by Jade Lee
He saw understanding seep into the governor’s feeble mind. His eyes narrowed in confusion as he studied Zhi-Gang’s face, and then Bai abruptly paled. “But… but… But the Enforcer wears glasses!” he gasped. “Lie-Zi told me!”
Zhi-Gang grinned. “I could put them on if you like.”
The man sputtered, his gaze darting about the room to no point. His guards were not coming. Zhi-Gang allowed him to stall—for a time—but in the end, he began his interrogation. “Tell me about these girls you have sold.”
“But it is nothing!” Bai gasped. “Peasant girls sold by their paren—” His words were cut off on a gasp as Zhi-Gang drew blood. The crimson stain welled on the edge of his blade, shiny in the lantern glow.
“Do not women add value to a man’s home? Beauty and song? Sweet nectar for their husband’s pleasure, and sons to bless his old age?”
“Peasants and ugly girls,” the governor whispered. “No one of value.”
Rage darkened Zhi-Gang’s thoughts, and his hands trembled with the need to slit this bastard’s throat. Bai was a putrid excuse for a governor and part of a system of graft and illicit trade that the Emperor had tried to end. It actually hurt Zhi-Gang to pretend—even for a moment—that this corrupt system was supported by the Son of Heaven. But he claimed allegiance to the Empress Dowager. Therefore, all corruption had to stem from the enemy camp—her son—when the blame lay far more at the eunuchs’ feet.
Either way, Bai had important information. But Zhi-Gang felt sullied by the game he had once embraced. So he jerked his head in Jing-Li’s direction, signaling that his friend should continue the interrogation. He had already grown weary of it.
Jing-Li crossed the room on silent feet to stand over the quivering governor. “Who bought the girls?”
When the man did not answer, Jing-Li set a firm hand on Zhi-Gang’s arm, pressing gently backward. Zhi-Gang hadn’t even realized how hard he pushed on the governor’s neck. The man didn’t dare speak for fear of slitting his own throat. And still, Zhi-Gang found it difficult to pull away. So he leaned forward instead, whispering his words for fear that he might scream them otherwise.
“You kill China, do you know that? Every bribe that warms your body steals food from the people’s mouths. Every time you smoke an opium pipe, you open China’s doors to the white thieves that kill our country. That you would dare sell our children to the ghost devils makes you worse than a dog. Your life is forfeit, Governor Bai.” He would have finished it then. He would have drawn the blades together with relish if it were not for Jing-Li.
His friend eyed him with a dark warning, the words clear though totally unspoken: Do not push too hard. We are still outnumbered and very jar from our friends.
Zhi-Gang swallowed. Corruption was part of China and had been since long before even the Qing ruled this land. One man could not hope to stand against it, least of all himself, and yet the need burned inside him nonetheless. In the end, necessity stayed his hands. He pushed away with a snort of disgust, turning his back to this dog who had—at a minimum—allowed his sister to be sold.
“Save your life, Governor.” Jing-Li spoke in a low undertone, inaudible to any but the three of them. “Tell us of the girls. Where did they go from here? Who purchased them?”
“I… I only know of three. Brothels in Shanghai where… where I had no need to pay.”
“Name them.”
He did. With the ease of a steady customer. Zhi-Gang turned to face him. “And when you went there to whore, did you ever look in the girls’ eyes? Did you recognize their faces as the children of the servants who draw your water, as the babies of the farmers who grow your food? Did you see them and remember? Even once? As you rutted between their legs?”
The governor stared at him in stupefied confusion. He gaped while Zhi-Gang waited. In the end, the man sputtered the only answer he had. “But they were just peasant girls.”
Zhi-Gang reacted without thought. He leaped forward without conscious will and took great satisfaction in slitting the man’s throat. For the second time that day, he killed in a white-hot rage. This time the blood spilled onto the floor and not into a woman’s face.
“Shit! Diseased monkey shit!” Jing-Li cursed from where he had jumped out of the way. “Must you go about killing every corrupt dog you meet? You will have a larger mountain of dead than General Kang! What now are we to tell his wives?”
Zhi-Gang carefully wiped his blades on the elegant silk that covered Bai’s thick legs. He had to bend down nearly to the floor to find fabric clear of gore. “Tell them the truth,” he replied in an amazingly calm voice. “That the Enforcer judged their husband a traitor to the Dragon Throne and summarily executed him.” He straightened. “And then order me a bath.”
Anna dipped her head a bare half inch in thanks to the governor’s First Wife. She would have kowtowed to the sour-faced bitch if she thought it would help, but she knew that to do that would be to demean herself in the woman’s eyes. Much better to pretend to a status far above the First Wife and allow the shrew to ingratiate herself.
At least that was the plan. She was currently in the First Wife’s luxurious quarters, with wives Two through Five hovering in the background. They ranged in age between late fifties to the young teenager Wife Number Five. All were dressed in their finest, sitting or—in the case of the youngest two—standing as they pretended to embroider clothing for the governor’s children. In truth, they all were staring at her, memorizing her every word and action for later discussion.
Anna ate as delicately as possible, doing her best to play a haughty aristocrat in a borrowed chong san of darkest black—probably the best outfit allotted to the tiny Fourth Wife. Anna’s hair had been cleaned, combed and ruthlessly wrapped by a servant around a bamboo board in the style of the Manchu rulers. The delicate butterfly decoration that perched on the left side of the board had been a gift from Wife Number Two.
Now Anna ate sweet rice with pork and hot vegetable soup while the women hovered around her, their dark Chinese eyes studying her every breath as if she were a great mystery. And perhaps she was. A white concubine of a Chinese official? Who had ever heard of such a thing? And so they had hovered when she dressed, whispered behind her back whenever she looked away, and now stared at her when she ate.
Anna pretended to an aristocrat’s arrogance, acting as if she were always the focus of such undivided attention. And all the while she studied the women and wondered one thing: Who had the opium?
They had some: that much was obvious. The youngest wife—Number Five—was clearly an addict. She was waif-thin with sunken eyes and dry lips. Worse, the girl bore the mark of a man’s fist on her face and arms. God only knew what her bastard husband had done between her legs. But her eyes were glazed in that half-aware place of a user. She’d probably taken enough opium to make her forget her pain and yet still function as servant and nursemaid to Wife Number One.
Wife Number Four was twitchy, clearly hungering for the drug but abstaining. Anna judged her to be about six months pregnant. Poor woman. Her bruises were gone, but there was a tightness in her shoulders that gave her a hunched and frightened appearance.
Wives Number Two and Three had similar aspects—a shrinking, timid appearance coupled with old bruises. Number Two was the worst, with a leg so crippled that she needed a cane to move about. She was perhaps the thinnest of the wives—even more so than Number Five—and Anna doubted she got enough food to survive.
A primary question, of course, was who had beat them. It would be easy to say the double-damned governor had done it. He certainly allowed the beatings to occur. The physical marks were much too clear to miss. But a First-Wife could be equally brutal and ten times more inventive in ways to hurt the lower wives.
Whatever the case, Anna was sure that the First Wife held the bulk of the power in the women’s quarters and therefore the main stash of opium. Befriending her would be the first goal. If Anna could not worm some opium out of her, then she would have
to focus on finding the other women’s hidden stores.
Anna finished off the last of the rice, a little startled that she had eaten everything so fast. She hadn’t even realized she was hungry, but had consumed the food—praising the First Wife’s chef to the skies—in the hopes of making an ally. It had worked. Wife Number One visibly preened, beaming smugly at the lower wives as she patted her obviously dyed black hair.
Next came praise of the children. Two sons were dutifully trotted out and admired. Apparently Wife Number Two had a son as well, but he was left in the children’s quarters because—according to First Wife—he had a weak chest and would likely die soon.
Next came the litany of all of First Wife’s pains and struggles. How life was so cruel. Anna sympathized, encouraging the woman to talk as much as possible, to detail the when and how of each injury and how it affected her. And thus she got a complete picture of the power structure in the home.
The governor was a bastard. That much had been clear early, but only his current favorite wife would experience the full extent of his cruelty. Though half the First Wife’s complaints were the aches and pains of old age, the other half stemmed from her time as her husband’s only woman.
Which meant the youngest wife got the opium because she was the governor’s newest victim. Which meant all Anna needed to do was appear pathetic…
Anna allowed her mind to drift back to unpleasant moments—to hot sticky blood coating her face, to the stench of decay in the hospital’s hopeless ward, and worst of all, to the stench of sex in a smoke-drenched room. Her eyes teared and her breath choked off.
As expected, every woman in the room abruptly stopped what she was doing and stared. Anna turned her face away, burying it in her hands, but her shoulders still shook with pretend strain.
“Lady. Honored lady? What is it that ails you?” gasped the First Wife.
Anna didn’t lie, though she could have created an elaborate fiction on the spot. But the truth was always easier to maintain. “My deepest apologies,” she murmured. “It has been so hard. Sometimes I cannot breathe for the pain. The memory… “
“But what happened? Why is it so horrible?”
This was what all of them had been waiting for: a story to remember and recount over and over as they passed each day in tedious chores. Anna did not hesitate, though the words came slowly.
“I had a kind life once,” she confessed, her eyes misting. “A mother who loved me, or so they told me. Nursemaids who fed me sweets.”
All the ladies nodded. All of them had been either wealthy or beautiful children. They had to be in order to many the governor. Someone in their childhood—either a parent or nursemaid—had to have loved them. And so they understood her beginnings, though she was white and likely not nearly as wealthy.
“My father visited occasionally. He brought gifts that I treasured—a doll from Canton, sweets from England. Until he died.”
“Was it a sickness?” asked Wife Number Four.
“Hush! Do not show your ignorance by interrupting!” snapped First Wife.
Anna shook her head, the memories building up in her mind like a wave crashing over her. She fought it, as she always did, but sometimes they were too many to escape. “It was worse than that,” she said. “There was a problem. A bad shipment, a gambling debt. I don’t know.”
“Murdered, then,” said First Wife. “For his debts. And you were sold.”
Anna stiffened, unable to stop herself from snapping. “Whites do not sell their daughters like that.”
First Wife recoiled as if slapped, and so it was left to Wife Number Two to explain their assumption. “But you were given as a gift to the mandarin. How else would you be his wife?”
Anna looked away, stalling for time. How stupid of her to forget the story the mandarin had created. And how impossible to tell the truth of their meeting. “I lived in a mission,” she said. “That is where white children go. And I wrote—I write letters to my father’s family in England.” She lifted her chin. “They want me back. They want me to come to them,” she lied.
“But… how do you come to be married then? To a Chinese Imperial scholar?” Wife Number Two’s eyes betrayed intelligence despite her wasted frame.
“My father’s business partner came to the mission. He claimed… “ She shook her head. “He said I was pretty and that he needed me to help him. He lied to the nuns. He claimed he was my real father and that he wanted to take me home to England.” She looked up, real tears brimming in her eyes. “I didn’t know any different. And he was so nice to me.”
“He sold you.” Wife Number Five’s voice was dark and cold—like a whisper from the grave and equally hopeless.
Anna looked at her, at her battered face and deadened eyes, and she could not bring herself to say the truth. She could not show this girl that there was no hope in this world, though that might be the cruel reality. So she switched to exactly what they wanted to hear: an elaborate fable.
Taking a deep breath, she sighed and shook her head. “Oh no,” she whispered. “My new father turned out to be horrible and mean.” True enough. “It took me a long, long time to see the truth, but eventually I did. And then… “ She shrugged. “I ran away.”
As one, they gasped in shock. She could tell by their eyes that every one of them had dreamed of such a thing. They had hoped and schemed and prayed, but in the end, they did nothing. Where would they go? How would they survive?
“I ran away,” she said firmly. “I stole whatever I could carry and I ran as far and as fast as I could.”
“But how?” whispered the youngest wife.
“I walked. And I took rides on carts. And I sold something to pay for passage on a boat down the Grand Canal.”
Wife Number Two’s eyes narrowed. “You ran from Peking all the way down here?” It was clear she didn’t believe.
“No. I was caught quickly enough. By the mandarin himself.”
The First Wife’s mouth pinched in disapproval. “Your father must be very powerful indeed to send a mandarin to catch you.”
Anna shook her head. “Not powerful. Rich. And not every mandarin is as wealthy as they pretend. Besides, the mandarin was not sent to find me. He was sent by the Dowager Empress for another reason. He only discovered me by accident.”
“Humph,” snorted the First Wife. She didn’t really believe the story, and neither would the other ladies either. That wasn’t the point. The story was to give hope and to gain sympathy. It didn’t matter if it was real.
“But I don’t understand,” whined Wife Number Three. “How are you with the mandarin now?”
“We fell in love,” Anna stated. She hadn’t thought she could say the lie without choking, but it came out easily enough. She spoke quickly, not giving the women time to question as she spun a story about a glorious courtship and marriage on the boat. She claimed it had been years ago, and that they lived in Peking now and that she had given the mandarin a son.
They didn’t believe her. No one in this country would accept that a rich Chinese official would stoop so low as to marry a white woman. A ghost barbarian? Impossible! And yet they hung on her words, wanting to believe. After all, if someone little better than a monkey could marry a Chinese official for love, then how much easier to write a happy ending for them—Chinese women with access to money and jewels. They wanted to believe, and so they listened to her story as they would drink a dark wine or inhale sweet drugging smoke—with outward reluctance, but an inner desperation.
“You cannot be in love!” exclaimed the First Wife.
Anna nodded, pushing herself to believe it. And the Peking life she created for herself and her husband was so wonderful as to make her ache with the same longing she had for England. It was so beautiful that she nearly forgot her primary purpose—to create sympathy enough to get opium. Fortunately, Wife Number Two recalled her to the purpose.
“If your life is so happy,” she challenged, “then why do you cry? Why were you running in a fi
eld and sleeping in a tree? The villagers threw stones at you.” Then she sniffed. “I heard the story from my husband’s guards.”
Of course. Wife Two was the smartest of the bunch. Her network of spies would not be large, but it would be accurate. Anna paused as she studied the crippled woman and judged the best way to gain her sympathies. Then she heaved a dramatic sigh and looked down at the floor.
“I… I have not told you the full truth,” she confessed. “We are very happy together, my husband and I. But even a mandarin could not possibly take me as First Wife.” She raised her gaze to the Second Wife. “And my mother-in-law… “ She shuddered.
“You ran from them?” snapped the First Wife. “The women who are your sisters through your husband? The women who share their food and their home to you, a white—”
“You do not understand!” Anna cried. “You are the kindest and most gentle of wives! You cannot know how cruel some people can be!” She wiped away her pretend tears as she continued to bemoan her fate. “They pinch me and hurt me. They order me to do the most terrible things!” Then she looked up, her eyes pulled dramatically wide. “But I could stand those things! Maybe I deserve them, I don’t know.” She took a hiccupping breath. “I ran because of my father!”
Wife Number Three frowned, clearly lost. “But I thought he died. Murdered for gambling.”
Anna grimaced. “My pretend father. The one who took me from the nuns. He never stopped looking for me. He wants his things back. The things I sold to escape him.”
Wife Number Two’s eyes narrowed. “What things?”
“He found me a month ago. It is a big story in Peking about the mandarin with a white wife. Everyone talks about it. They don’t believe it is possible, that we could fall in love. But then they see me with my fine clothing and the jade in my hair, and they know it is true.”
First Wife nodded darkly. “Those who look will always find you. You cannot escape them.”
“But I did. For years, I have been so happy! But he found me. Samuel.” She whispered his name like the hiss of a snake, and all the women recoiled in horror. Then she continued, her shoulders shaking from a fear more real than she cared to admit. “A month ago, he found me and demanded payment for what he lost.”