note 12 written just before her death in 1917, that was part of her last will and testament and in the tai-pan's safe, she had laid down more rules and one of them was that there should always be substantial amounts of secret cash for the tai-pan's use, on hand, and another that there should be at least four loaded handguns perpetually available in secret places. She wrote: "I abhor guns but I know them to be necessary. On Michaelmas Eve in 1916 when I was infirm and sick, my grandson Kelly O'Gorman, fourth tai-pan (in name only), believing I was on my deathbed, forced me from my bed to the safe in the Great House to fetch the seal-chop of the Noble House—to assign to him absolute power as tai-pan. Instead I took the gun that was secretly in the safe and shot him. He lingered two days then died. I am God-fearing and I abhor guns and some killing, but Kelly became a mad dog and it is the duty of the tai-pan to protect the succession. I regret his death not a jot or tittle. You who read this beware: kith or kin lust for power as others do. Do not be afraid to use any method to protect Dirk Struan's legacy …"
A bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. He remembered the hair on the nape of his neck rising when he had first read her instructions, the night he had taken over as tai-pan. He'd always believed that Cousin Kelly—eldest son of the Hag's last daughter Rose—had died of cholera in one of the great waves that perpetually washed Asia.There were other monstrosities she had written about: "In 1894, that most terrible of years, the second of Jin-qua's coins was brought to me. That was the year plague had come to Hong Kong, bubonic plague. Amongst our heathen Chinese, tens of thousands were dying. Our own population was equally savaged and the plague took high and low, Cousin Hannah and three children, two of Chen-chen's children, five grandchildren. Legend foretold that bubonic plague was wind-borne. Others thought it was the curse of God or a flux like malaria, the killing 'bad air' of Happy Valley. Then the miracle! The Japanese research doctors Vitasato and Aoyama we brought to Hong Kong isolated the plague bacillus and proved the pest was flea-borne, and rat-borne, and that correct sanitation and the elimination of rats would cast out the curse forever. The eyesore hillside of Tai-ping Shan that Gordon owns—Gordon Chen, son of my beloved tai-pan—where most of our heathen always lived was a stinking, festering, overcrowded, rat-breeding cauldron for all pestilences, and as much as the authorities cajoled, ordered and insisted, the superstitious inhabitants there disbelieved everything and would do nothing to improve their lot, though the deaths continued and continued. Even Gordon, now a toothless old man, could do nothing—tearing his hair at his loss of rents, saving his energy for the four young women in his household.