draped across buildings along the way, and Lin translated one of them for us.
‘On the stage tonight at the Pianfu Theatre, the great actor Yi-shih Hsiu is now performing.’
‘Hsiu? Is he related to Natural Elegance?’
Lin smiled at my question.
‘Not that you would know from his name, which simply means Fashionable Elegance. But they could be related — most of these travelling troupes are.’
We emerged into a large square, which had a permanent stage set at one end next to a building I knew from its shape to be a temple. I checked that out with Lin, though.
‘Is that the Temple of the Earth-Goddess?’
‘Yes. And it houses temples and shrines to other gods too.’
‘Including the god of lost items?’
Lin looked puzzled at my enquiry, but nodded.
‘Yes, that too. You will see opposite the entrance two small statues of young children. That is the form of the god you refer to. There will no doubt be an old priest or priestess who acts as its intermediary. Now, can we get to our seats?’
I raised my hands in submission, but still had time as we passed to cast a quick look into the temple. I could just make out the statues Lin had described, but there was no priest. We made our way to an elevated platform facing the stage, which was obviously intended for important officials such as ourselves. As we ascended the stairs I saw Li Wen-Tao amongst the blue-robed old men already there. We nodded at each other, as Lin explained.
‘This is the shen-lou. It means god’s tower, and I suppose is entirely appropriate seeing those who are seated in it.’
He gave a little grin and we sat down too. The play soon began and developed into what Lin had described as a ‘strip-and-fight thriller’. It was an old tale called ‘The Three Princes at Tiger Palace’, and involved lots of acrobatics from young men who were stripped to the waist. I could see out the corner of my eye that Gurbesu was on the edge of her seat. And I envied the youths their physiques — wine-drinking was not good for my waistline.
As the story progressed I saw that Lin was getting more and more agitated. Eventually, I leaned across and whispered in his ear.
‘What’s going on, Chu-Tsai?’
He turned his head slightly without taking his eyes off the stage.
‘Some of the lines — I have not heard them before in this play. Just now one of the princes said, “When frost fell, men knew how a virtuous woman suffered,” and earlier, the same prince said, “The greater the position, the shorter the memory.” Often lines are changed in these plays. The words of plays are not set in stone. But…’
‘It sounds like the lines are meant for us to hear, you think?’
He nodded.
‘Let us wait until the end and we will see.’
When the play had finished, we all went backstage to congratulate the troupe. Natural Elegance saw Lin and quickly slipped through the crowd of well-wishers to speak to him. He still had his female make-up on, but close up you could not mistake him for a woman. I wondered how I had been deceived before. Words tumbled out of his mouth as he sought Lin’s approval.
‘Did you see the technique of my empty exit?’
I looked at Lin questioningly. He explained what the boy meant.
‘An empty exit — hsu-hsia — is when the actor turns upstage to be out of the action, even though he is still visible to the audience.’
I nodded in understanding, though all this pretence was beyond me.
‘Tell him I liked the use of the offstage voices when the princes were fighting. Even if I didn’t quite understand what they were saying.’
The boy laughed, clearly understanding my Mongol.
‘There was no one offstage. I can throw my voice.’
I was glad of his confirmation. It was exactly as I had hoped. My plans were beginning to fall into place.
ELEVEN
Lying beside the warm body of Gurbesu that night, I found I could not sleep. It looked as though, with Guan’s play due to be performed soon, we needed to dig out the truth of Old Geng’s murder more quickly than I had anticipated. Some of the lines from the play that evening were still rattling around in my head. One of them — ‘a pinch of arsenic, or an inch of steel’ — whispered in my ear by Lin, had particularly struck home. Not that it necessarily had anything to do with Jianxu’s case, though it may well have done. No, it reminded me once again of my parents.
I was nine at the time, and the ongoing war between my mother and father was coming to a head. Being the selfish little brat I was then, I assumed it was all about me. Rosamund, my mother, was English and the daughter of a knight who had sojourned in Venice on his way to Outremer. He had stayed overlong because his wife had contracted a fever. It was unusual for a crusader to be travelling with his wife and child, but they had come nevertheless. Now my grandmother was paying the price of her obstinate insistence on travelling. She was bedridden and delirious. In the end, the crusader knight had to depart on one of the ships taking men-at-arms to Cyprus, the launching-off point for Outremer. Two days later, his wife died. He never got to know about it because he was drowned in the Nile when the ship he was on got sunk in a minor skirmish. His chain mail dragged him to the bottom of the river. The dark-haired girl Rosamund — my mother — was only fourteen and suddenly an orphan. But there were already the signs of the startling beauty she was to become, and Agostino Zuliani took her in. He was twenty years her senior, but it didn’t stop him marrying her when she was sixteen. I was the first child to survive any length of time, and by the time I was nine, I was aware of the feuding between my parents. Agostino had other children by his first marriage, but for my mother I was an only child, and therefore precious. Father accused her of making me soft through not exposing me to the harsh realities of the world. They were both hot- tempered, but father was a strong and cruel man, who used his strength to bully his way to dominance in the marriage. My mother got her revenge in secretive ways, sometimes spreading rumours about her husband’s impotence — which was not true — and sometimes lacing his food with mild emetics. I knew this because she delighted in telling me. It was a secret we shared that united us against the tyrant who was my father.
At my side, Gurbesu stirred, and gazed sleepily up at me. I could feel the heat of her body, but I was not excited. The past bore down on me too heavily. She muttered a query.
‘What’s the matter, Nick?’
I stroked her thigh.
‘Nothing, my sweet. I am just thinking about tomorrow.’
‘Do you need some somnifera? I can make it up?’
I knew somnifera, her mixture of opium, hemlock and mandragora soaked into a sponge. It rendered you happily unconscious, but left you with a heavy head the following day. I couldn’t afford that, as I needed my mind to be clear.
‘No. You go back to sleep. I will be fine.’
She rolled over, pressing her buttocks against my thigh, and was soon snoring gently. The line from the play came back to me — ‘a pinch of arsenic, or an inch of steel.’ You see, I could not rid my mind of the persistent thought that my mother had gone one step further than emetics, and actually poisoned my father. Soon after a particularly bad row concerning how, in Agostino’s eyes, Rosamund molly-coddled me, I had told her that I would willingly stick a dagger into my father. An inch of steel, you see. She was shocked by my vehemence, but convinced me it would not be necessary. I still recall her words to me on that night. She said that evil acts always result in evil ends. The next day Agostino Zuliani fell sick. Being poisoned by arsenic resulted in a painful and slow death. I still believe she killed him first so that I didn’t do it.
