Page 11 of Ravishing Camille
A flicker of laughter passed over her features. “Couldn’t kill us with a pitchfork.”
“We owe that to fine dining,” said his father who commanded the head of the table and nodded to his wife at the other end.
“And from whom did we inherit that need to eat well?”Ada tossed her thick mahogany tresses.
“Grandpapa!” said Lily’s oldest son, Garrett. “Papa says he made everyone clean their plates.”
“He did indeed.” Pierce glanced to his right at the boy beside him who was the imitation of Killian with midnight black hair and quicksilver eyes. “Has anyone told you why he thought that so important, Garrett?”
The boy met his gaze with a sincere concern, severe for a child of eight years. “Because he starved in Ireland.”
“Indeed,” Pierce said and glanced up at the man who had saved money earned on the Dublin and Waterford docks to buy passage for himself and his younger sister to the new world. “Hunger is a frightening feeling. As if you’re a ghost of yourself. Transparent.”
His father stared at him, but did not see him. Lily and Ada did the same, pausing to recall what their father had told them of the hours of his own mother dying from lack of a crust of bread. Pierce had never felt that hollow gnawing, but he’d seen it all too often on the wharves of Shanghai and in the cantons where the villagers with far too many children and far too little food to feed them, left babies in the streets to starve.
“I understand, sir,” said Nathaniel who was Lily’s nephew, “that many in China die of want.”
“That they do,” he replied, recognizing in the handsome boy his resemblance to his dark-haired mother.
“Why is that?” the boy wondered. “Has the Chinese emperor no interest to improve the lot of his people?”
Well, Pierce was certainly put to his tasks to provide these children with what they wished to learn of his far-off home. “The Emperor Kuang-shu is young but he is becoming devoted to that. He faces many difficulties, beginning with government officials who are opposed to change.”
“Why not vote them out?” asked Vivienne. She was a young girl sprouting into a willowy young lady and one of Ada’s two step-daughters.
Pierce thought that a viable question from a child whose father sat in the House of Commons. “Because those officials are not elected. They take examinations to qualify to serve in their territories. The exams don’t test their understanding of how to raise rice or nurture chickens, but what they know of a set of rules put down by a philosopher who lived two thousand years ago.”
“Who’s he?” asked Vivienne as if the man were an upstart.
Pierce suppressed a smile. “His name was Confucius.”
Camille’s friend, Hamilton Turnbowe was spellbound. He wasn’t the only one, either. Each child—and many of the adults—at the table was aghast or confused.
Turnbowe put down his fork and knife. “But how then, Mister Hanniford, do these officials govern?”
“Very badly, I’m afraid. And please, sir, call me Pierce.”
The man was still curious and he leaned forward, the better to see Pierce from far down the long table. “Of course. Pierce. Why not change the examinations? Make them more useful?”
“That would be a bit like trying to make all Englishmen speak Latin. Difficult, troubling, and dare I say, irrelevant to the fact that the Chinese masses need a basic education first. Few of them read or write.”
“That sounds fine!” joked Garrett.
“We could ride horses all day!” His cousin Nate joined in.
“Mama,” said Vivienne with a devilish grin, “would not have to host so many receptions for Papa’s constituents.”
Ada swallowed her bite of dessert and took the high road with a grin. “I would find a way!”
Vivienne turned to Pierce. “She loves politics more than Papa does, I think. But many people make her cranky.”
“Is that so?” Pierce knew Ada’s point of view on the subject of those who refused to change anything in society. But he took stock of the expressions on the other women’s faces. Not one of them—not his step-mother or Lily or Camille—objected. In fact, they winced.
“It is,” said Lily with a frown at Ada.
“I am just very great with child,” she admonished them all with wide eyes and playful indignity.
“Right you are.” Camille nodded. “We’ve encouraged her to do more gardening lately than political work.”
