The sultana reached for her bejeweled handbag and pulled out an embroidered lace handkerchief. “Will you please autograph this?” she asked Kitty expectantly.
“Your Majesticness, it would be my pleasure!” Kitty beamed.
The sultana turned to Shang Su Yi, who had been surveying the whole exchange with bemused interest. “This is your grandson’s fiancée? How delightful. Be sure you invite me to the wedding!” The sultana began to wiggle off one of the three humongous diamond rings on her left hand and handed it to Kitty, as the ladies looked on in horror. “Congratulations on your engagement—this is for you. Taniah dan semoga kamu gembira selalu.”†
The farther Nick and Rachel walked from the great lawn, the more the park began to change. The strains of the string ensemble gave way to birds with strangely hypnotic chirps as they entered a pathway shaded by the sprawling branches of two-hundred-year-old Angsana trees. “I love it over here—it’s like we’re on a whole other island,” Rachel said, savoring the cool relief underneath the lush canopy.
“I love it here too. We’re in the oldest part of the park, an area that’s sacred to the Malays,” Nick explained quietly. “You know, back when the island was called Singapura and was part of the ancient Majapahit empire, this is where they built a shrine to the last king.”
“ ‘The Last King of Singapura.’ Sounds like a movie. Why don’t you write the screenplay?” Rachel remarked.
“Ha! I think it’ll draw an audience of about four,” Nick replied.
They reached a clearing in the pathway, and a small colonial-era structure covered in moss came into view. “Whoa—is this the shrine?” Rachel asked, lowering her voice.
“No, this is the gatehouse. When the British came in the nineteenth century, they built a fort here,” Nick explained as they approached the structure and the pair of massive iron doors under the archway. The doors were wide open, flush against the inner wall of the tunnel-like gatehouse, and Nick slowly pulled on one of the heavy doors, revealing a dark narrow entrance cut into the thick stonework, and beyond it the steps leading to the roof of the gatehouse.
“Welcome to my hideout,” Nick whispered, his voice echoing in the tight stairway.
“Is it safe to go up?” Rachel asked, assessing steps that looked like they hadn’t been treaded on in decades.
“Of course. I used to come up here all the time,” Nick said, bounding up the steps eagerly. “Come on!”
Rachel followed gingerly, taking care not to rub any part of her pristine dress against the dirt-caked stairway. The roof was covered in freshly fallen leaves, gnarled tree branches, and the remnants of an old cannon. “Pretty cool, isn’t it? At one point, there were more than sixty cannons lining the battlements of the fort. Come take a look at this!” Nick said excitedly as he disappeared around the corner. Rachel could hear the schoolboy adventurer in his voice. Along the south wall, someone had scrawled long vertical lines of Chinese characters in what looked like a muddy-brown color. “Written with blood,” Nick said in a hushed voice.
Rachel stared at the characters in amazement. “I can’t make them out … it’s so faded, and it’s that old form of Chinese. What do you think happened?”
“We used to make up theories about it. The one I came up with was that some poor prisoner was chained here and left to die by Japanese soldiers.”
“I’m getting sort of creeped out,” Rachel said, shaking off a sudden chill.
“Well, you wanted to see the proverbial ‘sacred cave.’ This is as close to it as you’re going to get. I used to bring my girlfriends up here to make out after Sunday school. This is where I had my first kiss,” Nick announced brightly.
“Of course it is. I couldn’t imagine a more eerily romantic hideout,” Rachel said.
Nick pulled Rachel closer. She thought they were about to kiss, but Nick’s expression seemed to shift into a more serious mode. He thought of the way she looked earlier that morning, with the light streaming in through the stained-glass windows and glinting on her hair.
“You know, when I saw you in the church today sitting with my family, do you know what I thought?”
Rachel could feel her heart suddenly begin to race. “Whh … what?”
Nick paused, gazing deeply into her eyes. “This feeling came over me, and I just knew tha—”
The sound of someone coming up the stairs suddenly interrupted them, and they broke away from their embrace. A ravishing girl with a short-cropped Jean Seberg hairstyle appeared at the top of the stairs, and behind her shuffled a portly Caucasian man. Rachel immediately recognized the hand-painted Dries Van Noten dress from Patric’s atelier that the girl was wearing.
“Mandy!” Nick gasped in surprise.
“Nico!” the girl replied with a smile.
“What are you doing here?”
“What do you think I’m doing here, silly rabbit? I had to escape from that taaaaacky reception. Did you see that ghastly giant teapot? I half expected it to get up and start singing in Angela Lansbury’s voice,” she said, shifting her gaze onto Rachel.
Great. Another Singapore girl with a posh English accent, Rachel thought.
“Where are my manners?” Nick quickly recovered. “Rachel, this is Amanda Ling. You might remember meeting her mum, Jacqueline, the other night at Ah Ma’s.”
Rachel smiled and extended her hand.