Heart of the West (45 page)

The Flowery Flag devils wandered around the room, peering at the scroll paintings, rudely picking up a Ming vase from this table, a ceramic Tang horse from that one, as if checking their authenticity.

"Christ, what I wouldn't do for some whiskey," one of the devils said. A man with a rotund belly and the vacuous-eyed face of a water buffalo. "But I reckon all we're gonna get is more of that damned tea."

"Tea is what we're here for, after all," the other answered.

He was a young man with a cap of short curls brighter than hammered gold and a smile as blinding as sun-struck snow. "Just humor the old devil. Remember, to these people, face is everything."

Filled with excitement that she had understood nearly every word the barbarians uttered, Erlan turned to her mother. But her thoughts withered unspoken on her tongue. Tao Huo was staring avidly at the young golden-haired devil, and the look on her face... the look on her face was the one she wore when she picked over a box of crystallized fruit, trying to decide which sweet morsel she would bring next to her red lips.

It was two weeks later that the household guards locked Tao Huo in her rooms. The concubine screamed and pleaded for the patriarch, but he never came. The guards placed screens in front of her door and no one was allowed to pass.

Throughout a night and a day and another night Erlan sat in the garden on the porcelain taboret. She watched the golden carp swim in the pond and took slow careful breaths that were filled with the cloying odor of peonies. And she listened as her mother's screams grew weaker and weaker until they faded into the songs of the larks in the cypress trees, the tolling of pagoda bells, and the peddlers' cries outside the walls.

An hour after dawn on the second day, the patriarch's first wife came toward her down the pebbled path. The enormous kingfisher feathers in Po Tai Tai's hair stirred in the gentle breeze, and she looked sly and pleased with herself.

Erlan was beyond all pride and dignity. She kowtowed deeply to the older woman, and her voice broke with her pleading words. "What has she done? Oh, please, tell me. What has she done?"

"That shuey-kee!" Tai Tai spat, swelling like a toad in her satisfaction, and Erlan stumbled to her feet in shock and anger. A shuey-kee was a waterfowl, but it was also a word for the worst sort of prostitute, one who specialized in pleasing foreign barbarians. "That shuey-kee has betrayed the House of Po by lying with a white demon."

This crime was so terrible that Erlan could not imagine it, could not believe it. And yet she thought of her mother's face staring hungrily through the lattice screen at the Flowery Flag demon with the golden hair.

On the heels of this thought came another that made her gasp aloud. "What... what will he do to her?"

"It has been done. She was sent the scarlet noose."

The scarlet noose, with which she must hang herself and so avoid the disgrace of execution. It would have been done by now. Erlan's mother would have tied one end of the red silk cord to the canopy frame of the great rosewood bed, the other end she would have wrapped around her slender neck. Then she would have stood on the sandalwood chest and stepped into the air and beyond, into the shadow world.

There was a loud, strange humming in Erlan's head, like the singing of a thousand cicadas. And she kept getting sharp pains in her chest, because she forgot to breathe.

The funeral. What was being done about the funeral? The wives, who had always been jealous of Tao Huo, would do nothing to see that she was given a proper burial. It was up to Erlan, then, and there were many things to think of. She must put on a white mourning gown and slippers of white hemp. Blue and white streamers must be hung about the courtyard, and biscuits burned to make Tao's journey to the shadow world easier.

"And as for you, you worthless little turtle's egg," Tai Tai said, "you are being sent away."

Erlan barely heard her. There was so much... so much to think of, and it was so hard to think with this terrible humming in her head. "But who will see that she is given a white coffin?" she said aloud.

Tai Tai's painted mouth twisted into a cruel smile. "The shuey-kee has been given a coffin. She did not make use of the scarlet noose, and so she was nailed into her coffin alive."

Erlan stuffed a hand into her mouth as the humming in her head exploded into a silent scream. Great sobs tore at her throat, threatening to break out, but she would not weep in front of her mother's enemy.

She straightened her back and lifted her head, drawing herself up tall. "Leave me," she said.

Tai Tai huffed, but she said nothing more. She turned and went down the path, her golden lilies leaving tiny doelike tracks in the pebbles.

Erlan waited until First Wife had disappeared into the women's pavilion, and then she went in search of her father.

She waited for him in the shadows of the marble screen in the hall of the ancestors. She wasn't sure what she would do, what she would say. Her only thought was to beg forgiveness. And to promise she would do whatever was necessary to redeem her mother's honor, if only he wouldn't send her away.

Candles flickered on the red gilt altar, their flames reflecting a thousand times in the thick gold embroidery on the altar cloth. Soft-colored lanterns swung in the warm summer air, whispering,
"Shuey-kee... shuey-kee
..." The smell of incense was so thick she nearly choked on it.

At last he came. He looked as forbidding as an emperor in his long dragon robe, but his face was that of her father and she loved him so. She waited a little longer, until he was done kowtowing before the ancestral tablets. Then she ran out into the middle of the hall and threw herself at his feet, pressing her forehead into the hard stone floor. When he did nothing, said nothing, she dared to raise her head... and she quailed at the rage that twisted his face.

"You dare!" he snarled and struck out at Erlan with his foot, sending her sprawling onto her back. "You dare to approach me, you whore-cunt's spawn." He raised a clenched fist to the heavens. "I will curse you from the land of the spirits for all eternity!" And then he was gone, leaving her alone in the hall with only the ancestors to witness her shame.

The next day she was taken in a litter to the home of the Foochow slave trader.

Far now beyond the garden walls of her lao chia, much farther than she had ever wanted to go, Erlan lay beside her sleeping husband. Beyond the creaking log walls, an animal howled in loneliness. And the smell of peonies filled the room.

"Mother," Erlan whispered to the spirit hovering between darkness and light. "Why did you do such a shameful thing?" And she didn't know which shameful thing she meant: that Tao

Huo had been shuey-kee and lain with a barbarian or that she had lacked the courage to use the scarlet noose and thus redeem some of her lost honor.

"Mother," Erlan whispered again. But the spirit didn't answer, and the scent of peonies faded.

The tears had long ago dried on Erlan's cheeks. She had wept for the fourth and last time.

He came high and hard and long in her.

Hannah collapsed against him, skin wet and slippery, chests heaving and sucking and sighing. She murmured his name against his mouth when at last he allowed her to breathe.

One of his hands cupped her bottom, and he began to knead it gently. She was on top, straddling him. She tightened the inner muscles of her thighs, squeezing him, prolonging the moment. It always made her sad, the ending. Sad and lonely.

It never lasted beyond that one sweet moment, that was the trouble... her trouble. Men—all they ever wanted was to have their hunger satisfied. A woman, though, she hungered to be wanted, and so she was never satisfied. Because what a man wanted and what a woman hungered for were never the same thing.

She let him pull her mouth over to his for an unhurried, easy kiss, strongly flavored with whiskey. Yet when he released her lips, they felt naked. And she felt alone and needy still. She wanted to be wanted; she wanted him to want
her.
She wanted to hear him say the words that made this so, the tender words.

She sat up, still straddling his hips, still holding deep inside her the only piece of him she would ever have. A faint light came from the moon shining through the window. It limned the planes of his chest and the ridges of his stomach with silver, and made his eyes shine like a pair of gold coins dropped in a well. She rubbed her hands over him, reveling in the feel of him. Hot and hard. She stared at his face. He was so beautiful. So beautiful and so cruel.

"What?" he said.

She traced the shape of his lips. "I was thinking how good you look lying in my bed."

Rafferty showed his teeth in a strange smile. "Yeah. What I want to know is who else's been lyin' in it while I've been gone."

She tried to hit him, but he grabbed her wrist. He glared up into her face, then brought her fist to his lips. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have said that."

She pulled free of him. "No, you shouldn't have."

The mattress gave and the sheets whispered as she got up, releasing the musky smells of man and sex into the air.

She pulled on her silk wrapper and lit a lamp. She went to the window, but she could see nothing beyond the reflection of her own face in the night-blackened glass. The curtains moved as if a hand had stirred them.

That boy who had come up to her in the Best in the West tonight, bold as brass and wanting to buy her a drink... there was something about him that kept tugging at her thoughts. Maybe it was because he was a miner like her daddy had been. Like his own daddy had been before he too had been killed in a fall. They both had come from the same place, she and that boy. Maybe that was why when he'd looked at her, she'd thought for just a moment that he was seeing not the Hannah Yorke she was now, but the young girl she used to be. That girl who had been so full of big dreams and sweet hope.

Drew Scully... She said his name to herself, feeling almost guilty for doing it. He had the hardest, coldest eyes she'd ever seen.

Behind her Rafferty lay quiet, too quiet. "I thought we agreed a long time ago not to go putting brands on each other," she said to her blurred white reflection in the glass panes.

"I been comin' to this house for four years, Hannah. To this bed. In all that time I ain't ever fucked another woman."

She forced a laugh, turning from the window. "Lord, we're near to being married, you and I."

He said nothing, just lay on her bed, long and lean and naked. The brooding slant of his hard mouth, his wild, golden eyes—when he looked like that she wanted at the same time both to hurt and to heal him, but it was beyond her to do either.

She turned away from him and went to her dressing table.

He heaved a sigh, a man's sort of sigh that said I-will-never-understand-women. "Are we having a fight, Hannah?"

"No. Pour me some whiskey, will you?"

She started to reach for her hairbrush, but her gaze was caught by the bell jar. She ran her palm over the smooth glass. Even in the soft light of the oil lamp, the wax flowers from her wedding cake looked old and yellow, a bitter legacy of the first time she had loved this deeply, and this badly. There had been other loves between her first man and Rafferty, and she supposed there would be more. But she was thirty-three years old this time around, and the emptiness in her womb was becoming a hole in her soul. She wanted another baby, someone to love who would never leave her. Oh, Lord, why not just admit it to herself: she wanted a man who would last. A gold-ring kind of lasting.

She cast a glance at Rafferty over her shoulder, her heart tightening.
Oh, Hannah, you have always been the biggest fool. Since when did just loving him one night at a time stop being enough?

But the nights with him were getting fewer and farther between. At first he'd only leave the valley for weeks at a time. Now it was months. He'd take a job riding shotgun for Wells Fargo or hunting bounty, claiming they needed the cash to keep the ranch going. Or there'd be a herd of cattle he had to drive somewhere, and horses to pick up somewhere else. Probably it was in his nature to roam, but he'd never once told her the truth about why he left. And she wasn't what brought him back.

Even though he'd been gone for over six months this time, she had believed him when he said he hadn't been with another woman. Why, he'd had her twice before they even made it to the bed, he'd been that hungry for her. The trouble was, she knew him so well. In many ways they were closer as friends than as lovers, and she understood that somewhere along the way he had gotten it into his man's head that by being faithful to her, he was being faithful to the one woman he did love and could never have.

The one woman he did love...

She shook her head, angry with herself, angry with him. Sad for him. Lord, how could she be jealous of his love for Clementine, when she loved that girl so much herself?

She wasn't sure when she'd first suspected it, maybe all the way back to that first summer. It was nothing they did, nothing they said, but she could feel it in the air around them whenever they were together. A thickening, a freshening, a wild wind-and-lightning storm raging just past yonder ridge, too far away to see but powerful enough to feel. They
yearned
for each other, there was no other word for it. It was as if they weren't two separate hearts and souls, but one heart, one soul, that had somehow been ripped apart and forced to spend eternity searching for their missing halves, and now they had found themselves in each other.

And she and Gus... they were the other loves, the also loves, the would have, could have, should have loves.

Her fingers tightened on the handle of her brush. Well, hell and damn, wasn't she the one who had said it so long and so often? She wasn't the marrying kind. Oh, no, not Hannah Yorke. Good ol' Hannah, how she does like her fun and freedom. She can look after herself just fine, can good ol' Hannah, and no man is ever gonna tie her down, uhuh. Except that good ol' Hannah hadn't turned out to be so good at holding herself close during the bad and lonely times. And good ol' Hannah wasn't ever going to make up a family and a happily-ever-after all by her lonesome.