Dynasty by Elegant Robert;

Author:Elegant, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

Sir Jonathan still resented the restraint his granddaughter Guinevere’s wedding had imposed on his penchant for lavish hospitality. Guinevere was his favorite granddaughter, not only because of her gentleness, but because she personified the traditional Chinese feminine virtues. She was soft-spoken, self-effacing, devoted to domesticity, and attentive to her elders. Her doting grandfather had, however, never quite forgiven her for insisting upon a family wedding followed by a reception for no more than two hundred guests when she married Dr. George Chapman Parker in September 1924. Unassuming modesty might suit Guinevere, but it was not the Sekloong way. He still complained, only half jesting, that his business associates had suspected the fortunes of the House were declining when Sir Jonathan Sekloong married off his eldest granddaughter under “drably middle-class circumstances.”

Sekloong weddings, like Sekloong hospitality, were legendary. Charlotte’s marriage to Manfei Way had been nicely calculated to be only slightly less pretentious than her mother and father’s. More than a thousand guests had been invited, and the flood of wedding presents had provided Hong Kong with material for gossip that lasted for months. Feeling himself belittled by Guinevere’s subsequent modesty, Sir Jonathan was determined to recoup when Jonnie, the heir-presumptive, married Sarah Haleevie.

Three thousand were to attend Jonnie’s reception, and fifteen hundred were asked to the banquet afterward. The Old Gentleman was confident that the volume and splendor of the wedding presents would make the largesse showered upon Charlotte seem no more than a provincial viceroy’s hoard compared to the Imperial Treasury. His own chief gift was the Second Small House, the replica of Mary and Charles’s mansion originally built for Harry, who had never occupied it. Sir Jonathan furnished it with a selection from his choicest treasures, and matched Bentley sports coupés for the bride and groom stood in the garages. His confidence was justified. All his associates rendered fitting tribute to the House of Sekloong’s joy, though they ranged from great European financiers through China Coast merchants who had made new fortunes in the post-war boom to Secret Society chieftains who preferred not to discuss the gambling, gold-smuggling, prostitution, drug traffic, and strongarm men that provided their wealth. Like the new breed of thrusting populist politicians, with whom they were allied, the presence of the Secret Society chieftains might be distasteful. But it was necessary.

The marriage of Sarah Rebecca Haleevie to Jonathan Osgood Sekloong on the afternoon of November 16, 1924, was the most memorable wedding Hong Kong had seen. For all the wrong reasons. Though the gifts had exceeded Sir Jonathan’s expectations, none of their donors from abroad was present. The bride glowed like a star ruby in her Alençon lace gown, but the expected phalanxes of her relations and friends from Shanghai were absent.

The formations of riot police outside the Roman Catholic Cathedral on Caine Road outnumbered the guests at the ceremony. When they emerged from the Cathedral, those guests were assailed by jeering. Banner-waving demonstrators pressed against the police cordon, shouting slogans in Cantonese and broken English.

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