As if the laughter had been a signal the old woman came hobbling in with food – all very plain, boiled vegetables from the garden, dark bread, cheese, water for Theodore and rice wine for the others. Theodore must have fallen asleep in the middle of the meal, because the next thing he was conscious of was waking up and finding that he had been laid on a rough mattress against a wall and covered with a blanket. The meal had been cleared, but the rice-wine flagons were still there, more of them than before. The other three were sitting in a row, on cushions, with Mrs Jones in the middle. The lantern-wick was smoking, and cast a dull, bronze light across their faces. The two men were listening with rapt attention to Mrs Jones, who was singing in a rich, sweet voice:
‘Wotcher, ‘Ria! ‘Ria’s on the job.
Wotcher, ‘Ria! Did you speculate a bob?
O, ’Ria she’s a toff
and she looks immensikoff
And they all shouted Wotcher, ’Rial’
Dazedly Theodore stared at this scene of debauchery, until Mrs Jones noticed him watching them, and winked. He closed his eyes, achingly aware of the huge weight of fatigue that prevented him from rising up and declaring their wickedness. He remembered that he had had a chance to bear witness to his faith, and had run away, so who was he to denounce anyone else? All he could do was pray. His lips moved automatically into the familiar words.
‘Our Father . . .’
He was asleep again before he had whispered a dozen syllables.
4
OFTEN, DURING THE journey to the mountain, Theodore would remember the argument in P’iu-Chun’s house and the laughter that had ended it. Lung had lost the argument, but now he was behaving as though he had won. Theodore would look ahead and see above the bobbing hats of the line of porters, the yellow umbrella, the little round embroidered cap and the blue quilted sur-coat, all enhancing Lung’s air of dignified swagger as he rode Sir Nigel at the head of the procession.
P’iu-Chun had apparently settled the argument while Theodore slept. It was quite simple – there was no point in going east, because the rage against foreigners was sweeping through the province like a brush fire. The Governor was trying to suppress the Boxers, but this only had the effect of driving the young fanatics outwards and spreading the blaze. A week ago they had reached Taho and burnt the mission. Dr Goertler was either fled or dead. Nor did P’iu-Chun dare to hide the travellers for more than another day and a night – he was rumoured to be a rich man, and the local townsmen would be delighted to ransack his house. But to the west lay the great barrier of the Yangtze, and if Mrs Jones and her party could only cross that they might be Safe, because the authorities would use the river to prevent the Boxer madness spreading that way. But for the time being Mrs Jones must travel in disguise.
So next morning Lung had ridden into the town and bribed the local magistrate to supply him with papers authorizing a rich widow to cross the river and journey to the Plain of Shrines, where she could burn incense at the tomb of her husband’s ancestors. P’iu-Chun himself had provided the disguise – clothes and a litter belonging to his dead wife, Lung’s uniform, a similar jacket for Theodore, a Chinese-style saddle for Sir Nigel. He had insisted that all these were gifts, but he had had no hesitation in accepting a gift of gold coins from Mrs Jones, in fact the two of them had conducted the exchange with complete understanding, and Theodore had needed to do very little translation. When it was over P’iu-Chun had added one genuine gift, the map from his rejected survey.
So now here they were, doing what Mrs Jones longed to do, heading towards the mountains where she might find flowers no botanist had ever seen. Three days earlier they had crossed the Yangtze with no trouble at all, and now were travelling almost due west along a steep-sided valley; below them rushed a tumbling tributary, green with melted snows. As they climbed, the climate changed, the rain ceasing earlier each day until by now it had ended before they were moving. But the forests that clothed the valley’s flanks were ancient and reeking with decay, and though the air grew steadily cooler, the valley still breathed out a heavy, sodden odour which seemed as oppressive as the heat in the lower hills. Only sometimes, brought into view by a curve of the track or the crest of a ridge, was there a glimpse of anything beyond this prisoning cleft – far off, blue against blue, the snow peaks of the Himalayas. No day’s journey, however long, seemed to bring them nearer.
They hired porters at the villages, each sourer and poorer than the last, a huddle of ramshackle huts spilt down the hillside like a rubbish-tip. The poorer each village seemed, the more sullen were its inhabitants, though they must have needed the money they were paid. Lung conducted all the negotations with great lordliness while Mrs Jones encouraged him with fierce mutters from behind the closed curtains of her litter.
On this third morning the track narrowed and began to climb erratically away from the river. Mostly the party was forced into single file, with Lung at the head, followed by half a dozen porters carrying their burdens slung fore and aft on coolie-poles and jogging up the track with an apparently tireless shuffle. Next came Theodore, leading Bessie, who carried the front end of the litter; its rear end was carried by Albert, because the litter-poles prevented him from straying and Mrs Jones was close enough to coax or bully him into tolerable behaviour. Then came two more porters with coolie-poles, and finally Rollo, led by an elderly, tiny man who carried no load but had a huge old pistol stuck in his belt to show he was guarding the party against bandits and so was worth his extra copper coin a day. He spoke a little Mandarin and Miao, beside his native Lolo. He wore a long wisp of grey beard, so Mrs Jones called him Uncle Sam.
‘Come and look here,’ called Mrs Jones after they had been travelling for a couple of hours. ‘Path’s wide enough for two, and old Bessie’ll jog along without you. I been looking at these here hangings.’
Theodore hitched Bessie’s reins to a basket and dropped back. Mrs Jones had drawn the litter curtains and was looking around for something to amuse her. The litter was a gaudy affair, like a miniature pavilion with gold tassels dangling at the corners; its curtains were scarlet, embroidered with green trees through which swooped blue and yellow birds. At the foot of each tree sat a man and a woman, fully clothed and not touching each other, but with something about their poses and expressions which produced in Theodore a flicker of unease.
Mrs Jones was dressed in much the same style as the women in the pictures, with her hair piled up into a bun, stuck through with great wooden pins, and her face painted white and scarlet like a doll’s. Her small hands fluttered inside the huge sleeves as she spoke.
‘Isn’t it perfectly marvellous needlework?’ she fluted in her upper-crust accent. ‘I can’t help wondering what they’re up to. What do you imagine the story is, Theo?’
‘There’s got to be a story?’
‘Oh, yes, please. I wouldn’t trust this gentleman here one inch. Why’s he giving her that lily – lilium tigrinum, I’d say? He’s just the type to deceive an innocent girl. Would you say she looked innocent?’
‘The rain has spoilt them.’
‘I don’t know,’ she cooed. ‘These vegetable dyes don’t run and wool stands a lot of wetting . . . Now is this the same lady? Ooh, fancy, she’s got a knife! Is it for herself or for him? It’s a different gentleman, I think . . .’
Theodore knew quite well what she was doing, deliberately steering the conversation as close as she could to the frontiers of indecency, to see how he would take it. At first she had been amused simply to play the mourning widow, a figure of mystery behind her curtains – to peep out at the fabulous Yangtze and the busy ferry-towns, or to wait with her gun cocked beneath the litter-rugs while Lung bargained with porters or officials. She had positively enjoyed the danger, and the triumph of using that danger to force both Lung and Theodore in the direction she wanted to go, towards the forbidden mountains. But now she was bored – bored with the slow job of the porters, and with her role as a female, mere baggage, not allowed to ride her own horse, let alone to halt the procession and botanize in the teeming woods. She had spent twenty minutes swearing at Albert, pitching her voice just below the level at which Theodore could pick out definite blasphemies, and now she was bored of that too and had found a subtler way of teasing him. He looked at the embroidered picture, and smiled.