In the center of the wall’s length was a portaled guard tower and a single majestic gate. The gate to China was always open, but no European could set foot through it.
Struan’s boots sounded loud as he hurried across the
pra
ça and opened the tall, wrought-iron gates of the bishop’s palace and walked through the gardens that had been tended for three centuries. One day I’ll have a garden like this, he promised himself.
He crossed the cobbled forecourt, his boots clattering, and went up to the huge door. He pulled the bell and heard it echo within and pulled it again and again, insistently.
At length a lantern flickered past the downstairs windows and he heard footsteps approaching and a stream of querulous Portuguese. The door opened.
“Bom dia. I want to see the bishop.”
The half-dressed, half-asleep servant stared at him without recognition and without comprehension, then spouted another stream of Portuguese and began to close the door. But Struan shoved his foot in the door, pushed it open, and walked into the house. He turned into the first room—an exquisite, book-tiered study—and sat in a carved-backed chair. Then he let his eyes fall on the gaping servant. “The bishop,” he repeated.
Half an hour later Falarian Guineppa, Bishop of Macao, General of the Church of Rome, strode imperiously into the room that Struan had commandeered. He was a tall patrician who carried his fifty years youthfully. His nose was Roman-beaked, his forehead high, his features well used. He wore a magenta skullcap and magenta robes, and around his taut neck hung a bejeweled crucifix. His black eyes were sleepy and hostile. But when they fell on Struan, the anger and the sleepiness vanished. The bishop stopped on the threshold, every fiber of his being alert.
Struan stood. “Good morning, Your Grace. Sorry to come uninvited and so early.”
“Welcome in the name of God, senhor,” the bishop said pleasantly. He motioned to a chair. “I think a little breakfast. Would you join me?”
“Thank you.”
The bishop spoke curtly in Portuguese to the servant, who bowed and hurried away. Then he strolled slowly to the window, his fingers on his crucifix, and stared out at the rising sun. He saw
China Cloud and the clusters of sampans surrounding it in the bay far below at anchor. What emergency, he wondered, brings the Tai-Pan of The Noble House to me? The enemy I know so well but have never met. “I thank you for such an awakening. This dawn is very beautiful.”
“Aye.”
Each man assumed a civility that neither felt.
To the bishop, Struan represented the materialistic, evil, fanatic Protestant English who had broken the laws of God, who—to their everlasting damnation—had denied the Pope as the Jews had denied Christ; the man who was their leader, and the one who had, almost singlehanded, destroyed Macao, and with Macao, Catholic domination of the Asian heathen.
To Struan, the bishop represented all that he despised in the Catholics—the dogmatic fanaticism of self-castrated, power-seeking men who sucked riches from the poor in the name of a Catholic God, drop by bloody drop, and from the drops built mighty cathedrals to the glory of their version of Divinity, who had idolatrously set up a man in Rome as Pope and made the man an infallible arbiter of other men.
Liveried servants obsequiously brought silver trays and hot chocolate and feather-light croissants and fresh butter and the sweet kumquat jelly for which the monastery was famous.
The bishop said grace and the Latin increased Struan’s discomfort, but he said nothing.
Both men ate in silence. The bells from the multitude of churches tolled matins, and the faint, deep-throated litany from the chorus of monks in the cathedral filled the silence.
After chocolate there was coffee from Portuguese Braziclass="underline" hot, sweet, powerful, delicious.
At a motion of the bishop’s hand a servant opened the bejeweled cigar box and offered it to Struan. “These are from Havana, if they please you. After breakfast, I enjoy Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘gift’ to humanity.”
“Thank you.” Struan chose one. The servants lit the cigars, and at a sign from the bishop they left.
The bishop watched the smoke spiral. “Why should the Tai-Pan of The Noble House seek my help?
Papist help?” he added with a brittle smile.
“You can wager, wi’out odds, Your Grace, that it’s na sought lightly. Have you heard of cinchona bark? Jesuits’ bark?”
“So. You have malaria. Happy Valley fever,” he said softly.
“Sorry to disappoint you. Nay, I’ve na malaria. But someone I cherish has. Does cinchona cure malaria?”
The bishop’s fingers toyed with the huge ring on his middle finger, then touched his crucifix. “Yes. If the malaria of Happy Valley is the same as the malaria that exists in South America.” His eyes were piercing. Struan felt their power but stared back as relentlessly. “Many years ago I was a missionary in Brazil. I caught their malaria. But cinchona cured me.”
“Do you have cinchona here? In Macao?”
There was a silence, broken by the clicking of the fingernails tapping the cross, reminding Struan of the Chinese doctor tapping May-may’s wrist. He wondered if he had judged correctly—about the bishop.
“I don’t know, Senhor Struan.”
“If cinchona can cure our malaria, then I’m ready to pay. If you want money you can have that. Power? I’ll give you that. If you want my soul you can have that—I dinna subscribe to your views, so that would be a safe exchange. I’ll even gladly go through the form of becoming a Catholic, but it would be meaningless, as you know and I know. Whatever you want I’ll give you if it’s in my power to give. But I want some of the bark. I want to cure one person of the fever. Name your price.”
“For one who comes as a supplicant, your manners are curious.”
“Aye. But I’m presuming that, irrespective of my manners—or what you think of me or I think of you—that we have the means of a trade. Do you have cinchona? If you have it, will it cure Happy Valley malaria? And if it does, what’s your price?”
The room was very quiet, quiet overlaid with movement of minds and wills and thoughts.
“I can answer none of those questions now,” the bishop said.
Struan got up. “I’ll come back tonight.”
“There’s no need for you to return, senhor.”
“You’re saying you’ll na trade?”
“I’m saying that tonight may be too soon. It will take time to send word to every healer of the sick and to get a reply. I will get in touch with you as soon as I have an answer. To all your questions. Where will you be?
China Cloud or your residence?”
“I’ll send a man to sit on your doorstep and wait.”
“There’s no need. I will send word.” The bishop remained seated in his chair. Then, seeing the depths of Struan’s concern, he added compassionately, “Don’t worry, senhor. I will send word to both places, in Christ’s name.”
“Thank you.” As Struan was leaving, he heard the bishop say, “Go with God,” but he did not stop. The front door clanged behind him.
In the stillness of the little room the bishop sighed deeply. His eyes saw the bejeweled crucifix that hung at his chest. He prayed silently. Then he sent for his secretary and ordered the search to begin. Then, alone once more, he split himself into the three persons that all generals of the Church must simultaneously be. First, the anointed Peter, first Bishop of Christ, with all that that spiritually implied. Second, the militant guardian of the Church temporal with all that that implied. And last, just a simple man who believed the teachings of a simple man who was the Son of God.