Robert, being a bachelor, had no relatives at home, but he was sadly missed by the loyal workers on his estate. They wondered if they should continue with the work on the dam, but as his brother was in Canada, and as they had had no instructions to the contrary, they continued with the project, dedicating their work to their dead employer.
Richard’s wife and son took the loss of their husband and father hard. He had been the backbone of the farm, and both were at loss as to how they could continue. Still, they were sturdy country folk, and struggled on, unaware of the deal made between the cousins.
Their struggle was made all the more difficult when their stream ceased to flow ...
While the guns of The Great War — The War to End All Wars — was turning the fields of France and Belgium into stinking piles of rotting flesh, a much quieter, and even genteel way of life existed on the other side of the world.
This was the world that Janice Patricia Green, the only child of John Thomas Green and Ann Elizabeth Green, a handsome English couple residing in the British quarter of Shanghai, came to know as home.
John, the latest of many generations of diplomats, was the son of Sir Robert and Lady Green, who was currently England’s Ambassador to Italy.
Ann Green, Janice’s mother, was the only child of Captain Aubrey Taylor R.N. and June Taylor. The Captain was currently on active duty in European waters, while his wife tended their home on the coast of England. There, she constantly looked out to sea, praying, and awaiting her husband’s safe return.
Due to the fact that her father had been assigned to numerous overseas postings, Ann Green had spent little time with her parents. Almost all of her early life had been spent in the bosom of the ladies who operated the Staunton College for Young Ladies. A school whose primary aim was to teach its students those skills necessary to become the successful wife of a man of substance.
This school had no time or space in their curriculum for the personal nurturing of its students. Love was expected to be provided by the student’s family, if and when she saw them, and certainly not by the school’s staff. Self-esteem was found, or not, by the student, as a matter of luck. Consequently, a graduate of the Staunton College for Young Ladies was fully equipped to masterfully manage the running of a household, yet making it a loving household was also a matter of luck.
The marriage of John Green and Ann Taylor was generally agreed to be a positive thing for the career of John, as he followed in his father’s footsteps in the Foreign Office. The pair made a handsome couple, with John’s height and wavy brown hair and Ann her dignified beauty and soft blond hair, as they left on their honeymoon. It was a foregone conclusion that, together, they would travel from posting to ever more important posting, throughout the world. Moreover, true to expectations, John’s initial minor position in Greece had been carried out with aplomb, resulting in his elevation to the position of Under Secretary to the Commercial Attache in China.
The birth of Janice Green had taken place in their residence in Shanghai, and was officiated at by an English-speaking doctor, of Indian descent, from the local European hospital, assisted by several Chinese midwives.
It had proven to be an extremely difficult birth resulting in thirty-six hours of agony for Ann, a fact that Ann, in later years, was never loath to mention to her daughter, whenever that child did something of which her mother disapproved.
The entire experience had been so traumatic for Ann that she swore to herself, and had made abundantly clear to her husband, that she would never allow herself to become pregnant again, especially if it meant being ministered to by a group of ‘heathens’. Ann became adamant that further children could wait until they were posted to England, or, at the very least, to a civilized country. Consequently, to his annoyance, John was relegated to the guest bedroom, while Ann remained in the master bedroom.
Janice was born with her mother’s blond hair, and the startlingly green eyes of her father’s mother. The baby’s green eyes were a curiosity to the oriental staff, who insisted on constantly touching the baby, ‘for luck’.
This intense curiosity from her ‘pagan’ staff further upset Ann greatly. She felt that her hours of agony had resulted in her having given birth to some sort of freak, and after a time grew to hate the baby. It’s constant crying was a drain on her energy, and the thought of taking the child to breast brought on a feeling of such loathing that she refused have it anywhere near her. ‘Get it away from me. Feed it a bottle!’ demanded the furious mother.
At a complete loss as to what to do, John called for the doctor, while the female servants shook their heads and sighed at the stupidity of these European fools. The cook took matters into her own hands and sent one of the gardeners off with a message for one of her relatives.
Within an hour a wet-nurse was found, baby Janice was put to breast, while Ann was left to recover her composure, leaving all the obligatory problems to her servants.
Ann was relieved to be rid of the child, leaving its upbringing to the staff, and devoted herself to managing the household, acting only as supervisor and chief critic in her daughter’s rearing.
Her father, on the other hand, was delighted with his new bundle of joy, whose green eyes were an absolute delight to him. He immediately began calling her Jade and bought a small pendant of that stone to hang around her neck.
Ann was aghast, and refused to call her anything but Janice.
The staff however, opted for her father’s approach, and called her ‘Missy Jade’. Ann saw this as a direct slight to her command of the household though, and after many tirades the staff were forced to refer to the child as ‘Missy Janice’ whilst in her mother’s presence, but reverted quickly to ‘Missy Jade’ when Ann was not around.
John, trying to assert a modicum of authority under his own roof, paid no heed to Ann’s wishes, and called the child Jade at all times.
The wet-nurse that had been found was the cook’s niece, an intelligent young woman by the name of Yee-Ling. Yee-Ling’s husband, a schoolteacher, had died of influenza when she was four months pregnant with her first child, and grief had hit her badly. She ate little, and her weakened body, as well as her tortured soul, produced a further tragedy of the stillbirth of her child.
Yee-Ling was just eighteen years of age, standing just a little over five feet in height, with lustrous black hair that reached to her waist and the high cheekbones of a true oriental beauty.
Fortunately, the position as wet-nurse saved the girl from a slow death due to grief, and meant that Yee-Ling could concentrate all her energies on raising Jade as a substitute for her own child, which she did with a single-minded determination that almost bordered on mania.
Nothing on this earth was going to take her new child away from her ...
* * *
For convenience, Yee-Ling was given a room next to Jade’s nursery, and Jade’s earliest memory was of a savage night of storms, with thunder and lightening erupting around the house. Scared, clutching her favourite stuffed animal, Jade had jumped out of bed and ran to the room next-door. Climbing into Yee-Ling’s bed, Jade was overcome with the feeling of warmth and safety experienced there.
Yee-Ling had crooned softly to her in Chinese, stroking her hair, making her feel better until finally, she had fallen asleep once more. The following morning she had been disappointed to awake and find herself back in her own bed.
As Jade grew older, she began to sense the undercurrents of unhappiness within