Fifty Candles

A crimson-sailed steamer slices through a cobalt Pacific, ferrying exiled aristocrat Hung Chin Chung from fragrant Honolulu plumeria to the gallows-scented mists of Imperial China—until Henry Drew, American titan of sugar and steel, purchases the philosopher’s remaining breaths like a sack of rice, chaining him to twenty velvet-and-iron years of servitude. Rage ferments beneath silken cuffs; each sunset drips molten indignity onto the ledger of his life. On the eve of emancipation the same steamer, now a floating powder-keg of tuxedos and secrets, bears Drew, his restless wife, stenographer Mary-Will Tellfair, and lovelorn Ralph Coolidge toward a fog-choked San Francisco. A jade-handled dagger, once an objet d’art, becomes the exclamation point that ends Drew’s heartbeats in a candlelit stateroom. Suspicion ricochets like stray bullets: the white man’s love, the yellow man’s vengeance, the woman’s unreadable gaze. When the smoke clears, only the candles know whose fingers truly curled around the hilt, their fifty guttering tongues spelling out a confession written in smoke and blood.