The Ghost Bride (33 page)

“Don’t cry.” I felt his arms around me, and I
buried my face in his chest. The rain began to fall again, so dense it was like
a curtain around us. Yet I did not get wet.

“Listen,” he said. “When everyone around you has
died and it becomes too hard to go on pretending, I shall come for you.”

“Do you mean that?” A strange happiness was
beginning to grow, twining and tightening around my heart.

“I’ve never lied to you.”

“Can’t I go with you now?”

He shook his head. “Aren’t you getting married?
Besides, I’ve always preferred older women. In about fifty years’ time, you
should be just right.”

I glared at him. “What if I’d rather not wait?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Do you mean that you don’t
want to marry Tian Bai?”

I dropped my gaze.

“If you go with me, it won’t be easy for you,” he
said warningly. “It will bring you closer to the spirit world and you won’t be
able to lead a normal life. My work is incognito, so I can’t keep you in style.
It will be a little house in some strange town. I shan’t be available most of
the time, and you’d have to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.”

I listened with increasing bewilderment. “Are you
asking me to be your mistress or an indentured servant?”

His mouth twitched. “I don’t keep mistresses; it’s
far too much trouble. I’m offering to marry you, although I might regret it. And
if you think the Lim family disapproved of your marriage, wait until you meet
mine.”

I tightened my arms around him.

“Speechless at last,” Er Lang said. “Think about
your options. Frankly, if I were a woman, I’d take the first one. I wouldn’t
underestimate the importance of family.”

“But what would you do for fifty years?”

He was about to speak when I heard a faint call,
and through the heavy downpour, saw Yan Hong’s blurred figure emerge between the
trees, Tian Bai running beside her. “Give me your answer in a fortnight,” said
Er Lang. Then he was gone.

Chapter
39

T
ian Bai
took me home in a rickshaw that day. He was pale and didn’t speak much, other
than to ask if I was all right. I had shivered in my wet clothes, having refused
all offers of entering the house to change. My heart was too full, my thoughts a
storm of paper fragments. The Lim mansion seemed to frown on me even more than
usual that day, the eaves weeping as the rain ran ceaselessly off its roof. The
whole household was in an uproar. No one inquired too deeply as to how I had got
out of the well. I supposed my scratched arms and cut hands led them to presume
I had crawled out by myself. There was no one to insist that I change my
clothes, or berate me for catching a chill as Amah surely would have. It was
only Tian Bai who, in the midst of it all, quietly slipped his cotton jacket
around my shoulders. Later I found out that Madam Lim had attacked him when he
had returned home, though I only learned the full story when Old Wong came home
that evening.

“She was waiting for him with a kitchen knife,” he
told us later. “I don’t know how she got hold of it, but she tried to stab
him.”

Fortunately, her frailness betrayed her and Tian
Bai had escaped with no more than an ugly cut on the arm. It was this that I
saw, bandaged loosely with gauze, when he took me home that day. Alarmed, I had
protested he need not accompany me, but Tian Bai merely shook his head. He
looked drained, utterly weary, and I wondered whether sending me home was an
excuse to escape the hysteria in that house. During our brief ride home, I stole
occasional glances at him. The sinister inflections I had previously ascribed to
him seemed to have evaporated with my suspicions of murder. There were lines
under his eyes, and a smudge of ink on the cuff of his left sleeve. He was just
a man whose family was falling apart. A good man, if Yan Hong could be believed.
An unexpected tenderness filled me, even as my swollen mouth recalled me to
another.

The last subject Tian Bai broached as he handed me
out of the rickshaw was a request to keep things quiet about the situation with
Madam Lim. I nodded, knowing that duty called and no breath of scandal must
touch the Lim family. They were contemplating sending her to a madhouse,
although the shame of it would reflect badly on them.

“It would be better to keep her at home, but she
needs constant supervision.” Tian Bai glanced guiltily at me. “Would you mind if
we postpone the wedding?”

I didn’t mind at all, though I could hardly express
it to him. He held my hand.

“Li Lan, I’m glad you’re here.”

Afraid that he might kiss me, I half turned my face
away. As soon as I had done so, I was filled with guilt, but he merely tightened
his grip.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hardly knowing what I was
apologizing for.

“What for?” he said. “Yan Hong told me that you
saved her.”

Tian Bai touched my hair briefly. His calm
demeanor, his ability to handle difficult situations; these were all qualities
that I admired. He would be a good husband, levelheaded and dependable. Amid the
frenzy, he had still thought to cover my wet shoulders with his jacket.
Remembering this small kindness, I could not help but place my other hand on his
face. If I belonged to him, my family and I would surely have a good life.

T
o my
surprise, we received a constant stream of visitors and gifts from the Lim
family over the next few days. I would have thought that I was the last person
they wanted to see, since I was privy to how Madam Lim had tried to kill first
Yan Hong and me, and then Tian Bai. On the third day, Tian Bai’s uncle, Lim Teck
Kiong himself, came expressly to see me. Amah rushed to tell me of his arrival,
seizing me by the arm and hastily fastening up my hair.

“Your clothes!” she hissed. “You can’t receive him
like that.”

She frowned at my plain
baju
panjang
, but it was too late for such niceties. Besides, I had the
suspicion that he had other things in mind than his future niece-in-law’s dress.
When I entered the front parlor, he was sitting down with my father as though
their friendship had never suffered a rupture. I studied him with new eyes,
thinking of the Third Concubine in the Plains of the Dead and wondering how he
could have been the lover who had driven her to so much bitterness and damage.
But he was still the same, portly and complacent, the image of a wealthy
businessman.

His small glittering eyes, so like Lim Tian
Ching’s, rested on me, and after inquiring in a roundabout manner after my
health, he began to talk of my father’s debts. These, as I knew from Yan Hong,
had already been settled by Tian Bai, but now his uncle put a fresh gloss on
them, saying that as we were to be relatives soon, he had reinvested the
remainder of my father’s capital to secure a modest but stable income for him.
He then went on to say that he admired me immensely and had heard a great deal
about my scholarship. At this, my father was flattered enough, despite my
protests, to retrieve a sample of my calligraphy from his study to show him.
While he was gone, Lim Teck Kiong asked me whether I had ever thought to study
abroad.

“A girl like you would benefit from a formal
education,” he said. “Especially in England, where they have colleges for young
ladies. What do you think?”

In another time and place, I would have leaped at
this suggestion, but now my stomach clenched. “What about the marriage?” I
asked.

“Tian Bai would wait until you came back. There’s
no hurry, you’re both young.”

I heard a faint snort from Amah, who had hidden
behind the door. Young, indeed! In her mind I should long have been married off,
but I could not afford to offend this man. “Uncle, England seems very far and I
think I would miss my family and Tian Bai.”

“To be sure! Well, if that is the way you feel,
then perhaps we had better have the wedding sooner, then. But remember, if you
ever wish to study or travel, you need not worry about the well-being of your
family. I would be happy to sponsor you.”

I looked at him, thinking of Yan Hong’s tale of how
this man had once beaten Tian Bai until he could not sit down for two days. Yet
in the end, Tian Bai had turned out far better than his own spoiled son. But I
understood him very well. He would prefer not to have me marry into his family,
knowing all the sordid details as I did. If the British authorities should find
out about the attempted murders, they might well use them as an excuse to make
an example of his household. At the very least, there would be scandal to be
explained away. If he could not get rid of me, however, the next best thing
would be to have me under his continual scrutiny. But two could play at that
game, I thought, completely forgetting my own hesitation about marrying Tian
Bai. I leaned forward and gave him an enchanting smile, one that I had learned
from observing Fan.

“You are very kind to me, Uncle. And to my father.
I’m so grateful to you.”

Although he continued to study me, I noticed a
subtle change. His eyes widened and a bemused smile flickered across his face.
Fan had once said I did not know how to use my face and body, that they were
wasted on me, and now I realized she had been right. It was strange to think
that power in this world belonged to old men and young women. Still, I had mixed
emotions of shame and triumph after he left. It would be a difficult road, but I
thought I could manage marrying into the Lim family.

I
t was
hard to believe that I had gone from having no marriage prospects to two,
although you could hardly call either of them ideal. I was happy—that is, I felt
that objectively I ought to be happy—but in truth I was quite miserable. Amah
had drilled me well. In our community of Straits-born Chinese, marriage was a
weighty proposition, a transaction that sought to balance filial duty and
economic worth. In that sense, Er Lang’s proposal was quite out of the question.
In fact, I was still in shock over it.

I knew very little about him. Far less than the Lim
family, with all its intrigue, though Er Lang had warned me that his family
would be worse. How much worse, I could not imagine. But he had never lied to
me. That was certainly one of his inhuman qualities. To follow Er Lang would be
a leap into the unknown, the culmination of all my desires and terrors. I wasn’t
sure that I was brave enough to act with the same impulsive certainty that he
had when he had risked his life for me on the Plains of the Dead. We were too
different; it was impossible.

My mind wandered off in tangents, I could barely
sew a seam straight. I wished I could speak to my mother again. Of all people, I
missed her counsel, experienced as she was with the ways of the living and the
dead. I was on my own, however, with no one to confide in. Whatever I chose,
there was a heavy price to pay. If I went with Er Lang, I would lead a curious
half-life, wandering the fringes of a hinterland peopled with ghosts and
spirits, though I clung to the hope that I might meet my mother again. But it
wasn’t even clear whether I would have children myself, though I remembered how
the Chinese emperors had claimed descent from dragons and wondered if I might
bear such an honor, or give birth to a monstrosity.

If I stayed with Tian Bai, I would gain the
security of a good marriage and the familiar comfort of my family. It also,
however, meant living with the Lim legacy of madness and murder. Besides Tian
Bai’s uncle, there were the other wives and concubines to contend with. I must
steel myself, learn to manage them the way that Madam Lim, or even Yan Hong,
had. In some ways, I was surprised that Yan Hong had even returned for me. It
would have been far more convenient for her if I had perished in that well. But
she called on me a few days after Lim Teck Kiong’s visit.

W
hen
Yan Hong came, I was in the back courtyard raking out the chicken coop. Old Wong
always kept a few chickens, which he fattened for a month before slaughter, not
permitting them to leave their pen until they were plump and succulent. In a
great household like the Lim’s, a daughter of the house would not be doing such
a task, but Ah Chun claimed the feathers made her sneeze so Old Wong had handed
me the rake that morning with a grunt. I started guiltily when I saw Yan Hong
appear with Amah, as though our positions were reversed. Strangely, Amah did not
press me to change my clothes. She merely looked satisfied and I suddenly
understood that this was because, unlike Tian Bai’s uncle who valued pretty
women, it was important to impress upon the women of the Lim household what a
virtuous and hardworking daughter-in-law I would make. Amah announced she would
go and serve the many-layered
kuih lapis
cake that I
had made (a complete fabrication) and that we ladies should come in for tea.

“I owe you,” said Yan Hong as soon as we were alone
together. “For saving me.”

Not knowing what to say, I kept quiet.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she went on. “It was
an accident, whether you believe it or not.” She twisted her hands together. “He
was always malingering; he used it to punish us if he felt neglected. That
evening I was at the end of my patience. I had some ma huang prescribed to me
before. I heard a larger dose would give him a headache and make him vomit, but
I didn’t think he would actually have a seizure.”

Ma huang was the stimulant herb derived from the
jointed stems of ephedra. Steeped into a tea, it gave relief to coughs and
loosened phlegm from the lungs, but even I had some idea of its dangerous
properties and could not quite believe that Yan Hong had been so ignorant of its
side effects.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” she asked, biting
her lips. It was the same nervous gesture I had witnessed when I had wandered
through the Lim mansion as a disembodied spirit.

I shook my head. Who was I to judge her, or know
exactly what had happened that evening? Yan Hong glanced away with a mingled
look of shame and relief.

“I’m glad you’re marrying Tian Bai,” she said at
last. “He’s lucky to have you. Because someone has to take charge of the Lim
household.”

“Why can’t it be you?”

“My husband has family and business interests in
Singapore. I’ve told him that I’d prefer to move there.” She straightened her
back, avoiding my eyes. “It will be better for you and Tian Bai without so much
baggage. Take care of him, will you? It hasn’t been easy for him in our
family.”

“Does he know about Lim Tian Ching’s death?” I
asked.

“No, though he might have suspected. I almost told
him at the time, I was so terrified at what happened. Sometimes I wish I
had.”

“Don’t,” I said. We both knew that Tian Bai would
only try to protect her. It was better for me to bear the burden of this
knowledge than him.

“Thank you,” she said.

We walked back to the house in silence. I couldn’t
help wishing that matters had turned out differently. For despite everything she
had done, I still liked her.