China Quest

One

Hong Kong
February 11, 1861

The wedding of Serena Rose Bellamy to Mister Harry Bolton of Shanghai promised to be the most talked-about event of the Victoria social season. This in itself was not surprising. Morgan Bellamy was one of the wealthiest taipans on the China Coast, and it was only to be expected that he would marry his daughter off in high style. But it was not just the anticipated spectacle that kept tongues wagging over afternoon tea in Hong Kong's poshest residences, over brandies at the exclusive English Club on Queen's Road, or on the cricket fields, the bridle paths, and military parade grounds.

Wagers had been laid among Hong Kong's young bloods as to which of them would be lucky enough to wed and bed Serena. When she had chosen Harry Bolton, all bets had been canceled, and a dazed pall had settled over the ranks of merchants' sons, young diplomats, and military officers who'd hoped to win her. Blinded by their own dreams, they'd had no inkling that Serena would single out a stranger -- cultured, soft-spoken Harry Bolton who, at fifty-five, was eleven years older than her own father.

The ceremony was scheduled for the afternoon of Friday, February 17, 1861, in the parlor of the Bellamy mansion on Caine Road, with a reception and ball to follow. Serena, it was said, had insisted on prolonging her engagement so that the wedding could take place during Race Week, when Hong Kong was at its gayest, with European visitors pouring in from all the treaty ports along the China Coast.

Stephen Bellamy, Serena's twin brother, knew better. It was for his return that she had waited. Serena would never have married and gone away to Shanghai without first having seen him safely home from his studies in England.

As he strode up the stairs, his nose still tingling with the well-remembered richness of the Hong Kong air, Stephen wondered whether she had changed. Somehow he found it difficult to reconcile the memory of lively, laughing Serena with the image of a woman who would marry an old man like Harry Bolton.

Stephen's long legs covered the length of the upstairs hallway in a few strides. The house, at least, was the same -- the cream walls lined with paintings, the burgundy-toned carpet running up the curved staircase and along the floor of the hall, the full-length mirror from Boston, an eagle carved at its crest, that had been his mother's. He smiled, remembering the times he and Serena had pranced and postured before the mirror in old capes and plumed hats. Stephen seldom bothered with mirrors anymore, except to shave. They made him feel shy, oddly startled by the thin-faced, blue-eyed image that looked back at him, discomfited by the shock of light brown hair that tumbled down over his forehead. He turned from the mirror without looking into it and rapped softly on the door of Serena's room.

"Who is it?" Her voice was as he remembered it, whispery and almost as deep as his own. He did not answer, only rapped again, a bit louder.

"Well, then, come in if you must!" she said, a trace of petulance in her tone. Slowly, he turned the knob and opened the door.

The room was pink and white, intensely feminine, with a ruffled canopy over the bed and lace curtains at the windows. Serena was standing in the center of the pink and green Persian rug, wearing her white silk wedding gown. Two Chinese seamstresses and her amah -- the fat one, he remembered -- knelt in a circle around her, fussing with the dress. The sun, shining through the tall french windows, gleamed like living gold on her loose-hanging blond hair. The elfin brows above her dark eyes shot upward like wings when she saw him.

"Stephen!" In the next instant, she was upon him, enfolding him in a fragrant cloud of silk and tulle and flying golden hair, knocking him off-balance as she flung her arms around his neck and covered his face with wet little puppy kisses. Behind her, the two seamstresses sat back on their heels and glowered at him, their mouths full of pins. The amah twisted her plump hands nervously, fearful for the gown's basted seams.

"Stephen!" Serena pushed him back and held him at arm's length, her cheeks glowing, her smiling lips showing small, perfect teeth. "Let me look at you! Four years! Four years! I can't believe it! Lord, but you're tall! And skinny!"

"And you're prettier than ever! My little sister!"

She wrinkled her nose at him. "Your big sister, you lout! I was born first -- remember?"

"Remember?" He laughed. "You never let me forget it, runt! First by ten minutes, and for that you've lorded it over me all our lives!"

"We didn't expect you till next week, you know." She linked her arm through his. Her blond head came only to his shoulder. "Have you seen Papa?"

Stephen frowned. He had missed his father, but for reasons of his own he was not looking forward to their reunion. "We found space on the mail steamer," he said. "It left a week sooner than the ship we'd planned on."

"And where's your Madeline? I'm dying to meet her! Imagine, you getting married so far away, and not a one of us there!"

"Well, Grandmamma was there at least." He cleared his throat. "Madeline's aboard the steamer with our things. Since there was no one to meet us, I walked up here to get the buggy and a couple of the boys to fetch everything. She'd have come, too, but she hasn't been well."

"Oh?"

"Rough passage, you know ... and she's, uh, with child." Stephen glanced down at his shoes.

"So soon? Stephen! You devil!" She laughed when the blood rose in his cheeks. "Oh, I just want to talk to you! For hours! Let me get rid of these old hens ..." She clapped her hands to dismiss the three Chinese women.

The two seamstresses glanced nervously at Serena's gown. "Missee," the amah spoke up timidly, pointing to the dress.

"Oh, drat!" Serena pouted. "Yes, I suppose I'd best take it off before they go. Turn around, please, brother dear ..."

Stephen turned his back while the women divested Serena of her unfinished wedding gown, carefully unpinning the waist. "It's pretty, don't you think?" she said to his back. "Harry gave me the silk ..."

"And when do I get to meet your Harry?"

"Next week, love. He'll be down from Shanghai the day before the wedding. You'll like him. Everyone does." Stephen heard the rustle of silk and crinoline; seconds later, the three Chinese women minced past him and out of the room, bearing the white clouds of Serena's gown and petticoats in their outstretched arms.

Stephen kept his back turned. "And what about Evan Ames?" he said. "You wrote me about him, I remember ... the newspaperman's son, wasn't it? I half-expected to see you marrying him."

"That was over a long time ago," she answered, "before I ever met Harry. Evan -- when I got to know him -- he was ... well, strange. Jealous. He'd fly into a fit if I so much as looked at anyone else. I knew it wouldn't work for us, and I told him so. That was the end of it." She paused, and Stephen heard the sound of a silk sash being tied into a bow. "There," she purred, taking his arm again. He saw that she was dressed in a pink wrapper that matched her cheeks.

"Serena," he said, something aching inside him when he looked at her. "Why Harry Bolton? You look so happy ... but I can't believe you're in love with him. He's almost old enough to be your grandfather!"

Her face was thoughtful as she led him toward the french windows. "Harry is everything I want," she said softly. "He's kind and gentle ... well educated ... distinguished ..."

"And the richest man in Shanghai! Don't tell me you haven't thought of it!"

"Of course I have, and I know what people are saying. But that's not the reason --" She tossed her head, snapping her hair like a whip. "Oh, damn them all! Let them say what they want! I don't care!" Suddenly, she laughed, flinging wide the french windows that opened onto the narrow verandah. "Oh, Stephen, I'm so glad you're here -- you just don't know --" She tugged him toward the open doors. "Come out!" she commanded. "Look at it! Breathe it! You're home!"

He followed her out to the stone balustrade and stood looking down, his arm looped about her shoulder. The city of Victoria spread below them, a ruffle along the steep-rising gray-green skirt of Hong Kong Island. The place had grown in the four years of his absence, for Victoria was a young city, no older than the pair who gazed down at it from the verandah.

Stephen inhaled, filling his senses with the glorious potpourri of fragrances that he had carried in his memory for four years -- the drifting aromas of ginger and cloves, of white Canton cabbage pickling in salt brine; of fennel oil and fish and Indian curry ... of smoke and seawater ... "Aye, Serena," he whispered, "I'm home."

"Has it changed much?" She squeezed his arm.

"Changed?" He laughed. "Why, I'd hardly know the place! New buildings everywhere I look! What's that one down past Government House, north of the Parade Ground?"

"That's the new ice house. Just think, ice all summer! We're having mango ice cream at the reception -- wait till you taste it! And over there is Dent's new godown, just down from the Club ..."

"It's amazing!" Stephen's eyes picked out the public garden surrounding Government House, the gaol, and the military barracks. To the east, rounding the curve of the harbor, lay Morrison's Hill, and below that the tract of flat land where Jardine Matheson, the biggest trading company on the China Coast, had its godowns. Around to the north of the hill would be Wong Nei Chong -- Happy Valley, where the racetrack kept incongruous company with the English cemetery.

He looked to his left, out to where Taiping Shan, Victoria's Chinese section, sprawled to the west like some teeming fungus, fecund, bulging, swelling, as refugees poured in from rebellion-torn China; "By heaven," he whispered, "is there any end to it?"

Serena shook her head. "They just keep coming," she said. "By the thousands ... month after month. We can't keep them out. We can't send them back ..."

Stephen sighed. The massive Taiping movement was nothing new to him. It had sprouted when a young Hakka schoolmaster named Hung Hsiu-chuan had awakened from a forty-day delirium claiming to be the brother of Christ and the God-appointed savior of China. Through the late 1840's and 1850's the movement had grown, until Hung's fanatical followers spread throughout the southeastern part of the empire and controlled the area from Kwangsi Province to the Yangtze River. Now, these "God-worshipers," with their own strange version of Christianity, threatened to overcome the Celestial Throne itself.

The refugees had come to Hong Kong first in a trickle, then in a flood, fleeing both the Taipings and the ravages of the imperial troops who followed them. Stephen remembered them from his boyhood, their clustered huts where hollow-eyed children crouched in ramshackle doorways and thin, weary women hung out laundry on bamboo poles, where human waste ran down the streets and rats scurried through the shadows. And now there were so many more of them ...

"You can't go out at night anymore," Serena was saying. "There've been pirate attacks almost right in the harbor, and it's getting worse. Maybe you should have stayed in England."

Stephen shook his head. "I don't belong in England," he said softly. His eyes swept out to the harbor -- the finest harbor in the world, he'd heard it said -- where scores of ships dotted the green water. There were towering clippers and old East Indiamen, still in service after two, three, even four decades; newer paddle-wheel steamers, and the creaky, aging opium hulks that had long functioned as floating warehouses for the taipans, the trader barons of the China Coast. Junks winged their way about the harbor, their thick, ribbed sails patched and ancient looking. Tiny sampans and slipper boats, propelled by single oars in their sterns, sculled about like water beetles, dodging the more imposing craft.

The mail steamer that had carried Stephen and his bride from England lay at anchor off Pedder's Wharf. Madeline would be waiting for him, he reminded himself. He'd best be getting back to her ...

But the view of Hong Kong held him like a spell. He closed his eyes and heard the departing whistle of a steamer far out in the harbor. A vendor of squid, his wares swimming live in two pails balanced on the ends of a bamboo shoulder pole, called to customers in a Chinese falsetto. Somewhere a child was crying ...

Serena stirred beside him. "Tell me about England," she said. "And what's Grandmamma like? I'd give anything to know her."

"Oh, a bit like you, perhaps ..." Stephen smiled as he watched an old peasant woman laboring up the street below them. Serena's curiosity about her grandmother was natural. It had been more than twenty years since Rose Bellamy had left her missionary husband in Macao and gone back to England. She had since married again, happily. "She's still beautiful," he said. "And busy. Her husband's up for Parliament this year. Once, when we were alone, she asked me about Grandfather." He shrugged. "What could I tell her about a man I'd never seen? Only that he was alive ..." Stephen's throat tightened with anticipation as he wondered how he could best break the news that was bursting inside him. It would have to be done soon. He would need her on his side when the time came to face their father.

Affection warmed in Stephen's eyes as he gazed down at this small sister who had been his special companion from the moment of their conception. Strange, he'd always thought, how the two of them could be twins and yet be such opposites in appearance and temperament. He had always been known as the serious one -- quiet, reserved, scholarly ... a model son. It was dainty little Serena who had once dipped the queue of the number-one boy into a pot of honey as he dozed; Serena who had tossed a string of firecrackers off the verandah just as the governor's carriage was passing below; Serena who burst into a fit of tears every time Stephen beat her at chess. The two of them had always been close, and had grown even closer in the thirteen years that had passed since their mother died giving birth to their younger sister, Moira.

"How's Moira?" he asked, putting off the moment of truth a little longer.

"You'd hardly know her. She's getting to be quite a young lady, bosoms and all. But she's shy, as you'd expect. Spends most of her time painting. Actually, she's quite good. Papa's even had some of her things framed and hung."

"No improvement in her foot, I suppose."

Serena shook her head. "The doctors say it's hopeless. She'll always be like that ... clubfooted. Even the word's ugly."

"And Papa?"

"The same as ever. Spends most of his time at the Club. He's probably there now. He'll be glad to have you back. The way the company's grown, it's about time we had a lawyer in the family!"

Stephen felt a sudden dampness on his palms and the back of his neck. It was now or never, he told himself. He took a deep breath.

"Serena," he said in a tight voice. "I'm not a lawyer."

"What?" She spun lightly away from him and stood with her head cocked, blinking like a bright little bird. "But your letters -- It was what Papa always wanted, and he was so pleased --"

"My letters were lies!" Stephen turned away from the view of the harbor to face her. "It was the only way. If Papa had known the truth, he wouldn't have sent me another shilling; but now it's too late. It's done and he can't change it."

"Stephen!" She managed a bemused chuckle. "What in heaven's name are you talking about?"

He took her arm again and ushered her back into the bedroom. "I tried," he said. "I knew Papa wanted it, and I really tried. But by the end of the first term, I knew it was no good. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn't law --"

She pressed the side of her face against his sleeve in sympathy. The gesture gave him courage. His next words came in a rush.

"I transferred from law school to a theological seminary," he said. "Serena, dearest, I'm an ordained minister."

She let go of his arm and sank down onto the bed. "Oh!" she said, her brown eyes growing huge. "Oh, my God!" She stared at him for a very long moment. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, she began to giggle, then to laugh, until her face turned a deep rose pink and the tears rolled down her cheeks. Finally, she caught her breath. "Oh, Stephen! Oh, how delicious! Papa is just going to have a stroke!"

Copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth Lane