Imperial Woman (6 page)

She paused, her lips quivered, she tried to smile.

“And then?” the Emperor inquired, his heart enchanted by the beautiful face, so soft, so young.

“There was no wind that day,” she said. “The smoke from the burning incense rose straight heavenward from the altar. It spread into a fragrant cloud and in the clouds I saw a face—”

“A man’s face,” he repeated.

She nodded her head, as a child nods when she is too shy to speak.

“Was it my face?” he asked.

“Yes, Majesty,” she said. “Your imperial face!”

Two days, two nights, and she was still in the royal bedchamber. Three times he slept and each time she went to the door and beckoned to her serving woman, and the woman came creeping through the curtains to the boudoir beyond. There the eunuchs had prepared a ready bath, a cauldron of water upon coals, so that the woman needed only to dip the water into the vast porcelain jar and make her mistress fresh again. She had brought clean garments and different robes and she brushed Yehonala’s hair and coiled it smoothly. Not once did the young girl speak except to give direction and not once did the serving woman ask a question. Each time when her task was done Yehonala went in again to the imperial bedroom and the heavy doors were closed behind the yellow curtains.

Inside that vast chamber she sat upon a chair near the window to wait until the Emperor woke. What had been done was done. She knew now what this man was, a weak and fitful being, possessed by a passion he could not satisfy, a lust of the mind more frightful than lust of the flesh. When he was defeated he wept upon her breast. This, this was the Son of Heaven!

Yet when he woke she was all duty and gentleness. He was hungry and she sent for the Chief Eunuch and bade him bring the dishes that his sovereign enjoyed. And she ate with the Emperor and she fed the little dog with bits of meat and released him now and then into the courtyard outside the window. When the meal was over the imperial man commanded his Chief Eunuch once more to draw the curtains over the window and hide the sunlight and he bade them leave him alone and not come unless summoned, nor would he meet his ministers that day or the next and not until he felt inclined.

An Teh-hai looked grave. “Majesty, evil news has come from the south, for T’ai P’ing rebels have seized the half of another province. Your ministers and princes are impatient for audience.”

“I will not come,” the Son of Heaven said peevishly, and fell back upon his pillows.

The Chief Eunuch then could but leave the room.

“Bar the doors,” the Emperor commanded Yehonala.

So she barred the doors and when she turned to him again he was staring at her with fearful and unsatisfied desire.

“Come here,” he muttered. “I am strong now. The meats have made me strong.”

Again she must obey. This time it was true that he was strong, and then she remembered something the ladies who lived in the Palace o£ Forgotten Concubines had told her in their gossip. They said that if the Emperor delayed too long in his bedchamber, a powerful herb was mixed in his favorite dish which gave him sudden and unusual strength. Yet so dangerous was this herb that he must not be roused too far, for then exhaustion followed so extreme that it could end in death.

On the third morning, this exhaustion fell. The Emperor sank into half-fainting silence upon his pillow. His lips were blue, his eyes half closed, he could not move, his narrow face set slowly into a greenish pallor, which, upon his yellow skin, made him seem dead. In great fear Yehonala went to the door to summon help. Before she could call she saw An Teh-hai, the Chief Eunuch, approaching, expecting the summons.

“Let the Court physicians be immediately called,” she commanded.

She looked so proud and cold, her great eyes so black, that An Teh-hai obeyed.

Yehonala returned to the bedside. The Emperor had fallen asleep. She looked down on his unconscious face and suddenly she longed to weep. She stood there shivering in the strange chill which had fallen upon her again and again in these two days and three nights and she went to the door and opened it enough to let her slender body through. Outside it her serving woman sat, nodding on a wooden stool, weary with waiting, and Yehonala put her hand on her shoulder and shook her gently.

“Where is your little dog?” the woman asked.

Yehonala stared at her unseeing. “I put it in the courtyard some time in the night—I forget!”

“Do not mind,” the woman said, pitying her. “Come, come with me—take your old woman’s hand—”

And Yehonala let herself be led down the narrow passageways. It was dawn and the rising sun shone upon the rose-red walls along the way, and thus she came again to her solitary home. And while the serving woman made herself bustling and busy she talked to comfort her mistress.

“They are saying everywhere that never has a concubine stayed so long with the Son of Heaven. Even the Consort spent only a night with him at one time. That eunuch, Li Lien-ying, says that you are the favorite now. You have nothing more to fear.”

Yehonala smiled but her lips trembled. “Do they say so?” she said, and she held herself straight and moved with her usual smooth grace.

Yet when she was bathed and clothed in sleeping robes of softest silk in her own bed, though the curtains were drawn, the serving woman gone away, she fell into shivering and deathly chill. Silent she must be so long as she lived, for to no one could she speak. Oh, there was none, for what friend had she? She was alone and never had she dreamed of such loneliness as now was hers. There was not one—

Not one? Was Jung Lu not still her kinsman? He was her cousin, and the ties of blood cannot be broken. She sat up in her bed and dried her eyes and she clapped her hands for her serving woman.

“What now?” the woman asked at the door.

“Send to me the eunuch Li Lien-ying,” Yehonala commanded her.

The serving woman hesitated. Upon her round face the doubt was plain enough.

“Good mistress,” she said, “do not be too friendly with that eunuch. What can he do for you now?”

But Yehonala was stubborn. “Something that only he can do,” she said.

The woman went away, still doubtful, to find the eunuch, who came in great haste and elation.

“What, what, my lady Phoenix?” he inquired when he came to her door.

Yehonala put the curtain aside. She had dressed herself in a dark and somber robe and her face was pale and grave. Beneath her eyes were shadows, but she spoke with high dignity.

“Bring to me here my kinsman,” she said, “my cousin-brother, Jung Lu.”

“The Captain of the Imperial Bannermen?” Li Lien-ying asked, surprised.

“Yes,” she said haughtily.

He went away, wiping the smile from his face with his sleeve.

She let the curtain fall and heard the eunuch’s footsteps go away. When she had the power, she told herself, she would raise Jung Lu up, so that no one, not even a eunuch, could dare to say “the guardsman.” She would make him at least a duke, a Grand Councilor perhaps. And while she cherished these thoughts in her mind she felt such a yearning arise in her heart that she was frightened for herself. What could she want of her kinsman except the sight of his truthful face, the sound of his firm voice, while he told her what now she should do? Oh, but she was wrong to send for him, for could she tell him what had befallen her in these two days and three nights and how she was changed? Could she say to him that she wished she had never come to the Forbidden City and beg him now to help her to escape? She let herself sink to the floor and she leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. A strange pain, deep in her vitals, swelled up into her breast. She hoped he would not come.

Vain hope, for she heard his footsteps. He had come instantly, he was at the door, and Li Lien-ying was calling through the curtain.

“Lady, your kinsman is here!”

She rose then and without thinking to look at her face in the mirror. Jung Lu knew her as she was. There was no reason to be beautiful for him. She went to the curtain and put it aside, and he was there.

“Come in, cousin,” she said.

“Come out,” he said. “We must not meet inside your chamber.”

“Yet I must speak with you alone,” she said, for Li Lien-ying waited, his ears outstretched and greedy.

But Jung Lu would not come in and so she was forced to leave her chamber, and when he saw her face, how white it was and how pale were her lips and dark her eyes, he was concerned for her, and he went with her into the courtyard, and she forbade the eunuch to follow there. Only her serving woman stood on the steps nearby, so that it could not be said that she was alone with a man, even her cousin.

Thus she could not touch his hand, nor allow him to touch hers, sorely as she longed for his touch. She moved as far from the door as she could, and she sat down upon a porcelain garden seat, under a clump of date trees at the far end of the courtyard.

“Seat yourself,” she said.

But Jung Lu would not sit down. He stood before her as straight and stiff as though he were only a guardsman by the Emperor’s gate.

“Will you not sit down?” she asked again and looked up at him with pleading in her eyes.

“No,” he said. “I am here only because you sent for me.”

She yielded. “Have you heard?” she asked so softly that a bird upon a branch above her could not have known what she said.

“I have heard,” he said, not looking at her.

“I am the new favorite.”

“That, too, I have heard.”

It was all told in these few words, and what more was there to be said, if he would not speak? She kept looking at his face, the face she knew so well, comparing it with that thin narrow sickly face upon the imperial pillow. This face was young and handsome, the dark eyes large and powerful, the mouth set full and firm above the strong chin. Here was a man’s face.

“I have been a fool,” she said.

He did not answer this. What could be answered to it?

“I want to go home,” she said.

He folded his arms and looked carefully above her head into the trees.

“This is your home,” he said.

She bit the edge of her lower lip. “I want you to save me.”

He did not move. If one watched him he would have said that Jung Lu stood subordinate to the woman who was seated there under the date trees. But he let his eyes slide down to her lovely uplifted face, and in those eyes she saw his answer.

“Oh, my heart, if I could save you, I would. But I cannot.”

The heavy pain inside her vitals suddenly eased. “Then you do not forget me!”

“Night and day I do not forget,” he said.

“What shall I do?” she asked.

“You know your destiny,” he said. “You chose it.”

Her lower lip quivered and tears shone silver in her black eyes.

“I did not know how it would be,” she faltered.

“There is no undoing what is done,” he said. “No going back, no being what you were.”

She could not speak. Instead she bent her head to keep the tears from running on her cheeks and she dared not wipe them lest the eunuch lurked near enough to see.

“You have chosen greatness,” he said in her silence. “Therefore you must be great.”

She swallowed down her tears and still did not dare to lift her head. “Only on your promise,” she said, her voice small and trembling.

“What promise?” he asked.

“That you will come when I send for you,” she said. “I must have that safety and that comfort. I cannot be always alone.”

She saw the sweat start out on his forehead as the sunlight fell through the trees upon his face. “I will come to you when you call,” he said, not moving. “If you must, then send for me. But do not send unless you must. I will bribe this eunuch—a thing I have never done before—to bribe a eunuch! It puts me in his power. But I will do it.”

She rose. “I have your promise,” she said.

She gave him one long look and held her hands hard clasped together so that she could not put them forth to him.

“You understand me?” she asked.

“I do,” he said.

“It is enough,” she said, and passing him she left him there and went directly to her chamber. Behind her the curtain fell again.

For seven days and seven nights Yehonala would not leave her bed. The palace corridors were busy with whispers that she was ill, that she was angry, that she had tried to swallow her gold earrings, that she would not yield again to the Emperor. For as soon as the Court physicians declared the Emperor recovered from their powerful drugs, he sent for her. She would not obey. Never in the history of the dynasty had an imperial concubine refused herself and no one knew what now to do with Yehonala. She lay in her bed under her rose-red satin coverlets and she would not speak except to her woman. The eunuch Li Lien-ying was beside himself as he saw all his plans astray and his goals lost. Yet she would not allow him to lift the curtain of her door.

“Let them think I want to die,” she told her woman. “At least it is true that I do not want to live here.”

The woman carried this message to the eunuch and he gnashed his teeth. “If the Emperor were not beside himself with love, it would be easy enough,” he snarled. “She could fall into a well or she could be poisoned, but he wants her whole and sound—and now!”

At last the Chief Eunuch, An Teh-hai, himself came and was no more successful. Yehonala would not see him. She kept her earrings beside her bed on the small table where stood her porcelain tea bowl and her earthen teapot bound in silver.

“Let that Chief Eunuch step over the threshold,” she declared in a voice raised to reach his ears, “and I swallow my gold earrings!”

So it went through one whole day and then another and another and the Emperor grew peevish and distrustful, believing, he said, that some eunuch was delaying her coming in hope of a bribe.

“She was very obedient to me,” he insisted. “She did all that I asked.”

None dared to say that His Majesty was hateful to the beautiful girl, and it would not have come to the imperial mind to imagine this alone. Instead he felt that he was potent and able and he did not wish to waste himself on another concubine while he loved Yehonala. Indeed he had never loved any woman as he now loved her, and knowing that with other women his passion died early, he was pleased that after seven days he longed for her presence more than ever and he was therefore the more impatient at delay.