Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,108

The woman’s voice cracked, and she had to start over. “I love him still. I’m told he came back to England, hoping to find someone to care for his daughter when he died, and I would be honored if you would allow me to do that. For his sake, and for yours.”

Ji felt a breeze kick up cool against her face. Heard a child laugh and a dog bark somewhere nearby. It would be so easy to let this woman go on believing a lie. So easy. But even a well-meaning lie could sometimes cause incalculable harm.

It was the hardest thing Ji had ever done, but somehow she forced herself to say, “I’m not his daughter. Not really. He adopted me after he found me abandoned by the river the day his real daughter and her mother died. People think he named me Ji because it means ‘good fortune’ and I was lucky he found me. But he always said I was his good fortune because I gave him a reason to keep living.”

Ji saw the woman’s chest jerk with a quickly indrawn breath and knew just how much her words had hurt the woman—that she’d been holding on to the comforting thought that a part of Hayes still lived, and Ji had just taken that away from her. Then the woman gave a strange smile and shook her head. “If he adopted you, then he loved you and you are his daughter. That’s all that matters. Will you let me do this, for him?”

Blinking hard against the threat of tears, Ji glanced over at Alice, who was no longer playing her hurdy-gurdy and was instead simply holding it and listening to them. “What about Alice? We’ve been taking care of each other.”

“Ach, child,” said Alice quickly, “don’t you be worrying about me. I’ll be fine.”

“If Alice has been taking care of you, then I think it’s only fair that we continue to take care of her.” The woman held out her finely gloved hand. “Will you let me? Please?”

For one suspended moment, Ji hesitated. Then she reached out and felt the woman’s hand close protectively around hers.

Historical Note

T he Allied Sovereigns’ visit to London in June of 1814 was, if anything, even more of a whirlwind of activities than depicted here. I have tried to stay as close to the actual schedule as possible, although I shifted a few events. The reception at Carlton House was not held on the evening of 9 June, and the barge expedition down the Thames started earlier in the morning.

The barges on the Thames were the stretch limos of their day. For a good six hundred years, virtually every guild, official organization, and wealthy family had its own elegant barge, complete with a liveried crew. On the Thames side of Somerset House, you can still see the arched entrances to the building’s old barge house, and several surviving examples of the carved, gilded barges are preserved at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

The British East India Company was basically an example of capitalism run amok. A joint-stock company with its origins in a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth I, it eventually turned into an empire-building enterprise with the right to acquire and rule territory, raise an army and navy, make war, and mint money. By Sebastian’s time the company controlled most of the Indian subcontinent and had an army of more than a quarter of a million men (twice the size of the British Army). It was when the Directors of the company ran into financial difficulties in the eighteenth century that they convinced Parliament to pass the Tea Act of 1773, which of course helped spark the American Revolution. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 led to the end of company rule in India, with the Crown taking direct control of what then became the British Raj.

The Canton System and the East India Company’s trade with China were essentially as described here. One of the most helpful books I read on the subject was Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845.

Both the process for producing tea and the plants themselves were once closely guarded Chinese secrets. The East India Company did eventually manage to send in spies to discover the secret to tea production and steal some of the plants. They then began to grow their own tea in India and what was at the time called Ceylon.

The story of Britain’s role in the production and spread of opium use is sordid. By forcing Indian farmers to produce opium rather than wheat, the East India Company did cause massive famines. The worst was in 1777, but smaller famines continued to occur throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than carry the opium in their own ships, the company sublet the operation to what were called “country traders”—private ships used to smuggle the opium from India to China. The silver thus earned was then used by the company to buy the Chinese luxury goods they shipped back to Britain. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, addiction levels in China had soared and were becoming a huge problem. When the Qing dynasty finally moved decisively to put a stop to the smuggling, Britain declared war on China—twice. As a result of what became known as the Opium Wars, the Chinese government was forced to legalize the opium trade. The Opium Wars also helped to spur a wave of Chinese immigrants to the West Coast of the United States. And yes, they brought opium with them.

Hero’s interviews with street musicians are based on the reports of Henry Mayhew. Most street musicians of the time were either blind or of foreign birth.

The character Mahmoud Abbasi is loosely based on a man named Sake Dean Mahomed, a former captain in the East India Company who ran what is believed to have been the first Indian restaurant in London. The Hindoostane Coffee House opened in George Street in 1810 but was forced to close the following year, after which Mahomed went into the “shampooing” business. Turkish-style baths became increasingly common in the late Regency (one opened near Jamie Knox’s old tavern at Bishopsgate churchyard in 1817), although it was under the reign of Victoria that they really exploded when they were widely recommended for “medicinal purposes.”

British use of Lascars continued well into the twentieth century. There were more than fifty thousand Lascars working on British ships at the outbreak of World War II, and when I took a P&O ship from Australia in the 1970s, the ship’s crew was still almost entirely Indian or Goan. Many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indians who ended up in Britain took local wives, with their children being absorbed into London’s population. There were no legal restrictions on mixed-race marriages in nineteenth-century England, and in 1817 a magistrate of the Tower Hamlets wrote with “disgust” about the number of local white women marrying Indian seamen. For an interesting firsthand look at the life of a half-Indian, half-British man growing up in nineteenth-century London, see Albert Mahomet’s From Street Arab to Pastor.

There was a ship called the Earl of Abergavanney that struck the Shambles off the Isle of Portland in a dense fog, but that was in 1805 and it sank. Its captain, John Wordsworth, was a brother of the poet, and he went down with his ship.

The medieval church of St. Dunstan-in-the-East managed to survive the damage of the Great Fire of 1666, but some of the repairs were done badly. By the early nineteenth century, the weight of the roof had forced the walls seven inches out of perpendicular. In 1817, it was completely rebuilt in a similar style, only to be heavily damaged by bombing in World War II. Rather than tear it down or rebuild again, the ruins and the churchyard were turned into a lovely park that can still be found today near the Tower of London.