The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure

by Adam Williams

  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 moistu
re 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?’

  Airton could hardly breathe for sheer joy. He had achieved, unexpectedly, his ambition in coming to China. Here was a member of the mandarin class—a Confucian, a pagan, but a man of enormous influence—who was reading the Bible and seeking to understand its precepts. To what might this lead? he wondered. The Mandarin’s first questions were sceptical—even cynical—as was only to be expected, but it was a start. The start of which he and his fellow missionaries had always dreamed.

  That first meeting was followed by another two days later, and after a time the doctor and the Mandarin had settled into a regular routine. The Mandarin liked to take a parable at a time, and in each case would apply his most rigorous logic to penetrate the message behind it. The doctor would reel out of each challenging session as exhausted in body and mind as he had been after the games of squash he had played at university as a boy. He never knew where the Mandarin’s ball would come from.

  By a tacit agreement, neither mentioned the death of Hiram again nor the execution that had followed it. The subject of Boxers or bandits rarely came into their conversation, and if it did it was smiled away. For the doctor, the Mandarin’s questions appeared to have become more and more abstruse. He seemed fascinated by the Christian concept of goodness, asking how it differed from the virtues enunciated by Confucius. If a ruler really had the benefit of his subjects at heart, he would ask, then should it matter if he achieved his virtuous ends by foul means? Was a reward in heaven denied if a Christian strayed from the restrictive Ten Commandments? Were the certain rewards of this earth really worth sacrificing for only the promise of salvation? If Christianity was the gentle religion that the good Daifu made it out to be, then why were its precepts so fanatical and absolute? Not that he wished to offend in any way the Son of God, but was not this Jesus a little unworldly, perhaps? And please could the doctor explain how the powers of the West had managed to conquer the world if their principles consisted only of loving their neighbours and turning the other cheek.

  ‘This rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s,’ the Mandarin would say, ‘is all very well. In our system it is much simpler, since our emperor happens to be a god. Why did not your Jesus, who had, if I am to understand the other tale of His encounter with the Devil on a mountain, the power to rule the wrold, take on Himself the authority of Caesar? If He had He would not have had to worry about this untidy problem of free will.’

  ‘Ah, but, Da Ren, don’t you see? It is in the fact that He gave us free will that we have our salvation.’

  ‘If He had worked in a yamen instead of strolling around the hillsides, He might have had a better understanding of ignorant human nature. In my experience, free will is only a curse, leading to the most outrageous forms of behaviour if one leaves it unchecked. I do not believe that this Jesus could have loved His people if He set them such impossibly high demands.’

  ‘But Jesus was the God of Love,’ exclaimed Airton.

  ‘So you say,’ muttered the Mandarin, biting into a peach.

  But the doctor was not disheartened. On the contrary, hope gleamed in his eyes. Sometimes he even dared to wonder whether the Mandarin was at last beginning to question his own cynical principles. As soon as he detected such a thought, of course, he immediately repressed it as fanciful or overoptimistic. No, this new interest in the Christian religion was only academic; nothing in the Mandarin’s manner revealed anything other than his usual bland curiosity; if there were spiritual yearnings churning behind the hooded eyes and sardonic, worldly expression, they remained concealed. Yes, yes, but on the other hand, the irrepressible voice shouted from inside, here was a high official of the mandarin class seriously asking questions about the Gospel! It hadn’t happened for years! And he must have been reading his copy of the Holy Bible, which he, Airton, had inspired him to
acquire! His natural sense of modesty struggled vainly with his ambition. He was pitifully aware of his own limitations, of course, but he could not be blind to the potential. If curiosity led to understanding, could understanding not lead to desire, and desire to conversion? Virtue lay not in himself—he was a humble Scottish doctor who practised medicine and liked cowboy books, no theologian he, certainly not, but the Lord had been known to fill the humblest vessel with His light, and work His wonders with the weakest of clay. A conversion of a mandarin could lead to the conversion of a district: St Augustine’s conversion of England had begun with the baptism of a minor Saxon king; in China where Matteo Ricci and his army of Jesuits had failed, could humble Airton of Shishan not be the one … At which stage the doctor would chew firmly on his pipe and tell himself not to be so preposterous and vainglorious—but that did not stop him spending feverish evenings in his study with volumes of Plato, Aquinas and Boethius, which he had not looked at since his university days, and rushing out of his door to the yamen on the days of his appointments scarcely finishing his lunch.

  * * *

  The other foreign residents of Shishan were unaware of the doctor’s preoccupations. Helen Frances and Henry Manners went out riding every afternoon. Frank Delamere and Tom Cabot were feverishly preparing for the great expedition that would make their fortunes. A late October evening found them in the Babbit and Brenner godown locking up for the night. They had made a final check of the bundles of samples and provisions they were to load the following day onto the mules that would carry them to Tsitsihar and their appointment with Mr Ding. The last line of salmon pink was fading on the far horizon. A night wind started to blow. ‘That’s the last of it, old boy,’ muttered Frank, his pipe thrust firmly under the moustache in the florid face, the kindly brown eyes watering with amusement at one of his prospective son-in-law’s jokes—Tom seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of comic stories. ‘One last night in the comforts of hearth and home. Then it’s the wide open spaces for us. How I love this life. And what a joy it is to me that you and my little Helen Frances will soon be joining together. I’m a lucky man. A lucky man.’