The Forbidden Orchid

by Sharon Biggs Waller

  At dusk, we had been moving so slowly that we were still hours away from the next temple, so the soldiers directed us to a shabby, ramshackle place at the side of the road, insisting it was a guesthouse. Foul-smelling and ill-tempered, the innkeeper shambled forward and refused to show us to rooms unless Papa paid him first, and not in Chinese coins but in the more sought-after Mexican silver dollars. The man insisted on being paid at triple the usual rate of most wayside inns. Papa didn’t even try to haggle with the man. He gave him what he wanted. The man palmed the money, flashing a gap-toothed grin, and then let us into the inn.

  Several men turned from their stools and stared at us, watching as we walked through. The place was bare of any furnishings apart from a few benches against one wall and some tables in the middle of the room. Several men crouched in front of one, playing a dice game. Our soldiers joined them, mixing in with the tavern patrons as though they were long-lost friends.

  The innkeeper shouted at an old woman squatting by the fire. She cringed and cowered under the man’s raised fists and then shuffled toward us, arms waving at her side, in the telltale gait of bound feet. She gestured for us to sit at one of the tables and then served us a meal of rice with some sort of gravy over it, eggs boiled in tea, and pickled vegetables. We were so hungry from our long ride that the meal was welcome and delicious. I told the woman so in what Chinese I knew, and when she beamed, I saw there was not a single tooth in her head.

  After dinner, she showed Ching Lan and Papa to their rooms, tiny stall-like cupboards devoid of any decoration or luxury, only a stub of candle next to a bamboo mat. Papa tried to hand her some coins but she ducked her head and handed them back to him. As Alex and I were shown to a long ladder that led to a loft upstairs, I could hear feminine laughter coming from behind the doors of the stalls we passed. This was a very strange inn, indeed.

  Our room was decorated as sparsely as the ones below, but we had a window covered by a stained paper covering. The heat from the kitchen fire had risen into the room, so Alex threw open the shutter. The air was so oppressive in that mean room that we both hung out of the window for a moment gulping in the fresh air. Shouting broke out from downstairs, sounding as though more men had come to the tavern and a raucous game had commenced.

  We ignored the bamboo mat and laid out our own bedding, settling down in our traveling clothes, and trying to get some rest despite the din from downstairs. I was so exhausted I fell asleep almost immediately.

  I don’t know how long I had been sleeping when I began dreaming I was in a bakeshop. I could smell the scent of something sweet, but the scent in my dream was sickly, cloying, and very like the aroma of burnt sugar. The air was fuggy with it, sticky and smoky at the same time. When my nose began to burn from the acrid smell, I realized I wasn’t dreaming.

  I opened my eyes and saw that the smoke was real; I could see it wafting through the cracks of the bamboo floorboards.

  “Alex!” I shook him. “I think something is burning. Something is on fire.”

  Alex stirred. “What? What is it? What’s happening?” He sat up, the blanket falling away from his chest. His hair was rucked up in the back and he blinked and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands.

  “Look!” I pointed at the floorboards.

  He dropped his hands and peered down at the floor, growing very still as the enormity of the situation sank in.

  I felt the floorboards; they were cool, so there was no fire underneath us, but the smoke was quite real. “Do you smell it? It’s an odd smell.”

  “It’s opium smoke,” he said flatly. “This is no traveler’s inn. We’re in a huayan guan.”

  “A what?”

  “A flower smoke den. It’s . . . it’s a place where men go for opium and women. Those damned soldiers led us here.” He flung off the covers and stood up, searching around in the darkened room. He grabbed his boots from the corner and sat on the bench, pulling them on.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t stay in here. Forgive me, Elodie, but I can’t. I’ll have to sleep outside.”

  “I know the smoke is unpleasant, but it’s safer in here than out there with all those strange men about.” I got up and went over to the open window. A few men had gone outside, and they were milling around a person lying on the ground. From his clothing I recognized him as one of our soldiers. The men were jeering at him, poking at him with the toes of their slippers. The prostrate man laughed, swiping at their feet with his hands, trying to grab them, as though it were some sort of parlor game. I backed away from the window. “One of our soldiers is out there, and he looks beyond useless. Come back to bed. I’m sure the smoke will clear soon.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said, his face frantic. “I can’t stay in here.”

  I didn’t like the way he looked, trapped and desperate, as though his life depended on getting away from the smoke. “Why wouldn’t I understand? Alex, what is it? You’re frightening me!”

  He muttered something under his breath in Russian and then looked at me, his face pained. “I must tell you something. And I worry that . . . that you’ll hate me when I tell you.”

  A shot of dread leapt up from my stomach, gripping me hard. What could Alex have done that would make me hate him? Did it have to do with what Holst and Pru had said? Sometimes I forgot that I knew very little of Alex, despite the closeness that we’d developed in the past few months. It was as though he’d had no life before I met him, as though I’d imagined him into being, fully formed, with only the faults and foibles that I chose to give him, ignoring what I didn’t want to see. “Tell me,” I whispered, suddenly wary of him.

  “Do you remember in London, when the captain scolded me for being away from the ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “The captain never wanted me to leave the ship on my own because he thought I’d go looking for an opium den,” Alex said, his voice so low that I could barely hear him, and indeed I thought I’d misheard him at first.

  “Did you say an opium den? You? What a great nonsense!”

  Alex leaned forward and rested his forearms on his legs. He wouldn’t look at me. “I’m telling you true, myshka. It’s one of the reasons why Holst hates me so much. He despises opium addicts and has always been suspicious of me.”

  “But you were a child. You were, what? Fourteen or so when you left China?”

  “Opium sots come in all ages, men, women, and children.” He stood up and crossed over to the window, gazing down at the men below. “For a long time the Osprey was the only safe place for me, because as soon as we docked I tried to run off to find opium. The captain had Holst lock me in my cabin and bar the windows. I craved smoking; it was like an itch that demanded to be scratched. I didn’t want to feel that way, but once opium takes you it’s difficult to turn yourself loose from it. It’s painful to do so, excruciating, sometimes even deadly to try to stop.” He started pacing the room, cracking his knuckles. The splintered floorboards creaked under his boots.

  “But how did such a thing happen to you?”

  “The ship I’d worked on after I left the Crimea sank in the Pearl River outside of Canton. I thought about going back to Russia, but I couldn’t get on another ship, so I found a job in a flower smoke den in Canton, fetching things for the women who worked there and doing odd jobs of the sort. Mostly my task was to prepare the chandu for the men who came in to smoke.”

  “I’m sorry, Alex. I don’t understand—”

  “The chandu.” He repeated the word, sounding frustrated. “It’s . . . I don’t know the word in English. It’s a little portion of opium that goes into the pipe, and it’s a tradition for a boy to prepare it for the patrons. The man who owned the den liked that I wasn’t Chinese. He said it made his place different. Exotic.”

  Alex stopped talking for a moment, gathering his wits to tell me the rest of the story. He returned to
the window, watching the men below, tapping his hand against the windowsill.

  “You smoked opium, then? At this tavern, or whatever it’s called?”

  “No. Not then. I’d been working maybe a month or so at the place, and I had no idea there was another duty to fulfill. I was so stupid, so green. I had the barest of Chinese, and I was so desperate to find a place to live that I just agreed to whatever was asked of me, even though I didn’t know what they were asking. One morning the owner came to me and said something. I nodded and said yes. And then . . . one of the girls who spoke a little English came and told me he’d sold me to one of the patrons. That’s what the owner was telling me.”

  “Sold you? Do you mean for his slave?”

  Alex lifted his fingers. “For the night.”

  “The night?” I asked. The meaning of the situation was dawning on me, and I felt a creeping horror rise. “He wanted you to . . .” My lips felt frozen. I didn’t want to say the words because saying them would make it real.

  “The owner expected me to be a . . . a catamite.” Alex turned from the window and sank down on the floor, as though his story was too much for him to deal with standing up. He was holding his shoulders tightly, his arms rigid at his sides and his hands in fists.

  “He wanted to lie with you?”

  He nodded, a small little nod, as though he couldn’t bear to acknowledge the truth of it. “That’s what a catamite is—a boy who is used by a man. The patron had offered a lot of money, and as it turned out I owed for my upkeep that I hadn’t earned, or so the owner claimed. I went to him and begged him to reconsider. I couldn’t help it, but I cried. He was so angry with me for making a fuss, and he hit me. He said I had no right to refuse and that I didn’t own my body, he did.”

  “Alex.” I crossed the room and sank down next to him. I tried to touch him to comfort him, but he flinched, leaning away from me.

  “I didn’t want to leave because I had no other place to go. So I agreed I would go with the man. But I was afraid. I was really afraid. One of the women who worked there told me to smoke opium on the night and that I wouldn’t mind it so much.” Alex’s voice had become dull, almost monotonous, his accent heavier, and I had to listen close to understand him. “So I smoked it. Most people become tired when they smoke opium, but I felt invincible. I felt strong, like I could do anything. When the man came in the room, I . . .”

  I took his hand. This time he didn’t pull away from me, but his hand lay unmoving in mine. “Don’t say another word, Alex, if you don’t want to. If it’s too painful.”

  “I want to tell you the truth of it. I’ve never told anyone before. Ever.”

  “Surely the captain knows?”

  He swallowed. “He only knows I was an orphan, and about the opium. But that’s all he knows, I never told him about the flower smoke den.”

  The room was steadily filling up with the sweet smoke, making me feel light-headed. Outside, the wind picked up, sending the paper-latticework shutter swinging back and forth, clacking against the windowsill. “I was waiting for the man,” he said. “I had a knife from the kitchen, and when he came in . . . I stabbed him.” Alex was trembling, shaking so hard I could feel his shoulder juddering against mine. “But it wasn’t him; it wasn’t the man who’d bought me.”

  “Was it the owner of the den?”

  “No!” The word burst out of Alex in a sob. He pressed his face into the crook of his elbow, his voice muffled when he spoke again. “It was one of the servants, a man I knew.”

  “Did . . . did you kill him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t wait around to find out. I ran away. I climbed out the window and made my way to Foochow. It took me a month to reach the city, and I started begging in the streets. I remembered how the opium made me feel. I wanted all that pain to end, so I began smoking in earnest. I could only afford the scrapings from inside used opium pipes, but it was enough to make me forget the feeling of the knife piercing the man’s body, the sadness I felt from losing my family. And then one day I found Kukla, and then I met Ching Lan, who brought Prunella Winslow to me. Pru took pity on me and helped get me away from the opium. I worked as an errand boy for her school. Before she left, Pru found me a position at another place, but without her guidance I fell back into my old ways again. I’d still be smoking now if it hadn’t been for Kukla. Someone stole her away when I was in an opium den one day. I found her later locked in a trunk, and I knew it would happen again if I didn’t leave China and its abundance of opium. I knew I wouldn’t be able to find opium on board a ship. I thought it the only safe place for Kukla and me. If I hadn’t stowed away aboard the Osprey, I probably would be dead by now. Maybe I should be.”

  “Don’t say that, Alex. You mustn’t blame yourself for stabbing the servant. It was an accident.” I could understand why Alex felt himself culpable. I’d felt the same when I’d defended myself against the orchid thief. It’s hard to forgive yourself when you’ve hurt someone, even if it’s for the best of reasons. You’re never the same after.

  “I should have just run away from the flower smoke den, but instead I chose to stay because I was afraid. I chose to attack the man. I . . . I think I even liked it. It didn’t horrify me like it should have done. I felt no remorse, only fear that I’d be caught.”

  “That was the opium that made you feel that way. It wasn’t you.”

  But Alex wasn’t listening to me any longer.

  I don’t know if it was the smoke from the opium pipes below or the demon gnawing at his soul, but whatever it was, at that moment, Alex was lost to me, and nothing I could do or say could retrieve him. I wanted to hold him so badly, to make the hurt go away. But I knew I couldn’t. No more than I could make my father’s hurt go away or Ching Lan’s.

  “I’m not a good person, Elodie.”

  I could almost feel Alex’s despair, and it terrified me. It reminded me of Papa’s that day at the train station. Their anguish was almost tangible, an evil miasma that one could taste and feel. I could sense it stealing Alex away, as sure as the opium’s blue smoke curled around him, kidnapping him.

  “Forgive me,” he said. And then, shaking off my hand, he left.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I wanted to believe that Alex wouldn’t smoke the opium, and that he’d left the room to gather his thoughts, but I was naïve.

  I fell asleep. Sometime in the night I turned over and reached out for him, finding nothing but an empty blanket where he should have been. I got up and looked out the window. No one was outside, and there were no sounds from below. I sat back on the pallet and waited. Fear for Alex increased as time went by until desperation had become a live thing clawing at me. I couldn’t wait there any longer. I wanted to find Alex; make him see sense. I dressed quickly and descended the ladder.

  It was deathly quiet in the tavern. The raucous activity of the evening had given way to a quieter kind of vice. Several men lay unmoving on bamboo mats and benches around the floor, tiny oil lamps flickering next to them.

  I saw Alex lying on a bench in the corner, his legs splayed out, his arms stretched overhead. An opium pipe lay next to him, its ashy contents spilling out onto the bamboo mat below.

  I imagined him climbing down the ladder after he left me, joining the men in their vice, buying a little bit of opium, and then lying back to smoke it, floating away, forgetting all about the horror of his past, paying for one more moment of nothingness.

  I crossed the room and picked up the pipe. I held it gingerly, as though it were a snake about to strike.

  The pipe was almost a thing of beauty, a long flutelike object, painted along its length with blue and red flowers. A silver bowl attached by a filigreed plate held the opium. I wondered how something so lovely could deliver such torment. The burnt sugar smell wafted from the pipe. The scent reminded me of Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne.

  Perhaps the only diffe
rence lay in the method of execution— one dispensed from a pretty cobalt blue bottle; the other delivered from a decorative pipe. Thanks to Pru’s explanation, I knew the truth of it now. Opium and morphine were the same. And indeed Alex had the look of my mother when she was under the Chlorodyne’s spell: he was in a place where no one could reach.

  I remembered how the medicine had made me feel—happy, all my sorrows diluted, drop by drop. If I had felt a fraction of the pain that had been visited upon Alex, I might well have been driven to opium, too. But I knew from my own brief experience that what lay beyond that heaven of oblivion was a kind of hell on earth. I couldn’t lose Alex to opium any more than I could Mamma to the Chlorodyne. What was more, I knew Alex didn’t want that for himself.

  I looked up from the pipe and saw that Alex was awake and watching me. His skin was sallow; dark circles marked the skin under his eyes, his beard rough and patchy. He looked years older than eighteen.

  I ran out of the tavern and into the forest. I flung the pipe into the ravine as far as I could. I watched it tumble in the rays of the rising sun, end over end, and landing with a splash into the stream below.

  I knew what I’d done was fruitless. I couldn’t pour Alex’s opium away as I’d poured away Mamma’s medicine. There would always be more. People would always make more. And smuggle more. People who needed money and knew how to get it easily. Perhaps like Papa did.

  Had Papa supplied people here with opium? Perhaps he’d sold the men opium last night. He might still be smuggling, for all I knew. Were the clothes my sister and I wore purchased with opium? Were my sister’s dollies? Was our house?