The Blue Rose Read online

‘But why are they wearing white instead of black?’ Scotty asked.

  ‘White is the colour of death in China, I believe, sir,’ Tom answered.

  Herr Hüttner frowned. ‘It is most messy and noisy. Do they not know Orderliness is next to Godliness?’

  As if in response to his words, two young men began to throw handfuls of firecrackers down on the ground. Bangs and pops. White light snapping on the ground. Smoke billowing past. Showers of paper confetti. The reek of gunpowder.

  Tom clapped his hands over his ears. ‘I don’t think they do, sir,’ he replied, trying not to laugh.

  ‘Fireworks at a funeral seem disrespectful,’ John Haxton said, gazing around bemusedly. ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ David answered, just as puzzled.

  Scotty turned to Father Li, who was walking with them, his hands tucked inside his sleeves, and asked him, in careful Latin, to explain.

  The Chinese priest answered, ‘To scare away malevolent ghosts.’

  ‘The Chinese believe in ghosts?’ Tom asked eagerly.

  ‘Many ghosts in China,’ the priest replied. ‘Hungry ghosts, trickster ghosts, venomous ghosts, pestilence ghosts, nightmare ghosts, goblin ghosts.’

  David was not sure if he had understood him properly. Despite all his grandfather’s careful tutoring, Latin had never been his strong suit. He had learned as much as he needed to study botany, and little more.

  Tom looked at him doubtfully. ‘But you don’t believe in ghosts anymore, do you, Mr Plum?’

  Father Li did not speak for a moment, then replied ‘not yes’ in Mandarin.

  There did not seem to be a single word meaning ‘no’ in his language. Sometimes Father Li said ‘not right’ and sometimes ‘not true’ and sometimes ‘not can’. Such subtleties of difference made it a very difficult language to learn. David had tried hard to master it on the long months spent sailing on the ocean, with only the company of birds and whales and flying fish to break the monotony of the never-ending ocean. It had stumped him, however. David recognised the sound of some spoken words and the pattern of some written characters, but the two did not always seem to belong together. The way the word was pronounced could change its meaning considerably. David had sent Tom into paroxysms of laughter by telling the Chinese priest that he ‘wished to kiss him’, when he meant to say he ‘wished to ask him’.

  Tom had learned the language much faster and more easily than David or any of the other adults on board the Lion. He delighted in the Chinese love of puns and double-entendres, and so had begun to call the Chinese priest Mr Plum, since the symbol for his surname ‘Li’ was also the symbol for a plum tree. Tom took great care in practising his Chinese logograms, and loved the multiplicities of meaning behind just a few simple strokes.

  Four swift scratches of his quill, and he created the logogram for fire. Yet that simple character could also mean light, bright, burning, passion, anger, ammunition, rage, wrath, war, weapon, explosion, inferno and imminence, depending on how many times the figure was drawn or what other logograms it was combined with.

  China itself was imminent, David thought. They had sailed that very morning, the 6th of March 1793, into the harbour at Batavia, on the north coast of the island of Java, in the East Indies. It had been their first sight of civilisation since Rio de Janeiro, ninety-five days and nine thousand, five hundred and ninety miles away. They needed only to navigate through the islands and they’d be in the South China Seas, with the peaks of the fabled Flowery Kingdom slowly rising on the horizon.

  They had seen Chinese junks in the harbour as the Lion had sailed towards the town, with flimsy high-pooped decks and red sails fluted like a fan. Father Li and Father Cho had fallen to their knees, crying aloud and bowing their heads to the ground. It was, Father Li had later explained, the first sight of anything Chinese since he had been sent away to Italy as a boy, at only twelve years of age.

  There had been fear in the priest’s face as well as joy. Afterwards he had been greatly agitated, walking the decks, rattling his rosary beads, turning often to stare at the junks. Later, when they had all embarked, the two Chinese priests had found their compatriots who had sailed on the Hindostan, and there was much loud jabbering in their own language. It had sounded like a furious argument.

  The funeral procession reached what looked like a street altar, painted lacquer-red with golden characters inscribed upon it and smouldering joss sticks stuck in ceramic jars. The grief-stricken young men in white suddenly dropped to their knees in the filth of the street, and knocked their foreheads against the ground.

  ‘That’s the ko-tow,’ Tom said knowledgeably. ‘A ritual prostration performed by the inferior to the superior. Did you know the people of China have to ko-tow to the emperor’s throne, even if he is not sitting in it, and to any letter that carries the imperial seal? And if they are in the presence of the emperor himself, they have to do the grand ko-tow, which is three kneelings and nine knockings of the head. My father says Lord Macartney swears he shall not demean himself so, as he is the representative of King George.’

  ‘No man should kneel before another, or kiss his feet, or doff his hat,’ David said. ‘All men are created equal.’

  ‘But you would kneel to the king, would you not, and kiss his hand?’ Tom asked, shocked.

  ‘As it is most unlikely that I will ever be presented to the king, I have no need to worry about that,’ David responded.

  ‘I would like to meet the king,’ Tom said. ‘One day perhaps I shall. I am to meet the emperor, you know. I’m to act as Lord Macartney’s page and carry his train. The emperor is very old and wicked, I have heard. He has two empresses and twenty-nine concubines, and orders people to be executed by the death of a thousand cuts.’

  The boy spoke with a certain breathless excitement, not at all shadowed by trepidation.

  But Father Li, gazing back at the young Chinese men bowing low to the altar, was tense-jawed and fist-clenched.

  The crew and passengers of the British ships were very pleased to be on firm land again, and enjoyed themselves bargaining in the markets, drinking vast quantities of palm wine, and buying monkeys and parrots. David had no cash to spare, since his salary was sent straight to his grandfather, so he spent his time in Batavia at the botanical park, studying the plants and trying to secure samples and seeds.

  He was most pleased to be given a fragrant young nutmeg tree, and a nut supposed to be close to germination, and arranged for them to be sent back to Sir Joseph Banks at Kew Gardens on the very first ship returning to England. Sir Joseph had given David a job, despite his lack of a letter of recommendation from the Marquis de Valaine, and had put his name forward for this journey to China. David was determined to prove himself to his patron, and took a great many notes about the care and harvesting of clove, cinnamon, pepper, and the fruit of the mangosteen tree.

  He was interested to learn that pineapples were as common as turnips. In England, they were rare and precious and grown only in the glasshouses of the tremendously rich. Often they were not eaten, but displayed on the table as proof of wealth and power. A man wishing to impress could even hire one for the evening, for an exorbitant price.

  Here, in Batavia, pineapples were so unexceptional people often cleaned their swords by running them through the yellow flesh, thought to be so full of acid it would dissolve any dirt or rust upon the metal.

  After ten days, the Lion set out once more. Lord Macartney was ill, as were many of the crew, but the admiral was keen to try and catch the strong surge of the monsoon winds that were meant, at this season, to blow towards China.

  But the wind died away. The fleet was becalmed.

  Pacing the quarterdeck in the heat of the blazing sun, gazing out at a sea as calm as bath water, David could not help but wonder uneasily if all this bad luck had anything to do with the shooting of the albatross.

  At last, the monsoon came and the fleet of ships sailed on.

  But all felt the shadow of the
ill omen.

  ‘Madame Guillotine is thirsty today!’ a woman said to Viviane, passing her a calf’s liver wrapped in bloodied paper.

  Another loud cheer echoed across the rooftops of Paris.

  ‘May she drink deep,’ said Alouette, the Temple prison’s laundress. A passionate revolutionary, she wore a short, striped tricolour skirt and a red cap crammed over her dark curls, which had been chopped à la jacobine. ‘Such a damned shame we have to work today, Rozenn, else we could go watch.’

  ‘I’d rather not,’ Viviane answered, stowing the package away in her basket. Seeing Alouette’s quick frown, she added, ‘You know I don’t like crowds.’

  ‘Oh, the smell, the crush!’ Alouette pressed one hand against her forehead, pretending to faint. ‘You are such an aristo,’ she added.

  ‘I am not,’ Viviane answered sharply. ‘It’s not my fault crowds make me feel sick.’

  It was not exactly a lie.

  ‘All right, then, such a clodhopper.’ Alouette grinned at her. ‘Though you’d think the smell of pigs and cows would be worse than the smell of Paris.’

  ‘Trust me, it’s not,’ Viviane replied, and moved on to look at the chicken giblets laid out on the next table.

  She and Alouette were at the markets at Les Halles, crowded as always with women buying and selling and talking and arguing. The market square was only ten minutes away from the Place du Carrousel, so they could hear the roar of the crowd as another tumbril deposited its human cargo at the foot of the guillotine. Since the Revolutionary Tribunal had been set up a month earlier, the nation’s razor had been busy.

  It had been a tumultuous few months in France. Peasants in the provinces had rebelled against the National Convention’s Levée des 300,000 hommes, which demanded men leave their fields and families and go and fight in the army. France was now officially at war with Britain, Austria, Prussia, Holland, Spain and Sardinia, and fighting on all fronts. Food riots in Paris had led to the formation of the Committee of Public Safety under the leadership of Georges Danton, famous for having shouted, ‘The kings of Europe would dare challenge us? We throw them the head of a king!’

  This in turn had led to the Revolutionary Tribunal, formed to prosecute anyone believed to be an enemy of the revolution. Meanwhile, the National Convention was bitterly divided on the best way to govern the country. The Brissotins were popular in the provinces, where people were shaken and disturbed by the execution of the king, and the Jacobins had the support of the sans-culottes, the angry and often violent mob of Paris.

  Alouette attended the assemblies at the National Convention whenever she could, knitting as she listened for she had nine younger brothers and sisters, all hungry and cold. She cheered and clapped at the speeches she approved of, and booed and hissed at those she did not. Sometimes she hammered on the wooden benches with the hilt of the dagger she always carried, useful for cutting wool, skewering mutton in a stew, or holding off an amorous soldier. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘a sans-culotte always has their weapon well sharpened, ready to cut off the ears of opponents of the revolution!’

  At the moment, her most bitter enemies were the Brissotins, who had tried to arrest Jean-Paul Marat, the journalist who had once accused Marie-Antoinette of trampling on the cockade. The Brissotins had charged him with trying to incite violence, but Marat had been acquitted of all charges. His accusers had then been arrested themselves, and the National Convention was now ruled by the Jacobins, led by Maximilien Robespierre.

  The Jacobins’ first task was the drafting of a new constitution. The one written in 1791 had been for a constitutional monarchy, but the monarchy was no more. So, in just two weeks, Robespierre and one of his acolytes, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, formulated a new system of government for the new republic. It was adopted by the Convention on the 24th of June, and then submitted to vote by popular referendum.

  ‘It’s all very well and good,’ Alouette grumbled, ‘but they’ve forgotten about us women. Why aren’t we allowed to vote for the constitution too? They don’t mind us throwing flowers and hanging wreaths on statues, but when it comes to being a real citizen, they give us nothing. Surely the so-called “rights of man” means our rights too? What has the National Convention done for us? There’s no flour for bread, no soap for us poor washerwomen to do our job, no coal to light our stoves to heat our irons. Those bloodsuckers are hoarding it all for the rich, and letting us starve.’

  The next day, a mob of washerwomen stopped two carts full of bars of soap on the Rue Saint-Lazare, and commandeered it for themselves. They sold the soap to each other for only twenty sous. The unrest spread, and shopkeepers and merchants found themselves mobbed by angry women, forcing them to sell soap, tallow candles, sugar, salt and coal at more reasonable prices. A house on the Rue de Provence was besieged by two hundred women who believed the owner was hoarding soap for rich merchants. By the following morning, more than a thousand women were attacking the cargo boats moored at the Quai de l’École. They were dispersed by policemen, but marched on the Convention and presented a petition protesting the cost of everyday items such as flour and beer.

  Alouette returned with a black eye and a torn blouse, filled with satisfaction.

  Viviane told her that Jacques Hébert, Deputy Prosecutor of the Paris Commune, had said, ‘Damn it! You spend your time catching flies when there are lions to be fought. Great heavens, are we to make war on sugar and soap?’

  ‘It’s fine for him,’ Alouette had said. ‘He’s not the one that has to queue up all night for bread, and then try and wash sheets all day without any soap. He’s probably eating foie gras and truffles, and sleeping on silk. All men like him ever do is make promises and then shrug and say sorry when the whole cost falls on the shoulders of the poor, like always. We should send him to the guillotine too!’ And she had laughed.

  Viviane could not understand how anyone could find the guillotine a source of glee. So, as another roar of approval resounded through the streets, she hesitantly asked, ‘Why do you want to go and watch the guillotine, Alouette? It’s people dying, people with mothers or lovers or children left behind to grieve.’

  The young woman was silent for a moment, looking down at the filthy cobblestones. ‘It’s justice,’ she said after a long moment. ‘Justice for all the wrongs we sans-culottes have suffered. Thousands of years crushed under the red heel of the tyrant.’ Suddenly she looked up, her dark eyes ablaze. ‘And vengeance! Vengeance at last!’

  On 20 June, David had his first sight of China. Soft blue billows of hills, rising from sea smoke. He and the other men raised a resounding cheer. Nine months they’d been at sea, and at last their objective was in sight.

  As the fleet sailed closer, clusters of peaked islands, bare and windswept, rose from the water, looking like fragments broken from the continent. The rocks were dark, almost black, and honeycombed with erosion. Ahead lay the peninsula of Macao, with its high summit looking down on the bay, and behind, the great dark landmass that was China.

  The bay was crowded with junks, with stiff-battened sails like red silk parasols. Smaller boats with flat bottoms were propelled along by a single oar. Father Li said they were called sampans, which meant ‘three planks’. The boats were crewed by men with heavy-lidded black eyes, wearing loose trousers and tunics and pointed straw hats. Their queues hung in long thin braids down their backs.

  Some of the boats carried bamboo crates filled with live chickens, all squawking loudly. Another was hung with strings of still-flapping fish. One had a hull piled with strange-looking bristled fruit. Yet another sampan trailed smoke from a small charcoal furnace. An array of razors, tweezers and brushes hung from a bamboo pole, and the man on the boat made a great noise clanging tongs against a cymbal. Someone nearby gestured to him. The barber poled over, jumped on to the other boat, and within moments was shaving the man’s forehead with a glinting razor.

  At the sound of the local boatmen’s high-pitched jabbering, Father Li and Father Cho shrank away and hi
d themselves from sight.

  ‘What is wrong?’ Tom asked in Latin, laying his hand on Father Li’s sleeve.

  The priest looked down at him with a troubled face. ‘We are in China.’

  It was as if he had never expected this day to come.

  23

  A Great Mandarin

  21 June – 3 July 1793

  ‘But why can’t we go ashore, sir?’ David demanded. ‘We have come so far, and we are so very close. I want to walk on Chinese soil, and see a Chinese garden, and smell the perfume of a Chinese flower.’

  ‘I understand your frustration,’ Sir George replied patiently. ‘But Macao is not really China, it’s a little corner of Portugal. It is walled off from China, with a single gate that no-one but the Chinese can pass through. So you would be as distant from the real China as you are now.’

  ‘But I would get a taste of what China is like, and have solid earth beneath my feet instead of this infernally rocking boat,’ David responded.

  Sir George smiled. ‘So the old sea dogs failed to wash the landlubber out of you after all! I’m sorry, I’m afraid Lord Macartney’s instructions are clear. Until we know how the emperor has responded to our overtures, the embassy must be careful not to offend in any way. I am hopeful to receive a favourable communication from the emperor soon, but until then only myself and my servant are to go ashore.’

  David sighed in disappointment.

  Someone tapped on the door. Sir George’s manservant opened it, showing in Father Cho and Father Li, both looking nervous and uncomfortable.

  Father Cho bowed and begged pardon. He could not travel any further. It was too dangerous. If the emperor found out … he would be punished most cruelly. He had left China without permission … he had ko-towed to another god … he must not risk his neck anymore …

  In vain, Sir George protested. They had an agreement. Father Cho had been already paid for his services. They needed an interpreter.