The Courtesan (34 page)

Suyin moves out from behind the bushes. Flames leap from the Boxers' torches to the kitchen roof and then to the heavens. She screams a scream of sheer terror. She screams again, and now she is ferociously angry, ready to fight, to struggle with every bone and every limb—tiger against tiger—dragon against dragon—woman with knife against Boxers in the courtyard. Her voice is loud and sure above all the other sounds, and her fingers grip the prince's knife, and they are made of iron—

“Look no further,” she cries
.
“I am the one you want. I am the Emissary's Courtesan.”

It is a young boy who reaches Suyin first, who raises an arm and a knife, who believes that she is Sai Jinhua. He is barely more than a child, and his fellow Boxers are chanting those murderous words, and the Hall of Midsummer Dreams is burning with a heat that is unbearable. The prince's knife drops from Suyin's hand, and the boy lunges, and she knows that he, too, has no choices left. She feels the plunge of his knife into her heart, a pain that hurts beyond all other pain, and then her anger vanishes. The pain is gone. “I wish,” she whispers—“I wish”—and the last thing that Suyin sees is the uncertainty in a young boy's
eyes.

The Courtesan's Child

OCTOBER 21, 1900

The Palace of Peaceful Longevity

The Forbidden City

Peking

THE LION AND THE BUTTERFLY

Count Alfred von Waldersee

Verdammter Hund.

The damned dog has eyes like liquid garnets that could crack a grown man's heart into a thousand pieces. No bigger than Alfred's kneecap, the dowager empress's Pekinese has woken him from a much-needed soldier's forty winks by pawing the toe of his boot.

He assumes the dog was hers because it was found cowering in a corner of the dowager's bedroom in the Palace of Peaceful Longevity near what looked to all the world like a pile of the dowager's fingernail clippings.

So much for palaces with golden roofs.
Scheisse.

When the dog woke him, Alfred had been dreaming, hunched over a fresh blotter, a telegram from the kaiser, and a letter from his wife, Marie, who is American and ambitious and pious, and has as much or more to say in her letter than the kaiser has. Hunched over what was, until the fourteenth day of August, the empress dowager's massive pearwood desk in what was her sitting room until that
same day, the day that General Gaselee arrived with his Union Jack and his Sikhs and Rajputs to put an end to the Boxers' siege of the legations.

The Brits were the first to arrive, of course. The punctual, unctuous British.

He—Alfred—arrived later. The siege was over. The empress had fled. The expedition was a soldier's nightmare—and its aftermath still is, with eight bickering, so-called allied armies at large, and Alfred is wondering how it is that a man called by his kaiser to be the Allied Supreme Commander in China over all these armies can be sitting in a frigid palace with a foolish little dog at his feet and a sudden, guilty craving for a cigar gnawing at his tongue.

“Cigars are forbidden,” according to Marie, who thinks Alfred should have been here for the big fight. But he is here now—in the empress's sitting room, which is his campaign office, with a single brazier putting out a puny heat—and pondering the kaiser's orders to tidy up what is known as “the Chinese situation.”
Exact retribution
is what the kaiser means. Put an end to
die Gelbe Gefahr.
The Yellow Peril.

And what is also understood by this, of course, is that one must make sure that Germany gets her fair share of the loot in the aftermath of war.

There is treasure in Peking. Lots of it. Porcelains and jades—

The dog is relentless, mewling, bowlegged, probing Alfred's boot. He doesn't like dogs, not unless they hunt, which this one surely doesn't. He cocks his boot a little to the left and the dog cocks its head at an identical angle. Their eyes meet, his and the dog's, and the dog is as white as untouched snow, and it seems to Alfred that the creature adores him.

At sixty-eight he is too old for this. He is too old to be Bismarck, which is, he knows, what Marie has in mind for him.

“This is the last chance for us,” she told him just before he boarded the steamship
Sachsen
bound for Shanghai. She is hungry for power. She is bedding the young kaiser, he suspects.

Scheisse
—again. Alfred's socks inside his boots are stiff with dried sweat.

It is a hellish task, this Chinese business. All in the name of the glorious German
Kaiserreich,
and the bloody-minded British, the pious Americans, the conniving Russians, the duplicitous, heathen Japanese, the slovenly French, the Austrians, and the Italians—they are all the same.

And then there is Marie.

Alfred puts down his pen and scoops the little dog onto his lap and pours himself a glass of
Schnaps
. He tosses his head back and savors the faint scent of apricots for just an instant, then the bitterness on his tongue and the heat that seeps from his gullet down into his chest.

It is a soldier's comfort, and one that he needs. He toasts the dog.

“Prost.”

He read this morning in the
Times
a report that Count Alfred von Waldersee, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces at Peking, is down with a bout of dysentery, and he thinks of what he knows is true yet not recorded in the worthy pages of what passes as a purveyor of news. That native women have been suffocating themselves with their silk veils to escape rape by civilized Christian men, and that eighty-five broken clocks have been found inside the Forbidden City, and that diplomats and missionaries are plundering Peking's palaces, soldiers tittering at the sight of a Chinaman's head exploding from the impact of a dumdum bullet. And he wonders—what should he write, exactly, to a kaiser bent on revenge?

He is exhausted. And the white dog reminds him suddenly of the little Chinese girl in Vienna. Those dark eyes, exotic and
trusting and vulnerable. That heart-shaped face, her skin so light and her hair so dark. A child and not a child, both at the same time. He remembers the sense he had on that day in the Prater that she had somehow been harmed. That she was waiting for something to happen. Maybe it was happiness. He remembers now her voice worrying sweetly over German words that were harsh with consonants and other European sounds.

He has not thought of her in a long while. They met only the one time, but he'd like to see her again. She will have grown into a beautiful woman by now.

If she is alive. If she has survived this damnable, godforsaken war.

If I wanted to find her in this damnable, godforsaken country,
Alfred wonders now,
how would I do it?
And why?

He pours himself another glass of
Schnaps
. And then another. The Pekinese uncurls itself in his lap and rolls onto its back, and it is so small and so white and so utterly trusting of him. An ear twitches, bent paws hover, and a hairless belly rises and falls. A vein in Alfred's temple throbs and he tells the dog, “One day I should give you a name. Snowglobe might just suit.”

THE PINE IN WINTER

THE SECOND DAY OF DECEMBER 1900

The Residence of Qing Shan in the
British Sector, Peking

Jinhua

There is a hollow-eyed child in Edmund's bed. A boy and not a man, which briefly surprises Jinhua—and then it appalls her.

She has known since the end of what Edmund calls
le siège,
or the siege, or sometimes
the Boxer Troubles,
that he goes off to so-called secret establishments, places where men are men and they are women too. But the boy is only a child. He can't be more than ten or eleven. Jinhua aches for him. She is pouring pale tea into delicate porcelain cups that Edmund has, most likely, pilfered from a palace, a house, from someone who is dead. A green lampshade palliates the light in his bedroom in this place that he procured when the siege of the legations was over.

The house does not belong to him. It is a place with a harmful history.

“I have these things
pro tempore
—not forever, just for safekeeping,” Edmund says, “until the rightful owners can be found.” By this he means this house that belonged to a man named Qing Shan who drowned himself in the courtyard well for fear of the foreign soldiers' revenge. In another era long before this one, Qing Shan was Prince Duan's tutor.

Prince Duan. The man with the small hands and the ferret face who claimed he had done nothing. The history of this house causes Jinhua to weep tears of rage at this man who taught yet failed to teach Prince Duan, and when she thinks of what she herself has done and failed to see, the tears become hotter and more bitter.

By
pro tempore,
Edmund also means the porcelain cups, and the green lamp, the silk carpets, the urns, the books and jade, and all the other treasures he has brought here from outside.

They are the spoils of a war that China has lost. Edmund is one of the victors.

Perhaps when Edmund speaks of safekeeping he means the boy as well. He is painfully thin, a beautiful child. He looks vaguely familiar, but Jinhua cannot put a memory to him. Pouring tea, her hands are not steady. The words that Edmund uses to describe what has happened—the troubles,
le siège,
the siege—that to him meant fifty-five days of confinement inside the walls of the British Legation—these words are inadequate. For Jinhua it was the very same fifty-five days that were fifty-five days of the unimaginable—fifty-five days of crouching in fear on a threadbare mat in the garden of Prince Su, a beautiful site that had become a place of stink and squalor where dogs ate the bodies of the dead, the weak, the ones who starved; where the most fortunate of the Chinese Christians were crammed together to be safe from the wrath of the Spirit Boxers.

It was fifty-five days, too, of reliving over and over the horror of what Jinhua found at the Hall of Midsummer Dreams on that day of
dies irae.
Of knowing day after day in her skin and her bones—in her heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen, and gall bladder—that the Boxers had murdered Suyin and left her body to burn. Jinhua reaches, scalding cup of tea in hand, across stripes of light that hang over Edmund's bed, and she dislikes the intimacy of this room, the scent of Bordeaux on Edmund's breath so early in the morning—he says that the legation cellars ran dry after only twenty days of the siege—
“c'est vrai,”
he says—and most of all Jinhua dislikes this new conceit of his, the child in Edmund's bed.
How were those fifty-five days for the boy?
she wonders.
Where was he when the Boxers ravaged and Peking burned and all was lost?

Edmund has saved her, and he has probably saved the boy, and that is why they are alive, the two of them, living here,
pro tempore,
in this house. Everyone else has disappeared. Alive or murdered, who knows? Lao Ye? The girls? The gatekeeper?

The two houseboys? Liu, who helped her?

Jinhua releases the cup to Edmund's outstretched hand. “Stay as long as you wish, Jinhua,” he said when it was all over. “We will look after each other, the two of us, for a while.”

He means this honestly, if Edmund can be honest. Jinhua has begun to understand why it is that he calls himself
the harmful horse of the herd.
He is a person who cares for himself more than for others. And if she is honest with herself—

Jinhua pours a second cup of tea for the boy, whom Edmund has dressed in a tunic the color of butter, his legs and hips swaddled in yellow quilts—and she thinks of Resi's hot chocolate drink with whipped cream in a mound on the top—
and would the boy like that as much as she did?

The boy looks Jinhua full in the eyes when he thanks her for
the tea. Maybe, she thinks, he is already twelve years old—as she once was in a faraway time and place. He is certainly no older. And then he says, “I remember you. You are the sister of the lady with the candied crabapples. She gave me money. She said to hurry up before she changed her mind. You told me not to eat too many,” he says. “You said it would make my belly ache.”

And now she knows. The boy is Edmund's houseboy. She remembers his eyes, Suyin saying that they made her ache, those eyes. She remembers Suyin telling him, “Go and buy yourself some skewered crabapples coated with honey and sesame seeds,” and Jinhua remembers how the boy ran off, as quick as a rabbit, pigtail flying, trousers flapping, peeking back at her and Suyin—and remembering this makes her ache anew for what she has lost.

The boy's eyes have changed, and she thinks now of what he has lost. If she were to speak, Jinhua would say to Edmund—
Leave him alone; he is too perfect. He can be broken with your bed business—in the same way that I was broken long ago by a go-between, a foot binder, a madam, and a banker. I was broken, too, by a husband who meant no harm but caused it just the same.

She cannot speak just now. Edmund tells her, “Xiexie ni.” Thank you. He means for the tea. He means that she should leave the room. The perfect ovals of his fingernails gleam, and they are pink and look as though he has just now finished oiling them.

Jinhua goes to the door and doesn't like that she is walking away. She turns back once and looks at the boy still swaddled in yellow. She looks at Edmund. So careless. So unreliable. He has lost so little in all of this, Edmund has. For him it is not the way it is for Jinhua, and for the boy, and for Suyin, for whom this life is over. It is not the way it is for Chinese people who have lost yet another war. Edmund is an Englishman. He is strong and can take what he wants. He is one of the victors.

When Edmund brought her to the garden of Prince Su, he said, “It won't be long, Jinhua. Succor will arrive soon. Our armies are en route, and until then you will be safe here with the other Chinese people.”

Edmund didn't understand that she didn't care about dying. He didn't understand that in the few dark hours before that day of
dies irae,
Jinhua had finally learned that succor has always and only come from Suyin. He didn't understand her regret, her shame—her unbearable grief.

The rain came too late—and so did the foreign soldiers with their marching boots, and their waving flags, and their muskets slung over their shoulders. Chinese people died in the prince's garden, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. They prayed day after day for the Lord's protection. They ate rice and horsemeat to keep themselves alive, here where they were safe from the knives of the Boxers. Later it was cakes made of chaff and sorghum and leaves and bark that left their mouths raw and their bellies sore, and still they prayed and spoke of their god.

Jinhua is meager now, all bones and angles. She goes, still, every day to that darkened, empty place where the hall of her dreams once stood. She sits among the ashes, and there she speaks to Suyin and tells her almost everything. Today she will tell Suyin about the boy. Suyin will want to know what has happened to him. He is meager too; Jinhua noticed that.

Waking from a brief sleep, Jinhua sees that Edmund has come into the room that is hers,
pro tempore.
He is sitting at the edge of the
bed, dressed in his Chinese gown. Strangely, she feels that Edmund has witnessed her dream, the one she just had. Strangely too, she doesn't mind.

“I dreamt about another life. It was a time when I was a child and felt happy,” she says, sitting up. “My father was there and Suyin was too, and he told us both a story, and it began like this—‘Long, long ago in ancient times, when just wishing a thing made it so'—and there were dots like stars in his eyes from the light of the lanterns.”

Edmund's eyes are dark, and he is nodding, and Jinhua doesn't mind him being here; in fact, he must be here. She takes a breath.

“I have decided,” she says, “to go back to Suzhou.” A glint of sunlight settles on Edmund's lower lip, and his forehead is furrowed, and yes, there are dots of light in his eyes too. “It is where I belong, back in the place where I began,” she continues, and it feels good to say this to Edmund. It feels good to allow what is real to be real and what is not real to fade. It feels good to decide.

But there is so much more to think about—and more to say to Edmund.

She loves the count. She loves him still and always will. She loves his blue, blue eyes and his pale hair and the gold buttons on his jacket. She loves the things she felt when she was with him. His lips kissing her hand. Bubbles on her tongue. His body close to hers on the velvet seat of his carriage. She loves what he made possible. The touch of an empress. Seven sweet, buttery, chocolaty layers. Midsummer dreams—

It has been a heavy load to keep the dreams with her. Jinhua needed them. Because of them she chose what she should never, ever have chosen. She came here to Peking. She brought Suyin. It is because of the count that she loves Edmund. And yet—perhaps it is as Suyin always said. Some things are inevitable. And sometimes, she now thinks, mud and sand flow together.

Edmund's eyes match, even in this dim, uncertain light, the sky as they always have—the sky when a storm is coming. He is a good man in some ways, Jinhua sees now, and a bad man in others. She has forgiven him for being the way he is—but he is not in any way good for the boy—and she cannot forgive him for taking this child into his bed.

“
Aut viam,
” Jinhua says to herself, and the Latin words are impossible to say and hard to believe—and Edmund, who is so unreliable, so dear, so detestable, lovable, foolish, and wise—Edmund is nodding to encourage her. “
Inveniam aut faciam,
” she finishes.

I will either find a way—or make one.

“I will take the boy with me, Edmund,” Jinhua says now, and she is telling him this, not asking him—and it feels as though a storm has ended. She has decided, and it will make Suyin happy—and is so very necessary. It is what Jinhua must do. “He will come with me to Suzhou,” she says. “I will look after him and see that he is well.”

Edmund looks surprised and then not. He looks down at his hands, and in the droop of his shoulders Jinhua perceives the first real sorrow she has seen in him. “You have learned so much,” he says, and sitting here in this darkened, borrowed room, Jinhua knows that she is strong. She is becoming less harmful.