He bought gold, Sethji?
Bahram gave a belly-laugh and clapped Neel on the back. See, that is why you are a munshi and not a Seth. Arre budhu – he began to sell! And when he started to sell everyone thought, wah bhai, the battle is lost, so we’d better sell too. So the price of gold went down, down, down. Only when the time was right did Mr Rothschild step in to buy – and then he bought and bought and bought. You see? It was just that he knew the news before anyone else. Later some people told me the story is not really true – but what does it matter? It is a story for the times we live in, na? I tell you, if I had had the courage, I would have gone up to that man and touched his feet. You are my Guruji! I would have said.
Bahram had been pacing all this while, but now he came to a stop in front of Neeclass="underline" So do you see munshiji, why khabar-dari is important for a businessman like me? You know, no, that we are going to Canton? When we get there you will have to be my eyes and ears.
Neel took alarm at this: In Canton, Sethji? But how? I don’t know anyone there.
Bahram shrugged this off. You don’t need to know anyone. You can leave that part to me. What you have to do is to read two English journals that are published in Canton. One is called the Canton Register and another is the Chinese Repository. Sometimes other papers also come out but you don’t have to bother with them – only these two are of interest to me. It will be your job to go through them and make reports to me. You must cut out all the phoos-phaas and just give me what is important.
Here Bahram reached over to his desk and picked up a journal. Here, munshiji, this is a copy of the Repository. My friend, Mr Zadig Karabedian, has lent it to me. He has underlined some bits – can you tell me what they say?
Ji, Sethji, said Neel. He ran his eye over the lines and said: It seems that these are excerpts from a memorial written by a high-ranking Chinese official and sent to the Emperor.
Yes, said Bahram. Go on. What does he say?
‘ “Opium is a poisonous drug, brought from foreign countries. To the question, what are its virtues, the answer is: It raises the animal spirits and prevents lassitude. Hence the Chinese continually run into its toils. At first they merely strive to follow the fashion of the day; but in the sequel the poison takes effect, the habit becomes fixed, and the sleeping smokers are like corpses – lean and haggard as demons. Such are the injuries which it does to life. Moreover the drug maintains an exorbitant price and cannot be obtained except with the pure metal. Smoking opium, in its first stages, impedes business; and when the practice is continued for any considerable length of time, it throws whole families into ruin, dissipates every kind of property, and destroys man himself. There cannot be a greater evil than this. In comparison with arsenic I pronounce it tenfold the greater poison. A man swallows arsenic because he has lost his reputation and is so involved that he cannot extricate himself. Thus driven to desperation, he takes the dose and is destroyed at once. But those who smoke the drug are injured in many different ways.
‘ “When the smoker commences the practice, he seems to imagine that his spirits are thereby augmented; but he ought to know that this appearance is factitious. It may be compared to raising the wick of a lamp, which, while it increases the flame, hastens the exhaustion of the oil and the extinction of the light. Hence the youth who smoke will shorten their own days and cut off all hope of posterity, leaving their fathers and mothers and wives without anyone on whom to depend; and those in middle and advanced life, who smoke, will accelerate the termination of their years…” ’
Stop! Bas! Enough.
Bahram snatched the journal out of Neel’s hands and tossed it on a table.
All right, munshiji, it is clear that you can read English without difficulty. If you want the job it is yours.
*
If there was one thing Paulette had learnt about Fitcher it was that he was a methodical man. This was why she was not surprised to discover that he had prepared, long in advance, a plan to trace the provenance of the camellia paintings. His hopes were centred especially on the illustration acquired by William Kerr: the picture was no more than thirty-odd years old and had almost certainly been painted in Canton – it was perfectly possible in fact that the painter was still alive.
‘But you will need an expert to identify the artist, sir, will you not?’
‘So I will,’ said Fitcher.
‘And do you know of anyone?’
‘No, but I know of someone who may be able to help.’
The man Fitcher had in mind was an English painter who had been living in southern China for many years: he was said to be well-connected and extremely knowledgeable. Fitcher intended to call on him in Macau, at the earliest possible opportunity.
‘And what is his name, sir?’
‘Chinnery. George Chinnery.’
‘Oh?’
Paulette’s attention was instantly riveted but she was careful to feign a tone of indifference as she asked: ‘Indeed, sir? And how did you hear of him?’
‘From a friend of his…’
The name had been suggested to him, said Fitcher, by a regular client of his Falmouth nursery – one Mr James Hobhouse, a portraitist who had known Chinnery in his youth. The artist had been living in southern China for over a decade, Mr Hobhouse had told him, and was reputed to be intimately acquainted with the painters of Macau and Canton.
Hobhouse had known Chinnery at the Royal Academy, where they had been contemporaries of J. M. W. Turner. Chinnery had himself once been regarded as a painter of the same calibre, but he was a man of changeable moods: wilful and witty, amorous and extravagant, he was this minute in a high good humour, and in a deep dudgeon the next. None of this was out of keeping for a member of that clan, Mr Hobhouse had added, for the Chinnerys were a family in which unusual talent seemed often to be combined with odd and excessive behaviour.
The artist had certainly inherited more than his measure of the family’s traits. The promise of a brilliant career was not enough to keep him in London. He had taken himself off to Ireland, where, like many a feckless youth before him, he had ended up marrying his landlord’s daughter. She had given him two children in quick succession which was perhaps too strong a dose of family life for his flighty stomach; he had taken off again, leaving his wife to cope with the infants as best she could. His destination now was Madras, where his brother was then living: after five years in that city, he had moved on to Bengal, settling eventually in Calcutta. There, in the capital of British India, he had met with tremendous success, being universally acclaimed as the greatest English painter in the East. When word of his triumph trickled back to England his family had decided to make their way to India to join him – first his daughter Matilda, whom he had last seen as a child, and who was now a young woman; then his luckless wife, Marianne; and finally his son John, who had hopes of embarking on a military career. But the move brought misfortune with it: within a year of his arrival, John was carried off by a tropical fever, and the loss had all but unhinged Chinnery, embittering him against his wife, the very sight of whom became unendurable to him. Once again he took to his heels, moving about as far as possible – to Macau, a place that had suggested itself, or so the wags said, because in the event of his wife’s pursuing him any further he could always take refuge in Canton, where he would be safe from all foreign women.
In southern China, said Mr Hobhouse, his old friend appeared to have found a niche that was to his liking, for he had remained there for the last thirteen years, a length of time that was, for him, an eternity. Now, at the age of sixty-four, safe from marital pursuit, he seemed to be content in the company of sea-captains, travelling merchants, opium traders and other itinerants. They for their part, seemed to regard his work with the greatest approbation: so many, and so lucrative were his commissions that he was reported to have created an atelier in order to keep pace with the demand, training his house-boys and servants in his methods of painting.