The Warning Voice (18 page)

Parfumée, never one to take things quietly, set up a howl of tearful protest.

‘I gave that stuff to him because I hadn't got any orris and I was afraid if I told him I hadn't got any he wouldn't believe me. Anyway, it's good powder. And suppose I
have
been trained as an actress, I've never played outside for money. I'm a little girl, not a trumpet or whatever it was you called me. And as for being “bought goods”, well, it wasn't
you
who bought me. And anyway, look who's talking! I thought all of us here were bought goods. I don't know why you of all people would want to drag
that
up.'

‘Stop that at once!' said Aroma, shocked, and tried to pull her out of the way. But Aunt Zhao, in speechless fury, had already advanced on Parfumée and dealt her a couple of resounding slaps on the head. Aroma expostulated.

‘She's only a child, Mrs Zhao, you don't want to put yourself on the same level. Leave it to us to deal with her.'

Parfumée was not to be struck with impunity and reacted to the assault with a fine display of histrionics, weeping, shouting and throwing herself about in all directions.

‘How dare you hit me, you horrible old woman! You should
look at yourself in the mirror! Go on, hit me again then, hit me again! I don't want to go on living!'

Lowering her head, she drove it into Aunt Zhao's midriff, continuing, as she butted into her, to repeat her challenge. Several of the servants shouted at her and attempted to pull her off. Aroma would have done so too, but Sky-bright drew her to one side and advised her against joining them.

‘Leave them to it, Aroma. You and I don't want to get mixed up in this. It's the law of the jungle now: you hit me, I hit you. Heaven knows where it will end!'

The servants who had followed in Aunt Zhao's wake, when they heard the rumpus inside, gave thanks to the Lord Buddha that justice was at last being done. Among them, the old women who bore grudges against the little actresses were particularly gratified to hear that Parfumée was being beaten.

The news travelled quickly. Nénuphar and Étamine, who had found a quiet corner of All-spice Court in which to be alone together, heard it when the two former ‘painted faces' of their troupe, Xiang-yun's Althée and Bao-qin's Cardamome, burst in on them to enlist their support.

‘Come on, you two! If we let them bully Parfumée, we shall all of us suffer. It's time to come out in the open and make a stand. Let's show them a bit of spirit!'

The four of them were only children, full of righteous indignation for their friend. Without a moment's reflection they rushed off in a body and went charging into Green Delights. Cardamome made first impact, and Aunt Zhao would have been swept off her feet had she not been simultaneously ringed round by the three others, who, with fists flailing, heads butting, and all emitting loud ‘boo-hoos', pressed in upon her rear and sides. Skybright and the senior maids, though pretending concern and making half-hearted attempts to intervene, found it difficult not to laugh; but Aroma was genuinely distressed and dashed from one to another of them, dragging them away from Aunt Zhao. It was useless. As she pulled one off, another would dart in to replace her.

‘What's the matter with you all?' wailed Aroma. ‘If you've got a grievance, why can't you discuss it like sensible human
beings? You can't go taking the law into your own hands like this. I never heard of such a thing!'

Aunt Zhao could only curse helplessly, Éitamine and Nénuphar held her firmly by each arm and Althée and Cardamome had her pinned between them with their heads.

‘Kill us!' they kept shouting, ‘Kill us all four!'

Parfumée meanwhile lay stretched out corpselike on the ground, having cried herself into a swoon.

The little actresses might have remained locked in their grapple with Aunt Zhao indefinitely, but Skybright had already sent Swallow to bear word of what was happening to Tan-chun, and You-shi, Li Wan and Tan-chun, together with Patience and a number of female domestics, now arrived upon the scene and shouted to them peremptorily to release her.

Aunt Zhao was by now pop-eyed with anger and the veins stood out thickly on her forehead. They asked her how she came to be in such a predicament, but her reply, though long and voluble, was made almost incomprehensible by rage, and You-shi and Li Wan, unable to make anything of it, contented themselves with shouting some more at the actresses. Tan-chun, though, merely sighed.

‘This isn't really very serious. You are too easily angered, Aunt. As a matter of fact there was something I wanted to discuss with you, but the maids didn't seem to know where you had got to. Now it appears that you were in here, working yourself into a rage. Do come with us now.'

You-shi and Li Wan smilingly confirmed the invitation.

‘Yes, Mrs Zhao. Come with us to the office and we can discuss things with you there.'

Since she could scarcely object to being consulted, Aunt Zhao was constrained to go along with them, but even as she went she continued muttering angrily to herself until Tan-chun cut her short:

‘These girls are here for our amusement,' Tan-chun said. ‘They are like pets. You can talk to them and play with them if you feel like it, or if you don't, you can simply ignore them. It's the same when they are naughty. Just as, when your puppy-dog bites you or your kitten scratches you, you can either ignore it or have it punished, so with these
girls. If they do something to offend you, you can either let it pass, or, if you don't feel able to, you can call in one of the stewardesses and have them punished. There is absolutely no need to go rushing off in person, shouting and hollering at them. It's so undignified. And besides, it sets so bad an example. Look at Aunt Zhou.
She
doesn't seem to suffer any of this disrespect you complain of and
she
isn't always rushing off after people to have it out with them. If I were you, Aunt, I should go back to your room now and try to calm down a bit. And don't go listening any more to those trouble-makers. There's no reason why you should do other people's work for them; you get no thanks for it; they merely laugh at you for being stupid. However angry you may feel now, try to be patient for a few days until Lady Wang gets back and we'll see what we can do to get all this sorted out then.'

This dressing-down was effective, insofar as it left Aunt Zhao without a word to say, and she returned in silence to her room. As soon as she had gone, Tan-chun burst out angrily to the others.

‘You'd think she'd know better at her age. Why can't she do
anything
to make people respect her? I mean, what a ridiculous thing to quarrel about! And what a way to behave! She will listen to absolutely anything anyone tells her. She has absolutely no judgement of her own. And those wretched old women take advantage of the fact to use her as their cat's-paw.'

The more Tan-chun thought about it, the angrier she became. She ended up by ordering the women to make some inquiries and find out whose incitement it was that had goaded Aunt Zhao into action. The women went off obediently to investigate, but turned to each other with shrugs and smiles as they left the building.

‘Like looking for a needle on the ocean bed!'

And though they had Aunt Zhao's women and all the women from the Garden up in front of them for questioning, not one of them would admit to knowing anything at all about it, and they were obliged to report back to Tan-chun that they had failed.

‘But we shall go on making inquiries, miss,' they said. ‘If we find anything suspicious, we shall report it to you.'

Tan-chun's anger had by this time subsided and she would have let the matter drop; but Artémisie, the little actress who had been assigned to her apartment, came to her privately to tell her that she could identify the culprit.

‘It was Mamma Xia,' she said. ‘She hates us and she is always trying to get us into trouble. The other day she tried to get Nénuphar into trouble for burning spirit-money, but Bao-yu had
asked
her to burn it, and when he owned up, Mamma Xia hadn't a leg to stand on. Today, when I was delivering those handkerchiefs for you, I noticed her and Mrs Zhao twittering away for ever such a long time together and when they saw me coming they moved out of the way to avoid me.'

It seemed highly probable that it
was
Mamma Xia who had done the inciting; but these little actresses were all closely in league together, Tan-chun reflected, and all of them were exceptionally mischievous: it would be too risky to act on the evidence of what one of them had said. She thanked Artémisie for her information, but inwardly decided to do nothing.

By an unlucky chance Mamma Xia had a granddaughter who worked in Tan-chun's apartment and did various little errands for the maids, with all of whom she was popular. Her name was Cicada, but the maids all called her ‘Ciggy'. On this particular occasion Tan-chun had gone back to the ‘jobs room' after lunch, leaving Ebony in charge of her apartment. Ebony now asked Ciggy to go to the Garden gatehouse and get one of the pages there to run out and buy her a sweetcake. Ciggy objected that she had just finished sweeping the courtyard and had a backache. She told Ebony to ask someone else.

‘There's no one else I
can
ask,' said Ebony. ‘I tell you what. If you'll do this errand for me now, I'll give you a piece of good advice that you can pass on to your grandma when you get there.'

And she proceeded to tell her about Artémisie's denunciation.

‘Tell her to be on her guard.'

‘The little beast!' said Ciggy, taking the money for the sweetcake. ‘She wants to join in too, does she? Wait till I tell my gran!'

And off she went to the back gate of the Garden.

It was a slack time now in the kitchen and the women, Mamma Xia among them, having for the time being finished with fetching and carrying, were sitting outside on the steps and gossiping. Ciggy asked one of them to go out and buy a hot fried sweetcake for her and then proceeded to give her grandmother an account, interlarded with much bad language of her own, of what Ebony had told her about Artémisie.

Mamma Xia, both angered and alarmed by what she heard, was all for going off straight away, having it out with the little actress, and protesting her innocence to Tan-chun; but Ciggy prevented her.

‘Don't go, Gran! What can you say to them if you do go? How are you going to explain how you got to know about it? Once they start asking questions, you'll be in the soup again. I've told you this to put you on your guard. You don't have to
do
anything about it.'

Just then Parfumée peered in the gateway of the kitchen courtyard and called across to Mrs Liu, the cook, who was still banging about inside the kitchen.

‘Cookie, Master Bao says, for his vegetable dish this evening could he have something cold and vinegary again, please, only not so oily as last time?'

‘Very good,' Cook Liu stood in her doorway and called back cheerfully. ‘Why should they send
you
about such a great, important matter? Come in and look around, if it's not too dirty for you.'

Parfumgée had barely stepped into the courtyard when the woman to whom Ciggy had entrusted the money arrived back carrying Ebony's hot fritter on a saucer.

‘Oo, lovely hot fritter! Give us a taste!' said Parfumée jokingly.

‘That has been ordered and paid for by someone else,' said Ciggy primly, as she took the saucer from the woman. ‘It is not for you.'

‘Do you fancy one, miss?' Cook Liu asked Parfumée. ‘I've got one in here that I bought for our Fivey you can have if you like. It hasn't been touched yet, so it's quite clean.'

She brought the fried cake out on a saucer and handed it to Parfumée.

‘There you are. Now you wait there a moment and I'll heat up a nice cup of tea for you to go with it.'

She went inside again to rake the top off the fire and heat some tea up in a skillet. But instead of waiting for her, Parfumée picked the fritter up from its saucer, went over to Ciggy with it, and held it under her nose for her to inspect.

‘Look! What's that, then? Fritter. Who wants
your
mouldy fritter? I was only joking. I wouldn't eat yours if you went down on your bended knees and begged me to!'

She began to crumble it up between her fingers and throw the pieces to the birds.

‘Don't worry, Mrs Liu!' she called out in the direction of the kitchen. ‘I'll buy two catties of these for you presently.'

Ciggy glared at her in outrage.

‘Old Thunder up there must be blind not to strike you dead,' she said bitterly. ‘Either that, or he must be angry with me for something. Still, I can't compete with you, can I! I haven't got anyone to rush out and give
me
things, or trot around after
me
like a self-adopted slave, or chip in with a good word for
me
when there's an argument.'

‘All right, young ladies, that's enough!' said the women on the steps. ‘Can't you even see each other without having words?'

The more discerning of them, sensing that a storm was brewing and not wanting to get involved, had already begun slipping off elsewhere. But Ciggy had no stomach for a fight and went off, muttering angrily to herself, without further argument.

When the women had all gone, Cook Liu came bustling out of her kitchen for a private word with Parfumée.

‘That business we were talking about the other day – have you spoken to him about it yet?'

‘Yes, I have,' said Parfumée. ‘I was going to remind him of it today, but that wretched Zhao woman came along and
upset everything with her quarrelling. How's Fivey? Did she drink any of that Essence of Roses I brought her the other day?'

‘She drank it all,' said Cook Liu. ‘She loved it. She'd really like some more, to tell the truth, but she doesn't like to ask.'