Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [72]
He sighed again, his breath like a slow caress at the ridge of my jawline; I opened my eyes, slowly, to give him time to move away.
He did not. “Good morning,” he whispered, his soft, gravelly voice rumbling with recent sleep and great fatigue.
“Morning,” I said. I had to pull myself back with my elbows, so that I could sit up without my forehead smashing his high arched nose. “You seem troubled with thought.”
“That I am.” He sat on the edge of my seat, leaning on both his arms, his palms planted on either side of my legs. He was too close, and his proximity was constraining enough that I had to fight a mild panic. If he were to try and kiss me, there would be little I could do to avoid it, save for a hearty slap in the face. “Can you talk?”
“Sure.” I pulled up my knees to my chest, circumventing the arch of his arms, and felt immediately better as soon as my feet touched the floor. “What do you want to talk about?”
“My past,” he said. “Remember what I was telling you about Canton?”
Jack stayed with the rest of the Englishmen in the English factory—or, as the Chinese called it, hong. From what he described, it seemed more a vast complex of apartments, stores and secondary buildings than a place where anything was manufactured; every western nation represented in Canton was in control of one such sprawling building, surrounded by shallow gardens and allocated to the outside of the city walls. They were not allowed to house women, and the merchants who made homes there kept their families at Macao, where the Portuguese opium addict Jack had befriended came from. The two of them often took long walks by the port and around the city perimeter, all the while arguing about religion.
Jack was bored, and he used his time to learn the local Chinese dialect in addition to the pidgin they all used to communicate with half-naked coolies at the docks and the shopkeepers who hung signs in Chinese and English, undeterred from trade by neither imperial edicts and threats of death nor apparently latent patriotism. They always had good advice on bribing the officials.
Jack’s knowledge of Chinese made him useful, and his Portuguese friend and mentor told him he was interested in leaving Canton and traveling up the Pearl River, to distribute some of the religious tract he had cobbled together and printed in Chinese courtesy of some Englishman working at the Canton Herald. The book was the usual mix of misunderstood mysticism, catechism, and drugged fancies, such as his assurance of human ability to fly.
Missionary work was nothing new. However, in light of the recent souring of the relations due to the opium impasse and the mulish stubbornness of Captain Charles Elliot, the man who tried to negotiate the conditions of trade on the English side, it had become even more thankless and dangerous than before. Paolo’s plan was to have Jack dress in Chinese garb and send him up the river to distribute the religious pamphlets. His Chinese would be passable enough to keep him out of trouble—at least they both hoped this would be the case.
Jack told me he did not know who the men who captured him were—they spoke a dialect of Chinese strange to his ears, and they had no knowledge of pidgin whatsoever. They were not Chinese officials. They took his books and his clothes and beat him with great vigor, but did not put him into jail. Instead, they lowered him into what seemed to be a dried up well and tied large stones onto his back, around his neck, and to his arms and feet, so that he could not move.
“This is where it gets interesting,” he said and smiled when I leaned closer, enthralled. “I started trying to move, so as not to