The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (80 page)

Iron Man had been as crude as ever, arrogant, threatening. His pig eyes had peered insolently into the Mandarin's face, close enough for the Mandarin to smell the garlic on his breath. ‘You cheated me, Brother Liu,' he had hissed. ‘You didn't give me all the Christians, did you?'

‘All we could find,' the Mandarin had replied lightly, although he had felt the skin of his temples contract with anger. ‘Were fifteen heads not enough to satisfy your appetite?'

‘My men tell me that there are others. A doctor. His woman. Children. Why were they not executed in the square? Where are they?'

‘Major Lin?' The Mandarin had turned to his lieutenant. ‘Why were the
Daifu
and his family not brought to the execution ground with the others?'

‘They were not present, Da Ren, when we called on the mission,' said Major Lin. ‘My orders were to bring to execution only those who were there.'

‘Surely you don't mean that someone allowed the doctor and his family to escape?' exclaimed the Mandarin, in a tone of incredulity. ‘With all the troops and hundreds of Boxers guarding the house? These Christians must indeed possess magical powers if they can achieve a disappearing feat like that! That they managed to evade the vigilance of all your men, Iron Man, and the gods who are helping you! Astounding!'

Iron Man had merely grunted. He held out his beaker for Fan Yimei to pour more wine.

‘Games, Brother Liu? Do you really want to play games with me?'

‘That's not a threat, is it, Iron Man?'

Iron Man Wang gave him a long, black-browed stare.

‘What about the other foreign devil, the one who you were interrogating?'

‘Ma Na Si? He died.'

‘So I heard. Did he tell you where the guns were concealed before he died?'

‘Alas, no. He was a tight-lipped one, even under torture. I must have lost my touch.'

‘Are you playing games again, brother?' Iron Man smiled.

He rose to his feet, agilely for such a bulky man. His great axe suddenly appeared in his hands. With efficient force he slammed it down on one of the lacquer stools, slicing cushion and wood into two neat halves, the tray with the tea on it shattering to the floor.

‘Thought I smelt a rat under there,' he said, in the silence that followed.

‘Major Lin,' said the Mandarin, ‘you will escort our guest to the gate, or into the brothel, or wherever else he wishes to go. Then you will order that sergeant of yours to go with his men and scour both town and countryside until they find these missing Christians. Our friend desires their heads for his collection and we do not wish to disappoint him. Will that be all, Iron Man? Are you satisfied?'

‘For now,' said the bandit. ‘Don't think that I'm not carefully watching you, my brother.'

‘As I am watching you,' replied the Mandarin. ‘With deepest respect, of course.'

And, thankfully, that had brought the interview to an end. Iron Man Wang and Major Lin had left. Now he took the opium pipe from Fan Yimei, but he held her off from lighting it, taking her chin in his plump hand and examining her features. ‘You are very beautiful,' he said, after a while. ‘Unlike your father, who was an ugly fellow. But you have the same intelligent eyes.'

Fan Yimei froze, but she felt her cheeks burning. A vivid memory of her father, smiling down at her as he wrote in his study, flashed before her eyes. ‘You … knew my father?' she stumbled.

‘Very well,' said the Mandarin, smiling gently at her confusion. ‘We had a friendship that spanned many years. Dear Jinghua. I see him now as clearly as on the day I first met him, in General Tseng Kuo-fan's camp, forty years ago.'

Fan Yimei found herself clutching a corner of the carpet to prevent herself shaking.

‘He didn't talk to you about me?' the Mandarin continued. ‘I'm not surprised. He was always a little perverse, my friend Jinghua. Other men might have boasted about a relationship with a high government official. Not your father. Or perhaps he did not wish to be reminded of those early years of military service. They were terrible times.'

He spoke in a low voice, meditatively, as if he were reciting a history of a different age. ‘He never spoke to you about the great rebellion, did he? Or of his career as a professional soldier. Well, it was never a distinguished one. He was always more of a poet than a warrior, and he never felt comfortable with all the blood we shed. He believed … Never mind. As I said, they were terrible times. But armies need their poets, men who can inspire courage through fine words, or make us dream of our homes when we are campaigning far away. I know that you have a reputation as a musician. It is one of your talents. You probably inherited that gift from Jinghua. There were many evenings, crouched round the campfire, in the rain, after a defeat, when your father's lute cheered our hearts, and made us laugh away our fear. I did not see him for years, and it was a long time after I came to Shishan that I discovered he was living here. We met, once or twice. A proud man, your father. Never one to crawl and beg favours from the powerful, as I had become—but there was one evening, oh, it must have been a year before the plague, when he and I drank wine together. The years dropped away and we became Hunan Braves again. It was a good evening.'

He smiled, remembering. ‘Yes, it was a very good evening. And on that night he asked me a favour, laughing, because he never thought that it would be one he would have to call in. You were there, although you don't remember, a studious little girl in the next-door room, practising endless scales on your
chin
. He was proud of you. I think you know that. You were to him like the son he never had. We listened to you for a while—you played very well, even then—and he asked me, when we were both drunk, happily, sentimentally drunk, he asked me—there were tears rolling down his cheeks and mine, even as we chuckled at the great improbability of your father asking me a favour—he asked: “If anything ever happens to me, will you look after her?”'

Fan Yimei heard his words as if from far away. In her mind was the face of her father, smiling, intoxicated, loving, droll. The Mandarin was wrong. She did remember that evening. It was a rare occasion for her father to drink wine, and he had been sick afterwards for two days. She had admonished him in her childish way for associating with bad company—but she had never known the identity of the man with whom he had been drinking or that it was the Mandarin.

‘Of course I agreed,' the Mandarin continued. ‘We drank on it, in the old Hunan way. I did not see him after that. The plague came. I was busy. Yes, I did hear that your father had died, but so many died then. Forgive me. We were living from day to day. I looked for you when I could. First I heard that you, too, had perished. One more nameless victim in a nameless grave. I made offerings for you and your father in the temple. And life went on. We grow accustomed to sadness, and loss…'

He paused. His brows furrowed, as if he was remembering something painful. Fan Yimei stared at him, her mouth half open, her mind whirling. The Mandarin sighed. Then, in the same flat voice with which he had begun his monody, he continued: ‘It was years later, when one of your uncles was up before me in the
yamen
court. Actually it wasn't the court, but the persuasion room next to it where truth is always to be found. He was an evil man, this corrupt banker uncle of yours, who had stolen from his own family, including your father, as well as from all those others who put their trust in him. And he told me that he had sent you here, that he had sold his own brother's daughter, my friend's daughter, into a brothel. It probably won't bring you any comfort to hear that his end was a cruel one. That at least was in my power to arrange. But a deserved death in itself could not right the wrong that had been done to you … Yes, I will have that pipe now.'

Fan Yimei lit the candle, and the Mandarin sucked in the heavy smoke. ‘Thank you.' He closed his eyes, and lay silent. She sat, head bowed, at his feet—two still figures in a room. ‘Should I have bought you out?' He spoke after a while. ‘Easily enough done, even at the extortionate prices charged by Mother Liu. But what would have become of you? You would have been unmarriageable. I could have kept you in my chambers, made you one of my concubines, in name if not in fact, but my wives would have guaranteed that your life became a misery. You would have found yourself in as much of a hell as the one in which you were living here. Perhaps a worse one. I considered sending you to a temple. But for someone like you to live the half-life of a nun? I thought and I thought, and I could see no future for you other than as some listless chattel, an unwanted cuckoo in someone else's nest. So I settled you on Major Lin. It seemed practical. He is not a bad man, though he has his problems. Pragmatically—I try to be pragmatic, life is a balance of this and that—I thought that the two of you might be good for each other. At least your status as kept mistress offers you some protection. And I believe that Lin is fond of you in his way. Forgive me. It was not a perfect solution.'

Fan Yimei said nothing. There was nothing to say.

The Mandarin pulled himself up so that he was leaning on one elbow. ‘Yet you did manage to surprise me,' he said. ‘You possess many of my friend's virtues: courage, compassion, patience … Yes, I have been watching you over the years, I see the father in the daughter. You also have Jinghua's talent for doing the unexpected. It was you who persuaded Ma Na Si to rescue that wretched American boy, was it not? You inconvenienced me at the time. There might have been repercussions—there would certainly have been if the situation in this country had not so dramatically changed. Yet I was delighted and proud that you had performed such a noble act. I was also glad that Ma Na Si had taken you under his wing. I wish that you had escaped with him. There is no place for you in our society, but there might be in his. The complication is that he loves another, or thinks he does.'

‘You speak of him as if he were still alive,' Fan Yimei said quietly.

‘He is very much alive,' said the Mandarin. ‘You are shortly to meet him. That is one of the reasons why I have revealed so much to you today. I know that there is little for which you have to thank me, but I was your honoured father's friend, and it is for his sake that I am asking you this favour now.'

‘I do not understand, Da Ren.'

The Mandarin was no longer reclining but sitting forward on the couch, looking closely into Fan Yimei's confused eyes.

‘Listen, then. An intelligent person like yourself, who has survived so many years in an establishment such as this, will be versed in politics. Believe me, the politics of the state are different only by degree from the politics of the boudoir. Your Mother Liu in her little world is no less an empress than the Old Buddha in Peking. All life is a struggle for power; power is the currency of survival. We temper it with compromise and we balance competing strengths. We stave off open conflict because in conflict there is always danger. But there will inevitably come a time when compromise is exhausted. That is the situation in which I find myself now.

‘During the last few weeks, I have been forced into an accommodation with that disgusting bandit whom you saw here earlier. The reason is simple. He presently holds more power, in men, in weapons, than I do. You will also have gathered from my last exchange with Iron Man Wang that our relationship, such as it is, is coming to a crisis. I am being forced into a position where I will have to retreat in order that I may return with enough force to regain my dominance of this city. Never mind how I plan to accomplish this. All you need to know is that both Ma Na Si and Major Lin are essential to my plans. I cannot afford that there should exist any more bad blood between them.

‘We will shortly be leaving Shishan. You will accompany us. I will not leave you to the vengeance of that abominable woman and her son. After some persuasion on my part, Major Lin has agreed to take you with him. Mother Liu will be in no position to prevent this—but if this is to work, I need you to be loyal to Major Lin.'

‘I am his bondmaid,' murmured Fan Yimei. ‘His slave.'

‘You have run away from him once, with another man. And that same man will be with us on our journey.'

‘There will be no impropriety,' said Fan Yimei.

‘It is not propriety that concerns me. It is whether you are strong enough to control your emotions. Ma Na Si will be accompanied by your rival, the red-headed girl. He will, no doubt, be making passionate love to her. I need you to be strong enough not to show any jealousy. In fact, I want the opposite. I want you to be her friend.'

‘You mentioned survival, Da Ren,' Fan Yimei said softly. ‘In our world—my world—we have an expression for women in my position. We call ourselves “sisters in sorrow”. If I have survived so long, it is because I have learned never to hope. You have no need to fear that I will shame you, or Major Lin, in any way.'

The Mandarin touched her cheek gently with his hand, and stroked her delicate eyebrow with his finger. ‘There will come a time when it will be appropriate for you to hope,' he said finally. ‘I have learned that there is one area where no power holds sway, and that is over the human heart. I ask for an interlude, that is all. Act your part for a while longer. Then I will make you free to win Ma Na Si away from his fox woman, if you can.'

‘You are good to me, Da Ren.'

‘Oh, no, I may be many things, but goodness is something to which I would never dare to aspire.'

Major Lin strode into the room. ‘I have done what you have ordered, Da Ren. My troopers are now riding uselessly round the countryside.'

‘Thank you. We must humour these bandits for a while longer. I, meanwhile, have been well entertained by this lovely girl of yours. You are extremely fortunate, Major. She has been telling me how much she admires you. She firmly rejected the advances of an ugly old man.'