The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure

by Adam Williams

  ‘But think hard, old girl. Think hard while I’m away. It doesn’t matter if you throw away my life, but don’t throw away yours.’

  His voice choked. ‘Excuse me. I can’t bear to face anybody else this evening. Pass on my thanks to Mrs Airton. Make some excuse … Oh, God, HF, your hair in the light of that candle … How I love you … God go with you, my dearest. Think of me sometimes.’

  The door to the corridor opened and softly closed. The children listened to Tom’s footsteps fade. Helen Frances had not moved. She continued to sit rigidly in her chair, then her body slumped and began to heave with silent sobs. A hum seemed to emanate from deep inside her, which developed into a shrill wail of misery. She rocked from side to side as the keen from inside her grew louder. Jenny could not bear it. She left her hiding-place under the tablecloth and hugged the weeping woman. Tears were running down her own face. The keening stopped. Helen Frances put her arms round her and the two wept silently in each other’s arms. Like a mole, George put his own head into the light. In a moment he, too, had been swept into the embrace. The three rocked silently together, and it was this tableau that Frank Delamere saw, a cigar in his mouth, when he peeped in from the sitting room.

  ‘I say,’ he called to the Airtons behind him, ‘here’s a subject worthy of Burne-Jones. Mariana crying her eyes out at the moated grange with a couple of cherubs as comforters. No sign of Sir Lancelot. No doubt he’s so overcome with sorrow at a separation too grievous to be borne that he’s sloped off already. Ain’t it touching? Well, well. Cheer up, old girl. We’re only going to Tsitsihar. Back before you know it. Don’t worry, the wedding bells will ring soon enough. Airton, how come your children are up so late? Getting a little liberal, aren’t you? It was six o’clock to the nursery with a loaf of bread in my day.’

  * * *

  Two miles away, in the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, Fan Yimei was coming to a decision. Major Lin was away with his troops. She was alone in the pavilion.

  Across the courtyard she could see lights in the windows of the pavilion that mirrored hers. Earlier the Englishman Ma Na Si had been having dinner there, followed by a bout of drinking with his Japanese friend. Originally Major Lin was to have joined them (no doubt for another interminable discussion about gunrunning) but there had been disorder in one of the outlying villages—a group of hooligans, maybe one of the bands of Boxers that everyone was talking about, had been inciting disturbances against local Christians, and a barn had been burned—so the Mandarin had ordered Major Lin to go there to restore order. He had grumbled, but obeyed. He had said that he would be away for at least two days.

  She had observed that the Japanese man who reminded her of a snake had already left Ma Na Si’s pavilion a short while earlier, following Mother Liu to the main building. She knew where he was going, and she felt a deep pang of sympathy for the white catamite who waited for him. Colonel Taro had repelled her from the moment she met him. For all his courtesies and good looks she sensed violence lurking behind the velvet charm. His eyes never smiled: lizard-like, they would flick from person to person, coldly, appraisingly. He had a terrible effect on Major Lin. The more relaxed and ingratiating the Japanese became, the stiffer and more curt was her lover’s response to him. He took propriety to the extremes of discourtesy, as if he loathed this man he had to do business with. Yet in pauses of conversation, when Taro’s attention was elsewhere, she would observe Lin looking at the Japanese, with a wistfulness in his eyes that was almost spaniel-like. It was the gaze of a worshipper or a lover.

  Lin always drank more than usual before and after the Japanese colonel’s visits. And invariably at night when he and she were alone after his drinking, the rod would come out and he would demand to be beaten. He had also become brutal with her, slapping her, forcing her to her knees in front of him. If he took her it was in the dog position. Sometimes she would wake in the night and hear him crying. She had always suspected that her lover was hiding some shame. She had assumed that it dated back to the war. Now she no longer doubted what it was. As a slave herself she had come to recognise the symptoms.

  Her suspicions of Taro’s proclivities had been confirmed a few days before, when Mother Liu, angry and preoccupied, had summoned her to the main buildings. Mother Liu’s creature, Su Liping, had led her up flights of stairs she had not known existed and down an undecorated wooden corridor flanked by cells. In one of the rooms Mother Liu was waiting. She lifted a blanket from a figure huddled on the bed. It was like revisiting a bad dream. For a moment she had the delusion that the bloody, bruised flesh was that of Shen Ping returned from the grave. Then horror gave way to curiosity and surprise. This was no girl and no Chinese but a thin, pinched foreign boy. Mother Liu gripped her by the throat. ‘You won’t breathe a word, do you hear? Or you’re a dead woman. I want you to clean this brat up. Fix him up and get him well, like you did last year with that bitch Shen Ping. I don’t want this one dead on me. Not yet. There’s still money to be made from him. Do you understand? I’ve picked you because you have a healing touch, and you’re intelligent enough to know when to keep your mouth shut. You’d better not disappoint me. Do you hear?’

  Numbly she had set about her task. It was obvious that the boy had been beaten, but not in the indiscriminate manner of Ren Ren. The cuts were clustered on the buttocks and upper thighs (a dim part of her mind registered that there were scars on Major Lin’s body in the same area). The real torment had been the cigarette burns on the boy’s nipples and genitals. The boy was conscious and in whimpering pain, and screamed when she placed the ointment on his wounds. The pale eyes in his puffed red face followed her movements with fear. When she tried to talk to him he shook his head violently from side to side. ‘No words,’ he whimpered. ‘No words. Ren Ren will … Ren Ren will…’ and his narrow face had screwed up with terror.

  It had taken time, but by the third day her gentleness had won him over, and he began haltingly to answer her questions, in surprisingly fluent Chinese. She asked him if it had been Ren Ren who had beaten him. ‘No,’ he told her, his eyes widening. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong. Really I haven’t done anything wrong. Please don’t tell him I’ve done anything wrong.’ He forced a smile. ‘He sometimes comes to me when I’m good.’ Then tears began to stream down his face. ‘I did try. I did try. The old men like me. He never punishes me for the old men. He used to reward me—sometimes if I did really well he stayed the whole night with me afterwards. And this time I tried so hard. When this one explained about the pain, I did listen. He said that there could be no love without punishment. So I let him … I let him…’

  ‘Ren Ren?’ asked Fan Yimei, confused.

  ‘No!’ the boy cried. ‘Ren Ren loves me. It was the other man. It was the devil man Mother Liu said I had to specially please. The Japanese,’ he whispered.

  Then Fan Yimei knew. And her horror of Colonel Taro increased. She told herself that many men become violent when drunk. That was not abnormal. Many men gave way to violent passions when their senses were befuddled by liquor—her own Major Lin was typical. But Colonel Taro was different. He was like Ren Ren, a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain, only unlike Ren Ren, who had the appetites of a brute, this Taro practised cruelty with refinement and patience: the more he drank the more deliberate and passionless he became. ‘He says that love is an art,’ the foreign boy had whimpered as she bandaged the wounds on his back and thighs. ‘He says that love is an art.’

  And with her understanding came sympathy for Major Lin. If Colonel Taro had been his captor during the war, then everything was explained. The poor, proud man …

  She knew that she should be alarmed about her own situation. She did not know why Mother Liu had let her into the secret of the hidden room and the extraordinary presence of a foreigner in the brothel. Perhaps it was as the old tyrant had said: she remembered her nursing of Shen Ping. More likely, in Mother Liu’s mind, Fan Yimei was dispensable, or would be when Lin was finished with her. Well, what was different? She
knew already that the hut at the bottom of the garden awaited her one day. Mother Liu had nothing to fear. The secret was safe. Where did she have to run? Who did she have to tell? But she did feel sorry for the boy who was imprisoned here.

  Then that afternoon her sympathy for his predicament had turned to alarm for his safety. She had been aware that Ren Ren and his hangers-on were having a carousing and gambling session in one of the dining rooms of the main building. She had not been prepared for their eruption into her courtyard in the early part of the afternoon, or for the noisy demonstration that followed. They were wearing yellow scarves wrapped round their heads and one carried a silk banner with a picture of a black stick and the word ‘Retribution’ painted on it in bloody characters. Another man pounded on a drum while Ren Ren, stripped to the waist and holding a sword, shouted and leaped into the air, apparently possessed or drunk, in a travesty of martial arts. She had been ordered to stay in her room out of sight because she was told that a yin force would contaminate the magic they were conjuring: female pollution would deter the gods from descending into the bodies of the martial artists. Or so Monkey, one of Ren Ren’s more odious henchman, had barked at her as he bolted her into her room, but it had not prevented her peeking through the cracks in the door to see what was going on, or listening to the shouts as Ren Ren and three of the others danced themselves into a frenzy. She did not believe that any god would wish to inhabit Ren Ren’s body, so she presumed that he was playacting or showing off—but she knew him well enough to realise that whatever game he was playing it boded badly for somebody. ‘Save the Ch’ing! Annihilate the foreigners!’ they were shouting, and ‘Death to the foreign devils.’ One of them had run up to the locked pavilion opposite and yelled in a high-pitched voice, ‘This is where one of them brings his fox-spirit whore. Kill! Kill! Kill!’ and the others had laughed as he pissed against the doorpost. The performance had lasted all afternoon, and only finished when Ren Ren had collapsed on the ground exhausted. The group had then drifted off in twos and threes in the direction of the outer gate. ‘To the altar in the Black Hills,’ one shouted, ‘where the heavenly army descends.’ Another began to sing and they all took up the crude doggerel:

  ‘No rain comes from Heaven

  The earth is parched and dry

  And all because the churches

  Have bottled up the sky.

  ‘The gods are very angry

  The spirits seek revenge.

  En masse they come from heaven

  To teach the Way to men.’

  Waving their swords and spears they left, even Ren Ren, leaning on a friend’s arm. The sound of the drum and the angry voices faded. Fan Yimei sat on the edge of her bed, exceedingly disturbed.

  She had never paid much attention to the other girls’ gossip about the Boxers. Her father had taught her not to believe in magical spells and she did not credit the stories about gods descending to the earth. Nor could she become excited about an army that would spring from the soil to purge society of evil-doers and restore the wrongs that the dynasty was suffering at the hands of the foreigners. It would have to be an exceptional army, she thought bitterly, to consider righting the wrongs of poor creatures like herself suffering inside the walls of the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure. Not if it was an army made up of men.

  And what had the problems of the dynasty to do with her anyway? She was as much cut off from the world outside as a Buddhist nun in a convent. She smiled at the conceit. Yet the life of the flower girl had its own equivalent of monastic rules, its own perversion of celibacy, and rituals of oppression that had been hallowed and condoned for centuries. It was part of the same social order that the Boxers were saying they wanted to save and preserve. So, what should she expect from the Boxers if not more oppression? The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, in its way, was as much a symbol of tradition and established order as the temple, or the yamen, or even the dynasty itself. There had always been flower girls. And always men to exploit them. And here was Ren Ren himself rushing off to join the Boxers. What more needed to be said?

  Such animosity towards foreigners was new. She remembered the kindly doctor who looked like a mouse and had tried to save her father’s life. What sort of threat could he be to the dynasty? Or blundering, foolish De Falang, who probably even now did not know what had happened to his Shen Ping, believing Mother Liu’s lies that she had been sent away to the country. What harm could he be to anyone? The missionary’s son? He was a victim like her. And that left Ma Na Si.

  Ma Na Si. As always when she thought of him, she was startled by the vivid impression of a smile and laughing blue eyes, which immediately came to her mind as if he was physically present in the room. Yes, she admitted to herself, perhaps there was something dangerous about Ma Na Si. Despite herself she had become curious about this courteous and confident foreigner who had so effortlessly exerted a mastery over Major Lin, and even persuaded Mother Liu to offer him the privileges of the other pavilion for his foreign mistress. Not since that first terrible evening—the evening of her friend’s murder—had he addressed anything but polite compliments to her. As was only proper—she was Major Lin’s concubine—he ignored her, or pretended to. Yet there was something there. Sometimes she would look up from her chin and see his blue eyes observing her, and if their eyes met a slow smile would break over his tanned features, and once—she could hardly believe it—he had winked at her. On that occasion she blushed and looked down at her hands, and when she looked up again his head had been bent in close confabulation with Major Lin. She wondered if she had imagined it: he hardly looked at her for the rest of the evening. Nor did he ever direct such a personal gesture at her again. Yet ever since then she had felt that there was an unspoken complicity between them and, deeper than that, she had read in his clear gaze an interrogation, as if he had been trying to seek the true character behind the flower girl’s mask. And sometimes, when he smiled in her direction, she caught herself hoping that he had seen something, and she would give way to the idle fancy that the appraising look of this barbarian was one of respect.

  She had been startled by her own reaction when Ma Na Si had taken the pavilion opposite and the visits of the foreign woman began. Many were the gloomy winter afternoons that she waited by her window for the black-cloaked form of the woman to hurry from the gatehouse and disappear inside the pavilion. Ma Na Si in his white shirt would open the door and pull the figure inside. She never did manage to see the woman properly, though once a strand of brilliant red hair slipped from beneath the hood, and fluttered in the breeze; she had watched transfixed as a long freckled hand moved nervously from under the cloak to smooth it away. But it was not the foreign woman who fascinated her. What she was waiting for, and dreading at the same time, was the glimpse of Ma Na Si’s own face when he greeted his paramour, and each time the radiant smile of welcome had pierced her heart. At first she could not understand her feelings. She could never admit to herself that she was jealous, yet when she first saw Ma Na Si’s arms embrace the black cloak, her lips tightened, her chest constricted, her eyes misted and a vein in her temple throbbed. She never allowed herself such a self-indulgence of emotion again. She watched sadly and calmly, as she watched everything that went on in the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure sadly and calmly. After all, this was only one more slice to a spirit that had learned to endure the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

  And then the woman’s visits ceased. There had been no assignation for a month now. Ma Na Si still came to the pavilion, but always by himself, and on these occasions Fan Yimei sensed a weariness in his step, as if sorrow was weighing on his shoulders. He would remain alone in his room for hours, allowing the afternoon to fade and the dusk to settle before calling for the lamps. At first Mother Liu had brought girls to him, Su Liping and Chen Meina, but they never stayed with him long and once he angrily turned Su Liping away. Ren Ren had been called, and there was an ugly scene, with much shouting and fist-shaking on the part of Ren Ren. Money had resolved whatever the altercat
ion was about. Ma Na Si had thrown a pouch of gold at Ren Ren’s feet, and watched sardonically as the young man scrabbled for the coins.

  Most evenings he would dine with the Japanese colonel; sometimes Major Lin would join them. On these occasions Major Lin would return drunk in the early hours. Fan Yimei suspected that when Ma Na Si was by himself he also drank heavily. Once, when he was leaving after one of his solitary vigils, she saw him swaying on the steps, then he righted himself and walked quietly away. Fan Yimei sat among her own shadows, wishing for an impossibility—but eventually she put aside the thought. She had learned many years ago that her greatest enemy was hope.

  Tonight it was not hope that impelled her across the courtyard but fear. She had thought about the implications of what she had seen in the courtyard this afternoon. Ren Ren might have been playacting at being a Boxer, but there was more behind this than his usual operatic vanity. The slogans he and his friends had been chanting were none of their own invention. The threats made against the foreigners were therefore real. Her first thought was for the boy. She knew enough to realise that his life hung by a thread of secrecy; she did not doubt that Ren Ren and Mother Liu between them had already thought of a way to dispose of him should there be any danger of him being discovered. Even she had heard about the execution of the peasants who were supposed to have murdered him. The boy was therefore already as good as dead. Now that Ren Ren was espousing the cause of the Boxers, here was a ready-made foreign victim in his power. His only hope was escape back to his own kind. She thought of Ma Na Si. She had no plan, but if anyone could help him … Anyway, Ma Na Si needed to be warned himself … She had an opportunity this evening … No one would see her …