“No wonder the wee fellow was an esteemed poet,” Raeburn said with approval. “It’s verra heathen, but I like it!”
“Worth a red knob on your hat, anyday,” Maitland agreed.
“Almost worth learning a bit of Chinee for,” the master’s mate chimed in, eyeing Mr. Willoughby with fresh interest. “Does he have a lot of those poems?”
Jamie waved the audience—by now augmented by most of the off-duty hands—to silence and said, “Go on, then,” to Mr. Willoughby.
“I fled on the Night of Lanterns,” the Chinaman said. “A great festival, and one when people would be thronging the streets; there would be no danger of being noticed by the watchmen. Just after dark, as the processions were assembling throughout the city, I put on the garments of a traveler—”
“That’s like a pilgrim,” Jamie interjected, “they go to visit their ancestors’ tombs far away, and wear white clothes—that’s for mourning, ye ken?”
“—and I left my house. I made my way through the crowds without difficulty, carrying a small anonymous lantern I had bought—one without my name and place of residence painted on it. The watchmen were hammering upon their bamboo drums, the servants of the great households beating gongs, and from the roof of the palace, fireworks were being set off in great profusion.”
The small round face was marked by nostalgia, as he remembered.
“It was in a way a most appropriate farewell for a poet,” he said. “Fleeing nameless, to the sound of great applause. As I passed the soldiers’ garrison at the city gate, I looked back, to see the many roofs of the Palace outlined by bursting flowers of red and gold. It looked like a magic garden—and a forbidden one, for me.”
Yi Tien Cho had made his way without incident through the night, but had nearly been caught the next day.
“I had forgotten my fingernails,” he said. He spread out a hand, small and short-fingered, the nails bitten to the quicks. “For a Mandarin has long nails, as symbol that he is not obliged to work with his hands, and my own were the length of one of my finger joints.”
A servant at the house where he had stopped for refreshment next day saw them, and ran to tell the guard. Yi Tien Cho ran, too, and succeeded at last in eluding his pursuers by sliding into a wet ditch and lying hidden in the bushes.
“While lying there, I destroyed my nails, of course,” he said. He waggled the little finger of his right hand. “I was obliged to tear that nail out, for it had a golden
He had stolen a peasant’s clothes from a bush where they had been hung to dry, leaving the torn-out nail with its golden character in exchange, and made his way slowly across country toward the coast. At first he paid for his food with the small store of money he had brought away, but outside Lulong he met with a band of robbers, who took his money but left him his life.
“And after that,” he said simply, “I stole food when I could, and starved when I could not. And at last the wind of fortune changed a little, and I met with a group of traveling apothecaries, on their way to the physicians’ fair near the coast. In return for my skill at drawing banners for their booth and composing labels extolling the virtues of their medicines, they carried me along with them.”
Once reaching the coast, he had made his way to the waterfront, and tried there to pass himself off as a seaman, but failed utterly, as his fingers, so skillful with brush and ink, knew nothing of the art of knots and lines. There were several foreign ships in port; he had chosen the one whose sailors looked the most barbarous as being likely to carry him farthest away, and seizing his chance, had slipped past the deck guard and into the hold of the
“You had always meant to leave the country altogether?” Fergus asked, interested. “It seems a desperate choice.”
“Emperor’s reach very long,” Mr. Willoughby said softly in English, not waiting for translation. “I am exile, or I am dead.”
His listeners gave a collective sigh at the awesome contemplation of such bloodthirsty power, and there was a moment of silence, with only the whine of the rigging overhead, while Mr. Willoughby picked up his neglected cup and drained the last drops of his grog.
He set it down, licking his lips, and laid his hand once more on Jamie’s arm.
“It is strange,” Mr. Willoughby said, and the air of reflection in his voice was echoed exactly by Jamie’s, “but it was my joy of women that Second Wife saw and loved in my words. Yet by desiring to possess me—and my poems—she would have forever destroyed what she admired.”
Mr. Willoughby uttered a small chuckle, whose irony was unmistakable.
“Nor is that the end of the contradiction my life has become. Because I could not bring myself to surrender my manhood, I have lost all else—honor, livelihood, country. By that, I mean not only the land itself, with the slopes of noble fir trees where I spent my summers in Tartary, and the great plains of the south, the flowing of rivers filled with fish, but also the loss of myself. My parents are dishonored, the tombs of my ancestors fall into ruin, and no joss burns before their images.
“All order, all beauty is lost. I am come to a place where the golden words of my poems are taken for the clucking of hens, and my brushstrokes for their scratchings. I am taken as less than the meanest beggar, who swallows serpents for the entertainment of the crowds, allowing passersby to draw the serpent from my mouth by its tail for the tiny payment that will let me live another day.”
Mr. Willoughby glared round at his hearers, making his parallel evident.
“I am come to a country of women coarse and rank as bears.” The Chinaman’s voice rose passionately, though Jamie kept to an even tone, reciting the words, but stripping them of feeling. “They are creatures of no grace, no learning, ignorant, bad-smelling, their bodies gross with sprouting hair, like dogs! And these—these! disdain me as a yellow worm, so that even the lowest whores will not lie with me.
“For the love of Woman, I am come to a place where no woman is worthy of love!” At this point, seeing the dark looks on the seamen’s faces, Jamie ceased translating, and instead tried to calm the Chinaman, laying a big hand on the blue-silk shoulder.
