China by Edward Rutherfurd (historical books to read TXT) 📕

give way over their heads. As plaster rained down, those who could dived under the table—though Lady MacDonald, who was sitting in a tall wooden chair with arms, and Trader, who was a little too old to move so fast, remained in their places. For a moment, after the dust had settled, there was silence. Then, with a sound of scraping chairs, people reappeared and started dusting themselves off. Fortunately, it seemed, nobody in the dining room had been much hurt. But the table looked like the aftermath of a battle, a long field of broken plates and glasses.

In the doorway, the pale face of Sir Claude MacDonald appeared. Young Tom was beside him.

“Are there any casualties upstairs?” his wife inquired.

“Nobody there except myself and young Tom here. Our girls are in the downstairs sitting room. They’re all right. No damage in the kitchens.” The minister indicated his empty chair and told Tom to sit in it. “I’m going back to bed,” he announced.

“This is most unfortunate,” said Lady MacDonald calmly. And she rang the bell for the servants, who were mostly Catholic converts that night, to clear the table.

While they were at work, she turned to Trader. “What do you think we should do now?” she asked.

“Have you more glasses, back there?” Trader indicated the butler’s pantry.

“Certainly.”

“In that case, Lady MacDonald,” he said, “I think this calls for a bumper of champagne!”

Later, as they were retiring, Lady MacDonald took Emily to one side. “You know, my dear,” she said, “if I hadn’t met my husband, then I’d like to have married your father.” She smiled. “I do like a man who knows how to behave.”

—

But the hot days dragged on, and there was still no news of the relief force. Each day the Chinese snipers seemed to be improving their aim. British, French, German, Japanese troops: their numbers were gradually dwindling. Emily wondered how long things could go on.

She discovered one evening.

There were two kinds of sewing inside the besieged legations. The first was making sandbags for the walls and barricades. The women used whatever cloth they could get their hands on—sacking, old shirts, pantaloons—anything that could be fashioned into a small sack the size of a pillowcase, filled with earth, and sewn up with tough thread. In the rain, these makeshift sandbags tended to leak a grey sludge onto the ground; and they often burst. A fresh supply was always needed, and Emily would often help the women make them.

There was another, grimmer kind of sewing to be done, however: the winding sheets in which the bodies must be buried. There were no coffins, just winding sheets, which were often made in a hurry, using whatever material there was to hand. Since the burials were carried out after dark, when it was cooler, the shortcomings of the winding sheets weren’t so visible.

There had been two men to bury that night. She and Henry attended at the makeshift grave. One was a small fellow, neatly enclosed in his shroud, which made her think of the sandbags of earth she’d been making. But the other man was tall, and the winding sheet she’d made was too short, and his bare feet stuck out in such an ungainly way. And try as she might, she kept thinking of her father, wondering if she would soon be burying him, and what she could do to cover his feet if the shroud was too short, and it made her want to cry.

When they got back, she went to make sure that Tom was asleep. And she had just come from Tom’s room onto the upstairs landing when she heard her father speaking in a low voice in the hall below.

“How long do you give it?”

It was MacDonald who answered. “At the present rate of attrition, there won’t be any troops left by the end of the month.”

“And ammunition?”

“About the same. End of the month.”

“Well, that still leaves the relief force a bit of time. By the way,” her father went on, “I heard something underground by the French legation this afternoon. Thought I’d better mention it.”

“You think the Chinese are digging mines?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Nor me. Goodnight.”

Emily tiptoed quickly to her room. She wondered whether to tell Henry. Not now, anyway. He seemed to be asleep. But then he opened one eye.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, hoping he’d go to sleep again.

“Emily.” He sat up. “Please tell me.”

So she did. “We can only pray,” she said when she’d finished.

“God will not desert us.” He said it with such a sweet smile. “And one thing I know for certain,” he added firmly. “The only thing that really matters is that God’s will be done.”

That comforted her a little. At least she supposed it did.

—

Trader had prepared his family for what was to come. “The relief force is on the way,” he told them. “The closer they get, the more desperate Cixi will be to kick us out. Her hope will be that if we’ve departed or been killed, she can close the city gates and tell the relief force that there’s nobody left to rescue. I’m saying this,” Trader continued, “so that when the next big attack comes, you’ll understand clearly what it means. It’ll be desperate—their last attempt to dislodge us before the siege is lifted. If we can just hold out, the relief will arrive, and we’ll all be saved—including the converts, God willing.”

Ten days passed, the Chinese edged a little closer, the sniper fire went back and forth, and from time to time they could hear the faint sound of picks and shovels in the tunnels underground. Although they had no definite news, Trader felt sure the relief force could not be far away.

So when, at dawn on Friday the thirteenth of July, a huge bombardment began, he told Emily: “This is it. We’re almost home. One last stand, and our boys will come through.”

All day the Krupp guns rained shells upon the Fu. Around the converts, the