Anna and the King of Siam

by Margaret Landon

  Anna was distressed. She had not brought that much money with her. But the judge spoke directly to her as if the pettiness of the dowager were a small matter not worth her attention. “You are now the mistress of L’Ore. I will have the dika papers made out. Bring the money to me tomorrow and all will be arranged.”

  “Thank you! Thank you very much,” Anna said in a low voice. She rose from the floor, her knees stiff and shaky. She bowed coldly to the great ladies but they ignored her. This troubled her not at all, for her heart was full, and she returned home for once radiantly happy.

  The next day she presented herself at the court again. Only three of the female judges were present with several of the sheriffs or pakums. Khun Thao Ap handed her the dika that freed L’Ore and ordered one of the pa-kums to go with her to see the money paid, and L’Ore liberated.

  Once more Anna went through the tortuous alleys and came into the mysterious street that ended at the brass door. Her heart was beating rapidly as she pushed it open and stepped within. There was the slave, chained as before. But the piazza of the deserted house was full of people. Anna’s heart leaped in triumph. The Princess Butri and the Chao Chom Manda Ung sat there, surrounded by their sympathizing women. They pretended to be unaware of Anna’s presence, but they had not dared to absent themselves, as she had been afraid they would.

  The pa-kum was timid and hesitant, so obviously afraid of the consequences to herself even of the discharge of her official duty, that Anna finally advanced alone. She opened her reticule and took out forty pieces of silver money. She had hardly laid them before the dowager when the angry woman dashed them away with her foot in token of her contempt. They went rolling hither and thither on the pavement. Anna ignored this childishness and kept her eyes fixed on the woman’s face. Grudgingly the dowager gave the order that L’Ore was to be released and allowed to go.

  A female blacksmith, a dark and ponderous woman, moved to the side of the slave and filed the rivet asunder. L’Ore was free at last! To Anna’s amazement she did not move. When her chains fell off she merely sank to the pavement and lay inert with her hands folded in supplication before her royal persecutors. Anna stepped forward and spoke to her, but she made no sound. It was as if the chains had fallen from her leg and not from her mind, leaving her as helpless as before.

  The thought had come to Anna when she had first talked to the slave that her long ordeal might have affected her mind, so that even physical freedom would not restore her. She could not drag L’Ore away by force, yet to leave her there would be a terrible humiliation as well as a serious defeat of justice, and the death of hope in many hearts. She whispered to the pa-kum, “What is the matter? What has gone wrong?” But the timid sheriff cast down her eyes and did not answer.

  Anna was profoundly troubled. Currents and cross-currents flowed about her, and their meaning eluded her. She felt, as she often did in the harem, that she was walking uneasily over treacherous quicksands. The royal women on the piazza were chattering busily without looking at the prostrate slave or Anna. L’Ore lay like one dead. Her brown back was burned almost to ebony by the sun. Her matted hair had fallen forward over her outstretched arms. As Anna stood determined not to be driven away or outwitted a woman with a child in her arms passed behind her and said in a barely audible voice, “They have taken away her child.”

  So that was it! She had not foreseen this maneuver. The royal ladies had planned cleverly and maliciously. Free the slave they must, since the King had ordered it. But nothing had been said about the child. The faces of the crowd, which had been growing every minute as person after person seeped through the door, were marked with sympathy and sadness, as if the miracle of L’Ore’s freeing had been too much to hope for after all. They exchanged glances. Anna caught faint half-whispered sighs. Then the same woman said in her ear, “Go back! Demand to buy the child!”

  There was nothing else to do. She went back, alone and sad, more than half afraid that the case was lost. L’Ore would not leave her son, and Anna did not know whether there was any hope for him in the law or not.

  Khun Thao Ap was still sitting on her strip of matting in the court when Anna reached it and stated her case. She said nothing, but opened a casket, drew out a roll and started toward the house of the brass door. When they reached the mansion the scene was just as Anna had left it. There sat the royal ladies, holding small jeweled hand mirrors and creaming their lips with a sublime air of indifference. There lay L’Ore still prostrate before them, her face hidden on the pavement. As Anna and the judge appeared, the crowd of women pressed anxiously in, and all eyes were strained to see what the judge was about to do.

  She bowed courteously to the ladies and opened the dark scroll to read the law: “If any woman have children during her bondage, they shall be slaves also, and she is bound to pay for their freedom as well as for her own. The price of an infant in arms is one tical, and for every year of his life shall be paid one tical.”

  The precise terms of this declaration produced a strong effect on the crowd, and none whatever on the royal ladies. Ever so many betel-boxes were opened and the price of the child pressed upon Anna. She took the first offered and laid four ticals down before the women on the piazza. They only preened themselves the more in their mirrors. The judge, seeing that they intended to do nothing about restoring the child to his mother, sent one of the pa-kums for the boy.

  In half an hour he was in his mother’s arms. She did not start with surprise or joy, but turned up to heaven a face that was joy itself. Both mother and child bowed ceremoniously before the great ladies, who disdained to notice them. Then L’Ore tried to stand up and walk, and failing at first, laughed at her own awkwardness. Eager hands pulled her to her feet and she limped and hobbled away, borne along by the exulting crowd, at whose head marched the judge. Her weakness and difficulty in walking did not lessen her radiance. With her face pressed close to her boy’s, she talked to herself and to him: “How happy we shall be! We, too, have a little garden in your father’s house. My Thuk will play in the garden. He will chase butterflies in the grass, and I will watch him all day long.”

  The keepers of the gate handed flowers to the boy as L’Ore and Anna passed through, saying, “Phutho di chai nak na! di chai nak na!” (Merciful Buddha, we are very glad indeed! very, very glad indeed!)

  In some mysterious way the news had spread outside the Palace. Before Anna, L’Ore, and Thuk had more than stepped through the gates on their way to the river they were surrounded by a host of Malays, Indians, Siamese, and some few Chinese, who had loosened their cummerbunds and converted them into flags.

  So with an army of many-colored banners flying, the men, women, and children running and shouting along the banks of the Chow Phya, spectators crowding to the front of their floating houses, L’Ore and her son were put into a boat that took them down the river to their home.

  The next day the Naikodah Ibrahim called on Anna to repay the money she had advanced for his wife and child, and to tell her that his son’s name of Thuk, or “Sorrow,” had been changed to “Free.”

  22

  THE DEATH OF THE FA-YING

  The effect of L’Ore’s almost miraculous return to her husband was far-reaching. Anna found herself famous overnight. Slaves going into the city from the Palace on business told the story to shopkeepers, who passed it on to their customers. Some of the great ladies of the Inside complained bitterly to their families outside. What, after all, was to happen to society if a slave could demand and get freedom merely because the price of it was available? From that time forward Anna had powerful enemies among the nobility who suspected her of revolutionary ideas.

  That knowledge was for the future. In the spring of 1863 she was more aware of the common people. They fell on their faces as she passed. They crawled to her with their petitions as she sat on her piazza in the evening. When she entered the temple schoolroom she found at her place and on her chair flowers plucked by slave hands and woven into garlands. It was as
if the humble people of Palace and city, the almost nameless—for they had only their given names like “Red” Or “Black” or “Fat” or “Lotus”—had heard a long way off a bell intoning a new day, and had lifted their heads in hope of something better than they had known.

  This new fame was to prove onerous, even dangerous, before the end. Anna’s heart was to be wrung again and again with helpless pity. She was to give and give out of her small salary, even to dip into her principal in an effort to alleviate the daily parade of suffering which came to her. “The White Angel” they called her in awe. “Go to the house of the White Angel and she will help you,” became a message of hope whispered in the ears of the distressed. They never knew her name, these people who came to her in simple faith. It is said that fifty years later when one of her grandsons tried to find the house in which she had lived by asking for “Mem Leonowens’ house” he met blank stares. But when he asked to be shown the “House of the White Angel” they took him to it gladly.

  Only a week after L’Ore’s freeing, the attention of the court swung away from Anna to other things, and she felt relieved. The King and all those about him were much occupied with the cremation of Prince Witsanunat, His Majesty’s second son. He was not in the line of succession because he had been born before the King went into the priesthood. He was one of the two sons of the King’s first wife. The Prince had been thirty-seven when he died the previous December, leaving eleven children, some of whom were older than his young step-sisters and brothers. He had been very close to his royal father and had handled His Majesty’s private property for some years. His cremation, therefore, was on a grand scale. School was dismissed for a week in order that the royal children might attend the ceremonies and the ensuing festivities.

  Anna was glad of a little respite. It gave her time to catch up on her personal correspondence and to teach Boy, as well as to attend to many household tasks. It so happened, then, that both she and Louis were on their piazza that afternoon of May 14 when he called out, “Look, Mama, look!” and pointed excitedly up the river toward the Palace. One of the royal barges, long and filled with rowers, had shot out into the midst of the river traffic and was coming toward them with tremendous speed. The boats of the market people, the launches shoving importantly among them with flags flying and boatmen in livery, gave way hurriedly for the barge.

  The moment it had come alongside the quay a slave ran to Anna with a letter bearing the King’s seal. She broke it open and read:

  My dear Mam,—

  Our well-beloved daughter, your favorite pupil, is attacked with cholera, and has earnest desire to see you, and is heard much to make frequent repetition of your name. I beg that you will favor her wish. I fear her illness is mortal, as there has been three deaths since morning. She is best beloved of my children.

  I am your afflicted friend,

  S.S.P.P. MAHA MONGKUT.

  And the slave added an entreaty. “My lady,” she cried, “three slaves are lying dead in the princess’ court. And the Fa-ying was seized this morning. She keeps crying out for you. Please come to her quickly!”

  Anna paused only long enough to tell Louis that he could not come with her, that he must stay with Beebe, and go nowhere, nowhere at all, and eat nothing except what Beebe cooked. Then she was in the barge. There was a coldness around her heart and her hands were wet with sweat. The boat seemed to crawl across the river. She learned that the little princess had gone with several other of the royal children to the theatricals and fireworks, which were part of the cremation festivities, on the evening before. She had seemed perfectly well. There had been cholera in the city for some weeks past, as there was every year, but no one had thought much about it, for the epidemic was not serious.

  Anna urged the rowers on, but they were already exerting themselves to the utmost. The current shoved against them. And when she reached the heavy gates, how slowly they opened! She was breathless when she arrived at the little princess’ room. Dr. Campbell from the British Consulate was standing near the door. He shook his head at Anna. His mouth formed words soundlessly, “She is dying.”

  The Fa-ying lay on a mattress in the middle of a carpet. Over her hung a canopy on which mosquito bars were draped. Around her bed relatives and slaves were chanting in anxious urgency, “Phra Arahan! Phra Arahan!” the most sacred of the titles of Buddha, which is repeated in the ears of the dying until life is extinct to remind the soul to go to heaven and not to lose its way. Old Princess Lamom, who had raised the child, was prostrate on the floor at her feet, apparently too overcome to do more than whisper the sacred syllables.

  Anna crept close to the bed, her heart breaking and her eyes overflowing. Not this child! Of all the children in the Palace surely not this one child. The Fa-ying opened her eyes. Recognition stirred. She held out her arms. Anna clasped the little girl to her breast, the Faying nestled close with a faint sigh, and lay still. Anna closed her own eyes in a vain effort to press back the tears. When she looked down again the Fa-ying was dead.

  Anna kissed the delicate face, thinking with a spasm of grief that there was no more need for the chant since this little one would never lose her way again. She laid the tiny body on the mattress and straightened up. The significance of what she had done reached those in the room. The death chant was succeeded by a sudden burst of wailing. The sound rose thinly through the afternoon air and was caught up by others of the harem who were kneeling on the pavement outside. Anna could hear the shrill lament echo and re-echo faintly through the streets of the Inside as word was passed along.

  “Dr. Bradley and I did everything there was to do,” Dr. Campbell said heavily, picking up his bag. “It was already too late when we were called. Her pulse was imperceptible and her skin cold. Too bad, too bad.”

  Anna was stunned by the swiftness of the cholera. Only yesterday the Fa-ying had been alive and happy. Just a few short hours before she had embodied all that was dear to her royal father and many of her English teacher’s hopes for the future. And now incredibly with all her promise and charm she was gone.

  One of the women in charge implored Anna to go to the King and tell him what had happened. None of them dared to carry the terrible news that his favorite child was dead. Anna demurred, but finally responded to the real panic of the women.

  Attendants conducted her to him. He was sitting apart in his study, still dressed in the white garments he had worn to the cremation of his son. He had just returned from igniting the pyre. As Anna entered the room she searched her mind for words with which to break the news to him gently. She could find none, but she did not need any. He read her face and, covering his own with his hands, wept passionately. Strange and terrible tears welled from a heart that sometimes seemed desiccated and shriveled to the point where it held nothing but an engrossing conceit of self.

  What could she say? She sat helpless and yet unwilling to go, leaving the King alone with his grief. No one else had ventured to enter the room with her. It was late afternoon and the last of the sunlight slanted through the windows. The great clock on the nearby tower tolled six. The King sat with his head sunk in his hands, mourning for his child, calling her by tender names as if she were on his knee to hear them. Tears streamed down Anna’s cheeks as she listened.

  So for an hour they sat almost without speaking, but close in spirit. During that little time they were not an English school teacher and an imperious Eastern monarch, but a man and a woman weeping together for a beautiful child they had both loved. Then Anna stole quietly away.

  It was morning before the King had sufficiently recovered his control to go to the hall where the Fa-ying’s body lay on a white satin cushion, fringed with heavy gold. Princess Lamom was still prostrate at the feet of the child, and would not be comforted. As the King entered silently she moved to him across the carpet and mutely laid her head on his feet, moaning “Phutho! Phutho!” In the silent room all were weeping. Speechless, with trembling lips, the royal father took the little body in his arms
and bathed it in the ceremonial manner by pouring cold water over it.

  In this he was followed by other members of the royal family, by relatives, and the ladies of the harem in waiting upon him. Each advanced in the order of her rank and poured water from a silver bowl over the slender body. Two sisters of the King then shrouded it in a sitting posture, wrapping it tightly in long strips of waxed cloth, overlaid it with perfume, frankincense and myrrh, and swaddled it in a fine winding sheet. All the things necessary for this last office to the dead child had appeared silently in the hands of those whose duty it was to prepare the royal dead for the lying-in-state.

  When these preparations were complete each person crept to the body and took a formal leave of it by repeating, “Pai sawan na! Chao-fa-ying cha.” (Go now to heaven, Chao-fa-ying.) After the leave-taking was over, three young girls dressed in white brought two golden urns. The body was gently deposited in the first and this in turn was placed in the second, which was of finer gold and richly adorned with precious stones. The inner urn had an iron grating at the bottom, and the outer an orifice at the most pendant point through which the fluids of the body could be drawn off daily by means of a stop-cock.

  These preparations were all harrowing to Anna, who had never seen them before, but she solaced herself by thinking that they could in no way disturb the rest and tranquillity of the little girl who had gone.

  The double urn was placed on a gilt sedan and borne under a royal umbrella to the temple of the Maha Prasat where it was mounted on a graduated platform six feet high and surrounded with lighted tapers, tall candles, and fragrant oil lamps which hung from the ceiling. These lights would burn night and day for the six months that would pass before the cremation.

  The King had followed the body of his favorite child from the palace to the temple with anguish in his face. During the ceremony he sat apart, his head buried in his hands, while the trumpeters and blowers of conch shells performed their lugubrious tasks. Insignia pertaining to the rank of the little princess were placed in formal order below the urn, as though at her feet. Then the musicians struck up a lamentation, ending in a plaintive and solemn dirge. When this had been completed His Majesty and all the princely company retired, leaving what was mortal of the lovely Fa-ying in the peaceful beauty of the Maha Prasat.