Kyril Bonfiglioli - All the Tea in China

What met my eyes made me stagger back against the door in astonishment, not unmixed with salacious delight, to speak plainly.

Blanche was spread-eagled face down on the great, gaily-painted Indian bedstead, each ankle and wrist manacled to one of the corner-posts. She wore silk stockings but no drawers: this was plain, for her silk gown was hoisted up to her waist. There was a pillow under her loins which raised her rump in the most engaging fashion and another was under her face. This other pillow, as I realised when I saw the array of whips and canes on the little table beside the bed, was for her to scream into. I gazed, entranced, at her superb bottom and noticed that it was all traced and laced with long stripes and scars and cicatrices, some old, some fresh and pink.

“Please only use the little green one at first, Karli,” she said in a voice muffled by the pillow. I found it: a beautiful little terrier-crop with a silver horse’s-head handle and the lash bound with green velvet. In a spirit of experiment I laid it across her croup a few times in a sheepish fashion. She wriggled, as though impatiently. I have never much enjoyed giving pain (except to my own descendants) but the situation was so novel and picturesque that I laid on even harder, watching with undeniable interest the way her enviable nates blossomed into a deep rose-colour.

My interest — and the strokes of the whip — diminished after a while and she turned her head from the pillow and gazed at me wonderingly.

“Why are you not …?” she said, puzzledly.

“Not what?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, in some confusion, her cheeks as pink now as her bottom, “you should be, well, your clothes should be unfastened and you should be, that is, ah, holding your person. Do you not know how to make love?”

I began to understand.

“Blanche,” I said lovingly, passing a hand gently over her rosy bum, “Blanche, let us have a little lesson. Let me teach you how we make love in Holland?”

We unclasped the absurd manacles and fetters and I turned her the right way up. That is to say, upon her back. We rehearsed, for a while, that way of kissing which was so new to her, then I applied my attentions to her unusually fine teats. This, too, seemed something of a novelty to her but, after a token protest, she submitted to it.

“What are you doing?” she cried a little later, “it is you that must hold that , not I …” But she grew reconciled to this, too. The crux came presently.

“Karli, you must not touch me there, you must not, you must … my God, what are you doing, that is wicked, it is against religion, it is beastly, it is what horses do, I have seen them, it is abominable, stop, stop, it hurts; stop , I beg you!”

“ Stop ?” I asked, in a kindly, considerate way. She breathed deeply, perhaps three breaths.

“Stop stopping is what I meant, Karli.” She said this in a small voice.

I stopped stopping. Incredibly, but demonstrably, she was — had been until that afternoon — a virgin. After some little time we both had need to stop. I explained certain things to her.

“And am I now deflowered, Karli?”

“I think so.”

“Should we not make sure?”

We made sure; it was even better than the first time. Then we fell asleep. Then she awoke me, seeming concerned that the deflowerment might not have been permanent. This time, although it was perhaps a little uncomfortable for her, I made it very certain indeed. I left her in a deep sleep and went to the galley, for I was hungry, hungry. I have no recollection of what the food was except that it was good and that, for once, I ate greedily.

The Captain returned at dusk in a state of satisfaction equalling mine, although I would not have exchanged my reasons for gratification with his. He had indeed been the first Western buyer in the market — the auctions were due to begin within the week — and he had already set our Calcutta schroff to work at suborning everyone concerned and, in particular, the venal auctioneers. Also, he had contrived to buy for ready gold a few chests of the very primest opium — grown and dried by private horticulturalists of course, for the stuff grown under the aegis of the Honourable East India Company was not subject to unofficial dealings. (Unless your schroff had the ear of a penurious official and a bag of gold to chink into that ear, you understand.)

The Yankee clippers of Russell & Co., and those slower ships of Dent & Co. and Jardine Matheson, were evidently days behind us and, although the auctions would not commence until there was a decent quorum, we had our foot in the doorway first and your honest Oriental respects the first man to bribe him — especially when he has had to give a receipt. The Parsee firm of Bonajee were already there, of course, but at this time they were only dipping the toes of their mighty banking firm into the evil footbath of opium and their ships were few and old and ill-crewed.

As the Captain, having delivered his news with unwonted friendliness and condescension, bade us goodnight, he pulled out his great watch and I heard him say “Blanche, be ready in —” only to be cut off short, to my delight, with her snappish rejoinder that she had a severe headache.

In our little cabin, I rummaged in the tin shirt-box for some delicacies to augment our dinner that night: Peter was enchanted at my change of mood.

“Is it that you feel riches already within your grasp, Karli?” he asked with his mouth full.

I answered him ambiguously for my mouth, too, was as full as my wicked heart.

At dawn the next morning we made a full boat: Captain Knatchbull and Blanche — who, indeed, may have had a headache for there were dark circles under her lovely eyes — Lubbock, Peter, me, the comprador and the Captain’s servants and our new schroff , a base, ill-made looking little man who was clever. The lugubrious Second was left with the anchor-watch.

To speak plainly, Calcutta was a disappointment. There were some fine European buildings and some Indian temples adorned with carvings which were so explicit in their indecency that I might almost have averted my face, had it not occurred to me that Oriental ingenuity might well have a lesson for me, even me. A side-glance at Blanche shewed that she was averting her face so determinedly that she had clearly glimpsed these carvings and was now convinced that it was I, and not her husband, who had the right of it in such matters.

Nevertheless, the city was a disappointment. Where were the scented arbours, the jewelled birds, the shameless, bare-breasted, nard-anointed houris I had dreamed of? This city was a crammed turmoil of white-swathed figures, screaming and chaffering and jostling in a humid air laden with the stench of dead dogs and human excrement. To have walked those streets would have been unthinkable, but we were drawn in a small procession of little chariots like the bathing-machines of the wonderful Margate itself, each pulled by a horse of amazing thinness who could yet break wind again and again in the most striking manner. I recall wondering what such decayed horses could be fed upon in so stricken a city.

We were entertained in a huge, cool hall by some petty merchant princeling of John Company — the tea, we were assured, was cooled by snow brought two hundred miles from the Hills — then sauntered out into a great cloistered enclosure, shaded by awnings, where the very opium itself was laid out in neat batches. The fat, dark cakes of the Patna stuff, the lovely, polished balls of best Benares — oh, I came to know them all, all. And their values, you may be sure.

Peter was in a strange mood of bitter elation. “Look, Karli,” he murmured, “here is England’s greatness and the pride of commerce. Enough poison to corrupt and ruin a great Empire. (No, the Chinese Empire, Karli, do not be obtuse: how could the British Empire ever fall?) The Celestial One has banned opium from all his territories — he has heard of the havoc it has wrought in Formosa — but although he is well-informed, he is ill-served by a system of mandarins whose only concern is to become rich as quickly as may be. They send out a brace of war-junks as a sort of token; they fire off an antique cannon or two, we return fire in an aimless sort of way and, honour appeased, they make best speed for shelter. The Emperor receives reports of bloody battles in which the Western-Oceans devils were routed and we then comfortably make our bargains. It’s a shabby business but everyone becomes rich. Honour is out of date, you see, Karli.”