Fragrant Flower Page 13

  Yet however consoling this might be, Mr. Chang’s junk had certainly been attacked, and the cargo which had been loaded from the Island had obviously been the attraction.

  It was clear the pirates had not expected to find women aboard, but Kai Yin’s fear that they would be sold was obviously a possibility and Azalea felt herself tremble at the thought.

  How could they possibly escape? And more important, where were they being taken?

  Azalea could feel the satin of her tunic being soaked with Kai Yin’s tears, but she was not crying as violently as she had at first.

  “Try to be brave,” Azalea pleaded, “and I want you to tell me all that you know about women being kidnapped. I would rather be prepared for what might happen than to be shocked when it does.”

  With what was clearly a tremendous effort, Kai Yin raised her head from Azalea’s shoulder and wiped her eyes with a minute silk handkerchief which she took from the wide sleeves of her tunic.

  Although she seemed a typically helpless and subservient Chinese woman, Kai Yin was quite intelligent.

  It took Azalea a little time to understand what she was saying, especially as she was too agitated to speak in anything but Chinese.

  Gradually she pieced together a picture of the kidnapping of women and girls which had raised an acute conflict between the British law and Chinese customs.

  According to Kai Yin the number of kidnappers coming before the Courts was increasing every year, and kidnapping was becoming more popular because the girls were bought to be sent overseas where the price of sale might be as high as $350.00.

  “In Hong Kong price only $45.00,” she said scornfully. Because the trading was advantageous women were lured into Hong Kong on completely false promises.

  But, as the General had said, attempts to stop the kidnapping brought the authorities up against the deeply rooted Chinese custom of the purchase of children for adoption and particularly of girls as domestic servants.

  This was called Mui Tsai.

  The situation so worried the authorities that Kai Yin had heard from her husband that the English and Chinese together were considering setting up an anti-kidnapping society.

  This in fact would become the Society for the Protection of Virtue, or in Chinese words Po Leung Kuk.

  “Honourable husband think good idea,” Kai Yin said. “He support British, tell Governor he give money.”

  Azalea longed to say that she wished the Society had started already, but she was well aware that she must not show her fear too obviously or Kai Yin would start to cry again.

  “Do you think it would be wise for me to tell the pirates that I am English?” Azalea asked.

  Kai Yin gave a scream of protest.

  “No, no! Very dangerous!” she exclaimed. “Some pirates spare Chinese but kill British. You pretend be Chinese.”

  It certainly made sense, Azalea thought, but she wondered how long she could keep up the deception, seeing that her Chinese was halting and she very often used the wrong words.

  “I talk,” Kai Yin said. “You say nothing.”

  It seemed, however, at the moment there was no chance of either of them saying anything.

  The ship in which they were imprisoned was now moving and the reason the cabin had been dark, Azalea realised, was that the one small port-hole in their prison had been against the side of the junk.

  Seeing that the sunshine was now coming in through the dirty, salt-stained glass, Azalea rose to look out and when she did so gave an exclamation of horror.

  “What matter? What wrong?” Kai Yin cried. “What you see?”

  For a moment Azalea did not answer, then she decided not to tell Kai Yin the truth!

  They were already perhaps fifty yards from Mr. Chang’s junk and the pirates had set it on fire!

  She could see the flames licking at the base of the sails and there was thick black smoke coming from the Saloon. She remembered now she had heard that the pirates would strip their prey and then burn it so that there would be no evidence against them.

  The wanton destruction of shipping seemed to her terrible, especially of a junk as beautiful and as expensive as Mr. Chang’s. But even more important was the anxiety as to whether anyone had been left on board alive.

  There was no sign of any movement, and yet Azalea could not help wondering what the pirates had done with the sailors whose hands they had tied behind their backs.

  It would have been easy, she thought, to murder them by throwing them overboard, knowing they would be unable to swim – or perhaps they had been placed below decks where they would burn to death.

  “What you see?” Kai Yin asked again and Azalea turned towards her to say quietly,

  “Nothing. I was only upset because we are sailing in the opposite direction to Hong Kong.”

  There was nothing either of them could do, she thought to herself, and what was the point of upsetting Kai Yin who, even if her husband was dead, as she feared, would not wish his body to be burned at sea.

  She sat down once again on the pile of sacking to say,

  “We must be very brave. There is nothing to be gained by making scenes or antagonising our captors. Where do you think they will take us?”

  Kai Yin shrugged her shoulders.

  “Many places. All give big money superior Chinese girls.”

  “They will know I am not superior when they see my feet,” Azalea said.

  “Then you be servant,” Kai Yin replied.

  Azalea thought this might in fact be preferable to the other fate which might await her, but she was not certain. She only knew that she was frightened, desperately frightened, of what the future might hold, but there was no point in expressing her feelings.

  She could only pray in her heart that it might not be as bad as she anticipated.

  Now that the ship was at sea there was a great deal of bumping and banging and it sounded as if the crates that had been taken from the junk were being carried below and stacked outside their cabin.

  But there were no longer loud voices or harsh orders and perhaps, Azalea thought, the silence, except for the noise of the crates being handled, was even more frightening than if the men had sworn or shouted at one another.

  She heard their feet padding above them, a sound very different from that made by European sailors, and now the ship was moving there was the creak the masts made, the slap of the sails and the beating of the waves against the wooden sides.

  Kai Yin had been silent for some minutes then suddenly she said in a quiet firm voice: “No man touch wife of Honourable Husband – I die!”

  Azalea looked at her in consternation.

  “You must not do that!”

  “I kill myself!” Kai Yin said firmly. “Much worse be defamed, insulted, then lose face!”

  “It is not a question of losing face,” Azalea said, knowing how much this meant to the Chinese. “It would mean that you had given up hope of being rescued, and in England we say, ‘While there is life there is hope.’”

  “No hope,” Kai Yin said firmly. “I wife of Honourable man – Mr. Chang wish me die.”

  “You cannot be sure of that,” Azalea protested.

  As she spoke she realised how much the humiliation of losing face meant.

  She had heard so many stories of men who would starve rather than take a job which they thought would degrade them – of Chinese who had cut their throats because of some quite minor dispute in which they had been the loser.

  She had always thought these were tales invented about the Chinese because they were an enigmatic race.

  Now she was not sure.

  There was a dignity about Kai Yin that had not been noticeable before, but it was always difficult to interpret her emotions because her face could be so impassive.

  She sat with her back very straight and her eyes were narrow slits.

  “Please, Kai Yin,” Azalea begged, “do not think of anything so horrible. Besides you cannot leave me! I should be so frightened without
you!”

  “We separated when sold,” Kai Yin answered. “Where I go there be knife. Easy die by knife.”

  “No, no!” Azalea pleaded. “You cannot talk like that. It is wrong – and very wicked to take one’s own life.”

  “Chinese gods not angry,” Kai Yin replied. “They understand.”

  Azalea used every possible argument she could think of, but she knew it was to no avail.

  It seemed to her as if Kai Yin had grown up suddenly. From being the soft, sweet, pampered young wife of an older man she had suddenly become a woman with principles, with an ideal of honour from which she would not be diverted.

  Despairingly Azalea knew that if Kai Yin said she would kill herself, then that was what she would do. Life was always cheap to the Chinese and especially with regard to women. Girl babies were lucky to survive. There were even places, Azalea had heard, on the outskirts of towns in China where there were notices saying ‘Girls must not be drowned here’.

  Too many girls in a family was a financial disaster, to avoid which the baby was left out in the sun to die or, more mercifully, smothered and buried hastily so that no one would notice the shame of having another daughter.

  It seemed a horrifying thought that Kai Yin, who had lived only for seventeen years, should die by her own hand. Yet Azalea could not help wondering, as she thought of what lay ahead, whether it was not perhaps the wiser course.

  Would she be able to stand the terror of being sold to a Chinese master who could treat her as a slave? Or worse still, forced into an immoral life, the details of which she did not entirely understand?

  Azalea was innocent, as were all English girls of her age. At the same time she had read a great deal and lived in foreign countries.

  She was aware of what Colonel Stewart, whom her father had killed, had intended to do with the daughter of their dhirzi after he had beaten her.

  It was not just the first or second time this had happened, and the whispers about his behaviour had been heard by Azalea even though her mother had tried to protect her from the knowledge of such evil.

  And because she talked with the Indian servants she had known that to them love was a beautiful thing, a gift from the gods.

  They worshipped the act of fertility – she had known what the phallic symbols on the Temples meant and the little shrines of the lingam by the wayside at which peasant women left pathetic little offerings of flowers and rice.

  Because she had spent most of her life in India, the beauty and the wonder of Krishna, the God of Love, was to her all that love could mean when a man and a woman belonged to each other and became one.

  The Indians were intrinsically moral. Their women were kept in purdah and the purity of Indian married life was unassailable.

  That was what Azalea herself had hoped to find one day in marriage.

  What lay ahead of her now, if Kai Yin was to be believed, was not marriage with purity, but something foul and so degrading that she could not even imagine the depths of humiliation to which it would subject her.

  “Kai Yin is right,” she told herself. “I too must die!”

  Every nerve in her body shrank from the thought! Then she knew that if any man even kissed her after she had been kissed by Lord Sheldon, she would feel unclean.

  She had loved him from the first moment he had taken her in his arms by surprise, when she had been unable to move, unable to struggle or to run away.

  It was love when one belonged instinctively not only in mind and body but also in spirit to a man. Love was the indefinable magic which drew two people together as if they had been part of each other in a past existence and were spiritually indivisible.

  “I have belonged to him before,” Azalea told herself now, “and therefore I can never belong to any other man.”

  She and Kai Yin sat silent on the dirty sacking and they were both in their own ways thinking how they must die.

  ‘Supposing I only wounded myself?’ Azalea questioned. Then she thought it would be stupid to try to kill herself by the same method that Kai Yin would use.

  The Chinese were experts at suicide.

  Kai Yin would know the right place in the body in which to insert a knife so that death would be instantaneous, but for Azalea there was a better way.

  When they took her up on deck she would throw herself into the sea and hope that she would not be rescued.

  Most Chinese could not swim, and it was a tradition amongst seamen of all nations that if their ship foundered it was best to drown quickly and not prolong the agony by trying to keep afloat.

  ‘I will throw myself over the side of the ship!’ Azalea thought. ‘By the time the pirates realise what has happened I shall have drowned!’

  She could not swim. Her uncle would have been horrified at the thought of either the twins or herself being seen undressed in public.

  In India it had not been safe to bathe in the great water tanks which stood outside every village.

  ‘I shall die quickly!’ Azalea told herself and tried to be consoled by the thought that although she would never see Lord Sheldon again he would remember her as he had seen her yesterday.

  “You are beautiful!” he had said in the garden, and she could feel again the quiver that had gone through her at his words.

  “Can you really believe,” he had said later, “that we can walk away from each other and forget what our lips have said not in words but with a kiss?”

  She would never forget as long as she lived, and perhaps he would remember her sometimes in the future – when he stood in another garden as beautiful as Mr. Chang’s, or when he saw a blue magpie wing its way into the sunshine.

  “Let us hope they bring us luck!” he had said.

  But there was now no luck, Azalea thought, where she was concerned. There was only death, with the green waves closing over her head as she sank to the bottom of the ocean.

  Because she could hardly bear her own thoughts, she rose restlessly to walk once again across the cabin to the porthole.

  She hoped to have a last sight of the junk even though it was in flames, but now the pirate ship had tacked from side to side to get the wind and there was nothing to be seen except in the distance the outline of an island. It was green and mountainous, but Azalea had no idea where it was.

  They might, she thought, be swinging back on their tracks and going towards China – or again, it might be to one of the many islands they must pass before they reached the ocean.

  Kai Yin did not speak and Azalea thought that she was perhaps praying to Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy.

  “Oh, God, send us help,” Azalea prayed. “Even now you could save us from what lies – ahead.”

  She felt as if her prayer was weak and ineffective. Then she remembered that her mother had always told her that prayers from the heart were always heard.

  They had been visiting a Temple in India, and Azalea who was very young at the time, had watched the women in their colourful saris praying at the shrine of the Elephant God.

  “How can they think that funny god with the Elephant’s head can hear them, Mama?” she had asked.

  “It is the prayer that matters, Azalea,” her mother answered. “When a prayer comes from the heart, there is always Someone who will listen – Someone too big and too wonderful for us to understand. But He is there! Although He may appear in different forms to different people, God is there for everyone.”

  Azalea had been too young to comprehend exactly what her mother had meant at the time.

  But afterwards, when she had grown to understand a little of the Indian religions and realised the sacrifices the Hindus, the Moslems and the Buddhists made for the gods they worshipped, she began to understand.

  Now she was sure that Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy to whom Kai Yin was praying, and the God to whom she herself prayed were one.

  “Please – please help us,” she prayed again and imagined her prayer being carried like the wings of a bluebird up into the sky above them. There wa
s a sudden explosion so loud that the whole ship seemed to vibrate with it.

  Azalea gave a little scream and clasped her arms round Kai Yin as if to protect her. The Chinese girl clung to her.

  “What – happens?” she asked in a frightened whisper.

  Any answer Azalea might have made was drowned by the noise of a gun being fired from the deck above them, and this time the sound was deafening.

  Again there was an explosion, and Azalea knew that it was made by a big gun which was attacking them.

  The shell had not hit the ship, but had exploded in the water beside it. She heard the splash of the heavy spray on the deck and then the water washing overboard, so that it slid down over the port-hole.

  Releasing Kai Yin, Azalea ran across the cabin. She looked out and gave a shrill cry.

  “It is a ship! A British ship!”

  For a moment Kai Yin looked at her as if she could not take in what she had said.

  “I can see the White Ensign!” Azalea cried. “We are safe! Kai Yin – we are safe!”

  “They kill us!” Kai Yin said. “They kill us before British sailors come on board!”

  There was a note of terror in her voice which told Azalea that she believed what she was saying.

  It was quite likely, she thought. The pirates would be tried for piracy but, if there was also a charge of kidnapping, their sentence would be harsher.

  Even as she thought it, she heard feet coming down the companionway and rushed to the cabin door.

  There was a bolt on the inside, although not a very adequate one – just a flat piece of wood which slotted into a wooden lock fixed on the wall.

  She jammed it home.

  She had only just done so when she heard the bolt on the other side being dragged back and the door was shaken as someone tried to open it. Azalea put out both her hands and pressed herself against it.

  She realised that she had little strength compared with the man who was trying to reach them. At the same time, combined with the bolt, she might be able to hold the door closed until the ship was boarded.