The Silver Lotus Read online

  On their second night in San Francisco, as they sat down to a lovely supper for the first time in weeks, Lady Yee decided it was time to remind her husband that there was a new captain expected on deck in about seven months, give or take a few days. He sat back in his chair and stared off into the distance. After a silent interval he came down to earth again, looked at his beautiful wife, and said, “You know, I must thank you again, dearest lady, for such an inspiring gift.” He did point out, however, that her happy, heaven-sent condition precluded any further journeys by sea for several years to come, if ever. That being the case, he asked her where she would like to live and raise her children. He confidently assured her that their present circumstances would allow her to choose a fine mansion anywhere in San Francisco, or all of California for that matter, and she might employ as many servants as she pleased.

  Lady Yee acknowledged her husband’s generosity, but she said that she preferred to live with him, even if that meant sailing away again. The captain laughed and said he had no intention of sailing away and leaving her behind. He had more than enough capital to trade on his own behalf without going back to sea for quite a while. And, barring ill fortune, The Silver Lotus would continue to realize decent profits for a few years to come. By any measure one cared to use, they were wealthy enough now to retire from business altogether if she so pleased.

  The captain’s wife smiled and declared that she would never allow her husband to sacrifice anything that gave him real pleasure, but children, she said, rarely make such allowances, and are selfishly prone to favor the presence of both parents. Captain Hammond promised to fulfill his role as a confused parent as soon as Lady Yee was pleased to make delivery. Until then, he suggested they find a fitting place to live before they were forced to emulate Joseph and Mary.

  Lady Yee had no idea what he was referring to, but she smiled and suggested there was no reason to search for something they already possessed. She said the house in Monterey served their purposes directly, and they presently warehoused enough handcrafted furnishings to dress the place out ten times over. She bolstered her suggestion by saying that after their child was born, they could move on if the captain wished to. But for the moment, Lady Yee, who professed to dislike the abiding filth, noise, and constant bustle of city life, pleaded for the serenity of a small town, the peaceful refuge of her own gardens, and the salubrious influence of gentle ocean breezes. Captain Hammond, who had long since surrendered all instincts to say no to anything his wife suggested, immediately saw the logic in her thinking, and promised to make all the necessary arrangements at once.

  The day after The Silver Lotus was dispatched back to Portland for her refit, Captain Hammond, his wife, her maid, and her cook left San Francisco by train. They arrived at the depot in Monterey that same evening. The captain had wired ahead to his bank to say he was returning to live in his house. He requested that the bank use its good offices to hire a wagon and two strong men to meet them at the depot. The captain had removed all their possessions from the ship before it sailed, and was surprised to find that their property in total filled eight packing crates and four hundred-gallon barrels. Their personal luggage was another matter, and ultimately required the services of a mule cart, along with a surrey to carry the household.

  Considering the scale of his deposits, and the chances of ingratiating themselves into further financial considerations, the captain’s Monterey bank sent along one of its clerks to see to it that its client’s requirements were satisfied in a timely fashion. His name was Jacob Oaks. He was twenty-three and almost at once he became totally enthralled with the house of Hammond. It was young Oaks who accidently gave rise to the undying rumor that Captain Hammond was married to a very wealthy Chinese princess of the old imperial household. What Mr. Oaks had in fact said was that Captain Hammond was married to a beautiful Chinese woman who looked like a rich fairy-tale princess. Still and all, once the rumor clicked over a couple of times, the engine started right up and continued humming along, gathering momentum all on its own. Soon Lady Yee discovered that nothing she could do or say would convince people that she wasn’t in the least respect related to any imperial family and, despite her husband’s acts to the contrary, she wasn’t a princess of anything larger than her household, and her father was only the emperor of six warehouses and three loading piers in Canton.

  But the rumor only dug in its heels with denial. As it passed from one to another, and possibly challenged by a listener, people would simply say that Lady Yee was a person of infinite modesty and decorum, and a person that would never have allowed address as a titled personage in America. And still, no matter what Lady Yee did to disabuse people of this absurd story, it continued on, though part of the problem could be laid at her husband’s door. His insistence on always referring to his wife as Lady Yee cemented the general belief that she must be of royal blood. Still, it was Lady Yee’s serene, sophisticated, and regal deportment, plus her facility with foreign languages, which locked down the community consensus that Monterey was now home to an authentic Chinese princess. The fact that her husband was a wealthy, handsome, and dashing sea captain only enhanced the romantic image they had come to prefer. To the local population, whose middle-class tastes defiantly leaned toward the romantic side of periodical fiction, the Hammonds were like exotic characters that might have been invented by Thackeray, Brontë, or Hawthorne.

  Lady Yee, however, found the whole business personally and culturally very distressing, and more like a bizarre Lewis Carroll fantasy than anything else. On the one hand the Americans treated the local Chinese very poorly, and generally thought of them as little better than beasts of burden, whereas she was always regarded with the greatest deference and respect. It took Captain Hammond to point out that in China, as well as most other parts of Asia, clan and family provided the vehicle to success and the paths to power, but in America it was only wealth. In America, any fool could rise to prominence with only one dubious credential to his or her name: stacks and stacks of greenback dollars. The captain impressed on Lady Yee the understanding that money was the American god, the American philosophy, and the American creed all in one, and that people high and low bowed to its majesty. He told Lady Yee that it was her wealth that truly instigated people’s respect. If she were truly poor, whether Oriental or Occidental, no one would have bothered giving her the time of day, and her beauty would have only been an invitation to men of dark purposes.

  Though she had always been taught that this was possibly true about most Yankees, Lady Yee took special note of her husband’s particular lesson, principally because it seemed to interlock in an odd way with her father’s favorite dictum that every disadvantage could be made to serve a good purpose if one didn’t take the circumstances too personally. He had once told her that what people believed to be the truth, despite all evidence to the contrary, remained the truth in their eyes, and it was possible to make this work to one’s own advantage.

  By way of example, he told his daughter the story of a poor Taoist monk who was famous for his compassion, generosity of spirit, and good works. As it happened, there was another man in the next province who carried exactly the same name, but who made his way through the world as a vicious bandit and murderer. Somehow a rumor got started that the two men were one and the same. Despite the rumor’s complete and total implausibility, when the story became widespread, the authorities decided to investigate. When they discovered that the connection between the two men was indeed only a name, and broadly published this fact, it did nothing to hobble the groundless speculation that the kindly monk was in fact a truly dangerous and cunning villain who had even fooled the authorities.

  The poor modest little monk was so distressed by this turn of events that he even entertained thoughts of suicide to clear his name, that is, until one day when he noticed something odd. Now when he went about begging for money to help the poor, people had a marked tendency to be far more respectful and generous than they had been before the ridicu
lous story had taken root.

  Of course, they all called him the “bandit monk” behind his back, a pointless slander he was well aware of, but with the funds he raised over the years, he built three hospitals for the poor, endowed a temple and residence for the Taoist nuns who worked in the hospitals, and with the help of a rich and enlightened (if somewhat fearful) patron, built a medical school and sanitarium dedicated to the study of mental disorders and madness. Later in life the little monk would laugh and confess that, taken altogether, if it hadn’t been for the confusion surrounding his name, none of what he’d accomplished over the years would have been possible.

  Like the Taoist monk, Lady Yee became determined to make use of her situation. It seemed, the captain observed, that all of Monterey really needed and wanted a rich, beautiful, and secretive Chinese princess living in their midst and, barring all apparent reality, or cogent arguments to the contrary, that Lady Yee had drawn the short straw. She would have to make the best of things as they lay. And though he was much amused, the captain was in no way surprised when he discovered not only to what purpose Lady Yee had used her disadvantage, but how she had augmented this now popular image in the very subtlest of ways to better serve her own purposes.

  ALL SUCH PETTY nonsense thankfully melted into the background as California prepared to celebrate what was hoped to be the birth of a new and prosperous century. Everyone had something to say about the portents of the year 1900. As usual, there were always those of morbid and pessimistic predilections who foretold the end of the world for any number of moral or biblical reasons, but for the most part people ignored all that with their own plans for elaborate festivities to celebrate the future greatness of their state in a grand style. Every civic ladies’ club, fraternal organization, local Grange, state college alumni association, firehouse marshal, and military veterans’ group of every ilk and conflict had realigned its entire focus toward celebrating a lucrative future.

  With this distraction in mind, Captain Hammond decided to introduce himself to, and ingratiate himself with, the town fathers, and do so in the best possible circumstances. Thus Captain Hammond, using Lady Yee’s best testamentary and calligraphically artistic skills, wrote and arranged to have his Chinese connections in San Francisco send him six hundred pounds of assorted fireworks and rockets, all of the best quality. These crates he had delivered free of charge to the mayor and city council of Monterey, but in care of the sheriff’s office. For reasons of safety and security, the captain just assumed the sheriff would know how to keep such a potentially dangerous cargo out of harm’s way. A few days after the shipment arrived by train, Captain Hammond received an elaborately stylized letter of gratitude from the mayor on behalf of the citizens of Monterey. It was cosigned by every member of the city council as well as the sheriff, and came with an invitation to be the honored guest to light the very first fuse on the appointed night.

  This invitation pleased Lady Yee, for being Chinese she well understood the intricate language of fireworks, and the spiritual connotations and purposes behind every cluster, arrangement, and color. And though she was quite sure the locals would follow their own agenda in such matters, fond as they were of deafening brass bands, thunderous bass drums, and crashing cymbals, Lady Yee would still enjoy the fireworks and chrysanthemum rockets for their own sake. Her father, Master Yee, had always employed a professional display team to celebrate her birthday every year, so it was something of a family tradition. Captain Hammond happily kept up the practice, though on a more modest scale when they were at sea.

  Amid all this local backslapping, toasting, planning, and organizing, and while she was well into her fifth month of pregnancy, Captain Hammond began to notice that something very strange and eerily unique had begun to influence Lady Yee’s insights. She just blushed in a maternal fashion, and said she assumed it had something to do with her condition, but the good captain, being of ancient New England stock, was just superstitious enough to believe that his wife was now possessed of a mysterious, and potentially disquieting, ability. He listened in rapt amazement as she would solve complex problems out of thin air, and with little or no information to guide her to a solution. Soon nothing in the house could be lost or misplaced for long. It was most remarkable, but she always knew where everything was, no matter how improbable the item or location, or whether she’d seen it or not in the past. It was most disconcerting for the captain to come to terms with the knowledge that his wife even knew how much money he carried in his wallet, and whether a sock—hidden by a boot—had a hole in it.

  Then one day in late November, Lady Yee read in the newspaper about a man whose body had been found floating in the bay off Moss Landing, and despite the indisputable fact that the man had drowned, he was discovered wearing a rope with a hangman’s knot around his neck. However, there were no medical signs to indicate that the dead man had ever hung from the rope. The police were confused and unable to categorize the incident one way or the other.

  Lady Yee handed the short article to her husband to read, and when he’d finished a few moments later, he looked up to see his wife nodding as if she knew the answer, and she did. She calmly told the captain that the man had been murdered on his wife’s orders for habitual infidelity. She also believed there was substantial money involved. Captain Hammond raised a brow and nodded indulgently as though this kind of behavior was an everyday occurrence, which was true. Then, like any number of strange things that had happened of late, he forgot all about it, and went back to his accounts.

  Two weeks later the same newspaper printed another article that stated the police were actively searching for the whereabouts of one Mrs. Moira Blackrock on suspicion of commissioning the murder of her husband, whose body was lately discovered floating unceremoniously in Monterey Bay. The reporter stated that the police believed the motive was revenge for infidelity and the proceeds of a life insurance policy worth five thousand dollars. The paid assassin had been apprehended after bragging to a prostitute that his was the more lucrative line of work, as he had just been promised twenty-five hundred dollars for ten minutes’ labor. Afterward, without mentioning the murder, he complained of not getting paid for his services. The prostitute, knowing that Moira Blackrock had been an acquaintance of her client, and that her husband was missing, put the parts together and went to the police with her suspicions.

  When the captain, now quite surprised by the outcome, went to Lady Yee with the article, she couldn’t remember anything about it. She didn’t even recall reading the original gazette entry. And then later that same day, when a broker acquaintance in San Francisco wired Captain Hammond with an offer to sell a healthy block of railroad shares that were going up in price all the time, Lady Yee calmly told her husband to wait until after news of the scandal had spread, for the prices of the shares would most certainly come down.

  When the captain asked what scandal she meant, she responded with the news that one of the directors of the railroad had embezzled considerable funds from the company and had run off to Brazil with the wife of a state senator.

  The captain, who by custom read financial periodicals religiously, had not scanned the least breath of scandal from that quarter. Since Lady Yee could not quite remember where she had obtained the information, the captain let the matter slide by without comment. Still and all, taking past experience to heart, he made no move to buy the offered shares. Ten days later all the papers put out banner headlines reporting the fraud of the decade. The particulars of the crime were just as Lady Yee had said they would be, but by then she had forgotten all about it. The next day Captain Hammond picked up the very same shares for a fraction of the price first quoted. He didn’t bother mentioning this to his wife on the plausible assumption that she’d probably known all about it before he made the purchase.

  Even for a town as small as Monterey, the new century was celebrated with spectacular enthusiasm and expense. There were dress balls being hosted by all manner of organizations, and fiesta-like celebrat
ions where food and drink were the primary focus, but all was handsomely plumed at midnight by a spectacular fireworks display launched from Lover’s Point under the supervision of the police department, and a nice little Chinese gentleman the captain had hired from San Francisco to supervise the display. His name was Mr. Cheng Na Wa, and his clan had been making fireworks displays for five centuries.

  It was said by some that Monterey County didn’t sober up for a week, but that wasn’t true in the least. The Methodist population of Pacific Grove held some odds on sobriety, which kept a balance, but the majority of people were too short of funds to celebrate that seriously, unless the spirits consumed were homemade, which was more common than one might suppose. Everybody else just went back to work the next day and talked about the fireworks, and how strange all the rich folks looked and behaved.

  As the weeks rolled by and the fetus grew larger, so did Lady Yee’s sense of perception, and ultimately prognostication. One day she insisted that her husband not take the train to San Jose on business. He bowed to her wishes grudgingly but was impressed and relieved when he heard that the Salinas River rail bridge had collapsed that same day. Recent heavy rains had scoured away so much supporting soil that the bridge simply collapsed on its own. Happily, no one was hurt because the train the captain would have occupied was late leaving Monterey due to a slight labor malfunction. It was reported that the brakeman had been found drunk and disorderly at his post, and was replaced with a crewman from another train. The captain visualized an inebriated brakeman and a weakened bridge and immediately went to his wife and thanked her for the timely warning. She again claimed to have no idea what he was talking about, so again he let the matter drop.

  Captain Hammond was not a man easily intimidated or disoriented by unexpected events, but his pregnant wife’s newfound clairvoyance and subsequent lack of recall were beginning to make him truly uncomfortable. He worried about her health, and at times even her sanity seemed in question. But there always remained the cloying reality that, recalled or not, she was always disinterested and always correct, and wherein could one possibly find fault with that?