Fatal Enquiry

CHAPTER FIVE

I recounted every word Nightwine had said; every nuance and inflection, as we made our way back to our chambers. My employer walked with his hands clasped behind his back and his head sunken on his breast. I was determined to get it all out before he spoke.

“Obviously, he was trying to drive a wedge between us.”

“And has he succeeded?” he asked. That’s Barker for you. No need for a hundred words when four will do.

I raised my hands. “I understand how you work. If you wish to remain silent about your private life, that is your own affair. I suppose if I believe a piece of information you hold is required, I shall ask for it.”

We entered the office, the door of which had been thrown open in our haste to leave, and took our chairs again.

“Do you think my past with Nightwine is such a piece of information?” he asked.

“You would be better placed to answer that question than I would, sir.”

“You do realize,” he said, “that sometimes information can just as easily get you killed as save your life.”

“I understand that, yes.”

He exhaled half a barrel full of air and then sat back in his green chair. I sat up. He was finally going to tell me something of his past.

“I suppose the first thing you should know is that I did have an elder brother. Caleb was two years older than I, and while my parents were missionaries in Foochow, dressing in Chinese clothing to make the Western religion more palatable for the natives, Caleb was sent to a proper English boarding school in Shanghai.

“You must understand there is a major tragedy in China every couple of years: a flood, an invasion, an earthquake. In this case, it happened to be cholera. It swept through Foochow and my parents set up a makeshift hospital to care for the sick and dying. Before I knew it, both my parents had contracted the disease, leaving me, at twelve years old, to fend for myself in a strange country.

“I was small and quick and could steal from market stalls and vegetable gardens, but by the time I was sixteen, I was nearly six feet tall. I had to work to eat and there was precious little chance of work while the country was at war. I dug ditches, worked on boats, harvested in the rice paddies, and carried palanquins, but mostly I starved. By my calculation, I had been starving for four years.

“I hardly even remember the time when my parents were alive, except for a party my mother had thrown the night before Caleb had gone off to school. She had contrived to serve roast mutton and had assembled a cake from local ingredients. I thought of that cake for years. It was an inconceivable time. People were dying by the millions. A foreign boy on his own in China would have found an early grave, and so I became one of them, simply to survive.

“China had become a nation of refugees. The Taiping Rebellion was blowing north, consuming as it came, and soon overtook Foochow. It was rumored that Shanghai was the only safe place to go, but the boats were full and the prices exorbitant. I realized my only chance of survival was to find my brother, and in desperation, I set out to find him. Over the course of six months, I walked four hundred miles barefoot. Shanghai was in chaos when I arrived, choked with panicked refugees, both Chinese and European. At least I knew where I was going, to the St. Francis Xavier College northeast of the Bund, the European quarter of the city. When I arrived, the English guards had no use for a ragged scarecrow and refused me entry, but I was determined to find my brother, my only living relative for almost six thousand miles. Caleb would know what to do, I told myself. I climbed a fence one night in the midst of a rainstorm, timing my entrance with the metronomic pace of the guards’ beat, and made my way to the college, but when I arrived, I found it boarded up and abandoned. I have to admit I broke down, convinced my brother was on a ship halfway to Perth and the comfort of distant relatives who no doubt believed me buried with our parents.

“I was fast approaching the point where I could not go on without food. There was but one way to get a full belly in Shanghai at that time, by joining the multinational army gathering to defend the city. I made my way to an encampment outside of Shanghai called Kuang-fu-lin. Less desperate recruiters might have questioned my age, but I was tall and already sported a smudge on my upper lip which would eventually become a mustache. The ironically named Ever Victorious Army needed bodies, and if I had marched from wherever I’d come from, I might be tough enough to last five minutes in battle, which was the best one could hope for.

“The recruiter, a British sergeant broiled red by the sun, expected me to make my mark. I took the pen and signed my name in Chinese: Shi Shi Ji. Then I thanked him in English. He was surprised by the fact that I could speak English, and told me to report to a certain tent after I was fed.

“The young man whose tent I was sent to arrived on that very same January day. His uniform had been made for him at Huntsman’s in London, and his boots were hand-tooled. One wouldn’t know by his looks and professional appearance that he had just been turned out of Sandhurst Military Academy for numerous offenses, and sent to China to temper his high spirits. With the phrase ‘Right Honorable’ in front of one’s name, one could write one’s own ticket. That wasn’t to say that everything was rosy. He told me later he knew no one in this half of the world, and everyone on the other half had told him what a disappointment he had turned out to be. While the American brigadier in command of the general army was trying to figure out where to put a young Englishman in boots so new they squeaked, he sat in his tent and looked about at the crates of supplies and the Enfield rifle still waiting to be fired, wondering what would become of him. He felt a few card games and some spirited larks had not merited being banished to a country where one found heads lined up along the ground like cabbages, but it was far too late to argue now. He knew he must learn to adapt and change, as his father, a close friend of Darwin and an explorer and scientific author in his own right, would have said. He supposed, he told me later, that if his father had not put the family name on the map, it wouldn’t have been necessary to send his son so very far away.

“‘What in hell do you want?’ he snapped when I lifted the flap and stepped in.

“I explained to him I was told to come there. He ordered me to give his horse a good rubbing down. And that was the beginning of a long and complicated relationship.”

“Obviously the officer in question was Sebastian Nightwine.”

“Correct. No doubt to the surprise of Frederick Townsend Ward, the American brigadier in charge of the defense of Shanghai, the young popinjay the English government had foisted upon him proved to be a capable leader. He was fearless in battle, could quote strategies from Marcus Aurelius and Caesar, and seemed to know automatically how to attack a fortified camp. He was soon well liked by the men, not least because he always returned from a raid with spoils, and he understood how to acquire or build whatever was needed with the skill of an engineer. Granted, he was something of a freebooter, but then Ward himself had attended West Point in the same era that would produce George Custer and was something of a glory hunter himself, if one listened to the local gossip. The important thing was that Captain Nightwine could perform the task at hand, whatever it might be, which is an important ability when fighting on foreign soil.

“He began sending me into various villages to bring back intelligence, such as the fact that most villagers were more afraid of the southern rebels than loyal to the Ching government. My hair was so dark, and my features so swarthy that with the front of my head shaved, a long queue, and my round Asian spectacles, I easily passed as a native among the Chinese. Of course, by that time I had spoken Cantonese for so long, I considered it my first language. A large percentage of our soldiers would bolt or switch sides if given the opportunity, mostly due to the fact that they had few weapons and were expected to scavenge battlefields for them. The rebellion was led by a man named Hong Xiuquan, a failed scholar, who, having read some Christian tracts, came to believe himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ, mandated to free his country from the oppression of the hated Manchu government. His mental capacity was questioned but not his success. He’d already taken southern China.

“Without proper funds, Ward could not be expected to create an efficient modern army. All he had were his so-called Devil Soldiers, wildcatting Americans who were willing to jump into the dragon’s mouth, and a few thousand untrained Chinese soldiers who had been farmers just months before. Men like Nightwine and me were the best that he could hope for under the circumstances.

“One day, a year after I’d enlisted, my brother arrived in camp. When the school had shut down, he had been recruited by his headmaster as an interpreter and taken to Peking. He enjoyed the work, and being involved in various palace intrigues, but eventually he and his master had fallen into disfavor at court and their usefulness to Her Majesty’s government had come to an end. He came to Kuang-fu-lin, much in the same way I had.

“I was thrilled to see him. He hadn’t changed much, save that he’d somehow turned into an adult since last we met, with a mustache, a cigarette, and a civilian suit.

“He had believed me dead, after combing Foochow looking for me and learning that our parents were dead. Now he saw me masquerading as a Chinaman. I couldn’t exactly stand up and declare myself a Scot after all that time. Only Nightwine knew, for I had told him soon after we met. Caleb asked if Ward still needed interpreters, and I took him to the officers’ tent. Nightwine was very interested in him and both were on their best behavior. They discussed the political aspects of the war, Chinese history, the imperial government, and the right of people to govern themselves, but they were giving each other what they wanted to hear. Even before it was over, I knew their mutual cordiality was false. Caleb and I were not fifteen feet from the tent when he warned me of Nightwine’s unsavory reputation.

“‘Do you fight at his side?’ he asked.

“I told him the truth. After I had collected enough intelligence in one quarter, he sent me to another before he attacked so I would not be implicated as a spy.

“He’d heard in Peking that Nightwine was a butcher, who rode his horse through the lines, running citizens through as if he were playing at pig-sticking. Women, children, old people, he hacked them to pieces. He rode into houses and looted and raped and made certain there was no one alive afterward to implicate him. He was a monster.

“I was young and naïve and didn’t believe that a friend of mine could be so ruthless. I argued that he was only obeying orders.

“‘Perhaps he is,’ Caleb said. ‘On the other hand, a subordinate is not going to tell Ward that Nightwine enjoys hacking limbs from peasants or beheading captured rebels. I suspect your so-called friend does not possess a conscience. He’s using you, lad. You’re risking life and limb in the rebel camps, knowing the punishment for spying is beheading, while he sits in his tent all afternoon drinking and shining his boots, or tending to his charger.’

“I had to admit, I attended to his boots and his horse.

“Of course, I didn’t want to believe it. Sebastian was my best friend, possibly my only one. His ruthlessness, however, was something I suspected. He had a way of deflecting any of what he considered the weaker virtues. Privately, he called the Chinese no better than cattle, but then he felt much the same about the English. He didn’t care a fig about people unless he knew them well, and even then he could go cold suddenly, as if his compassion were shut off with a gas cock. Perhaps I knew it all along, but was too ashamed to admit it. I was out in the enemy camps away from our own soldiers who might have warned me. To them, I was a Chinese orderly, there to wash clothes and cook meals. Perhaps, I reasoned, he had isolated me so I wouldn’t hear how he was putting my intelligence to use.

“When I returned to his tent after walking Caleb back, Nightwine seemed genial enough, and asked if he would be willing to interpret for him. They were raiding the hills near the Old Armory.

“I offered to go with him, but he refused, telling me, ‘You’re too valuable for that. One stray arrow and where would the Ever Victorious Army be?’

“I should have seen it, Thomas. I should have recognized it from Second Samuel. David wanted to rid himself of Uriah the Hittite, and so he led him into battle and then ordered his men to withdraw.”

“Oh, no,” I murmured.

“Even though I was forewarned, I didn’t think Nightwine capable of such base treachery then. I went off blindly northward toward my next assignment, where my commanding officer sent me. When I found the rebel camp two days later, they were in the midst of a major celebration. Word had arrived that Ward had been killed. It was said that the Devil Soldiers were withdrawing. There was confidence among the rebel forces that the Ever Victorious Army would finally lose. I was in the wrong place. I turned about and began the long march back to Shanghai.

“The rumor proved to be true. The Americans were withdrawing in disorder and Nightwine was nominally in charge, while England decided on a more permanent and high-ranking successor. The war over China would go on. I searched for Caleb and learned from some of the Chinese soldiers that he had fallen in battle, pierced by no less than three arrows. He hadn’t so much as a pocketknife to defend himself. After all my searching and my bloody walk from Foochow, I had spoken with him for less than half a day and wasted most of that precious time arguing about Nightwine’s character in a vain attempt to make them like each other. I have no doubt that it was deliberate murder. Sebastian Nightwine killed my only brother, and I will never forgive him.”