*
There being no one else to claim Freddie’s body it fell to Zadig Bey and Shireen to make arrangements for his funeral.
They quickly agreed that he would be buried according to Chinese rites; that, said Zadig, was what Freddie would have wanted. As for the site, it was Shireen who suggested that he be buried next to his father.
This suggestion drew a quizzical look from Zadig. ‘But what about Dinyar and the other Parsi seths?’ he said. ‘What will they say about Freddie being buried next to Bahram-bhai? What if they object, because he wasn’t a member of the community?’
‘Let’s not worry about the seths,’ Shireen said. ‘What matters is what Bahram would have wanted. And in death at least I think he would have wanted to give Freddie the acceptance he could not give him in life. It’s only right that Freddie should be buried beside him.’
Zadig did not demur: ‘Yes, that is true — Bahram-bhai would have wanted it so.’
They agreed also that the funeral would be held that very day. The body had been in the water a long time already and the weather being as hot as it was it would not do to put off the interment. In any case the island would be celebrating the Queen’s birthday the next day, and who knew what problems might arise?
Since neither Zadig nor Shireen had any idea of how to organize a Chinese funeral, the arrangements were left to Freddie’s landlord. It was he who found a coffin and pasted yellow and white papers on it; he also hired grave-diggers, a cart and a few professional mourners.
It took a while to get all this done and it was not till late afternoon that the corpse was properly prepared and the coffin closed.
The sun was dipping towards the horizon when the procession set off from Sheng Wan. As they were leaving the village Zadig said to Paulette: ‘Have you had any news from Robin Chinnery?’
Paulette nodded: ‘Yes, he sent a letter recently, from India. He fell very ill in Chusan and was evacuated to Calcutta—’
She broke off to point to the bay, where a longboat could be seen heading towards Sheng Wan. ‘Look, there’s Mrs Burnham.’
The cart was told to go on while Paulette, Zadig and Shireen went back to the seashore to greet the visitor.
Despite the heat and humidity, Mrs Burnham was wearing gloves and a veil, as always, except that they were black instead of white. She was mortified to find the others dressed in light-coloured clothing.
‘Oh good heavens!’ she said, clapping a hand over her mouth. ‘I’ve made an ooloo of myself, haven’t I? I don’t suppose they wear black at Chinese funerals, do they? Should I go back and change?’
‘Oh no,’ said Shireen. ‘I’m sure it’ll make no difference. It’s enough that you came.’
Mrs Burnham gave Shireen’s hands a squeeze. ‘Of course, Shireen dear: I’d have come earlier if I had known.’
The cart was now a long way ahead so they had to hurry after it.
The old coastal pathway that ran past Sheng Wan village had recently been widened and paved, but work on it was still continuing: the road was to be formally named the next day, in honour of the Queen. Gangs of labourers were putting in milestones and removing rubble as they passed by.
The cart was waiting for them at the top of the ridge that led to the Happy Valley. On arriving there they saw that a cloud was coming across the valley, trailing a sheet of rain.
‘It’s just a shower,’ said Zadig Bey. ‘But we’d better take shelter here while it passes.’
There were some trees beside the road and they huddled under them to wait.
From where she stood Shireen could see much of the shoreline of Hong Kong Bay. The year before, when she had gone to visit Bahram’s grave for the first time, there were only a few little villages dotted along the shore. Now there were godowns, barracks, parade grounds, marketplaces and clusters of shanties. Preparations were already being made for the first land auction: plots had been marked out along several stretches of the shore. At some points sampans and junks were anchored so closely together that it was as if the very soil of the island had expanded.
Paulette too was looking down at the shoreline and she saw that a large, official-looking boundary had been staked out right above the beach where Freddie’s body had washed up earlier in the day. It was there too that he had been sitting the year before when she came down from the nursery and unexpectedly ran into him. The memory brought tears to her eyes and she raised a hand to wipe them away.
Mrs Burnham was beside her, and she slipped her hand into Paulette’s.
‘Do you miss him already, Paulette?’
Paulette buried her face in her hands. ‘I cannot believe,’ she said between sobs, ‘that he too has left me.’
*
At Whampoa the next day, when the guns went off to mark the Queen’s birthday at noon, the blasts seemed to congeal the heat and humidity, making it hard to breathe: Kesri was reminded of the sultry weather that preceded the coming of the monsoons, back home.
The embarkation took unusually long because the transport vessels were a disparate assortment of junks and local boats, captured only the day before. There were no fewer than thirty of them and it was 3 p.m. before the convoy began to move, with all the boats being taken under tow by the Nemesis. But on the way there were further delays because of attacks by fire-boats; as a result there was only an hour of daylight left when the convoy finally reached the designated landing-point, at Tsingpu village, to the north of Guangzhou.
When the boats pulled in Kesri was with Captain Mee on the highest deck of the Bengal Volunteers’ transport vessel. Spyglass in hand, the captain was surveying the salient features of the landscape that lay ahead of them: the four forts he’d pointed out on the chart lay almost due south and were dimly visible through the haze.
The distance between the landing-point and the forts was not great — only three or four miles, as the captain had said — but Kesri saw at a glance that the intervening terrain would not be easy to cross. In between lay a stretch of land that was strikingly similar to the surroundings of his own native village: it was a flat patchwork of fields, covered with green shoots — the crop was rice and Kesri guessed that many of the paddies were flooded. As at home the paths that wound through the fields were very narrow, scarcely wider than a man’s foot, with surfaces of slippery wet clay. Even experienced rice farmers were apt to lose their footing on such pathways; for soldiers and sepoys, balancing muskets and fifty-pound knapsacks, it would be hard going.
Nor was the area as sparsely populated as Captain Mee had led Kesri to think. Kesri guessed that several thousand people lived in the tightly packed clusters of houses that dotted the plain. It was probably in order to resist dacoits and marauders that they lived so close together — and evidently this was exactly what the people of Tsingpu had in mind now. Armed with sticks, staves and pikes they were pouring out to confront the squad of marines that had gone ashore to establish a perimeter around the campsite.
The villagers’ response did not surprise Kesri — people in his own district would have reacted the same way — but the marines were caught off-guard and for a few minutes it looked as though there would be an all-out confrontation. Then an officer took matters in hand: a couple of warning shots were fired, a cordon was formed and the angry villagers were pushed back, past a small temple at the edge of the settlement.
As soon as the situation had been brought under control General Gough stepped off the Nemesis and marched over to the crest of a nearby elevation, to take stock of the terrain. In the meantime some of the junior officers, Captain Mee among them, went into the village temple to look around. They emerged whooping with delight, having found quantities of offerings inside the temple, among them haunches of fresh meat, which they requisitioned for their own table.