Yim-Fong didn’t notice. Her eyes glowed with eagerness. A grandson at last! She knew nothing of the ways Colonel Noma tormented Cheung about the child’s parentage because Cheung was too ashamed to tell her, though in a moment of weakness he had told Tak-Wing. Yim-Fong knew nothing of Emily’s rape either. Cheung thought it better to spare her. So she reached out for Raymond as a creature of pure joy.

Emily gently placed the writhing, howling little worm into her arms.

In Yim-Fong’s arms, the child calmed a little. She hadn’t birthed as many children as Cheung’s sisters-in-law still up in the village at Tai Hang—nevertheless, with two children, both boys, she had done her duty. And she knew how to soothe a baby. She jostled Raymond Duk-Ming and cooed. “Hush now, little one, Grandmother is here. Don’t you want to be quiet and good when all these guests have come to see you?”

Tak-Wing and Emily sat down beside her as she rocked the baby. Tak-Wing tried to take Emily’s hand, but she pushed it away. Yim-Fong, preoccupied with the child, didn’t notice, but old Cheung did, and wondered what was going on.

Raymond fell asleep in Yim-Fong’s arms, and when he was snoring as loudly as an old man, Emily took him back and brought him over to meet Old Mah and Second Mother Polly. Tak-Wing came with her to pay his respects to his in-laws. Old Mah, Second Mother Polly, and Pineapple were sitting up in the stands several rows behind Yim-Fong. Since the Chinese wedding at Chek Keng five years ago, the Cheungs and the Mahs had reached a kind of détente, a tentative peace that did not constitute love exactly, but did comprise a kind of willingness to go on living in the same city together with the familiarity that family brings.

The British bankers, including Vandeleur Grayburn, Charles Hyde, Richard Hancock, and his son, Selby Hancock, were already on the pitch in their cricket whites, sipping tea and puffing as though their empire weren’t over, as though their luck and privilege had not run out. It was all bravado. The bankers, Cheung knew, were being compelled to liquidate the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and transfer all funds to the Yokohama Specie Bank and the Japanese-run Bank of Taipei. The medical men were there too, including Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke. The Kempeitai had picked him up at St Paul’s Hospital two weeks earlier. There had been a lot of escapes from the military internment camp at Sham Shui Po, including that of Lindsay Ride, and the Kempeitai suspected Selwyn-Clarke of aiding and abetting the escapees. They’d been holding him for interrogation for the past two weeks, and thought Noma a fool to release him just to play in this ridiculous cricket match, but Noma was their commanding officer and they had to obey.