China

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “I am sorry to hear it.” Shi-Rong bowed his head, but he continued to look at Bright Moon. “You are binding her feet, I see,” he remarked.

  “Beauty like this shouldn’t go to waste,” said Mother.

  “Certainly not.” Shi-Rong nodded his approval.

  The girl opened her mouth as if to speak. She still complained about her feet, almost every day. Was she about to embarrass them by venting her feelings to a mandarin? Mother gave her such a look that even Bright Moon wisely decided to remain silent.

  “An excellent meal,” Shi-Rong said politely. “And now I shall stroll by the pond for a little while.” He turned to Mei-Ling. “Perhaps the mother of this lovely child would accompany me.”

  * * *

  —

  Shredded clouds, high in the sky, caught the light of the third quarter moon as they walked down to the bridge in silence.

  What did he want? Mei-Ling wondered.

  They stepped onto the bridge and walked towards the middle, where he paused. He pointed down at the reflection of the moon in the water. She nodded, to signify that she had seen it.

  “Tell me,” he said quietly, “have you heard anything from Nio?”

  So that was it. He was after Nio again.

  “Nothing.” She looked at him sadly. “You want to arrest him?”

  “No. I just wondered what happened to him. We were not always enemies, you know.”

  “I have heard nothing in five years.”

  “Then he’s dead. Maybe at Nanjing.”

  She knew how the Taiping had at last been broken. The Ever-Victorious Army, as they were called—armed with barbarian rifles and cannon—had smashed them. Finally Nanjing had been taken. The Heavenly King was dead. The slaughter had been terrible.

  “I know he loved you,” Shi-Rong continued. “If he were alive, I think he would have come by now.” He smiled sadly. “The Taiping will never be a threat again. So I wouldn’t arrest him if I did see him, unless he forced me to. Actually, it was you I came to see,” he continued quietly.

  “Me?” She looked astonished. “Why?”

  * * *

  —

  It was fate, he thought. It had to be fate. When he set out on his journey, he had known only one thing: He needed a change. A couple of years away from a not-very-happy marriage until he got a promotion that might put his wife in a more affectionate temper. A time to reflect, live for himself a little.

  And perhaps find some companionship.

  From time to time he’d wondered whether to take a concubine. Law and custom allowed it. People almost expected it of a man in his position. Many a respectable family down on their luck would have been happy to supply him with one of their daughters—well brought up, with bound feet and a smattering of culture—on reasonable terms.

  Sometimes concubines and wives got along quite well. But he couldn’t see it working with his own wife. It would cause her pain. There would be anger. Endless anger. He might not feel that he was loved, but he had no wish to cause his wife more pain.

  The solution was to take a temporary concubine, just for the period he was away. This, too, was perfectly acceptable. Any middle-aged mandarin might be expected to regain his youth with a pretty girl. And there were plenty of pretty and elegant women in the big cities who were well trained to fill such a role.

  So why had he turned south and made a detour, which added two hundred and fifty miles to his journey, to reach an obscure hamlet that might or might not contain a peasant woman with unbound feet with whom, years ago, he had spent a moonlit night sitting by a pond while she told him the story of her life?

  Her beauty. Her honesty. That had impressed him. Her intelligence. And something else, something magical that he couldn’t define. Maybe it was just the moonlight, but he didn’t think so. It had haunted him.

  And now that he had this little period of freedom, he had just wanted to find her again, to see if she was how he remembered. He was quite ready to find her changed or find her magic gone in the broad daylight, so to speak. Most likely of all, to find that she was unavailable.

  But he had almost gasped when he saw her just now. She was everything he remembered. Perhaps more.

  And she was widowed. And therefore, presumably, available. It had to be fate.

  * * *

  —

  He paused a moment. “I am sorry that you lost your husband. But you have two fine sons at home and your little girl. She has your beauty. And with bound feet, she could find a rich husband.”

  “We hope she will find a good husband,” she said quietly.

  “You should also teach her embroidery and so forth, and some of the other arts that belong to a young lady. She should learn to recite a few poems. That sort of thing.”

  Why was he telling her this? She had no idea. But in order to say something and because it was so much in her mind, she heard herself respond: “You have to spend money to get a rich husband. I’ve learned that much already.”

  “Ah.” He placed his hands on the rail of the bridge and stared at them. “I may be able to help you there.” He turned to her. “If you like.” He saw her look suspicious. “I shall be in Guilin Prefecture for a year, maybe a year and a half,” he went on quickly. “I want you to accompany me.”

  “Accompany?” She frowned. “You mean as a concubine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you get a concubine there?”

  “You have haunted me ever since we met that night with Nio. I have thought of you ever since. I came two hundred and fifty miles out of the way to find you.”

  “Have you a wife?”

  “She will not be there. You can bring your little girl, if you want. She would learn much that way, about how a man like me lives. It could be useful to her.”

  Have her child living in this man’s house where she was a concubine? It was not what she wanted.

  But she couldn’t deny that what he’d said was true. She knew almost nothing about the sophisticated lifestyle of a rich man or a mandarin. The habits, the conversation, the social rituals. Nor did anyone in her family or in the hamlet, if truth were told. If Bright Moon wanted to find a rich husband, a year or two in a mandarin’s house would be the perfect education for her.

  A year or two—or until he gets tired of me, she thought, and kicks me out. She didn’t want her little girl to see that.

  “My daughter stays here at home,” she said.

  “As you wish. Does that mean that you might consider my proposition?”

  “I would be free to leave in a year and a half?”

  “Yes.”

  Mei-Ling thought. Buy the land, she’d told her sons. The money for Bright Moon would turn up. She’d believed it was the right thing to do. But the truth was she had no idea where that extra money would come from. And now, suddenly, here was an opportunity for her to earn the money herself. However little she liked it, her duty was clear. As long as the money was enough and she was sure of getting it.

  There were risks, of course. This mandarin might mistreat her. She supposed she could endure a beating or two. If it got worse, she could always run away. Or maybe kill him, she thought, and then kill myself. So long as the money was secure.

  “You’d have to pay me in advance,” she said. “You’d have to pay me now.”

  “And trust you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you might say that.”

  He took out a small bag full of coins, put it in her hands, and opened it. She looked inside. She could see the silver coins by the moonlight. She didn’t take them out to count them, but it was quite a lot of money.

  “I need two bags like this,” she said.

  He looked impressed. And to her surprise, pulled out another bag. She looked inside that one, too.

  “The same,” he said.
“You have my word.”

  Mei-Ling calculated quickly. If she gave the bags of silver to Mother at once, the older woman could hide them where no one would find them, not even her own two sons.

  She looked at this man she hardly knew. What would Second Son say? That she was doing what she had to, she supposed, since he was not there to help her. Yes, she told herself, he’d say something like that. And just for a moment, the first time since she’d heard of his death, it seemed to Mei-Ling that she felt her husband’s presence.

  “We shall have to ask the head of the family,” she said.

  * * *

  ◦

  Mei-Ling liked Guilin. Shi-Rong could see she did. It had been a long journey, some three hundred miles north of the hamlet, but when they got there, they both agreed: The place was quite remarkable. Millennia of rains and flowing waters had sculpted the soft karst stone of the region into a landscape of miniature mountains, steep as anthills, hundreds of feet high and covered with green trees, except for the grey cliffs on their sides, here and there, where even mountain trees couldn’t find their footing. A pleasant river, called the Li, flowed beside the town.

  On sunny days the hills gathered around the intimate plateaus of pastures and rice fields, like giant green dolmens protecting a sanctuary. But when the mists filled the river valleys, then the onlooker seemed to be witnessing an army of hooded gods moving slowly through a world of clouds. Shi-Rong had seen such landscapes in paintings and supposed they must be imaginary. Now he discovered that this paradise was real.

  She liked the subtropical climate, rather hot and humid for his own taste, and she liked the people, too.

  Some of the local tribes had lived around Guilin since before China was a state. Each tribe seemed to have its own language or dialect—often as not incomprehensible to its neighbors. The servants in Shi-Rong’s official residence were all from the Zhuang tribe, which was the largest. And somehow, within a month, Mei-Ling was freely conversing with them, and even enjoying their sour pickled cabbage and the tea leaves fried in oil that they seemed to eat with rice every day. “You can eat it for me,” Shi-Rong told her with a laugh.

  But he couldn’t help being impressed by how adaptable this peasant woman from her little hamlet showed herself to be. “How do you do it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But my mother was half Hakka, so I was used to having family in two worlds from the start of my life. Perhaps that helps me.”

  He soon realized that her intelligence went far beyond talking to the Zhuang servants.

  When he first arrived, he’d wondered what to do with Mei-Ling as regards the prefect and the other officials. Of course, he could keep her secluded in the house. But then people would talk and make up stories. So after a month, when he had got to know the prefect, who turned out to be a kindly and easygoing man, he told him frankly about his charming concubine. “She’s just a peasant, part Hakka. But she’s intelligent and very beautiful. What should I do with her?”

  “My dear Jiang,” the genial grey-bearded prefect said, smiling, “rumors of her beauty had reached me. I was wondering if I’d get to see her.”

  “I must warn you that her feet aren’t even bound.”

  “I’ll start a rumor that she’s half Manchu.” The older man grinned. “We’re so far from Beijing down here, you know, and surrounded by all these curious tribes, that we don’t worry about all that. Bring her to see my wife. She’s always glad of fresh company.”

  Shi-Rong did as bid. The two women met for an hour. Afterwards, Mei-Ling told him that the prefect’s wife wanted her to return the next day. And to his astonishment, this invitation was repeated a dozen times in the course of a month. Any doubts he might have had about these visits were soon dispelled when the prefect remarked: “My wife enjoys Mei-Ling’s company so much. They chatter away all afternoon.”

  “How do you talk to each other?” he once asked Mei-Ling. “I suppose she speaks Cantonese.”

  “Yes, she speaks Cantonese. But she’s teaching me to speak Mandarin.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “She’s quite curious about my little hamlet and our simple life. She’s always lived in towns. And I have many questions for her.”

  “Oh,” he said, wondering what those might be. He was to discover a month later, when she announced one day that she was going to serve him tea. Nothing unusual in that, of course. It was a normal ritual in any household in the land. He was surprised, however, to find a beautiful new tea set laid out in the most elegant manner, and still more so when Mei-Ling ministered to him in a rich silk dress and with her hair coiffed as elaborately as a Beijing lady’s. Not only did she make polite conversation in Mandarin, but she even dropped appropriate poetic quotations into the conversation.

  How in the world had she learned such things? Obviously, from the prefect’s wife. And as time passed, her accomplishments increased. She began to hold herself in a different way. Her Mandarin improved so much that in a year, he supposed, it would be quite elegant.

  What was her purpose? To please him? To show what she could do? Or might it be that after enjoying the life of a sub-prefect’s household, she might not want to go back to her poor hamlet. She might be thinking that after they parted she could become the concubine of another official, or even the wife of a merchant, perhaps.

  A new suspicion came to him when he noticed something else.

  At first he had observed that she gently avoided his attentions at the time of the month when she might conceive, and he did not complain. But then she gave that up. She was not too old to have a child. Was it possible that she was now calculating that she could make her position permanent if she gave him a child? And come to that, if such an event had occurred, what would he do? So one evening he asked her outright: “Are you risking having a child?”

  “No,” she said calmly. “There’s an herbal drink you can take. It’s made from dandelion roots and the thunder-god vine. It’s very effective. The apothecary gives it to me.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he confessed.

  “Neither did I. The prefect’s wife told me about it.”

  Shi-Rong wasn’t sure how he felt about the prefect’s wife intruding quite so far into his private life, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

  The idea of keeping her for the longer term still remained. It was tempting. As a lover, she gave him everything a man could wish for. He constantly looked at her with a sense of wonder. While they were making love, there were moments when he would ask himself: How can it be that I feel this strange magic? She was like that southern region’s rose, with its never-fading color, repeatedly blooming. Or like the lotus, China’s symbol of purity, which rises out of the common mud to flower.

  Whether Mei-Ling’s own emotions were engaged was another matter.

  Did he know how she felt? Not really.

  “You do so many things to please me,” he said to her kindly one day. “I hope you know that I am grateful that you learn so much.”

  “I am glad you are pleased,” she said politely. She seemed to pause for a moment. “And I am grateful to you in turn, that I can learn such things for my daughter.”

  For her daughter. Of course. How could I have been so vain, he thought, and so foolish? She is learning so that she can teach all this to her little girl, whose feet are being bound, to make her a lady. And though he might have liked it if she had been seeking to please only him, he couldn’t help admiring her.

  Soon afterwards, she started learning to read and write, and curious to discover more about her mind, he even began to teach her a little himself.

  She learned fast. “Another skill you’ll be able to teach your little girl,” he remarked laughingly.

  But she shook her head. “I can get her started, but she’ll need a proper teacher. I’ll need money for that.”
/>   Shi-Rong said nothing. But he got the message.

  * * *

  —

  She was curious about everything. She wanted to know about Beijing and the Forbidden City, and how things were done there. She asked about the great rivers and the city of Nanjing, the Grand Canal and the Great Wall. All these things she had heard of, but never seen. She wanted to know about the emperor, too.

  “He was only six when his father died,” he explained, “so he’s still a young boy. He’s taken the name of Tongzhi for his reign. It means ‘Union for Order’—which is certainly what we need. He’s advised by a regency council headed by his father’s senior wife—who’s very nice and quiet and doesn’t know much—and his mother, who used to be called the Noble Consort Yi, but who’s now known as Dowager Empress Cixi, a very strong character. They have the imperial seals used to authenticate royal documents. They’re advised by Prince Gong.”

  “So is this Cixi really allowed a say in the government?”

  “In practice, yes. In fact, just recently she’s become even more important than Prince Gong.”

  “Has China ever been ruled by an empress?”

  “Only once, by a very wicked woman they call the Empress Wu, during the Tang dynasty, twelve hundred years ago. She killed so many of her family to get power that after she died her gravestone was left blank.”

  “Oh.” Mei-Ling sounded a bit disappointed.

  “Funnily enough,” Shi-Rong went on pleasantly, “here in this region, in ancient times, the tribes were ruled by women.” He smiled. “Confucius would not have approved at all.” He noticed with amusement that when he said this, she kept silent.

  She was also curious about the barbarians and the world outside the Celestial Empire. He explained how wise Prince Gong and others had discovered how to turn the barbarians to good use, as mercenaries, customs officials, and so forth.

  “We have acquired their arms, and soon we shall buy their iron ships. We are even sending scholars to inspect their universities,” he told her proudly.