My Last Empress (16 page)
“You were there?” Q seemed smitten by the man’s charm and faulty memory. Had he really been there at the soirée? Did he falsify the incident and the chance meeting to gain footage into the cockles of my queen’s heart?
“I was. I even shook your little hand. For a brief while I mistook you as a Japanese girl.” The man of Maine was bubbling over like a lobster in a pot.
“Really?” Q seemed more enchanted than ever.
“You were wearing the most delicate Japanese kimono—”
“I did! It was my favorite that I still keep in my possession. So you really were there. How marvelous.”
So, he was there. So were a thousand others! I wanted to give him the proverbial boot sending him upstairs, but he must have evoked something fatherly in Q, for she squatted down as no empress would have done and helped him to his feet.
Putnam shook straight his wooden foot, undoing a mechanical kink, and he dragged Q along across the dim room to a spider-webbed corner. On a dark shelf, Putnam fumbled and found a bound volume.
“Margo’s Confession!” the man said excitedly. “A beloved nurse who has since passed. What isn’t recorded often finds its way into Margo’s entries, may the Lord bless her soul. She had always wanted to be a poet, you know.”
Putnam opened the diary to the pages of April in the year of 1885. The first few entries were dry accounts of the diarist’s busy days shouldering her responsibilities as a ward nurse at Union Hospital. Then came the pertinent entry:
On this bleak night, I was awoken by our young doctor pounding ever so hard on my flimsy door. Though I had just returned from a thirteen-hour shift, with my heels sore from standing and running, I leapt out of my bed. The young doc told me he had an urgent case of a dying woman, this time one of our own, the daughter of a Congregational Church pastor
.
I ran as fast as my old feet could along the hallway
.
One cannot imagine how much running we do here, from bed to bed, from one ward to another. Union is only peaceful from its outer white facade: nothing is at peace here except the departed in the back wing
.
It was crowded in the triage room. Armed clergymen guarded the hospital’s front gate, and grim-looking women chirped like morning birds, flitting about, crowding corridors. Amidst it all was a tall and handsome man, the pillar of the congregation and my dear and darling H
.
On the gurney a young thing was covered with her own blood soaking her dress. Her father stood holding his begrieved wife, a pretty woman of little charm. Acrimony would seem untimely for one in despair, but she deserved it. She had once given me a cold stare and curt words after I had fainted in her husband’s arms during a citywide rally to condemn the Chinese occultist named Wang Dan, who had abducted Reverend H’s only daughter. We had been protesting, also, against the American legation and the Manchurian Royal Court for having done little to intervene in this matter of life and death
.
I am already blushing as I compose this entry, seeing Reverend H. You see, we were lovers, thrown together by chance and loneliness. This town could make your heart so hollow at times
.
That particular noon rally, while he had been freshened by our rendezvous, I had become weak-kneed and wan after the sweaty exertion, thus falling faint in his arms to be witnessed by his sour wife. The wife dressed me down with her sharp tongue by uttering, “Next time find someone else’s arms to faint in.”
But enough said about H and me. The word was that H’s daughter had not just been abducted by the Chinese occultist, but raped and impregnated by him as well.…
Upon reading these words, I nearly fainted.
Could this be the same H, as in Hawthorn, the progenitor of my darling Annabelle? Could this young patient on the gurney, under Margo’s pen, be my very own heart and soul?
My bleeding Annie, my wounded Annabelle! I trembled like a shaken sieve while urging my dewy eyes further along the rows of scribbling ink. Even though Q and the incapacitated hospital administrator were near and reading the pages as avidly as I, it seemed as if I was alone with this vital account recounted in this precious volume by one sinning nurse.
And for that duration of time before the eventful night in the hospital I am describing—dark wintry months—H suffered much and alone in the confinement of his attic. He became a fugitive of delirium and despondence. He was never whole again no matter the tenderness and love I offered. The few times he sought me, as he always did in times of trial and uncertainty, he seemed lost, not in ways of our intimacy but in ways of his soul
.
He was vengeful, brooding over an ugly outcome—his daughter’s pregnancy. He was bent on purging the ill seed of Wang Dan from his daughter’s young body, and so anguished that he even dared suggest that I slaughter the bastardly life, concocting a scheme to have her drugged by a devout herbalist parishioner and dragged down to a crypt beneath his chapel to have me cleanse her young womb
with a knife or pessary. Bitterly I rejected his request. But today, as I watched H’s daughter nearly die on the table in the pains of childbirth, I wondered if this had been the right decision
.
The young surgeon was able to do what needed to be done. A cesarean birth was skillfully conducted, and mother and daughter were saved. Before the young mother opened her eyes again, fate was decided for the newborn: she was to be declared stillborn and the secret kept from the mother forever. The child was to be given to no other than my old friend, Prince Qiu, whose sterility has long deprived him of an offspring. Such arrangement would not only resolve the headaches of H, who knew nothing of the infant’s placement, only knowing it would be rightly taken care of, but it would also dissolve the knot of international political intrigue. Yet for days and days afterward, guilt consumed me so, until I could no longer contain myself. In a moment of weakness, I sent the young mother a secret note laying bare all the facts about her child.…
With that, ladies and gents, my damnation is complete, and the circularity of Annabelle’s curse perfected. There is no hell hot enough for my ruffian self.
How could you have entrapped me so, my Annabelle, dangling me by such a thin rope of entanglement? How could you have misled me so in the path of my passion and lust?
As our sedan squeaked in this fading light, I told the child of your heritage—of you whom I had so loved, of whom I had sought near and far—of her father, that rebel who had sired her.
I had anticipated a rash reaction, but Q took it as facts of life, myth or not, blaming no one, cursing none. She was as open as a clear sky, as accepting as a quiet sea.
“You are a madman, are you not?”
I nodded.
“Are you glad you found me?”
I nodded again.
“I must find my father,” she said as if to herself, before leaning on me with her eyes closed.
As darkness fell upon the silent city of Peking, I realized that Annabelle was my captain, I her ship. She had brought me here, but for what reason?
Oh, Annabelle, what am I to do with your forsaken heir, loving her so?
For days I languished in a gray mood. Fog surrounded me even on the clearest of summer days, and all senses and sounds were muffled and blunted. I felt detached from all that held me whole, living in a cocoon, owing no one, owning nothing.
Such mood was worsened by the absence of Qiu Rong, that girl fathered by my fate. How I longed for her, though with a new kind of love dawning on me, an unfamiliar kind, not of lust but perhaps fatherly.
All her previous seductiveness became memories of childish charm perceived not from the prism of a perverted eye but of a doting yet possessive parent. Her giggle was no longer a cooing love call but the call of a bibbing tot, her coyness that of a teething infant. I was sorrowful for that forsaken child, mournful of her motherlessness. In the fog, a path was cleared. In the gray, a sun broke through.
No one has stood as I did now in this far fringe of time and apogee of space serving as that which binds man to heaven, acting as a conduit between real and ethereal, light and dark. And so I am the seer, chosen to answer that heavenly call.
This was neither lunacy nor madness. I had found her, my dead lover’s lost child, without a map, a lantern, or a fancy occultist’s torch. All that led me to my find was my pitiable and
improbable love, the air and water sustaining this bedraggled interloper, and nothing more.
When Qiu Rong returned, summer solstice anewing, she came to me with a lilt in her gait, the surrounding palace all hushed. In that tunnel of silence, in she strides, my jade princess, pale in a tangerine dress like a wedge of sun in motion, the hem riding her abstemious calves. Her hips were fuller and shoulders rounder, no doubt the consequence of rich food and inactivity: seven days of opera watching with the dowager and her Court retinue. Her eyes were darker and deeper with angst and anguish. Could you have been love stricken too, my child?
She halted briefly, her swan neck tilting adoringly, blond pigtail swinging over one shoulder blade. Then she hopped over the threshold, running through my hallow atrium, her gait lithe like a deer’s, before flinging herself into my trembling ape arms. Wretchedly she weakened me with her parched lips and quivering hot tongue.
In broken murmurs, she uttered, “You horrible big, big wolf,” as she wolfed me down. Mutely I held her, my treacherous hands caressing her nymph buttocks, my desperate fingernails unable to help digging deep into her taut and silky skin. She stood barely to my chest, her hair smelling of summer crushed weeds and morning fresh leaves. Her neck tasted of stale sweat and coarse fragrance.
Carefully I lifted Q up, leaning her face over my shoulder as a father would of his napping child. My toes kicked up my squeaky stairs, my footfalls, lithe like a thief’s, echoing faintly along the empty villa … In-In had bargained for a leave to tend an aging, ill servant of his village. Gently I put
her down on my bare bed, enshrining her within the white mosquito net.
I was about to fetch tea when she gripped my hand and asked, “You do love me, don’t you?”
“You have no idea,” I whispered, my voice trembling.
“Then don’t leave.” She pulled my pajamas off, discarding them at my feet, and imbibed my scepter in her quivering mouth.
My imperial pupil donned a green suit, Q’s wedding gift to the groom two barren years back. It was of Austrian tailoring, with a broad chest and pinched waist and a short collar, making him look the part of a Continental esquire, complete with wingtip shoes.
“I have important matters to discuss. Can we have lunch in your study?” was all he said before our class in geometry. It was one of S’s favorite lessons, after the “Introductory Parliamentary Politics” course, which had only been allowed after a lengthy array of approval and disapproval among many an invisible imperial adviser, and after three changes of course title.
The emperor was quite excited when I showed him the drawings I had rendered in my spare time of a circular lily pond, bricked squares, triangles of curvy roofs, and the octagonal Taoist compass, linking learning to reality. He rubbed his hands, as if seeing these objects for the first time. “You mean to say that all these sciences are inherent in what surrounds me right here under my roof?”
“And more. Your ancestors excelled in making things that have long been imitated and mimicked by all abroad.”
“Name one such mimicry.”
“Cannons derive from the basis of Chinese fireworks. Also compasses, which came from China, now needle north on all ships. There are many other things.”
“Such as?” S’s eyes shone with an intense light so typical of youth, the kind of light only possible when the early morning sun was shining at its best.
“Noodles, what the Romans had borrowed and remade into pasta.”
“Yes, yes, the trade of that monk named Marco Polo. Qiu Rong gave me pamphlets explaining his exploits, her very first present to me among the many she brought from the ocean lands of her father’s diplomatic tour. That Marco fellow, though much noted, I found to be a self-grandiosing trumpeter of sort, who touted himself as a friend of the Court though there were no traces of his presence or record of his involvement in any of our Court proceedings. I have searched all over, spending days in the Treasure Wing myself, searching for proof of his claims, any which would have pleased me so, but there is none. A fraud he must be then, writing books about land he possibly never set his Roman foot upon, telling tales he must have heard from those who made them up in drunken stupors on ships that once docked far off our land. Fairytales they all are. He is, for my worth, a fraud. Now what do you say about those noodles?”
