SQ 04 - The English Concubine Read online

  Passion and power in l860s Singapore

  (Volume 4, The Straits Quartet)

  DAWN FARNHAM

  Contents

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  43

  Glossary

  Map of Singapore Town in 1862.

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated to all those who strive to keep alive the rich historical heritage of Singapore.

  In particular, Geraldine Lowe-Ismael who has been an advocate for and dedicated guide to the stories and memories of Singapore’s past for over forty years.

  Also to the Friends of the Museums of Singapore, an organisation of passionate volunteers who support heritage in Singapore. There is no doubt that my time as a docent in the Peranakan Museum inspired this series.

  1

  ‘The whole of Singapore is going to the dogs.’

  As if to lend credence to these words, half a dozen rib-caged mongrels on the riverside set about each other, growling and snarling over some slops hurled onto the fetid bank of low tide.

  For the thousands of inhabitants of the squat kajang-roofed boats, the river served every daily purpose. When the river water dragged away to its rendezvous with the ocean, the wind carried the stench of the muddy sludge over the government offices, which lay mere feet away, and a choice had to be made between cloacal odour and sweltering heat. The newspapers said it killed the Chinese and Klings who lived on and along it even though scores of Indian convicts laboured up to their knees on every low tide, bucketing out the foul mud and filth that built up against the quay walls.

  The press raised fears of the noxious gases rising from the rubbish-dumped upper river which endangered the town. Dr. Cowper, the military surgeon, said the gangrenous bodies of sick Chinese and the improper disposal of corpses was to blame for the cholera epidemic in Chinatown and Kampong Glam. Heated debate went back and forth in the newspaper regarding the controversial theory that the disease was spread by polluted water and not foul air with neither side winning the argument. In the meantime the bodies of the dying continued to litter the streets and the riverside, and ten funerals in the Chinese and native cemeteries took place every day.

  The Chinese didn’t read the newspapers and held firecracker-popping processions with drums and gongs, carrying palanquins of deities and great smoking tubs of joss. Only in this way could they exorcise the power of huoluan, the sudden chaos, which they knew perfectly well was caused by the malign forces of demons serving the Wangye, the Kings of Pestilence.

  Robert Macleod, Commissioner of Police, rubbed his shoulder, a dark mood hanging on him like the river smell. An old wound had begun to give him trouble but this was not the cause of his bad temper.

  The editor of The Straits Times blamed the police for not ensuring more sanitary conditions to dispel the noxious odours in their districts and accused them of misreporting deaths. The proliferation of half-starved men and dogs was a bane on his life. The crazed man in China who thought he was the brother of Jesus Christ had ignited a vast uprising and brought thousands of criminals and desperate men on every junk to Singapore. Piracy was carried out within sight of the shore. The Free Press reported that there were more whores in Singapore than respectable women and that two-thirds of the Chinese male population were opium addicts.

  But despite this formidable litany of ills, none of these was the cause of his bad temper.

  He transferred his attention to the men atop Government Hill. From the river’s edge they looked like scurrying ants. The house, which had been the Governor of Singapore’s home since Raffles’ time, had been demolished and hundreds of Chinese coolies and Indian convicts were building up and flattening the top of the hill, rock by rock.

  ‘A fort,’ he spluttered. ‘Ridiculous to set a fort miles from the shore all for the sake of a mutiny which took place a thousand miles away. Just because it scared the damned Indian government to death. What has that to do with us? Who will attack us and how, with a fort on this hill, out of range of enemy ships, overlooking the very town it should defend, will we avoid blowing the place to bits? The cannon are trained on Chinatown, for God’s sake. And it is to be named for that stupendous idiot Charles Canning, the man virtually responsible for the mutiny in the first place. It’s intolerable. And all these new names for perfectly good streets. I hardly know what anyone is talking about. Did you know that Tavern Street is now Bonham and Commercial Square renamed Raffles Place. Why …’

  Charlotte Manouk placed a hand on her brother’s arm.

  ‘Robbie, for heaven’s sake, I know, but I want to talk to you of Alexander.’

  In truth Charlotte, too, like all of the town, was aghast at the works into which poor Singapore had been thrown because of the rebellion in India two years ago. The British government had got a terrible fright. In consequence the Crown had gathered the government of India into the Colonial Office, ending a hundred years of East India Company rule. At this news, the Straits Settlements pricked up their ears and sought to extricate themselves from their own indifferent Company authority and petitioned to be made a Crown Colony with direct appeal to London. But that was not to be. She was to continue to be governed from Calcutta who cared not a whit for the island of Singapore or its interests, yet, like all of Her Majesty’s colonies, must be fortified whether she needed it or not.

  Robert ignored his sister.

  ‘We need more police. Crime is rampant because the coolies have no means of livelihood. Moving Tock Seng’s hospital from Pearl’s Hill to the swamps of Balestier Plain means a death warrant and no-one dare go there and wail if they are dragged away. I have fourteen police officers in a town of over fifty thousand. Yet funds are found for useless forts which will never fire a shot and Collyer runs around building batteries and redoubts, barracks and magazines, walls and fortifications as if his life depended …’

  ‘Robbie!’

  Robert threw an annoyed glance at his sister though these considerations were also not the cause of his bad temper.

  ‘Well, don’t bother me with Alexander. You have spoiled him rotten, indulged his every whim and financed his appalling habits. You have known this for the past two years. And now he has gone too far. What is it? A married woman, the Dean’s wife no less. No, sister. It is your fault and you must find a way out.’

  Charlotte looked downcast.

  ‘Rob, don’t be angry. I know you’re right. But I have no idea how to tell him about, well, about, any of this.’

  Robert sighed and folded Charlotte’s arm into his. They walked slowly back towards the Court House.

  ‘I know. You are scarce less scandalous than him. Worse, actually.’

  His laugh was tinged with irony.

  ‘Did you hear the new pastor has fulminated from the pulpit about fornicators etcetera? That means you. And me. And the whole town.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Charlotte sighed. ‘We will not inherit th
e Kingdom of God. At least this one has not mentioned me by name and put the mark of Cain on me. And he seems a little more concerned about the drug addictions of virtually the entire town. But I was talking of Alex.’

  He patted her hand. ‘You have spoiled him because of guilt. Because there are secrets and lies between you. Tell him the truth.’

  He stopped and turned Charlotte to face him.

  ‘Tell him all the truth.’

  Charlotte shook her head. ‘Not all. I dare not.’

  Robert dropped his sister’s arm.

  ‘Then you will pay the price. He is coming back from Scotland under a cloud, but older, eighteen, a young man with all his wits. He will find out. Be warned.’

  Robert’s tone was severe. He was fed up with Charlotte’s nonsense with the boy who needed a good slap. But this was most certainly not the cause of his bad temper.

  ‘Well, I’m in a terrible mood and not worth the talking to. I must sort out this divorce business by hook or by crook.’

  Charlotte turned away, now as annoyed as her brother.

  ‘For heaven’s sake Robbie, Teresa will never divorce you and you cannot find grounds to divorce her. You might as well get used to it.’

  Robert glowered at her and strode away.

  Charlotte was sick to the back teeth of the question of Robert’s blessed divorce. If he wasn’t moaning about the state of the town and lack of money he was going on and on about this divorce until he drove all his acquaintance distracted. Really he had become grumpy and self-centred.

  Ever since Shilah, his Anglo-Indian mistress, and mother of his eldest daughter Amber, had become pregnant he talked of nothing else. He had become a bore on the subject of the new Matrimonial Causes Act, which he knew by heart, and now so did Charlotte and all his long-suffering friends.

  The Act made marriage a contract rather than a sacrament and made allowance for divorce in a civil court. To rid himself of a wife a man had only to prove his wife’s adultery which, since Teresa lived an exemplary life with their son Andrew amidst the copious numbers of aunts and uncles of the enormous da Souza family, there was nothing he could do. Not an ounce of scandal attached itself to Teresa and it drove Robert mad.

  He had married Teresa because she was upright and respectable and he had been too ambitious and too scared to risk condemnation by marrying a half-blood woman, the illegitimate child of convicts. But Charlotte was sure that he had loved Teresa too, as she still loved him, and he had been happy and contented with his wife for many years. Yet somehow this passion for Shilah had been re-ignited and he had found the courage to leave Teresa, even after the birth of Andrew; had risked losing his position, risked his reputation. He had survived it all, to his credit, because he was invaluable to the town, and recently had risen to the official position of Commissioner. Now, with a new child on the way, he had become obsessed with marrying Shilah.

  ‘Guilt, guilt. He is right, perhaps. We are all driven by guilt,’ Charlotte said to herself.

  She turned, raising her parasol against the sun and the inevitable stares of passers-by and gazed over the river to Boat Quay and the godown of Baba Tan, now the commerce and property of Zhen, the man she had shared her life with for the past three years and by whom she had a daughter.

  A year ago some visiting wag had laughingly dubbed her the English concubine over a dinner full of drunken revellers and it had found its way into the column of ‘Delta’, the town’s self-appointed wit and purveyor of gossip. It had stuck. The fact that she was Scottish was hardly the point. She tried to laugh it off but increasingly she felt the power of the endless tittle-tattle. It wore away at you. Drip, drip, drip. A rebuff here, a whispering there, a row of open stares, even public denunciation. She was never free of it, on either side of the river, and it took its toll.

  This was the veiled life she had kept from both Alexander and her younger son, Adam. But deeper than this was the dark secret of Alexander’s real paternity. The terrifying fact that he was not, as he believed, the son of Tigran Manouk, one of the great Dutch Armenian merchants of the East Indies. This father was his pride and in such a lineage lay Alexander’s deepest feelings of belonging. To deny it would, she feared, shatter him utterly and destroy his affection for her as Tigran’s widow. Children cared so little for the truth in such matters and she knew he would blame her, judge her, condemn her and wish she had never told him. So she did not.

  She felt the ache creep into her neck. It would crawl up into her head and grip her like a vice. She turned her steps to home and some quiet rest. Soon he would be here and, for the first time, she admitted to herself the unpalatable truth that she was not looking forward to seeing her elder son.

  2

  ‘We come together to honour the yishi of the Ming, patriotic guardsmen of our Chinese legacy and renew our pledge to overthrow the foreign Qing dynasty and restore the Ming.’

  Three hundred men shouted fanqing fuming, with more or less enthusiasm, to the funerary tablets lining the walls of the Five Tiger Shrine which stood in the courtyard of the great lodge of the Ghee Hin Kongsi in Rochor.

  The Deputy Mountain Lord, Fu Shan Chu Teo, rose and the formal part of the evening ended. The Mountain Lord, Shan Chu Wei Sun Wei, was in China.

  Zhen and Qian rose too with the others, all important and, above all, wealthy members of the Hongmen, the triad society which, since the violent eruptions between the Teochew and Hokkien sects four years ago, had united all the different dialect groups in Singapore in relative peace. They made their way to the banqueting room.

  ‘Restore the Ming,’ Zhen said and shook his head. ‘Restore their youth more like. We’re the only ones under fifty.’

  Naturally he attended, like all the towkay, the annual tribute to the spiritual ancestors of the kongsi. The kongsi was in effect the government of the Chinese in Singapore and no-one who wished to have any influence here could ignore it. It provided welfare and employment for the thousands of coolies pouring into the Straits at every tide. It controlled the labour force, regulated affairs in its own courts of law, its leaders had muscle and capital and much business was conducted in its shadow. But these old-fashioned oaths meant nothing, at least to him.

  Hong Boon Tek sidled, slug-like, over to Zhen, mopping his forehead.

  ‘There is a rumour the Mountain Lord is dead,’ he whispered. ‘What do you hear?’

  This rumour had circulated for the last week or so and some sort of announcement had been expected. This had not come. Hong was so fat his eyes got lost inside the pockets of his cheeks. His breath smelled and he was always slick with sweat. All this would not have mattered had he been an agreeable man but he was mean, vindictive and venal. It was said he kept slave women on his plantation.

  ‘Why ask me? Why don’t you ask the Deputy Lord and see if he likes the question?’

  Hong threw a glance around him, simpered and oozed away. Hong disliked him, but Hong disliked everyone and Zhen did not care.

  ‘The leases come up in three months,’ Qian said. ‘He is not content with the spirit farm, he wants the opium lease too. If the leader is dead then the old syndicate will fall apart. It’s Wei’s money that bankrolls it.’

  Zhen watched the men milling and whispering. Qian was merely stating the obvious.

  ‘Who inherits? The son died.’

  ‘I’m not sure. He had several daughters, didn’t he? One married the Kapitan in Perak or someone like that? I can’t remember.’

  ‘No, nor me.’

  ‘Have you thought of what I asked?’

  The two men joined the crowd in the banqueting hall. Rice wine began to circulate. The noise level rose.

  ‘Qian, I told you. They won’t have you.’

  Qian pulled a face, poured a cup of wine and tossed it back.

  ‘They would if you asked. I could sell two of the ah ku houses to you.’

  Zhen glanced at Qian. This man was his closest friend. They had been through poverty and hunger together, endured the long a
nd dangerous journey here to Singapore, faced tigers and misery in the jungle and the new adventures of marriage to strange men’s daughters. In a moment of drunken brotherhood they had betrothed their children to each other.

  But within the last two years Qian’s fortunes had declined greatly. His wife, to whom, despite his own sexual proclivities, he had been surprisingly devoted, had died. Qian’s father-in-law, Sang Che Sang, had been leader of the kongsi and had extensive plantations of gambier and pepper with which he financed the leases of the opium farm and the spirit farm, easily the two most lucrative pursuits in the region. Out of respect for the living relative of the former Lord of the Kongsi, Zhen suspected, creditors had bided their time.

  The business had declined slowly. Qian did not have Sang’s stature or control over the labour force which only a kongsi official could exert, nor his ruthless commercial acumen. When he lost the lease on the opium farm, he had no idea how to recover. Eventually, the gambier and pepper plantation was lost to him too, for without the opium farm and its sales to the tens of thousand of coolies on the island, there was little profit in it. The land in Singapore had been stripped, ruined and abandoned, bled dry by the heavy demands of the cultivation. When the roads had been made out into the once impenetrable countryside, the colonial government had sent their surveyor to assess and tax the plantations.

  Wei Sun Wei had instantly ceased all agriculture and ordered 4,000 labourers to leave Singapore and go to Johor where he was Kang Chu, the head of the river, with ten concessions along the entire east bank of the Johor River, as well as numerous others, employing thirty thousand coolies. He was Kapitan Cina and the most trusted ally of the new Temmengong Abu Bakar who had hegemony over the lands of Johor. The syndicate which Wei headed had had control of the Johor/Singapore joint opium farm for the last five years. Wei’s rise from humble cloth pedlar to such wealth and power was legendary and on the lips and in the minds of every penniless coolie who set foot on the island.

  When Qian’s wife died, the creditors had swarmed out of the woodwork. The great Sang compound on High Street was sold. All that was left to Qian were his four brothels on Hong Kong Street and the small shophouse he lived in. Prostitution was a high-profit business, but even this could not keep up with his too-lavish lifestyle with the Malay boy who ruled him with bonds of lust.