Struan and Brock were waiting to receive them in the garden, dressed in their best frock coats and white cravats and top hats. Struan was freshly shaved and Brock had had his beard combed. Both wore ostentatious flowers in their buttonholes. They knew that ceremony gained them much face and made the Hoppo lose face.
“Right you are,” Brock had said with a hoarse laugh. “Struan an’ me’ll take the godrotting edict, an’ if we baint acting proper like they, then mayhaps they be burning us up like rats in a trap an’ not waiting the time they give us. Now, do exactly as Struan sayed.”
The party halted at the gate. Mauss opened it and Struan and Brock went to the threshold. The bannermen glowered at them. Struan and Brock were grimly aware of the rewards that were still on their heads, but they showed no fear, for they were covered by unseen guns in the windows behind them and by the cannon on Brock’s lorcha anchored in midstream.
The chief bannerman spoke heatedly, gesticulating with his flail.
“He says come out and get the edict,” Mauss interpreted. Struan merely raised his hat and held out his hand and planted his feet firmly. “The Hoppo said the edict was to be delivered. Deliver it.” He kept his hand out.
Mauss translated what he had said, and then after a nervous moment the bannerman cursed at How-qua and How-qua hurried forward and gave Struan the rolled paper. Struan and Brock and Mauss immediately doffed their top hats, and shouted at the top of their voices, “God save the queen.” At this signal Gorth put a taper to the firecrackers and tossed them into the garden. The Co-hong merchants leaped back, and the bannermen drew their bows and swords, but Struan and Brock, their faces solemn, stood perfectly still, holding their hats in the air.
The exploding firecrackers filled the garden with smoke. When the explosions ceased, to the Co-hong’s horror Mauss, Struan and Brock shouted, “God rot all Manchus!” and from inside the factory there were three resounding cheers. The chief bannerman strode forward belligerently and harangued Mauss.
“He asks what this is all about, Tai-pan.”
“Tell him, just like I told you.” Struan caught How-qua’s eye and winked covertly, knowing his hatred of the Manchus.
Mauss said in loud, ringing, perfect Mandarin, “This is our custom on a very important occasion. Not every day are we privileged to receive so estimable a document.”
The bannerman cursed him for a moment, then ordered the Co-hong away. The Co-hong went, but now they were emboldened.
Brock started laughing. And laughter spread through the factory and was echoed from the far end of the square where the American factory was situated. A Union Jack appeared from one of its windows and waved bravely.
“We’d best be getting ready t’move,” Brock said. “That were very good.”
Struan did not answer. He tossed the edict to Mauss. “Give me an accurate translation, Wolfgang,” he said, and went back to his suite.
Ah Gip bowed him in and went back to her cooking pots. May-may was dressed but she was lying on the bed.
“What’s the matter, May-may?”
She glared at him and turned her back, pulling up her robe and revealing her bruise-tinted buttocks.
“That’s wat’s matter!” she said, with mock rage. “Look what you’ve done, you brute barbarian fan quai. I must either stand or lying on my belly.”
“ ‘Must lie on,’ ” he said, and slumped moodily in a chair.
May-may pulled down her robe and gingerly got off the bed. “Why do you na laugh? I thought that would make you laugh.”
“Sorry, lass. I should have. But I’ve a lot to think about.”
“Wat?”
He motioned to Ah Gip. “You dooa out, heya, savvy?” and bolted the door after her. May-may knelt beside the pot and stirred it with a chopstick.
“We’ve got to leave at three o’clock,” Struan said. “Say you wanted to stay in the Settlement until tomorrow, what would you do?”
“Hide,” she said immediately. “In a—how you say—a small up room near the roof.”
“Attic?”
“Yes. Attic. Why you want to stay?”
“Do you think they’ll search the factory when we’ve left?”
“Why stay? Very unwise to stay.”
“Do you think the bannermen will count us as we leave?”
“Those godrotting scum canna count.” She hawked noisily and spat in the fire.
“Will you na spit!”
“I tell you many times, Tai-Pan, it is important, wise Chinese custom,” she answered. “There is poisons in the throat always. You become very sick if you dinna expectorate it. It is very wise to expectorate it. The louder the hawk, the more the spit-poison god is frightened.”
“That’s nonsense, and it’s a disgusting habit.”
“Ayee yah,” she said impatiently. “Do you na understand English? Sometimes I wonder why I trouble to explain all so many civilizationed Chinese wisdoms to you. Wat for should we hide here? It is dangerous na to go with the others. It will be dangerous badly if the bannermen see me. We will need protections. Why should we hide?”
He told her about the lorcha. And about the bullion.
“You must trust me very much,” she said very seriously.
“Aye.”
“What must you give Jin-qua in returns?”
“Business concessions.”
“Of course. But what else?”
“Just business concessions.”
There was a silence.
“Jin-qua is a clever man. He would na want just business concessions,” she mused. “Wat concessions I would ask if I am Jin-qua! To anything you must agree. Anything.”
“What would you want?”
She stared at the flames and wondered what Struan would say if he knew that she was Jin-qua’s granddaughter—second daughter of his eldest son How-qua’s fifth wife. And she wondered why she had been forbidden to tell Struan—on pain of the removal of her name from the ancestral scrolls forever. Strange, she told herself, and shuddered at the thought of being cast out of the family, for it meant that not only she but her offspring and their offspring and theirs forever would be lost from the mainstream, and therefore deprived of the protective mutual help that was the single rock of Chinese society. A perpetual rock. The only real thing of value that five thousand years of civilization and experimenting had taught was safe and worthwhile. The family.
And she wondered why, in truth, she had been given to Struan.
“Second daughter of fifth mother,” her father had said on her fifteenth birthday. “My illustrious father has conceived a great honor for you. You are to be given to the Tai-Pan of the barbarians.”
She had been terrified. She had never seen a barbarian and believed them to be unclean, loathsome cannibals. She had wept and begged for mercy, and then, secretly, she had been shown Struan when he was with Jin-qua. The giant Struan had frightened her but she had seen that he was not an ape. Even so, she had still begged to be married to a Chinese.
But her father had been adamant and had given her a choice: “Obey, or leave this house and be cast out forever.”
So she had gone to Macao and into Struan’s house with instructions to please him. To learn the barbarian tongue. And to teach Struan things Chinese without his knowing he was being taught.