Imperial Woman (49 page)

In such grave mood, what shock then to find that foolish one, Sakota, persuaded by Prince Kung, now always jealous of Jung Lu, at the Tombs before her! Indeed, Sakota stood ready before the marble altar and in the central place, and when the Empress descended from her palanquin she smiled a small evil smile and motioned to her to stand at her right, while the left place was empty.

The Empress gave one haughty stare, her black eyes wide, and then ignoring Sakota’s invitation, she walked without a hint of haste into the pavilion nearby. There she seated herself and beckoned Jung Lu to her side.

“I do not deign to question anyone,” she said when he knelt before her. “I do but command you to bear this message to my co-Regent. If she does not yield her place at once, I will command the Imperial Guard to lift her from her feet and put her into prison.”

Jung Lu bowed to the floor. Then, his handsome aging face as cold and proud as ever nowadays, he rose and bore the message to Sakota. From her he soon returned to make obeisance before the Empress, and he said:

“The co-Regent received your message, Most High, and she replies that she is rightfully in her place, you being only the senior concubine. The empty place at her left is for the dead Consort, her elder sister, who, after her death, was raised to the place of Senior Empress.”

This the Empress heard, and she lifted up her head and gazed into the distance of dark pines and sculptured marble beasts. She said in her most calm voice,

“Go back again to the co-Regent with the same message that I sent. If she does not yield, then command the Imperial Guardsmen to seize her and Prince Kung also, with whom I have been always too lenient. Henceforth I shall be merciful no more to anyone.”

Jung Lu stood up and summoning the guardsmen, who followed him in their blue coats, their spears lifted and glittering in their right hands, he approached Sakota again. In a few minutes he returned to announce that she had yielded.

“Most High,” he said, his voice level and cold, “your place waits. The co-Regent has moved to the right.”

The Empress came down then from her high seat and walked with great state to the Tomb, and looking neither to the left nor right she stood in the center and performed the ceremonies with grace and majesty. When these were done she returned to the palaces in silence, acknowledging no greeting and giving none.

The life in the palace closed above this quarrel and one day followed another in seeming peace. Yet all knew that there could be no peace between these two ladies, who had each her followers, Jung Lu near the Empress and beneath him the Chief Eunuch, and with Sakota, Prince Kung, an old man now, but still proud and fearless.

The end was certain, but whether it would have come as it did had Jung Lu not committed a madness, unnatural and unforeseen, who knows? For in the autumn of that same year a rumor crept up like a foul miasma that Jung Lu, the faithful, the noble-hearted, the one above all to be trusted, was yielding to the love advances of a young concubine of the dead Emperor T’ung Chih, who had remained a virgin because her lord had loved only Alute. When the Empress first heard this foul report of Jung Lu come from the thick lips of her eunuch she would not believe it.

“What—my kinsman?” she exclaimed. “I would as soon say that I myself could play the fool!”

“Venerable,” Li Lien-ying muttered, grinning hideously, “I swear that it is true. The Imperial Concubine makes eyes at him when the Court meets. Do not forget that she is fair enough and still young, indeed, young enough to be his daughter, and he is at the age when a man likes his women as young as his own daughters. Remember, too, that he never did love the lady whom you gave to him, Majesty. No, three and three are still six and five and five are always ten.”

But the Empress only kept on laughing and shaking her head, while she chose a sweetmeat from the porcelain tray upon the table at her elbow. Yet when the eunuch brought her proof a few moons later, she could not laugh. His own serving eunuch, Li Lien-ying now told her, had waylaid a woman servant as she took a folded paper to a certain altar in the inner room of the imperial Buddhist temple. There a priest received it and for pay he thrust it into an incense urn, where a little eunuch found it and again for pay took it to the gate where Jung Lu’s manservant received it, all bribed by the concubine who thus made herself a fool for love.

“Majesty, pray read for yourself,” the eunuch begged.

The Empress took the perfumed sheet. It was indeed a note letter of assignation.

“Come to me at one hour after midnight. The watchman is bribed and he will open the third moon gate. There my woman will hide behind the cassia tree and she will lead you to me. I am a flower awaiting rain.”

The Empress read and folded the letter again and put it in her sleeve, and Li Lien-ying waited on his knees before her while she mused. And why delay, she asked herself, when proof was in her hands? She was so close in heart and flesh to the man Jung Lu that a word that either spoke went straight to the other as arrow sent from bow. Whatever intervened of time or circumstance had always crumbled when her heart spoke to his. She could not forgive him now.

“Bring me here the Grand Councilor,” she commanded the waiting eunuch. “And when he comes then close the doors and draw the curtains and forbid entrance to everyone until you hear me strike this bronze drum.”

He rose, and always ready to make mischief, he went in such haste that his robes flew behind him like wings. In less time than she needed to subdue her rage Jung Lu came in, wearing his long robes of blue, upon his breast a square of golden embroidery, upon his head a high cap of the same gold and in his hands a length of carved jade which he held before his face as he approached the Empress. But she would not see his splendid beauty. She sat upon her private throne in her great library, her robes of crimson satin sewn with gilt dragons falling to her feet and her headdress set with fresh white jasmine flowers so that about her clung their matchless scent, and saw him as an enemy. Even he!

Jung Lu prepared to kneel as her courtier but the Empress forbade it.

“Sit down, Prince,” she said in her most silvery voice, “and pray put down the jade. This is no formal summons. I speak to you in private to inquire of this letter placed in my hand an hour ago by my palace spies, who, you know, are everywhere.”

He would not sit, not even at her command, but he did not kneel. He stood before her and when she plucked from her sleeve the perfumed letter he did not put out his hand to take it.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“I see what it is,” he said, and his face did not change.

“You feel no shame?” she asked.

“None,” he said.

She let the letter flutter to the floor and folded her two hands together upon her satin lap. “You feel no disloyalty to me?” she asked.

“No, for I am not disloyal,” he replied. And then he said, “What you ask of me, I give. What you do not ask or need remains my own.”

These words so confounded the Empress that she could not answer. In silence Jung Lu waited and then he bowed and went away, not asking for her permission, nor did she call out his name to stay him. Thus left alone, she sat immobile as any image, while she pondered what he had said. So used was she to doing justly that even now her mind weighed his words against her heart. Had he not spoken truly? She should not have listened so quickly to a eunuch. There was not a woman in the realm whose heart did not answer to Jung Lu’s name. Was this his fault? No, surely he was above the petty loves and hates of lesser persons in the palaces. Then she had done him much injustice when she could believe him easily disloyal to her, his sovereign. And should she in justice blame him for being a man? And she sat thinking how she would reward him with some new honor and oblige him to be faithful.

For a day or so, nevertheless, she was unkind to Li Lien-ying and short in what she said to him, and he was prudent and withdrew and planned another way to gain her ear. Thus some weeks later, one day after the Empress had given her usual audience to her princes and her ministers, a eunuch, not Li Lien-ying, brought to her a private memorial from the Emperor’s tutor, Weng T’ung-ho, who said therein that he had a duty to report to her a secret matter. Immediately she suspected that again it had to do with the young concubine, for this tutor hated Jung Lu, who had once been scornful of him in an archery tournament when the tutor had pretended prowess and had failed miserably, for he was a scholar and had a scholar’s reedy frame and was no archer.

Nevertheless, the Empress received the memorial which the tutor had sent her thus secretly. It said simply that if she would go at a certain hour to the private chamber of a certain concubine, she would see a sight to surprise her eyes. He, Weng T’ung-ho, would not risk his head to reveal a secret, except that he did so from duty, since if scandal went unnoticed in the imperial palaces, what then would take place in the nation and among the people, to whom the Empress was a goddess?

When the Empress had read this memorial she dismissed the petty eunuch by her lifted hand, and with her serving women she went swiftly to the Palace of Forgotten Concubines, and to the room where the lady lived, a concubine whom she had once chosen for her own son and whom he had never summoned.

Softly she opened the door with her own hands, while around her servants and eunuchs, stricken by her unexpected presence, could only fall upon their knees and hide their faces in their sleeves. She flung the door wide and suddenly and saw the horrid sight she feared. Jung Lu was there, seated in a great chair beside a table upon which were set trays of sweetmeats and a jug of steaming wine. At his side knelt the concubine, her hands folded on his knees, while he gazed smiling down into her loving face.

This was the sight the Empress saw. She felt within her breast such pain and heat of outraged blood that she put her hands against her heart to save it. And Jung Lu looked up and saw her. He sat an instant gazing at her and then he put the girl’s hands from his knees and rose and waited, his arms folded on his breast, for the imperial wrath to fall upon him.

The Empress could not speak. She stood there and they gazed at each other, man and woman, and in that moment knew that each loved the other with a love so hopeless, so eternal and so strong that nothing could destroy what was between them. She saw his proud spirit unchanged, his love still immaculate, and what he did here in this room was meaningless between them. She closed the door as softly as she had opened it and returned to her own palace.

“Leave me alone awhile,” she bade the eunuchs and the serving women, and alone she mused upon the scene she has discovered. No, she did not doubt his love or loyalty, but here was the wound—he was in some measure a common man, flesh as well as spirit. Flesh made its demands even upon him, and he had yielded. Even he, she murmured, even he is not great enough for such loneliness as I must bear.

Her temples ached. She felt her headdress heavy on her head and she lifted it from her and set it upon the table and smoothed her forehead with her hands.

Sweet it might have been to know that for her sake he could and did deny the common flesh of common man! So might her own loneliness be lightened to know that though he stood below her he was equal to her greatness.

Here her thoughts ran around the world to find Victoria, the English Queen, whom never having seen she thought of as her sister ruler, and she addressed her thus in secret communication. Even as widow, Sister Empress, you are more lucky than I have been. Death took your love away unsullied. You were not cheated for a silly woman.

Yet Victoria could not hear. The Empress sighed, tears rolled down her cheeks and fell like jewels on her bosom, and love ebbed from her heart.

I thought I was alone before, she told herself most somberly. But now I do accept the full depth of loneliness.

Time passed while she sat musing and with each moment the dark knowledge of her utter loneliness steeped through her soul until she was drenched with bitterness fulfilled. She sighed again and wiped away her tears, and as though she came out from a trance she rose from her throne and walked here and there about the great stately hall. She could now think of her duty and the punishment which Jung Lu must accept, if she were just. And just she was and always would be, and to all alike.

The next day, at the hour of early audience, before sunrise, she announced, and by imperial edict, that the Grand Councilor, Jung Lu, was from this moment relieved of all his posts and hereby she declared his full retirement from the Imperial Court. No charge was made against him, nor needed to be made, for already rumor had carried the news of her discovery far beyond the palaces.

At dawn she sat upon the Dragon Throne, which she had taken for her own when her son died, and her ministers and princes stood before her, each in his place, and they heard their fellow thus condemned and none spoke a word. Their looks were grave, for if one so high as Jung Lu could fall so low, then none was safe.

And the Empress saw their looks and made no sign. If love were not her guard, then fear must be her weapon. In loneliness she reigned and no one was near her and all were afraid.

Yet fear was still not enough. In the second moon of the next year Prince Kung took upon himself a task which was hateful, but to which he said he was compelled. One cool spring day, after audience, Prince Kung petitioned to be heard privately, a favor which for long he had not asked. Now the Empress was eager to leave the Audience Hall and return to her own palaces, for she had planned to spend the day in her gardens, where the plum blossoms were beginning to swell with spring warmth. Nevertheless, she was constrained to yield to this Prince, for he was her chief advisor and her intermediary with the ever more demanding white men. These foreigners liked Prince Kung and trusted him, and in commonsense the Empress took advantage of their trust in her Prince. Therefore she stayed, and when the other princes and ministers were gone, Prince Kung came forward and making his usual brief obeisance he presented himself thus: