The vendor, feeling sorry for the pretty lady, called to them to approach, and when they did, he refilled the tiffin. But Ting-Yan knew how hard it was for a street seller to make a living. She didn’t have much in her pocket, having already paid a handsome sum to Granny Kwok, but she gave the vendor everything she had left. So she’d both cursed Emily and Tak-Wing and paid for their wedding breakfast in the same morning. She didn’t want to think about it. “Where are you staying?”

Someone blew a whistle. Police raid! The vendors slammed down covers and pulled wraps over carts and wheelbarrows and hightailed it out of the alley so fast that Emily and Ting-Yan were left standing there alone when the police rushed past them.

CHAPTER 12JOLLY GOOD FELLOW

July 9, 1937

When Cheung got to the Hong Kong Cricket Club, the first-floor bar was abuzz with a story that to him already felt like ancient news—the story of Selby Hancock’s drunken misbehaviour at Clearwater Bay yesterday and Cheung and Lee’s rescue of the entire crew. The news of Selby’s further misbehaviour early this morning in Wan Chai was also beginning to trickle in. Vandeleur Grayburn, head of the Hong Kong branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, wondered if he should fire Selby. He wondered, too, if they’d done the right thing to elect Richard Hancock as president of the HKCC. Lindsay Ride, physiology professor at the University of Hong Kong, said that it wasn’t Hancock’s fault, and that the trouble Selby got up to wasn’t so unusual for young men new to the colony. He rattled off the names of half a dozen other young cricketers who’d had similar troubles when they first came. Grayburn agreed that there was nothing unusual about Selby, but said that it was embarrassing just the same, and that because of who Selby’s father was, it was embarrassing for the club too.

But the bar also buzzed with a second story, which was that of Cheung Tak-Wing’s secret marriage to Emily Mah Wai-Yee. But since it was about Cheung in a shameful way, the toffs did not speak this gossip in his presence. It was minor gossip anyway because no actual members of the club were involved.

But there was a third story that developed before Cheung’s eyes. The club’s chief steward, Martin Colville, was returning to Melbourne. Colville was convinced that the Japanese were going to invade Hong Kong. “I don’t know when, mates, but I’m telling you, they are coming. I have a family. I’ve got to keep them safe.”