The French warship, the Capricieuse, hadn’t come to rescue them. It was ending a long voyage from South American, and Ningpo was its first port of call. Fate had been kind.
Dr. Winchester hurried back to the flagpole and ran the British ensign to the top. He called Robert over and pulled a crumpled letter from his pocket. He handed it to Robert. “This came the other day,” he said. “It is an unsigned letter accusing you of theft from the consulate.”
Robert was stunned. He opened the letter and read that he was taking bribes and stealing money from the consulate cash box. It also revealed he was living with two Chinese women, and he was pimping them as whores. By the time he finished reading, his ears burned and the strength in his legs had leaked out. He handed the letter back. “I don’t know what to say.” He stammered. “It’s all lies. Why did you wait until now to show me this? Does this mean I’m going to lose my job? Am I to be sent to Australia and the penal colony for something I didn’t do?”
“Rubbish,” Dr. Winchester replied. “Think nothing of it. Since that letter came, I watched you carefully, and I saw your compassion for your servant earlier. No thief acts that way. I’m sure you will understand that I had no choice. I have concluded that whoever wrote that letter is someone who holds ill will for you. Your actions today prove that you are an honorable, God-fearing man. You are not the type to do what that letter accuses you of. Take care, Robert. Someone wants to ruin you. That man is a coward or he would have stood as a witness against you. I want you to know that I haven’t shared this letter with my wife because rumors can damage a person’s reputation. We wouldn’t want that.”
“Thank you for your trust, Dr. Winchester. You will not regret it.” Robert thought of Ward. Who else could it be? It couldn’t be Hollister. He had sailed to England long ago.
“Can you think of anyone who would want to do you damage?” Dr. Winchester asked.
“One man,” Robert replied, and he told about his close encounter with death at Sungkiang and the heated confrontation with Ward days later. He did not mention Ayaou.
Dr. Winchester looked irritated. He said, “I’ve heard of this Ward, and none of it was good. If you have made an enemy of him because of his ineptness, you must be careful. Although I can’t blame you for confronting him out of anger because he almost got you killed, it would have been wiser to avoid him after escaping the Taipings. You should have returned to Ningpo straightaway. The odds are he would have never discovered what happened to you or taken the time to find out. Men like him have colossal egos. He cannot take the blame for his actions. When something goes wrong, it is always someone else who is at fault. It isn’t wise to make an enemy of a man like that.”
“I agree,” Robert replied. He now realized he had made a mistake. It had never occurred to him he should have just slipped away with Ayaou. The chances were that Ward would never have found out. He had been a fool to confront the man as he had.
Dr. Winchester folded the letter and handed it to Robert. “The letter is yours now. Maybe you will recognize the handwriting one-day and be able to put a name to the man who has accused you. If it is someone powerful like Ward, I suggest you forget it.”
Robert took the letter and put it in his top left, breast pocket. He decided to carry it with him as a reminder to stop and think first.
Before Guan-jiah left the consulate to return to his family, Robert pulled him aside. “Guan-jiah, you are not my slave. You are my employee. We do not own slaves in Ireland.”
Guan-jiah stared at his feet and shuffled them. “Master, an astrologer told me that we were tied together. Wherever you go, I will follow. In that way I am your slave even if you do not own me like an animal.”
What could Robert say? After all, this was China. He could not force his beliefs on these people. They had their culture. “Guan-jiah, I’m going to raise your pay and give you a few days off a month to do as you please. What is your favorite leisure activity?”
“Eating,” he replied.
“That’s all you will do is eat?” Robert was surprised, because Guan-jiah was thin like a twig.
The eunuch eagerly nodded. “With money and time, I will eat more. I will eat crabs, drink tea, sing operas, fly kites, stew ginseng, hold conversations, take afternoon naps, have three meals in one, practice calligraphy, chew on duck-gizzards, eat carrots, walnuts, melon seeds, gamble for moon cakes, eat noodles, solve literary riddles, and sleep. It’s what any good Chinese man does when he has free time. If I become tired of that, I can always find a second job.”
Eventually the Taotai, the Chinese governor of Ningpo, hired another band of local pirates to control the Cantonese pirates.
In addition, the foreign powers, Britain included, were continuing to force China to swallow more opium trade. This made for hard feelings against people like Robert, so he started to keep a wary eye out for threats—not that he wasn’t already alert because of the attack on him. Maybe such hard feelings for foreign devils was the reason for that assault in the fog. Maybe Ward had nothing to do with it. The thought that Robert could make some Chinese peasant rich by losing his head was something not to take lightly.
Robert didn’t tell the girls about the unsigned letter or what had happened at the consulate with the Portuguese. He didn’t want to worry them.
In the afternoons, Robert went home dreading what mood the girls might greet him with. Tee Lee Ping arrived about the same time to spend the next four hours in instruction and discussion. Sometimes it was funny to Robert when he heard gibberish coming out of Master Ping’s mouth that made no sense to him. He put a serious look on his face and pretended to understand. Tee Lee Ping forgot that Robert wasn’t a native speaker and that he had to do a lot of guesswork. Nevertheless, Robert didn’t mind his teacher being difficult, which meant speaking and dropping idioms and slants like crazy. He felt the opposite. He appreciated it.
During break time, Ayaou hovered about the room. She’d ask Master Ping questions. They often ended in hot debates. It was to Robert’s benefit as he practiced his listening comprehension along with his cultural education by seeing them negotiate and manipulate each other.
“You should give my master a discount in his tuition, because your Mandarin is not as pure as the Mandarin spoken by Peking opera actors,” Ayaou said one night, and Robert was alarmed. He thought he was about to lose his teacher.
Ayaou believed Robert should learn the Imperial accent instead of the Ningpo accent. She demonstrated Master Tee Lee Ping’s flaws. The look on his face said he was taking her criticism as an insult, but he did not say one word to her. The reason he swallowed Ayaou’s insults was because she was a Chinese woman. This was the woman’s role, to be the critic so one’s head did not swell. Tee Lee Ping yielded to Ayaou when it came to proper pronunciation.
“You should split your pay with me,” she said in a joking tone. He answered her with silence while he continued the lesson.
With Ayaou in charge, Robert’s progress mastering Chinese accelerated. Ayaou and Shao-mei pounced on his Ningpo accent. The penalty was to wash the dishes when they caught him. Keeping strictly to this schedule and routine helped minimize any pitfalls that might open at his feet when Shao-mei had a mood swing. The only times he felt as if he were walking on broken eggshells was at bedtime and in the mornings before he went to the consulate.
After Tee Lee Ping left, Shao-mei, Ayaou and Robert ate the evening meal. Then his lesson with the girls started. They were ardent students. They picked up the written language faster than he was learning it. If this kept up, they would catch up to him before a year had gone by.
While he was teaching, there were giggles and strange hand motions between the girls. During snack time they’d chat, telling each other what had happened in the morning market to rumors about an Imperial theft taking place inside The Forbidden City.
Although they were fascinated with what the neighboring concubines had been wearing in their hair, the girls never spent a penny on their clothing or o
rnaments. Even after Robert told them they were allowed to do so on special occasions, they didn’t think they deserved it.
Eventually when the tutoring ended, which meant bedtime, gloom settled inside the house like thick smoke. It made the long nights colder. Ayaou was no longer a willing bed warmer. She’d turned to ice.
Shao-mei’s beautiful, bright eyes had grown dark circles under them. She looked tortured. She’d be happy one moment and sour the next. She blamed herself for everything—the dinner was too salty, or the tea wasn’t hot enough. She looked nervous and unwilling to go to her room when bedtime came. Ayaou silently held her sister’s hand for a long time before parting for the night. This scene caused Robert’s stomach to twist into knots making for another difficult night getting to sleep.
Ayaou went to Shao-mei’s room. The sisters whispered into the night. Robert read his Chinese books as he waited for Ayaou. Some mornings he awoke to find her side of the bed empty.
He feared going into Shao-mei’s room to see if Ayaou were there. The truth was that Robert feared seeing his beauties, the loves of his heart, in the same bed. He knew his weakness. The warning signs were his dreams. They were filled with him having intercourse with Ayaou and Shao-mei at the same time. While he was inside one of the girls, the other massaged his back and played with his testicles. Then they switched positions before he ejaculated. All the while the sisters urged him not to shoot all his seeds so both would know pleasure and fulfillment.
Sometimes Robert stood at the head of the stairs and listened to them through the door. Shao-mei’s tone told him she was holding back a tempest of jealousy and despair.
Shao-mei said one night, “You know what will happen if Robert doesn’t come to me. One day he will be short of money. He’ll find a reason to sell me. Is that what you want, sister?”
“I’m not going to fall into one of your silly traps,” Ayaou replied. “Go to sleep or I’ll leave.”
As time slipped by, his sense of imbalance turned into depression. At night, his desire sometimes went wild. It was impossible to shut his mind off. The loss of sleep was wearing him down. He honestly didn’t know how much longer he could go on like this. Something had to change.
Robert was beginning to hate himself. He was tempted to give up both Ayaou and Shao-mei and move into the consulate or possibly quit his job to become a missionary. As he sat on the idea, he realized he couldn’t live without them. Where would they go if he set them free? It was painful for him to consider they might end up as prostitutes, or their father might sell them to the highest bidder again. Besides, Ayaou still belonged to Ward. Letting go of Ayaou meant she might be returned to him. The concept of freedom in China for a woman was almost nonexistent. Women were considered property by almost everyone.
He finished reading The Dream of the Red Chamber. Reading the one hundred and twenty chapters spread out over the three volumes had been tedious. Tee Lee Ping spent hours with Robert discussing the meanings between the lines.
“Are you saying that the novel is an extended metaphor?” Robert asked at one point.
“Of course,” his teacher replied. “I will have you read the story of Nu Wa Mending the Sky. Then you will see how Lin Daiyu is an incarnation and how that creates an alliance between stone and wood.”
The look of confusion on Robert’s face must have been obvious.
“Yes, I see,” Tee Lee Ping said. “You will have to read Nu Wa Mending the Sky to understand.”
His explanations helped Robert see the Chinese way of thinking. The culture was built with much complexity and sophistication. An ordinary conversation concealed hidden meanings that could be the key to either break or mend a relationship. The tragedy in the story came from misunderstandings and false assumptions. To Chinese intellectuals talking in circles was the way to exhibit the richness of the mind. Any impatient listener was thought uncultured. To understand you also had to be a scholar of Chinese mythology and folklore. Then you could start making the connections. Robert saw that he had much to read and learn.
“Mr. Hart,” Master Tee Lee Ping said one day after a challenging discussion. Robert kept getting the characters confused. After all, there were more than four hundred named characters in the book. “Be patient and you will reach your goal. Reading The Dream of the Red Chamber and understanding it is the one sure way to know China.”
Reading Chinese literature should have satisfied him, for he was a lover of books, but Robert yearned to read in his language. He struggled with the Chinese characters. He thought in English and had to translate every character. At times, he yawned and found his thoughts straying. To get relief, he took breaks and read books in English. Eventually, he forced himself back to the task he was committed to, which was master Chinese and understand how the people thought.
Robert wanted to read about all the cultures of the world and know what was happening in every part of the British Empire. Whenever he got a copy of the London Times or another English language newspaper, he devoured them. He recalled fondly the bookshops and libraries of Belfast where he’d spent so much time. Books were the doors and windows to the world. One learned so much from reading.
It was expensive on his salary ordering books from home. When he could afford to purchase one or two without causing a financial burden to his girls, he sent a request and the money to his family.
He’d never stopped writing home, but he was careful what he allowed his family to know about his life. He never mentioned Ayaou or Shao-mei. Many times he crafted fictions in his letters that made his life look like something it wasn’t. He also did not forget that someone else like Ward might be reading what he was writing. It was frustrating to realize that someone might be spying on him. It was even worse that he could do nothing about it. He could stop writing the letters. He could instruct his family and friends to stop, but that was unthinkable—those letters were his only contact with home.
As he was finishing The Dream of the Red Chamber, several novels arrived from Ireland. One was Charlotte Mary Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe. Robert was a fan of her writing. He read the book in record time and identified with the character of Guy Morville, who had a dark side to his nature that he struggled to control as Robert struggled to control his.
Both The Dream of the Red Chamber and Mary Yonge’s book made a deep emotional impact on him, since they focused on decadence and the tragedy born of it. Like Guy, Robert struggled to do what was right. Guy was not a villain, and Robert could see he wasn’t either.
He hated Guy’s cousin, Philip Edmonstone, when he drove Guy to his death by his sanctimonious righteousness. Robert saw similarities between Philip and the missionaries across the river. After all, they had condemned Hollister for having Me-ta-tae. Had those missionaries damaged Hollister as Phillip damaged Guy? It wasn’t right to treat others as if you were morally superior to them. All humans had flaws. All faced temptations.
There was also the character of Xue Baochai in The Dream of the Red Chamber, who appeared to fill a similar role to that of Philip Edmonstone. Where Philip drove Guy to his death, the scheming of Baochai and other family members indirectly drove Taiyu to her death. Robert wondered if there was anyone capable of driving him to his death.
Shao-mei started to gain weight and wear loose clothing to hide it. Because of her depression, she must have been binge eating when Robert wasn’t home. This explained why her stomach was always upset. Her flat chest also vanished, as her breasts developed.
In early December Robert took the girls to see the opera The Dream of the Red Chamber, which only covered a portion of the book. His teacher, Master Ping, accompanied them. They shared a box with a Chinese banker Robert had done business with at the Consulate. The banker pointed out the actress who was playing Urjia. He said Peach, the actress’s real name, had recently become his fifth concubine. Robert saw by the shine in the banker’s eyes that he was proud of her. Robert asked. “How do you manage your relationship with your concubines?”
The
banker looked at Robert and laughed. “I’ve never discussed this topic before. The number of wives a man has in China is a sign of his status—of how successful he is. The concubines are his property. There’s no relationship to it.” He paused and studied Robert, who was the only foreigner in the audience. Everyone was speaking Chinese. Robert found it amazing that he understood what they were saying.
“I see that you’re a man seeking answers.” The banker’s eyes darted toward Shao-mei and Ayaou, who were sitting with Tee Lee Ping in the other chairs in the shared box.
“I’d like to invite you for an evening meal at my home sometime this week,” the banker said. “You’ll see how I run my house.” He smiled slyly.
They agreed on the Saturday coming up.
During the entire play, Shao-mei and Ayaou sat spellbound. They laughed when the characters flirted by singing poems to one another and wept when the female protagonist, Taiyu, died of heartbreak.
The costumes fascinated Robert. Master Ping said the design of the costumes came from the Ming Dynasty. The embroidery and headdresses were intricate in design. The way the actors painted their faces helped show what kind of character the person was. The characters with the redder face paint demonstrated courage and loyalty above all else while those with the blacker face paint were more impulsive. Blue face paint said the character was cruel but white indicated wickedness. On the other hand, if only the nose was white, it let the audience know this character would impart humor to the plot.
The screeching falsetto of the singers, the loud clacking of the clappers and the noisy banging of drums and cymbals were all shocking. At the same time, the over dramatic nature of the opera kept Robert sitting stiff and erect in his seat lest he miss something. There was never a dull moment.
My Splendid Concubine Page 21