High Road to China

High Road to China
Jon Cleary

HIGH ROAD TO CHINA is a 1977 novel by award-winning Australian author Jon Cleary. Set in the 1920s, the plot concerns heiress Eve Tozer, whose father is kidnapped by a Chinese warlord.In 1920 Eve Tozer, the attractive daughter of an American tycoon with huge trading interests in China, disembarks from her P&O liner at Tilbury and checks in at the Savoy.It is at the hotel that Eve discovers that her father, Bradley, has been kidnapped by a Chinese warlord. Desperate to save him, Eve hires two pilots to help her fly from England to China. But can she deliver the ransom before it’s too late?

JON CLEARY

High Road to China

Dedication (#ulink_693786f5-9b6d-5276-b71c-d29e51301347)

To Marina and Aubrey Baring

Contents

Cover (#ub5a65bfc-dfb7-5cac-8801-5612bf3f4698)

Title Page (#ub38abdc6-07ff-5109-8cdf-91c51f1ac870)

Dedication (#ulink_23b89f2c-fbac-5aa1-b6bb-5a769799480a)

Author’s Preface (#ulink_f757b34e-714d-54a8-a371-f93721ab05ee)

Chapter 1 (#ulink_5fb1b37f-9dbf-547c-b3d1-553b291f8ba2)

Chapter 2 (#ulink_19d9036b-81e1-5dba-ace0-2fdf3a8b33aa)

Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Author’s Preface (#ulink_a19487b3-95a5-5e9d-94c2-5f07829ba4d2)

William Bede O’Malley died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 22 July 1974, aged 80. He left behind him an autobiography called, plainly, AN ADVENTURE; it ran to over 1500 pages of manuscript. He left no instructions as to whether he wished it to be submitted for publication. After much discussion his family offered it to me, a distant cousin, to use as I thought fit.

I decided to tell the story of what I think was one of the best of Bede O’Malley’s adventures and it was agreed that I could use excerpts from his manuscript. I wished to include them because I thought that, with some minor editing, they would give a sense of perspective to a story that took place when I was only three years old, a time of which my memory is, to say the least, hazy. The year 1920 is almost as remote as 1492 or 1066 to a lot of people today.

I found that certain incidents did not accord with historical fact in respect of time, but Bede O’Malley was writing without benefit of diary or notes and an old man’s memory does not always recognize the calendar. But it does not alter the truth of what he experienced.

He was an adventurer, a dying breed: but who of us does not still dream of being one?

Chapter 1 (#ulink_8c0f8268-eac4-5e81-8947-b5b3b7493708)

1

‘So far I’ve shot only one man.’ Eve Tozer patted the gun-case beside her as if it were a vanity bag containing all she needed to face the men of the world. ‘Elephants are easier.’

‘Of course.’ Arthur Henty kept his eyebrows in place. ‘Did you kill the, er, man?’

‘One couldn’t miss at ten yards. He was a perfectly ugly Mexican who was trying to rape me.’

‘Ten yards? That was rather distant for rape, wasn’t it?’

‘He was trouserless. His intention was distinctly obvious, if you know what I mean.’

Henty hung on to his eyebrows from the inside, wondering if one could dislocate one’s forehead. He was a tall balding man in whom the bone was very evident, as if the skeleton had already decided to shrug off the flesh; but his eyes were bright blue, shrewd and amused, and he had no intention of stepping into an early grave. Not while women as attractive as Eve Tozer presented themselves to his gaze. Even if that was as far as the presentation of themselves went.

He had never met Bradley Tozer’s daughter until he had gone down to Tilbury this morning to escort her from the ship that had brought her from China. Several people in the Shanghai head office of Tozer Cathay Limited had written him that she was every inch her father’s daughter and now, with a glance at the gun-case on the seat of the car, he was prepared to believe they were right. He studied her, wondering what the perfectly ugly Mexican had thought of her as, trouserless and lance pointed, he had rushed towards her and the fate worse than he had anticipated.

Eve was staring out at London as it slid by outside the car and Henty looked at her closely, yet managed not to stare. It was a trick he had learned in ten years up-country in China, where the stranger’s gaze could never afford to be too frank. He saw a girl above average height with a figure that would attract men less violent and point-blank than the unfortunate Mexican. She was dressed in a beige silk travelling suit with tan stockings and shoes that, even to his inexpert eye, looked expensive and hand-made. The skirt, he noticed, was of the fashionable length, just below the knee; his wife Marjorie was always trying to educate him in such trivialities. But he also noticed that she was wearing her dark hair cut unfashionably short and there was a touch of rouge on her cheeks, something that Marjorie would have labelled as ‘fast’.

‘It is six years since I was last in London.’ Eve looked out the window of the Rolls-Royce as they drove along the Embankment. Grey skies and a thin muslin drizzle of rain had not kept the August Bank Holiday crowd at home; the English, she guessed, were as dogged about their pleasures as they had been about winning the war. England was still settling uneasily into the new peace; during last year’s summer holidays, she had read in The Times, there had still been a disbelief that the long agony was really over. This long holiday weekend, however, the citizens were determined to enjoy themselves, come what may. Buses, bright in their new postwar paint, rolled by; on their open top decks passengers sat beneath their umbrellas, teeth bared in resolute smiles. Excursion boats went up and down the Thames, their passengers bellowing ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ as they went past the Mother of Parliaments. A newspaper poster said, Woolley: Duck, and Eve wondered at the strangeness of the English language as spoken in England.

‘What’s a woolly duck?’

Henty frowned in puzzlement, looked back, then laughed. ‘That’s Frank Woolley, one of our more famous cricketers. He scored a duck. Nil runs.’

‘Oh. Some time, not this trip, I must go to see a cricket game. When we were last here, Mother wanted to see one, but Father wouldn’t hear of it. Said it was too slow for him. Instead we went to Wimbledon. We saw Norman Brookes beat Tony Wilding in the men’s singles. I remember I fell in love with Tony Wilding.’

‘He was killed in the war. At Neuve Chapelle. My two brothers were killed there, too.’

‘Was that where you got your, er, wound?’

‘No, on the Somme.’ Henty tapped his stiff right leg with his walking-stick. ‘The bally thing plays up occasionally. When it rains, mostly.’

‘You shouldn’t have come all the way down to the ship.’ But she turned away from him, looked out the car window again. She could shoot animals without a qualm and had shot the rape-minded Mexican and left no mental scar on herself; but she felt helpless in the face of other people’s suffering. ‘That was a beautiful summer, 1914, I mean. I read that they are calling it the long golden summer, as if there’ll never be another like it.’

Perhaps there never will be, thought Henty, but not in terms of weather. It had been a summer, he mused, which even some people not yet born would look back to with nostalgia. But he had looked up the weather records and they had shown that it had not been a ‘long golden summer’: that had occurred four years before, in 1910, the last season of the Edwardian reign, of a king meant for pleasure and not for war. But memory, Henty knew, had its own climate and regret for a time gone forever created its own golden haze. So people now believed the sun had been shining through all the months and years up till August 1914. Suddenly his leg began to ache. But he knew it had nothing to do with the rain or the shrapnel still lodged beneath his kneecap.

The Rolls-Royce turned up towards the Strand and a few moments later pulled into the forecourt of the Savoy Hotel. It was followed by the smaller Austin in which rode Anna, Eve’s maid, and the luggage. Henty, who did not own a car and usually rode in buses and taxis, knew he had done the right thing in hiring the Rolls-Royce in which to bring his boss’s daughter up from the ship. He had been warned that Bradley Tozer expected nothing but the best for his only child; and, Henty had remarked to himself, evidently Miss Tozer took for granted that only the best was good enough for her. At least she had made no comment when he had escorted her off the ship and down to the car. The Rolls-Royce was good enough for the Savoy, too: a covey of porters and pages appeared as if royalty had just driven up to hand out grace and favour pensions to the common herd.