The War of the Dragon Lady (32 page)

He was back within minutes. Alice had dried her tears and was staring sightlessly at the ground. Simon took her hand. ‘I’m afraid Gerald is dead, my dear. Shot through the heart. Sir Claude knew of the little swine’s treachery and it was confirmed when he saw him aim at me. He agrees completely with the subterfuge. By far the best way out. It seems no one noticed the incident in all the excitement.’ He released her hand. ‘Now wipe your face, my love. Here comes Jenkins with a glass of champagne for you.’ He grinned. ‘Rescuing us all, once again.’

Jenkins handed her the glass. ‘Cheer up, Miss Alice. I know we all smell a bit, but you shouldn’t turn your nose up at us, you know. We’re all you’ve got, see.’

Alice accepted the glass and a sad smile crept across her face. ‘Oh yes, my dear 352,’ she said. ‘And I couldn’t wish for better. I am very, very lucky.’

Mrs Griffith accepted the death of her son with the typical stoicism and faith of a missionary’s wife. She always knew, she said, that he was engaged in dangerous work somewhere – ‘intelligence work for Sir Claude, you know.’ Too secret to be admitted even now, but it did explain his absences. She was sure that her husband would have been proud of him and so it was fitting that he should be buried next to him in the Legation’s little cemetery.

Even so, Alice realised that she could not face her aunt on an everyday basis for long and she urged Simon to make haste to get them away. First, however, she had to complete her despatches and send them off as soon as cable facilities were re-established in the Quarter. This was done and accepted with enthusiastic alacrity by the
Morning Post
in London’s Fleet Street. She had filed a separate story on Simon’s adventures in getting to Tientsin and on his part
in the attack on the city there, as well as the relief of Peking. This was, of course, her scoop on Dr Morrison’s despatch for
The Times
and it made Fonthill a celebrity in the war-torn capital, much to his embarrassment.

The siege of Peking and its relief had made front-page news in all the great capitals of the world. Yet the atmosphere in the Legation Quarter, particularly in the impossibly troop-crowded British Legation, was now one of anticlimax. Free from the danger, the noise and the rumour-fed tension of the last fifty-five days, the inhabitants of the Legation were at a loss. The civilians wandered around, rather dreamily, inspecting the barricades and complaining now of the crowded living conditions. Monsieur Pichon, the despised French minister, made it known that he was already halfway through his account of the siege and that he had secured a publisher for it in Paris. The hard-pressed medical staff in the hospital were relieved of their duties by the army doctors and orderlies and, with more sophisticated care and supplies now available, the wounded began to make much quicker progress.

To Alice’s relief, her aunt announced on the day of Gerald’s burial that she intended to return immediately to her home and recommence her work in the mission there. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, however, Chang decided that he wished to take holy orders and help his mother in her work in the village.

‘I think I am not really a soldier,’ he confided to Simon and Jenkins. ‘I find I get afraid too much, you know.’

‘Blimey, Changy,’ said Jenkins, ‘don’t we all?’

Chang gave a smile that wrinkled his battered nose. ‘Oh no, Mr Jenkins,’ he said. ‘Not you two. No, not you two.’

So the five of them sadly retraced their steps to the house in the little village that they had left in such a hurry two months before. They found it still locked and untouched. The Fonthills and Jenkins stayed just long enough to ensure that Mrs Griffith and Chang were safely reinstalled before returning to Peking. There, Simon began to make arrangements for their passage home to Norfolk, England.

These were not completed when a cable arrived addressed to him. This was unusual because, although Alice was now in frequent touch with her editor in Fleet Street, Fonthill rarely received urgent mail.

‘It’s a knighthood, darling,’ said Alice. ‘No more than you deserve.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s probably a bill.’

He tore it open, read the message, reread it and then silently handed it to his wife. She read:

Alice looked up, frowning. ‘Kitchener. He was an intelligence major when we were in the Sudan, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes. Never met him. Of course, he became a general and beat the Sudanese finally at Omdurman two years ago and I understand that he has taken over from Roberts in command of the British army in South Africa. So the war there continues.’

‘Seems like it.’ Alice looked hard at him. ‘You are getting famous, my love.’

‘Umph. Don’t know about that. I’m also getting old. I wonder what “urgent task” means?’

‘Don’t you think we ought to go home via the Cape and find out?’

‘What? Do you mean it? Honestly?’

‘Of course. I think Jenkins would get awfully bored in Norfolk again, don’t you?’

He grinned and kissed her. ‘You’re marvellous,’ he said. Then he called through the open door, ‘352, can you spare a minute?’

The War of the Dragon Lady
is a novel, of course, but I have tried to relate the main events of the Boxer Rebellion and the Siege of Peking as accurately as a study of respected accounts of the conflict allows. It is important, however, to distinguish between fact and fiction. Fonthill, Jenkins, Alice, Chang and the Griffiths sprang from my imagination, as did Gerald's mentor, Kuang Li. However, Sir Claude MacDonald very much existed, as did the Generals Jung Lu, Tung Fu-hsiang, Lineivitch, Frey and Gaselee, Admiral Seymour, Brigadier Dorward, Colonel Shiba, Dr Morrison, Monsieur Pichon – who published a best-selling memoir of the siege, portraying himself as a hero – and the Dragon Lady herself, of course, the Dowager Empress.

A way into the Chinese City of Peking
was
found by barefooted Sikhs, who climbed up cracks in the great outer wall; the Rajputs
did
enter the Legation Quarter via the sluice gate and were the first into the Quarter; the Russians
did
attack the wrong gate; and a Belgian lady
was
shot by a sniper as she stood on the Legation lawn to welcome the relieving troops. Other individual incidents I relate as occurring during the siege – such as the destroying of the Chinese guns on the Chien Men tower, the counter-attack at the destroyed Austrian Legation, and the ‘friendly fire' falling on the Americans at Yangtsun – did take place. It is also true that spies frequently found easy methods of entry and exit into the Quarter throughout the siege.

I must confess, however, to diverting from the truth a touch here and there in recounting the detail of the siege. For instance, the gallant and popular Captain Strouts was not killed on the attack on the Krupps guns but during a defence of the French Legation. By the same token, I have taken liberties occasionally in the timing of the events of the Uprising, mainly so that I could involve Simon, Jenkins and Chang in them without stretching chronology and geography too far. I believe, however, that these indulgencies have not altered the overall veracity of my story of the rise of the Boxers and the Siege of Peking. This is a novel, after all. Nevertheless, I extend my apologies to scholars of the period who may be offended by these minor departures from fact.

The Boxer Rebellion shocked the world by the ferocity with which the Boxers attacked foreign missionaries throughout northern China in 1900. Stories emerged of elderly Europeans and their families being brought into village squares and beheaded, one by one. Wives of missionaries were forced to watch their husbands decapitated, as, holding the hands of their children, they waited their turn. On one
such occasion, more than three hundred men, women and children were killed.

The Foreign Powers, of course, took their revenge after the relief of Peking. Punitive columns were sent out into the provinces to find the perpetrators and shoot or hang them. Some of the Chinese military leaders were executed and others, as related, committed suicide. Financial and other reparations were levied on the Chinese Government that ended the long reign of the Manchu dynasty, held back the growth of that country for generations and led to the eventual coming to power of the Communist Party.

And the Dragon Lady herself? With the relief column at the eastern wall, she hurriedly packed and escaped to the north before setting off on a seven-hundred-mile ‘tour of inspection' to the south and west. She was not pursued and eventually returned to the capital two months later. As she stepped down from her ceremonial chair at the entrance to the city, the wall was lined by survivors of the siege. She looked up at them, gave a distant smile, clasped her hands together and bowed. Immediately, the survivors applauded her. It was a strange ending to an even stranger conflict.

As ever, I owe a debt to the staff of the London Library for helping with my research; to my agent, Jane Conway-Gordon, for her constant support; and to my wife, Betty, devoted proofreader, research assistant and lifelong mate.

The Siege of Peking provoked scores of books, not all of them consistent in their recording of events, nor in their Western spelling of Chinese names. I read many but, in the end, relied heavily on
The Siege at Peking
, by Peter Fleming, published by Rupert Hart-Davis (London 1959);
The Siege of the Peking Legations, a Diary
, by Lancelot Giles; and
Chinese Anti-Foreignism and the Boxer Uprising
by L.R. Marchant, both published by the University of Western Australia Press.

According to author J
OHN
W
ILCOX
, an inability to do sums and a nascent talent to string words together steered him towards journalism – that and the desire to wear a trench coat, belted with a knot, just like Bogart. After a number of years working as a journalist, he was lured into industry. In the mid-nineties he sold his company in order to devote himself to his first love, writing. His Simon Fonthill novels have been published to high acclaim and he has also published two works of non-fiction.

www.johnwilcoxauthor.co.uk