My Last Empress (23 page)

It would take three men, six eunuchs that is, to break out the iron rods. Q was the first to be pushed out the window. Following her, I crawled through the narrow passage, my boots nipped by ferocious flames. Only two other eunuchs made it out. The rest were all entombed within, burned to embers and ashes.

Let’s now borrow a passage or two from the palace record, which is so regularly wrong and fictive that at times it could not help itself being right. The Court historian hereby wrote:

Fear shrinks a dwarf but only stirs a gallant. Only a fool would linger in the aftermath of the fire to read in this jaundiced publication his own fate and the condemnation of those involved. In the evening twilight, what little I had I packed up within a small trunk, and I headed out through a backyard grove of secretive bamboo. From there I was to make my way to a curtained rickshaw awaiting me outside the western gate, which In-In had summoned with two silver ingots to ensure his way. By then my house was already being watched by the eyes of a platoon that had to be fooled by the stage props of a lit lantern in my bedroom shining opaquely on a bulbous bed wherein lay, as my substitute, a stool covered snugly by a silk quilt.

A hidden door allowed me to exit my damp vault into a garden of peonies now felled aground by their own heavy, dewy blooms. I crawled through the peony patch next to leaning bamboo trees following a mental topography mapped for this very circumstance. This route of evasion was to be best trampled in summer’s lush leaves and thick shrubbery while winter urgency would have dictated an alternate course. Next the rising hedges of stout pine bushes led me to a dock over an eel pond whereby I poled to shore a discreet boat from its moor under a bridge among swaying lotus stems, in a morass of turtles and rotting leaves near the garden of Q’s mansionette.

All along, my guilt, my sorrow, was heavy with a certain pending premonition. My imagining eye could see a singular profile of Q, not supine or prone, but encircled by a casket of stillness, with summer heat chilled around her.

Quickly I threw open her lacquered door. Her living chamber was empty, gray in twilight, no maids or servants in sight. I stormed next into the bedroom. I didn’t see her right away. On the wall was projected an elongated silhouette hung by a thin rope from a ceiling beam, her head bent in equanimity, her arms dangling in surrender.

Sadness weakened my knees and my arms yet I leaped at her, lifting her feet up. The noose atop slackened around her neck, and she slumped over my fetching shoulder.

Next I reached for the handle of a boot-plunged knife and stepping on a chair gave the hanging rope quick slashes. It gave finally, and gently I laid her on a rumpled bed. Save for a garish cut beneath her petite larynx and some spittle smearing her lower lip and the corners of her mouth, she looked utterly unhurt, at peace in slumber. I sheathed the Arab knife and fished from my trouser pocket a tiny leather holder containing a pin-sharp silver toothpick, with which I would now perform that ancient art of the Needle Cure. One prick, needlewise, at a certain hot-blooded nerve point beneath a woman’s tender ankle and she would coil with rampant desire and contort for condign punishments. No province of carnal knowledge or precincts of fancy were beyond my reach.

With the makeshift needle, I aimed at the vertical furrow above the upper lip. The philtrum, as it is otherwise known, had linear filaments running to the brain. To stir the tender groove was to awaken the life within.

The sharp point pricked into her pale skin. A living man would leap in an unbearable pain, but in her it cajoled not a twitch or a wince, leaving me with one last resort: the tip
of her
digitus medius
, or middle finger, a secret burrow to the ventricles of her heart. If this failed, I did not know what would become of me.

I forced my slender tool inside the tenderness between her nail and flesh, at once inducing a bead of blood. My fingers went into frenzy, spinning its stem, stirring its tip deeper down in, trying to call forth that residual flame remnant in her. After only exerting the full length of my bloody toothpick did I finally make Q quiver.

Maddeningly I kept on the task with my scepter of life whilst pasting my ear over the diamond of her chest, listening for her heartbeat. She jerked again, this time heaving up with a long-lodged sigh. Soon I sensed Q’s weak arteries pulsing and her fey bosom heaving, but she was still blue. Wiping the copious mucous from her face, I sealed my lips around her mouth, pinched shut her nose, and inflated her lungs. In four breaths she was pink. She then gurgled, as if some blockage had just given way, and opened her big eyes, looking puzzled.

“What are you doing here, Big Man?” she inquired weakly, easing herself up with a haunted look on her face as if seeing ghosts. “Quick, Big Man, get me out of here. They tried to kill me!”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“The servants! Eunuchs. A band of them forced their way in. Did they try to kill you, too?” she asked, cupping my face with her cold hands.

“Not yet.”

“How did you know to come rescue me?”

Carefully I caressed the bruise around her neck as tears
rolled down her cheeks. “I only knew I had to come take you far away from this place.”

“Where are we going?”

“Wherever you wish to go.”

“To my parents’ residence then.” She climbed off her bed, still weak but able.

My Q, my innocent. Her purity jabbed my tender heart.

I carried her out of the house across her garden into the bobbing boat. It was dead quiet. Such would be the case, with her unwatched and unguarded, giving her ample time to hang, limp and dead, while resident ghosts preyed on her, until the shocking discovery in the morn. A case of suicide would be made with evidence strewn all over her abode. A note of demise would be forwarded to her princely adoptive father, who would only be allowed to view her body at her burial, a hush-hush affair in the royal cemetery.

What fallacy! But before we could pole away into safety, I had to do one more deed. Leaving Q alone on the stern of the boat, I trudged back into her home, picked up the shortened candle, and fed its waning flame to the hem of a curtain where some rude boot had stomped on its fringe. Slowly it caught with a sizzling crawl upward.

By the time we reached the opposite bank of this palace pond, the tongues of fire were visible, squirming up other curtains and drapery. When I carried her, my delicate living ghost, into the carriage at the foot of that deserted western gate, the sound of gongs and the fury of shouts were faintly audible, just enough to distract the vigilance of the gate guard.

To avoid easy pursuit, I told the rickshaw man to take a shortcut along a quiet moat away from the boulevards and streets to the American legation, a stopover to let Q heal her wounds and calm her fragile soul. But the asylum of ambassadorial protection was not to be had easily.

Colonel Winthrop, the tic and tac man, only grudgingly acquiesced to a two-day stay if I rendered a diary of events leading to the unexpected departure. When I let it be known the circumstances wherein, he nearly fainted. The stout man of courtly manners had to lean on a frail railing to let the spell pass. His facial tics resumed frantically, contorting the right side of his face. But it was when Q’s identity was whispered to him by an aide of his, a well-heeled nobody who’d had a chance encounter with Q a summer before at her chrysanthemum tea party in the Jing Garden, that Winthrop stomped into our room threatening to turn us into the palace if I didn’t take to the road at once. It was after midnight, mind you. He could not wait till daybreak when carriages could be summoned. Only after lengthy pleading on the point of my delicate company would he let us stay until sunrise. By then, when the main gate of the walled Tartar City had opened, not only was a notice of apprehension of two treasonous fugitives, Q and I, posted but so was an announcement of the honorable Prince Qiu’s death by self-hanging.

When I informed her of the tragedy, Q was pale and strengthless, leaning on her bedpost. Neither the gentle voice with which I delivered the news nor the ensuing words of comfort could soothe her. She shook her head violently, asking, “Why him? My poor papa. Why is my path filled with
death? Why are you still here with me? Why aren’t you gone like the rest? I am cursed. I must be.” She wasn’t speaking to me in particular. She seemed to be repenting to someone, her God perhaps.

How I wished I could answer her. All I could do was rock her in my arms till she fell into a jerking, sobbing sleep.

The world outside could be windy and stormy in June heat, but in here, within our haven, all was calm. Q and I found refuge for the next two nights in a petite alley inn, deftly named Ye Ying Tang, the Nightingale’s Nest. Afterward I often thought of it as some winsome device off pages of myth and folklore.

The inn hid behind a willow garden, barely visible from an archway crawled by long-neck peonies. It came into my view only when, our carriage freshly discharged from the legation’s rear gate, the Mongol stallion suddenly veered left without the urging of the reins, taking us into a narrow alley as if sensing danger ahead. At the alley’s end, the Nightingale’s Nest came into view.

It could have been the sound of men in arms two blocks down that frightened the intuitive beast or its innate beastly spirit sensing danger afar. Whatever the cause, the horse brought us even farther down the alley, trotting forcefully, notwithstanding the whipping and cussing by its master, till it stopped at an archway upon which a bell hung. Homer would have spirited it so that the white-furred beast used its snout to ring the bell to announce our arrival to the innkeeper, who might in turn be a three-breasted horned beast, but the feat was already angelic enough without the aid of literal
fanfare as the Greeks were prone to do or overdo. I paid an extra silver tael to the driver for additional hay to be fed the beatific beast. The man patted his animal proudly and bowed rapidly in thanks.

The innkeeper was a dwarf paired with a fully grown wife. They greeted us like a vaudeville comic show. All they had for the night was one single room in a quiet corner of their establishment, said the impish innkeeper with a childlike voice.

Q had draped her head and shoulders with a scarf, a gift from the congenial Mrs. Winthrop upon leaving the besieged legation, which concealed all but her downcast eyes. I murmured some gibberish to the effect that she was my daughter, adding with my mangled Mandarin that we were awaiting arrival of her sick mother who was recovering at Union Hospital and that the single should suffice with a mat and satin quilt for my daughter. The innkeeper was agreeable, and he led us to our enchanted nest with a window overlooking a willow grove.

“A single room?” Q said as soon as I shut the door. “Are you mad? I am not your daughter, and you will not come near my bed. You’ll stay on the floor for as long as we have to stay here.” Her eyes darted about our chamber with disdain as she cast away the scarf and dove into the fluffy bed, curling herself up under the blanket.

I ordered our supper to be brought to our chamber, on account that my darling daughter was infirm and a whiff of outside wind would only worsen her fragility. The host was quick to oblige. Q quietly ate two servings of soft corn crepes and crusty fried pork skin, a culinary affliction with which
all Manchurians were cursed. Before tea could be served, she yawned and dozed off, lying on a bamboo pillow.