My Last Empress

  ALSO BY DA CHEN

  Sword

  Brothers

  Wandering Warrior

  China’s Son

  Sounds of the River

  Colors of the Mountain

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by DS Studios Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chen, Da.

  My last empress: a novel/Da Chen—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Americans—China—Fiction. 2. First loves—Fiction. 3. Empresses—China—Fiction. 4. Courts and courtiers—Fiction. 5. Intrigue—Fiction. 6. Beijing (China)—Fiction. 7. Paranormal romance stories. I. Title.

  PS3603.H4474M9 2012

  813’.6—dc22 2011049964

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95270-7

  Jacket design by Melissa Chang

  v3.1

  To Robert S Pirie, a generous mentor

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I am old, decayed, and fermented. I am a dead tree with a rotten cavity within which grows a stem of flower—my last empress.

  Sitting on the veranda, I feel my bones aching and my heart ready to dip down the horizon like the aging sun. I am alone now with In-In, the palace servant from my days tutoring the last emperor. He is as faithful as the thoughts of my Annabelle.

  Age makes simple all urges. Only the essence of life remains; the rest matters not at all. Daily I rise to do one small task: write down what transpired from that initial spark to the final flame, patching pebbles of my past into the riverbed of the present.

  For what reason?, you may ask. The answer is simple. So you will know that I have not lived a fruitless life but an immortal one.

  I relive on paper the bygone days, savoring their glory the same way a shadow vies for the sun. This is a story of love and inevitability. I was nothing until Annabelle came along one fateful summer day.

  “Your ink is ready, master,” In-In calls in his soft voice, placing the inkwell before me. Ink gleams like the encroaching night. Carefully I dip the tip of my brush at the edge of the well, then let the brush glide over the porous scroll.

  From my trembling hand bleeds forth the passion that I thought had died all those years ago. Yet still, I am forever burning, forever wanting.

  1

  There was no evidence or early trace of my penchant for the young, the tender, or the ghostly. Every branch of my family tree has been upright and shadowless, even in the afternoon slanting sun. Father worked at the family law firm of Pickens, Pickens & Davis, and he summered on his white yacht off the Connecticut coast with his white-shoed friends who doted over me, my father’s only heir, a navy-suited blinking boy with blond eyelashes. Early memories are of standing in a ring of cigar smoke puffed from the admiring mouths of my father’s friends, and the manly breath of whiskey amidst slurred New England syllables. Mother, a buxom matriarch, was the fruit of an even taller tree, the linear descendant of Elihu Yale, the founder of the famed college that bore his name.

  It was never debated what the path of my own life would be: Phillips Andover followed by Yale, then days at the family law firm and evenings at the club. I too would drink whiskey and puff cigars and ogle the help while my bride, a thin blond wisp from a similarly upstanding family, would look the other way. It was the path that my father had followed and his father before him, and who was I to veer from it?

  It started so innocently while I was still at prep school, culminating in my maiden encounter with one ripened maiden. Mrs. D was the barren wife of the stiff-necked librarian. She idled her days away in the New England sun, devouring forbidden romance novels while her poodle, a big-snouted pooch, licked between her stockinged thighs. She had the dazed look of disillusion, her hazel eyes full of anguish and unknowable pain, which the entire campus unanimously blamed on her childless state.

  Mr. D had the look of a seedless man, pale and thin, without a boisterous moustache or prickly chest hair, as seen on occasion during his reluctant and awkward participation in the faculty cricket games. Just as surely, gossip posited that she could be the culprit, for she had the docility of a guilty mute. They both could be conspirators in the childless game, each as barren as the other, or they both could be endowed with potential to bear, but the fire of lust had never been lit or lit rightly in their cold, separate bedrooms. It was a longstanding uncurriculumed subject that every Phillipian dabbled in during the last drowsy minutes before sleep stole our souls after the lights were shut. I felt a certain stir whenever the word barren was mentioned in the same breath with the sullen Mrs. D.

  Her hair, not always neat, had an occasional strand falling over the bridge of her nose, fringing her often parted lips. Her hips were wide with the sacrificial openness of a fertile woman. How could anyone blame her for anything?

  My heart still thumps at the memory of the first touch of her trembling hand.

  It was my first Thanksgiving spent at school, away from the snowfall of Connecticut. The silence of the campus was deafening. Mr. D had gone to the mountain to hunt deer, leaving Mrs. D all alone in the company of an empty house. My duty that afternoon was to dust the small collection of toy yachts, canvas sails, and bamboo masts encased in the draped library of Mr. D’s home. I arrived to find Mrs. D just awoken from a nap, lying starfished on a couch, book at her bosom, legs apart. The pooch wasn’t around, though its stench hung thin in the air.

  Mrs. D greeted me, cupping my face with her soft hands. I melted like a snowman in the sun, burying my face in the valley of her bosom. Her breasts were firm, her buttocks soft. She swayed to the crazed crawling of my fingers, her breath whiskied like the summered memory of my father’s white yacht. In a blur of scenes—birds flying, windowpanes reflecting, pooch sniffing somewhere in the corner of the house, my mast tenting—she whispered her dearing words, and I felt the warmth of her hand hungering over my sword. Silky stockings ripped and I plowed blindly in the mud of her.

  Oh, that long ago Thanksgiving Day, that woe of my youth.

&
nbsp; We mated a few more times under the veil of Mr. D’s suspicion till we could bear the suspense no more—I faced expulsion, and she the foreseeable loss of Mr. D’s vocation, but the memory of her came to form the basis of my youthful arousal. Parted lips, loose strands of hair hanging over the face, an empty house, a cold sky laden with the angst of oncoming snow, and my heart would ache as it ached that dreary day, and my groins would burn with the flame of that afternoon.

  I often plotted trespassing the ivied residence of Mrs. D again, impinging upon her shaded vulnerability and unearthing her muffled screams that she stifled under bookish breath. We came close only one last time at a pompous school event whereby all wives of the academic faculty were demanded at the angular dining table for the benefactors of the school, the elder Pickens included. I sat three heads and a table corner from Mrs. D and watched her chew her London broil. I smiled at her with code of our love, but she avoided my gaze.

  A ball ensued. Old chaps of the school borrowed the young wives of others to hold in their arms, and I got to whirl her around the room in the guise of a waltz. She stayed silent with sullen face and begged me to stop halfway around the ballroom. Leaning on my shoulder with the world swaying on tiptoes, she uttered the three most horrifying words: “I am pregnant!”

  I nearly let her fall out of my hand. I held my breath for the next three long and dying seconds until I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard the congenial Mr. D whisper, “Let me take over.”

  Was it relief or burden that I felt? I could not tell—the ring of her words still echoed in my ear. I swiped two tall glasses of some liquor from the dark corner of the ballroom, downed them, and rushed back to my dormitory.

  This must be my punishment from God: fathering a bundle of sin. What would she do with him or her, the little me?

  After a long week of fearing, the campus was suddenly abuzz with news of Mr. D’s departure. Mrs. D’s pregnancy had fulfilled a longstanding clause in his late uncle’s will, a liquor dealer from Boston, bequeathing him, the only living heir of the Ds, a minority stake in a brewery on the condition that D produce an heir of his own blood and flesh. The Ds rushed off rather unceremoniously, and I have lived in cloudy ambiguity ever since.

  For weeks after their departure, I was haunted by nightmares; each time, I woke up sweating and panting. Headmaster Herbert had called Father twice with mild compliments of my sporting verve but expressed concern over my general well-being. My eyes were circled with dark rims, and I was dispirited in religious assembly. A school nurse, after checking my pulse, scraped the moss from my tongue, tapped my echoing ribs with her knowing but misguided knuckles, and declared me a slight case of depression that a home visit and some sun should dispel. But it was the uninduced confession from another virile classmate of mine, one Samuel Polk III, the son of a mean-spirited financier, that cleared my guilt in toto.

  One insipid Sunday afternoon after I had scorched my throat with much hymnal singing, Sam Polk strolled with me along a patch of lawn near the school chapel that afforded a slice of Mrs. D’s former garden. The dreary day produced a dreary chat, and soon the New York boy was regaling me with his ventures with Lower East Side foreign whores whom he described as not only good with their craft but with their tongues.

  “Got it, Pickens?” He chuckled at his own wit. “But you know, Pickens. I had more fun and less trouble right there behind those hedges.” He pointed his toe at Mrs. D’s garden.

  “You what?” I sputtered.

  “I had my way three times with that barren Mrs. D. Only made two trips to her house; the other time, I had her behind the hedge before it was trimmed and the leaves cleared.”

  I nearly choked the boy with my own hands.

  I was let out of the jail of burden and breathed the fresh air of a sonless youth, but in that freedom I yearned for her—the hedge, the garden, the white house, the possibility that she would forever gaze at her child’s face and think of me.

  2

  After the Ds’ departure, Andover was as empty for me as the Forbidden City, under whose roof I now am penning this improbable diary. The colors were erased from autumn trees, and a certain buoyancy was amiss in the eyes of the young boys around me, mourning the fable that was Mrs. D. The vibrant PE teacher, Mr. Waldran, no longer sat on the short wall fencing off the Ds’ former house in between his classes—another suspect. Cricket balls, footballs, any balls seldom found their way to that haunted garden anymore.

  That shrine of our hearts soon was spiderwebbed as snow whited its shingles and ice icicled its roof, but soon came spring, and all dread vaporized upon the lilting sound of an exotic mellow flute. It came from the window of that white house, the Ds’ former abode, hovering over the same garden.

  Here and now I must pause. The hurried rustling of my brush must have awoken the demons of the night within the Forbidden City where I reside now: the footfalls of the night guards are nearing. You see, I am being watched constantly by the eyes in and beyond the walls. The flutist, creating the music that hung in the air over Andover that day, is the woman who links me to this fate within this red wall of the Forbidden City. She is the ebb and flow of my tide, the doing and undoing of it all.

  She was conceived, as she would tell me in our initial shy encounter, on the Nile one rippleless night sailing through Egypt. She was born at dawn when the Qing Dynasty was dusking in the Manchurian port city of Dalien, where her father, and before that her grandfather, served as missionaries in the church of Jesus Christ, the northern division of their worldwide conference. The Hawthorns were a clan of proud missionaries with pious convictions and big-boned conventionality. Her father, Hawthorn IV, a blue-blooded Phillipian himself, had lost a leg to a striped tiger in the Changbai Mountain. A reassignment by the North American Conference, his employer, landed the man back on the campus of his alma mater and his only daughter on my cold lap.

  The blond and blue-eyed whimsical Annabelle, after growing up in the Orient, liked to dress up as a Chinese empress in an ornate embroidered coat, a gift from a local warlord. The cross-Pacific voyage had left her melancholy and stricken with longing for the only land she had ever known. The bamboo flute was a gift from a Changbai Mountain monk, and this flute, upon which she blew her scented breath to stir the melodies of that yellow dirt land, was her only solace in her uprooted existence. That is, until I came along.

  We chatted behind our hymnbooks about eloping—she nineteen, an unbridled bride, and I eighteen, a doomed groom—to the foggy kingdom of her Shangri-la. She was full of myth and mythology. Our temple floated in the clouds and spring tasted sweet; she dreamed of being a ghost, dead from the inferno of a love affair, living thinly between the wall and its wallpaper. I boasted of becoming a fearless explorer with the sunlight my only guide, the moonlight my bed.

  Quickly and clumsily we fell in love. Ache of that nascent love and the pain of our monstrous desire to possess each other nearly destroyed us during the honeyed month of our affair. She would ricochet between the imaginary summit of elation and the abyss of low and dark moods, while I languished in a permanent state of tented agony, hungry for every glimpse of her: strolling down the wooded path, a white lily in her hair; in a tree, skirt afluff, a blond butterfly in greens; laughing on the swing, my heart in flight.

  Compared to Mrs. D, Annabelle was a tadpole in a puddle, an apprentice in the witchcraft of womanhood, a girl in waiting—waiting for the hands of her fate to unpeel her petals. During sleepless nights, the ghost of Mrs. D, the married martyr, would still creep to the edge of my canvas, elbowing aside Annabelle to make it a portrait for three. Mrs. D’s sudden vulgarity shamed me—the rolling stomach, corrugated thighs, and copious breasts. Those signposts of age all burst into flames, and in its place rose the phoenix of Annabelle.

  I still tremble at the thought of touching Annabelle’s budding chest for the first time under the May maple tree. The hedges formed our barricade beyond which her mother was having tea with summer friends. Tree leaves played peek-a-bo
o with tea leaves upon their white-clothed tea table. Her young breasts were taut under her plain dress. Her face twisted in agony, she pressed my palm into her chest, her hands over mine, then slowly pushed it down to bury between her legs. We both drew in a long breath, suspending the moment into an eternity. My fingers were about to wriggle for its prey when suddenly, a bark was yelped at her puppy. Her mother called to her errant daughter from her shaded alcove. When we emerged, I was poured a cup of tea, which I shamelessly accepted.

  The cravings germinated from that unfulfilled under-the-hedge hanky panky left our hearts sobbing with even more potent desire. Rubbing shoulders in the chapel’s narrow corridor induced dizzy spells; holding hands secretly generated electrifying lightning; drawing her name on the sandy ground rendered my knees weak and sword amast. We were stupefied by the storm of love ravaging our young bodies.

  My hand is shaking now as I prepare myself to compose that fateful night when we met again. Even my palace ink boy, In-In, frowns with concern. Grind on, my boy, make it dark, make it silky, make it last longer than the etchings on my tombstone. I desire the world to know that truth—yes, the truth that begets no explanations.

  It was love. It was the moon. It was fragrant June. All was quiet, a New England summer night, when I followed Annabelle’s instructions left in a coded note slipped into my Bible. A trail of yellowed leaves waited for me from the shadow of my window. A blithe jump landed me out the dorm, and I tiptoed along her Silk Road, my heart in my throat. Our tryst was a narrow isle between two looming haystacks reeking of stale autumn.

  Annabelle sat on the hay, her hair tossed over her shoulder, smoking a slender bamboo pipe tipped with a bubbling holder. The air was tinctured with the heady scent. “Smoke it.” She puffed. “It’s opium.”

  I took a long draw, swallowed it with a gag, then kissed her parted lips. Pain creased her forehead and pleasure quivered her lower lip. Weakened by desire, I lifted the hem of her skirt. She drew another puff, blowing it into me, and we fed on each other’s hungry mouths. I thrust my hand up her skirt, sailing for my dark destiny, her scented Shangri-la, and she slackened her legs with a small cry. Heaven was near. Oh, that sweet, sweet spring. In an outburst of tenderest love, I let loose my painful sword. She took me in her slender hand, making it quiver, and opened her castle gate. I marched forward with stars blinking over my shoulders and was on the verge of possessing her, my darling, darling Annabelle, when the sparks from her damned opium pipe leaped into life. The flames, like a gale on a stormy sea, swallowed the haystacks.