Heart and Soul (5 page)

Jade shied away from the thought. Her father, conscious of the frailty of his succession, had arranged Wen’s marriage very early, when he was just fifteen. And when no children from this marriage ensued, he had given his son two more wives—the second wife a beautiful noblewoman of the Tiger Clan; and the third, a singsong girl of the Fox Clan, the youngest daughter of a minor fox nobleman. And though he showed more affection for Third Lady than for his first two wives, Wen’s true love was still his opium dreams, and no son had so far made an appearance.

Jade took the plank at the back of her brother’s boat, and stretched it across to the boat following so close behind that perfect timing was needed for the flying. There were indentations on both vessels for the plank. It might have looked like an unsteady bridge, but Jade—who had been used to these since earliest childhood—half ran, half danced across it to the boat that was the women’s quarters.

She was removing the plank linking the two boats—because any sudden shift, however minute, was likely to splinter it—when she heard soft steps behind her. Turning, she saw Third Lady bowing to her.

Third Lady was beautiful—smaller than Jade and of a lithe, graceful build that went well with the triangular shape of her face and her slightly too large eyes. The whole made one think of a cat or perhaps of a fox—which of course was what Third Lady, whose real name was Precious Lotus, turned into. This perhaps lent a naturally cunning look to her eyes, but that look now seemed far more haunted than Jade was used to.

“Third Lady,” Jade said, inclining her head slightly, but not bowing, because within the family her rank was superior to Wen’s third lady, though not to his first one.

Third Lady bowed rapidly, and far more deeply than Jade, with the confusion of one who was so deep in thought and worry as to have forgotten the niceties of everyday interaction. “Oh,” she said. Then again, “Oh.” And then in a rush, “I was waiting for you to return. I was hoping you might return soon, for I have a great need to speak with you.” As she talked, she wrung both her slim, delicate hands together.

“Come to my rooms with me,” Jade said. “If you would,” was added as an afterthought.

Third Lady nodded and meekly followed in Jade’s wake as she walked rapidly down the steps to the living quarters, and then down a long hallway whose floor had been painted a bright red and whose wooden walls showed the traces of careful paintings done upon them very long ago. Now the paintings were so faded that children’s faces and, at the end of the hallway, the face of a wondrously beautiful woman seemed to peek from the gloom of nonexistence.

Jade opened the door and led Third Lady into the antechamber to her room. Her quarters were the best on the boat, the ones she suspected were normally reserved for the emperor’s principal wife. In fact, she had once heard her father’s principal surviving wife—she who had once been Second Lady—remonstrate with her father about giving Jade greater prestige than he gave his wives. The late emperor’s dry response had been that none of his remaining women had ever given him a child, and so he would give what honor he pleased to the one daughter he did have.

Third Lady—and indeed, even Wen’s first lady, who was of a retiring disposition—made no such demands. Instead she walked timidly into Jade’s antechamber, which normally served her as a place to read and write letters. Since Jade had inherited her mother’s effects—as well as what she suspected had been goods stolen from carpetships and given by her father as gifts to her mother—the room looked like no other in the Dragon Boats. There was a small desk in the corner, appointed with the quills the foreigners used to write, as well as the brushes that Jade used more frequently. Pulled up to the desk was a spindly chair, of the sort she was given to understand was much prized in England. Against the wall was a small bookcase with her mother’s favorite novels, bound in now somewhat lusterless leather worn by long use and much reading. Jade’s mother had taught her to read and speak English, and now, many years after her mother’s death, Jade turned to the novels as her only way to recall her. In those novels she heard her mother’s voice speaking the syllables she remembered.

A sofa, also of English manufacture, sat against the wall, draped over with a wildly embroidered Chinese cloth, showing dragons in flight. Jade remembered her mother embroidering that piece and could name all the dragons shown in it—herself and Wen, most prominently.

Now she turned away from the sofa with a sudden jerk, to avoid showing emotion. After the last few days of mourning and fear for Wen—and her own life—Jade was not prepared to think of her mother, not without the sting of tears inside her eyelids.

“Lady Jade,” Third Lady said. There were many names that could with more propriety be used for Jade by her brother’s wives, but every one of them—and the population of the Dragon Boats—called her Lady Jade. As her father’s favorite child, allowed to remain unmarried even at such a late age as her early twenties, she had a separate position in the Dragon Boats. And as the child her father often entrusted with diplomatic business and to whom he often confided his more daring plans, she was treated as a power in her own right.

That status was obvious now, as Third Lady gave her a shy look and an even shyer smile. “Lady Jade,” the woman repeated, the smile belied by a nervous twitching at her lips. “I’ve come to talk to you about my lord…and…” She hesitated. “And about Zhang.”

Jade merely inclined her head. She could not talk, or not freely. If she told Third Lady that she herself didn’t like Zhang or that she was worried about Wen’s feeble grasp on power, given his addiction, it would be either betraying the internal divisions in the power of the rulers of the Dragon Boats, or else giving her own brother up. She would do neither.

The formal gesture seemed to inflame Third Lady’s nervousness. She stepped away, her naturally tiny feet appearing to dance a fast step, even though she didn’t go very far. Jade knew that her sister-in-law’s feet were not bound. Jade’s father, like all the other Dragon Boat lords, would neither admit the practice of binding female feet in his household nor contract a spouse who had bound feet. The deformities such practice caused in the dragon form was enough to deter them. But Third Lady’s feet were so small they looked like they should have been twice as large to support her—admittedly slim and small—body. Only the ease with which she moved them, nervously shuffling on the English carpet that covered the floor, was enough to show Jade that they were indeed natural feet.

“I come from the Fox Clan,” Third Lady said. “Though not from a very important family, and as the fifth girl in my father’s house, I was sold very young to become a singsong girl.”

Jade nodded. “My father told me,” she said. This earned her a quick, startled look from Third Lady. “He told me almost everything,” Jade said. She did not add that her father had discussed with Jade his decision to purchase Third Lady’s contract from an entertainers’ troupe that often was called in for Dragon Boat celebrations. Jade’s father had decided to buy her contract and to acquire her because he often saw Wen looking at Third Lady. And Jade had encouraged him because she had noticed something that often evaded her father’s notice—that Third Lady was looking back.

To this day, she noticed that, unlike Wen’s first two wives, Third Lady seemed to devote most of her time to either attracting Wen’s attention or to making him happy. And for this reason alone, she was Jade’s favorite of all her remaining relatives, after Wen.

“I see,” Third Lady said, and lowered her eyes, and looked upon the embroidered covering of the sofa as though it were the main cause of her visit here. She spoke, matter-of-factly, as if her voice were divorced from her eyes. “I don’t wish to speak ill of someone who has your confidence, and I do not wish for you to misinterpret my interest in the matter. I have only one interest in this, and it is to ensure that my lord is protected and…and in command of that which is his.”

“There will be no misinterpretation, Third Lady,” Jade said, somewhat wearily. She knew that she’d kept herself too closed into her own impassive facade to serve as a buffer between the emperor and his court, and for that reason, few people knew her likes and dislikes and her unswerving loyalties. She realized that Third Lady was venturing but very lightly onto the thin ice of the politics of the Dragon Boats, and decided to help her. “You mentioned Zhang?”

To her surprise, Third Lady blushed and gave the impression of suppressing a sigh. “I beg your pardon,” she said, humbly. “I did not mean to say anything about your betrothed.”

“Betrothed?” Jade said. And something of her shock must have shown in her voice.

Now Third Lady’s look indicated relief. “You’re not betrothed?” She seemed to become, suddenly, dizzy or weak, and sat on the sofa with a quick, collapsing movement that gave the impression her legs had lost all their strength. “Oh. I was so scared. Because the rumor in the women’s quarters—” She stopped, a hand covering her mouth, as if afraid she’d gone too far.

“Yes?”

A small startled sigh, as if in resignation at having to repeat rumors, and Third Lady continued, “The rumor in the women’s quarters is that you, milady, were betrothed to Zhang by your father’s dying wishes. That he wanted to arrange for you to have some protection after he was gone.”

Jade shook her head. “If it were so, he would have told me,” she said. And then, in a lower voice from which she could not keep a vibration of dread, “And I would have obeyed, but not with joy.”

Third Lady lifted her face. It was triangular, with broad cheekbones tapering to a small chin, and tiny, heart-shaped lips accentuated by something—probably oil of almonds. Third Lady’s slightly too large eyes looked at Jade with every appearance of querying her motives. As though seeing something in Jade’s eyes that reassured her, she nodded. “Good, because I…You see, I have heard from my father. I might have been an unimportant daughter, but when I…when your brother took me as his third wife, my father, of course, wanted our clan…” She seemed to get lost within her own words and looked up at Jade, as though expecting her to help.

“You were an unimportant daughter, being the fifth born,” Jade said. “But having married into the True Emperor’s household, you are, of course an asset to him, and one he wishes to protect and enhance.”

Third Lady made an inarticulate sound, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh, and nodded. “Yes, yes, you understand.”

Jade nodded. She understood, indeed. It was the lot of the daughter to never be valued by herself, but always for what she could bring the family in either recognition or credit, which must come through her marriage.

“Well, my father, through his contacts…” Third Lady hesitated again. Jade understood the habits of survival in the Dragon Boats. The barges always traveled together, and all across them stretched families and servants and friends, all kin and dependents of one another. Jade imagined it might be very much the same thing at an emperor’s court, except that, presumably, there would be nobles arriving from the provinces and more movement amid the familiar faces. Here, in the Dragon Boats, it was just the same faces year after year, century after century.

Oh, sometimes the other were-clans sent notes or gifts, but because the Dragon Boats were as outlawed in China as in the rest of the world, they had to tread very carefully indeed, which meant their “presence” at court and their tribute was no more than the occasional letter or information sent by a secret and hassled messenger.

In these circumstances, it was all the more important for Third Lady, one of the few strangers in the Dragon Boats and a mere third wife, to be very careful of whom she might offend. And if the target of her words was the all-powerful Prince of the High Mountain…

Jade decided to bridge the chasm between her sister-in-law’s misgivings and her speech. She said, forcefully, and daring to guess, “Your father has heard of some treason of Zhang’s?”

Third Lady ducked her head, as though half in fear of these words, but also in assent. “My father…” she said, and paused. “You know, milady, do you not, that the Fox Clan has emissaries and representatives, relatives and spies all over the world?”

It was Jade’s turn to duck her head in assent. Her father had viewed this ability of the Fox Clan to live in foreign-devil lands, and to mingle with these creatures so patently inferior to the Chinese as something to be lamented. For that reason alone, Jade’s father had told her that the Fox Clan must be considered inferior to all other clans.

But Jade, whose mother had been a foreign devil, and who had learned one of the foreign-devil languages from childhood and been beguiled into the worlds of Austen and Sir Walter Scott, had a different view. She’d kept her opinion from her father—as she should—but she had thought to herself that perhaps this was an advantage to the Fox Clan.

And the fact that the foxes were mostly tricksters, thieves and beggars and often considered outside the realm of normal society couldn’t be held against them, either. After all, when you have to live secretly, you have to survive in whatever way you can, and your natural advantages of shape-changing can then become added spurs to your secrecy and cunning.

“My father has spies in India,” Third Lady said, gesturing in the direction of that great land that few among the Dragon Boats would know by name. “And there, he has followed…” Again, she paused, as though not sure that her interlocutor knew the whole story. “I trust that Lord Zhang has told you of the jewels that hold the whole power of the world?”

Jade started at that. She’d assumed that part of it to be a secret of state and well kept. “Who else knows of them?”