{ The general outline of this WIP has been on my head for a few years but it wasn’t until I read Rebecca that it began to take form and the main character to have a voice. This is from the first few pages of the book, most likely the prologue. It’s still a rather rough excerpt, even though I’ve edited it multiple times. I hope you enjoy it though! I’m hoping the writing style holds some impacts from Daphne du Maurier’s in Rebecca.}

Parts of this are subject to change such as the main character’s name and the name of the house. I need to do more search on the time period during which the book is set (late mid 1800s. The last opium war ended in 1860, so less than a decade after that.).

When I first came to Hampton I was a mere child, bright eyed at the endless mansion and the sloping grounds that belonged to it. Hampton was a place from a storybook, it held secrets I was curious to learn. When I left eleven years later, at the age of nineteen, it had twisted and morphed into something cruel. I was a young woman and the child I once was had burned away from me, the ashes left to scatter on the wind.

To say I spend my formative years at Hampton would perhaps minimize the first eight years of my life that I spent in Shanghai, a place that is a distant memory now, surrounded by the most beautiful language I know and used to speak fluently.  Now English, French and German are what fill my mind and come easily in conversation.  There are only a few phrases of Chinese I can still remember, they come back to me in the hours between sleeping and waking when my dreams are the clearest.  My Chinese is no better than that of a young child’s.  In fact I do not believe I could hold a continuous conversation with my eight year old self.

I came to England on a steamship from Shanghai during midsummer when the heat was at its peak there.  I remember little of my childhood in what the English consider the far east.  My mother and I lived in a small apartment near a river.  What I know of my father was told to me once I came to England.  He was a merchant stationed at a trading post in Shanghai when he met my mother.  They were married in a small church, with only a few friends at the ceremony.  He was constantly traveling but I like to believe their love was real.  They died only weeks apart without knowing it.

My mother was stricken with what the doctors called influenza, some sickness the foreigners brought when they first landed on our shores. Delirious with fever, and yet shivering under the blankets, she sent a telegram to my father. His reply came immediately: he was to set off on the next boat from London. The ship sank a few days into the journey, and he was not one of the survivors. Mother died a day later, still hoping for his arrival.

I am not sure how Uncle Frederik found me. Father must have given our address to his parents or had something in his will about us in the case of his death. My mother’s family did not live in Shanghai, or else I would have gone and lived with them and none of this would have happened. I do not think they approved of my parents’ marriage; I never met them.

Uncle Frederik arrived at our apartment in a black suit, a briefcase in hand. He worked at the Embassy and had just received word of my father’s ship sinking.

The first words he said to me were: I am your father’s brother.  Your parents are dead, and I am taking you to England.

Of course, I could not understand him then because he spoke English but I heard the story from him once years later over dinner. We left two days later. There was no goodbye to the country of my birth, I was too young to know what the finality of leaving meant. I have not been back since.

There was a man on the ship who was also Chinese. It was a ship full of businessmen and he was one of their translators. I remember speaking to him a few times over the long journey. It was the first time I was surrounded by people who looked nothing like me, and I was afraid.

I am not sure who my grandparents expected their granddaughter to be.  My father must not have been elaborate in detail when he told them he was married, and later that he had a daughter.  They probably believed his wife to be the daughter of merchant living in China or an employee at the British Embassy, or a lady on vacation to the far east.  The wars for opium had ended under a decade ago and it did not even enter their minds that my mother might not have been British at all.  When I showed up on their doorstep in clothing too big for me that Uncle Frederik had purchased at a shop in London as a mere afterthought, as a bachelor going on forty he was not used to taking care of children, it was certainly not what they expected.

I remember Gran staring at me from the inside of the threshold, an unreadable expression on her face as she took me in. At that age I looked nothing like my father who had a long noise, blond hair, and a pale complexion with blue eyes. I had my mother’s features: pin straight black hair that fell to my mid-back, skin tan from the summer sun, a round face set with brown almond shaped eyes. Everything about me was blatantly not western, I was a walking piece of the far east to them.

“This,” Uncle Frederik said. “Is Thomas’s daughter, Marie.”

I stared up at her.  Everything about my journey had been alien to me.  When we arrived in London it was grey compared to the brightness of Shanghai.  Every conversation I heard was unintelligible and I stayed close to Uncle Frederik as we stood on the dock waiting for our carriage. 

The woman who stood in front of me was father’s mother. She was tall and thin, her facial features sharp and her grey hair pulled back from her face in a style of the times. 

For a moment I was afraid she would shut the door in my face and renounce any relationship she had to me. 

There are days when I wonder what would have happened if she had. Would I have been left to become an orphan on the English streets, or return to Shanghai. For either road the horror of Hampton would never have touched me.

“What’s done is done,” she finally said and motioned to the maid to take our bags. “Welcome to Hampton dear.”

~ Ming