37
Whilst he was absent from Hankow for two weeks in 1865, starting his new job [cotton broking], she left for Hunan and 'virtuous widowhood.' [Despite her apparently being with child by Mesny?]
Under another heading, on male offspring, Mesny related an incident which occurred when he would have been about forty. He was riding by a tent of a member of a Mongolian-Turki nobleman in Turkestan and it was an act of benevolence, says Mesny, to perform the agreeable function of adding a male child to the nobleman's family. The nobleman, a weak-looking old man with a strong Turkish woman of about forty years of age, had borne a daughter and been barren ever since. The husband, Mesny concluded, introduced us and left us together.
Immediately after his capture by the Taipings in 1862 he was confronted by a Taiping chief, an Admiral, who, according to Mesny, welcomed him once he had realized that Mesny too was a Christian and immediately promised to make Mesny a Vice-Admiral in the Taiping navy commanding one of their vessels and give him the hand of one of his daughters in marriage. An old lady with great pull amongst the Taiping leadership who had befriended Mesny after he had repaired her musical box and her pistols, did not approve of Mesny marrying the Admiral's daughter as the girl had already been betrothed to two different men, both of whom had been killed in battle, a sign that she was unlucky and consequently should remain single. Mesny added, 'I had nothing to say in the matter, being as submissive in matrimonial matter as a lamb that is being led to slaughter.'
In 1896 he described another of his many adventures with the Taiping rebels in the mid-1860s when, as a captive, many of the Taiping ladies had been perfectly charming and very persuasive, offering him a wife or two from the large number of Taiping ladies in the Taiping king's palace and elsewhere. He added that he had told them that he had no intention of staying with the Taipings for a life time, and hoped to go back to his native land to get married there to a wife whose interests and sympathies would be nearer to his than those of any Chinese lady could ever be. He wrote this in 1896 and one can sense the regret in his tone that he ever did marry a Chinese woman as, at that stage in his life he was married for at least the second time, had two Eurasian children, and was kept at arms length by fellow expatriates in Shanghai where he lived at the time.