Free The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure by Adam Williams Page A

and, with the white garden chairs and tables, the swing and the roller, she was confident that if the house was still China, the garden was unquestionably Surrey.
    It was here that the uniformed houseboys, their long queues hanging down their backs, were busily lining up the crystal on the sideboard and laying out the last of the silver on the four long tables neatly spaced under the shade of the willow trees. The white of the servants’ jackets and the starched tablecloths blazed brilliantly against the restful background of green lawn and fir-covered hillside. They worked quietly and efficiently, but they were conscious of the scrutinising eyes of Lady MacDonald, who was making some last minor adjustments to the flower arrangements. She was dressed in a wide, feathered hat and a tight-waisted taffeta dress of a subtle and becoming violet, and the oversized pair of garden scissors were somewhat incongruous in her fashionably gloved hands. Sir Claude, on the other hand, blazered, white-bagged and straw-boatered, was a picture of ease as he smoked his long cheroot, looking idly over the drop to the yellow plain below.
    Much admired by his more temperamental European colleagues for his imperturbability, the canny analysis behind his short, enigmatic observations, his understated but natural authoritativeness—a typical English pro-consul, they judged, more mandarin than the mandarins—Sir Claude was actually a shy man, whose deep reserve was often mistaken for coolness or arrogance. He was respected rather than liked by his subordinates in the British Legation. Nearing fifty he had the colouring of a younger man, a full head of sandy hair and red, bony cheeks. A blond moustache waxed to thin points stretched out way beyond his ears at either side of his narrow, freckled face. It quivered as he moved, and seemed strangely detached from his face, rather as if a yellow bat had chosen to balance on his lips. Thin eyebrows frowned above pale, searching eyes. A tall man, he walked with a slight stoop, but even in the casual clothes he was wearing today, the deliberation of his movements evoked an aura of ceremony and grandeur. Under Sir Claude, the Legation functioned with an Imperial style, which extended even to its picnics.
    Sir Claude was never the man to boast about his achievements, but he had been responsible for several diplomatic successes in this posting, not least for the negotiations that had dramatically increased British territory and influence in China. He had been the moving force behind the leasing of Wei Hai Wei as a new colony and, almost as an afterthought, the acquisition of the New Territories in Hong Kong; he had also secured from the Chinese government the recognition that the Yangtse valley was a British sphere of influence. He had ably countered similar aggrandising moves from the other powers in the scramble that followed China’s unexpected defeat by Japan in 1895. Sir Claude was now keeping a wary eye on the activities of the Germans in Shantung and the Russians along the whole land border. Only yesterday he had received a worrying cable from his consul in the remote outpost of Kashgar, describing suspicious troop movements in the mountain passes leading to India. He had invited the Russian minister to the picnic and would choose a moment gently to communicate a veiled warning. It was not Sir Claude’s style to seek confrontation when a quiet exchange behind the scenes might defuse tension.
    He had found that his method of diplomacy harmonised well with that of the Chinese. He had struck up a practical working relationship with the officials at the Tsungli Yamen . Together they had resolved a number of thorny issues. Sir Claude had been proud of his intervention in the autumn of last year, after the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi, the real power behind the throne, had deposed the Emperor in a palace coup following the young man’s abortive hundred-day reform movement. A wave of