My Splendid Concubine (48 page)

Without the money Customs collected from foreign i
mports, the Imperial government was in danger of collapsing. Meanwhile, the Taiping Rebellion, already in its twelfth year, was threatening to sweep away the Ch’ing Empire and millions had already died.

Sir Rutherford Alcock, the British consul in Shanghai had stepped in and was struggling to create a temporary inspectorate of customs in order to fulfill Britain
’s obligations under the treaty system, a product of the Opium Wars, and help the Ch’ing Dynasty survive.

Western merchants wanted China with its vast population to stay an open market where they could sell opium without r
estrictions. On the other hand, the Taipings led by Hong Xiuquan, a man claiming to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother, wanted to bring down the dynasty and force all foreigners out of China.

Robert
had no idea that these horrible events were about to place him on the world’s stage where he was going to make a difference.

It was dark when Robert reached home where he placed his back to the door and studied the street. The house was located off a narrow, crooked alley that seldom had foot traffic. Two people were in sight. One was an old bent woman hobbling along in obvious pain—the other a middle-aged man with dark bags under his eyes.

He watched t
he man until he was gone. Once the street was empty, he knocked on the door. A moment dragged by before he heard the scratching sound he was waiting for. He knew the spot Ayaou would be scratching. In reply, he scratched back. He heard the locking bar being lifted from its brackets. The door swung open.

He stepped into gloom, closed the door and locked it by dro
pping the bar into its four brackets. Ayaou stood in the shadows beside an inked wall hanging that was two feet wide and five feet long.

There was the same dreadful look in her eyes he
’d seen daily since Shao-mei’s death. He could see that the woman he loved was close to death too, and he didn’t know how to save her.

There were Chinese symbols on the watercolor behind Ayaou that said
he sheng
and
ning jin
,
harmony
and
tranquility
. The words were printed on colorless rice paper. The calligraphy was in black ink with a thin red border like a sliver of blood running around the perimeter three inches from the edge. There were several red ink stamps in the lower right-hand corner showing the name of the artist, but they looked more like clots of blood.

Shao-mei and Ayaou bought that wall hanging. The sisters had bought all the art in the h
ouse. It hurt to look at it. The words on that wall hanging were all lies.

He frowned.
For an instant, he wanted to tear the calligraphy from the wall and shred it. On the other hand, he knew if he destroyed it, Ayaou would feel as if he were attacking her. She believed Shao-mei’s ghost lived inside that paper and every other object the girls had bought and carried into this rented house.

On Ayaou
’s left, the steep, worn stairs with the narrow steps were swallowed by darkness at the top. Shao-mei’s empty, closet sized bedroom was up there across the hall from where he slept with Ayaou. Every time he looked at that door, he wanted to nail it shut so her ghost could not escape.

He stood an arm
’s length from Ayaou. There were no words of greeting. He reached inside a coat pocket and took out a new Colt revolver. Her eyes shifted to the weapon. He held it in both hands and offered it to her as if it were a dozen roses.

“
Ayaou,” he said in fluent Mandarin. “I bought this weapon to replace the one destroyed in the fire. You must promise you will never leave the house without it.”

She reached for the pistol
and took it. The four and a half-pound weight pulled her hand down to her side until the nine-inch barrel pointed at the floor.

“
Do you remember how many times you can shoot before you have to reload?” he asked.

“
Five,” she said in a dull voice.

“
Hide the pistol in your clothes, or if you have to, get a basket and cover it with a rag. In fact, you cannot go out unless Guan-jiah or I are with you. Do you understand?”

She nodded. She was still wearing white, the Chinese color worn to mourn the death of a family member or close friend. Her dark hair was pulled back and tied into a tight knot on top of her head. She had a slender neck, small ears and high cheekbones.

Compared to her, he seemed tall. He was five foot eight to her five foot two. “You know why we must do this?” he said.

“
If Ward discovers he killed the wrong sister, he will return to finish the job.”

He took her in his arms and held her. She pressed her ear against his chest where his heart w
as beating. “At least I can hear that you are alive,” she said. “Sometimes I cannot hear my own heart.”

A knot gathered in his thro
at. His eyes filled with tears, but he blinked them away. He didn’t want her to see the fear and worry that had built a nest inside his head.

Robert gasped and woke with a start. It took a moment for the wild beating of his heart to subside as his eyes searched the dark bedroom for intruders. He reached under his pillow and touched the pistol to make sure it was there.

His fears were like cancerous growths eating him. Was the front door strong enough to withstand an assault? Then he remembered that Guan-jiah had reinforced the front door. The eunuch had screwed iron straps to the inside surface.
Once the bar was placed in the four brackets, the door was almost invincible.

It would be difficult if not impossible for anyone to break in. He wasn
’t sure if he had checked the door to see if it was locked before coming upstairs. On the other hand, he knew it was his habit to check before going to bed. However, what if he forgot?

He thought of the rope ladder next. He slipped from under the thick blankets. When his bare feet touched the frozen floorboards, he sucked in his breath but was careful not to wake Ayaou. He stood naked in the dark and listened to her breathing until he was sure she still slept. Then he checked to see if the rope ladder was where he had left it below the one window in the bedroom.

Soon after Shao-mei’s funeral, he’d bought this rope ladder from a British ship. If Ward or another assassin set fire to the house as they had done to the cottage, he planned to use that rope ladder to escape from the upstairs bedroom into the alley.

He knelt and reached under the bed. Once his fingers touched the double-barreled shotgun, he relaxed. With that weapon, he could blast anyone in the alley before climbing to safety.

He picked up a pocket watch from the side table and moved to the window where moonlight helped him see that it was one in the morning.

T
wo or three times a night, he awoke at the same times. He checked the pistol under his pillow first; the rope ladder second and then the shotgun. Sometimes he went downstairs to inspect the front door and the window shutters though he had done that before going to bed.

That next morning, he and Ayaou sat on the benches at the kitchen table with the uneven top. They ate rice porridge from chipped, white ceramic bowls. The only sound was the crackling fire from the stove.

“
In my prayers,” he said, his voice hollow as if it belonged to a stranger. “I keep asking God to explain why Shao-mei suffered so horribly before she died. God doesn’t answer. I know He has more important things to do than to explain why a sixteen year old died such a horrible death and took her unborn child with her.” He cursed himself. He regretted speaking his thoughts. He should have kept his mouth shut.

“
It was Ward’s revenge,” Ayaou replied. She was nineteen, his age when he arrived in China more than three years earlier, yet she looked old beyond her years. She had been sixteen when he met her in that battle with the Tapings. She had been so beautiful and full of life. That’s why he fell in love with her. Now she was a shadow of her former self with no expression on her face. It was as if she was carved from sandstone, and he feared she might crumble and he’d lose her.

“
You forced him to sell me to you,” she said. “You pointed a pistol at him and offered him no choice. He wanted to keep me, even if it meant throwing me to his men then feeding me to the dogs. That would have been better. At least, Shao-mei would be alive and happy with you.”

“
Don’t think that way, Ayaou.” He wanted to say something cheerful, but he couldn’t. It was impossible to get nice things to come out of his mouth.

“
I’m afraid Ward isn’t finished with us yet,” he said. He and Ayaou had become lifeless puppets without strings to guide them. He didn’t know what to do except get up each morning and let his legs carry him to the consulate.

“
If Ward learns you are alive, he will return and murder you too.” The words leaked out. He couldn’t stop them. He didn’t tell her there was nothing he could do to protect her. After all, Ward commanded an army of mercenaries. In addition, due to the battles Ward’s army had won, the Ch’ing Dynasty had granted Ward Chinese citizenship. Robert, on the other hand, was nobody. “You have to be careful, Ayaou. For your safety, you have to do as I say.”

When she didn
’t respond, he said, “Ayaou?”

She held her rice
bowl in both hands with her mouth hanging open as she stared with empty eyes at nothing.

Seeking answers, Robert turned to God and attended William Martin’s sermons on the Sabbath. William, an American Presbyterian minister, the only minister living inside the Chinese city of Ningpo, was the one foreigner he trusted not to judge him. He did not want anything to do with the other ministers that lived across the river near the Presbyterian chapel. They were hypocrites. He knew he was being harsh in his judgment, but he didn’t care.

However,
William crossed the river at least once a week to visit the other ministers, who gossiped. They would eventually talk about him as they had talked about Hollister and his concubine, Me-ta-tae. William would hear their opinions. They would call Ayaou a whore as they did to Me-ta-tae.

Neither Me-ta-tae nor Ayaou were whores. In China, a conc
ubine was not a whore. In China, a concubine was a second-class wife and had no power over her life or future. A concubine, like most women in China, was property to be bought and sold.

The truth was as complicated as China—something most fo
reigners didn’t want to learn and probably couldn’t understand if they tried.

Master Ping, Robert
’s Mandarin language teacher, said it best. “The foreigners want to force China to become a Christian nation. That is impossible. China is a nation influenced by Laozi and Confucius, a way of life older than Christianity by a thousand years.

“
Most Chinese will ignore the missionaries as if they were invisible—yet be polite to them when face to face. How can you force someone to believe anything when he dissolves once you let him go?

“
If forced, a Chinese man will agree to almost anything. Then he will go about his business as if he’d said nothing. He will follow Taoism’s path and become the rock in the stream that lets the water flow by without struggling against it. By doing nothing, nothing is left undone. Meanwhile he will live by Confucius’s belief of a well-ordered society by being true to the five great relationships. There is no room for your Christ in China. To the Chinese, evil sprouts where the five great relationships do not exist, and everyone outside of the Middle Kingdom is considered a barbarian.”

He wanted to share his feelings with someone else besides Guan-jiah, his Chinese servant. He wasn’t sure William was the right choice, but there was no one else he could trust. William was one of the few foreigners that cared about the Chinese and their culture. It worried him that William might think less of him if he discovered the truth about Ayaou and Shao-mei.

He knew the risk he was taking by attending William
’s services. During one conversation while Shao-mei was alive, William asked if he was going to convert the girls to Christianity. Although Robert was a Christian, he didn’t want to change his girls. He wanted them to stay the way they were.

He felt as if a monster had moved inside his head. It had always been a struggle for Robert to hide his feelings. If William looked, he
’d see the truth. William had the ability to look into another person’s eyes and see the pain. There would be questions.               To combat this, Robert was learning how to turn his face into a mask but he wasn’t ready yet. Since Shao-mei’s death, he had practiced using a mirror.

Until he achieved the ability to hide his feelings, he made sure to arrive every Sabbath shortly after William started his sermon. He sat at the rear of the room near the door. When the sermon ended, he left. Sitting on that bench at the back and listening to the sermons worked like a drug to soothe his nerves.

The American started with a prayer to God asking Him to make sure he didn’t lead his Chinese flock astray. William didn’t tell them what to think or what to do as most foreigners did. He taught them to think and find a compromise between their ancient beliefs and Christianity; to fold one inside the other. When dealing with the Chinese, it was the best choice.