‘Mr Moddie remember a ship call Lord Amherst?’
‘Yes,’ Bahram nodded. ‘I remember.’
Bahram recalled the affair of the Lord Amherst with exceptional clarity because he had himself been involved in it, in a small way. It had happened six years ago: the Lord Amherst was one of many British ships to be sent to forage along the northern coast of China, in the hope of finding new ports through which to funnel opium and other foreign goods into the country. The British had long chafed against the constraints that were imposed upon them by the Chinese authorities, and of these none was felt to be more restrictive than the rule that compelled foreign traders to limit their activities to Canton: the thinking was that if only some means could be found of circumventing this regulation then the volume of trade could be vastly expanded.
The Lord Amherst’s mission was thus to try to establish links with people who might be inclined to subvert Chinese laws and regulations. It was a risky task, but the potential for profit was very great; the merchants who succeeded in entering these new, virgin markets were sure to earn enormous rewards. By virtue of his standing in the community, Bahram was one of the few non-British merchants to be invited to invest in the venture, and since such an opportunity could not be allowed to go begging he had added fifty crates to the Lord Amherst’s cargo.
But the mission had not gone well. Hit by bad weather, the Lord Amherst had been forced to take shelter in a Chinese port. When asked by the local authorities what their ship was doing so far north, the officers had said that they had been blown off course while sailing from Calcutta to Japan; a perfectly reasonable answer, except that they happened to be carrying pamphlets, printed in Chinese, that left little doubt of their actual intention. The officers had also taken the prudent precaution of lying about the ship’s name, so that in the event of a protest from the government the East India Company would be able to deny ownership – but this too had not turned out too well, for somehow the Chinese officials, in their usual bothersome way, had succeeded in ascertaining the facts.
Here Punhyqua broke in and addressed Bahram directly. ‘That-time Lin Zexu, he Governor Kiangsi. He savvy allo this-thing. Maybe he thinkee, English-fellow speakee too muchi lie, allo time.’
Bahram laughed. ‘Is tooroo,’ he said. ‘England-fellow speakee plenty lie. But he just like us: he likee cash.’
In any event, the matter of the Lord Amherst had evidently made a deep impression on Lin Zexu. On taking up his next post, in Hukwang, he had launched a massive campaign to eradicate opium – and being the man he was, his efforts had met with far greater success than any before. Indeed he had become such an expert on opium-trafficking that he was one of the select few to be asked to submit reports on opium to the Son of Heaven – and his memorial on the subject had proved to be the most comprehensive ever written.
Now, once again, Punhyqua leant forward. ‘Mr Moddie, Lin Zexu, he savvy allo,’ he said. ‘Allo, allo. He have got too muchi spy. He sabbi how cargo come, who bringee, where it go. Allo he savvy. If he come Governor Canton too muchi bad day for trade.’
‘But nothing has been decided yet, no?’
‘No. Not yet,’ said the linkister. ‘But Emperor meet Governor Lin many time already. He give him permission ride horse in Beijing. Is big sign. People say, Emperor has told that he cannot face shadow of ancestor until opium business is rooted from China.’
‘But others have tried before, no?’ said Bahram. ‘Even the present Governor is trying: raids, executions, searches – all the time we hear. But still it goes on.’
Punhyqua leant forward again and tapped Bahram’s knee with a fingernail. ‘Governor Lin not like other mandarin,’ he said. ‘If he come to Canton, too muchi trouble Mr Moddie. If cargo have got, better sell now, jaldi chop-chop.’
*
‘Why,’ said Fitcher, scratching his chin, ‘it must be Billy Kerr they were speaking of.’
Paulette looked up from Robin’s letter. ‘But sir, surely the man who introduced the world to the Tiger Lily and the Chinese Juniper and Christmas Camellia was not a smoker of opium?’
‘Oh he had his share of troubles, did poor Billy Kerr…’
Kerr had been in China a couple of years already when Fitcher met him for the first time, in Canton, in the winter of 1806. He was in his mid-twenties then, a little younger than Fitcher: a tall, strapping Scotsman, he had more energy and ambition than he could put to good use. He had arrived in Canton bearing the gaudy title of ‘Royal Gardener’ but only to find that it carried no weight in the British Factory, which was as starchy in its own way as a manor house. A gardener was, after all, just a servant and was expected to comport himself as such, remaining below stairs and refraining from intruding upon his superiors.
It was true certainly that Billy had been born with dirt beneath his fingernails – his father had been a gardener before him, and probably his grandfather too. But Billy was a sharp, hard-working fellow who had applied himself to his books and his botany with a mind to bettering himself. His position in the British Factory didn’t jibe with his idea of his own consequence and he was a little bit forward at times: as a result, instead of finding a place at the high table, he was fed a steady diet of snubs and slights. Nor did it help that his salary, which, at a hundred English pounds a year, would have been perfectly adequate elsewhere, was a trifling sum in Canton: Billy could not even afford to pay for his own washing.
‘Billy was a forthy fellow, prickly as a hedgy-boar.’
One summer he had run off to the Philippines, in defiance of Sir Joseph’s instructions. Unfortunately for him the voyage had turned into a disaster: the collection he had put together in Manila was destroyed by a typhoon, on the way back to China.
Billy took it hard: the journey was but a few months behind him when Fitcher arrived in Canton. Fitcher could see that he had been greatly affected: one sign of it was that he had moved out of the British Factory, cutting himself off from his compatriots. A Chinese merchant had granted him the use of a plot of land, near Fa-Tee, and he had built himself a little shack there. Fitcher had visited him once and so far as he could tell, Kerr’s existence was one of hermitlike solitude. His ‘house’ consisted of a single room, surrounded by clusters of saplings and rows of experimental plant-beds. His only companion was the boy he had hired to help with his garden, Ah Fey: he was some thirteen or fourteen years old at that time, and by dint of his service with Kerr, he already spoke fluent English.
‘Is that the same Ah Fey who brought the camellia picture to England?’
‘Yes. The very one.’
Although Ah Fey had successfully discharged his mission, his departure from Canton was not without a price for Kerr: deprived of his only companion he had become more isolated than ever. When Fitcher saw him next he was in a poor state: his skeletally thin frame and haunted eyes were clear signs that he was in an advanced stage of addiction. Desperately eager to be on his way, he had left Canton within a couple of days of Fitcher’s arrival. Fitcher was never to see him again: he died of a fever shortly after his arrival in Colombo.
‘And what of Ah Fey?’
‘Ah, that’s a strange story now…’
On returning to England, three years later, Fitcher had learnt that Ah Fey’s time at Kew had not been a happy one: he had quarrelled with the foremen and fought with the family he was living with. A local clergyman had taken the little savage into his house, in the hope of saving his soul by awakening him to the Lord. In return, Ah Fey had burgled his house and disappeared.
For many years after that, reports were heard that Ah Fey had changed his name and was living in the slums of East London, pushing a costermonger’s barrow.
‘Did you ever see him yourself?’
‘No,’ said Fitcher. ‘Last I heard of him, he was working his way back to China, on a ship. But that was a long time ago now – over twenty years if memory serves me right.’
*
By the time all eighty-eight courses of the banquet had been served and the last toasts drunk, the diners’ wine-cups had been filled and refilled so many times that there was scarcely a guest present who was entirely steady on his feet. It remained only to thank the host and say the final chin-chins: then Bahram headed back towards the estate’s landing jetty with some of his English and American friends. They strolled down to the water arm-in-arm, with dozens of lantern-bearers lighting their way, and it was agreed by all that the warmth and conviviality of the night had been such as to place it among the finest banquets of all.
On reaching the jetty there was one last burst of leave-taking and then they parted. As the others headed off
