My Last Empress

  “Hmmm.” Before I could open my mouth, she had brushed her lips over mine, sealing the words within; another brush of her soft lips and I would tremble in tatters and shreds, but she wasn’t to repeat. I nearly fainted. But quickly I reassembled my fallen self and slipped my hands along her waist to finally rest them on her slight hips. How I now detested round matronly hips, thickly constructed like those of my original tutor, the quiet Mrs. D, and some expedient others of her breed in between.

  Tightening my grip, digging my nails into the soft rise of her buttocks, I thrust her hips toward me, aiming her nether protrusion—that final cliff wherein dives the man. She unleashed a hah!—an airy issuance halfway to its final formation as an utterance, the plea of meek surrender. On my part, a certain after-rain mushrooming had long flamed in a mushy forest, tented and canopied. I was squeezing her hind cheeks, readying for another deathly blow—mine, not hers—when Q pulled her slim elbow sideways like the sling of a catapult and levied a numbing slap across my face, throwing my cheeks to flop and lips to flap. New blood spurred from my already bleeding nose.

  “You rascal, now see what you have done.” She cursed prettily. “Be still. I’m trying to stop you from bleeding to death.” Her attentiveness was a marvel to witness, having just struck a jaw-slacking blow. This time my spillage gushed onto the white of her dress.

  She kept my nose tip pinched, aiming to cease my discharge, which, as long as she was busy with her enterprise, I minded not at all. I pivoted my heels on a higher rung of stairs and gave her a bit of a toss, hopping her bottom just an inch off my skin, letting her concavity sink directly on my tortoise’s head; each hop brought home an abject awakening deep in my heart.

  As I tossed her some more, letting my toes do their kinetic tricks, she gyrated her tiny waist. Such circular gyration only incensed the heat in me—I was nigh fainting again. My darkened eyes saw a dusky bonfire on the New England prairie burning with sizzling zest.

  She mopped my blood with one hand, pinching my nose with the other, suffocating me. I closed my mouth, stopping my breathing altogether. The resultant delirium was to die for, causing a hallucinatory mirage to appear: in my lap was my Annabelle, not Q.

  Such evocation caused a sudden halt to the entire business at hand. I searched around, sensing one angry and awry vein engorge on my forehead. I was not going to succumb to threat by mi amor with my oven heating a near boil, ruining what I had so long craved and was so near to attaining.

  “If you get caught doing this,” Q said, without cease in her circular gyrations, “we all will be hanged.”

  “Doing what?” I asked, resuming the hopping of my lap, panting for that goal that was nearing.

  “Doing this.” She sank down her tail, letting me feel her softness, the warmth from her inner groove a thin undergarment apart. My hardness lengthened and rose, standing obliquely to face its headlong onslaught, peeling painfully with each of her forceful glide: it was then and there I reached that delirious state where one clung to nothing, and everything around me, above me, and under me ingratiated itself toward reaching that finality. As I accelerated my urging, I was blinded by a numbing sensation rising en masse along every cell, along every tiny man-hair, every porous inch, every yielding yardage.

  In the distance I heard Q say, “Please come with me … to the hospital … and help me …”

  “I will!” Slipping one cupping hand from her waist down to her bottom, I poked one single deviant digit, the middle one, into her parted crevice, slipping it tightly into the unknown, followed shortly by her pained convulsion, triggering my own deathful cry as I let loose a monstrous deluge that soiled the front of my robe.

  Through my glassy vision, I made out a slender form slipping off my tattered lap, blushing possibly and dashing downstairs, leaving me to die alone on the steps.

  20

  After cleansing myself and consuming a beastly breakfast of dried sweet dough, buttered cornbread, and coils of lamb sausages exceptionally rendered by my prodigious young cook, I secretively appeared, suit wearing and hatted, at a deserted eastern gate where I was met by a four-man sedan. Behind the drapery was my pubescent mate leaning on her side of the cushioned seat, powdered and coiffed, dressed in the hunting attire of safari pants and knee-high boots. Her eyes were downcast, staring at her own knees, with a pink blush that even her white powder could ill cover.

  “What took you so long?” she asked, slanting her eyes to peep out the tiny sedan window.

  “A meal and a bath,” I answered while taking my seat, gazing her up and down. Those slender thighs under the manly wear stirred me; she clamped them closed as if sensing my stare.

  Outside the drapery, the head of the foursome gave orders, and our carriage went aloft and mobile through a side archway; the main one was reserved for the chosen, and no one else. The glow in my heart animated me to reach over my paw, yearning to touch her.

  She slapped the encroaching hand away with her ringed fingers, an inset green jade denting my palm. “Be proper,” she snapped, pasting herself to her sedan wall.

  Three willow-lined streets later, she sagged and sighed before leaning her head on my shoulder. I cupped her hot hands between my sweaty palms; she dug her nails, lightly denting my skin. After a silent ride down some leafy boulevards, she tilted her swan neck and hungrily kissed my eager mouth, one long leg swinging over my lap.

  By noon—a bound-foot granny could have outrun our hoofed foursome!—we alighted under the awning of Union Hospital. A turbaned concierge of Indian descent chased away the scattered paupers before greeting us with his shiny, white-toothed smile.

  Among a cluster of nurses and doctors crowding the white-walled corridor, Q followed me, as a minor would with a father or uncle. Beyond that fortress, outside the maroon wall, she was but a helpless child.

  We were courteously greeted by the hospital administrator, a jovial old chap from the coast of Maine, Blue Hill to be exact, a peninsular hamlet south of Bangor: a predial digit dipping in a pellucid Atlantic sea whereupon I had once swum in a quarry pond with some local lads. Colonel Putnam, the hospital administrator, a crippled soldier of the Spanish War, refused to grant me privy to the underground vault of the hospital even after I hinted of my tacit liaison with Colonel Winthrop of the American legation. The one-legged letch kept leering at my escort sitting in the corridor, whom I merely introduced as a lady of enormous means and whose concern over the lineage of an invented friend would, when adoptive identity known, lead to a possible future donation. He only yielded after planting a prolonged wet kiss on the back of Q’s hand. His cursed lips lingered inappropriately long for an initial encounter, or any encounter for that matter. The curative effects Q had on the lame duck engendered a rare pang deep in my groins, but I kept my quiet, though inwardly I shouted, “Lick my blushing bride’s hand one more time …”

  But calm I remained. Life is marred with wrongs.

  We climbed down dusty stairs, Putnam wobbling alongside Q, iron key in hand, an obvious bulging in his treasonous trousers. He had to lean on her thrice down three short flights, pushing away my aiding hand.

  “These documents would have been condemned, but I kept them,” sighed Putnam, unlocking a rusty chest labeled by dynastical reign and its Westernized calendar year.

  Before letting us browse the aged contents, our pugnacious Putnam hinted at the neediness of the crowded wards and the stinginess of the nurses’ quarters. Q frowned at his plea, and on the spot dropped fifteen tael of silver. Ownership of said coins brought a gleam to his eyes.

  The probe through the meager month of April 1885 produced ten births under the midwifery of Nurse M. Mead. There had been an outbreak of plague that year at the hospital, scaring away expectant mothers from the maternity ward. Among the listed were a set of twins to a French couple, one caesarean birth to German merchants conducted by a surgeon initialed as M.H., and three consecutive boys to respectively productive Russian railroad engineers. The three boys were trailed by a succes
sion of four baby girls to three Londoners and one Yorkshire veterinarian.

  There were no offspring of Manchurian ancestry or Chinese parentage.

  “Where is my name?” said Q.

  “Are you …?” Putnam’s shiny forehead wrinkled in puzzlement before slowly breaking into a grimace.

  “No, she is not,” I said emphatically.

  “But this much silver and your obvious mixed blood … You have to be—”

  “It proves nothing,” I opposed adamantly.

  Barely before I ended my words, Putnam was on his knees. “Your Excellence.” He grabbed Q’s honey hand and abjectly kissed it again and again. In between his canine breaths, he uttered, “I had long been an admirer of your regality and your pedigree, having dined once with your father. You were young then, six or seven, having just returned from a diplomatic tour to the Empire of Japan. It was at the Hawthorn Bloom Banquet that your father hosted annually. I was freshly discharged from the army hospital in Manila, having just taken my present post. What a grand host your princely father was. What a darling hostess you presented, standing beside him, greeting your guests on that unforgettable spring day when hawthorn trees were in full bloom and butterflies were alighting upon their nectar.”

  “You were there?” Q seemed smitten by the man’s charm and faulty memory. Had he really been there at the soirée? Did he falsify the incident and the chance meeting to gain footage into the cockles of my queen’s heart?

  “I was. I even shook your little hand. For a brief while I mistook you as a Japanese girl.” The man of Maine was bubbling over like a lobster in a pot.

  “Really?” Q seemed more enchanted than ever.

  “You were wearing the most delicate Japanese kimono—”

  “I did! It was my favorite that I still keep in my possession. So you really were there. How marvelous.”

  So, he was there. So were a thousand others! I wanted to give him the proverbial boot sending him upstairs, but he must have evoked something fatherly in Q, for she squatted down as no empress would have done and helped him to his feet.

  Putnam shook straight his wooden foot, undoing a mechanical kink, and he dragged Q along across the dim room to a spider-webbed corner. On a dark shelf, Putnam fumbled and found a bound volume.

  “Margo’s Confession!” the man said excitedly. “A beloved nurse who has since passed. What isn’t recorded often finds its way into Margo’s entries, may the Lord bless her soul. She had always wanted to be a poet, you know.”

  Putnam opened the diary to the pages of April in the year of 1885. The first few entries were dry accounts of the diarist’s busy days shouldering her responsibilities as a ward nurse at Union Hospital. Then came the pertinent entry:

  On this bleak night, I was awoken by our young doctor pounding ever so hard on my flimsy door. Though I had just returned from a thirteen-hour shift, with my heels sore from standing and running, I leapt out of my bed. The young doc told me he had an urgent case of a dying woman, this time one of our own, the daughter of a Congregational Church pastor.

  I ran as fast as my old feet could along the hallway.

  One cannot imagine how much running we do here, from bed to bed, from one ward to another. Union is only peaceful from its outer white facade: nothing is at peace here except the departed in the back wing.

  It was crowded in the triage room. Armed clergymen guarded the hospital’s front gate, and grim-looking women chirped like morning birds, flitting about, crowding corridors. Amidst it all was a tall and handsome man, the pillar of the congregation and my dear and darling H.

  On the gurney a young thing was covered with her own blood soaking her dress. Her father stood holding his begrieved wife, a pretty woman of little charm. Acrimony would seem untimely for one in despair, but she deserved it. She had once given me a cold stare and curt words after I had fainted in her husband’s arms during a citywide rally to condemn the Chinese occultist named Wang Dan, who had abducted Reverend H’s only daughter. We had been protesting, also, against the American legation and the Manchurian Royal Court for having done little to intervene in this matter of life and death.

  I am already blushing as I compose this entry, seeing Reverend H. You see, we were lovers, thrown together by chance and loneliness. This town could make your heart so hollow at times.

  That particular noon rally, while he had been freshened by our rendezvous, I had become weak-kneed and wan after the sweaty exertion, thus falling faint in his arms to be witnessed by his sour wife. The wife dressed me down with her sharp tongue by uttering, “Next time find someone else’s arms to faint in.”

  But enough said about H and me. The word was that H’s daughter had not just been abducted by the Chinese occultist, but raped and impregnated by him as well.…

  Upon reading these words, I nearly fainted.

  Could this be the same H, as in Hawthorn, the progenitor of my darling Annabelle? Could this young patient on the gurney, under Margo’s pen, be my very own heart and soul?

  My bleeding Annie, my wounded Annabelle! I trembled like a shaken sieve while urging my dewy eyes further along the rows of scribbling ink. Even though Q and the incapacitated hospital administrator were near and reading the pages as avidly as I, it seemed as if I was alone with this vital account recounted in this precious volume by one sinning nurse.

  And for that duration of time before the eventful night in the hospital I am describing—dark wintry months—H suffered much and alone in the confinement of his attic. He became a fugitive of delirium and despondence. He was never whole again no matter the tenderness and love I offered. The few times he sought me, as he always did in times of trial and uncertainty, he seemed lost, not in ways of our intimacy but in ways of his soul.

  He was vengeful, brooding over an ugly outcome—his daughter’s pregnancy. He was bent on purging the ill seed of Wang Dan from his daughter’s young body, and so anguished that he even dared suggest that I slaughter the bastardly life, concocting a scheme to have her drugged by a devout herbalist parishioner and dragged down to a crypt beneath his chapel to have me cleanse her young womb with a knife or pessary. Bitterly I rejected his request. But today, as I watched H’s daughter nearly die on the table in the pains of childbirth, I wondered if this had been the right decision.

  The young surgeon was able to do what needed to be done. A cesarean birth was skillfully conducted, and mother and daughter were saved. Before the young mother opened her eyes again, fate was decided for the newborn: she was to be declared stillborn and the secret kept from the mother forever. The child was to be given to no other than my old friend, Prince Qiu, whose sterility has long deprived him of an offspring. Such arrangement would not only resolve the headaches of H, who knew nothing of the infant’s placement, only knowing it would be rightly taken care of, but it would also dissolve the knot of international political intrigue. Yet for days and days afterward, guilt consumed me so, until I could no longer contain myself. In a moment of weakness, I sent the young mother a secret note laying bare all the facts about her child.…

  With that, ladies and gents, my damnation is complete, and the circularity of Annabelle’s curse perfected. There is no hell hot enough for my ruffian self.

  How could you have entrapped me so, my Annabelle, dangling me by such a thin rope of entanglement? How could you have misled me so in the path of my passion and lust?

  As our sedan squeaked in this fading light, I told the child of your heritage—of you whom I had so loved, of whom I had sought near and far—of her father, that rebel who had sired her.

  I had anticipated a rash reaction, but Q took it as facts of life, myth or not, blaming no one, cursing none. She was as open as a clear sky, as accepting as a quiet sea.

  “You are a madman, are you not?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you glad you found me?”

  I nodded again.

  “I must find my father,” she said as if to herself, before leaning on me with her eyes closed.
br />   As darkness fell upon the silent city of Peking, I realized that Annabelle was my captain, I her ship. She had brought me here, but for what reason?

  Oh, Annabelle, what am I to do with your forsaken heir, loving her so?

  21

  For days I languished in a gray mood. Fog surrounded me even on the clearest of summer days, and all senses and sounds were muffled and blunted. I felt detached from all that held me whole, living in a cocoon, owing no one, owning nothing.

  Such mood was worsened by the absence of Qiu Rong, that girl fathered by my fate. How I longed for her, though with a new kind of love dawning on me, an unfamiliar kind, not of lust but perhaps fatherly.

  All her previous seductiveness became memories of childish charm perceived not from the prism of a perverted eye but of a doting yet possessive parent. Her giggle was no longer a cooing love call but the call of a bibbing tot, her coyness that of a teething infant. I was sorrowful for that forsaken child, mournful of her motherlessness. In the fog, a path was cleared. In the gray, a sun broke through.

  No one has stood as I did now in this far fringe of time and apogee of space serving as that which binds man to heaven, acting as a conduit between real and ethereal, light and dark. And so I am the seer, chosen to answer that heavenly call.

  This was neither lunacy nor madness. I had found her, my dead lover’s lost child, without a map, a lantern, or a fancy occultist’s torch. All that led me to my find was my pitiable and improbable love, the air and water sustaining this bedraggled interloper, and nothing more.

  When Qiu Rong returned, summer solstice anewing, she came to me with a lilt in her gait, the surrounding palace all hushed. In that tunnel of silence, in she strides, my jade princess, pale in a tangerine dress like a wedge of sun in motion, the hem riding her abstemious calves. Her hips were fuller and shoulders rounder, no doubt the consequence of rich food and inactivity: seven days of opera watching with the dowager and her Court retinue. Her eyes were darker and deeper with angst and anguish. Could you have been love stricken too, my child?