“I have brought you here to see my embroidery, but first I will feed you,” Madam Hong is saying now, and she seems angry in a way that is small and tight and shrinking and not at all the way that Lao Mama gets angry, which is a big and round thing that gets bigger and bigger until it bursts. “You will see,” she says, “that my cook, who cooks for only me, is a guibao, a rare gem. He brings honor to my table. His temper is hot but his fingers are enlightened.”
Madam Hong’s voice reaches Jinhua’s ears layer upon layer. Huizhong is busy, poking at the brazier, arranging the table, bringing the dishes. Food aromas drift. A manservant comes, hunching and bowing. “Duibuzhu,” he says. “This humble, lowly person is here to light the lanterns.” Madam Hong nods to him almost without moving. When the lanterns have been lit and the brazier has been stoked, when the manservant has gone and the sudden sound of rain is loud, Madam Hong turns. She looks first at Huizhong and then at Jinhua. “The weather is changing,” she says. “You must call me Elder Sister.”
The table is beautiful, with a dozen plates of food or more: gleaming rice and egg-yolk tarts and tiny twisted dumplings; shrimp and meat and vegetables and angry-colored fruit. Madam Hong takes Jinhua’s arm and presses her to sit. She waves Huizhong away, “so that we can be alone,” she says, nodding at Jinhua. She prods a dumpling with the tips of her chopsticks. The dumpling is pink with shrimp, and plump, and fragrant; the skin gleams, fragile and diaphanous, and Madam Hong is careful not to pierce it. “It is,” she says, placing the dumpling on Jinhua’s plate, “far too beautiful, too beautiful to eat.”
Jinhua takes a sip of tea and looks down at the food. She is not at all hungry and has the feeling of drowning.
“Take my hand, and I will show you.” Madam Hong has risen from her seat, her hand drifting, then floating, then reaching for Jinhua, and Jinhua sees that Ò—the pictures on the walls are not paintings, but embroideries. She says this aloud, and Madam Hong is staring with those black and dusky eyes that are perfectly painted.
“A woman’s embroidery is the evidence of her chastity,” Madam Hong is saying now. “This room is my refuge, and what you see on these walls is the toil of my lifetime. For someone like you”—she pauses, looking down at Jinhua—“this will be hard to understand.”
Now they are strolling along the edge of the room—Jinhua and Madam Hong bound arm in arm—looking at the embroideries, one at a time. There is a tiger and a crane, a cicada and a monkey. “Look at this one, and this one,” Madam Hong is saying, pointing with her finger, “and this one over here.” She is squeezing Jinhua’s arm tighter and more tightly, taking tiny steps.
The colors are exquisite; the stitches are as fine as the barbs of a feather. There is a phoenix and a rabbit, two fish in a pond. Madam Hong is speaking, and Jinhua tries to listen but cannot help thinking—Fishes Gobbling, Cicada Clinging, Monkey’s Attack, Turtle Rising. Nine animals. Nine Positions. All of them are here, hanging on the wall.
“If the lady is virtuous and the needle sharp; if the eye is enlightened and the thread superior—then the embroidery will be flawless, and the lady will be too,” Madam Hong says. Jinhua is thinking of Dragon Flying, Tiger Stance—Banker Chang and animals. “Chain stitch; peking knot; satin stitch; couching stitch,” Madam Hong is saying now, and Jinhua is counting—one stitch, two stitches, three stitches, four. Trying hard to memorize—chain stitch, peking knot. Trying not to think. Hearing Suyin’s voice: “Nine times one is always nine and never any other number. And you, Jinhua, will always be a girl who has eaten brothel rice.”
What Madam Hong intends is clear, as clear as nine times one. “The threads are so delicate that you almost cannot see them. Forty-eight strands from a single cord of silk. I split them myself, she says, with my own unblemished hands.”
Jinhua is breathing hard. “I know nothing about embroidery.” The grip on her arm tightens like a strap. I am ruining my eyes, she hears—
Jinhua pulls her arm away. “I cannot make such fine stitches. I cannot choose fine colors or embroider animals or do any of these things—” She moves toward the door. “I have been a money tree,” she says. “I am not virtuous or wise or—”
And then she remembers, and she turns back to say, Please, Madam Hong—will you buy Su—
“It is as the fortune-teller said. You cannot stay and yet you must be here. And now,” Madam Hong continues, “I have a gift for you, for my little sister, who may not leave until I have finished. Come with me and I will show you, and if you are clever enough—”
The piece of silk is square and white with the faintest of markings. When Madam Hong gave it to Jinhua, she asked, “Do you know what this is?”
Jinhua shook her head. No, she did not.
Madam Hong’s hands were rigid. And yet they were shaking.
“It is the Ye He Hua.” The Flower of Nocturnal Togetherness.
Rage in Madam Hong’s voice. Lips dark, almost gray underneath her lip paint.
“Ò,” Jinhua said, and she repeated the words she had never heard before. “Ye He Hua.”
It is the merest, palest outline of a flower on the silk. “Painted by my own chaste hand,” Madam Hong told her, lips becoming darker, “with a fine, mousehair brush. And with a delicate paste of oyster shell to draw the flower pattern. But now that you have come,” she said, “I cannot bring myself to touch it. My hands, you see—”
There are no stitches. No colors and no threads. There is only the pattern that Madam Hong has painted on the square of white silk.
The color of magnolia.
Madam Hong began to laugh a little. “You shall have my embroidery box as well,” she said. “Do you understand my meaning?”
Jinhua nodded—Yes, she understands—and Madam Hong frowned a deep, tight frown that made her face ugly for one long moment. “No,” she said, releasing the frown, speaking softly. “You are a person who understands nothing. Now, go back to your courtyard and ponder what it is that I have taught you.”
Jinhua is in her own courtyard now, sitting in her own room. She is looking at the Ye He Hua—the Flower of Nocturnal Togetherness—and she has opened Madam Hong’s embroidery box, and color spills from it with the finest silk threads perfectly ordered: yellows next to other yellows—the color of forsythia and daffodil and ochre-tinted soil; pinks with pinks—orchids, peaches, pomegranates; watermelon red and rose red and chrysanthemum red that is almost brown; greens and blues and purples all in shades that range from almost white to almost black. And Jinhua’s cheeks are burning.
She takes a needle in her hand. She takes a piece of silk thread in her other hand, and it is orange, the color of kumquats, and she sits for a long time thinking, and finally, when her hips ache from sitting and her head aches from thinking, an image comes to her quite clearly, and it is her own face seen from beyond herself, with the red line drawn at her throat. And later a second image comes, one she has seen again and again—it is Lao Mama’s dark eye peering through a crack.
23
A WAVE WITHOUT WIND
Madam Hong
The lake is disheveled at this time of year. The rumpled leaves of the sacred lotus began rising from the muck only a few days ago, and now they wallow across the surface of the water in shades of jade sea and blue sky. No blooms yet, but the lotus flowers will soon intrude with daubs of pink and white.
Madam Hong has been sitting here for hours watching birds and fish and dragonflies beyond the red railings of the pavilion, and she has been contemplating Wenqing’s letter on the table, anchored by a pebble against the wind, pondering how a single lotus plant can live for a thousand years—and thinking, too, about poison.
She misses her embroidery; it is one more thing that the courtesan has taken from her. Madam Hong hears the tidy splash of a carp in the pond. It is a warm day with a blinding sun, and Huizhong is hovering at the edge of the pavilion.
“Madam Hong,” she says, and her hands, as always, are constantly moving, “you must forget this foolishness. Onl
y Cook and I have touched your food, and the concubine has not come near it. It is perfectly safe for you to eat what he has so carefully prepared.”
Huizhong does not understand—at all—what it is that worries Madam Hong. On the table she has placed a bowl of bean-curd milk and a plate of crisp shaobing and a tray of ginger-infused towels. Madam Hong likes the scent of ginger, usually. Today it disgusts her.
“The doujiang is warm and Cook has sweetened it with just a drip of honey,” Huizhong says. “It will strengthen and revive you. He has prepared it in just the way that you like, Madam. Do not be afraid.”
Perhaps Huizhong is right; perhaps she is foolish to fear the food that Cook has prepared and Huizhong has brought to her, and perhaps it is true that the courtesan has not been near it. Madam Hong fills a porcelain spoon with milk and takes the smallest of sips. “It is delicious,” she says, leaning over the bowl. “Not bitter at all, but difficult to swallow.”
Huizhong looks pleased, and Madam Hong reminds herself that she had planned to give the maid a bolt of cloth from the storeroom as a gift. The blue silk will fetch a good price at the market—and Cook must have one as well. Or maybe she will give them each two bolts. She tells herself that Huizhong has a faithful heart. That her husband will be home soon. His letter arrived three days ago. I am coming back to Suzhou, he wrote, and I bring news from the Capital.
Madam Hong does not concern herself with thoughts of what the news might be; perhaps the great Qing army has won a battle against the foreign devils. Or perhaps Wenqing has completed the drawing of a new map showing an advantageous border with that barbarian place to the north that so worries him.
Russia.
Either way, it is not her concern for today or tomorrow. Her concern is the courtesan. It is her husband. Her embroidery. Her life.
Yesterday Huizhong told her, “You have caused a hundred knots of worry to tie up my intestines since the master went away. You must eat. You must rest. You must give up these thoughts of poison.”
But the spider was real. She did not imagine it or conjure it in her dream.
It was the day after the courtesan came to visit—or was it two days after, or three? Her mind is a little confused, which is of course a symptom—one of many possible symptoms—of poisoning. She woke to find the spider there, nestled in the folds of her quilt, less than the length of her arm from her chin. It was morning, and she stared and lay quite still, and she could hear the creature breathing and see its body perfectly, like two chestnuts joined at the waist, brown and hairy and muscular; its eight legs were knuckled and as rugged as the root of the lotus. The spider waved its sluggish fangs in the direction of her face and then retracted them, and it watched her, and she watched it. She lay there for a long time, as helpless as a cripple in her bed, but strangely calm.
When Huizhong came and saw the spider there on the quilt, she screamed like a crow and ran to fetch the gardener, who studied the creature from a respectful distance before he told them, “It is a hu wen bu niao zhu,” a tiger-striped-bird-capturing spider. “I am quite sure of this naming,” he said. “It can be nothing else. The creature is a killer, I tell you.” While he said this the spider waited, and Huizhong watched from the far side of the room, whimpering a little—and Madam Hong thought, I told them there was danger, and I was not wrong.
Hearing the commotion, Cook arrived with chopsticks in his hand, the long ones that he uses for frying in hot oil, and he said, “You are the gardener and know about spiders. You do it,” and the gardener said, “All right, but let me use your chopsticks.” Madam Hong did not move—and kept her eyes on that spider. The gardener picked the spider up the way one plucks a morsel of pork from a bowl of noodles and dropped it on the floor, and it crept two steps this way and three steps that way, and then it stopped.
Huizhong said, “Kill it. Step on it. Stab it,” and she was shrieking. Cook said, “Give me back my chopsticks,” and the gardener looked at Madam Hong. She said, “Give it rice to eat and tea to drink. Put it in the cricket cage and bind the cage with hemp. Treat the creature well. It is deserving. It is a living being just as I am.”
It is the evidence. Her husband must see it.
She knows nothing about this kind of spider, but Madam Hong knows more now about poison than she did before. She found the book in her husband’s library on the bottom shelf, where the largest, heaviest books are kept. It is called A Long History of Poison, and Madam Hong has read every single page—twice. Sadly, she has found no mention of the tiger-striped-bird-capturing spider, but she has read about Lu Wanghou—the empress Lu—who put poison in lotus-root soup to make the concubine Qi go deaf and blind.
Sometimes events happen in reverse. Sometimes it is the courtesan who poisons the wife.
Madam Hong’s gaze shifts now to Wenqing’s letter. She takes it in her hand. She has read it several times, but today his careful script is blurred. She can barely make out the words To my Good Wife in her Chaste Chambers. Today, surely, her vision is worse than it was only yesterday. And was it not this morning that Huizhong put an extra layer of powder on her face to hide the unnatural flush in her cheeks?
Madam Hong reaches for a gingered towel but stops before she touches it, and Ò, how she longs for her embroidery and for the time, such as it was, before the courtesan came.
24
KNOW YOUR ENEMY
Jinhua
“I return from the capital with news, and the news is monumental and of great import.” Master Hong clears his throat, and he looks weary after his journey, swaying slightly on his feet in dusty boots.
“A thousand changes lie ahead.” He clears his throat again and blinks, and Jinhua notices that a few stray hairs have escaped his queue, and there is dust, too, at the hem of his gown. “The old must be replaced with the new.” Master Hong is shaking his head, and Jinhua imagines that this smallest of movements of his head from side to side is not something that he intends to do, but rather something his mind suggests and his body cannot forestall.
He is displeased, puzzled, agitated—and changed, she thinks. Not the way he was when she last saw him.
The monumental news of great import cannot be good news.
Jinhua bows, and she is thinking that she must remember to call Master Hong by the name of Wenqing as he has requested that she do. The sounds of brooms chafe in the courtyard, the maids at their morning chores, and the sounds are loud, and Master Hong retrieves an object from his writing table. It is wrapped, she sees, in yellow cloth—the color of an egg yolk—and yes, he is thinner in his cheeks than he was when Jinhua last saw him, and she has forgotten, yet again, to think of him by that other name.
“I trust,” he says, and it is hard to remain calm, “that my concubine is feeling well and that she has not been ill in my absence.” He is fumbling to unwrap the object, peeling back layers of the yellow cloth. “The first lady is in a delicate state, I fear. Her maid has said that her heart has been distracted, her thoughts have been in turmoil, and she has not been eating well, or sleeping, or doing her embroidery as is her habit.”
Jinhua waits, and she herself has not been sleeping well—and it is because of Madam Hong and because of the shame that she feels and cannot now forget. She notices the large pot of paintbrushes, a great ivory-handled brush lying next to it, the tip as large as a fist. She has not been in this place before—the place where Wenqing works and draws his maps, and where the walls are hung with paintings of the mountain-water type. It is a wooden tablet her husband has unwrapped and is holding up for her to see, painted black and inscribed in gold—and not much larger than the palm of his hand.
Wenqing reads aloud.
By Divine Mandate the Emperor of China sends the Honorable Bearer of this pass as Emissary to the nations of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Holland, and Russia—
He pauses, and she can see the shudder of his throat when he swallows and wonders what it means—this writing on the tablet.
A journey to a faraway, barbarian
place.
And upon surrender of said pass to the Presiding Official at the Chinese Embassy in Weiyena, the Bearer shall be given the Official Seal of Office.
He is waiting now, looking first at her and then at the floor in front of where she is standing. She should avert her gaze but doesn’t.
“What does this mean?”
“It means,” he says, shifting his stance, coughing a small cough, “that I will go to Weiyena—to live there—for a while, in service to the emperor.”
She nods and understands.
“How long will you be gone?” she asks, and what she understands is that she will be here alone with Madam Hong, and Master Hong will be there, in Weiyena, and this is terrible, terrible news that he has brought back from the capital.
“And because it is unseemly to take a first wife to such a place—because of decorum”—it is as though she had not asked the question; his voice is drifting—“my concubine will be the one to come with me. To live there—for a while—for two years, or three.”
The Courtesan Page 14
