My Last Empress (15 page)

“What are you nosing about my toes for? Sit down here and cover yourself, Big Man.” Q’s hand patted the carpet to her left, breaking my reverie. Tamely I sat on my assigned turf, my legs crowding hers, yanking down the left front of my sleeping gown to cover myself. Frankly, I was sick of this Big Man business. One moment she could be so stricken by her crust-thin emotion, and the next, vulgar like a mercenary street waif off some Boston wharf. Relief came readily when I garnered a peep at her tender armpit, rank with a tiny shock of curlies when she raised a short-sleeved arm and parked it over my shoulder.

“Now listen, Big Man,” she cajoled. “The whole palace is a ghost town: everyone has gone to the shrine. We’ve got things to do.” She dug her fine fingers into my upper arm while overlapping her thin legs in a stack.

“Today is the day,” she whispered conspicuously into my ear. “Let’s pay a visit to Union Hospital where I was born. There must be a record—if not of my adoption, then of the death of my mother. I’ve been there once. It’s run by foreign doctors with foreign head nurses guarding each ward.”

“How can I be of use?” I asked, her nearness tickling my nerves.

“You are one of them,” she said with wide-eyed certainty. “And you’re a sweet talker and a handsome man. The old nurses there will open anything for you.”

“A sweet talker?” I faked a frown, questioning.

She nodded, her long-lashed eyes downcast as if bemused by her own toes, so that I could see her profile and the tiny mole on the center of her left lobe.

“How handsome?” I asked, leveraging on her sweet mood.

She nodded a second and third time and bent her head lower, showing a shaded nape whereupon her hair changed to blond down. So utterly fragile! I could almost fracture that slender column to pieces with one robust snap.

“Quite handsome.” She turned her face, nose tip to my ear, and lifted a strand of my hair, draping it over my ear, blowing with tobacco-scented breath another filament away from my left eye. My hair roots went atingle at her breeze, my head dizzied as if fondled by seductive fingers, sending a thousand little caresses up my scalp and along my burning temples.

“How sweet?” I urged dreamily.

“Lozenge sweet!” The wench wrenched my spiculated nose-ridge hard between her knuckles and gave it a fiendish twist followed by a hammering blow with her other fist. “That’s how sweet it is, you foolish man.”

“Where did you …?” A hot rush burned down the septum of my nose, reddening my upper lip. I cupped my nostrils, blood seeping through my fingers.

Q flushed with pity, her puerile almond eyes darkening with worry.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” My helpless child cupped her lips as if in like ache. “I was just playing the Russian sickle and hammer game.”

I uttered nasally, “Now you have to—”

“What can I do, you poor darling?”

Before she finished speaking, my crimson paws had forfeited the bleeding nose and inserted under her hairy armpits, lifting her lithely to plant her rump on my sighing lap, her vaginal mound a mere fist away from my aliquant appendage. Had she writhed one inward inch, or giggled a half-ticklish breath, she would have autumned a windfall to last me a fortnight, a forever. But heaven had to wait … though I couldn’t.

My child sat in stillness, astraddle my mutinous thighs, examining me with impenetrable attentiveness, a trait perversely privy only to the young. Her tilted eyes squinted into one conjoined eye; her upturned nose, as turned up as her ancestral A’s, wrinkled with frustration, and her nether lips grew lax.

Diagnostically pleased, she pushed my chin up, then lifted the frontage of her silk dress to wipe clean the red residue while nursing me with another pinch on my nose, this time to stop the bleed. “You are a naughty man asking me those silly questions. You deserve to bleed to death.”

“Hmmm.” Before I could open my mouth, she had brushed her lips over mine, sealing the words within; another brush of her soft lips and I would tremble in tatters and shreds, but she wasn’t to repeat. I nearly fainted. But quickly I reassembled my fallen self and slipped my hands along her waist to finally rest them on her slight hips. How I now detested round matronly hips, thickly constructed like those of my original tutor, the quiet Mrs. D, and some expedient others of her breed in between.

Tightening my grip, digging my nails into the soft rise
of her buttocks, I thrust her hips toward me, aiming her nether protrusion—that final cliff wherein dives the man. She unleashed a
hah!
—an airy issuance halfway to its final formation as an utterance, the plea of meek surrender. On my part, a certain after-rain mushrooming had long flamed in a mushy forest, tented and canopied. I was squeezing her hind cheeks, readying for another deathly blow—mine, not hers—when Q pulled her slim elbow sideways like the sling of a catapult and levied a numbing slap across my face, throwing my cheeks to flop and lips to flap. New blood spurred from my already bleeding nose.

“You rascal, now see what you have done.” She cursed prettily. “Be still. I’m trying to stop you from bleeding to death.” Her attentiveness was a marvel to witness, having just struck a jaw-slacking blow. This time my spillage gushed onto the white of her dress.

She kept my nose tip pinched, aiming to cease my discharge, which, as long as she was busy with her enterprise, I minded not at all. I pivoted my heels on a higher rung of stairs and gave her a bit of a toss, hopping her bottom just an inch off my skin, letting her concavity sink directly on my tortoise’s head; each hop brought home an abject awakening deep in my heart.

As I tossed her some more, letting my toes do their kinetic tricks, she gyrated her tiny waist. Such circular gyration only incensed the heat in me—I was nigh fainting again. My darkened eyes saw a dusky bonfire on the New England prairie burning with sizzling zest.

She mopped my blood with one hand, pinching my nose with the other, suffocating me. I closed my mouth, stopping
my breathing altogether. The resultant delirium was to die for, causing a hallucinatory mirage to appear: in my lap was my Annabelle, not Q.

Such evocation caused a sudden halt to the entire business at hand. I searched around, sensing one angry and awry vein engorge on my forehead. I was not going to succumb to threat by
mi amor
with my oven heating a near boil, ruining what I had so long craved and was so near to attaining.

“If you get caught doing this,” Q said, without cease in her circular gyrations, “we all will be hanged.”

“Doing what?” I asked, resuming the hopping of my lap, panting for that goal that was nearing.

“Doing this.” She sank down her tail, letting me feel her softness, the warmth from her inner groove a thin undergarment apart. My hardness lengthened and rose, standing obliquely to face its headlong onslaught, peeling painfully with each of her forceful glide: it was then and there I reached that delirious state where one clung to nothing, and everything around me, above me, and under me ingratiated itself toward reaching that finality. As I accelerated my urging, I was blinded by a numbing sensation rising en masse along every cell, along every tiny man-hair, every porous inch, every yielding yardage.

In the distance I heard Q say, “Please come with me … to the hospital … and help me …”

“I will!” Slipping one cupping hand from her waist down to her bottom, I poked one single deviant digit, the middle one, into her parted crevice, slipping it tightly into the unknown, followed shortly by her pained convulsion, triggering
my own deathful cry as I let loose a monstrous deluge that soiled the front of my robe.

Through my glassy vision, I made out a slender form slipping off my tattered lap, blushing possibly and dashing downstairs, leaving me to die alone on the steps.

After cleansing myself and consuming a beastly breakfast of dried sweet dough, buttered cornbread, and coils of lamb sausages exceptionally rendered by my prodigious young cook, I secretively appeared, suit wearing and hatted, at a deserted eastern gate where I was met by a four-man sedan. Behind the drapery was my pubescent mate leaning on her side of the cushioned seat, powdered and coiffed, dressed in the hunting attire of safari pants and knee-high boots. Her eyes were downcast, staring at her own knees, with a pink blush that even her white powder could ill cover.

“What took you so long?” she asked, slanting her eyes to peep out the tiny sedan window.

“A meal and a bath,” I answered while taking my seat, gazing her up and down. Those slender thighs under the manly wear stirred me; she clamped them closed as if sensing my stare.

Outside the drapery, the head of the foursome gave orders, and our carriage went aloft and mobile through a side archway; the main one was reserved for the chosen, and no one else. The glow in my heart animated me to reach over my paw, yearning to touch her.

She slapped the encroaching hand away with her ringed
fingers, an inset green jade denting my palm. “Be proper,” she snapped, pasting herself to her sedan wall.

Three willow-lined streets later, she sagged and sighed before leaning her head on my shoulder. I cupped her hot hands between my sweaty palms; she dug her nails, lightly denting my skin. After a silent ride down some leafy boulevards, she tilted her swan neck and hungrily kissed my eager mouth, one long leg swinging over my lap.

By noon—a bound-foot granny could have outrun our hoofed foursome!—we alighted under the awning of Union Hospital. A turbaned concierge of Indian descent chased away the scattered paupers before greeting us with his shiny, white-toothed smile.

Among a cluster of nurses and doctors crowding the white-walled corridor, Q followed me, as a minor would with a father or uncle. Beyond that fortress, outside the maroon wall, she was but a helpless child.

We were courteously greeted by the hospital administrator, a jovial old chap from the coast of Maine, Blue Hill to be exact, a peninsular hamlet south of Bangor: a predial digit dipping in a pellucid Atlantic sea whereupon I had once swum in a quarry pond with some local lads. Colonel Putnam, the hospital administrator, a crippled soldier of the Spanish War, refused to grant me privy to the underground vault of the hospital even after I hinted of my tacit liaison with Colonel Winthrop of the American legation. The one-legged letch kept leering at my escort sitting in the corridor, whom I merely introduced as a lady of enormous means and whose concern over the lineage of an invented friend would, when adoptive identity known, lead to a possible future
donation. He only yielded after planting a prolonged wet kiss on the back of Q’s hand. His cursed lips lingered inappropriately long for an initial encounter, or any encounter for that matter. The curative effects Q had on the lame duck engendered a rare pang deep in my groins, but I kept my quiet, though inwardly I shouted,
“Lick my blushing bride’s hand one more time …”

But calm I remained. Life is marred with wrongs.

We climbed down dusty stairs, Putnam wobbling alongside Q, iron key in hand, an obvious bulging in his treasonous trousers. He had to lean on her thrice down three short flights, pushing away my aiding hand.

“These documents would have been condemned, but I kept them,” sighed Putnam, unlocking a rusty chest labeled by dynastical reign and its Westernized calendar year.

Before letting us browse the aged contents, our pugnacious Putnam hinted at the neediness of the crowded wards and the stinginess of the nurses’ quarters. Q frowned at his plea, and on the spot dropped fifteen tael of silver. Ownership of said coins brought a gleam to his eyes.

The probe through the meager month of April 1885 produced ten births under the midwifery of Nurse M. Mead. There had been an outbreak of plague that year at the hospital, scaring away expectant mothers from the maternity ward. Among the listed were a set of twins to a French couple, one caesarean birth to German merchants conducted by a surgeon initialed as M.H., and three consecutive boys to respectively productive Russian railroad engineers. The three boys were trailed by a succession of four baby girls to three Londoners and one Yorkshire veterinarian.

There were no offspring of Manchurian ancestry or Chinese parentage.

“Where is my name?” said Q.

“Are you …?” Putnam’s shiny forehead wrinkled in puzzlement before slowly breaking into a grimace.

“No, she is not,” I said emphatically.

“But this much silver and your obvious mixed blood … You have to be—”

“It proves nothing,” I opposed adamantly.

Barely before I ended my words, Putnam was on his knees. “Your Excellence.” He grabbed Q’s honey hand and abjectly kissed it again and again. In between his canine breaths, he uttered, “I had long been an admirer of your regality and your pedigree, having dined once with your father. You were young then, six or seven, having just returned from a diplomatic tour to the Empire of Japan. It was at the Hawthorn Bloom Banquet that your father hosted annually. I was freshly discharged from the army hospital in Manila, having just taken my present post. What a grand host your princely father was. What a darling hostess you presented, standing beside him, greeting your guests on that unforgettable spring day when hawthorn trees were in full bloom and butterflies were alighting upon their nectar.”