The Fourth Princess

 

 

For sale or lease: Lennox Manor

A five-acre country estate just outside Shanghai, minutes from the junction of Brenan and Jessfield Roads. Fully furnished, all rooms are well-appointed with a tasteful mix of superior European and Asian furnishings. Three-year minimum lease with option to purchase.

Three floors of gracious living. On the ground floor, the impressive entrance foyer features a marble floor, double curved staircase, and a Venetian crystal chandelier. The formal drawing and dining rooms overlook splendid French-style gardens. Other areas on the ground floor include a dining room, parlor, billiards room, smoking room, and private library.

The servants’ quarters are adjacent to the kitchen, which has been updated with the latest conveniences. On the second floor are three suites of rooms, each with attached bathrooms and dressing rooms, six smaller bedrooms, and two additional bathrooms, plus nursery with nanny room. The top floor boasts a magnificent ballroom with parquet flooring and orchestra platform. Electric lights and fans are installed throughout, with and stoves for heating.

The grounds include a formal French garden, rose garden, garden, orchard, tennis court, croquet lawns, and a man-made lake. This is the ideal home for owners who entertain frequently and in style.

 

 

Shanghai

March 1, 1911

Lisan was not doing anything forbidden, not yet. She had managed to get away from the house unseen, granted anonymity by the large black umbrella, the crunch of gravel under her feet muted by thunder and rainfall, water droplets on windowpanes making it unlikely that Master Liu would bother looking out. She would face his displeasure only if she was successful, and at the moment, her chances of success seemed less substantial than ripples on a pond.

Luck was on her side. Old Mah the gatekeeper wasn’t at his station and she slipped out onto the street. At the intersection, she expected to wait because rickshaws were generally in short supply on wet days, but one pulled up just as she approached and let off a passenger. She hurried over to the corner and the puller held aside the tarp as she climbed onto the seat and huddled under the shelter of its canopy. She had to haggle; it would be a long ride out to the External Roads Area. A horse carriage would’ve been faster, and a motorcar even better, but she couldn’t afford either. The rickshaw puller agreed to wait and bring her back, adding to his fee.

They soon left the busy streets of Shanghai’s French Concession, the rickshaw puller jogging at a surprisingly fast pace. The canvas tarp attached to the rickshaw’s canopy offered protection against the downpour, but the constant strum of raindrops on its threadbare surface echoed Lisan’s agitation and made her anxious. She pulled aside the tarp just a few inches to look at the surroundings.

“Where are we now?” she called.

Rain coursed off the rickshaw puller’s cape of woven bamboo and palm leaves. He turned to reassure his passenger with a shout. “We’re on Bubbling Well Road, nearly at Jing’an Temple! Then we cut over to Yuyuen Road and up to Brenan Road!”

Lisan flinched as cold rain lashed her face and hair, hastily closed the tarp. She had to look decent when she arrived at Lennox Manor.

Bubbling Well Road had once been just a dirt track used by visitors to Jing’an Temple and its cemetery. The city had improved the road and it was now a wide street planted with shady sycamores. As Shanghai expanded, the building lots along the road were snapped up by wealthy Chinese and foreigners. Some properties were the size of small city parks and held mansions with formal gardens in front and lawns extending far behind. Rose gardens, kitchen gardens, tennis courts, and even horse stables were common features. The McBain residence was one of the grandest, a three-story mansion on ten acres. Farther along was a house familiar to Master Liu, the family estate where he had lived before moving to a modest villa in the French Concession. Lisan had only seen it from the outside, a vaguely Tudor-style complex of mansions that housed the extended Liu household, multiple generations of family and their retainers, some four hundred people.

But she wasn’t going to an address on Bubbling Well Road, smoothly paved with stone and illuminated with streetlamps at night. She was due at Lennox Manor on Brenan Road, which was a rutted menace. Like many roads in Shanghai, it was covered with a mixture of dirt and clay intended to smooth out an uneven base of rocks and rubble, but with all the rain this spring, the clay had been washing away in muddy trickles. The rickshaw jounced with every pothole, the puller swearing loudly each time his foot hit a rock.

Lisan risked another peek through the gap in the tarp. Houses along the road grew sparser as the rickshaw made its way farther west. They rolled past Jessfield Park, then the railway station. Brenan Road was becoming a fashionable residential area, but its westernmost environs were still considered too remote—more than an hour by rickshaw; half that time by motorcar. With spindly young trees and empty lots, this stretch of Brenan Road felt like an abandoned territory rather than an extension of urban Shanghai.

Lennox Manor was the last house on the road. The rickshaw stopped and Lisan lifted the tarp to venture another look. The rickshaw waited in front of a pair of gates, all elaborate wrought iron curlicues and pointed finials set into high brick walls. A hedge of evergreen yews a few yards inside the gates created a dense screen that obscured views of the house and garden from casual passersby. Perhaps the landscaper had been Chinese and chose to use greenery in place of a spirit wall to shield the house from evil spirits. Beside the iron gates a wicket door set into a brick arch creaked open and the gatekeeper scurried out, opening a large umbrella as he darted toward her.

“I have an appointment with Mrs. Stanton,” Lisan called out to him. If she’d been in a chauffeur-driven automobile, if she’d been a white foreigner, the gatekeeper would’ve rushed to open the gates without question.

The rain had lightened to a misty drizzle and Lisan kept the canvas tarp pulled open as the rickshaw rolled along an oval driveway of crushed gravel. Inside the oval was what had to be a rose garden. It was a sad sight, grass between flower beds sodden from the rain, shrubs brown and withered from neglect. At first all she could see of the house through the mist was a heavy, hulking shape at the end of the oval. Set so far back from the road, Lennox Manor looked desolate, a solitary outpost against windswept skies. As the rickshaw drew closer, the silhouette resolved into a looming edifice of timber and brick, a bulky, squat building that gave the impression of being perched uneasily on its foundations.

Details emerged as she neared the house: dormer windows, a forest of chimneys, lamplight shining through mullioned windows. Slim pillars and latticework adorned balconies but they seemed tacked on, an afterthought to remedy the mansion’s heavy lines. The house was the strangest blend of Chinese and Western elements. Lisan stared in fascination at the swooping eaves of the roof, the faces of reptilian demons that glared down from each corner. At the top of the roof, Chinese spirit guardians shaped from green and yellow glazed pottery paraded around a mansard roof.

Normally such spirit guardians marched atop the ridge of a steep, gabled roof. What was the point of putting spirit guardians up there to fend off evil spirits when the roof’s flat top made it easy for evil spirits to land? But of course foreigners wouldn’t know any better. It wasn’t that Lisan was superstitious, it was more that the jumble of styles was so jarring, odd and disturbing, and not just for aesthetic reasons, though she couldn’t have explained exactly why. It made Lisan wonder if the inside of the house was as strange as its exterior.

As the rickshaw drew closer, Lisan felt anxiety and anticipation like a hand gripping her heart, an odd and disconcerting sensation. No doubt she was feeling nerves at the prospect of the interview. A movement drew her eyes to a window on the second floor. A woman in red was standing at the window, her features blurred behind the rain-spattered glass. A blink later, she was gone.

The manservant who answered the door gave the rickshaw puller permission to wait for Lisan under the shelter of the porte cochere, a relief since it was unlikely she would find another rickshaw this far away from the center of town.

The servant stood at the door, patiently waiting. She hurried up the few steps and he held open the door, wordless. Inside, another manservant took her coat and hung it inside a cloakroom just off the entrance. Tall and silent in a long blue tunic vest, his black trousers and cloth shoes immaculate, he beckoned her to follow. They crossed a foyer dominated by a magnificent double staircase that curved down from the second-floor mezzanine to terminate at a broad semicircular landing with a half dozen steps descending to the marble floor. The landing and steps were directly in line with the front door. Lisan could just imagine what Master Liu would say, shaking his head over the lack of attention to feng shui . Luck would run down those stairs and straight out the door like a waterfall.

A thick Persian carpet covered the foyer’s finely veined white marble floor and a tiered crystal chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, spanning three stories. Heavy tapestries above mahogany wainscoting covered the walls, and a row of clerestory windows emphasized the height of the entrance. Each corner of the ceiling was decorated with a bizarre figure squatting on a bracket, each one different, carved from the same mahogany as the paneled wainscoting. They resembled gargoyles in photographs of European cathedrals, all sneers and protruding eyeballs. But even without those grotesque faces, the house made her shiver. The rich carpet and tapestries couldn’t fend off the damp chill of a rainy afternoon, and the proportions of the space felt wrong. Even the placement of furniture in the entrance foyer seemed unharmonious, everything pushed against the walls.

If she got the job, she would have to live here. If Master Liu allowed it.

The manservant didn’t take her up the curved staircase. Instead, she followed him past the grand marble steps to a doorway just behind, which opened onto a corridor with a stairwell at one end. The steep wooden staircase connected corridors on each floor, a hidden byway for servants to move between floors and stay out of sight except when needed. They climbed the stairs, Lisan quickening her steps to keep up with the manservant’s long, effortless stride. They emerged on the next floor, and the servant led her back toward the main staircase and mezzanine. He stopped at the first room beside the main staircase.

He knocked on the door and the voice that replied was low and musical, slightly husky. Lisan entered a room that was a complete contrast to what she had seen of the house so far. A pair of tall windows looked out to the garden, and instead of dark paneling, the walls were covered in pale yellow wall paper printed with tiny red roses. A blond woman in soft green rose from an armchair, her smile natural and unforced as she greeted Lisan. She appeared to be in her twenties, not much older than Lisan, but with foreigners it was hard to tell. Her face reminded Lisan of a kitten’s, a small pointed chin and wide-set eyes. There was also an older woman in the room; she remained seated on a small sofa, her disapproval so evident even the ruffles on her bright blue gown seemed to bristle with condemnation. The woman in red she had glimpsed was not in this room.

“Caroline, you’re wasting your time,” the older woman spoke as though Lisan weren’t there. “A Chinese secretary? Miss Wallace met all the requirements. Absolutely respectable, familiar with who’s who in our social circle. I would not have referred her otherwise.”

“Oh, Mrs. Easton,” Caroline Stanton said, “it doesn’t hurt to interview someone different.” Her smile as she turned to Lisan carried a trace of amusement, but it wasn’t directed at Lisan. “Now, Miss Liu. You’re nineteen, yes? In your letter, you say you graduated from a school called St. Clare's Hall. Tell me about it.”

“St. Clare’s is the top school for Chinese girls in Shanghai,” Lisan said. “It provides a Western education while also making sure we are fluently bilingual.”

“Did you really attend St. Clare’s?” Mrs. Easton said. “It’s a school for daughters of wealthy Chinese, so why do you need a job?”

Lisan ignored the accusatory tone. “I’m an orphan, ma’am. My guardian paid my tuition at St. Clare’s as long as I earned good grades. I don’t expect him to continue supporting me, nor do I want that.” That was as much as she was willing to reveal; they didn’t need to know more.

“An orphan,” Mrs. Stanton said. Lisan caught an undertone of sympathy, genuine feeling. It was as unexpected as it was warming. “How old were you when you lost your parents?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Lisan said. “I have no memories at all of my life before my guardian took me into his household.” No memories, only nightmares.

Mrs. Easton snorted. “Who knows what slum she came from?” as though Lisan weren’t fluent in English and didn’t understand every word perfectly.

Mrs. Stanton smiled at Lisan. “Can you type?”

Lisan answered Caroline Stanton’s questions as succinctly as she could, all the while observing the American woman’s face, her voice, the way she moved her hands and body. Unlike Mrs. Easton, whose nest of curls threatened to slide off her forehead, Caroline Stanton’s blond locks were pinned in a simple roll, held in a twist at the back with a tortoiseshell comb. The pale green dress emphasized her fresh complexion, and her only visible jewelry, apart from a wedding band, was a pair of cameo earrings, coral pink and finely carved. With such hair and skin, Lisan had expected Mrs. Stanton’s eyes to be blue, but they were strange, even for a foreigner, an indeterminate shade that was neither brown nor green, shifting color as Mrs. Stanton turned her face from window to lamplight.

At the end of twenty minutes, Mrs. Stanton stood up and pulled the bell. “I think you’ll do, Miss Liu. Can you start on Monday? Come at noon. There will be a room ready for you by then.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Stanton,” Lisan said. “Yes, I can be here on Monday. Thank you.” She dug her fingers into the palm of her hand to contain her excitement. In just a few days, a new life.

In answer to the bell, the same manservant glided in to show her out. Just before the door to the parlor closed, Lisan heard Mrs. Easton’s censorious words. “Really, Caroline. This will hardly enhance your position. What could a girl like that understand?”

Walking away from the door, Lisan couldn’t make out Caroline Stanton’s reply, only the tone of her voice, and to Lisan it sounded rather amused. But it was clear Mrs. Easton would do her best to make young Mrs. Stanton change her mind.

Not that any of it would matter if Master Liu didn’t let her take the job.