Imperial Woman (46 page)

“Stay—” the Empress Mother put out her hand. “Since I know my son is alone today, I will invite him here. And I will command my cooks to prepare a feast of the Emperor’s favorite dishes. My son will dine with me. The day is fair. Let the tables be set under the trees in the courtyard, and let the Court musicians attend us, and after we have dined the Court actors must give us a play.”

She tossed her commands into the air left and right, and eunuchs ran to obey and her ladies hastened hither and thither.

“And you, Jasmine,” she said next, “you are to stand near me and tend my tea bowl, and be silent unless I bid you speak.”

“Yes, Venerable Ancestor,” the girl said, her big eyes lively and her cheeks scarlet.

Thus it came about that in an hour or two the bugles announced the Emperor and soon thereafter his sedan entered the vast courtyard, where the eunuchs were already busy with tables and the musicians with their instruments.

The Empress Mother was seated in her private audience hall upon her small throne, and near her stood Jasmine, who held her head down while she toyed with a fan. Behind these two the ladies stood in a half circle.

The Emperor came in wearing a robe of sky-blue satin embroidered in gold dragons, his tasseled hat upon his head, and in his hand a jade piece to cool his palms. He bowed before his mother without obeisance, since he was Emperor, and she received his greeting and did not rise. Now this was a symbol, for all must rise before the Emperor, and the ladies looked at one another to ask why the Empress Mother kept her seat. The Emperor seemed not to notice, however, and he sat down on a small throne on his mother’s right, and his eunuchs and guardsmen withdrew to the outer court.

“I heard you were alone today, my son,” the Empress Mother said, “and to guard against your melancholy until the Consort returns, I thought to keep you here for a while. The sun is not too hot for us to dine under the trees in the courtyard, and the musicians will beguile us while we dine. Choose a play, my son, for the actors to perform for our amusement afterwards. By then it will be sunset and so one day passed.”

She said this in a sweet and loving voice, her great eyes warm upon him, and her beautiful hand outstretched to touch his hand upon his knee.

The Emperor smiled and was astonished, as anyone could see, for of late his imperial mother had not been kind. Indeed, she had reproved him much, and he would have refused to come to her this day, except he was unwilling to bear her wrath alone. When Alute was with him, she gave him strength.

“Thank you, my mother,” he said, pleased to know she was not angry. “It is true I was lonely, and true, too, that I was casting here and there in my mind to know how to spend the day.”

The Empress Mother spoke to Jasmine. “Pour tea, my child, for your lord.”

The Emperor lifted his head at these words and stared at Jasmine, nor did he take his eyes away while with pretty grace she took the bowl of tea from a eunuch and presented it with both hands.

“Who is this lady?” the Emperor inquired as though she were not there.

“What!” the Empress Mother cried in feigned surprise. “Do you not recognize your own concubine? She is one of the four I chose for you. Can it be that you do not yet know who they are?”

In some confusion the Emperor shook his head and smiled again but ruefully. “I have not summoned them. The time has not yet come—”

The Empress Mother pursed her lips. “In courtesy you should have summoned them each at least once,” she said. “Alute must not be too selfish while her younger sisters waste their lives in waiting.”

The Emperor did not answer. He lifted his bowl and paused for her to take drink from her own bowl and then he drank and Jasmine knelt and took the bowl again. Now as she did this she raised her eyes to his and he looked down for that instant into her face, so gay and vivid, so childlike in its hues of cream and rose beneath the soft black hair that he could not look away too quickly.

Thus began the day, and while it passed the Empress Mother summoned Jasmine again and again to wait upon the Emperor, to fan him, to keep away a vagrant fly, to serve him when they dined at noon beneath the trees, to fetch him tea and choose sweetmeats for him while the play went on, to put a footstool near his feet and cushions beneath his elbows, and so until the sunset fell. At last the Emperor smiled openly at Jasmine, and when she came near him she smiled at him, not shyly or with boldness, but as a child smiles at a playmate.

The Empress Mother was well pleased to see these smiles, and when twilight fell and the day was done, she said to the Emperor:

“Before you leave me, my son, I have a wish to tell you.”

“Say on, Mother,” he replied. He was in a happy mood, his belly filled with favorite foods, his heart lightened and his fancy teased by the pretty girl who belonged to him, his for the taking, if ever he so wished.

“You know how I long to leave the city when the spring comes,” the Empress Mother said. “For many months I have not stirred from these walls. Now why should we not go together, you and I, and worship at the tombs of our Ancestors? The distance is but eighty miles, and I will ask our provincial Viceroy, Li Hung-chang, to send his own guard to protect us as we come and go. You and I, my son, alone may represent our two generations, since it would not be fitting for you to take the Consort with you upon so mournful a journey.”

She had already set her mind secretly to take Jasmine with her as though to serve her, and it would be easy to send Jasmine to her son’s tent at night.

The Emperor considered, his finger at his lower lip. “When shall we go?” he asked.

“A month from this very day,” the Empress Mother said. “You will be alone then as now, and in these days when the Consort cannot come to you, we will make the journey. She will welcome you the more when you return.”

Again the Emperor wondered why his imperial mother was so changed, that she should thus speak of Alute. Yet who could ever know her reasons? And it was true that though she could be cruel and hateful she could be as truly kind and loving toward him, and between these two halves of her he had gone uncertain all his life.

“We will go, my mother,” he said, “and it is indeed my duty to worship at the tombs.”

“Who can say otherwise?” the Empress Mother replied, and was pleased once more at her own cleverness.

So all came about as she had planned. On a certain night far outside the walls of Peking, in the shadow of the Ancestral Tombs, the Emperor sent a eunuch to bring Jasmine to him. He had spent the day in worship before the tombs, his mother always at his side, instructing him in obeisance and in prayers. The day began with sunshine, but in the afternoon there came a thunderstorm and after it a steady rain which continued into the night. Under the leathern roof of his tent the young Emperor lay wakeful and lonely. It was not seemly to bid his eunuch strum a violin or sing, for these were days of mourning and respect for the eight Ancestral Emperors who surrounded him in their tombs. He lay listening to the rain and fell to thinking of the dead and how certainly one day he would be the ninth to lie outside in the rain. And while he so thought a fearful melancholy seized him, a dread and terror lest he would not live his life out but might die young. He fell into a fit of shivering and he longed for his young wife who was so far away. He had promised her to be faithful to her, and it was this promise which had prevented his summoning until now even one concubine into the bedchamber. But he had not made fresh promise for these days at the tombs, for indeed, not he nor Alute could know that his imperial mother would bring Jasmine as her companion. Nor had his mother spoken of her. Nor had he himself made one sign throughout the solemn day that he saw Jasmine. But he had seen her as she moved here and there about his mother’s tent, where he had taken his night meal after the ceremonial fast. Now he thought of her and he could not put her image away.

To his eunuch he only said that he was cold. “I am chilled to my marrow,” he said. “I never felt so cold as this before, a coldness strange as death.”

The Emperor’s eunuchs had been well bribed by Li Lien-ying and so this eunuch said at once:

“Sire, why do you not send for the First Concubine? She will warm your bed and quickly drive the chill from your blood.”

The Emperor pretended to be unwilling. “What—while I am in the shadow of the tombs of my Ancestors?”

“A concubine, merely,” the eunuch urged. “A concubine is no one.”

“Well—well,” the Emperor agreed, still seeming to be unwilling.

He lay shivering while the eunuch ran through the wet darkness of the night, and the rain thundered on the taut leathern roof above his head. And in a very little while he saw the flash of lanterns and the tent door parted like a curtain. There Jasmine stood, wrapped in a sheet of oiled silk against the rain. But rain had caught in the blown strands of the soft hair about her face, it glistened on her cheeks and hung on the lashes of her eyes. Her lips were red and her cheeks as red.

“I sent for you because I am cold,” the Emperor muttered.

“Here am I, my lord,” she said. She put aside the oiled silk and then her garments one by one and she came into his bed, and her body was warm from head to foot against his chilled flesh.

In her own tent the Empress Mother lay awake in the darkness and listened to the steady beating of the rain, a peaceful sound, and all was peace within her heart and mind. The eunuch had reported what he had done, and she had given him an ounce of gold. She needed now to do no more. Jasmine and Alute would carry on the war of love, and knowing her own son, she knew that Jasmine was already the victor.

The summer passed, the Empress Mother sighed that she was growing old, that when the Summer Palace was built she would retire there for her last years. She said her bones ached and that her teeth were loose, and there were mornings when she would not rise from bed. Her ladies did not know what to make of such pretended illness and old age, for the truth was the Empress Mother seemed instead to be renewed in youth and strength. When she lay in bed, insisting on her headaches, she was so young and beautiful, her eyes so bright, her skin so clear, that lady looked at lady and wondered what went on inside that handsome skull. Never had the Empress Mother eaten so well and heartily, not only at her meals but of the sweetmeats that she enjoyed between meals. When she moved it was not slowly and with dragging footsteps, but with fresh grace and youthfulness.

Yet she insisted she was not well, and when Jung Lu came to ask for audience she refused him, and even when Prince Kung came urging audience she would not yield.

Instead, she summoned her Chief Eunuch and demanded of him, thus: “What does that tyrant of a prince want of me now?”

The Chief Eunuch grinned. He knew well that her illness was a pretense of some sort and that she waited for a purpose that even he did not yet know. “Majesty,” he said, “Prince Kung is much disturbed at the present behavior of the Emperor.”

“And why?” she asked, though she knew well enough.

“Majesty,” the Chief Eunuch said, “all say the Emperor is changed. He spends his days in gaming and in sleep, and far in the night he roams the city streets dressed as a common man, and with him are but two eunuchs and the First Concubine.”

At this the Empress Mother made great show of horror. “The First Concubine? It cannot be!”

She raised herself on her pillows and then fell back and closed her eyes and moaned.

“Oh, I am ill—very ill! Tell the Prince I am like to die because of this evil news. I can do nothing more, tell him. My son is Emperor now and only princes can advise him. He does not hear me. Where is the Board of Imperial Censors? Surely they will advise him.”

And she would not allow audience to Prince Kung.

As for that Prince, he took her words as command, and he did so attack the Emperor face to face that he roused a fury in his imperial nephew, and on the tenth day of the ninth solar month of that same year, the Emperor sent forth a decree signed with his own name and the imperial seal, declaring that Prince Kung and his son, Ts’ai Ch’ing, were stripped of all their ranks, degraded thus because Prince Kung had used unbecoming language before the Dragon Throne.

At this the Empress Mother did rouse herself, and the next day she sent out another edict above her own name and Sakota’s as her co-Regent, commanding all ranks and honors to be restored again to Prince Kung and his son, Ts’ai Ch’ing. This she did alone and without Sakota’s knowledge, knowing that her weak sister-Empress Dowager would not dare to speak a word in protest even at this use of her name. And, such was the honor of her place as Empress Mother, none dared to dispute this edict, and by its firmness she restored herself very much toward power by this seeming favor to Prince Kung, who was of the older generation and much respected by all.

As for the Emperor, before he could decide what next to do he fell ill of black smallpox, caught somewhere in the city when in disguise he went out to amuse himself. In the tenth month, after many days of restless fever while his skin broke out in pox, he lay near to death. The Empress Mother went often to his bedside, for long ago as a small child she had caught the smallpox and it left her immune, without one scar upon her faultless skin. Now she was all mother, and truly so, and she was wrung with strange twisted sorrow. She longed to grieve with her whole heart, as mothers should, and in this grief relieve her secret agony. But she could not be only mother even now. As she had never been mere wife, she was not mere mother. Her destiny was still her burden.

On the twenty-fourth day of that same month, however, the Emperor improved, his fever fell, his tortured skin grew cool, and the Empress Mother sent forth an edict to say the people’s hope could be renewed. On the same day, too, the Emperor sent for the Consort, who till now had been forbidden in his chamber because she was with child. Now that the Emperor’s skin was clear and his fever gone, the imperial physician declared it safe for her to come and she went to him with all speed, for indeed her heart was desolate at these many weeks apart. Her days she had spent in praying at the temple, and her nights were sleepless, nor could she eat. When she entered the royal bedchamber, she was pale and thin, her delicate beauty, so much dependent on her mood and health, was for the moment gone, nor had she stayed to change the gray and unbecoming robe she wore. She entered all impatience, thinking to embrace her love, but on the threshold she was stopped. There by the great bed whereon her lord lay sat the Empress Mother.