The Courtesan

by Alexandra Curry

  Jinhua is not here.

  Suyin gasps too because she can still hear those other sounds, fainter and more distant than they were before, the sounds she heard in the night that made her body sweat and the blood pound in her ears; they made her bones quiver and her teeth clench as though they were nailed, the top ones to the bottom.

  It was those sounds that made her body do these things while Suyin slept and didn’t sleep—and it was the prince and what he did to her. She has known pain before, but it was a different kind of pain and she cannot think about that now. It was Jinhua as well. That Suyin screamed and blamed her, that Jinhua left—and who can say that she should have stayed?

  Lying there, Suyin calls Jinhua’s name. She calls for Lao Ye and the two houseboys and Cook. She calls for the girls, one by one, all six of them, even though she knows that everyone has gone, and no one will come back to a place where such terrible things have happened. She calls in a weak and quiet voice, and no one answers.

  It is ferociously hot in the room. Daylight is beginning, and there is much to be done, surely there is, and Suyin aches in too many places to count: her ankle, her shoulder, her mouth—her breasts and her bottom. It takes a huge effort to will the aching places out of her mind. She won’t think about the prince or the pain—she won’t think now about a man forcing himself on her, although the words for this are there in her head. It is not so bad, she tells herself. It is a thing that has passed, and I have survived just once what Jinhua has survived so many times. And now there are things to be done, and I must be the one to do them.

  Weng. Weng. Weng. The mosquito is circling, and the sound of it is unendurable. Suyin sits up slowly. She gets slowly, painfully out of the bed. She stands for a moment, motionless, eyeing with horror the stains she now sees on her naked body. Bruises, scratches, drying blood, and fresh blood too. Places where the prince has left his mark. Suyin howls, a howl for all that has happened. For the pain she cannot, after all, deny. For her chastity that is no longer, and most of all because the Boxers are chanting those terrifying words of murder, and Jinhua has gone somewhere—and terrible things can happen—and Suyin does not know what to do.

  When the howl subsides, when Suyin has found a way to be quiet, she reaches for the knife on the bed, and she tells herself, You are the same person you were before the prince came here. You are Madam Working Hands. You are as strong as a boulder. You are a pillar of iron in a sea of trouble, and you can wield this knife.

  Jinhua

  “I’d love to offer you a drop of sherry or port or a cup—” Edmund is saying, and he is neither calm nor looking at Jinhua, speaking very quickly, and his bed has not been made. “Don’t be cross with me—but the situation is calamitous, and I have no time—you do see, don’t you?” He looks up, but only for a moment, “Clever girl,” he adds, “to dress yourself like a filthy, dirty Boxer in this time of canis canem edit.”

  Dog eat dog.

  Edmund’s pale hair is out of order, and he is packing, doing it carelessly, throwing things into his leather traveling case. A shirt not properly folded, a slipper, a pipe, a bottle of tawny liquid.

  Calvados. Or one of Edmund’s lovely brandies.

  Jinhua’s heart is pounding. She has seen things on her way here—terrible, shocking things—streets on fire lighting up the sky. Knives, flames, axes, spears. Rivers of blood. Boxers stomping through the streets—cutting people into pieces.

  “I need your help,” she says, pleading with Edmund. “They have lists—”

  “Dies irae,” he says, snatching up a pair of trousers and tossing them into the leather case. “Another Latin phrase for you to learn, and this is the moment, je promets. It means the day of wrath.” He is still not looking at Jinhua. A heap of other items on the bed are poised for packing: socks, a book, a silver corkscrew, a jade belt buckle. He is looking at these things, choosing and deciding. Jinhua grabs his arm.

  “There is no one else I can ask—”

  Edmund stops. He stops for just a moment, and he is shaking his head, and he says, “Look, it is worse, much worse, than we all feared. Boxers killing foreign bugger devils and foreign bugger devils killing Boxers. My neighbor’s head has been removed from his body and is now parading the streets on the high end of a long stick. As for me—c’est très périlleux, I do fear. Time to push off, you see, for safety, for the dubious comforts of the British Legation.”

  “I know,” Jinhua screams, and she has mustered all the strength she has left to say this, and her feet are aching, and she is tearing at the front of Edmund’s shirt. “I saw it,” she sobs. “I saw your neighbor’s head—and Edmund, you are strong. Tell me what to do. I am not asking for myself. I need help for Suyin. She doesn’t deserve to be killed. She is injured, Edmund, and not herself. Where can we go?”

  Edmund has pulled away from her. Gone back to his packing. “Pull yourself together,” he says, and his voice is sharp. “I will help you if I can, if you will just simmer down and let me think.” He snatches up a stack of handkerchiefs. “Come to the main gate at Legation Street. You and the always lovely Suyin. Meet me there. Now, off you go, fetch her, and hurry.”

  Edmund is looking now at Jinhua with his blue, blue eyes, a box of cigars in his hand poised for packing. “Ah,” he says. “You have a knife. Be ready to use it. Remember, Jinhua, dies irae.”

  The red headscarf from Houseboy Liu has slipped over one of Jinhua’s eyes. She has the knife he gave her in an iron-fingered grip, and she is running, running as she has never run before, her feet on fire, her teeth clenched, her lungs close to bursting. The street is filled with people; all of the people are running as she is, their possessions, as much as they can possibly carry, bundled into great blue parcels; dragging children, pushing wheelbarrows laden with old people, pots, kindling, and bedding; heading east, a few heading west. They are running away as fast as they can, looking neither left nor right, looking now and again over their shoulders to see the danger behind them, running faster than Jinhua can run with every muscle working. They are running away from catastrophe—running away from fire, and knives, and almost certain death.

  “When you get to Legation Street speak German, old girl, speak English, French, Latin,” Edmund called to Jinhua as she was leaving his house. “Tell the foreign devil bugger bastards that you are a Christian, for Christ’s sake. Our Father which art in Heaven is a good start. Pater noster qui es—if you can manage—otherwise they will shoot, and they will shoot to kill.”

  And now Jinhua sees them coming down the street toward her. Boxers. Three of them in front and many more behind—strutting like dusty, hungry farmyard cockerels with their headscarves and sashes and wide, dirty country faces—knives in their hands, some of them carrying flickering torches; they are almost dancing, waving yellow banners, brandishing those knives above their heads. They are laughing as though they own the pebbles on the street, the dust in the air, and the clouds in the sky. Laughing like crazy people. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Shouting those awful words. “Support the Qing,” they scream in their hoarse voices. “Kill the collaborators.” In her mind, Jinhua hears Prince Duan saying, “The cause of the Spirit Boxers is just and correct,” and she sees him mounting Suyin—and then she hears the last words that Prince Duan spoke. “What I have done is nothing,” and she is running on her tiny feet back to the Hall of Midsummer Dreams and back to Suyin, who does not deserve any of this—and when all of this is over—

  Suyin

  She is in the kitchen when she hears them. A cricket is singing, and Suyin is eating cold rice from an oxblood bowl with wet hair dripping down the back of her gown, armed with the prince’s knife that Jinhua left for her. She is hungry enough to swallow the wind, and Suyin has decided to go—again and again, and decided to stay—over and over. To go and find Jinhua wherever she is. To stay here and wait for her to come back.

  But those Boxer voices are very near, and it is too late now to think of choices, of going or staying or finding or waiting. Suyi
n leaves the rice and the oxblood bowl and steps onto scorching courtyard pavers arranged in the everlasting pattern; and every muscle is taut, and the Boxers are just outside the gate, shouting, fearless—enraged and excited—the flames of their torches soaring over the wall. “This is the place,” they holler, “the hall of foreign devil dreams,” and the wall seems suddenly impossibly low and the lock on the gate is impossibly meager, and the low wall and the meager lock are all that separate Suyin from the knives and the flames and the Yi He Tuan.

  “Support the Qing and kill the collaborators,” the Boxers are screaming, and Suyin maneuvers herself into a small space between the kitchen wall and the frail cover of a cluster of camellia bushes that have not yet bloomed. She hears the gate groan, then creak, then splinter with a loud, long, untidy crash. She sees splashes of red leap through a glaring, ragged opening. One—two—five—no, ten—eleven—there are far too many of them to count. The Boxers are inside, overturning potted plants. Smashing a garden stool, a table, a lantern. “We are here for the Emissary’s Courtesan,” they shriek, and there is noise everywhere, and there is no air left in Suyin’s lungs. “We will show no mercy. We will slice off her breasts and sever her arms and her legs from her body. We will poke out her eyes and burn her to ashes. She cannot run away—she cannot hide. We will find that woman wherever she is—”

  Suyin moves out from behind the bushes. Flames leap from the Boxers’ torches to the kitchen roof and then to the heavens. She screams a scream of sheer terror. She screams again, and now she is ferociously angry, ready to fight, to struggle with every bone and every limb—tiger against tiger—dragon against dragon—woman with knife against Boxers in the courtyard. Her voice is loud and sure above all the other sounds, and her fingers grip the prince’s knife, and they are made of iron—

  “Look no further,” she cries. “I am the one you want. I am the Emissary’s Courtesan.”

  It is a young boy who reaches Suyin first, who raises an arm and a knife, who believes that she is Sai Jinhua. He is barely more than a child, and his fellow Boxers are chanting those murderous words, and the Hall of Midsummer Dreams is burning with a heat that is unbearable. The prince’s knife drops from Suyin’s hand, and the boy lunges, and she knows that he, too, has no choices left. She feels the plunge of his knife into her heart, a pain that hurts beyond all other pain, and then her anger vanishes. The pain is gone. “I wish,” she whispers—“I wish”—and the last thing that Suyin sees is the uncertainty in a young boy’s eyes.

  PART SIX

  The Courtesan’s Child

  OCTOBER 21, 1900

  The Palace of Peaceful Longevity

  The Forbidden City

  Peking

  46

  THE LION AND THE BUTTERFLY

  Count Alfred von Waldersee

  Verdammter Hund.

  The damned dog has eyes like liquid garnets that could crack a grown man’s heart into a thousand pieces. No bigger than Alfred’s kneecap, the dowager empress’s Pekinese has woken him from a much-needed soldier’s forty winks by pawing the toe of his boot.

  He assumes the dog was hers because it was found cowering in a corner of the dowager’s bedroom in the Palace of Peaceful Longevity near what looked to all the world like a pile of the dowager’s fingernail clippings.

  So much for palaces with golden roofs. Scheisse.

  When the dog woke him, Alfred had been dreaming, hunched over a fresh blotter, a telegram from the kaiser, and a letter from his wife, Marie, who is American and ambitious and pious, and has as much or more to say in her letter than the kaiser has. Hunched over what was, until the fourteenth day of August, the empress dowager’s massive pearwood desk in what was her sitting room until that same day, the day that General Gaselee arrived with his Union Jack and his Sikhs and Rajputs to put an end to the Boxers’ siege of the legations.

  The Brits were the first to arrive, of course. The punctual, unctuous British.

  He—Alfred—arrived later. The siege was over. The empress had fled. The expedition was a soldier’s nightmare—and its aftermath still is, with eight bickering, so-called allied armies at large, and Alfred is wondering how it is that a man called by his kaiser to be the Allied Supreme Commander in China over all these armies can be sitting in a frigid palace with a foolish little dog at his feet and a sudden, guilty craving for a cigar gnawing at his tongue.

  “Cigars are forbidden,” according to Marie, who thinks Alfred should have been here for the big fight. But he is here now—in the empress’s sitting room, which is his campaign office, with a single brazier putting out a puny heat—and pondering the kaiser’s orders to tidy up what is known as “the Chinese situation.” Exact retribution is what the kaiser means. Put an end to die Gelbe Gefahr. The Yellow Peril.

  And what is also understood by this, of course, is that one must make sure that Germany gets her fair share of the loot in the aftermath of war.

  There is treasure in Peking. Lots of it. Porcelains and jades—

  The dog is relentless, mewling, bowlegged, probing Alfred’s boot. He doesn’t like dogs, not unless they hunt, which this one surely doesn’t. He cocks his boot a little to the left and the dog cocks its head at an identical angle. Their eyes meet, his and the dog’s, and the dog is as white as untouched snow, and it seems to Alfred that the creature adores him.

  At sixty-eight he is too old for this. He is too old to be Bismarck, which is, he knows, what Marie has in mind for him.

  “This is the last chance for us,” she told him just before he boarded the steamship Sachsen bound for Shanghai. She is hungry for power. She is bedding the young kaiser, he suspects.

  Scheisse—again. Alfred’s socks inside his boots are stiff with dried sweat.

  It is a hellish task, this Chinese business. All in the name of the glorious German Kaiserreich, and the bloody-minded British, the pious Americans, the conniving Russians, the duplicitous, heathen Japanese, the slovenly French, the Austrians, and the Italians—they are all the same.

  And then there is Marie.

  Alfred puts down his pen and scoops the little dog onto his lap and pours himself a glass of Schnaps. He tosses his head back and savors the faint scent of apricots for just an instant, then the bitterness on his tongue and the heat that seeps from his gullet down into his chest.

  It is a soldier’s comfort, and one that he needs. He toasts the dog.

  “Prost.”

  He read this morning in the Times a report that Count Alfred von Waldersee, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces at Peking, is down with a bout of dysentery, and he thinks of what he knows is true yet not recorded in the worthy pages of what passes as a purveyor of news. That native women have been suffocating themselves with their silk veils to escape rape by civilized Christian men, and that eighty-five broken clocks have been found inside the Forbidden City, and that diplomats and missionaries are plundering Peking’s palaces, soldiers tittering at the sight of a Chinaman’s head exploding from the impact of a dumdum bullet. And he wonders—what should he write, exactly, to a kaiser bent on revenge?

  He is exhausted. And the white dog reminds him suddenly of the little Chinese girl in Vienna. Those dark eyes, exotic and trusting and vulnerable. That heart-shaped face, her skin so light and her hair so dark. A child and not a child, both at the same time. He remembers the sense he had on that day in the Prater that she had somehow been harmed. That she was waiting for something to happen. Maybe it was happiness. He remembers now her voice worrying sweetly over German words that were harsh with consonants and other European sounds.

  He has not thought of her in a long while. They met only the one time, but he’d like to see her again. She will have grown into a beautiful woman by now.

  If she is alive. If she has survived this damnable, godforsaken war.

  If I wanted to find her in this damnable, godforsaken country, Alfred wonders now, how would I do it? And why?

  He pours himself another glass of Schnaps. And then another. T
he Pekinese uncurls itself in his lap and rolls onto its back, and it is so small and so white and so utterly trusting of him. An ear twitches, bent paws hover, and a hairless belly rises and falls. A vein in Alfred’s temple throbs and he tells the dog, “One day I should give you a name. Snowglobe might just suit.”

  47

  THE PINE IN WINTER

  THE SECOND DAY OF DECEMBER 1900

  The Residence of Qing Shan in the

  British Sector, Peking

  Jinhua

  There is a hollow-eyed child in Edmund’s bed. A boy and not a man, which briefly surprises Jinhua—and then it appalls her.

  She has known since the end of what Edmund calls le siège, or the siege, or sometimes the Boxer Troubles, that he goes off to so-called secret establishments, places where men are men and they are women too. But the boy is only a child. He can’t be more than ten or eleven. Jinhua aches for him. She is pouring pale tea into delicate porcelain cups that Edmund has, most likely, pilfered from a palace, a house, from someone who is dead. A green lampshade palliates the light in his bedroom in this place that he procured when the siege of the legations was over.

  The house does not belong to him. It is a place with a harmful history.

  “I have these things pro tempore—not forever, just for safekeeping,” Edmund says, “until the rightful owners can be found.” By this he means this house that belonged to a man named Qing Shan who drowned himself in the courtyard well for fear of the foreign soldiers’ revenge. In another era long before this one, Qing Shan was Prince Duan’s tutor.

  Prince Duan. The man with the small hands and the ferret face who claimed he had done nothing. The history of this house causes Jinhua to weep tears of rage at this man who taught yet failed to teach Prince Duan, and when she thinks of what she herself has done and failed to see, the tears become hotter and more bitter.