The Courtesan (16 page)

The piece of silk is square and white with the faintest of markings. When Madam Hong gave it to Jinhua, she asked, “Do you know what this is?”

Jinhua shook her head.
No, she did not.

Madam Hong's hands were rigid. And yet they were shaking.

“It is the
Ye He Hua.
” The Flower of Nocturnal Togetherness.

Rage in Madam Hong's voice. Lips dark, almost gray underneath her lip paint.

“Ò,”
Jinhua said, and she repeated the words she had never heard before.
“Ye He Hua.”

It is the merest, palest outline of a flower on the silk. “Painted by my own chaste hand,” Madam Hong told her, lips becoming darker,
“with a fine, mousehair brush. And with a delicate paste of oyster shell to draw the flower pattern. But now that you have come,” she said, “I cannot bring myself to touch it. My hands, you see—”

There are no stitches. No colors and no threads. There is only the pattern that Madam Hong has painted on the square of white silk.

The color of magnolia.

Madam Hong began to laugh a little. “You shall have my embroidery box as well,” she said. “Do you understand my meaning?”

Jinhua nodded—
Yes, she understands
—and Madam Hong frowned a deep, tight frown that made her face ugly for one long moment. “No,” she said, releasing the frown, speaking softly. “You are a person who understands nothing. Now, go back to your courtyard and ponder what it is that I have taught you.”

Jinhua is in her own courtyard now, sitting in her own room. She is looking at the
Ye He Hua
—the Flower of Nocturnal Togetherness—and she has opened Madam Hong's embroidery box, and color spills from it with the finest silk threads perfectly ordered: yellows next to other yellows—the color of forsythia and daffodil and ochre-tinted soil; pinks with pinks—orchids, peaches, pomegranates; watermelon red and rose red and chrysanthemum red that is almost brown; greens and blues and purples all in shades that range from almost white to almost black. And Jinhua's cheeks are burning.

She takes a needle in her hand. She takes a piece of silk thread in her other hand, and it is orange, the color of kumquats, and she sits for a long time thinking, and finally, when her hips ache from sitting and her head aches from thinking, an image comes to her quite clearly, and it is her own face seen from beyond herself, with the red line drawn at her throat. And later a second image comes, one she has seen again and again—it is Lao Mama's dark eye peering through a crack.

A WAVE WITHOUT WIND

Madam Hong

The lake is disheveled at this time of year. The rumpled leaves of the sacred lotus began rising from the muck only a few days ago, and now they wallow across the surface of the water in shades of jade sea and blue sky. No blooms yet, but the lotus flowers will soon intrude with daubs of pink and white.

Madam Hong has been sitting here for hours watching birds and fish and dragonflies beyond the red railings of the pavilion, and she has been contemplating Wenqing's letter on the table, anchored by a pebble against the wind, pondering how a single lotus plant can live for a thousand years—and thinking, too, about poison.

She misses her embroidery; it is one more thing that the courtesan has taken from her. Madam Hong hears the tidy splash of a carp in the pond. It is a warm day with a blinding sun, and Huizhong is hovering at the edge of the pavilion.

“Madam Hong,” she says, and her hands, as always, are constantly moving, “you must forget this foolishness. Only Cook and I
have touched your food, and the concubine has not come near it. It is perfectly safe for you to eat what he has so carefully prepared.”

Huizhong does not understand—at all—what it is that worries Madam Hong. On the table she has placed a bowl of bean-curd milk and a plate of crisp
shaobing
and a tray of ginger-infused towels. Madam Hong likes the scent of ginger, usually. Today it disgusts her.

“The
doujiang
is warm and Cook has sweetened it with just a drip of honey,” Huizhong says. “It will strengthen and revive you. He has prepared it in just the way that you like, Madam. Do not be afraid.”

Perhaps Huizhong is right; perhaps she is foolish to fear the food that Cook has prepared and Huizhong has brought to her, and perhaps it is true that the courtesan has not been near it. Madam Hong fills a porcelain spoon with milk and takes the smallest of sips. “It is delicious,” she says, leaning over the bowl. “Not bitter at all, but difficult to swallow.”

Huizhong looks pleased, and Madam Hong reminds herself that she had planned to give the maid a bolt of cloth from the storeroom as a gift. The blue silk will fetch a good price at the market—and Cook must have one as well. Or maybe she will give them each two bolts. She tells herself that Huizhong has a faithful heart. That her husband will be home soon. His letter arrived three days ago.
I am coming back to Suzhou,
he wrote,
and I bring news from the Capital.

Madam Hong does not concern herself with thoughts of what the news might be; perhaps the great Qing army has won a battle against the foreign devils. Or perhaps Wenqing has completed the drawing of a new map showing an advantageous border with that barbarian place to the north that so worries him.

Russia.

Either way, it is not her concern for today or tomorrow. Her concern is the courtesan. It is her husband. Her embroidery. Her life.

Yesterday Huizhong told her, “You have caused a hundred knots of worry to tie up my intestines since the master went away. You must eat. You must rest. You must give up these thoughts of poison.”

But the spider was real. She did not imagine it or conjure it in her dream.

It was the day after the courtesan came to visit—or was it two days after, or three? Her mind is a little confused, which is of course a symptom—one of many possible symptoms—of poisoning. She woke to find the spider there, nestled in the folds of her quilt, less than the length of her arm from her chin. It was morning, and she stared and lay quite still, and she could hear the creature breathing and see its body perfectly, like two chestnuts joined at the waist, brown and hairy and muscular; its eight legs were knuckled and as rugged as the root of the lotus. The spider waved its sluggish fangs in the direction of her face and then retracted them, and it watched her, and she watched it. She lay there for a long time, as helpless as a cripple in her bed, but strangely calm.

When Huizhong came and saw the spider there on the quilt, she screamed like a crow and ran to fetch the gardener, who studied the creature from a respectful distance before he told them, “It is a
hu wen bu niao zhu,
” a tiger-striped-bird-capturing spider. “I am quite sure of this naming,” he said. “It can be nothing else. The creature is a killer, I tell you.” While he said this the spider waited, and Huizhong watched from the far side of the room, whimpering a little—and Madam Hong thought,
I told them there was danger, and I was not wrong.

Hearing the commotion, Cook arrived with chopsticks in his hand, the long ones that he uses for frying in hot oil, and he said, “You are the gardener and know about spiders. You do it,” and the gardener said, “All right, but let me use your chopsticks.” Madam Hong did not move—
and kept her eyes on that spider.
The gardener
picked the spider up the way one plucks a morsel of pork from a bowl of noodles and dropped it on the floor, and it crept two steps this way and three steps that way, and then it stopped.

Huizhong said, “Kill it. Step on it. Stab it,” and she was shrieking. Cook said, “Give me back my chopsticks,” and the gardener looked at Madam Hong. She said, “Give it rice to eat and tea to drink. Put it in the cricket cage and bind the cage with hemp. Treat the creature well. It is deserving. It is a living being just as I am.”

It is the evidence. Her husband must see it.

She knows nothing about this kind of spider, but Madam Hong knows more now about poison than she did before. She found the book in her husband's library on the bottom shelf, where the largest, heaviest books are kept. It is called
A Long History of Poison,
and Madam Hong has read every single page—twice. Sadly, she has found no mention of the tiger-striped-bird-capturing spider, but she has read about Lu Wanghou—the empress Lu—who put poison in lotus-root soup to make the concubine Qi go deaf and blind.

Sometimes events happen in reverse. Sometimes it is the courtesan who poisons the wife.

Madam Hong's gaze shifts now to Wenqing's letter. She takes it in her hand. She has read it several times, but today his careful script is blurred. She can barely make out the words
To my Good Wife in her Chaste Chambers.
Today, surely, her vision is worse than it was only yesterday. And was it not this morning that Huizhong put an extra layer of powder on her face to hide the unnatural flush in her cheeks?

Madam Hong reaches for a gingered towel but stops before she touches it, and
Ò, how she longs for her embroidery and for the time, such as it was, before the courtesan came.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Jinhua

“I return from the capital with news, and the news is monumental and of great import.” Master Hong clears his throat, and he looks weary after his journey, swaying slightly on his feet in dusty boots.

“A thousand changes lie ahead.” He clears his throat again and blinks, and Jinhua notices that a few stray hairs have escaped his queue, and there is dust, too, at the hem of his gown. “The old must be replaced with the new.” Master Hong is shaking his head, and Jinhua imagines that this smallest of movements of his head from side to side is not something that he intends to do, but rather something his mind suggests and his body cannot forestall.

He is displeased, puzzled, agitated—and changed, she thinks. Not the way he was when she last saw him.

The monumental news of great import cannot be good news.

Jinhua bows, and she is thinking that she must remember to call Master Hong by the name of Wenqing as he has requested that she do. The sounds of brooms chafe in the courtyard, the maids at
their morning chores, and the sounds are loud, and Master Hong retrieves an object from his writing table. It is wrapped, she sees, in yellow cloth—
the color of an egg yolk
—
and yes, he is thinner in his cheeks than he was when Jinhua last saw him, and she has forgotten, yet again, to think of him by that other name.

“I trust,” he says, and it is hard to remain calm, “that my concubine is feeling well and that she has not been ill in my absence.” He is fumbling to unwrap the object, peeling back layers of the yellow cloth. “The first lady is in a delicate state, I fear. Her maid has said that her heart has been distracted, her thoughts have been in turmoil, and she has not been eating well, or sleeping, or doing her embroidery as is her habit.”

Jinhua waits, and she herself has not been sleeping well—and it is because of Madam Hong and because of the shame that she feels and cannot now forget. She notices the large pot of paintbrushes, a great ivory-handled brush lying next to it, the tip as large as a fist. She has not been in this place before—the place where Wenqing works and draws his maps, and where the walls are hung with paintings of the mountain-water type. It is a wooden tablet her husband has unwrapped and is holding up for her to see, painted black and inscribed in gold—and not much larger than the palm of his hand.

Wenqing reads aloud.

By Divine Mandate the Emperor of China sends the Honorable Bearer of this pass as Emissary to the nations of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Holland, and Russia—

He pauses, and she can see the shudder of his throat when he swallows and wonders what it means—this writing on the tablet.

A journey to a faraway, barbarian place.

And upon surrender of said pass to the Presiding Official at the Chinese Embassy in Weiyena, the Bearer shall be given the Official Seal of Office.

He is waiting now, looking first at her and then at the floor in front of where she is standing. She should avert her gaze but doesn't.

“What does this mean?”

“It means,” he says, shifting his stance, coughing a small cough, “that I will go to Weiyena—to live there—for a while, in service to the emperor.”

She nods and understands.

“How long will you be gone?” she asks, and what she understands is that she will be here alone with Madam Hong, and Master Hong will be there, in Weiyena, and this is terrible, terrible news that he has brought back from the capital.

“And because it is unseemly to take a first wife to such a place—because of decorum”—it is as though she had not asked the question; his voice is drifting—“my concubine will be the one to come with me. To live there—for a while—for two years, or three.”

He is avoiding her gaze, and she is seeking his. It is a long time. Two years. “And Madam Hong?”

“Madam Hong,” he says, looking at her now, “will stay here in Suzhou. She is a virtuous person. She cannot possibly live among the barbarians.”

“It is right here,” Wenqing says, and he is showing Jinhua a map. “It is far, far to the west, in the lands of Austria-Hungary.” His voice is quiet. His face is pale, and she has not seen this map before. “Weiyena is the imperial capital of the emperor of that place. It is a
remote spot, an ancient city, as old as our own city of Suzhou, but a barbarian place cannot be compared—”

Jinhua is uncertain. “It is an honor, then—that the emperor has named you his emissary to this remote, ancient, and imperial land?”

It is a while before Wenqing answers, and it occurs to Jinhua—
she should not have said this.

“No,” he says, finally. “It is not an honor—to be sent away to the land of the barbarians. And were the choice mine and mine alone, I would stay here with you and Madam Hong in Suzhou and draw my maps, and I would never travel there to Weiyena. But the Guangxu emperor has decreed it, and I am his subject, and therefore I will go and you, Second Lady, will go with me.”

It is the first time he has called her this. Second Lady. And now there is the sound of Wenqing's fingers tapping on the writing table, and he is murmuring about a time long, long ago when the barbarian people of Europe paid tribute to the Chinese emperor and when they observed the Comprehensive Rites of the Great Qing. “But much has changed,” he says. “The barbarians have become greedy. They no longer respect the rites. They do not respect our emperor.”

As he tells her this, it is as though there were not enough air in all the world, and it is as though Jinhua were not even in the room as Wenqing speaks—and there is no doubt, absolutely none, but that Jinhua would rather go to the lands of the greedy foreign devils with guns and warships than stay here in this house alone with Madam Hong. “They are our enemies,” Wenqing continues, “and it is just as Sun Tzu has written—know yourself; know your enemy. This is why I must travel to this place called Weiyena: to observe our enemies' ways and strategies. Their methods must be used to strengthen China. There are factions at court who say we must change ourselves in order to emerge victorious—”

And now they hear screams and a pounding on the door, and the pounding on the door is Huizhong who has come, who bursts into Wenqing's study, wailing, sobbing, gasping.

“It is my virtuous, my ever-kind and always generous mistress,” she cries. “My mistress whom I have loved and who has treated me kindly, lovingly, generously. She is—she is dead. She has—she has hung herself from the eave of the veranda in
this person's
courtyard.” Huizhong points as she says this. She points with two hands and two forefingers aimed like arrows in Jinhua's direction.

The cord around Madam Hong's neck is white; her clothes are red, her face powdered and painted—and Jinhua thinks of what Lao Mama said to her on that day when she left the Hall of Round Moon and Passionate Love. “If you are miserable in that house you can powder your face and then hang yourself—wear red,” she said, and Madam Hong has done these things, just as Lao Mama instructed.

The morning breeze shows no pity. The body is swaying from the white cord, and dragonflies are buzzing, and servants are wailing. Madam Hong's neck is much longer than it was before, and the hanging has left her chin stiff and tilted strangely upward. Her face is hideous now and strangely colored—and Jinhua cannot help but stare at her.

Worst of all are Madam Hong's dusky eyes, so wide, so round, so unblinking—and Huizhong, who is wringing her hands and saying over and over again, “Who is the person who made my beloved mistress do this awful thing?” And Jinhua is thinking that this face of Madam Hong's will stay in her mind for a very long time. Like a picture she can never take down from the wall. Like Lao Mama's eye that comes again and again to her, reminding her always of where she has been and what she has done. Reminding her of eating brothel rice. Of animals and positions. Of men. Of shame. Of that other life she has lived.

Madam Hong has left two notes. Jinhua notices the flush that appears on Wenqing's face when he reads the note that is addressed to him. He does not read it aloud, he shows it to no one, and a wail comes out of his mouth. He covers his face with his hands when he has finished reading—and all of the servants are wailing with him, but Jinhua cannot.

How can she wail for such a person?

And how can she not?

The second note is red and tightly rolled, tied with a piece of embroidery thread—in just the way that Madam Hong's other note was rolled and tied. “The last words of a dead person must be carefully noted,” Huizhong hisses between one wail and the next, and she presses the note into Jinhua's hand—and Jinhua cannot refuse it.

To the Courtesan,
she reads, and the note coils back around itself, and in this it is like that other note that was three things—an invitation, a command, and an accusation. This one reads:

As Lady Ban has admonished, there are Four Virtues for Women. As long as you shall live in my husband's house do not forget Moral Behavior, Proper Speech, Modest Demeanor, and Diligent Work. And as Lady Ban has also written, do not forget Obedience. Do not forget Chastity.

Each of these is your Duty.

The note is signed
Elder Sister.

“She was beyond reproach.” Wenqing is wailing, sobbing, weeping.

“My beloved mistress was indeed beyond reproach,” Huizhong
repeats. But Jinhua can neither weep nor wail, and she is thinking of embroidery, and thinking, too, that Madam Hong is dead but not gone, that she will be with them, with her and Wenqing, for a long time to come.

When the cord has been cut from Madam Hong's throat, and she has been laid in the Hall of the Ancestors on the Yellow Robe of a Thousand Prayers, when night has come, Wenqing knocks at the door to Jinhua's bedchamber. He is still weeping. He is here for comfort.

Jinhua dries his tears. She murmurs words that mean nothing, that neither she nor he will remember later. This does not matter, because it is the sound of her voice that he needs, and Jinhua knows this. She holds his hands and strokes his cheek, and he needs this too. But when later Wenqing reaches out to her for comfort of a different kind, she turns away and says to him, “We may not do this thing. Madam Hong is with us both tonight.” And later still, when his breathing deepens, she whispers to her husband, “
Nu-nu?
” a term of endearment she has never used before. She dares to think about a barbarian city where she will live, for a while, for two years or maybe three. She dares to be glad that they are leaving
Suzhou.