“You killed her, Father. Maman was sad because you abandoned her.”
“How dare you talk to me like that!” her father flared. “I loved your mother and she had everything she needed and wanted.”
“I saw you. I saw you kissing a woman in front of this very apartment building, and she was certainly not maman,” Gerel had released the words that had been fighting to come out for years. She wanted them to be as hurtful to her father as possible. Maybe it had something to do with her being officially an adult in two days. She wanted her father to do the same: grow up.
“I did no such thing. And stop yelling, you’ll wake up your brother and Isabell.”
“Isabell is the woman you had affair with when you were still married to maman.” Gerel bore a contemptuous stare at her father and retreated to her own room.
When night fell, her father somehow manned up. He told her the truth, maybe not the whole truth, but Gerel got the gist. To this day, she’d never been able to forgive her father.
It turned out that Gerel’s grandfather wasn’t too hot about Emilee Gardner, the American archeology student his future-neurosurgeon son, René Garnier, had fallen madly in love with. “Son, you’re ruining your future, you won’t be happy with that girl,” he warned after he’d met his future daughter-in-law. Of course, René didn’t heed his old man’s warning. The love birds went to the family villa in Normandy one weekend and came back married. Grandfather Garnier was furious. “How are you going to fix people’s brains when your own is deranged? Are you planning to have kids? How are you going to do that when your wife’s passion is to run around in no-man’s-land digging dirt? You’ll be working two jobs for a long time to come, paying the bills for your wife’s hobby and being a house husband when you are not fixing people’s brains.”
“But Father, Emilee’s going to be a professor, we’ll work it out between the two of us,” René had promised himself and his father. He loved his wife and she loved him, there was nothing they couldn’t overcome.
At first things worked out exactly as René had planned. He started working at the Clinique de Alma, a private hospital in Paris specializing in neurosurgery and Emilee continued her studies at Sorbonne. Yes, she did go for a few digs, but they didn’t prevent her from getting pregnant when their first anniversary came around.
Then things went south.
First, Gerel’s uncle, her father’s younger brother and a successful nuclear engineer, died in an accident. He’d never been married and didn’t leave any children behind. Since Grandfather Garnier only had two sons, the survival of the Garnier family’s bloodline fell solely on his eldest son René and his “crude” American daughter-in-law. The old man allowed the ice between them to thaw, but only temporarily.
“Your first grandchild is going to be a girl,” René soon reported.
The old man was disappointed but didn’t make a fuss. “You’ll have more children, will you? For generations the Garnier men have always amounted to great things. It can’t stop with you, son.”
“What if Emilee and I just have more girls?”
“In that case, you’ll have to get a new wife.”
The young doctor thought his old man was only joking.
Things went wrong the day Emilee went into labor. There were complications. An emergency procedure had to be performed to save the baby. But if she went through with it, it would mean Emilee could never have children again.
“Do everything to save my daughter.” Emilee didn’t hesitate.
But her husband was not sure. “Think carefully, Emilee, you may not have more children again. I love you and I want you to be happy.”
“I love you, too. It doesn’t matter how many children we plan to have, but it matters we love the one who is here now. It’s our baby, we can’t let her die.”
So Gerel was born. For her parents, it was the beginning of the end.
“I knew that woman was a curse from day one, full of that American self-righteousness and self-centeredness,” Grandfather Garnier fumed. “Her love for mankind and its history, what has she done for the greater good of the world besides giving you the privilege of footing the bills for her whimsical trips? Now she’s cut off the Garnier family bloodline, the crème de la crème of France.”
“You still have Gerel, Papa,” René tried to console.
“She’s never going to be like all the men in the Garnier family, the Garnier name went extinct the minute she was born.”
Father and son didn’t talk for many years after that, until the old man was dying. On his death bed, he handed his son a copy of his will. René was not to inherit the Garnier family fortune unless a true Garnier heir was produced: a boy.
The wealth René could have inherited was shockingly sizable, almost ten million euros.
“That’s why you were seeing Isabell? You wanted to leave maman all along, for the money?”
“But I didn’t divorce her. She’d been suffering from severe depression long before that and her death was an accident.”
“You broke maman’s heart for money, that’s why she died!” Gerel screamed.
Then, she was alone in her room.
Two days later, on her birthday, Gerel left the lovely apartment she’d called home for the past eighteen years. As far as she was concerned, love had abandoned the dwelling long ago. But she did want something for her birthday, as her only inheritance from the Garnier family: the Maison Suspendu in Normandy.
For a long time, Gerel had seriously considered changing her surname to Gardner, her mother’s maiden name, but never had the resolve to go through with it. After all, her maman died a Garnier. The memories, faint as they may be, still appeared in Gerel’s dreams. Those long, glorious summer days at Maison Suspendu. A little girl, singing and laughing with her happy parents on the beaches of Normandy. The summers she’d spent with her maman at the villa before she died seemed to be yesterday.
The villa was a secret safe house. It sheltered her when she thought life had finally beaten her down. Nobody knew that the girl who often couldn’t make rent for the small apartment she cohabitated with several girls in the City of Light could own a villa on a beach in Normandy. But “villa” might be an exaggeration. It was really a tiny cottage with an oversized balcony, tattered, weather-beaten, and according to the real property assessment, a tiny drop in her father’s ten-million-euro-inheritance bucket.
As time went by, she’d made peace with the Garnier name. The Garnier villa slowly became Gerel’s villa. And her artistic ambition was born at the villa. A pair of her mother’s fan-shaped vintage earrings, a deep blue lapis lazuli, that were left in the tiny jewelry box in the drawer of the bedroom vanity became Gerel’s muse. She began to draw, to sketch things that had only existed in her imagination since she was a little girl. She sketched what she imagined great-grandmother Lis, the princess, would have worn for earrings, necklaces, hair clips, and ornaments. Then André had come into her life before he was the creative directeur at Cartier, and guided her to the road of haute couturier jewelry design.
After the success of her Qing Dynasty imperial court jewelry collection, she’d unveiled the villa for André on a brilliant summer day. “Here’s where I came up with many of my creative ideas.”
“Oh là là, the view is magnificent,” André declared as he stepped onto the ridiculously disproportionate balcony. Then his artist’s critical eyes scanned the walls and facade of the villa itself, the cracks in the mortar and crevices in the blackened stone. “But Gerel, ma cherie, it’s old, small, and cold in winter. Sell it and buy an apartment in the city, remember you’re the upcoming star who is soon to be the toast of Paris. I don’t doubt it.”
“I can’t, André.”
“Why not?”
Gerel didn’t answer the question honestly. André has no idea what this place means to me. “I looked at the market for a place like this, it won’t fetch enough for a minimum down payment on a moderate apartment in the city.” Just like that, André nev
er brought up the subject again.
From the balcony suspendu, Gerel peered at the ocean fading into the grey sky. She was very much alone, on a deserted beach on a chilly March day. Or maybe not entirely alone, she had a lone seagull for company. Now and then the bird would come and perch on the wooden railing. But she needed to be here to make some sense out of the recent events, and to figure out how she’d gotten into the mess she was in now.
She wondered if her life would have been far less complicated had Blackwell never sought her out. Why couldn’t she be content with the fact that she’d been halfway up the ladder to the pedestal of jewelry design? It might take many more sleepless nights and coffee-guzzling days to get there, but she would get there.
Her first impression of Blackwell was that he was a phony comic. His air of old-world aristocracy was put on, that clipped King’s English exaggerated. Still, she allowed him to seduce her. Didn’t she despise the Garniers who had surrendered their souls for fame, legacy, and fortune? In that sense she was a hypocrite. She’d sensed that Blackwell’s seemingly glamorous world could be a web of treachery, but somehow had convinced herself that she was not trappable. The benefits of her association with people like Blackwell outweighed the risks, if there were any. He’s the kind of client who could put you on that pedestal overnight. That’s what she’d wanted, wasn’t it?
Look what she’d gotten herself into. Sure, she’d rubbed shoulders with the rich, the famous, and powerful in London, in Beijing; and Blackwell had kept his end of the deal, skillfully singing her praises at all the appropriate moments. But in the end, he and the Empress Seal had only thrust her to the forefront of a murder investigation. She could still feel the heat of the inquisitive stare of that annoying NYPD detective, irritably good-looking, who’d barged in on her studio a few days ago. She hoped he would not bother her again, but she had the feeling that was not the last time she would see him.
Guilt washed over her. Had I not accepted Blackwell’s commission for the replica of the Empress Seal, could he be still alive? Despite everything, she knew Blackwell was strangely enamored with her. “The princess,” he’d often called her. Why was Blackwell so keen on nagging her to “trace her lineage”? It was almost like he’d known something about Lis that she still didn’t know. Granted, he’d contributed to her hitting the genealogy jackpot in a four-hundred-year-old village outside Beijing. But then again, the jackpot had “opened a can of worms”—an idiom she’d learned from her maman.
She thought of Jane and Mama, two people whose path on this earth she never imagined crossing, but now they were like the family she’d never had. Mama had wanted Gerel to take the jade bangles and blue lapis comb with her. “I’ve promised my mother that I’ll give them to Hehua if she came back. As far as I know, she’s come back, her blood flows in every one of your veins,” Mama had insisted.
But Gerel couldn’t accept. The jade bangles were Meigui’s gifts to Mama’s mother. But now they were the property of the Forbidden City and cultural relics of China. She would’ve fallen in the same moral ground of those “shadowy owners” of stolen treasures if she were to sneak the bangles out of the country.
She couldn’t take away the blue lapis comb from Mama, either, though there was no doubt it came from Meigui’s mother Sarnai, the woman who’d held the red stone close to her bosom until the day it became the face of the Empress Seal. With Jane’s help, she’d convinced Mama to keep the comb. Two generation of women had taken great risks to protect the secrets of Gerel’s ancestors and to guard the treasures that had witnessed the history of past centuries. But times had changed. Mama and Bai Yu, had she still been alive, would not be prosecuted because they’d held onto something that represented China’s feudal past. “Next time, when your granddaughter and her children come to visit, you can tell them the story of Bai Yu, Huhua, Meigui, and Sarnai. Show them the comb. They’ll be very interested in all the stories you wanted to tell, and they’ll know it’s not your imagination. You’ve lived through it, it’s part of the history of your country,” Gerel had said to Mama.
The only thing Gerel wanted to take with her was the old notebook. The pages felt more like woven raw silk than paper. The writing inside was the same calligraphy Gerel had seen on silk scrolls in some of the antique shops in Paris. The intricate characters were tiny, aesthetically pleasing, but of course she couldn’t make out one iota of what they were all about. Jane had explained to her that unlike the modern layout of Chinese language, the words ran vertically from right to left rather than horizontally from left to right. To make it more difficult, the characters were in the more convoluted traditional form, the syntax and sentence structures were old, almost archaic. Jane frowned after flipping through a few pages. “It’s a manuscript all right, like Mama said, written by Meigui over the years when she was in the Forbidden City. But I’m afraid it’ll take me a long time to translate it into the story Meigui wanted to tell about her mother Sarnai. This is like asking an English speaker to read original Shakespeare, anyone would have trouble.”
Earlier, Mama had revealed the secret of the face of the Empress Seal, the red stone. But Mama couldn’t read or write. What she’d learned about the stone came as a story her mother Bai Yu had told her. The face of the seal, the red stone, was given to Sarnai, Meigui’s mother, by Meigui’s father, a French priest who had chestnut brown hair and tawny eyes. He did something to anger the Emperor, so he was killed before Meigui was born. On the day Sarnai died, she gave the stone to her daughter Meigui. She made Meigui promise that she’d keep the stone close to her bosom forever, so she would remember that her father was always with her even if she had never met him. According to Bai Yu, though, the stone was a curse. Whoever was in possession of it ended up dying a tragic death.
“That’s all I know about Sarnai. But mother said it must have been very important to Meigui that her family history didn’t get lost if something happened to her. She spent many nights writing down everything she wanted Hehua to know in case she herself didn’t have the chance to tell her. I believe it’s all in here.” Gerel remembered how Mama had picked up the manuscript and handed it over to her that day, solemnly, as if performing a sacred ritual.
But Gerel couldn’t just take the manuscript back to Paris. What were the chances she’d be able to find someone to translate an ancient Chinese manuscript? Even if she could, it wouldn’t take long for that someone to connect the dots between the manuscript and the much-publicized Empress Seal. They might try to capitalize on the most intimate details of her family history. She didn’t want her lineage plastered on newspapers and gossip columns. And most of all, she didn’t want to be referred to as the woman cozying up to Blackwell, the most eligible bachelor in England. The deluge of multimedia publicity would engulf her. She’d need bodyguards to venture out of her studio in Paris.
But the desire of knowing exactly what Meigui had documented was burning a hole in Gerel’s gut, and there was only one thing she could do before Meigui’s soul could be laid bare to her.
She had to be patient.
In the end, Jane came up with a good solution. Gerel would leave the manuscript behind, temporarily. Jane’s best friend, a professor of comparative literature at Beijing University, could be a good candidate for the job. “We’ve known each other since our college days and have been good friends ever since. She’s capable and trustworthy. The only drawback is you’ll have to settle for an English translation, she’s a professor of comparative literature, Chinese and English. But I know we can absolutely trust her,” Jane had assured Gerel.
Right after they left Mama’s house, Jane had called her professor friend. A short conversation later, the professor agreed to translate the manuscript. The manuscript was complex but fortunately not long. Based on what Jane described, the professor estimated Gerel should have the translation in a week.
It meant Gerel had to extend her stay for another few days. Bringing the manuscript and the translation back to Paris with her was safer than h
aving them mailed to her.
The next few days were unforgettable. Gerel explored Beijing like an adventurist and tasted the city like a local. Jane came into the city every day. On the days she was not working at the Palace Museum, she’d take Gerel to do the non-touristy things: they’d strolled along the ancient outer-city moat and zigzagged through the labyrinth of Hutongs, the city’s ancient residential quarters. Even the weather was glorious, clear and mild like early spring.
One late afternoon, they decided to delve into the Wangfujing area, the famous shopping and dining center in Beijing.
Suddenly, Gerel slowed down. Something else was floating in the air, faint notes of hymns and melodies, strange but familiar. “What’s that? The music.”
“Oh, that’s from the church around this corner,” Jane said. They turned the corner. A Romanesque church with pilasters and three bell towers stood on the other side of the street. “It’s the St. Joseph’s Parish, one of the four Roman Catholic churches in Beijing,” Jane explained.
“Wow, didn’t expect to see something like this,” Gerel murmured.
“Thanks to the faithfuls and believers from the West.” Jane suddenly remembered something. “Actually, one of your newly found ancestors could have had a hand in building this church.”
“How so?”
“The priest—Meigui’s father. I guess calling him your grandfather-the-great is easier than great-great-great-grandfather, don’t you think?”
It took Gerel a few seconds to process what Jane had said. The discovery that Meigui and her parents were ancestors of the Garnier family would take some time for Gerel to get used to.
“Come on, let’s go in and take a look,” Jane urged.
The last time Gerel had been to a mass was with her maman in the seventeenth century cathedral near the family villa in Normandy. Her father never set foot in a church. Maybe that wasn’t true. She did remember going inside the Notre Dame in Paris with her parents after they’d had her favorite chestnut ice cream at Bertillion near the cathedral. But there had been no mass, they were there to look at the colorful stain glass windows of the cloister.
The Face of the Seal Page 15