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

“Good God! Then what are we going to drink?”

“Couldn’t say, sir. Not to worry, eh?”

And so John Trader left Macao. He’d lost his woman. He still didn’t know whether he’d lost his fortune, or whether he’d be able to trade with China at all; or whether before long, at Hong Kong, he might die for lack of water.

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Nio gazed around him. There were at least fifty men in the large cell. He’d been there a week. Others longer. They were all smugglers and pirates, rounded up and brought there.

But once in the cell, nothing had happened. Were they going to be interrogated, tried, executed? Nobody knew. All he knew was that the place stank.

Perhaps if Sea Dragon had been with them, they mightn’t have been caught. After that terrible night when he’d failed to come out of Lin’s headquarters, Nio and the other men had made their way back to their camp. But the next day, Nio had gone back to the city to find out what he could. For three days he’d stayed there, and not a word had emerged.

But then the story had seeped out—from the sergeant to a friend, then to others. And soon, although nothing official ever appeared, all the gangs and the keepers of teahouses and the policemen, of course—all knew that Sea Dragon had tried to kill Lin and been caught and died under torture and never spoken a word, not so much as his name. Sea Dragon was a hero up and down the coast. In time, no doubt, his name would resonate in legend, all over the China seas.

The crew had stayed together. Partly held by a reverence for his memory, partly because they had no place to go and nothing else to do. And they’d all promised one another that they’d stick together and, when times got better, go out to sea again and ship opium and earn good money just as they had when Sea Dragon the hero had led them.

Then in a dawn raid on their camp, they’d been caught, every one of them, and taken to this place. Perhaps if Sea Dragon had still been there, they’d have posted a better guard. Perhaps they’d have killed the troops who had somehow found them.

It was a disaster. It was probably the end of his life.

He had only one big regret. That cache of money for Big Sister. Did she think of him? Of course she did. And he thought of her, every day.

The money was still in the same hiding place. He’d been intending, the very day the troops came, to tell his companions that he must go see his family and then secretly take the money to her. He cursed himself for not doing it sooner. And every day he tried to devise ways to escape, not for the sake of his own freedom, but so that he could give that money to Big Sister and see her face.

This morning, he was just in the middle of devising a new way of tricking the guards and breaking out, when he was surprised to see through the cage bars, which ran along one side of the big cell, a small knot of people approaching. Four of them were policemen. But one was a young mandarin.

He heard the young mandarin tell the guards to open the cage door so that he could get into the cell. The guards were arguing with him. They didn’t like the idea. But then he heard the young mandarin say something about Commissioner Lin, and a moment later he heard the key turn.

He couldn’t see the mandarin’s face from where he was, but the man seemed to be very quick at his work. He was selecting prisoners, one by one. They were being taken out of the cell and made to stand in a line.

The mandarin was coming his way. Nio caught sight of his face. And froze.

It was Lin’s secretary. He recognized him at once. He even knew his name. It seemed no time at all since they’d been face-to-face in Hog Lane. He was going to be discovered. He tried to hide himself behind another prisoner.

But Shi-Rong detected the movement. In an instant he was in front of Nio, staring at his face. “This one,” he said.

And Nio was led out of the cell and made to stand in the line—though whether as a prelude to interrogation or execution, he could not guess.

October 1839

Nio’s doubts began on a warm October day.

In the coastal regions by the mouth of the Pearl River, each October, the semitropical heat, humidity, and rainstorms of the long summer monsoon come to an end. A new and delightful season begins. The skies are clear and blue; light breezes waft over the waters. It is like a perfect English summer—though more reliable.

Nio was standing on a promontory at the end of the Bogue. Just behind him, four bearers with a silk-curtained mandarin’s litter waited patiently; and a short distance in front, just out of earshot, Commissioner Lin and Shi-Rong were gazing across the waters of the gulf, to where twenty war junks were going through their maneuvers.

Like the two mandarins, Nio also watched the war junks intently. For the exercise would ensure that, if it came to a fight with the barbarians, the gallant sailors of the Celestial Kingdom would destroy the British Navy.

—

Shi-Rong was excited. If he’d failed Lin in the matter of the pirate, he’d begun to redeem himself with his intelligence gathering on Macao. Today, back on the mainland, he’d prepared a small surprise for the commissioner, which he was hoping the great man would like. First, however, there were the maneuvers to watch. He’d bought a Dutch spyglass when he was at Macao—a little brass sea captain’s telescope of which he was rather proud—through which he could follow the action closely as soon as it began.

But