My Splendid Concubine (41 page)

“
Running sickness?” he asked.

“
Yes, if you drink water that is not boiled, you will be running to the chamber pot to empty yourself. You will wither up and die.”

“
But what does boiling water have to do with that?”

She stared a
t him as if he’d lost his mind. “The Chinese have done it forever,” she said. “No one drinks cold water. If it is not hot, you do not drink it or you stand a chance of getting sick. The boiling cleanses the water so you will not get sick.”

Robert was baffled. How did boiling the wa
ter keep you from getting sick?

She huffed and threw her arms into the air.
“You foreign devils are hopeless, Robert. Trust me. Do not drink water that has not been boiled and do not take the word of anyone telling you a glass of cold water was boiled. Now get on your way to the teahouse and get your bath. You stink. You must have been eating that yellow colored stuff you call cow cheese. This week you smell sour.”

She was right. Mrs. Winchester had received a shipment of her f
avorite cheese, Port-du-Salut, produced by Trappist monks in the Brittany region of France. Her husband had a friend at the monastery that shipped them a crate each year. The cheese came in thick cylinders nine or ten inches in diameter with an orange rind and a pale-yellow middle. Robert had snacked on it all week at the consulate.

As h
e walked to the teahouse, he tried to smell what she smelled but couldn’t. How could eating cheese make him sour?

Tea was an indispensable part of life in China. A Chinese saying ident
ified the seven basic daily necessities as fuel, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar and tea. China was where the custom of tea drinking started. It was here that he was introduced to his favorite green tea,
Lung-ching
, Dragon Well.

It was in teahouses
that Robert gained knowledge of politics and everyday life in China. Gossip about the Imperial government in Peking was also a favorite topic.

“
Did you hear about the thefts from the Forbidden City?” an old toothless man said. Robert was one of six at the table that day. He’d finished his bath and was enjoying several cups of tea in a relaxing atmosphere of friendship.

“
I heard about a theft a few weeks back,” a middle-aged butcher replied. “They said it was a mystery. A priceless jade hairpin vanished from the Empress Tzu Tsi’s palace as if it had been an ice cube and melted away. No one could figure out what happened. If that is what you are talking about, I have heard it.”

“
No,” the toothless man said. “That is old news. That was the first theft. Now there has been a second. The first theft is not worth talking about anymore. This time, they say it was a clock, a gift from the czar of Russia. It was there on the wall in the morning and gone in the afternoon. The Forbidden City’s Bannermen closed all the gates. The eunuchs searched every building inside the vermilion walls before the gates were opened again. Nothing was found. Not a clue. Imagine that this happened inside the Forbidden City where eyeballs have eyeballs. If there is a thief inside the Forbidden City, it must be a ghost.”

“
Ghost, hah,” the butcher said. “Nonsense. That hairpin was more valuable than a clock. The hairpin had a string of pearls hanging from it. A thing that tells time is worth nothing. Who cares what time it is? When the sun is up, it is daylight, and when the sun is out of the sky, it is night. We work until our work is done no matter if it is light or dark.”

“
Not this clock,” the toothless man said, not to be outdone. “They say this clock had diamonds and rubies for numbers. The even numbers were diamonds and the odd were rubies.”

“
Whoever this thief is, he will get caught and lose his head,” a silk merchant said. “It has to be one of the eunuchs—a stupid one who will not get a chance to enjoy the wealth gained. You cannot spend money when your head is not attached to your neck. Who else lives inside the Forbidden City other than thousands of concubines and the Emperor? The soldiers guarding the city never pass beyond the second gate.”

“
It would take a band of thieves to pull this off. One eunuch working alone could not do it.”

The rumors about thefts taking place inside the Forbidden City and speculations about who was doing it continued. Every few weeks there was a fresh theft. Each item taken was always worth a small fortune. Sometimes months slipped by before a new theft took place. Robert was sure the rumors inflated the values of the pieces taken, but to a common Chinese anything inside the Forbidden City was priceless—including the chamber pots. “Did you know that when the Emperor takes a shit, he has a dozen eunuchs waiting to wipe his ass? The thief is probably one of those eunuchs. How would you like to spend your life cleaning the Emperor’s ass?”

On another day, one of his
teahouse friends, a man who earned his living making fresh tofu juice from soybeans each morning, invited Robert to take an empty seat at his table.

After he
sat, the tofu juice merchant said, “Don’t look, Robert, but there is a man sitting at another table in the corner behind you who has been staring at you. I have noticed this strange behavior from the same man before. When you arrive on Saturdays, he is always waiting as if he is expecting you. He sits at the same table with his back against the wall. Before you arrived, he was staring into his teacup. After you arrived, his eyes glued on you.”

Robert
’s desire for tea fled, and his stomach felt as if it were shriveling into a prune. “Is this man Chinese?” he asked.

“
No, he looks like he could be a Japanese sailor. He also looks as if he has other foreign blood in his body. He is big like a foreign devil, and his eyes are not right. The look on his face is like that of a man waiting for something to happen. It is strange. I thought I should mention it.”

“
I thank you for your concern,” Robert said. This stranger sounded like the man he’d seen skulking outside his house in the dark that time he’d opened the bedroom window to breathe fresh air. He remembered the mugger with the club. He also thought of the man who attempted grabbing Ayaou, and the two men who had hunted him in the fog to press him into a British naval ship. Was this the beginning of another attempt to ruin his life?

He
was sure Ward was behind this too. He believed that Ward was the common thread to the threats against his girls and to him. He had to be careful. Only a crazy man goes to such extremes for such a small thing, and by all accounts, Ward was a lunatic. His reputation as a ruthless mercenary was growing.

On the other hand, Ward had many women to take care of his needs. Why waste so much effort to reclaim Ayaou? Why not just demand that Robert pay the five hundred pounds
instead?

It took a strong effort n
ot to turn and stare. By the time Robert was ready to leave, the stranger was gone. After that, whenever Robert entered the teahouse, he always managed a casual glance to see if he could spot this person. According to his friends, the stranger never appeared in the teahouse again. As time went by, this bothered Robert more than if the man had been there. What if this stranger had been a spy sent by Ward to gather information on Robert and Ayaou?

He didn
’t tell Ayaou or Shao-mei about the strange man from the teahouse. He didn’t want to scare them. He just reminded them to keep the window shutters closed and the door locked.

It wasn’t enough that he worried about strangers coming to ruin his life. Now Ayaou and Shao-mei were exhausted from the daily war with the growing heat leading toward summer.

In the mornings when he
awoke, there was a large wet spot on the bamboo mat from his sweat. The girls looked like dehydrated plants. They sat and frantically waved hand fans to generate a breeze. It didn’t help. He urged them to rest and put off scrubbing the floors and laundry for cooler days.

He said
they could eat out more often, so they didn’t have to cook. The sisters refused to cut any of the chores. They hated the idea of a dirty house, soiled clothing and the cost of eating out.

Robert told Guan-jiah about the teahouse stranger. “I want to move to a safer place,” he said. “I’m worried for my concubines. I can’t protect them when I’m working. Where can we hide?”

“
It is wise to be cautious, Master,” Guan-jiah replied. “I suggest you talk to a third cousin of mine who owns property outside the city. Maybe you could rent something from him.”

Not wanting to alarm the sisters with t
he truth, Robert told them he wanted to move to an isolated, out-of-the-way place away from the city where the air was cool and fresh. “The city walls cut off the breeze,” he said. “It will be better outside.”

“
That is true,” Shao-mei agreed. “We never lived in a city before. It is difficult to get used to the crowds and the smells. It would be good for us and our child to get away.”

Robert made plans and Ayaou arranged a reasonable rate from an Uncle. The old man owned a sampan, and he would take Robert house hunting. Thi
s uncle’s name was Bark.

Uncle Bark was an old toothless man with skin the color of dried leather. His face looked as if it had been shrunk to fit against the bones of his skull. He looked like a shriveled apple. He had to be over seventy, yet his body was stringy muscle. His energy to keep working no matter what the circumstances or temperature impressed Robert. Uncle Bark eventually played a crucial part in keeping Robert alive.

Guan-jiah’s cousin guided Uncle Bark and Robert upriver to an abandoned cottage inland from the river beside a creek. The cousin was the opposite of Guan-jiah. Where Guan-jiah was slender, the cousin was short and round. Guan-jiah had Buddha ears, but the cousin’s ears were small like dry flat prunes. The cousin’s eyes were black beads set close on either side of a thin nose. He looked like a thief, and that made it difficult for Robert to trust him.

The cottage was sur
rounded by shade trees. It sat on a knoll a dozen feet above the creek about a half-mile from the river. Uncle Bark tied his sampan onto a half rotting dock. They followed a weed-choked path up the slope to the cottage. The glass was gone from the windows. The outside boards had turned gray. Robert saw dry rot. The front door was missing. Piles of dry leaves crunched under his feet as he
walked from room to room. Spider webs were everywhere.

The stove in the kitchen had been stolen. The sitting room was large, and it opened to a garden courtyard filled with weeds. Birds had built nests inside the chimney. There was one bedroom and a musty smellin
g root cellar. There was no sewer stench. That was a blessing. There were almost no bugs or mosquitoes, and it offered privacy from spies.

He walked outside
and studied the wreck. Maybe Ningpo wasn’t that bad. Maybe the danger he dreaded was imagined.

Maybe Ward had forgotten about Ayaou.

A breeze rustled the trees and blew toward the creek. This welcome breath of nature drove the few mosquitoes away. The temperature cooled immediately. Compared to the hot, stuffy air in Ningpo, this was a slice of paradise. He remembered the miracle Ayaou and Shao-mei had created with the Ningpo house. He was sure the girls could do it again with this place.

“
Who lived here before it was abandoned?” Robert asked.

“
A foreign missionary named W. M. Lowrie,” Guan-jiah’s cousin replied.

Robert was speechless for a moment. This was where pirates had killed Lowrie in 1847. This cottage had been abandoned for almost ten years.
“Name a price,” Robert said.

“
Ten yuan a month.”

“
Too high!” he replied. “I have to travel almost three miles by sampan to reach Ningpo.”

“
But Ningpo is down river,” the cousin responded. “It takes no work to drift in a boat.”

“
That is correct, but it takes time to travel from here to Ningpo. When I return in the evenings after a hard day of work, it is not easy to row up river.”

“
But you don’t have to do the rowing,” the cousin said. “This old man will do all the work. You can sleep and be rested and fresh for your concubines.”

Robert pointed at the cottage.
“Does that price include a roof, paint, replacement for any rotting wood, doors, windows, and a thorough cleaning?”

“
You clean; you repair,” the cousin replied.

“
Three yuan a month,” Robert said.

“
Three yuan is robbery! Seven yuan!” Guan-jiah’s cousin raised his voice as if in the market. This man was nothing like Guan-jiah. Robert wished Guan-jiah had been here to bargain with this uncouth third cousin of his. He despised the thief already.

Robert turned to the house and pushed against one of the sid
eboards where he saw the dry rot was bad. His hand almost went through the wall. “Four yuan,” he said.

“
Six.” The cousin shot back.