The Shadow Queen (43 page)

She had immediately written a letter of condolence to Corinne and then, wanting to think about both Henry and her mother’s new beau, left the hotel intent on a good long walk to clear her head.

She hadn’t been close enough to Henry to be heartbroken by his death, but she had been fond enough of him to be deeply affected by it. As for Charles Gordon Allen, she knew her mother well enough to know that her mother wouldn’t have written to her about him unless she was thinking of marrying him. His being a legal clerk made him sound dull and stuffy, but perhaps someone a little dull and stuffy was the stabilizing influence her laughter-loving mother needed.

When she reached the Bund, she stood at the point where the Suzhou Creek poured its silt into the Hungpu River’s clouded yellow waters. If a divorce on the grounds of three years’ separation was as easy to come by in Virginia as her mother’s new beau said it was, then it was something she was going to consider very seriously.

She didn’t want to return to America just yet, though—and couldn’t until she’d fulfilled her mission by traveling on to Peking. Once in Peking she would stay with Katherine and Herman Rogers and enjoy China for a little while. It already fascinated her, and on a whim she turned away from the busy river in search of a rickshaw. Though advice on every side was not to stray outside the high walls of the settlement, Wallis had never been given to heeding good advice. The narrow, crowded streets fascinated her and she wanted to see them from outside the walls as well as from within them.

Her rickshaw driver spoke a little English, and when she told him she wanted to be taken on a tour of the city outside the International Settlement’s walls, he bowed his head, saying, “Yes, missee. Certainly, missee.”

As he trundled her away in a direction she had never ventured before, Wallis felt the adrenaline punch she always felt when doing something reckless or, when playing poker, betting for particularly high stakes.

The streets teemed with people. Delicately built Chinese women carried babies on their backs, old people pushed handcarts, and shop vendors touted their wares, their goods spilling out of tiny dark shops onto the street. The air was pungent with the smell of spices and dried fish and the deafening cries of hawkers.

She saw a spectacular display of silks and shouted to the rickshaw boy to stop. Minutes later she was in a dark cavern of a shop piled high with not only silk, but satins and intricately worked brocades.

Ever since her stay in Hong Kong, she had become an expert at beating down the price of anything she had set her heart on. In Shanghai, haggling was an art form, and, now a master of it, she indulged in it with gusto. When she emerged from the shop twenty minutes later, she did so carrying bolts of sumptuous silk that would keep her in evening gowns for as long as her heart desired.

Standing in the noisy street, waiting for the boy to stow her shopping in the compartment beneath the rickshaw’s passenger seat, she became aware that she was being watched.

Shielding her eyes against the sun’s glare, she scanned the tiny doorways of the shops on the far side of the street. Each had a pigtailed owner sitting outside, and because she was a Westerner, each and every one of them was looking toward her, their expressionless eyes revealing nothing of their thoughts.

They were the kinds of looks she had attracted since her first day in China and to which she was accustomed. They had long since ceased to make her feel uncomfortable, but she was feeling uncomfortable now.

Squeezed between an open-fronted shop selling porcelain and pewter and another piled high with lacquerwork and camphor wood was a doorway that belonged to neither shop. Seated so far back in its semidarkness that Wallis hadn’t at first seen her was a woman so ancient she appeared at first sight to be mummified.

Her eyes weren’t mummified, though.

Meeting them, Wallis felt a sensation akin to an electric-shock knife through her.

“Me ready now,” the rickshaw boy said. “We go now, missee. Chop-chop.”

Wallis didn’t move. “That woman,” she said. “The one seated between the pewter shop and the lacquerwork shop. What is she selling?”

The rickshaw boy looked across the street. “She sell only future, missee. No ivory. No lucky elephants. We go now?”

“The future? You mean she’s a fortune-teller? A soothsayer?”

The boy shuffled his feet. “She not for
waiguoren
—not for foreigners. Plenty fortune-tellers for
waiguoren
in settlement.”

Wallis continued to lock eyes with the old woman across the road. If ever anyone needed her future told, she did.

“Take me across to her,” she said. “I want her to tell me my future.”

The prune-black eyes in the yellowed, wizened face were drawing her with such compulsion that even if the rickshaw boy had refused to do so, she would have negotiated a way between the taxis and carts thronging the street.

In great reluctance he stepped from the rickshaw’s shafts. “This big mistake, missee,” he said unhappily. “This woman not just astrologist. This woman has strange powers.”

“Good.” Wallis was already aware that the woman possessed a strange power; it was that power that was propelling her across the road as fast as her high-heeled shoes would take her.

The rickshaw boy tried to keep in front of her, his straw-slippered sandals slapping against the soles of his feet.

“Will she be able to speak English?” Wallis said suddenly, aware that if the woman couldn’t, the whole thing would be a waste of time.

“No.” The boy’s voice was contemptuous. He spat, narrowly missing Wallis’s left foot. “She old woman. Me settlement rickshaw boy. Me speakee English.”

As they stepped up to the darkened doorway, Wallis hoped his English was going to be sufficient for whatever lay ahead.

The woman didn’t ask her what it was Wallis wanted of her; she simply rose to her feet and led the way down an increasingly dark passage and then into a small room.

There was no window, and the darkness was intense. Just as Wallis was about to turn around and head as fast as she could back toward the brilliant sunshine of the street, a match was struck and a lantern was lit.

The room still didn’t give Wallis confidence. Beneath the lantern was a large round table covered in a heavy velour cloth. There were black leather-seated lacquerwood chairs around it that looked as if they had once been very grand but were now abjectly shabby. A Chinese screen hid one corner of the room completely from view. On one of the rear walls stood an elmwood hand-painted cabinet, its shelves thick with books and chipped porcelain.

Close up, the woman looked even older than she had from across the street. If Wallis had been told the woman was a hundred years old—or even older—she wouldn’t have been remotely surprised.

A clawlike hand indicated that she should sit.

She sat.

The woman then withdrew from the cabinet a heavy book, a scroll of blank paper, pen, ink, and a compass. Then she seated herself at the opposite side of the table to Wallis and, in Chinese, spoke to the rickshaw boy, who was still standing.

The rickshaw boy said to Wallis. “Madam Xiuxiu want hour, day, month, year your birth, missee.”

“The nineteenth of June, 1896,” Wallis said, and then paused. What hour had she been born? She knew it had been late evening, but what had been the exact time? Once, when as a little girl she had asked her mother this question, her mother had replied in high amusement, “Honey, I was far too busy at the time to think of looking at the clock!”

Madam Xiuxiu waited, not moving a muscle of her corpselike face.

“Is the time important?” she asked the rickshaw boy.

He nodded.

What was it her Aunt Bessie had once said? That she’d been born right on the half hour and that by midnight she’d been bathed and gowned in flannelette and was lying in her mother’s arms. All that couldn’t have taken place if she’d been born at half past eleven, so she must have been born at half past ten.

“Half past ten in the evening,” she said, wondering what would happen next.

What happened next took a long time. With the compass Madam Xiuxiu drew a large circle on the blank scroll of paper, and then she drew a narrow circle near the edge of the outer circle, and then a smaller inner circle.

Wallis had no need to ask what she was doing. She had seen a Chinese birth chart at the Astor House and it had looked totally incomprehensible, which was exactly how Madam Xiuxiu’s chart was beginning to look.

It was hot and airless in the room, and as Madam Xiuxiu worked, filling the circle with symbols and figures and occasionally resorting to her Bible-like book for help, Wallis began to regret having been so impulsive, certain that the chart was not going to tell her the kind of things she wanted to know.

“Your life path is influence by the number four,” the rickshaw boy whispered to her.

Wallis was unimpressed. A fortune-teller at a fair could just as easily have given her a lucky number.

“Your sun is in Gemini and your moon in Libra,” he said a little later. Then, a little later still, “Mercury is your …”—he paused, struggling for the correct English word—“…  your
strong
planet, missee.”

After what, to Wallis, seemed an interminable length of time, Madame Xiuxiu passed the finished chart across to her. Wallis looked down at it, and it was as incomprehensible as she had known it would be.

She opened her purse in order to pay and be gone.

Madam Xiuxiu shook her head. Indicating that Wallis should remain seated, she rose to her feet and moved into a position behind her. Then she placed scrawny birdlike hands on the top of Wallis’s head.

Common sense told Wallis that their weight was infinitesimal, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt as if a huge burning weight were resting on her head. It was a heat that was all engulfing. Her body tingled with it from her scalp down to the tips of her toes.

Dimly, as if from a distance, Wallis heard Madam Xiuxiu begin speaking, her voice a mesmerizing singsong.

The rickshaw boy’s voice, as he began to translate, seemed to Wallis to be coming from a vast distance away. Part of her brain told her that he couldn’t possibly be translating into English word for perfect word, but that was how she heard him, and the words seared themselves into her heart and her memory.

“You are a woman of great destiny.”

Behind his words, Wallis could hear Madam Xiuxiu’s voice and that, too, seemed to be coming from far, far away. Though she had not been aware of any candles or bowls of incense being lit, the room seemed full of scented smoke and she felt giddy to the point of near insensibility.

“The man who will love you,” his voice went on, “will love you with every atom of his being. Kissed by the sun, he will be the ruler of kingdoms and you will be his shadow queen. The love you will share will echo down the centuries. Jewels beyond your wildest dreams will be yours, but there will never be a child.”

That was it. Nothing followed.

Wallis’s head spun. She felt as disoriented as if she had been chloroformed. Dimly she became aware that the wizened face and mummified body was no longer standing behind her but was facing her across the velour-covered table.

Wallis tried to force her brain to work. Had Madam Xiuxiu ever stood behind her? Had she imagined the entire last few minutes? Had the Chinese woman put her under some kind of hypnosis? How else could she have heard Chinese translated into perfect English by a rickshaw boy who previously had only ever spoken in pidgin English?

More to the point, where was her rickshaw boy? Terror at the thought of being left alone with Madam Xiuxiu seized her, and then, as if on cue, he said at her elbow, “We go now, missee. We go now, chop-chop.”

It wasn’t the voice or the perfect English she had heard a minute or so ago.

With a swimming head, Wallis rose unsteadily to her feet.

From a web of wrinkles the old woman’s eyes bored into hers.

Disoriented as she was, innate courtesy prompted Wallis to say good-bye. All that escaped from her throat was a choking sound.

Wanting only to escape, she spun on her heel and blundered from the room and down the dark passageway into the blazing sunlight of the street.

Only when she was safely back in the rickshaw, being trundled briskly in the direction of the International Settlement and the Astor House, did Wallis remember that Madam Xiuxiu had not asked for payment and that she, Wallis, had not proffered any.

N
ot until hours later was she able to think of her experience calmly. Whether the words she had heard had actually been said or had been part of some kind of hallucination she still didn’t know, but she knew she would never forget them.

In the blessed solitude of her small suite at the Astor House, she began running water into a pleasingly large bath, throwing a generous handful of scented bath crystals into the water, and then pouring in bath foam.

While the bath was still filling she made herself a Shanghai cocktail, mixing a measure of Jamaican rum with a teaspoon of anisette and half a teaspoon of grenadine and then, having cut a lemon in half, adding a quarter of the juice.

Giving the cocktail shaker a vigorous shake, she thought of the Chinese woman’s first words to her.
You are a woman of great destiny
. Despite the extraordinary physical reaction she had experienced when the words were being spoken, she had no intention of taking them at face value. The Chinese loved dressing things up in flowery language. No doubt every person who visited Madam Xiuxiu was told that he or she was a person of great destiny.

She poured the contents of the shaker into a glass and, taking the glass with her, went into the bathroom to turn off the taps.

What had followed that opening sentence had been far more to the point. That she would meet a man who would love her with every atom of his being.

Putting the cocktail glass down on the edge of the bath, she stepped into the water, sliding down into its scented depths until she was submerged in foam up to her shoulders.

That she would meet such a man was the deepest desire of her heart.