Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  “A minute, Sarah.” Gabriel was, in turn, confused. “I’m flattered, but there is one small obstacle. What about Lionel … her husband?”

  “Husband? She has no husband.” Sarah was imprudent in her jubilation. “We’ve known for years Lionel was killed at Soochow. It was terrible … all alone among the Chinese. Never mind, though. The important thing is you and Fronah can get married. There’s no obstacle.”

  “No obstacle at all, really?” Gabriel asked in cold anger. “You mean she could have married me at any time?”

  “That’s right, Gabriel, no obstacle at all.” Her normal acuity failed in her delight. “It’s wonderful.”

  Sarah did not realize that her unthinking enthusiasm was confirming the fallacious impression she had already given the American. He was convinced that Fronah had known for a decade of Lionel’s death at Soochow. He had a few minutes earlier learned with acute irritation that his mistress had not told her parents of his Jewish blood as she said she had. He now concluded with mounting anger that she had also concealed her knowledge of her husband’s fate from him.

  The twofold deceit enraged Gabriel. He knew that Fronah was inclined to cut the truth to suit her own comfort, but he could never have imagined that she would unabashedly prevaricate regarding such vital matters. No, not prevaricate! That euphemism was far too kind. She had lied outright, not once, but twice!

  He could only conclude that she had never had any desire to marry him—or any interest in him beyond a brief affair. She did not love him, he decided, but was only playing with him. Perhaps it had amused her to pretend to consider his proposal though she had no intention whatsoever of accepting him.

  Gabriel Hyde was profoundly wounded. His pride and his self-esteem were shattered. Though he had schooled himself to curb his violent temper, his fury made him virtually incapable of rational thought.

  “Mrs. Haleevie, I’m the one whose memory is going.” His sudden formality surprised Sarah, for he had not called her Mrs. Haleevie in years. “It’s a shame, but I’ve just remembered the training exercise at the Arsenal. I only got leave by promising to report on it.”

  “You’re going right now? But you just got here. Well, if you must. Anyway, we’ll see you this evening.”

  “Please tell Fronah I’m sorry I forgot my appointment.” Behind his unruffled demeanor, Gabriel was inflamed with rage at having been so callously manipulated. “Tell her I’m very sorry and …”

  “Yes, Gabriel?” she prompted. “What else shall I tell Fronah?”

  Perhaps he should not leave abruptly in anger, he cautioned himself. But his rage peremptorily rejected that counsel. Why should he endure further humiliation?

  “Nothing else, Mrs. Haleevie,” he said. “Just tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I’m terribly sorry about … about everything!”

  CHAPTER 75

  September 11, 1874

  The Garden of Crystal Rivulets

  THE SUMMER PALACES NEAR PEKING

  The lieutenant of the Imperial Guard seated himself gingerly on the pile of untrimmed cedar beams, propped his feet on a rough-hewn marble block, and wiggled his toes. He was grateful for the break in his monotonous rounds, though for little else. The rigid-soled riding boots that enabled mounted archers to stand erect in their stirrups for surer aim were cumbersome when a man was on foot. That burdensome footgear was, unfortunately, prescribed for the full-dress uniform required by the ceremonial duty he was performing.

  Patrolling the Imperial precincts of the partially rebuilt Garden of Crystal Rivulets was classified by the Guard’s Manual as direct attendance upon the Emperor, though the Lord of Ten Thousand Years might be miles away in the Forbidden City. The watch on the ruins of the Summer Palaces was, however, normally assigned to the most junior subalterns. That onerous duty required the officer of the day to stumble by the dim light of lanterns swinging in the hands of his resentful men among the building materials that littered the construction site and the excavations that yawned like tiger traps.

  The subaltern was as resentful as his grumbling subordinates, though a diversion had come their way in the mid-September dusk. The responsibility suddenly thrust upon him promised no possible reward, but certain disgrace if anything went amiss.

  A half-hour earlier, the Tung Chih Emperor had disembarked from his barge at the pier of the Pavilion of Auspicious Twilight, heralded by a bustle of eunuchs and a clatter of troopers. Ten minutes later, his nineteen-year-old Empress Aluta arrived amid a rustle of ladies in waiting. Except for the indispensable five eunuchs admonished to sit unspeaking and unmoving in the lower story of the pavilion, the entire entourage had been summarily dismissed by the Emperor, who craved the privacy denied him in the Forbidden City. Before reluctantly withdrawing, the colonel commanding the Sovereign’s bodyguard had tapped the subaltern on the shoulder.

  “Over to you, Lieutenant,” he said. “His Majesty doesn’t know your unit is here. If anything happens—or he discovers you hanging around—you’re for the high jump. You hold the life of the Dynasty in your hands tonight. Keep close watch, my boy, and think of the honor.”

  The subaltern yawned and scratched his sweaty chest under his heavy tunic. The evening was close, and a half-toppled wall blocked the light breeze blowing off Kunming Lake. He looked with yearning at the light flickering through the shades enclosing the rear terrace of the Pavilion of Auspicious Twilight. As the dusk deepened, he saw the yellow glow of the lanterns on the front terrace reflected in the lake.

  Some Manchus had all the good luck under Heaven. That fellow on the front terrace, who was exactly his own age, eighteen years and five months, was undoubtedly lolling in a silk-cushioned long-chair and sipping wine with the lovely Aluta. The Emperor had so many women that he’d just sent away a score of the most beautiful ladies in the Empire. And all because he’d picked the right father. Well—the subaltern grinned—the Emperor hadn’t been quite so clever in picking his mother, who made his life a misery. Even so, he wouldn’t mind changing places with that fellow. While he sat lonely and bored on a pile of rough timber that cut into his buttocks, he heard his sovereign’s tenor voice raised in glee.

  The Tung Chih Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty was actually looking over the balustrade at Kunming Lake and shouting at his Empress. He didn’t care who overheard him, for he had learned how intimidating Imperial rage could be. Not only his mother could awe her most courageous subjects and subdue her most vexatious counsellors by a display of fury. Unfortunately, even his most ferocious anger could not alter his predicament that night.

  “Not a single penny did We get from the entire mess!” he shouted indignantly. “Not a single shaved silver tael or one Shansi copper cash with a dirty great hole in the middle.”

  “No one blames Your Majesty for the scandal,” Aluta soothed him. “Your Majesty’s honesty is a byword throughout the country.”

  “Every son of a turtle bitch in Peking says the opposite, Aluta,” he exploded. “And do stop all that Majesty rubbish, or you’ll get smacked. Speak like a woman to a man. Say ‘you,’ not ‘Majesty.’”

  “As Your Maj—as you wish,” she replied docilely. “If you’ll come and sit beside me and drink a cup of mao-tai. It’ll help you relax.”

  “Kua …” He slipped into the self-pitying term reserved for the Emperor. “This Orphan relax tonight? The whole damned world’s against me. And the Gods are laughing with spite in Heaven.”

  “All you wanted, my love, was to give her a nice present for her fortieth birthday. Everyone knows you were just being a filial son. But she …”

  “We … I … I won’t have you speak that way about the Empress Dowager, Aluta. My mother had nothing to do with this mess. Why she … she … ah … she … ah …”

  The Emperor sputtered and pinched his nostrils with his thumb and forefinger. Nonetheless the sneeze exploded into his hand and recurred six times. After carefully examining the slime dripping from his fingers, he wiped them on the tail of his silk-gauze robe, jus
t below the nine dragon circles scrolled in gold thread.

  “Seven times,” Aluta counted. “Everyone knows that Heaven sends seven sneezes for luck. My mother always says …”

  “I don’t give a damn what your mother says, Aluta. The stink of paint and wood shavings always make me sneeze. At least there’s no blood in the snot tonight, but my mouth feels like a sewer. Even a puff of tobacco would taste like dried cow dung. By Heaven, I could use a pipe of the great smoke … just a whiff of opium.”

  “Maj … You promised, my love. Remember. If you start again, Heaven knows what she’ll …”

  “All right, Aluta, I won’t. But there’s nothing like opium to ease my pains.”

  The Empress’s narrow face was anxious beneath its coating of rice powder. Her fingers trembled against her pale-violet skirt, and the cut-silk phoenixes fluttered on her bosom. By Heaven’s peculiar grace, which transcended Dynastic Law, she loved the wayward youth to whom she was married. Far more than his violent moods, the violent pains that afflicted him frightened her.

  “Are you feeling ill again?” she asked. “Is the pain very bad? Maybe we should go back right now.”

  “It’s not that bad, Aluta. Just the usual headache. And those damned spots on my chest are prickling like seven devils. You’ve got a couple of opium pills, haven’t you?”

  “Of course, my love. They don’t watch me so closely.” She handed him ten small black pellets. “Only a few, though they are medicine. But no more pipes of opium. If she finds out … if Your Maj … your uncles find out …”

  “What more can they do?” he sneered. “What new humiliation can they heap on me? Anyway, let’s forget it for now Just.… look at that.”

  High above the pale-gold ripples of Kunming Lake, the declining sun and the new moon glowed together in the western sky. Beyond the promontory jutting from Myriad Longevity Mount, where the Bronze Pavilion shone emerald in the flare of torches, the first stars of the night sparkled over the lonely pagoda crowning Jade Springs Hill.

  “The most beautiful sight in the Empire!” The Tung Chih Emperor was for a moment lifted out of his self-absorption. “You know, I said I was rebuilding the Park of Radiant Perfection for my mother. But every Emperor since Kang Hsi has had the Park for himself. Take a good look. You’ll probably never see it again. I know I won’t. It’s not fair.”

  “The work’s going so well, my dear. You’re doing a wonderful job, supervising almost every day. You’ve showed you’re a true Emperor, proved you can manage thousands of men in a great enterprise. How can you say you’ll never see it again?”

  “The scandal, Aluta. They forced me to promise to stop building. All because a rascally Cantonese contractor and some crooked barbarians stole a few pennies. Well, actually five or six million taels. My mother’s damned Chief Eunuch, Cobbler’s Wax Li, was in it, too. Now they’re making me stop, and I couldn’t bear to see it half-completed.”

  “My poor darling. How could they? I wonder if she …”

  “It has nothing to do with my mother, Aluta,” he snapped. “Do stop calling the Empress Dowager she and her. She’s the cat’s mother. My mother’s the Maternal Auspicious Ancestor, not she. I did want it finished for her birthday.”

  “Sometimes,” Aluta ventured, “I think she’s trying to tear us apart.”

  “Aluta, that’s not true. She wants only the best for me … for both of us. Even if I can’t bear her always telling me what to do. No wonder I run away to the … the …”

  “The Flower Quarters you mean? If that’s the only way you can get away from her, I don’t mind. But sometimes I think she hates me—even hates you.”

  “Sometimes I think so too,” the Emperor confessed. “It’s not true, of course. My mother only wants the best for me. She’s always after me to persevere in my studies and to behave better.”

  “Does she? I wonder. But she’s right about one thing. You must persevere. You must show you are a great Emperor.”

  “Much chance I have with everyone after me all the time. Aluta, I get so tired, and sometimes the pain’s terrible. I feel so sick and …”

  The Empress rose and joined him at the balustrade. She lifted his hand to her cheek. The Emperor stooped and laid his head on her bosom.

  A faint scratching on the door to the interior of the Pavilion intruded, harshly imperative, into their silence. The Emperor straightened his shoulders and rasped a single syllable: “Lai!… Come!”

  An elderly eunuch in an orange robe cautiously opened the door. Fearful of his master’s temper, he knelt and presented on upraised palms a cylindrical packet encased in Imperial-yellow silk. The youth who reigned over the world’s largest empire scowled in dismissal. He stood tapping the silk casing against his palm as the door closed.

  “So it’s come,” he said bitterly. “Just read this, what they demand I sign.”

  Aluta slipped the scroll from its casing. After staring uncomprehendingly at the columns of black ideograms for a minute, she handed it back to him.

  “I’m afraid it’s too much for me,” she sighed. “The Officials’ Language is too high-flown. Please read it to me, my love.”

  “It’s not so bad—on the surface.” He scanned the document with difficulty. “I restore my uncle Prince Kung to his offices, and I order the reconstruction of the Summer Palaces to stop: for the good of the people in these unsettled times and to conserve the resources of the Empire. It’s all put so elegantly, I could almost believe it was my own idea.”

  He shouted, and the eunuch returned with a tray bearing a single brush in a jade holder and a malachite inkstone filled with vermilion pigment. The Emperor brushed his signature on the Decree and thrust it at the eunuch, who scuttled away.

  “Damn Prince Kung!” the Son of Heaven exploded. “Damn Prince Kung and damn Prince Chün, too. Chün’s even worse. Just because he’s my uncle twice over—my father’s brother and married to my mother’s sister—he thinks he can make me do whatever he wants. Sometimes, I swear, he thinks he’s the Emperor, not me.”

  The Son of Heaven could not believe that the younger Prince Chün had reluctantly agreed with his forceful older brother, Prince Kung, that they must curb their nephew’s excesses. Prince Kung himself had originally been almost as reluctant. The Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s stratagem had appeared so brilliant: to divert the Empress Dowager, above all, and the Emperor, as well, to the reconstruction of the Park of Perfect Radiance. In the beginning, the Emperor had been fascinated by the project—and even Yehenala was less domineering. However, Prince Kung reproached himself, he should have anticipated that large-scale graft would mar the enterprise.

  The Imperial uncles could disregard the Memorial presented a year earlier by a zealous Censor-who contended that the immense cost strained the Dynasty’s resources. But when the public learned of the wholesale embezzlement, the Princes had been forced to take action. Since their Imperial nephew ignored their private remonstrances, they had submitted a formal petition imploring him to “halt the reconstruction temporarily.” The petition had also begged the Emperor to rise above the corrupting influence of his eunuchs, because both his studies and his duties required greater attention.

  They might as well bring it all into the open, Prince Kung said fatalistically. It would probably do no good, but it would certainly do no good not to try.

  The Princes, therefore, further counseled the Emperor to get more exercise in the open and to curtail his drunken carousing, as well as to give up opium and forsake the Flower Quarters. They did not reproach their nephew with the common knowledge that a Chinese harlot had infected him with the plum-poison disease. However, they warned circumspectly that his precious life would be in peril if he did not follow the strict regimen prescribed by the Imperial Physicians.

  The young Emperor had raged when he received that petition. He would, he swore, never abandon the restoration of the Park of Radiant Perfection before it again shone in the splendor created by his ancestors. He scoffed at his uncles’
concern for his studies, his duties, and his health, screaming: “They’re treating Us like a schoolboy, not a crowned Emperor!” In his fury, the Tung Chih Emperor dismissed Prince Kung from all his offices.

  “It’s getting monotonous,” that resilient statesman said to his younger brother with a shrug, “being batted back and forth between Yehenala and the lad like a shuttlecock. Sometimes I suspect you and I are the only sane ones in the family. Our father must have had the gift of foresight. Why else give me the title Kung Chin Wang, the Respectful Prince? But even my respectfulness is wearing thin. Ah well, we’ll see what happens next.”

  Just a month later, the Emperor was compelled to signify his gracious approval of his uncles’ humble suggestions. No other course was open to him, since even he realized he could not rule without their support. He therefore endorsed the Decree directing that all building cease immediately.

  “She’ll be furious!” Aluta pursued her own preoccupation. “She wants this birthday gift more than she’s ever wanted anything else. I wonder what she’ll do.”

  “I’m damned sure of one thing,” the Emperor replied. “She’ll make my life miserable. Somehow it’ll all be my fault, even though her pet eunuch Cobbler’s Wax Li was in it up to his neck. She’ll blame me and bully me.”

  “Just stand up to her, my love. If you stand up to her, what can she do?”

  “Anything she damn pleases. I’m the Emperor, but she is the Maternal Ancestor. It’s no different since my coronation. She still pulls the strings. Between bribes and threats, she’s got half the Court jumping every time she whistles. Even Niuhura always goes along with her in the long run. You too, for all I know. You too, for all your pretty ways.”

  He bellowed, and the frightened eunuch appeared.

  “Summon the Imperial Barge,” the Emperor commanded. “Get the damned thing here right now!”

  “Where are you going, my love?” Aluta asked anxiously. “Can I come? What can I do to help?”