Peony: A Novel of China (9 page)

Instead of coiling her braid over her ear, she let it hang down her back. But into the red cord that bound her hair at her neck she thrust a white gardenia from the court. An old bush grew there, and at this season it bore many blossoms each morning. Peony had chosen to put on a pale blue silk coat and trousers, and now she looked delicate and modest as she stood waiting, and hers was the first face that Leah saw when the curtain of the sedan was lifted. Indeed, Peony herself lifted it, and she smiled into Leah’s eyes.

“Welcome, Lady,” Peony said. “Will you come down from this chair?” She held out her arm for Leah to lean upon, but Leah stepped down without this support. She was a head taller than Peony, and she did not speak, although she answered Peony’s smile.

“Have you eaten, Lady?” Peony asked, following a little behind her.

“I did eat,” Leah said frankly, “but I am hungry again.”

“It is the morning,” Peony said. “The air is dry and good today. I will bring you food, Lady, as soon as I have settled you in your rooms. I made them ready for you yesterday, and I shall bring you some fresh gardenias. They should not be plucked early, lest they turn brown at the edges.”

So the two young women went together, each very conscious of the new relationship between them and each trying to fulfill it. Wang Ma had gone ahead to tell Madame Ezra that Leah had come, and so Peony was left to lead Leah to her rooms.

“Am I to have this whole court?” Leah asked in surprise when Peony paused. The rooms were much more beautiful than any she had ever used. As a child she remembered having seen here David’s grandmother, an old lady, lighting candles at sundown.

“There are only two rooms,” Peony said. “One is for your sleep and the other for you to sit in when you are alone.”

She guided Leah into the rooms and a man followed, bringing her box. When he was gone Peony showed her the garments that Madame Ezra herself had worn in her youth, the robes of the Jewish people. Straight and full and long they hung, scarlet trimmed with gold, and deep blue trimmed with silver and yellow edged with emerald green.

“You are to wear the scarlet one today,” Peony said. “But first you must eat and then be bathed and perfumed, and here are jewels for your ears and your bosom. And my mistress says you are not to hide yourself away here alone, but you are to come out and walk about the courts and mingle with the family and enjoy all the house.”

“How kind she is!” Leah said. Then she was shy. “I doubt I can feel so free in a day,” she told Peony.

“Why not?” Peony said half carelessly. “There is no one here to hurt you.” She opened a lacquered red box on the dressing table as she spoke, and Leah saw a little heap of gold and silver trinkets set with precious stones.

Leah looked up from where she sat beside the table and met Peony’s smiling, secret eyes.

“It is marriage, is it not?” Peony asked in a light clear voice. “I think our mistress has made up her mind that you are to marry our young lord.”

Leah’s face quivered. “A marriage cannot be made,” she replied quickly.

“How else, then?” Peony inquired hardily. “Is not every marriage made?”

“Not among our people,” Leah said proudly.

She looked away, and reminded herself again that this pretty Chinese girl was only a bondmaid. It was not at all suitable that she should discuss with Peony the sacred subject of her marriage. Indeed, it was too sacred yet even for her own thought, something as distant and high as God’s will. “I will have something to eat now, if you please,” Leah said in a cool firm voice. “Then afterward I can dress myself—I am used to doing so. Please tell Wang Ma I will not have her help—or yours.”

Peony, hearing this voice, perfectly understood what was going on in Leah’s mind. She bent her head and smiled. “Very well, Lady,” she said in her sweet and docile way, and turning she left the room.

A few minutes later a serving woman brought in food, and Leah ate it alone. When she was finished the serving woman took it away, and alone Leah brushed her hair and washed again and put on the scarlet dress. But she put no perfume on herself, and she took none of the jewels from the box. When she was ready she sat down in the outer room and waited.

Peony had gone to her own room and wept steadily for a few minutes because Leah was so beautiful. She looked at herself in the mirror on her dressing table, and it seemed to her that all her own charms were mean and small. She was a little thing, light as a bird, and although her face was round, her frame had no strength. Leah was like a princess and she like a child. Yet she could not hate Leah. There was something lofty and good about the Jewish girl, and Peony knew that she herself was neither lofty nor very good. How could she be good, even if she wished to be, when she must win all she had by wile and trickery?

I have nothing and nobody except myself, the small Chinese girl thought sadly.

She shut down the mirror into the dressing table and laid her head down and cried still more heartily until she had no more tears. Then her brain, refreshed and washed clean by her tears, began to work swiftly.

You can never be a wife in this house, this hard little brain now told her. Do not tease yourself any more with dreams and imaginings. You cannot even be a concubine—their god forbids. But no one knows David as well as you do. You are his possession. Never let him forget it. Be his comfort, his inner need, his solace, his secret laughter.

She listened to these unspoken words, and she lifted her head, a smile twisting her lips. She opened the mirror and she coiled her hair about one ear and she examined every look of her face and her eyes. After a moment of intense gazing at herself, she changed her pale blue garments for the warm peach-pink ones and put a fresh gardenia in her hair. Then plucking a handful of the flowers for Leah, she presented herself again to the guest. It took all her strength not to be dismayed by the radiance of Leah’s looks, as she now stood arrayed in the scarlet robe. It fitted her well enough, and the golden girdle clasped it to her slender and round waist.

“How beautiful you look, Lady!” Peony said, smiling at Leah as though with delight while she handed her the flowers. “These are for you. And I will go and tell our mistress that you are ready.”

She ran away on her little feet as though all she did for Leah was pure joy, and going to Madame Ezra’s court she stood at the door and coughed her delicate little cough, trying not to weep.

“Come in,” Madame Ezra’s voice said.

Madame Ezra had finished her breakfast, and now she was making ready to survey the house and especially the kitchens to see that all the servants did their duty, and that nothing was left undone for the Sabbath, next day, which was the day of rest.

This morning Wang Ma had wakened her with the news that the caravan was so near that it might even reach here before the day was done.

“The day before the Sabbath!” Madame Ezra had exclaimed. After a moment she had added, “Do not tell Leah—let her not be distracted from what I have to say to her.”

“Yes, Lady,” Wang Ma had murmured.

Now Madame Ezra was about to step over the threshold on her task to see that the servants, excited by the news of the caravan, were not careless about the preparations for the Sabbath, when Peony approached, having swallowed her tears and made her face smooth and empty. Madame Ezra sat down again. “Come, come, child,” she said impatiently.

Peony stepped into the sitting room that Madame Ezra kept for her own. It was a room unlike any other in the house. The walls were hung with striped stuffs from foreign countries and with scripts woven into satin. The furniture was foreign, too, heavy and carved, and the chairs cushioned. The space and emptiness that a Chinese lady would have needed for the peace of her soul and the order of her mind were not here. In the midst of her many possessions Madame Ezra lived content, and Peony could not but grant, though she heartily disliked the room, that there was beauty in it. Had it been smaller, it would have been hideous indeed. But the room was very large, for Madame Ezra when she came here as a bride had taken out two partitions and had thrown three rooms into one long one.

“Mistress, the young lady is ready,” Peony announced.

“Where is my son?” Madame Ezra inquired.

“He was still sleeping when last I looked into his room,” Peony replied.

She had not seen David last night. This was her own fault, for she had not gone in the evening, as her wont was, to take him tea and to see that his bed was ready for the night. Partly this was because of Madame Ezra’s new command, but partly it was to test David. Alas, he had not sent for her, and when she went to bed she wept a while. In the morning she woke to reproach herself, and she had gone early to his rooms to take him tea, and if he were awake to ask him where he had been and why he had not finished the poem he had begun. But he was asleep and he had not waked, even when she parted the curtains of his bed and looked. He lay there, deep in sleep, his right arm flung above his head, and she had gazed at him a long moment, her heart most tender, and then she had gone away again.

“Bid Wang Ma wake him,” Madame Ezra now commanded. “And where is my son’s father?”

“I have not seen him, Mistress,” Peony replied, “but I heard Wang Ma say that he expects the caravan today, and therefore he went out early to the city gates to wait for it.”

“The caravan would come this day!” Madame Ezra exclaimed. “Now David will think of nothing else.”

Peony looked sad, to please Madame Ezra. “Shall Wang Ma bid him come here to you before the caravan comes?” she asked.

“Let her do so,” Madame Ezra said. “I will put off going to the kitchens, and meanwhile tell Leah to come to me.”

She opened an inlaid box and took out some embroidery, and Peony left her. Outside the door she met Wang Ma, and she said, as though Madame Ezra had commanded it, “You are to take the young lady to our mistress, and I am to go and wake our young lord. Make haste, Elder Sister!”

She ran on, but not to David’s room. She went to his schoolroom, now empty, and at the table in haste she took up the writing brush, put off its cover, and then made a little ink. She had kept the unfinished poem in her breast, and now she drew it out. Thinking fast and drawing her brows together, she quickly wrote three lines more upon the empty sheet.

“Forgive me, David,” she whispered, and replacing pen and ink, she ran back to her own room. Opening a secret drawer in her desk, she took out a purse with money in it, the gifts that guests gave her and the coins that Ezra tossed her sometimes when he was pleased with her. Putting this too into her bosom, she slipped through passageways to the Gate of Peaceful Escape at the very back of the compound, that little secret gate which all great houses have, so that in time of the anger of the people, when they storm the front gates of the rich, the family itself can escape by it.

Through this gate Peony now went, keeping to quiet alleyways, away from the streets, until she came to another small gate like the one she had left. This opened into the compound of the Kung family, and here she knocked. A gardener drew back the bar and she said, “I have a message for the family.”

He nodded and pointed a muddy finger over his shoulder, and she went in.

The house of Kung was an idle, pleasure-loving place, and no one rose from bed before noon. Chu Ma, the nurse, was only just stirring about her room, yawning and scratching her head with a silver hairpin, when Peony opened the door a little.

“Ah, you, Elder Sister!” Peony whispered.

Chu Ma opened the door wide. “You?” she said. “Why are you here?”

“I must make haste,” Peony said. “No one knows I have left the house, except the young master himself, who bade me bring this quickly to your young mistress—and let me know if there is an answer.”

This was a house that she knew a little, for once Ezra had sent her here with some treasure for Kung Chen that he dared not entrust to a servant only, and she had met Chu Ma, the eldest woman servant, and at New Year’s time Chu Ma had gone to pay her good wishes and Peony had come here to return her own, in the careless easy fashion between two houses whose elders had some business together. Madame Ezra, it is true, had no friendships here, but Ezra and Kung Chen were very thick in trade.

“What does it say?” Chu Ma asked, staring at the paper.

Standing there in the untidy room, Peony read aloud the little poem she had written. “Dew at sunrise,” Chu Ma echoed, sighing. “It is very pretty!”

She was a huge fat woman who, when she was young and slender, had come as wet nurse when the little third girl was first born, and she had lived on as her maid and caretaker. She had a large soft heart, ready to laugh or weep, and her whole life was bound up in the pretty child she tended.

“I will give the poem to her,” she now said. “Your young lord is so handsome that I do what I know is wrong. But I cannot help it. I saw the young man myself—after my little one came running to me to tell me she had seen him. I ran to the gate and saw him—a foreigner and that is a pity, but after all, foreigners are humans like ourselves, and he is so handsome, a prince, I told my child—so strong, so straight! And as for his being a foreigner, she can persuade him to be Chinese. Does he love her very much?”

Peony nodded. “He asked me to give you this,” she said. She drew out of her pocket the purse of money and gave it to Chu Ma.

“Oh, my mother,” Chu Ma said, remonstrating and pretending to push the purse away. “This is not wanted. It would shame me to take it. What I do, I do for—” But she took the purse when Peony put it into her hand again, and she began to dress herself with energy. “I will give the paper to her myself and tell you how she looks. Come back again,” she told Peony.

With that Peony went slipping through the alleyways again, and now she went straight to David’s room. There he lay in his canopied bed, still soundly and peacefully asleep. She touched his one cheek and then the other with her two palms to coax him awake. She knew better than to wake him suddenly, for in sleep the soul wanders over the earth, and if the body is waked too quickly, the soul is confused and cannot find its way again to its home.