The men carried ashore a table and benches and food, tea and brandy and clothes.
“Hurry it up!” Perry repeated irritably. “And stand off! Get to hell out of here and stand off.”
The oarsmen shoved the longboat off quickly and pulled out above the surf and waited, glad to be away.
Struan helped Culum into dry clothes and then put on a clean, ruffled shirt and warm reefer jacket. Perry helped him off with his soaking boots.
“Thanks,” Struan said.
“Does it hurt?” Culum asked, seeing the foot.
“No.”
“About Mr. Robb, sir,” Perry said. “After Culum left he went for the liquor. I told him no, but he wouldn’t listen.” He continued haltingly, “You’d given orders. So the cabin got a bit bent, but I got it away from him. When he came to, he was all right. I took him aboard
China Cloud and put him into his wife’s hands.”
“You did right, Isaac. Thank you.” Struan helped Culum to a dish of food—beef stew, dumplings, cold chicken, potatoes, hardtack biscuits—and took a pewter mug of hot, sweet tea for himself.
“His Excellency sends his condolences. He’d like you to step aboard, at your convenience.”
Struan rubbed his face and felt the stubble of his beard, and he wondered why he always felt dirty when his face was unshaven and his teeth not brushed.
“Your razor’s there,” Perry said, indicating a side table. He had anticipated Struan’s need to spruce up. The Tai-Pan had a fanatical obsession with his personal cleanliness. “There’s hot water.”
“Thank you.” Struan soaked a towel in the water and wiped his face and head. Next he lathered his face and shaved deftly without a mirror. Then he dipped a small brush into his mug of tea and began to clean his teeth vigorously.
Must be another heathen superstition, Perry thought contemptuously. Teeth grow old and rot and fall out and that’s all there is to it.
Struan rinsed his mouth with tea and threw the dregs away. He washed the mug with fresh tea and refilled it and drank deeply. There was a small bottle of cologne with his shaving gear, and he poured a few drops on his hands and rubbed them into his face.
He sat down, refreshed. Culum was only toying with the food. “You should eat, lad.”
“I’m not hungry, thank you.”
“Eat anyway.” The wind ruffled Struan’s red-gold hair, which he wore long and uncurled, and he brushed it back. “Is my tent set up, Isaac?”
“Of course. You gave orders. It’s on a knoll above the flagstaff.”
“Tell Chen Sheng, in my name, to go to Macao and buy honey and fresh eggs. And to get Chinese herbs to cure distempers and the aftereffect of Bengal plague.”
“I’m all right, Father, thank you,” Culum protested weakly. “I don’t need any heathen witches’ brews.”
“They’re na witches as we know witches, lad,” Struan said. “And they’re Chinese, not heathen. Their herbs have saved me many a time. The Orient’s not like Europe.”
“No need to worry about me, Father.”
“There is. The Orient’s nae place for the weak. Isaac, order
China Cloud to Macao with Chen Sheng, and if she’s not back in record time, Captain Orlov and all the officers are beached. Call the longboat in.”
“Perhaps Culum should go with the ship to Macao, Mr. Struan.”
“He’s to stay in my sight till I think he’s well.”
“He’d be well looked after in Macao. Aboard there’s not—”
“God’s blood, Isaac, will you na do as you’re told? Get the longboat in!”
Perry stiffened momentarily and shouted the longboat ashore.
Struan, with Culum beside him, sat amidships, Perry behind them.
“Flagship!” Struan ordered, automatically checking the lie of his ships and the smell of the wind and studying the clouds, trying to read their weather message. The sea was calm. But he could smell trouble.
On the way to the flagship Struan read the dispatches. Profits on last year’s teas, good. Perry had made a lucrative voyage, good. A copy of
Scarlet Cloud’s bill of lading that Perry had brought from Calcutta; bad: two hundred and ten thousand pounds sterling of opium lost. Thank God the ship was insured—though that would na replace the men and the time lost while another ship was abuilding. The cargo of opium was contraband and could not be insured. A year’s profit gone. What had happened to her? Storm or piracy? Storm, more likely. Unless she’d run into one of the Spanish or French or American—aye, or English—privateers that infested the seas. Finally he broke the seal on his banker’s letter. He read it and exploded with rage.
“What is it?” Culum asked, frightened.
“Just an old pain. Nothing. It’s nothing.” Struan pretended to read the next dispatch while raging inwardly over the contents of the letter. Good sweet Christ! “We regret to inform you that, inadvertently and momentarily, credit was overextended and there was a run on the bank, started by malicious rivals. Therefore we can no longer keep our doors open. The board of directors has advised we can pay sixpence on the pound. I have the honor to be, sir, your most obedient servant . . .” And we hold close to a million sterling of their paper. Twenty-five thousand sterling for a million, and our debts close to a million pounds. We’re bankrupt. Great God, I warned Robb not to put all the money in one bank. Na with all the speculating that was going on in England, na when a bank could issue paper in any amount that it liked.
“But this bank’s safe,” Robb had said, “and we need the money in one block for collateral,” and Robb had gone on to explain the details of a complicated financial structure that involved Spanish and French and German bonds and National Debt bonds, and in the end gave Struan and Company an internationally safe banking position and a huge buying power for expanding the fleet that Struan wanted, and bought for The Noble House special privileges in the lucrative German, French and Spanish markets.
“All right, Robb,” he had said, not understanding the intricacies but trusting that what Robb said was wise.
Now we’re broke. Bankrupt.
Sweet Christ!
He was still too stunned to think about a solution. He could only dwell on the awesomeness of the New Age. The complexity of it. The unbelievable speed of it. A new queen—Victoria—the first popular monarch in centuries. And her husband Albert—he did na ken about him yet, he was a bloody foreigner from Saxe-Coburg, but Parliament was strong now and in control, and that was a new development. Peace for twenty-six years and no major war imminent—unheard of for hundreds of years. Devil Bonaparte safely dead, and violent France safely bottled, and Britain world-dominant for the first time. Slavery out eight years ago. Canals, a new method of transport. Toll roads with unheard-of smooth and permanent surfaces, and factories and industry and looms and mass production and iron and coal and joint stock companies, and so many other new things within the past ten years: the penny post, first cheap post on earth, and the first police force in the world, and “magnetism”—whatever the hell that was—and a steam hammer, and a first Factory Act, and Parliament at long last taken out of the hands of the few aristocratic rich landowners so that now, incredibly, every man in England who owned a house worth twenty pounds a year could vote, could actually vote, and any man could become Prime Minister. And the unbelievable Industrial Revolution and Britain fantastically wealthy and its riches beginning to spread. New ideas of government and humanity ripping through barriers of centuries. All British, all new. And now the locomotive!