by Gai-Jin(Lit)
Love! That's what he would always say and she would say and that they had met when he was in Normandy one summer vacation, she an actress with a travelling Shakespearean troupe, he a junior official. It was love at first glance, they would always say, and tell how beautiful she was and handsome he was. Then running away together, married within the week, so romantic but not so happy ever after.
But we will be, Malcolm and I. Ah yes, and I will love Malcolm as a modern wife should, we'll have lots of children, they'll be brought up
Catholic, it won't matter to him, he's not fanatic either: "I'm really not, Angelique.
Of course we'll be married according to Protestant traditions, Mother will not have it otherwise, of that
I'm certain. Afterwards we can have a Catholic ceremony, privately, if you wish..."
Never mind even if it's secret, it's the real marriage--not like the other--the children will be accepted into Mother Church, we will all live in
Paris most of the year, he will love me and I will love him and we'll make love marvelously, she thought, her heart beginning to thump pleasantly as she let her mind roam. Deeper and deeper.
Then, because the evening had been wonderful and she felt wonderful and quite safe, she allowed the pleasing parts of that night's dream to return.
She could remember none of it exactly. The outrage dissolved pictures within erotic pictures within erotic pictures. A little burning that became a pervading warmth. Knowing but not knowing. Feeling but not feeling strong arms embracing, and being possessed by a never-before-experienced sensuality and openness, head, body, life, gloriously free to abandon all restraint, to relish everything because it was... just a dream.
But did I awake, or almost awake, and only pretend that I didn't, she asked herself again and again, always with a shudder. I could not have responded that wantonly awake--surely not--but the dream was so strong and, in its grasp, I was driven by a tempest to want more and again more and...
She heard the outer door open and close and then the bedroom door latch moving and whirled to see
Andr`e open the door silently and close it silently, bolt it, and lean against it, a mocking smile on his lips.
Suddenly she was afraid. "What do you want,
Andr`e?"
For a long time he did not answer, then came over to the bed and stared down at her. "To... to talk, eh?" he said softly. "We should, eh?
Talk, or, or what?"
"I don't understand," she said, understanding too well, painfully aware of the disturbing glitter in his eyes where only a few minutes before there had been only compassion. But she kept her voice reasonable, cursing herself that she had not barred the door--never a need here, always servants or
Legation staff about and no one would dare enter without permission. "Please, don't y--"
"We should talk, about tomorrow and be, be friends."
"Dear Andr`e, please, it's late, whatever it is can wait until tomorrow, sorry but you've no right to come in here without knock--" In momentary panic she retreated to the other side of the bed as he sat on the edge and reached for her. "Stop or
I'll scream!"
His laugh was soft and barbed. "If you scream, dear Angelique, that will bring the servants and I will unlock the door and tell them you invited me here--you wanted privacy to discuss your need for money, cash money, for your abortion." Again the mocking twisted smile. "Eh?"
"Oh Andr`e, don't be like that, please leave, please--if someone were to see you, please."
"First... first a kiss."
She flushed. "Get out, how dare you!"
"Shut up and listen," he whispered harshly and his hand caught her wrist and held it in a vise,
"I can dare anything, if I want more than a kiss you'll give it to me happily or else.
Without me you'll be found out, without me--"
"Andr`e... please let me go." As much as she tried she could not break his grip. With a twisted smile he released her. "You hurt me," she said, near tears.
"I don't want to hurt you," he said throatily, his voice sounding strange to him and he knew he was insane to be here and doing this, but he had been caught up in such sudden horror that it had overpowered his reason, his feet carrying him here of their own volition, to force her to--to what?
To share his degradation. Why not? his brain was shrieking, It's her fault, flaunting her tits and blatant sexuality, reminding me! She's no better than a street slut, maybe she wasn't raped, isn't she out to trap Struan and his millions by any means? "I'm, I'm your friend, aren't I helping you? Come over here, a, a kiss isn't much payment."
"No!"
"By Christ, do it happily or I'll stop helping you and, in a day or two, I'll inform
Struan and Babcott, anonymously. You want that? Eh?"
"Andr`e, please..." She looked around, desperate for a way to escape. There was none.
He moved closer to her on the bed and reached for her breast but she pushed his hand away and began to resist and to fight and hacked with her nails for his eyes but he held her helpless as she struggled, afraid to call out, knowing she was snared and lost and would have to submit. Abruptly, there was a violent pounding on the shutter.
The suddenness ripped Andr`e out of his madness and she screamed in fright. Aghast, he leapt off the bed, rushed for the door, unlocked it and the one to the corridor, then whirled and ran to the windows, pulling them open. In seconds he had unbarred the shutters and shoved them outwards.
Nothing. No one there. Nothing but bushes waving in the wind, the sound of the sea, the promenade beyond the fence empty of people.
A sentry hurried into view. "What's going on?"
"I should ask you that, soldier," Andr`e said, his heart grinding, his words tumbling over. "Did you see anyone, anything? I was passing
Mademoiselle's door and heard, or thought I heard someone pounding on her shutters. Quick, look around!"
Behind him, Pierre Vervene, the Charg`e d'Affairs, a flickering candle in his hand, hurried anxiously into the room, dressing gown over his nightshirt, nightcap askew. Others began crowding the doorway, "What's going on-- oh, Andr`e! What the devil... what's going on? Mademoiselle, you screamed?"
"Yes, I, he--" she stammered, "Andr`e was, he, someone banged on the shutters and
Andr`e, well, he--"
"I was just passing her door," Andr`e said, "and rushed in--isn't that true, Angelique?"
She dropped her eyes, holding the bedclothes closer around her. "Yes, yes that's true," she said, afraid and hating him but attempting to hide it.
Vervene joined Andr`e at the window and peered out. "Perhaps it was the wind, we have sudden squalls here and the shutters aren't exactly new." He shook one of them. Indeed it was loose and rattled noisily. Then he leaned out and shouted after the sentry. "Make a very good search and come back and report to me." Then he closed and barred the shutters, and re-bolted the windows. "There!
Nothing to worry about."
"Yes, yes, but..." Tears of relief began to well.
"Mon Dieu, Mademoiselle, nothing to worry about, don't cry, you're perfectly safe, no need to worry, of course not."
Vervene took off his nightcap and scratched his bald pate, at a loss. Then, thankfully, he saw Ah Soh amongst the others at the doorway and motioned at her importantly.
"Ah Soh, you-ah sleep here, with Miss'ee, heya?"
"Yes Mass'er." Ah Soh hurried off to get some bedding and everyone else began to drift away.
"I'll wait with you, More'selle
Angelique, until she returns." The older man yawned. "Probably you were both mistaken, and it was the wind. Who would want to bang on the shutters, eh? There aren't any rotten little street urchins and guttersnipes in the
Settlement to play pranks or be pickpockets, thank God! Must have been the wind, eh?"
"I'm sure you're right," Andr`e said, over his scare now, dreading that someone had been outside, watching--he had seen the crack but no other signs. "Don't you agree Angelique?"<
br />
"I, I, perhaps yes," she said, very unsettled and not yet recovered from her fright, both because of him and because of the sudden sound. Why did it happen then?
Was it someone, or just a God-given wind--truly a gift from God? Wind or not, person or not
I don't care, she decided. I don't care,
I escaped, tomorrow I move back beside
Malcolm, daren't stay here, mustn't stay, too close to Andr`e, too dangerous. "It sounded like someone banging, but, but I could be mistaken. It could have been a, a sudden gust."
"I'm sure it was," Vervene said confidently. "My shutters are always banging, wake me up all the time." He coughed and sat down, peering kindly at Andr`e whose face was still chalky. "No need for you to wait, my friend. You don't look very well at all, as though, Heaven forbid, you've a crisis of the liver."
"Perhaps, perhaps I have. I, I certainly don't feel very well." Andr`e glanced at
Angelique. "Sorry," he said, holding her eyes, making his voice calm and soft, seemingly the old Andr`e once more, all strangeness and lust and violence vanished. "Good night,
Angelique, you've nothing to be afraid of, ever. More'sieur Vervene is quite right."
"Yes... yes thank you, Andr`e." She forced a smile and then he was gone. She had looked at him deeply, wanting to read the truth behind his eyes. They were friendly, nothing else. But she did not trust what she had seen. Even so, she knew that she would have to make peace with him, would accept his inevitable apologies--pretending to forget everything and agreeing the attack was a momentary madness--and would become friends again. On the surface.
She shuddered. In her innermost being she also grasped that whatever he demanded, eventually she would have to give. While he lived.
Ori was trembling, hunched down against an upturned fishing boat on the pebbled beach.
Twenty yards away was the edge of the surf, the waves sibilant. "You're completely baka," he gasped, his fury directed totally against himself. Before he realized what he was doing he had hammered on the shutters and then, appalled at his stupidity, had rushed away, scaled the fence, found the oar he used as camouflage, shouldered it and loped across the roadway without being challenged, gai-jin voices in his wake.
Hiraga must be right, he thought, nauseated, mixed up, his heart aching in his chest, shoulder throbbing and a warm trickle of blood seeping from the tear in the wound his headlong flight had caused.
Perhaps this woman really has sent me mad.
Madness to pound on the shutters--what good would that do me? What does it matter if another pillows her? Why should that enflame me, make my heart roar in my ears? I don't own her or want to own her, what does it matter if another gai-jin takes her with or without violence? Some women need a measure of violence to excite them, like many men... ah, wait, would it have been better if she had fought me rather than welcoming me, however drugged she was--or pretended to be?
Pretended?
This was the first time such a thought had entered his mind.
Some of his venom left him though his heart continued to race and the ache behind his temples did not leave.
Could she have been pretending? Eeee, it's possible, her arms embraced me and her legs wrapped me and her body moved like no one has ever moved--all pillow partners move sensually, with moans and sighs and sometimes a few tears and,
"Oh how strong you are, how you exhaust me, never have I had the privilege of such a man before
..." but every client knows that these are surface words, learned by rote, part of their training, nothing more and meaningless.
She wasn't like that, every moment had meaning for me.
Whether she pretended or not doesn't matter-- she probably did, women are so filled with guile. I don't care, I should not have bludgeoned the shutter like a berserk fool, revealing my presence and hiding place and probably ruining forever my chance of gaining access there again!
Again his anger burst. His fist smashed the wood of the hull. "Baka!" he croaked, wanting to shriek it aloud.
Footsteps on the pebbles. On guard, he slid deeper into the shadows, the moon baleful, then heard the voices of approaching fishermen, chatting one with another, and cursed himself afresh for not being more alert. Almost at once, a rough, middle-aged fisherman came around the stern of the boat and stopped. "Watch out! Who're you, stranger?" the man said angrily, readying the short mast he carried as a club. "What are you up to?"
Ori did not move, just glared up at him and at the other two who moved up beside him. One was also middle-aged, the other a youth not much older than Ori himself. Both carried oars and fishing tackle. "You do not ask those questions of your betters," he said. "Where are your manners?"
"Who're you, you're not samur--" The man stopped, petrified, as Ori leapt to his feet, the sword instantly in his hand, the blade dangerously half out of its scabbard.
"On your knees, scum, before I cut your baka hearts out--a haircut does not make me any less samurai!" Instantly the fishermen fell to their knees, heads to the beach and were bleating their apologies, no mistaking the authority or the way the short sword was held.
"Shut up!" Ori snarled. "Where were you going?"
"To fish, Lord, half a league out to sea, please excuse us but, well, in the dark and your hair not norm--"
"Shut up! Get the boat in the water.
Move!"
Once safe out to sea, now over his blinding anger, the salt air cleansing, Ori looked back at the Settlement. Lights still on in the
French and British Legations, the Struan
Building and the Club that Hiraga had identified for him. Oil streetlamps along the praia, a few windows glowing in other bungalows and godowns, Drunk Town pulsating as normal throughout the night, the gin shops never totally sleeping.
But all of his attention was on the
French Legation. Why? he kept asking himself.
Why should I have been so possessed with--jealousy, that's the real word. An insane jealousy. To be jealous over pillowing is baka!
Was it because of what Hiraga had told me:
"Taira says their custom is like ours amongst the leader class, a man does not pillow the woman he will marry before marriage..." which means this tai-pan will not bed her and, as she is promised, no one else has the right. Did I smash the shutters to prevent that man pillowing her
--or was it to protect her?
Or was it just because I wanted no other man to enjoy her until I can again--that's even more stupid, how could I ever tell? Was it because I was the first? Does that make that pillowing different: because you have possessed her uniquely? Remember,
Chinese have always believed virginity to be the most powerful aphrodisiac between Heaven and Earth. Is that why I did what I did?
No. It was a sudden impulse. I believe she is a wolf woman who must be killed-- preferably after I've pillowed her once more--for me to escape her spell.
But how and when? It must be now.
Too dangerous to stay in the Settlement, or
Yoshiwara. Hiraga is bound to hear I have not left. I am a dead man if he finds me.
Could I risk three more days, then, if I fail to snare her, hurry off to Ky@oto with Hiraga none the wiser? Safer to leave now. Which? "You, old man, where do you live?"
"Second Street, Fifth House, Lord," the fisherman stuttered, all of them deeply afraid, long since realizing that this must be one of the ronin who were hiding in the Settlement to escape the
Toranaga Enforcers.
Sunday, 19th October:
Church bells were beckoning the faithful on this nice crisp morning. "Not many bloody faithful in Yokohama," Jamie McFay said to Struan. McFay's shoulders and back were aching, the church and the coming service not to his liking, nothing like the austere Scottish
Presbyterianism of his childhood. "Not that
I'm a real churchgoer, not anymore," he said, very much on guard, unsure how Struan was going to be after their violent row the day before.
&nbs
p; "My ma's still as strict as they come, three times on Sunday!"
"Like mine, though she's Church of England,"
Struan agreed heavily. He walked slowly and badly, hunched over, leaning on his canes, amid groups of men converging on the church that was down the High Street and set back slightly in its own garden on a choice lot facing the sea.
"The church is pretty though. Makes
Yokohama permanent."
Holy Trinity, or Holy Titty as they privately dubbed it, was the pride of the
