there followed flame and smoke and thunder.

The war ended in a treaty that pleased nobody.
Reparations were paid and strictures lifted, and the island of Hong
Kong ceded to Her Majesty’s government, for its position, I think,
though the British thought it little more than a barren rock, and a
handful of fishing villages. I was taken there in the care of the
major general, though I don’t remember how it was arranged. I
suppose they didn’t know what else to do with me. Perhaps it was
only meant to be temporary, but Lord Wolfram had other wars to
fight, and so I stayed behind. An afterthought, waiting for
something I didn’t understand.

For ten years, Headquarters House, an island on an
island, was my whole world. A makeshift, ramshackle world, taking
shape around me. When I first arrived, there was only a single road
leading from the waterfront, a scattering of buildings hastily
constructed from matting and wood, and some of the British
officials had to be accommodated in tents. I don’t think they were
very pleased about it. But Queenstown and I . . . we grew together,
through fire and flood and fever, and by the time I was old enough
to know a little of myself, and my place in this changing,
self-creating world, I could stand on the veranda of the house and
see shops, taverns, post offices, brothels, hotels, barracks, a
police station, a thriving community. A part of my landscape at
once so close and so distant, like the emerald slopes and
pearlescent, pink-edged mists of Victoria Peak, which I saw every
day, but never visited.

As I got older, there were tutors, though they never
stayed with me long. There was a missionary, I think, and an old
navy surgeon. I met some of the Celestials too, traders mostly, or
pirates, seeking new opportunities in this new place, who had grown
accustomed to foreign ways. We spoke in English, or sometimes the
pidgin they used in Canton, because it was forbidden to teach
Chinese or Manchu to
fang-qi
. Sometimes I’d meet visitors to
the major general, usually the wives of diplomats and
administrators.
What a pretty girl
, they’d say, or
what a
handsome boy
.

But wasn’t you lonely?

I . . . I don’t know. I suppose I must have been,
but I’m not sure how I knew how to be. On clear days I could see
all the way to the bay, and now I’m afraid it sounds a little odd,
but I watched everything and everyone, and I thought that was my
place, somehow. My part to play. I saw the ships come in and depart
again, I saw the people who stayed, and the people who left, the
ones who lived their lives by routine, and the ones who didn’t. It
was closeness of a kind.

I only really began to understand loneliness when
they took me to Gaslight.

I hated it there. There was nothing to see, just the
walls of the estate, and the heavy sky. Everything felt enclosed
and empty at the same time, mansions that would stand, unchanging,
for centuries to come. And I was frightened of the wide-open
streets where all footsteps echoed. I couldn’t sleep, that first
night, knowing how easily evil spirits would find me in such a
place. I saw them drifting over the cobbles and gathering round the
house, mournful and malignant, with tattered robes and curving
fingernails, and their hungry, empty eyes. Or perhaps I slept in
spite of my fears, and only dreamed, because suddenly I found
myself in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar darkness,
screaming.

I think I must have scared the servants half to
death. First with my cries, and then my breathless tales—half in
English, half in pidgin—of devils and ghosts and monsters. I was
summoned to Lord Wolfram’s study the next morning. The way he stood
and held himself, he was a man of stone and steel in the pale
Western sun. He told me he would suffer ignorance and superstition
in no child of his, and that I was never to speak such nonsense
again.

“It is not nonsense,” I answered. “It is common
knowledge. Evil spirits can only fly in straight lines and cannot
turn corners, which is why houses are built close together, and
facing one another, with blessings of happiness and prosperity
inscribed above the doors.”

Lord Wolfram had the lightest eyes I’d ever seen.
They were grey like the world he’d brought me to. “Evil spirits do
not exist. Such credulous notions are for women, children, and
foreigners.” He reached out and touched my hair, which I’d always
worn long. It was not a gentle touch, nor rough especially, just
impatient and careless, as if he wasn’t touching a person at all.
“And you are done with such . . . ambiguities.”

Even now I don’t know what possessed me to speak to
him as I did. I think it was fear, and wanting my hair free of his
fingers. “I came on a flying ship to a city lit by artificial suns
hanging from the branches of metal trees. I do not believe
ambiguities are so easily dispensed with.”

He did not even reply. Simply turned away, and I was
handed to the man I would later learn was to be my tutor.
Claverslick was his name. We despised each other. He had been in
the service of Lord Wolfram’s family his whole life. He was a
narrow-eyed, thin-lipped man, neither tall nor short, one of those
people the years seemed to have whittled to the coldest, sharpest
quintessence of their nature. On that first occasion, as on many
others, he taught my father’s lessons with a switch. And when I
wept—shock, I think, more than pain, at first—he chastised me for
that as well. He said my father would not abide such weakness. I
was at once instinctively mortified and bewildered. It had never
before occurred to me that tears were shameful.

Yet he always made a point of striking me until they
came.

I thought him monstrous, of course, but—looking
back—I do not think he derived any pleasure from cruelty, as I know
some do. His satisfaction lay in his conviction of righteousness. I
wouldn’t go so far as to say he believed he was helping me. It was
not quite personal in that way. But I think he saw it as his duty
to correct me.

He found much to correct. I’d always been aware, in
some nonspecific, ill-articulated way, of being different. But this
was the first time I understood that it . . . that I . . . was
wrong. And wrong in so many ways. The way I looked, the way I
acted, what I said, what I thought. Everything I knew and cared
about and liked or valued. I’d never had reason to believe myself
particularly stupid, but, oh, I started to believe it then. I
couldn’t understand what they wanted from me. I only knew that
Claverslick was determined I should behave in a way that would
bring credit to Lord Wolfram, and that this seemed entirely
disconnected from anything I found natural or admirable.

Every week or so, when he was in England, I would be
called to Lord Wolfram’s study, and he would ask Claverslick how I
was coming along. The answer would inevitably be that I was doing
poorly. At this task they had imposed on me, but not defined for
me. And my father would frown and dismiss us. Once I heard him tell
someone—Claverslick perhaps, but perhaps not, I don’t think they
were confidants—that he would turn me into a decent English
gentleman if he had to break me first to do it.

I think it was the second time he saw me that he
insisted someone cut my hair. I . . . I am ashamed to remember the
scene I caused, no doubt once again proving myself the savage he
thought me. He had two footmen hold me down while his valet did the
deed, and I screamed and wept and struggled, and uttered
phrases—not, thankfully, solely in English—I had no conception I’d
ever learned. Afterwards came correction and— Dil, whatever is the
matter?

’
Tis glimflashy-making, is all. Fucking . . .
fucking . . . I ain’t got no words bad enough.

I don’t believe that for a moment. Your command of
bad words is exceptional. And it was just my hair. I’m not
Samson.

That ain’t the point.

No, I know. But, looking back, I feel a little
foolish. It was not so great a violation, but I took it very hard.
I think I felt I had so little, it was more than I could afford to
lose. I should have been stronger than that. It was just . . . oh,
I don’t know . . . difficult, in a manner beyond expectation or
anticipation, to be suddenly made a stranger to myself. To find a
reflection in the glass that spoke of someone else’s wishes, not my
own, and to know that this . . . this distorted simulacrum was what
the world would see. I felt beaten in ways beyond the touch of
Claverslick’s switch. And I’m so sorry to be telling you all this.
It’s not . . . I was young, and—