Tai-Pan by James Clavell Page A

I might have been a crofter like my father before me. Aye, and content to be a crofter. But he sent us off into a stinking slum in Glasgow and took all the lands for himself to become Earl of Struan, and broke up the clan. So we almost starved and I went to sea and joss saved us and now the family’s well-off. All of them. Because I went to sea. And because The Noble House came to pass.
    Struan had learned very quickly that money was power. And he was going to use his power to destroy the Earl of Struan and buy back some of the clan lands. He regretted nothing in his life. He had found China, and China had given him what his homeland never could. Not just wealth—wealth for its own sake was an obscenity. But wealth and a purpose for wealth. He owed a debt to China.
    And he knew that though he would go home and become a member of Parliament and a Cabinet minister and break the earl and cement Hong Kong as a jewel into the crown of Britain, he would always return. For his real purpose—secret from everyone, almost secret from himself most of the time—would take years to fulfill.
    “There’s never enough time.” He looked at the dominating mountain. “We’ll call it ‘the Peak,’ ” he said absently, and again he had the strange sudden feeling that the island hated him and wanted him dead. He could feel the hatred surrounding him and he wondered, perplexed, Why?
    “In six months you rule The Noble House,” he repeated, his voice harsh.
    “I can’t. Not alone.”
    “A tai-pan is always alone. That’s the joy of it and the hurt of it.” Over Robb’s shoulder he saw the bosun approaching. “Yes, Mr. McKay?”
    “Beggin’ yor pardon, sorr. Permission to splice the main brace?” McKay was a squat, thickset man, his hair tied in a tarred, ratty pigtail.
    “Aye. A double tot to all hands. Set things up as arranged.”
    “Aye, aye, sorr.” McKay hurried away. Struan turned back to Robb, and Robb was conscious only of the strange green eyes that seemed to pour light over him. “I’ll send Culum out at the end of the year. He’ll be through university by then. Ian and Lechie will go to sea, then they’ll follow. By then your boy Roddy will be old enough. Thank God, we’ve enough sons to follow us. Choose one of them to succeed you. The Tai-Pan is always to choose who is to succeed him and when.” Then with finality he turned his back on mainland China and said, “Six months!” He walked away.
    Robb watched him go, suddenly hating him, hating himself and the island. He knew he would fail as Tai-Pan.
     
    “Will you drink with us, gentlemen?” Struan was saying to a group of the merchants. “A toast to our new home? There’s brandy, rum, beer, dry sack, whisky and champagne.” He pointed to his longboat, where his men were unloading kegs and laying out tables. Others were staggering under loads of cold roast meat—chickens and haunches of pig and twenty suckling pigs and a side of beef—and loaves of bread and cold salt pork pies and bowls of cold cabbage cooked with ham fat and thirty or forty smoked hams and hands of Canton bananas and preserved fruit pies, and fine glass and pewter mugs, and even buckets of ice—which lorchas and clippers had brought from the north—for the bottles of champagne. “There’s breakfast for any that are hungry.”
    There was a cheer of approval, and the merchants began to converge on the tables. When they all had their glasses or tankards, Struan raised his glass. “A toast, gentlemen.”
    “I be drinking with you, but not to this poxy rock. I be drinking to yor downfall,” Brock said, holding up a tankard of ale. “On second thoughts, I be drinking to yor little rock as well. An’ I give it a name: ‘Struan’s Folly.’”
    “Aye, it’s little enough,” Struan replied. “But big enough for Struan’s and the rest of the China traders. Whether it’s big enough for both Struan’s and Brock’s—that’s another question.”
    “I be tellin’ thee