My Last Empress

by Da Chen

  Colonel Winthrop, the tic and tac man, only grudgingly acquiesced to a two-day stay if I rendered a diary of events leading to the unexpected departure. When I let it be known the circumstances wherein, he nearly fainted. The stout man of courtly manners had to lean on a frail railing to let the spell pass. His facial tics resumed frantically, contorting the right side of his face. But it was when Q’s identity was whispered to him by an aide of his, a well-heeled nobody who’d had a chance encounter with Q a summer before at her chrysanthemum tea party in the Jing Garden, that Winthrop stomped into our room threatening to turn us into the palace if I didn’t take to the road at once. It was after midnight, mind you. He could not wait till daybreak when carriages could be summoned. Only after lengthy pleading on the point of my delicate company would he let us stay until sunrise. By then, when the main gate of the walled Tartar City had opened, not only was a notice of apprehension of two treasonous fugitives, Q and I, posted but so was an announcement of the honorable Prince Qiu’s death by self-hanging.

  When I informed her of the tragedy, Q was pale and strengthless, leaning on her bedpost. Neither the gentle voice with which I delivered the news nor the ensuing words of comfort could soothe her. She shook her head violently, asking, “Why him? My poor papa. Why is my path filled with death? Why are you still here with me? Why aren’t you gone like the rest? I am cursed. I must be.” She wasn’t speaking to me in particular. She seemed to be repenting to someone, her God perhaps.

  How I wished I could answer her. All I could do was rock her in my arms till she fell into a jerking, sobbing sleep.

  30

  The world outside could be windy and stormy in June heat, but in here, within our haven, all was calm. Q and I found refuge for the next two nights in a petite alley inn, deftly named Ye Ying Tang, the Nightingale’s Nest. Afterward I often thought of it as some winsome device off pages of myth and folklore.

  The inn hid behind a willow garden, barely visible from an archway crawled by long-neck peonies. It came into my view only when, our carriage freshly discharged from the legation’s rear gate, the Mongol stallion suddenly veered left without the urging of the reins, taking us into a narrow alley as if sensing danger ahead. At the alley’s end, the Nightingale’s Nest came into view.

  It could have been the sound of men in arms two blocks down that frightened the intuitive beast or its innate beastly spirit sensing danger afar. Whatever the cause, the horse brought us even farther down the alley, trotting forcefully, notwithstanding the whipping and cussing by its master, till it stopped at an archway upon which a bell hung. Homer would have spirited it so that the white-furred beast used its snout to ring the bell to announce our arrival to the innkeeper, who might in turn be a three-breasted horned beast, but the feat was already angelic enough without the aid of literal fanfare as the Greeks were prone to do or overdo. I paid an extra silver tael to the driver for additional hay to be fed the beatific beast. The man patted his animal proudly and bowed rapidly in thanks.

  The innkeeper was a dwarf paired with a fully grown wife. They greeted us like a vaudeville comic show. All they had for the night was one single room in a quiet corner of their establishment, said the impish innkeeper with a childlike voice.

  Q had draped her head and shoulders with a scarf, a gift from the congenial Mrs. Winthrop upon leaving the besieged legation, which concealed all but her downcast eyes. I murmured some gibberish to the effect that she was my daughter, adding with my mangled Mandarin that we were awaiting arrival of her sick mother who was recovering at Union Hospital and that the single should suffice with a mat and satin quilt for my daughter. The innkeeper was agreeable, and he led us to our enchanted nest with a window overlooking a willow grove.

  “A single room?” Q said as soon as I shut the door. “Are you mad? I am not your daughter, and you will not come near my bed. You’ll stay on the floor for as long as we have to stay here.” Her eyes darted about our chamber with disdain as she cast away the scarf and dove into the fluffy bed, curling herself up under the blanket.

  I ordered our supper to be brought to our chamber, on account that my darling daughter was infirm and a whiff of outside wind would only worsen her fragility. The host was quick to oblige. Q quietly ate two servings of soft corn crepes and crusty fried pork skin, a culinary affliction with which all Manchurians were cursed. Before tea could be served, she yawned and dozed off, lying on a bamboo pillow.

  You all might assume that with all the stumbling blocks removed and my pet safely caged, dozing with a smile on her impish face, that I would be free to make my final claim of my prey—all that had transpired before had not involved the ultimate act of burying myself inside her yet—but all I could think of was to dash out into the hallway and down to the parlor to find a jar of spirits to calm my nerves. Lust was all guts and nerves, a shaky rope bridge over a roaring river—sin without redemption, nightmare without end save for the promise of some fleeting bliss.

  I strolled the parlor, lit by a Baroque chandelier, surrounded by a mural of horses and their forlorn shepherds, who gazed singularly and silently at the lone interloper among the crowd. A low murmur of piano music crawled the air. A German duke and his dull duchess were chattering over a candled table with some English gentry, a surgeon and his skinny and much younger mistress. An Indian guard’s white teeth, eyeball sclera, and turban could be seen, but not the contours of his lunar face. In the corner was a lone woman, French possibly, sitting with her pubescent daughter—ten, twelve tops—a fresh breeze among the opaque curly locks, earthy blond, the kind one found in the French countryside among vineyards or on the beaches of Nice with sand on bare ankles, tan lines veining her virgin thighs, eyes blue like the inquisitive ocean, smelling of summer’s angst and languorous unripe lust. Youth always calls on me.

  I picked my way around an Italian man, moustached and idling with a jade pipe, framed in his own quaint smoke, no doubt looking to squeeze in on any rich widows and lonely women.

  “What a beauty your daughter is,” he offered to me with a gleaming shine in his eyes. “I saw you two pulling up in front of the inn. I’d love to meet her. She reminds me of—”

  I cut him off bluntly with, “She is sick, under the weather,” and chose a chair next to the bored child and her spinsterly mother.

  Haven’t I just hoarded one as juvenile and ready for the ravaging of my loving lust? Why was I eyeing the knees of another child while a sleeping siren lay upstairs, weak and supine on my bed? Am I to prefer those far-flung butterflies other than the ones in my net? Is it the dream or reality I craved?

  Before long the French girl turned and smiled at me. “Bonsoir, monsieur,” she said sweetly.

  “Good evening,” I said uneasily. Lust is never at ease.

  “Are you English?” She managed another smile, arching her left brow while crossing and recrossing her skirted legs. Oh, those bare knees! There were even scars rounding one cap.

  “American.”

  “American. From New York?” She picked herself up and sat at my table. “Me and my mama are from Paris. Would you like to buy my mama a drink?” She cast a glance at her stoic mom who smiled shyly at me.

  “I’m merely here to—”

  “She could join you, if you desire?”

  Quite a twin of hustlers, weren’t they? I shook my head, but the child was persistent. She came over to sit on my lap. “We can drink together. Don’t go yet.”

  “My daughter is waiting.”

  “Just one cocktail. Mama and I were left behind by my père, a ship engineer who drowned. We have to find our way home. Our ship abandoned us.” She ground her bony buttocks hard on my taut lap and slung her thin arms around my shoulders, her armpits emitting the stench of some coarse perfume.

  In my crooked search for the young and frail, I had been approached and handled by old hacks, swarthy men, and hairy-chested brutes. But never ever had I been solicited by a child in service of her own mother. But was she her real mother, or was it anothe
r convenient pairing in the commerce of flesh, demure they might all pretend to be?

  Quietly I declined, causing the girl to roll her eyes. She got up from my lap after giving it another grind.

  “Ask for Claudia’s chamber at monsieur’s convenience, oui? If not tonight, tomorrow maybe, or tomorrow after tomorrow perhaps.” She left, dusting the hem of her short skirt.

  I had to be further insulted by the Italian count, who gallantly ordered one cocktail each for the juvenile young madam and her geisha mama before casting me a dark look. It would surprise me not at all if the count was a cog of the threesome.

  “Leave him alone, Claudia,” said the petite innkeeper coming to my rescue. His hair was well combed, and he was dressed in evening wear, a snug child-size tuxedo, all four feet of him. “Monsieur is not to be disturbed.” He waved his short arm with authority at Claudia, nodding in my direction before moving on to others.

  The sound of gongs could be heard dismally through the window, drowning the murmuring trickle of a moaning piano manned by a player barely visible.

  Urgency suddenly laid bare my lust. In haste, I paid for a bottle of sugarcane rum and downed half the contents halfway to my cold nest. The Caribbean spirit ransacked through my heaving innards, sanctifying the urge, purifying its end goal. How could I have slowed my hooves this near the final trough that would sate the deepest of my yearning and seeking? That faraway ethereal pledge made by my heavenly Annabelle was now earthbound, a thin wall away awaiting my claiming.

  I fumbled out the key with shaking hand and opened the door. In a quiet light, lying in repose was no longer Q but the earthen solid object of my longing, a flesh and bone reincarnation of my tragic Annabelle. The candle shed soft light on her horizontal form, her childish hipbone barely rising with an arm under her neck, her head resting on the bamboo pillow the same way Annabelle had posed under that long ago summer moon. Infantile rouge had climbed up her cheeks and parted her lips red like summer berries. Tipping sideways were her pear-size breasts with darkened nipples slipping out of her loosened nightgown. Her other arm was draped softly over her thin thighs, bony fingers partially bent. The gown had ridden up her thighs baring her thin knees and pubescent calves, her feet arched and toes curled.

  The rum throbbed my temples and tickled my netherdom, numbing the outer world to a wavy periphery. Draining the bottle, I unbuttoned the bulky jacket, shed the cumbersome trousers, and kicked off my socks and boots in the slow deliberation of a lion readying for his bloody feast. My head was swarming now with firebugs of yesteryear, each stinging me with bitefuls of delight; my senses were doused with the fragrance of rampant weeds tinctured by cow manure, sodden mud, and dirty feet, transporting me back to that hazy night among haystacks. The evocation was vital to this enterprise, without which it would be just a meal and not at all a feast. This was what spanned the bridge that arcs from the living to the dead, hell to fierier hell. This was to be my coronation.

  I lay unrobed alongside my darling; the prelude would be brief. Lust’s eyes had long envisioned this moment as finality. As gentle as a monster could bear, I lifted the white satin off her soft, dewy skin, untying the sash over her waist, opening its seam and letting it fall behind the small of her back. She unleashed a sigh, eyes still closed, lashes casting lengthy shadows down over her cheeks. She moved her bare shoulder blades causing a slight jiggle of young breast, taut and unripe. Slowly I fondled her bud with trembling fingers. A light pinch caused a moan to escape her lips. Softly I cupped her juvenile mounds, too small to feed even the tiniest of babies, and suckled her with my abject lips and mournful tongue.

  She eased her chest and bare belly toward me and with the faintest moan whispered the following fateful words, “I’ve been waiting for so long.”

  31

  “You brute!” She turned her head, staring at my stark nakedness. “Who were you making love to?”

  “You, my darling, you,” I said drowsily, drained by her exuberance.

  “Why were you calling my birth mother’s name?”

  “Mmm?”

  “And you bruised me so,” she said in a hurt voice.

  “My darling little soul.” I swept her into my arms, my heart swollen with madness, and violently ravaged her all over again, causing her to moan with little cries.

  “You know I was just a virgin. Please …”

  At her announcement, I trembled and shattered with gushes only to be met by her blood-stained juice dripping down my shaft and her bare, parted thighs. Tightly I held her, covering her nose, lips, neck, and breasts with the tenderest kisses as tears of gratitude wet my sallow cheeks.

  All cultures worship the sanctity of the cherry, which in Chinese was labeled delicately as the peach blossom. Certain Mongolian tribes would spread white silk beneath the bride’s buttocks to catch the wedding night stains. If no redness was discerned, the bride would be returned to her father with a penalty of three horses, though the same culture also adhered to polyandry whereby a wife is shared tacitly and tactfully among brothers living in the same yurt.

  The blood of this cherry from Q offered hidden clues to the viability of her mother, Annabelle, much like the bloodline visible in the white of a hen’s egg when shone against the bright sun. Like the imprint of a lovesick soul, lost and regained through her daughter, her living vessel. Radiant proof that that which was lost is now living. It was Annabelle’s virginity I had ravaged, her cherry I had suckled and broken, her lips I had kissed, her heart I had throbbed.

  Oh, my darling and dear Annabelle. How I have missed you. Now in my arms, on my lap, you are whole again, unburned and uncharcoaled.

  What lay ahead mattered not at all. What lay within could never ever be lost again.

  32

  Gray marred our window when I heard a knock on our door.

  “Mister, open the door, please,” someone said urgently.

  I leaped off the bed and opened our door to the sight of the dwarf and his white-toothed Bengal servant.

  “Royal guards are downstairs,” the innkeeper whispered.

  “What for?” I asked, shielding my sleeping beauty from their view.

  “They are here with a palace warrant to search for the runaway empress and her cohort, a tall and white ocean man.” Knowledge was in his voice.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I calmly asked, though my heart was in my throat.

  “You know why. I might not know who you are, but I knew her.” He stretched his neck to peep around my waist. “I was a guest at her father’s princely tea party once. I am here to help you. Let’s waste no more time.”

  “Who brought them here?”

  “Who, indeed? Someone has led them here, someone who knows your whereabouts.”

  I darted a glance up and down the corridor. “What do you suppose you can do?”

  “He will help you gather your things,” the dwarf said, pushing his servant forward. “Then I will show you the way out.”

  Q, without urging, was already off the bed and dressing. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “They are here, after us. We must go.”

  “You’ve bitten more than you can chew, Big Man,” she said, wrapping herself up in the scarf. “Maybe it’s better that we surrender. We can plea for mercy.”

  “There will not be mercy or pity.”

  “This is all to fulfill some sort of fantasy for you, isn’t it?”

  “No, I am trying to save you from certain death.”

  “And how do you propose we do that—running from one nest to another?”

  “We have a final destination.”

  “Where?”

  “The home of Wang Dan, seventy miles south of Peking.”

  “The home of the bloodthirsty rebel?”

  “The father that you have never met.”

  “What good would this meeting bring?”

  “We can stay at his home temporarily, and he has an army to defend us.”

  “This is all a nightmare. I can’t
leave behind my husband.”

  “You can and you must, if you are to save him.”

  Without words, things were gathered and the trunk shut. The servant grabbed it up in his mighty hand, and Q and I were out of our chamber following the innkeeper along the corridor, down the stairs, into a willow garden via a back door. There in the back alley was a tall horse and a roofed carriage. The innkeeper opened the door for us, bowing. “Your highness,” he murmured, his eyes on the ground.

  “Who are these people?” Q asked.

  That was when I noticed that we weren’t alone. Claudia, the youthful pimp, and her stiff mother were already seated inside the carriage. They bowed as I helped Q inward, and I bowed back in thanks.

  The innkeeper pulled me aside and whispered, “I asked them to ride with you and pretend to be your family, four people instead of the two they are searching for. They can travel as far as you need them.”

  Gratitude flooded my heart. Rarely do I deserve such grace.

  I pressed five silvers into the tiny palm of the innkeeper. He refused, pushing it back. “I was once a guest of her fragrant house. I can never repay the honor bestowed upon me, but please do compensate the pair who will accompany you farther. You know, they aren’t even family. Claudia is French, her ‘mother’ a Russian widow. They have a roof above them, paying when they can, and they help me when I am in need, as is the case now.”

  “Why are you helping her?” I asked.

  “We are distant cousins on her princely father’s side. I render aid, if not for blood then the clan name.” He slapped the horse’s belly with his hand. “Off you go.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked him.

  “Don’t worry, I am not sending you through the gates. They have been crowded with royal inspectors since yesterday. A boat man will meet you at a loading dock.”