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Tai-Pan—and when he had died seven years ago, he had been buried as a saintly man.
    Horatio was able to forgive his father for driving his mother into an early grave, for the high principles that had given him a narrow, tyrannical approach to life, for the fanaticism of his worship of a terrifying God, for the obsessive single-mindedness of his missionary zeal, and for all the beatings he had inflicted on his son. But even after all this time he could never forgive him the beatings he had given Mary or the curses he had heaped on the Tai-Pan’s head.
    The Tai-Pan had been the one who had found little Mary when at the age of six she had run away in terror. He had soothed her and then taken her home to her father, warning him that if he ever laid a finger on her again he would tear him out of his pulpit and horsewhip him through the streets of Macao. Horatio had worshiped the Tai-Pan ever since. The beatings had stopped, but there had been other punishments. Poor Mary.
    As he thought of Mary, his heart quickened and he looked out at the flagship where they had their temporary home. He knew that she would be watching the shore and that, like him, she would be counting the days until they were back safe in Macao. Only forty miles away, south, but so far. He had lived all his twenty-six years in Macao except for some schooling at home in England. He had hated school, both at home and in Macao. He had hated being taught by his father; he had tried desperately to satisfy him but never had been able to. Not like Gordon Chen, who had been the first Eurasian boy accepted in the Macao school. Gordon Chen was a brilliant scholar and had always been able to satisfy the Reverend Sinclair. But Horatio did not envy him: Mauss had been Gordon Chen’s torturer. For every beating his father had given him, Mauss gave Gordon Chen three. Mauss was also a missionary; he had taught English, Latin and history.
    Horatio eased the knot in his shoulders. He saw that Mauss and Gordon Chen were again staring fixedly at the longboat, and he wondered why Mauss had been so harsh with the young man at school—why he had demanded so much of him. He supposed it was because Wolfgang hated the Tai-Pan. Because the Tai-Pan saw through him and offered him money and the post of interpreter on opium-smuggling voyages up the coast. In return for allowing Wolfgang to distribute Chinese Bibles and tracts and to preach to the heathen wherever the ship stopped—but only after the opium trading was completed. He supposed Wolfgang despised himself for being a hypocrite and a party to such an evil. Because he was forced to pretend that the end justified the means when he knew it did not.
    You’re a weird man, Wolfgang, he thought. He remembered going to Chushan Island last year when it had been occupied. With the Tai-Pan’s approval, Longstaff had appointed Mauss temporary magistrate to enforce martial law and British justice.
    Against custom, strict orders had been issued on Chushan forbidding sacking and looting. Mauss had given every looter—Chinese, Indian, English—a fair, open trial and then he had sentenced each of them to be hanged, using the same words: “
Gott im Himmel
, forgive this poor sinner. Hang him.” Soon the looting ceased.
    Because Mauss was given to reminiscing freely in court between hangings, Horatio had discovered that he had been married three times, each time to an English girl; that the first two had died of the flux and his present one was poorly. That while Mauss was a devoted husband, the Devil still tempted him successfully with the whorehouse and gin cellars of Macao. That Mauss had learned Chinese from the heathen in Singapore where he had been sent as a young missionary. That he had lived twenty of his forty years in Asia and had never been home in all that time. That he carried pistols now because “You can never tell, Horatio, when one of the heathen devils will want to kill you or heathen pirates will try to rob you.” That