Students marched up and down in Trafalgar square. It was known as the heart of London. Though to Lin the place looked much like any other square around the older houses having long been demolished and immense, crumbling cement sky scrapers built in their place.
But it had been named after the battle in which the French had been stopped from taking over all of Europe, like new Mongols.
As such, it had symbolic value as the most English of all squares.
Students descended on it, with signs, with chants, with an improvised p.a. system. Day and night they marched up and down.
Emma was one of the leaders the leader of one of the two factions involved in this.
Lin brought her soap and food and, sometimes, stayed and listened to her, kept her company.
But never too long. Never long enough. They couldn’t afford to have the cameras pick him up. The government would claim Chinese agitation.
And the cameras were coming: from Russia, from China, from the newly freed France, and Iberia, and Germany, even.
Filming the demonstrations, the yelling.
“Each day the government endures it,” Emma said. “It’s a sign that they’re weakening. We will win, Lin. I can feel it. And then….” She smiled at him. “Maybe you won’t need to go home.”
He nodded, handing her a bag with onions and cucumbers, all he’d managed to buy in the hotel.
The entire city seemed to be under siege, troubled, and the influx of camera crews had stressed the already fragile supply lines. “There is hope,” she said. “See, there is hope. We can win.”
Maybe they could have. Maybe. But the government didn’t relent. It talked of mercy to the students if they surrendered, but not of giving in to their demands. Government men explained to the foreign crews that this was all a misunderstanding.
“I don’t know Lin,” Emma told him, sounding exhausted. “Every day more and more students leave. They’re tired. They thought it would be easy. Quick. Now….” Smudges of tears showed on her face. “I tried to convince them to retreat by May
25. Leave the square, having made our point. I think we could do that.”
“And?” he asked.
“Mark,” she said. Mark was the guy from the club, the leader of the nationalistic faction that wanted the vote so they could deny it to anyone else. “He says we can’t retreat without having won some points.”
Lin held her arm. It felt very thin after almost a month here, on the barricades. “Forget this,” he said. “Forget all this. Come with me. Come home with me. Marry me.”
“Oh,” she looked at him, her sky-blue eyes filled with tears. “I can’t Lin. It’s my land. It’s my battle. I can’t run away.” He walked away feeling defeated. He’d always thought Englishmen were like sheep. But Emma wasn’t. More the pity. Emma wasn’t.
He woke up with the phone ringing, and reached for it, without seeing.
“Pack up, Lin,” his boss said. “Pack up. We’re going home.”
“Beg your pardon?” He couldn’t go home. Not without Emma.
“We’re going home. They’ve brought out the tanks, and Dragon Clouds Unlimited is pulling everyone back home. They don’t want to risk the lives of Chinese nationals.”
“Tanks?”
He turned on the light. He turned on the TV, but nothing was playing on any of the stations, nothing except a static pattern and a droning music.
Lin ran out of his room, to the elevator, down the darkened streets to Trafalgar square.
Two blocks away he heard screams, cannon booming and the staccato stuttering of machine guns.
He could swear he smelled the blood.
But a police cordon stopped him. Shock police, armed, though no one seemed to be trying to break through.
They identified Lin as a foreigner, as a Chinese, and escorted him meekly back to his embassy, from whence he was shipped home by the next plane.
He didn’t manage to go back until two years later, when it had all calmed down.
Two years later working for a new employer.
The images of the massacre in his mind tanks advancing on unprotected Englishmen the images he’d seen on TV at home, he went to Trafalgar square.
There were no blood stains on the pavement. Britain’s government, still holding on to the ideological remnants of communism, had become in all but name a free-trade society.
Dark cement giants still surrounded the square, but they’d been painted bright colors. Tourists ambled amid street vendors.
And yet, Britons still couldn’t vote, and from the interior stories of brutality and dark prepotence leaked, now and then.
Lin wondered lost in the square, as if he were in a foreign world.
He’d had an agency looking for Emma, for any trace of her. They found nothing save that she was missing, presumed dead in the Trafalgar square massacre.
The detective had rescued one thing, though Emma’s book of sketches. He’d sent it to Lin in Hangchow. It had arrived just before Lin left for London.
Opening it, Lin had been surprised. The pictures were unmistakably of England: there were the old monuments, the trees that seemed to hug the ground, the rolling hills.
But it was an England of cottages and pretty little towns.
An England as England could have been? As Europe could have been without the Mongols?
Lin didn’t know. But he carried the notebook around with him as he set about establishing an office for the international organization that monitored human rights abuses.
To prevent the Mongols from continuing to destroy everything in their path a thousand years after their defeat.
He would work for this small agency against overwhelming evil.
This would be his gift to Emma.
The Green Bay Tree
While doing research for my novel Ill Met By Moonlight, I came across everything that was happening around the time this story is set. The biographer was sympathetic to Judith and her strange marriage, but I started wondering how all of it made her straight-laced sister Susannah feel. In fact, how would Susannah, married to the very religious Doctor Hall feel about her eccentric family life?
Susannah Hall stood in her spacious, oak lined front hall, and looked through the little, thick glass squares amid the lead panes.
Her husband, Dr. John Hall, was late from his round of visiting his patients around Stratford. Susannah had given dinner to their daughter, five year old Elizabeth, and sent her to bed, and she’d set the mutton joint in the kitchen, close enough to the fire to keep it warm. Jane, the kitchen wench, had gone to bed, also.
Blurred through the window, Susannah saw the square building of the Guild Chapel, stark and dark-looking, under the grey sky of late March. Just out of sight, out of the corner of her eye, to the left, she saw a glimmer of light, no doubt from the many tapers lighting up the hall of New Place and shining through the big windows onto the street.
When Susannah had been a child, she and her brother and sister had lived, with their mother, in a much more modest house, in Henley street, and made their own tapers of mutton grease. Her father had lived in London, and who knew how or in what conditions. The only joy the little house had known came with her father’s sporadic visits, his stories of London, of the theater.
Now, Hall Croft, where Doctor Hall had brought Susannah when he married her was yet a different type of house—large and spacious, but sparely ornamented. No painted cloths on the walls, such as had graced her parents’ home. No colorful cushions. Only, everything cleaned and polished and right, beauty coming from a preservation of order and Spartan organization, rather than from that excess her father’s house now displayed.