By then he only wanted to die.
Professor Lovell made his way up the stairs, crossed the room, and stood over the boy for a long moment. He did not notice, or chose not to notice, the dead woman on the bed. The boy lay still in his shadow, wondering if this tall, pale figure in black had come to reap his soul.
‘How do you feel?’ Professor Lovell asked.
The boy’s breathing was too laboured to answer.
Professor Lovell knelt beside the bed. He drew a slim silver bar out of his front pocket and placed it over the boy’s bare chest. The boy flinched; the metal stung like ice.
‘Triacle,’ Professor Lovell said first in French. Then, in English, ‘Treacle.’
The bar glowed a pale white. There came an eerie sound from nowhere; a ringing, a singing. The boy whined and curled onto his side, his tongue prodding confusedly around his mouth.
‘Bear with it,’ murmured Professor Lovell. ‘Swallow what you taste.’
Seconds trickled by. The boy’s breathing steadied. He opened his eyes. He saw Professor Lovell more clearly now, could make out the slate-grey eyes and curved nose – yīnggōubí, they called it, a hawk’s-beak nose – that could only belong on a foreigner’s face.
‘How do you feel now?’ asked Professor Lovell.
The boy took another deep breath. Then he said, in surprisingly good English, ‘It’s sweet. It tastes so sweet . . .’
‘Good. That means it worked.’ Professor Lovell slipped the bar back into his pocket. ‘Is there anyone else alive here?’
‘No,’ whispered the boy. ‘Just me.’
‘Is there anything you can’t leave behind?’
The boy was silent for a moment. A fly landed on his mother’s cheek and crawled across her nose. He wanted to brush it off, but he didn’t have the strength to lift his hand.
‘I can’t take a body,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Not where we’re going.’
The boy stared at his mother for a long moment.
‘My books,’ he said at last. ‘Under the bed.’
Professor Lovell bent beneath the bed and pulled out four thick volumes. Books written in English, spines battered from use, some pages worn so thin that the print was barely still legible. The professor flipped through them, smiling despite himself, and placed them in his bag. Then he slid his arms under the boy’s thin frame and lifted him out of the house.
In 1829, the plague that later became known as Asiatic Cholera made its way from Calcutta across the Bay of Bengal to the Far East – first to Siam, then Manila, then finally the shores of China on merchant ships whose dehydrated, sunken-eyed sailors dumped their waste into the Pearl River, contaminating the waters where thousands drank, laundered, swam, and bathed. It hit Canton like a tidal wave, rapidly working its way from the docks to the inland residential areas. The boy’s neighbourhood had succumbed within weeks, whole families perishing helplessly in their homes. When Professor Lovell carried the boy out of Canton’s alleys, everyone else on his street was already dead.
The boy learned all this when he awoke in a clean, well-lit room in the English Factory, wrapped in blankets softer and whiter than anything he’d ever touched. These only slightly reduced his discomfort. He was terribly hot, and his tongue sat in his mouth like a dense, sandy stone. He felt as though he were floating far above his body. Every time the professor spoke, sharp pangs shot through his temples, accompanied by flashes of red.
‘You’re very lucky,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This illness kills almost everything it touches.’
The boy stared, fascinated by this foreigner’s long face and pale grey eyes. If he let his gaze drift out of focus, the foreigner morphed into a giant bird. A crow. No, a raptor. Something vicious and strong.
‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’
The boy wet his parched lips and uttered a response.
Professor Lovell shook his head. ‘English. Use your English.’
The boy’s throat burned. He coughed.
‘I know you have English.’ Professor Lovell’s voice sounded like a warning. ‘Use it.’
‘My mother,’ breathed the boy. ‘You forgot my mother.’
Professor Lovell did not respond. Promptly he stood and brushed at his knees before he left, though the boy could scarcely see how any dust could have accumulated in the few minutes in which he’d been sitting down.
The next morning the boy was able to finish a bowl of broth without retching. The morning after that he managed to stand without much vertigo, though his knees trembled so badly from disuse he had to clutch the bedframe to keep from falling over. His fever receded; his appetite improved. When he woke again that afternoon, he found the bowl replaced with a plate with two thick slices of bread and a hunk of roast beef. He devoured these with his bare hands, famished.
He spent most of the day in dreamless sleep, which was regularly interrupted by the arrival of one Mrs Piper – a cheery, round woman who plumped his pillows, wiped his forehead with deliciously cool wet cloths, and spoke English with such a peculiar accent that the boy always had to ask her several times to repeat herself.
‘My word,’ she chuckled the first time he did this. ‘Must be you’ve never met a Scot.’
‘A . . . Scot? What is a Scot?’
‘Don’t you worry about that.’ She patted his cheek. ‘You’ll learn the lay of Great Britain soon enough.’
That evening, Mrs Piper brought him his dinner – bread and beef again – along with news that the professor wanted to see him in his office. ‘It’s just upstairs. The second door to the right. Finish your food first; he’s not going anywhere.’
The boy ate quickly and, with Mrs Piper’s help, got dressed. He didn’t know where the clothes had come from – they were Western in style, and fitted his short, skinny frame surprisingly well – but he was too tired then to inquire further.
As he made his way up the stairs he trembled, whether from fatigue or trepidation, he didn’t know. The door to the professor’s study was shut. He paused a moment to catch his breath, and then he knocked.
‘Come in,’ called the professor.
The door was very heavy. The boy had to lean hard against the wood to budge it open. Inside, he was overwhelmed by the musky, inky scent of books. There were stacks and stacks of them; some were arrayed neatly on shelves, while others were messily piled up in precarious pyramids throughout the room; some were strewn across the floor, while others teetered on the desks that seemed arranged at random within the dimly lit labyrinth.
‘Over here.’ The professor was nearly hidden behind the bookcases. The boy wound his way tentatively across the room, afraid the slightest wrong move might send the pyramids tumbling.
‘Don’t be shy.’ The professor sat behind a grand desk covered with books, loose papers, and envelopes. He gestured for the boy to take a seat across from him. ‘Did they let you read much here? English wasn’t a problem?’
‘I read some.’ The boy sat gingerly, taking care not to tread on the volumes – Richard Hakluyt’s travel notes, he noticed – amassed by his feet. ‘We didn’t have many books. I ended up re-reading what we had.’
For someone who had never left Canton in his life, the boy’s English was remarkably good. He spoke with only a trace of an accent. This was thanks to an Englishwoman – one Miss Elizabeth Slate, whom the boy had called Miss Betty, and who had lived with his household for as long as he could remember. He never quite understood what she was doing there – his family was certainly not wealthy enough to employ any servants, especially not a foreigner – but someone must have been paying her wages because she had never left, not even when the plague hit. Her Cantonese was passably good, decent enough for her to make her way around town without trouble, but with the boy, she spoke exclusively in English. Her sole duty seemed to be taking care of him, and it was through conversation with her, and later with British sailors at the docks, that the boy had become fluent.