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name meant nothing to her, though she knew both Lord Clives and many of the Ho Cong families. All of China and the China Seas knew the Ho Cong families. Chang Ki Pien might be Emperor of China, but only because the Ho Cong families did not want the ancient title. The ten families ran every aspect of China; one could not so much as pass a passel of cold dirt without their approval, which came with a pretty price.
    Searching for another clue, she continued reading:
    Of this last possibility, I can only relate the details of our brief connection with the man and his island. As you might remember, I discussed with you that rumors circulated last February regarding a shift in the opium trade to a man of French aristocracy: the Duke de la Armanac. Over the last five years the duke has bought huge quantities of Indian opium, then the Turkish Opium fields, bit by bit, finally securing the largest acreage in Erzurum Hills and importing the patent seed to an island called the Isle of Blue Caverns. Rumors began claiming he was undercutting the company's choice opium again and again, and that the Ho Cong families, who feed the precious rot into the Chinamen's blood, preferred to deal with this French duke.
    Rumors also claim he now has enough opium m reserve to dump it onto the market until the price drops out. If true, he can continue long enough to cause the collapse of the opium market and our very own honorable company. The company, as I'm sure Lord Clives will be telling you, claims the duke convinced the Ho Cong families to deal with him by playing their own games of ruthless, murderous intimidation. I never believed it. I was imagining Clives dreamed these wild schemes and rumors while under the influence himself, desperate as he was for anything to maintain the company's opium monopolies in this region.
    Of course, when these rumors first surfaced I had made our own discreet inquiries into the family name. Our agents discovered nothing of interest to me: de la Armanac is an old titled name of France, referring to an area near the Italian and Swiss borders before Napoleon. Apparently, the family lost most of their vast lands in the Napoleonic purges. (I discovered this land is currently being considered for restoration, including the family title—they have high connections to the scoundrels of France's Chamber of Deputies, and a familial relationship to none other than Louis XVIII.) And it was during the bloody purges of the revolution that the family had purchased the Isle of Blue Caverns as a refuge from the blade of the guillotine, while initiating the Turkey opium production.
    So when I received an invitation to the Isle of Blue Caverns, I accepted, naively thinking it was no more than a request for civilized society so wanting in this region. Last month we sailed into the isle's small port. It is an island of haunting natural beauty: calm bays on the leeward, a mountainous range covered in lush tropical foliage and violent seas on the windward. Inexplicably, much of the windward side of the island has been destroyed by fire, and tree cutting, which the duke dismissed as malaria control—destroying "stagnant ponds, no more." Of course, this explanation is ridiculous; we learned the man uses his slave population in a quixotic quest for treasure—a long-ago lost Chinese pirate treasure rumored to be buried on his island. You are no doubt laughing at this, pleased as it is an indication of the kind of intelligence we are dealing with here.
    I cannot relate all of our strange impressions of this man, his lovely wife, and their island. The important facts are that he maintains a standing army of two thousand men, a slave population of at least a thousand. Nor can I attempt to describe all that happened during our short visit. The duke was cordial, urbane, and, like so many others of his kind, grandiose with the absurd pretensions of a dying aristocracy. We finally reached a point in our conversations—conversations already a