My Last Empress (27 page)

“Reverend Hawthorn armed his parishioners, and they stormed into my township demanding that his people be returned, but they did not want to go back, so Hawthorn’s soldiers beat them. That was when I came to their defense.

“Once I became a foe of Hawthorn, then a foe I was to all colonists, for he was the leader of all foreign Christians—if he feared me, all feared me. Allied forces came to be organized among the French, Americans, English, and Portuguese; even the Japanese and Germans united in their goal to annihilate me. To survive, I had to arm my parishioners.

“My victories soon gained the notice of the Royal Court, those imbecilic fools who have been beaten in every battle and nearly every war. Here I was defeating them all. The dowager approached with an offer to make us their army and fight in their name. My supplies by then were drained, with thirty thousand hungry and desperate men on the verge of rebelling when the Court came knocking. So I bent, thinking that our aim and theirs were one. Of course the palace readily betrayed me.” He paused here and asked his maid to fill his pipe with opium, which she expertly did. After a few puffs, the man glowed with a faint rosiness that colored his wrinkled forehead and sagging cheeks. “My medicine, if you will.”

I merely nodded.

“Annie came to me to plead for peace. The day she came, she seemed to have brought a flock of butterflies with her. They flitted around her like a water lily framed by a beauteous pond. She stormed into my sanctuary, her skirt the purity of white, her face tender like silk; her cheeks were rosy, her breath fragrant, and smile charming; her strides were blithe and her voice sweet. My heart thumped at the sight of her. I almost mistook her as a heavenly vision.”

Another puff.

“How I adored hearing her read the Bible and sing her hymns to me. After she left, how I craved to see again her bare limbs, blue eyes, golden hair, and sweet lips. She answered my yearning by returning once more. We made love. She even shed her virgin’s blood. Petite she was, just like you.” His dead oyster eyes lingered on Q, the tip of his tongue licking his dry lips.

“How can you say I am not your child?” exclaimed Q. “My mother’s virgin blood you spilled!”

“Youth is so impatient. Your mother was just as rosy as you,” Lord Wang observed, reaching a shaky hand out to pinch Q’s left cheek. “Like summer days, love invites thunder and storms. Her surreptitious visits were soon discovered by Hawthorn’s spies. One night when she returned to her father’s house, the devil ambushed her. Despicable evil awaited her.”

“What happened?” asked Q, attentive like a schoolgirl.

“She did not come back. After the first month passed, I sent an envoy to inquire the cause. He was robbed of his horse and returned to me bloody and beaten with no word of what had befallen my Annie. What loneliness I felt.”

“Didn’t your other wives keep you warm and your pillow soft during these lonely days?” I snidely asked.

Lord Wang ignored my question. “Annie was a jewel. Hundreds of others would not be her equal. I breached the truce negotiated by Annie and led my army toward Reverend Hawthorn’s camp in good faith to ask for Annie’s hand in marriage, but they met me with nothing but cannon shells and bullets, no matter that we made our peaceful intentions known. Fortunately she escaped the confinement her father had placed her in and came to me, fearless in the midst of battle. I carried her away to safety. That night she told me that new life grew inside her but that it was not my child planted within her.”

“Who else’s could it be then?” asked Q.

Wang only shook his head and resumed his tale. “Much pain and sickness she suffered. She could not return to her home, for her father had threatened to cut the infant out of her womb, but your mother never once swayed on her conviction to keep you. Then one day in April she fell ill and began to bleed. I had to seek audience with the dowager to gain Annie admission into Union Hospital, the one and only way to save you and her both. The palace saw this as an opportunity for peace and me as a sacrificial lamb. No sooner had I surrendered your mother to the hospital than I was taken to serve a three-year sentence imposed not by my own emperor but by the American legation by will of Reverend Hawthorn.” He paused, shaking his head. “But I did not suffer in vain. I pleaded that you, the child, be kept alive on the promise that I would not mobilize my far-flung army to riot against them, which I could have done
even from behind iron bars. So a bargain was forged and your life kept.”

Q seemed stunned, tears glistening her slanting eyes.

“A wonderful tale,” I said, “but you still refuse to acknowledge fatherhood and to provide protection for the empress’s safety.”

He pondered the weight of my words for a second before saying firmly, “I will show you the truth, and then you must be on your way.”

“What truth?” I asked belligerently.

“Scientific truth.” Wang gestured toward the foyer. “Come to my wash chamber. Just you.”

I followed the hunched, limping man to the near chamber, which contained a wooden bucket and a face basin. Without much ado, he lifted up the front of his gown showing me what seemed a suitable case of pseudo-hermaphroditism—a fully formed vagina, lipped and layered, upon which protruded an atypical genital organ that was larger than a clitoris but smaller than a normal penis, less than a pinkie in size and length.

“See for yourself,” Wang Dan said, his chin up and tone full of pride. “This is what God has given me.”

I was utterly unprepared for his revelation. The sight overwhelmed me, rushing instant hot tears into my cold eyes of judgment. It was a long lull before I could speak again. “But how …?”

“How, indeed? I can pleasure and be pleasured, but no child can ever be obtained from my matings.”

This was the first time I glimpsed this abnormality with my own eyes. The pictorial depictions of such were hardly as
shocking, what I had perused in the journals and encyclopedias I had scouted. Some African tribes were known to hack away the dwarfish penises on young female children after stroking the abnormal organ to its fullest hardness, which was then burned to ashes and mixed in with wine so the child could drink the cocktail to rid herself of any residual masculinity. The child would then be sold off as a prized bride to a tribal chief. It was said, when excited, that the stem, that residual node, would still harden, giving the male lover added pleasure.

“Who then could have impregnated our Annie?” I demanded.

“Not your Annie—mine.”

Such stubbornness.

“I will tell you if you promise to confide this to no other, especially the empress,” he said grimly.

“Fine,” I agreed.

“It was her father, the Reverend Hawthorn himself. Annie told me so.”

I was struck mute as if by clapping thunder right overhead.

“But why?” I asked.

“To rid her of my supposed seed in a moment of madness.”

This left me quiet and somber for a long while.

Poor Annabelle! My poor darling nymphet love! What a foul fate God had struck you with. What tragedy! Never in my maddest moments would I have ever conjectured this truth. My poor lamb, to have hoarded such ugly and slanderous shame.

Had she, in all my encounters, ever uttered or proffered the echoes of her pain? Had all her joyousness been but a
disguise to conceal her sorrow, a way to cleanse the tarnished stain of her past?

Why hadn’t God struck her father down with his thunderous wrath? Why hadn’t providence been more plentiful in blessing her, the wronged one, instead of cutting short her young life in punishment for the despicable deeds of another?

How had she penetrated through all the lies, coming to the truth that her child had survived her? How could she have known to guide me this far, searching for her living child?

Whatever the answer, the road ahead was straightened for me, and the path clear of all clouds and mist, disguises and camouflage.

Silent I must remain. Promise I must keep.

When inquired and probed by a frustrated Q, all I could offer her was a foul and disquieted mood. All I uttered to her regarding her birth and this trickery of a man was the comment, “He cannot have fathered you. He cannot father any child.”

For the next two hours, when supper was served and banal pleasantry exchanged between our host and Q, I stayed silent and moody. Our coughing lord gazed at me with certain smugness, content with having defeated my glibness.

At the conclusion of the meal, he rasped, “Now it is time for you to be gone from my township, royal tutor, but she can stay.” His lewd eyes darted to Q.

I was about to agree to this manly pact when Q stood up. “If my companion cannot stay, then I shall leave as well.”

I would have fought her, but something in her eyes warned
otherwise. She was, after all, more like her mother than not, unwilling to discard me in service of herself. What grace, what providence!

One could feel Wang Dan’s anger rise in his heaving chest, then in his reddening neck. But that was that. The road might be crooked ahead and tomorrow utterly uncertain, but sure was my heart, rhyming the same beat with Q, my beauteous queen.

Farewell we bid our host, and off we walked away from the sanctuary of Wang Dan with the moon over our shoulder, a light breeze fluttering the hem of summer night. A carriage was dispatched for our use until we reached Tianjin, a token of kindness that I readily accepted. Crossing the pull-bridge, I looked back at the golden sanctuary to see a flock of butterflies suddenly emerge chasing after us in sweeping plumes of colorful clouds.

“Why didn’t you stay and take that man’s offering?” I asked as the carriage jolted into motion.

“You said he was not my father,” she replied. Leaning against me, eyes half-closed, she asked, “What are we to do after we arrive in Tianjin?”

“We will go to America.”

“But this is my land, my father’s land.”

“Your adoptive father’s land from which we are being driven away.”

“Who will look after me?”

“I shall, and if not I, then your very own grandparents.”

“My grandparents? But I am an empress. I cannot leave my husband. We are bound forever in life and death.”

“He is probably already onto his next life if Grandpa has her way. The slaughtering has already begun, with your adoptive father being the first to go.”

She covered her mouth and sobbed. “I am fatherless, now and forever.”

I could not answer her. Some truths were best left untold.

She cried all the way through the frigid night as we journeyed along the pitted road.

When they came upon me, after I left Q at the modest lodging near Tianjin Wharf, it was not hard to conjecture the culprit behind the betrayal. I had, the previous day, paid a visit to the American consulate there to inquire about certain rights given not just to current citizens as I was but also to one born of an American mother.

The clerk was some haughty youth wearing a glaring orange tie. At once, he had excused himself, departing his post for a good minute, returning with his superior, a chargé d’affaires, to be sure, who in turn seemed confounded by the simple query. What useless minions! All that pomposity and no one seemed certain of anything. A third person was consulted, a minor legal officer, a typical Columbia man who knew everything and nothing. A fool he was, citing all sorts of irrelevant legalities and farfetched treaties that had little to do with my pointed inquiry.

Between the three philistines a precious half hour was squandered, during which time a telephone call could have been made to the legation in Peking into the ear of my nemesis, Colonel Winthrop, whose duty it was to keep an acute eye on me, or a messenger could have been dispatched to the nearest Manchurian sheriff from which an envoy could have been deputized for my seizure. Or even more tantalizingly
so, Wang Dan himself could have personally ridden out to the gate of the Forbidden City to whisper his intelligence into the waiting ears of his former cohort, the dowager, reporting to her the whereabouts of the prized fugitives for an unimaginable award befitting the task.

Why would I suspect that Wang would betray us? Why not, indeed? The lordship had, after all, given Q away once. Why wouldn’t he do it again to regain his former glory? All was within the realm of possibility.

When they came upon me in that glaring noon sun, I felt a sigh of relief unleash from my chest, as if this was destined and certain to occur sooner than later. My obsession and possession had steered me into the dark in search of that everlasting light. It had been tiring, and such fatigue only came upon me now, rightly and punctually.

Only two hours before, I had awakened in our love nest, my love slave still warm in my snug arms, my scepter ready and upright for mellow morning lust. We might be in flight—who in this world wasn’t in flight from one thing or another?—but this was, after all, our honeymoon with sweetened days numbered. She called me many things: brute, ape, thug, and animal. And yet she had delighted in every groan and every moan. Her playfulness had all but hidden a rather shy self, and only lust could lay bare her real self, a rosy, big-eyed novice in the game of coition. The days and nights on the flat-bottomed boat had provided a prelude to this full blossoming, how timely and opportune. Flight and lust were intertwined, one urging the other. How monstrously I adored and craved her. The more I loved, the more wretched the craving.