The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (28 page)

‘In my country,' said the foreigner, ‘we have a custom. At the end of the meal, we ask the ladies to leave us so the gentlemen can talk business. I'm ignorant of what goes on here, and I'm very conscious of the delicious attentions of this young siren on my left, but do you not think that it might be useful if the two of us were to take a leaf out of the English book and talk, as it were, unencumbered?'

‘You can have Su Liping for the night if you want her. She's paid for,' said Major Lin.

‘Delicately put,' said the foreigner. ‘And I'm very grateful, of course, but I'm afraid I must decline. The lady is very charming but a little young for me, and I do rather like picking my own women.'

‘I can get the madam to bring others if you don't like this one.'

Fan Yimei felt the stranger's eyes boring into hers. ‘I see at least one exquisite one here already. If this other lady is not your own choice for the night, Major…?'

Fan Yimei sensed danger and said quickly, bowing her head, ‘I have the honour of being Major Lin's choice every night, Xiansheng, if he wants me. I belong to Major Lin.'

‘I spoke out of ignorance, Major. Forgive me. I congratulate you on your taste, and your good fortune.'

Major Lin acknowledged the compliment. ‘She is a plain woman but she serves.' Fan Yimei was pleased to hear the faint note of smugness. She had been afraid that he would have been angered. ‘She plays adequately on the
chin,
Ma Na Si Xiansheng. May I suggest that if you wish to talk we can do so while she performs. She will not overhear us. The other one can leave.'

The gauche Su Liping, obviously afraid of Mother Liu's anger if she failed to secure her client, foolishly tried one last wile. ‘I know many tricks, Xiansheng,' she whispered, moving her hand to Manners's groin.

‘I'm sure you do, my dear.' He smiled, removing her hand.

‘Get out!' hissed Lin.

Su Liping, red-faced with shame and embarrassment, ran for the door.

So Fan Yimei was left on her own, playing the mournful music that usually reflected the sadness of her own soul, but tonight left her numb, as everything did while she waited for the inevitable results of Mother Liu discovering the letters. The two men talked confidentially, the foreigner smoking a pungent tobacco rolled in a brown leaf. Occasionally she heard words and phrases, ‘sphere of influence', ‘guns', ‘reliable shipments', ‘speedy delivery', ‘Japanese', ‘guns', ‘six to nine months', ‘private arrangement', ‘Taro will seal the deal', but it meant nothing to her. Nor did she care.

The two men shook hands. She had heard of this strange western custom from Shen Ping. Major Lin's face was red and excited. Whatever business they had done had pleased him. She knew that he would be full of energy tonight and her shoulders slumped at the thought. She did not care. What will come will come.

She stood up ready to bow the foreigner out. She was surprised that he took her hand and kissed it, another strange western custom. She looked up startled and saw his blue eyes, laughing and boring into hers. She looked at Lin in fear but he was smiling his crooked smile, delighted. The two men walked together across the courtyard, Lin the courteous host seeing his guest to the gate. As she stood in the doorway, she sensed a movement out of the darkness. Mother Liu. She felt a sharp pain in her arm as it was gripped by the old woman's hand, the nails pressing into her flesh. ‘I should send you to the hut for what you have done,' Mother Liu spat in her ear. ‘I won't. Not this time. This new development with the barbarian is much too interesting. I expect you to keep me informed of what is said, though. That stupid hussy was useless. You'll do better.

‘It was that merchant who gave you the letter, wasn't it? I should have suspected something then. Lu's not the kind to get drunk. Well, why didn't you deliver it? Scared of the effect?

‘Don't worry, my dear, I'm not the person to keep anyone away from their correspondence. Not me. Oh, no. Ren Ren's kindly agreed to deliver it in person. Isn't that kind of him? Little Shen Ping's probably getting to the last paragraph now as we speak…'

Fan Yimei felt her heart pound. ‘Shen Ping!' she gasped, and twisted her arm away from Mother Liu's grasp. Stumbling on her bound feet, she ran towards the inner courtyard, her blood racing, panting with fear and exertion. She saw the light in Shen Ping's room.

Strong arms grasped her and lifted her from the ground. She struggled violently, screaming, biting, but Ren Ren held her tight to his chest, pulling her head back over his shoulder by her hair. ‘Don't even attempt anything or I'll beat your teeth out,' he snarled. ‘Let's give the lady time to read her letter, shall we?'

She could hear the wheezing of her own breath in the silent courtyard. Ren Ren held her close, watching the movement of a faint silhouette behind the oil-paper window. After a while, the movement ceased. He continued to wait. Then, satisfied, he dropped his burden on the courtyard pavings, and walked back to the main building, whistling. Fan Yimei lay sobbing on the ground where she had fallen.

*   *   *

In the room, Shen Ping let the letter fall from her broken fingers. Under the bruises there was a dreamy smile on her face. For a long while, it seemed, she lay on her back, thinking of nothing in particular. Then slowly, very slowly—she did not mind the pain any more—she lifted herself off the bed. She crawled along the floor to the chair in the middle of the room. It was with great difficulty that she pulled herself up onto it, and she fell, she could not count how many times, before eventually she stood nearly upright on the chair. At least she did not have to fling the sash over the beam and tie a noose. She giggled faintly. That was the one kindness Ren Ren had ever done her. The noose was in just the right position for her head. With her useless hands, it took her one or two attempts to tighten it round her neck. She wondered whether she should say something, one last word, to sum up her wasted life. She saw no point. It was as she kicked the chair away and as she was falling, that she thought of the one person in her life who had been kind to her, but as the words ‘Fan Yimei' formed in her mind, the noose broke her neck, so no sound ever came.

Six

There is no work and little food.

Lao Tian has gone to join the bandits.

 

Nobody told Frank Delamere about Shen Ping's suicide. Lu Jincai heard the story next day from Tang Dexin, and they agreed that it would be best if the foreigner was kept in the dark about a matter so distressing and unpleasant. Quickly Lu made arrangements. If De Falang should decide to visit the brothel again and ask for the girl—an unlikely circumstance, he thought—he would be told that she was engaged with another client. A tael of silver to Mother Liu would ensure her silence and the silence of the other girls. Lu Jincai did not want De Falang disturbed before the caravan left for Tsitsihar. He knew how unpredictable his partner could be if excited, and he dared not speculate on what extravagances of guilt and remorse would be occasioned by news of the girl's death. As a further precaution, which cost him another tael, he asked Mother Liu to find a comely replacement who would be willing to entertain his friend should the need arise, but he was in no hurry to take him back to the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, and he persuaded the other merchants, Tang and Jin, to dine De Falang elsewhere if they had to, for the time being.

So Shen Ping was forgotten. Some of the girls believed that her spirit loitered among the gardens and pavilions. In her misery Fan Yimei was convinced that one night she saw the laughing white face of her friend in the dressing-table mirror but there was only moonlight on the curtains when she turned. To Mother Liu's relief, Shen Ping did not reappear as a fox spirit to wreak vengeance on her enemies and her faithless lover (Frank was never waylaid by any apparition on the road to Babbit and Brenner, nor surprised among his pots of soda crystals by a hungry ghost.) Lighting an incense stick in her shrine for safety's sake, Mother Liu bundled up and burned Shen Ping's few belongings, then gave her cot to a new addition to the stable, a timorous twelve-year-old from Tieling who was recovering from the double agonies of having her feet broken and bound and nightly visits by Ren Ren. Shen Ping's name was never spoken again. After a while only Fan Yimei felt her presence, but as time passed it became fainter and fainter even for her. Then one evening as she was tending a bonfire of fallen leaves in a corner of the garden, she suddenly sensed that her friend was ready to leave. Fan Yimei whispered half-remembered prayers as she shovelled leaves into the flames and if anybody saw the tears in her eyes they would have attributed them to the heat and smoke of the fire, but she was at peace when she walked away, believing—or choosing to believe—that her friend's soul was now at peace among the clouds.

*   *   *

That evening long wisps of pink nimbus did indeed float in the heavens like the trailing sleeves of a sky fairy's dress. If the spirit of Shen Ping had been elevated to the clouds as Fan Yimei hoped, then, looking down, she would have seen a Shishan also apparently at peace. The gold of the setting sun reflected a gilded countryside. Autumn had lingered longer than usual, as if it sought to delay the coming of winter and the uncertainties of a new century. The farmyards were still carpeted with grain from the second harvest; heavy wheels of passing mule carts crushed the stalks on the roads; farmers stood silhouetted with their flails against the gold on the threshing floor. Meanwhile the acrid scent of burning haystacks hung in the chill, clear air, mingling with the smell of apples and persimmons in the orchards. Leaves swirled and blew across the fields, piling against the hedgerows and glinting in the pale sunshine, sheathing the landscape in copper. A handsome young man and a trimly dressed young woman, foreigners, were riding through the lanes, pausing to admire a ruined shrine. A man of poetic sensibility, like Herr Fischer, would have drawn parallels with some classical Arcadia or golden age.

The bucolic scene around Shishan was the only bright island, however, in an otherwise grey sea of desolation. The rainclouds that usually gathered on the peaks of the Black Hills had harvested enough moisture over the year to spare the western counties of Manchuria from the drought that was ravaging other parts of north China—but little rain had fallen elsewhere. In a dry swathe that stretched from Shantung in the east through the whole province of Chih-li, to Shansi in the west, and even to the edges of Mongolia, famine raged. Frank Delamere's merchant friends gathered in Jin Shangui's countinghouse discussing the horrible rumours, brought to them by the mule trains, that over vast tracts of China families were boiling tree bark for sustenance, that the old and young were dying in hundreds, that there had been instances of cannibalism, that whole populations were deserting their villages to hunt for food, and that desperate young men were turning to the Boxers, blaming the foreigners for the disasters.

The foreigners, as usual, were largely oblivious to the threat. The consular circulars that the doctor received from the Legation in Peking were reassuring (droughts and famines were not uncommon in China, he was told), and the members of the small foreign community were busy enough anyway in their own little world not to think too much about what was happening outside it. Like picnickers on a ridge watching with unconcern the darkness of a thunderstorm brewing miles away across a plain, they contemplated the troubles in the south with equanimity.

Yet rumours of Boxer activities never quite went away; indeed, they intensified as the famine spread, and there was a week in early October when it was reported that Boxer groups from some mountain villages in Shantung had formed their own militias and attacked a town. The Boxer army, it was said, would wash like the tide over the Chih-li plain and sweep the foreigners into the sea. For a few days there was tension, even in Shishan. In the event, however, it was a nine-day wonder. The uprising, if such it could be called, was quelled easily by Imperial troops—actually it was more a police action than a battle. The victory over this ragtag militia, however, caused great satisfaction among the Legations in Peking, and there was some noisy celebration when the news reached Babbit and Brenner's and the railway camp. The common wisdom was that this decisive action on the part of Viceroy Yu had nipped the shoots of rebellion in the bud. The Boxer menace, if it had ever existed, was now firmly squashed. Subsequent reports, however, revealed that this optimism was somewhat premature. The conservative Viceroy Yu, it appeared, not only secretly sympathized with the malcontents but had gone so far as to employ some of the most notorious of them in his
yamen
. The
North China Herald
thundered for his removal, and it was reported that Sir Claude MacDonald had made an official protest to the
Tsungli Yamen
.

Dr Airton was much too excited to be worrying about events happening so far away. He had called at the
yamen
a few days after the execution of Hiram's murderers, fully intending to reproach the Mandarin and give him a piece of his mind. The wind had been taken out of his sails when the Mandarin himself apologised for the inelegant way in which the doctor had been informed, blaming his clerks for their insensitive application of procedure. He explained that the personal letter, which the Mandarin himself had drafted, had not been sent and instead the doctor had received merely an official form. He regretted any disrespect that this slight might have implied. Airton hardly heard what he was saying. All his attention was focused on the large Chinese language Holy Bible that lay on the tea table between them.

‘Ah, you have noticed that I am studying your Holy Book,' smiled the Mandarin. ‘It is a curious work. I see many parallels with the Analects and some with Buddhist writings, particularly in the more philosophical passages. The emphasis on love is interesting, and on the sacrifice of your god. In one of the early incarnations of the Lord Buddha, he allowed himself to be eaten by some tiger cubs because they were hungry. Your Jesus's undignified crucifixion probably had some similar purpose. You can explain it to me, perhaps. I also have one or two questions that I would like you to answer on the issue of forgiveness. There seems to be a discrepancy between what Christians aspire to and how they behave. I ask this as a magistrate who has to interpret the extraterritoriality laws. Perhaps you will explain to me how the implacable penalties that the Chinese government is bound to pay after the most minor infraction of foreign terms relate to these Christian teachings of forbearance?'