My Splendid Concubine (55 page)

“
Let us go to our house,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.

He heard the hunger in her raspy voice. His heart beat faster with anti
cipation. “There is no house,” he said. “I didn’t have time. The situation here is dangerous. After I leave, send Guan-jiah to find a house. Even with all the English and French soldiers in Canton, the wives of Westerners are staying in Hong Kong or Macao. People are killed daily. Many have fled.”

“
I see,” she said. The following silence indicated she wasn’t pleased.

“
Once we have a suitable place, I’ll come in the night,” he said. “I will have to leave in the morning before sunrise. Until it is safer, that is how we will meet. Tell Guan-jiah to send the same boy with the location of the house.”

“
Poetry cannot take your place in my heart,” she said, and stared into his eyes as if she were trying to read words there. She brushed his hand aside and pressed against him. He felt the rise and fall of her breasts, and her heart was beating fast like his.

“
It sounds like you have been missing me, Ayaou.” His eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He lifted her chin to see her face and kissed away the tears.

“
I do one thing when I miss you too much,” she said.

“
What’s that?” he asked. He loved listening to her silky voice. It reminded him of the evenings he’d spent teaching her and Shao-mei to read.

“
I read books. I still have trouble believing I can read. Books are blocks between us. Every time I remove one, I am one-step closer to you. See, it is true. I am here.”

“
How did you get here so fast?” he asked.

“
This junk belongs to Cousin Weed,” she replied. “When I received your letter, I went to Uncle Bark for advice and discovered his son had delivered a cargo to Shanghai and was returning to Macao. We sailed with him.”

The sensuous way her lips moved as she talked captivated him. He
did not want to go ashore and return to his empty, cold bed.

“
Would you like to stay tonight?” she asked. “I have been practicing on eggplants, so I would not forget how you like to be kissed.”

“
Eggplants?” He felt like laughing but looked serious instead. “The first time we were together, you told me your father made you practice on carrots.”

“
Carrots are hard,” she replied. “Boiled eggplant is soft like your lips.” He had a hard time imagining that his lips felt like eggplant. It was not a flattering image.

She took his hand and led him to a lower deck where the hea
dspace was restricted. He had to walk bent over, and he wasn’t a tall man. His thoughts were lost in a bedlam of emotions. He worried that if he didn’t return quickly to the commission his absence would be noticed. What would Parkes say if he knew about Ayaou? The first voice in his head said to leave before he was missed. A second voice said to stay—it won.

The smell of mildew and rot was strong. Bales of cargo crowded the space. She pulled him between the bales, pushed past a burlap curtain and into a narrow space filled with quilted pads and blankets. It reminded him of their first time together in the root cellar under Ward
’s house.

Thinking of Ward reminded him that while the mercenary lived, he was a threat to Robert
’s happiness and Ayaou’s safety. Canton might not be a safe place for Ayaou, but it was a long way from Ward, which brought Robert some comfort. The further they were from the Devil Soldier, the safer he felt.

She took both his hands in hers and pulled him down beside her. Their lips fed on each other.
“This is much better than eggplant,” she said.

“
That’s nice,” he replied.

“
Be quiet,” she said.

It was a night to remember. They didn
’t sleep.

Robert went ashore before dawn and made his way through the dark streets back to the commission. He hated leaving the junk. Ayaou’s scent clung to his clothes. As much as he wanted to keep her smell as a reminder of their night together, he didn’t want anyone else to discover it and guess where he’d been.

In his room, he washed his upper torso, arms and face. He changed clothing.
The cramped space seemed colder and lonelier than before.

At the commission, it was hard
to focus on his work. His concentration dissolved every time someone entered the room. When the messenger boy wasn’t there, his heart sank and the hours dragged. He could barely contain himself.

Guan-jiah’s note arrived late in the afternoon when a soldier escorted the same boy to Robert. The note said Guan-jiah found a small house hidden in a spider-web of streets. When darkness fell, the boy guided him there. Before he knocked, Robert gave the boy another yuan. The boy smiled and popped it in his mouth before he ran off.

The house was nothing like the one in Ningpo. It was old and smelled of oil, garlic and hot peppercorns. Over the years, the odor of cooking had soaked into the boards. The place crawled with coc
kroaches and other vermin. There were rat and mice droppings everywhere. During the night, he heard them inside the walls.

“
Make sure this place gets a thorough scrubbing.” He told Guan-jiah the next morning before he returned to the barracks. It wasn’t the kind of place he wanted to spend with the woman he loved.

But he had no choice. Anything more luxurious might gain the a
ttention of the wrong people. Even a place like this was preferable to death or being discovered by Parkes.

Dressed in a Chinese disguise, he hid his face under a cone shaped, woven bamboo hat with a large brim and made his way to the house each night. It was the same type of disguise he’d used to avoid capture from the Taipings after that horrible battle where he almost died.

Under the robe, his sweaty hands held
the revolver while his eyes searched the shadows. Every suspicious sound he heard caused him to leap around inside his skin. Each morning when the roosters crowed, he made his way back to the commission before sunrise.

Many Cantonese hated him because he was not Chinese. If he were discovered, they would take their time tearing his arms and legs out of their sockets. He would suffer a long and horrible death before they cut his head off and threw it in the river. The Chinese believed if you were not buried whole, your soul would be lost forever.

As much as he disliked sleeping alone at the commission, it was more comfortable than the bedroom he shared with Ayaou in that house. Guan-jiah could not find a suitable bed, so Ayaou and Robert slept and made love on old rice mats rolled out flat on the creaking, hardwood floor.

It didn
’t take long to discover that the mats were infested with lice. Robert took daily baths and thought he was going to scrub his skin off to get rid of them. Guan-jiah and Ayaou worked hard to clean the place, but it seemed a losing battle. Every time they cleaned the floor of droppings, the creatures returned in the dark.

One night, a rat woke him. It was sitting on his chest licking the salt from his skin. He screamed. The rat leaped off. Robert grabbed his pistol and almost fired a round before it escaped into a hole in the wall he hadn
’t noticed.

“
Master, what is it?” Guan-jiah rushed into the room half-naked. He held his Colt revolver in one hand and a machete in the other. His eyes had a wild, dangerous look to them.

The eunuch kept his head shaved except for his queue. Ro
bert was sure if his servant had hair, it would have been sticking in all directions. “Rats!” he said. “You have to rid this house of them, Guan-jiah.”

“
Master, since so many people have left the city, the rats have no one to hunt them down and keep their population in control.”

“
Find a way!”

Chapter 32

It rained for two weeks. His quarters were damp, both at the commission and at the house where he spent his nights with Ayaou.

To clean the house,
Guan-jiah used boiled water with a vinegar-garlic solution to scrape the floors and wash the clothing. Robert didn’t know what was worse, the smell or the lice and rats.

The evening meal was always the same: a variety of beans, coarse bread, spinach and peas.
“What happened to pork and beef?” he asked. “Is food so scarce that you can only find this?”

“
No, Robert,” Ayaou replied. “With this food, the lice won’t like the way you taste. They will stay away.”

He stared at the half-empty plate, sighed and continued eating. He was getting tired of the same food every night but wasn
’t going to argue. It wasn’t worth it. Besides, maybe she was right.

Guan-jiah scoured the city and found sleeping mats that were lice free. The traps he set out and bated with a peanut paste caught scores of rats and mice. Before the month
’s end, the rats and lice were gone.

“Guan-jiah,” he asked, “what’s wrong with your hands?” His servant’s hands looked bright red and raw. Scabs were forming.

Guan-jiah hid his hands behind his back.
“Nothing, Master.”

“
I told him not to keep the lice killing solution so hot,” Ayaou said. “I thought he was going to cook his hands.”

“
Let me see your hands.” Guan-jiah stuck them out. “We have to do something,” Robert said. “I’ll see if I can find an ointment.”

Ayaou started to do little things for him that Shao-mei had done when she was alive. One thing that Ayaou did was to sew a bag for his ink stone to replace the one she had destroyed during an argument with Shao-mei. It was an exact duplicate.
Robert didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t tell her it brought back the memories—the grief.

One night, Ayaou insisted they read together as they once did with Shao-mei. She wanted to read the poems that Shao-mei loved. He should have seen these changes in her behavior as warning signs, but the grief he was struggling to hide and the events taking place in and around the city were conspiring to keep him from seeing what was going on in the mind of his lover.

Early the next morning, Robert stumbled back to h
is quarters in the barracks and struggled to stay awake and do his job.

Around sunrise on May 30, shortly after he slipped back into his quarters at the commission, a large band of armed Chinese rebels attacked two policemen on duty at the city’s southwest gate. One of the policemen was cut in several places on the head but managed to escape. The left hand of the other policeman was almost severed from his arm.

“
I heard that a Chinese shopkeeper saved the second policeman by leading him across roofs and over the city wall,” a British infantry lieutenant told Robert.

That same evening, instead of going to Ayaou, he rode with Ca
ptain Pym and his police through the western suburbs. A spy of Pym’s said that rebels, known as the Canton Braves, were planning another raid similar to the one against the southwest gate. The troop rode for hours through the streets and outside the city walls as a show of force. It must have worked. There were no large assaults against the city that night—only skirmishes.

He didn
’t reach Ayaou until well after midnight. She answered the door when he knocked and threw herself in his arms. “I was afraid something happened to you, Robert,” she said, trembling. “We heard the shooting.” When he tilted her head back to see her face, he noticed the worry lines growing around her eyes.

“
You can’t sit here for hours like this. You will get sick.” He’d been blind these last few weeks. She was losing weight. “You aren’t eating,” he said.

“
How can I eat? You could be killed.”

That night, t
heir lovemaking was frantic.

On July 3, an hour before noon, a band of Taiping rebels attacked four French sailors who shouldn’t have been outside the city walls. Three of the sailors escaped. Pym’s police found the headless body of the fourth sailor in a stream. They never found the head.

“
The French commander must make sure his troops do as they are told.” Parkes face was swollen and his eyes red as he walked back and forth from one side of his office to the other. Robert and several officers stood in silence listening to his anger.

Parkes
’s lips curled into a sneer and twitched. “Orders were posted that all troops were to stay inside their compounds. It isn’t safe to be wandering around alone. It also isn’t safe for the Chinese that are friendly with us.” He stopped and slammed a fist into a palm. “There must be no exceptions! Any soldiers that disobey must spend time in the brig.”

Robert feared for Ayaou
’s safety. How could he protect her when he wasn’t at the house? But Guan-jiah was there with a revolver and the eunuch knew how to use it. However, Robert didn’t know if his servant would fight and that worried him.