“Oh, it is, is it? Well, I’ll tell you, you blathering old fart-dungheap right to your face—out you go! And I’ll send word to that woman tonight!” The little woman spun around and screeched, “Ladies!”
“Now, Mrs. Fortheringill, there’s no need for temper,” Quance said tentatively.
The girls came running. Eight of them. “Take them out and put ’em in me room,” she ordered, waving at the paints and brushes and paintings. “No more credit, and them’s mine until the bill’s paid to the penny!” And she huffed out.
Quance scrambled out of bed, his nightshirt flaring. “Ladies! You’ll touch nothing, by God!”
“Now, be a good boy,” Nellie said calmly. “If Ma’am says they’s to go, if the Lord Himself was standing there, they’s to go!”
“Oh yes, funnybunny darling,” another said. “Our Nelly’s said it proper.”
“Just a minute, ladies,” Struan said. “Mr. Quance’s been given a bill. That’s the reason for all the trouble. Miss Nelly, er, have you, well, spent time with him?”
Nelly stared at Struan. “ ‘Time’ you say, Tai-Pan? Our dear Mr. Quance has an appetite for time the like of which ain’t even in the Bible.”
“Oh yes, Tai-Pan,” another said with a chuckle. “Sometimes he likes two of us together. Oh, he is a one!”
“To paint, by God!” Quance shouted.
“Oh, go on with you, Mr. Quance,” Nelly said. “We’s friends together.”
“He paints us some of the time,” another said agreeably.
“When?” another asked. “I ain’t ever beed painted.”
“Lies, by God!” Quance protested to Struan, and when he saw the Tai-Pan’s expression, he winced and shrank back into the bed. “Come now, Tai-Pan,” he implored. “No need to be precipitate. A fellow can’t help it if he’s—popular.”
“If you think I’m paying for your quent, you’re sick in the head!”
“What’s ‘quent’?” Nelly asked, indignant. “We’re respectable ladies, that’s wot. We bleedin’ well are and we don’t like dirty words!”
“It’s Latin for ‘time,’ my dear Miss Nelly,” Quance said hoarsely.
“Oh,” she said, and bobbed a curtsy. “Beggin’ yor pardon, Tai-Pan!”
Quance clutched his heart and rolled his eyeballs. “Tai-Pan, if you forsake me, I’m finished. Debtors’ prison! I beg you”—he clambered out of bed and knelt supplicatingly—“don’t turn your back on an old friend!”
“I’ll settle this bill and take all your paintings against your loan. But this is the last penny. Understand, Aristotle? I’m paying no more!”
“Bless you, Tai-Pan. You’re a prince.”
“Oh yes,” Nelly said and sidled up to Struan. “Come on, luv. You pay Ma’am’s bill and it’ll be on the house.”
“Wot about me?” another asked. “Course, Nelly’s got more trickeries.”
They all nodded amiably and waited.
“I’d recommend,” Quance started, but Struan’s glare cut him short. “Every time you look at me like that, Tai-Pan, I feel near death. Forlorn. Lost. Forsaken.”
In spite of his irritation Struan laughed. “Devil take you!” And he strode for the door. But a sudden thought stopped him. “Why’s this room called the Blue Room?”
Nelly leaned down and picked up the chamber pot from under the bed. It was blue. “Ma’am started a new fashion, Tai-Pan. Each room have a different color, Tai-Pan. Mine’s green.”
“I’ve got the old cracked gold one,” another said with a sniff. “Ain’t ladylike at all!”
Struan shook his head hopelessly and disappeared.
“Now, ladies,” Quance said in a exultant whisper, and there was an expectant hush. “As the slate’s clean, after breakfast I propose a modest celebration.”
“Oh good,” they said, and clustered around the bed.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
At midnight the lorcha nosed the beach at Aberdeen, and Struan jumped into the shallows, Fong beside him. Earlier he had landed his men secretly just to the west and positioned them around the well. He tramped up the beach toward the well and the fork in the path. Fong carried a lantern and was very nervous.
The moon was hidden by the low overcast, but a trace of its glow filtered through. The air was heavy with the stench of low tide, and the hundreds of sampans in the narrow inlet were like so many hibernating wood bugs. No lantern except Fong’s cut the darkness. There were no sounds but for the inevitable foraging of dogs.
The village was equally ominous.
As Struan broke out onto the fork in the path, he searched the night. He could feel many eyes watching him from the sampans.
He loosened the pistols in his belt and stood carefully out of the light of the lantern that Fong had placed on the lip of the well.
The silence intensified. Suddenly Fong stiffened and pointed shakily. Just beyond the fork, lying across the path, was a sack. It looked like a rice sack. His pistols ready, Struan motioned Fong ahead, not trusting him. Fong advanced, panic-stricken.
When they reached the sack, Struan tossed Fong a dirk, haft first. “Cut it open.”
Fong knelt down and slit the hempen sacking. He let out a terrified whimper and backed off.
Scragger was in the sack. He had no arms or legs or eyes or tongue, and the stumps of his limbs were cauterized with tar.
“Top o’ the evening, matey!” Wu Kwok’s malignant laughter echoed harrowingly out of the night and Struan jerked to his feet.
The laugh seemed to come from the sampans.
“What do you want, you devil from hell?” Struan shouted back.
There was a guttural stream of Chinese, and Fong blanched. He shouted something back, his voice constricted.
“What did he say?”
“He . . . Wu Kwok says I’m to go—there.”
“You stay where you are,” Struan said. “What do you want, Kwok?” he yelled at the sampans.
“You alive! For Quemoy, by God! You an’ yor muck-pissed frigates!”
Figures swarmed from the sampans and raged up the hill with spears and cutlasses. Struan waited until he could see the first of the pirates clearly, then dropped him with a shot. Immediately muskets blazed from Struan’s ambushing crew. There were screams, and the first wave of twenty or thirty pirates was annihilated.
Another wave of shouting cutthroats hurtled up the path. Again the muskets blasted them to pieces, but four gained the well. Struan cut one down, Fong another, and musket balls killed the other two.
Again a quietness.
“The pox on you, matey!”
“And you, Wu Kwok!” Struan bellowed.
“My fleets be goin’ again’ the Lion and Dragon!”
“Come out of your rat hole and face me and I’ll kill you now. Scum!”
“When I catched you, that be yor way o’ dying, matey. A limb a week. That scum live five, six week, but you be a year adying, I’ll be bound. We meets face t’ face in a year, if not afore!” Again the evil laugh and then silence. Struan was tempted to fire the sampans, but he knew that hundreds of men and women and children were aboard.