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Epic Novels
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Opium Lords
“This is a most
excellent tale in paperback format, splendidly told and
profusely illustrated by old Chinese engravings. The author
is a born writer.” L.Ward Canberra Times 26.2.1997
“It is a mix of
fiction and history. It’s a really rollicking story in a
historical context. It’s a good read." Canberra Times
The story begins thus in the Year of Our Lord 1832:
“In this fine
spring of her twenty-first year, Holly Shay was about to
take destiny into her own hands. She would up anchor from
the port where she had always lived, and cast the ship of
her life adrift with the same resolution as her forebears,
those old whaling captains who, for three generations past,
set sail for the open sea knowing they would not return from
the Pacific Ocean for at least two or three years if at all.
She would abandon this dying port where the cluster of
sailing ships in the reaches of the river grew thinner every
year and leave America, possibly for ever.
Throughout the
long-drawn out days of her father’s last illness, she knew
she was heir to their restless spirits, and longed to be
free. Not to go to New York under the wing of her Aunt Jean,
as her Uncle Bart, executor of her father’s will, had urged,
but to the place of her longing for independence. So she
announced, now the predictable will had been read, that she
and her brother were his sole heirs, ‘I’m going to China.’
The shock of five
of the six people in the room was palpable: not only of her
uncle and aunt, but of her dearest friend, her cousin Abby
and Jim Peel, captain of the ship owned by her father the
Eugenia. But not of her brother, Lou, who already knew.
Such a plan was simply scandalous, preposterous, beyond all
bounds of propriety or custom they declared, vying in their
outrage as she stood defiantly before them, a slender
delicate figure in her flowing sprigged muslin gown, looking
younger than her years.
Proper enough to
be a teacher or governess, even to help Uncle Bart in the
business they insisted. But she could not, in all
seemliness, go to China; not unless well-chaperoned by a
married woman. Her Aunt Jean wept hysterically, clutching
Holly’s sleeve as if to detain her from a voyage already
begun.
‘I often warned
your father. A girl alone in a household of men! Warned him
where it would lead! Too much independence I said!’
Holly rebuked her
timid aunt impatiently. ‘Tush, aunt. Salem women have always
had to be independent. Who ran the shop but mother, for
heaven’s sake, while Dad was at sea months, years at a time
until he swallowed the anchor? As he had after a fall from a
yardarm in a hammering storm rounding the Cape, lucky to
lose no more than a leg.
Abby, arm
round Aunt Jean, said soothingly. ‘Holly is right. She needs
a change after her sad loss.’
Holly rejected this sop. ‘I’m not going for a change.’
The perplexity on Uncle Bart’s stolid face was almost
comical, ‘then why go at all?’
‘I want to go into the China trade.’
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