River of Smoke(183)

The last words struck Bahram like a thunderbolt. His hands began to shake and he withdrew them quickly into the sleeves of his choga. Really, it was unfair, profoundly unfair, that Charlie King should pull such a trick on him; to speak not only of continents and countries, but of his faith. And what did continents and countries matter to him? He had to think first of those who were closest to him, did he not? And what conceivable good could result for them if he brought ruin upon himself? For his children, his daughters and Freddy, he would gladly sacrifice his well-being in the hereafter: indeed he could think of no duty more pressing than this, even if it meant that the bridge to heaven would forever be barred to him.

By force of habit, his right hand slipped inside his angarkha, to seek the reassurance of his kasti. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Then he raised his head and looked Mr King directly in the eye.

‘My vote,’ said Bahram, ‘is with Mr Dent.’





Sixteen





Spasms of rheumatism had kept Fitcher confined to bed for the last several days so it fell to Paulette to gather together the plants that were to be sent to Canton with Baburao.

Time being short they decided, after a quick discussion, to send a collection of six: a Douglas fir sapling; a redcurrant bush and two specimens from the north-western coast of America – a yard-high bush of the Oregon grape, now covered with yellow flowers, and a pot of Gaultheria shallon, with glossy leaves and clusters of delicate, bell-like sepals. Also included were two recently introduced plants from Mexico – the Mexican Orange, with pretty white blooms, and a beautiful fuchsia that was one of Fitcher’s treasures: Fuchsia fulgens.

Paulette had grown attached to each of these plants, especially to the Oregon grape which had proved exceptionally vigorous. It pained her to see them being removed to the Redruth’s gig, to be transferred to Baburao’s junk; like a parent at a time of parting, she doubted that her children would be properly looked after.

‘Sir, I know I cannot go to Canton,’ she said to Fitcher, ‘but could I not travel with the plants a part of the way?’

Fitcher scratched his beard and mumbled, ‘Ee could go as far as Lintin Island; ee’d be all right as long as ee don’t get up to no flay-gerries there.’

‘Really, sir?’

‘Yes. The junk can tow the gig behind it and the men’ll bring ee back afterwards.’

‘Oh thank you, sir. Thank you.’

She ran on deck and signalled to the gig to wait.

The junk was close by, wallowing in the water: when the gig pulled up, Baburao lowered a wooden shelf for the plants. Paulette held her breath as the pots were being winched up, and was hugely relieved when the operation was concluded without mishap. Then a ladder was thrown down for her and she climbed up on deck.

This was the first time Paulette had stepped on Baburao’s junk, and her initial response was one of disappointment. The Redruth had been anchored off Hong Kong long enough that she had come to recognize some of the unusual vessels that plied those waters: caterpillar-like passenger boats, long and thin, with seats arranged in rows; ‘funeral-boats’, piled high with coffins; two-masted ‘duck-tail’ junks, with tiered houses; and perhaps the most eye-catching of all – whale-like ‘pole-junks’, over a hundred feet in length, with mouths that looked as though they were sieving food from the water.

In a place where such vessels abounded Baburao’s junk was not a craft likely to attract much notice: she was a sha-ch’uan – a ‘sand-ship’ – which his grandfather had acquired very cheap, somewhere up north. The ship’s name was too long for Paulette to remember, but it didn’t matter anyway, because in her hearing Baburao always referred to his junk as the Kismat – the word was the exact equivalent, he said, of the Chinese characters painted on the junk’s bows.

Like every other vessel on the Pearl River, the Kismat sported an enormous eye on each side of her bows – a gigantic oculus that seemed to be keeping watch for prey and predators. In size she was smaller than both the Ibis and the Redruth, being only about sixty feet in length, yet she had more masts than either of those vessels, being fitted with no less than five. Their arrangement was as odd as their appearance: they leant this way and that, like the tapers on a wind-blown candle-stand. Only two of the masts were planted squarely in the vessel and even these were slanted at strange, irregular angles, one leaning forward and the other tilting back. As for the three smaller poles, they looked more like sticks than masts, and were attached not to the deck but to the deck rails, being placed seemingly at random around the edges of the hull. The placement of the rudder was equally strange, to Paulette’s eyes at least, for it was fitted not into the centre of the stern, but on one side of the hull, and was controlled not by a wheel, but by a huge tiller that stuck out over the roof of the deckhouse.