By the time his hair became truly messed up, he thought for an instant, it’s just a practical joke. He was an expert of Qing Dynasty art. As far as he knew, empresses of the dynasty didn’t have official seals. The highest palace approval authority resided solely with the Son of Heaven, the Emperor. The Blackwell family could not possibly be in possession of an Empress Seal.
Then a thought hit him. His eyes darted toward the corner curio diagonally across from his desk. On the top shelf was a blue and gold cylinder, circled by a golden phoenix. His great-grandfather brought it back from China and it had been known to every member of the Blackwell family as the phoenix seal, a stamp with a gemstone face. He dragged his feet across the room and retrieved the stamp from the curio. Back at his desk, he began to search for a red ink pad. He knew he had one somewhere. He’d bought a pair of expensive decorative jade stamps in the shape of Chinese foo dogs a while ago. They came with a red ink pad in a jade box. He’d used them to stamp the word prosperity and long life in Chinese on holiday and well-wishing cards to friends. But he’d gotten tired of them and now the foo dogs were sitting on the bookshelf behind him, collecting dust.
Rummaging through a few desk drawers finally produced the ink pad. Gingerly, he laid it on the desk and lifted its cover. The red ink was slightly cracked, but usable. He picked up the phoenix stamp and pressed its face lightly onto the ink pad. Then he lifted the stamp and pressed the face again onto the note, next to the wax seal on the signature line—two flowers side by side. They were not exactly the same, but close. Both had five petals.
He felt cold, ice-water-injected-into-his-spine kind of cold. Château Margaux was forgotten. Scotch, he needed a double.
He stomped over to the liquor cabinet, reached straight for the Waterford scotch decanter—it was almost empty. “Allerton,” he called out but realized he was alone. His butler had asked for the evening off. This meant he’d have to go down the cellar himself to retrieve the liquor. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been down there. He didn’t have to. It was Allerton’s job to make sure the liquor cabinet in the study was well stocked with wine, expensive French red wine. Blackwell rarely touched scotch except in times of distress, which he’d seldom experienced in his life. Maybe he could count that one time when he’d dodged a bullet in the desert. Back at the base he’d downed a shot of whisky, or maybe it was several. It temporarily numbed his sense of reality, death’s stare seemed to be less intense. When the effect of the molten liquid began to wear off, he’d concluded that being a field reporter was a grand idea but not for him.
Now the anxiety the note had caused him was rapidly rising to the level of distress. He needed that liquid gold desperately, but he’d have to get down to the cellar first.
In the hallway he opened the door to the cellar. A flight of squeaky wooden steps down, he was facing a scroll-patterned wrought iron door. Its rusty hinges creaked as he pulled it open. He found himself peering down at a black hole. He fumbled on the walls, right and left, for a light switch. There was none.
Then his eyes began to adjust to the darkness around him. A cord dangled right in front of his nose—a pull string light switch. He tugged it, a single bulb came on, shedding light down on the brick barrel-vaulted cellar. A flight of stone stairs led him down, he was at the head of a narrow lane flanked by wrought iron wine racks. Another pull string hung down from the vaulted brick ceiling. He pulled it and proceeded deeper down the lane. The air became damp and musky. The chill shooting down his spine earlier had spread to his limbs. His teeth began to chatter.
He reached the end.
He was facing the wall. He used to imagine the family cellar was just like the one in Edgar Allen Poe’s story in which the wall at the bottom of the cellar had sealed a big secret: a woman’s corpse and a live black cat. He examined the wall, not much different from the last time he’d seen it, only a small wall rack with brackets had been mounted, securing the last few bottles of the scotch his father had left behind. His eyes moved to the left bottom of the wall—a hollow created by a missing brick gaped at him. Good, nobody’s sealed it. As a youngster, he’d hidden things he didn’t want his parents to see—packets of cigarettes, the Escort magazine, and certain books which, according to his mum, were not fit for a boy his age.
At twelve years old with a keen interest in reading, he’d often sneak into his father’s study and snatch books from the shelves. Charles Dickens, D.H Lawrence, Duma, Zola, and of course first editions by William Blackwell I. Sometimes he’d manage to circumvent his mother’s watchful eyes. He’d read Lady Chatterley’s Lover when he was thirteen. But he’d not been lucky when it came to the only fiction his great-grandfather had penned, Behind the Forbidden Wall. His mum seemed to have the nose of a bloodhound, sniffing him out every time he’d tried to read it.
One day the book seemed to have permanently disappeared from the Blackwell family study. The complete collection of William Blackwell I first editions had become incomplete and remained incomplete for almost a quarter of a century. His father had accused his mum of being prissy, throwing the book away in order to shield her son from the licentious content, which his mum had denied vehemently. They’d never known that young Blackwell had finally found the appropriate place and best time to read the entire book—in the family’s cellar, visited only by the family’s hired hands, and in the afternoon, when his mother was having tea with her lady friends. In between his trips down to the cellar, the book rested safely in that hollow in the wall. After the final page of the book had been turned, he’d let the book stay there, let his parents believe that the book was gone forever.
*
Back in his study, Blackwell poured two fingers of scotch, neat. After the first gulp, he sank in his wingback by the fire and examined the book that had not seen daylight for over a quarter a century—damp, yellowed pages, jagged edges along the hard cover. Time had done quite a bit of damage.
Somebody had written a short forward, which the young Blackwell had no interest in reading twenty-five years ago. He skimmed through it quickly. According to this person, William Blackwell I began his foreign correspondent career in 1872 at The Telegraph, a popular newspaper in England. At age twenty-two, he travelled to the Far East, covering moments of importance in domestic and international affairs in the area. His brisk writing style, speedy reporting, and mastery of local language, especially Mandarin Chinese, quickly advanced him to the position of The Telegraph’s chief correspondent to Beijing, the capital city of the Imperial Qing Dynasty. There he witnessed and exposed the ravages of opium on the country decades after the Opium Wars between China and Britain had ended. He reported the weak imperial court that gave into again and again the unreasonable trade treaties and demands of the West. He skillfully developed relationships with many officials gaining exclusive access to the life of the Empress Dowager and her son, the puppet Emperor. In the early twentieth century, after almost thirty years as a correspondent in China, William Blackwell I returned to London triumphantly, lauded as the authority on the late nineteenth century Qing Dynasty. A lucrative publishing career followed. He wrote diversely and prolifically, from historical documentation of the Opium Wars to China’s reform from dynasty to republic to the biography of the Dowager Mother, though unauthorized. The literary critics sang his praises and the publishers literally laughed to the bank. He finally took a wife in his fifties and continued writing well into his seventies.
His last book was Behind the Forbidden Wall, a collection of stories based upon gossip, rumors, and hearsay the author amassed during his time in Beijing. It was mainly a narrative of the personal lives of the Empress Dowager, her son the Emperor, and the eunuchs and concubines. When the book was first published, the literary highbrows thought the book beneath England’s renowned and authoritative historian. But it was a hit with the ladies of Victorian England who didn’t seem to be bothered by the explicit account of perverted sexual practices behind the palace walls. It brought in significant revenue for the publisher. Regard
less of its financial success, the swan song of the scholarly giant who’d unfurled the tapestry of the history of the nineteenth century Qing Dynasty was considered trivial, a scandalous fiction.
What a shame.
Nervously, Blackwell flipped to the book’s table of contents, eyeing the list of short story titles, praying the three dreaded words were not among them, yet knowing they were there. The Empress Seal. When he read it twenty-five years ago, it was a rather titillating story that had roused strange sensations in his pubescent body, but now it was proof of the ominous nature of the note. He drained the rest of the scotch in the tumbler and decided to cross to the other side of the forbidden wall a second time.
Among a group of maidens who had passed the preliminary examination to become the Emperor’s concubines in the Forbidden City, was a very unusual looking damsel. No doubt she was older, approaching twenty years of age, which usually would have put her at a disadvantage in this fierce competition. On closer examination, however, one couldn’t fail to see why she was selected. A flowy silk gown contoured to her delicate but shapely form and bosom. Her raven hair, porcelain complexion, pale grey eyes, and ebony irises contrasted one another, but were all elements of harmonious image—sensual yet graceful, levelheaded yet feminine.
Her name was Meigui, or “Rose” in Chinese. It’s unclear where she came from, but she was the first of the group to step over the high wooden threshold of the palace.
Her looks and pleasant disposition might have gotten her into the palace, but it was her physical nimbleness and mental acuity that would make her the Emperor’s favorite concubine and catapult her to the status of imperial noble consort.
She began her palace life by studying not only the Emperor the Son of Heaven, but also the Emperor the man. From the eunuchs and chambermaids she learned that the young Emperor was a man of lustful passion and insatiable sexual appetite, often seeking excitement outside the palace from prostitutes and transvestite Peking opera singers. As a ruler, he was controlled by the Dowager Mother who interfered with his marriage and meddled with official court affairs. Rumor had it that the Emperor had never visited the quarters of his wife, the woman whom the Empress Dowager had picked as the Empress of the great Qing Dynasty. Meigui also learned that the Emperor considered himself a progressive thinker and harbored grand ambitions. He often talked to his court officials about reform, turning China from a dynasty into a republic. He even explored the possibility of touring and studying in England and France, exploring Western political and economic ideas. But even a mention of this desire was immediately shot down by the Empress Dowager who was trying to hold onto her power over the decaying Qing Dynasty.
Meigui’s living quarters were in the back of the palace, secluded by a collection of small gardens, pavilions, and lotus ponds. For interior decoration she broke the rule of the traditional palace color scheme, avoiding yellow and blue. The colors she chose for her bed chamber were palettes to “stir a man’s passion.” The high walls were pink. Embroidered deep red and soft pink roses blossomed on lustrous black silk sheets. Golden phoenixes perched on quilts and pillows, cleverly strewn on the elaborately carved rosewood alcove bed. Through an array of pink silk-curtained windows was a view of the courtyard, adorned by trees of flaming pomegranate and bushes of crimson roses. In a small cavern-like room attached to the back of the chamber, incense was readied to smolder at the appropriate time, to permeate the chamber with fragrance of ylang-ylang, said to be highly aphrodisiacal.
Meigui’s eunuch, Li, was a man of twenty years of age. He was from a dirt-poor peasant family in northern China. When he was thirteen, a severe draught parched the farmland allotted to his family and killed all the crops. Thousands in the area died of starvation. To help his parents and save his siblings, young Li sliced off his manhood with a butcher knife. Excruciating pain left him in a comatose state for days. When he recovered enough to stand, he limped to the palace and begged to be accepted as a eunuch. For seven years he served many concubines and consorts. He helped with their bathing, dressing, and hairdos, and stripped them naked before wrapping them in silk blankets and carrying them to Emperor’s bed for the night. When required, he was a toy in the Emperor’s private sex games and palace orgies. He was everywhere behind the forbidden wall but remained invisible. A eunuch’s life was a lowly life, but his mediocre stipend from the palace helped his family survive.
Li went to great lengths to take care of his new mistress’s unusual requests, doing anything from special ordering silk and brocade to locating and purchasing books women were not supposed to read. Publicly, he told the maids and servants that his loyalty to Meigui was due to her pleasant and respectful nature. Secretly, though, Li had a plan of his own. Experience told him that Meigui was special. Her beauty, grace, pleasant temperament, and emotional maturity were all qualities of an imperial noble consort, a title and position just below the Empress. Her ascension could pave the way for him to become a chief eunuch at the residence of a noble consort. He would earn a much more lucrative pay and rub shoulders with other powerful eunuchs who had the ears of the elite inner circles of the Emperor and Dowager Mother.
Li decided to do whatever was within his ability to get Meigui and himself on the road to glory.
When Li was undoing and brushing Meigui’s hair to get her ready for bed, he would casually mention the Emperor’s preferred sexual practices by their designated names, just to gauge Meigui’s reaction to the deviant nature those names implied. “The Emperor is the Son of Heaven, man of all men, we’re all here to serve him, aren’t we?” she chirped softly like a young starling, one eyebrow slanting upward as she shot Li a smiling sideway-look. Li knew he had an accomplice in Meigui. They each knew what the other wanted. All he needed to do was bring the Emperor around to pay Meigui a visit, but make it look like a chance meeting.
On a warm day in late May, in her bed chamber, Meigui was sitting on a tall rosewood bench, her long hair undone, shrouding her shoulders and bosom like swathes of black silk, her flaming red satin lounge gown loosened at the neck and untied at the waist. One leg on the bench and the other dangling to the ground, her right arm holding a pipa—an instrument resembling a mandolin—close to her bosom, her left hand deftly plucking its strings. The effect of the music could only be described by the famous Chinese poet Bai Juyi:
The bold strings rattled like splatters of sudden rain,
The fine strings hummed like lovers’ whispers,
Chattering and pattering, pattering and chattering,
As pearls, large and small, on a jade plate fall.
At that moment, the Emperor, in his sedan chair carried by four men, was passing the front courtyard of Meigui’s quarters. They were on the way to see the peony blossoms in the back of the palace as suggested by the Emperor’s chief eunuch. The sound of the pi-pa halted the procession. Through the open windows of Meigui’s bed chamber, the Emperor saw what she was trying to show. The Emperor slipped through a side door that opened to the small cavern-like room where wisps of ylang-ylang smoke drifted from a gold incense burner. From there he entered Meigui’s bed chamber and stood face to face with her for the first time. As she fell on her knees in front of the Son of Heaven, he could see a blood-red stone dangling on a black satin strap around her delicate, marble-white neck. After he ordered Meigui to rise, the Emperor said, eyeing her half-exposed breasts, “That’s an unusual gem you’re wearing.”
Meigui lowered her eyes to look at the stone nestled in her bosom and quickly pulled the gown shut, as if she’d just noticed that the garment had come loose. “Please forgive me, Emperor, I’ve acted carelessly,” she said, her voice as soft as the feathery clouds in the sky on that day.
“The song you were playing, it’s beautiful but also sad. Aren’t you happy here?”
“It’s an honor to be in the palace. I’m sad only because it’s been almost a month and my Emperor has not visited me yet,” Meigui said timidly.
“But I’m here, aren’t I?” th
e Emperor laughed. His eyes scanned the room, drawn to the rosewood bed. “I see you like roses and phoenixes. There are a lot of them on your bed. Why?”
“Because rose is my name and phoenix is my Emperor’s favorite bird,” Meigui replied, color rising on her cheeks.
“Shut the windows and door, and take your leave,” the Emperor said to the guards without taking his lustful eyes off Meigui.
The chambermaid hurried along to bar the door and shut the windows and the guards withdrew to the back courtyard. “You can sit down now,” the Emperor said, gesturing at the bench. “You know phoenix is a heavenly bird for the Son of the Heaven, you should also know the Emperor is a dragon who likes to tease the phoenix . . .”
On cue, Li and a chambermaid appeared from behind the door of the ylang-ylang burning cave, quiet as mice. They helped Meigui shed the red lounge gown and the Emperor his yellow silk robe. A moment later, like shadows, the two disappeared behind the same door they’d come from.
Meigui sat on the edge of the rosewood bed, her upper body leaning back and resting on her elbows, legs apart, waiting for the Emperor to perform his ego-boosting sexual stunt. Li had prepared her for the moment, having administered to her a dose of aphrodisiac herbal medicine that also relaxed the vulva. The Emperor, meanwhile, aroused to a frenzy, took a few steps back and then ran toward her . . .
He’d successfully penetrated the phoenix at first try . . .
It was said that the Emperor stayed in Meigui’s bedchamber overnight. When he took his leave the next morning he was spent but proud as a peacock with its plume on full display. From that day on, Meigui became his favorite concubine. He named her living quarters the Rose Pavilion.
The Face of the Seal Page 3