Fragrant Flower Read online

  “I believe he is with the Governor, Sir John Pope-Hennessy,” the Aide-de-Camp replied. “They are having a series of meetings which start early and go on late.”

  “I am sure that my husband has a great deal to discuss with Sir John,” Lady Osmund said.

  On the quayside itself there were the picturesque Chinese Azalea had wanted to see in their large coolie hats, and below, rocking a little in the waves caused by the launch, there were innumerable small sampans in which she had learnt whole families lived and died.

  There was a carriage waiting for them drawn by two horses, but Azalea’s eyes were on the rickshaws. She was listening too for the first time to the strange tinkling lilt of the Cantonese language and pidgin English which contained no r’s, as the rickshaw-boys solicited for clients, crying “Lickshaw! Lickshaw!”

  As they drove from the wharf the streets were so narrow and so full of pedestrians that it seemed impossible that the horses would find their way through them.

  There were many soldiers and sailors, Portuguese priests, nuns, and Azalea caught a glimpse of a scarlet-curtained palanquin swaying as it was carried by four sturdy men.

  She also saw several Mandarins riding in rickshaws – she recognised them because they had jade hat-buttons and robes of brilliant satin embroidered with gold thread. In contrast there were all too many ragged children staring hungrily at the food hawkers and at the Chinese who could afford it sitting down in the street for their shik-anchan. Azalea knew this meant their midday meal.

  Fish with open mouths and large eyes hung decoratively head-down from the tops of open stalls. Red snappers, caught off Hainan, sea bream which had a red swelling between the eyes, lizard fish with mouths entirely lined with teeth, Macao sole and the huge conger pike with dagger-like teeth and a smooth tapering body.

  Mrs. Chang had taught Azalea about these and also about the birds of Hong Kong, many of which she could see for sale in gold painted cages. The yellow-green South China whale-eye seemed to be a favourite with the small shopkeepers.

  “Gay bird cheer up sad people,” Mrs. Chang had explained.

  “You mean shopkeepers have cages of them just to please their customers?” Azalea asked.

  “Happy customers buy more,” Mrs. Chang replied.

  The bird Azalea wanted most to see was the Chinese blue magpie. Mrs. Chang had described and even drawn for her the magpie’s dazzling blue wings and tail, his coral red bill and legs.

  “We believe to see a bluebird brings luck,” Azalea explained.

  “Many blue magpies – you much good luck!” Mrs. Chang smiled.

  “I hope so,” Azalea said wistfully, thinking, however, it was unlikely.

  She had the uneasy feeling that once she reached Flagstaff House she would once again become a household maid-of-all-trades, incessantly abused and criticised by her aunt.

  There were crowds everywhere. Never had Azalea imagined that so many people could be jammed into such a small space. Every house seemed to be tottering and bending under the weight of the human life within it.

  The air was full of cries and voices, the clop-clop of wooden shoes and the smell of spicy cooking.

  ‘It is just as I expected it would be!’ Azalea thought.

  But she had not realised that the streets would be so beautiful with long, narrow, coloured pennants and banners hanging from the high houses.

  In the richer parts balconies were festooned with creepers, while the houses with their porticos and colonnades looked cool in the hot sunshine which seemed to come from an almost purple sky.

  “Really, the place smells!” Lady Osmund said sharply as they passed what looked like a huge perambulator on which a Chinese man was cooking several different dishes at the same time.

  No one answered her, and after a moment, as if determined to find fault, she said,

  “The coolies look ridiculous with their enormous hats, like over-turned basins!”

  Azalea longed to answer that she thought the coolies made everything seem Oriental and exciting. But she knew that such a remark would only be replied to contemptuously by her aunt and refrained from speaking.

  Flagstaff House was, she thought, like every other important British residence abroad. She had seen so many of them in India and they all appeared to have been designed on the same pattern.

  Solid, imposing, they were unmistakably English, just as the rooms inside might have been conveyed there complete in every detail from Camberley, Aldershot, Cheltenham or Bournemouth.

  There were the same polished mahogany chairs and flowered chintz curtains over the windows – the same badly executed oleographs of the Queen and the Prince Consort, the same second-quality Persian rugs, and outside, the same effort to create an English garden. There were pansies, wallflowers, marigolds, asters, and forget-me-nots planted in tidy beds and chosen by every General’s wife to remind her of home.

  “Now, Azalea,” Lady Osmund said sharply, “you had better see to the unpacking.”

  “There are a number of Chinese servants in the house, my Lady,” the Aide-de-Camp said quickly, “and more, can be procured, if you will let me know your requirements.”

  “My niece can supervise them,” Lady Osmund said. “That is what she does at home, and it will keep her occupied.”

  The way in which her aunt spoke the words made it clear to Azalea that she was determined to keep her busy, however many servants were employed at Flagstaff House. Fortunately as soon as Lady Osmund had settled in, she discovered a dozen things she needed from the shops. Too busy socially to go herself, she ordered Azalea to buy her what was required.

  As she was of no importance, an elderly Chinese servant, who was traditionally called ‘Boy’ like the rest, was deputed to be her guide.

  Azalea asked his name and was told it was Ah Yok.

  She knew that the twins would have been escorted by an Aide-de-Camp and conveyed in a carriage, but she was only too content to go with Ah Yok in two rickshaws.

  In fact she preferred it.

  They set out and Azalea realised that Ah Yok was taking her to the shops in the Old Praya patronised by the English. In her somewhat halting Chinese she explained what she wanted and there was a faint smile on Ah Yok’s wide mouth as he commanded the rickshaw boys to convey them further into the town.

  Azalea soon insisted on discarding the rickshaws and walking in streets so narrow and so over-hung with signs that there was no sun, and up the flights of steep steps to visit the real Chinese quarters which Mrs. Chang had described to her.

  There were little bread shops which sold delicious freshly baked yeh see min bao, which were rolls with sweet grated coconut in the centre of them.

  There were stalls with fruits piled in polychromatic pyramids of colour, and the min yan who made for the children tiny coloured toys – tigers, cats, dogs and ducks – out of flour paste.

  The noise of the hawkers and pedlars, crying salted fish, brooms, incense, blood, gelatin, rang in Azalea’s ears. Ah Yok explained they had to buy wooden tickets for 50 cents which entitled them to call their wares.

  Some of them carried large, flat, rattan cages containing um chun – timid little brown birds called quail. Others cried “um chun don,” which were tiny little quail’s eggs – much favoured in Chinese soups.

  In one street packed with children Azalea found the blind musicians singing and playing nan yin. One musician played the ts’in-hu – a violin with a twelve-inch sound box, while another worked the p’ai-pan or clappers with one hand and strummed the ku-cheng or Chinese zither with the other.

  “Velly old music,” Ah Yok explained. “First mentioned Sung dynasty.”

  Whatever Azalea bought was recorded on a wooden abacus, a calculator which had been invented, she learnt from the guide book, by Chhiwhuni-Wen, a metallurgist, nearly a thousand years previously.

  Like a child’s toy, the beads were pushed backwards and forwards so swiftly by the thin, sensitive Chinese fingers, that the total seemed to be calculate
d by magic.

  What fascinated Azalea were the medicine shops with the rows of square bottles, their dried sea-horses from the warm Gulf of Tonkin and bears’ galls from the Tibetan highlands.

  “Vipers from jungles of Kwangi,” Ah Yok pointed out. “Deer’s antlers from Manchurian forests.”

  Azalea had been told by Mrs. Chang that these were to ensure a long life and were as prized for their aphrodisiac properties as the wild Manchurian Ginseng which had been believed for centuries to cure all disease.

  “Some herbs five thousand years old,” Ah Yok said proudly in Chinese and the shopkeeper nodded agreement and showed Azalea herbs for rectifying the heat of ‘high fever’ and for ‘purging the fire.’

  Azalea had read that the Chinese believed there were two opposing principles in nature, Yin and Yang, disease being a manifestation of unbalance in the body, health of balance and harmony.

  The shopkeeper confirmed this.

  “The heart – husband,” he said, “lungs – wife.”

  “What he is saying,” Ah Yok explained, “if no harmony between two – evil arises!”

  Azalea was shown the famous tonics of the Galens of China, which included stalactite, dried red, spotted lizard skins, dog flesh, human milk, teeth of dragons and shavings of rhinoceros horns.

  Even though she found it hard to believe in the efficacy of such treatments, it was absorbingly interesting, and only with the utmost reluctance did she allow Ah Yok to take her back to Flagstaff House.

  “Thank you, Ah Yok, thank you very much,” she said when they arrived.

  “Great privilege, Honourable Lady,” Ah Yok said with sincerity, and Azalea knew she had found a friend.

  One of the first things Azalea learnt in Hong Kong concerned Lord Sheldon.

  She had found it impossible, after leaving the Orissa, to decide what she thought about him.

  She had been bewildered and confused by her own emotions when he had kissed her the second time, and she had run away from him to lock herself in her cabin and throw herself down on her bunk quivering with emotions she had not known she possessed.

  Why should he kiss her? Why should he want to? she asked, and could find no answer. She could not really believe that he was attracted to her. How could he be?

  When they had met first in such strange circumstances, she knew how unattractive she must have looked in the clothes that did not suit her and which had belonged to Violet or Daisy.

  And yet his lips had held a compelling magic and she had been lifted by his kiss into a world of wonder and glory. But she could not believe that he could feel the same.

  How could he, with his experience, with his title, his importance, his position in the social world?

  Azalea was well aware, even without overhearing what Lord Sheldon had said to Captain Widcombe, that any Army officer who was reasonably good-looking was sought out and flattered.

  And if, as in Lord Sheldon’s case, he should come into a title, he would only have to look in the direction of a woman for her to fall only too eagerly into his arms.

  Why, then, should he trouble to kiss her? She could not explain it.

  Alone in the darkness of her cabin she admitted to herself that he had given her something to remember in the long years that lay ahead.

  At least she would not be ignorant of what a kiss was like and, if the thought of the ecstasy she had experienced made her long for more, then one had always to pay for one’s happiness.

  Her mother had told her that.

  “Nothing is for free, my dearest,” she had said once to Azalea. “If one receives one must also give, and one pays for everything in some way or another – sometimes with an aching heart!”

  Azalea had known that her mother was not speaking of herself but of some of the wives in the Regiment who had come to her weeping bitter tears because their husbands were unfaithful. It was a side of love which Azalea had hoped she would never experience, but now she was not sure.

  It was better, she thought, to have been kissed by Lord Sheldon and to know the wonder and joy of it, rather than to go through life as her uncle intended her to do, unaware of the rapture one could experience from a man’s touch.

  And yet it was hard to tell herself that she would never see him again.

  She knew that he had called the day after they had landed, but there had been no question of her meeting him. Lady Osmund had made it quite clear the moment they arrived at Flagstaff House that Azalea was to be kept in the background.

  But even to hear his name made something vibrate and come to life within her.

  Her uncle said on the second day at luncheon when the family were alone,

  “I am disappointed in Sheldon!”

  “Disappointed?” Lady Osmund asked. “Why?”

  “I believed he had come out here to help put matters straight where the Governor is concerned, but as far as I can ascertain, he is doing nothing of the sort.”

  “What can you mean?” Lady Osmund enquired.

  “What I say,” the General remarked crossly. “He appears to be agreeing with Sir John.”

  “I cannot believe it!” Lady Osmund exclaimed. “You must be mistaken!”

  The General was scowling and was obviously turning over in his mind something that had occurred.

  “What makes you think that Lord Sheldon is taking the Governor’s side?” Lady Osmund enquired.

  “We were discussing at the meeting this morning the custom prevailing amongst the Chinese community in Hong Kong of buying and selling girls for the purpose of making them domestic servants.”

  “A very sensible custom!” Lady Osmund remarked.

  “That is what I thought,” the General replied, “but the Governor is trying to put a stop to it.”

  “How ridiculous! Why should he interfere?” Lady Osmund enquired.

  “He alleges, I think wrongly, that the kidnapping of young Chinese girls for exportation to the Straits Settlements and to California and Australia has increased enormously.”

  “Had he any evidence of this?”

  “He has persuaded the Chief Justice to declare that there is no distinction between the sale of girls for domestic servitude and exportation for immoral purposes.”

  “I am sure that is nonsense!” Lady Osmund asserted.

  “That is what General Donovan said also. But the Chief Justice echoed what the Governor affirmed last year, that there are ten to twenty thousand female slaves in Hong Kong and that this form of slavery flourishes only through the failure of the Government’s officers to enforce the existing laws.”

  “It sounds very exaggerated to me,” Lady Osmund commented.

  “That is exactly what I said myself,” the General answered. “I have asked for reports on this subject, because it is a matter not only for the police, but also for the military. But one can hardly believe that the whole dispute is to be referred to the Secretary of State in England.”

  “On whose request?” Lady Osmund enquired.

  “Need you ask?” the General replied harshly. “The Governor insisted and was backed up by Lord Sheldon.”

  “It cannot be true!” Lady Osmund exclaimed.

  “As you well know,” the General went on, “we have been instructed that every care must be taken not to interfere with the habits and institutions of the Chinese – this matter of buying for adoption is deeply interwoven into their social customs.”

  “Perhaps you should speak privately to Lord Sheldon,” Lady Osmund suggested. “He is young and I have heard that the Governor can be very persuasive regarding his wildcat ideas. Surely he must realise that this sort of attitude can be dangerous to the peace and harmony of the whole Colony?”

  “I spoke on the subject in no uncertain terms,” the General replied. “I am convinced that the Chief justice is wildly exaggerating the whole matter, while the Governor is inclined to twist anything in which he takes an interest.”

  “Personally I find him very charming,” Lady Osmund said.

/>   “He can be when it suits him. At the same time, I can assure you, my dear, he is a trouble-maker. He never leaves well alone and sooner or later finds himself at variance with every public figure with whom he works!”

  The General paused and added somewhat spitefully,

  “Sheldon will soon find that he is backing the wrong horse!”

  “All the same, Frederick, I think it would be a good idea if you asked Lord Sheldon to dinner this week. I thought when he called yesterday he was being particularly attentive to Daisy.”

  “If you are considering him in the light of a potential son-in-law,” the General said rising from the table, “I advise you to do nothing of the sort.”

  “But why, Frederick? Why should you say that?” Lady Osmund asked.

  “Because, as I have told you, Sheldon is encouraging the Governor in the very attitude that I am trying to oppose.”

  “What is that?” Lady Osmund asked.

  “His determination to treat the Chinese with an equality to which they have no right.”

  “An equality?” Lady Osmund echoed, her voice rising.

  “That is what I said,” the General said firmly. “Do you know what the Governor is called by the Chinese?”

  He did not wait for his wife to answer but said contemptuously,

  “‘Number One Good Friend!’ That shows you the type of man he is!”

  The General left the Dining Room and Azalea, following Lady Osmund, felt as if her head was in a whirl.

  She might have known, she thought, that Lord Sheldon could be none of the things she had first thought about him. How, if he had been, could he have aroused in her anything so beautiful or so wonderful as the rapture she felt when their lips met?

  ‘How stupid I was!’Azalea thought.

  She felt herself blush as she remembered all the accusations she had made to him and how she had told herself how much she hated and despised Lord Sheldon even while she knew it was untrue.

  She did not sleep that night for wondering if she would ever have the chance of telling him again how sorry she was to have misunderstood what he had said to Captain Widcombe.

  It would not matter to him, she thought, what she felt about him. At the same time, it was humiliating to know how wrong she had been and how foolish.