Burning Tigress Page 4

  Ken Jin frowned, trying to sort truth from speculation. "General Kang was here yesterday." He had heard that from his Dragon friend Fu De. "But then the General left, and all was well."

  "All was not well," Little Pearl growled. She gestured angrily at the ruined courtyard. "None of this happened yesterday. The General was most respectful."

  "In the daylight."

  Little Pearl nodded, and he saw the sheen of unshed tears in her eyes. "Shi Po and her husband are gone. No one has seen them since evening meal."

  So, they had been taken in the middle of the night. And Little Pearl was left to pick up the pieces. Which meant... "Was anything else taken?"

  Little Pearl threw up her hands in disgust. "Everything was taken! Or desecrated. Or destroyed."

  Ken Jin winced. The loss was devastating, but at least he knew some of the sacred scrolls were safe. They were right now clutched in the arms of the conspicuously silent Miss Charlotte, where they would have to remain. Right now the ancient texts were safer in a white woman's hands than at the school. Only the rats survived Imperial scrutiny.

  Ken Jin bowed deeply to Little Pearl, trying to offer both respect and support in the one gesture. She would have none of it, of course. She had always become furiously angry when unsettled. He hoped she found peace someday, but for now, he could only offer his meager services. "I will learn what I can about the soldiers."

  Little Pearl sneered and spat into the dirt at his feet. "The ghost peoples' stench covers you. Do not meddle where your influence will only bring a quicker death to those I love." And with that, she spun on her tiny bound heel and stomped heavily away.

  Ken Jin closed his eyes, his blood ice inside his chest. Little Pearl had said "those I love"—as if he did not owe equal love and loyalty to the Tan family. But he would get no understanding from Little Pearl. He had forfeited that right long ago.

  "My goodness, she's an angry little thing," Miss Charlotte commented from just behind him. Her tone was conversational, completely devoid of blame, and its warmth eased some of the constriction in his chest. Until she added, "Why does she hate you so?"

  He shook his head, dropping his gaze in apology. "You misunderstand," he lied. "She hates whites. I should not have brought you here. I beg your forgiveness."

  Charlotte waved off his apology with a quick snap of her wrist. "Nonsense. That woman hated you. True, she didn't like me, but I'm just a maggot."

  Ken Jin winced. Obviously she had understood the dung slug reference.

  "But she spit at your feet," she continued. "And named me as another of your whores." The light was back in her green eyes, shining with an intelligence rare in any race, his own included. "Why is that, Ken Jin? Do you often bring white women here to... to whore with them?" She sounded intrigued rather than horrified.

  Ken Jin lifted his gaze to meet and defy the bright light in hers. "I have no concert with whores, Miss Charlotte—white or yellow. Little Pearl speaks from her own poisoned yin." He carefully did not elaborate on the source of that poison.

  Charlotte did not reply at first, and he felt himself squirm under the force of her gaze. In the end, she sighed and turned toward the door. "I suppose you are right," she commented as they stepped out into the street. "I believe, technically, one has to pay for them to be called whores."

  His breath thickened enough to choke him. And yet, somehow, he still managed to hand her up into the carriage. Some of his horror must have shown on his face, for she paused halfway to her seat.

  "Men always think they're so clever." She rolled her eyes, and when he didn't respond, she elaborated. "I know you've lain with every white woman in Shanghai." Then she flushed a brilliant scarlet that in no way dimmed the intelligence in her eyes. "All of them, of course, except me."

  * * *

  A letter clutched in Wen Ken Jin's ten-year-old fist

  and handed to Tan Shi Po.

  July 9, 1881

  To dearest Tigress sister Tan Shi Po:

  My daughter-in-law is insane. My son is possessed by a demon. Please, for love of the practice we both share, take this boy and protect him. I will send what money I can for his care, but he has no one. Please, I beg you, care for my grandson. He is the cleverest of the lot. He will bring you great fortune.

  In wrenching grief,

  Wen Ai Men

  To relieve vertigo, apply pressure at the point which is about 2.5 cm/1 inch below the outer ankle-bone. Tong Sing, the Chinese Book of Wisdom,

  Dr. Charles Windridge

  Chapter 3

  She'd done it again; Charlotte had opened her mouth and something scandalous leapt out. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe. If only she could keep her mouth shut as easily, but the urge was too strong: She had to explain herself. But what to say to the servant who sat in stoic silence beside her? He wasn't even taking up the reins. He just sat there and stared at the horse's ears.

  "I am so sorry," she blurted. "I should not have spoken so bluntly. And on an open street, no less." She used Shanghai dialect so as to keep up the pretense that she belonged in this Chinese side of the city. Unfortunately, that meant the pair of women passing on the street overheard and understood. As one, they turned and stared, and Charlotte's face heated to a burning crimson. Lord, even her hands had gone red with embarrassment.

  "It's not what it sounds like," she said hastily to the pair. "He's a modest man, most moral. Well, for a man, I mean. Not—"

  Her words were cut off by a squeal of horror. One of the women—she was actually more of a girl, really, with a soft moon face and chapped lips—let loose a bizarre sound that was half scream, half Chinese wail.

  "Really," Charlotte cried, desperate to end the spectacle. "He's not evil at all. It is only that my friends talk to me. About..." She trailed off. Nothing she said could possibly help. Besides, the women weren't listening. They just kept screaming or cursing or praying—it was hard to tell exactly what was happening; the Chinese words ran too fast for her to understand. Charlotte caught the phrase "ghost devil" and "fire tongue." Or maybe it was "fire head." It must have been the latter, because she heard Ken Jin curse before throwing her shawl back over her. She had let it drop in the courtyard and forgotten to hide her reddish blond hair.

  "Oh yes," she scrambled to say to the two still-squealing women. "My hair. It is very bright, but—"

  "Be silent!" Ken Jin hissed as he snapped the reins. The horse obediently kicked into a stately walk. The women followed, screeching.

  "But I'm trying to explain."

  "You're not!" he snapped in English.

  "But I have damaged your reputation! I cannot—"

  "They don't care that I lie with women!" he ground out in English, glaring at the growing crowd of pointing and squealing and jabbering Chinese.

  "But then—"

  "It is you!" he snapped. "An Englishwoman who speaks Chinese. They think you are invading."

  She blinked, first at him and then at the pointing crowd. "But I'm not. How—"

  He shook his head, clearly struggling with the words. "Not invading. Possessing. They believe you have possessed a Chinese person."

  "What?"

  "They think you have sucked out her brains. How else could you speak Chinese so well?"

  The horse was moving faster now, losing the worst of the crowd, but the shrieks still echoed in Charlotte's head. "They think I sucked out the brains of a Chinese person simply because I can speak Chinese well? That I am a white person who sucked out someone's brain?"

  "Yes!"

  She shook her head, dumbfounded. "But I learned Chinese with Joanna. From a tutor."

  "I know." His words sounded as if they grated his throat.

  "And they think—"

  "That you are a ghost. Miss Charlotte, please, will you please speak English?"

  "Oh!" She shifted languages. "But everyone knows I speak Chinese. I am practically famous for it."

  "At home, yes, but this is here." Here meant a bare mile or two east of w
here she lived. But they were in Chinese Shanghai, where no white person ever went. Or at least no white people who spoke Shanghai dialect.

  Charlotte pressed her lips together, annoyed with her own stupidity. And yet, her mind still struggled. "You mean, they don't care that you... that you..." Why was it more difficult to say in English? Her father whored. All his friends whored. But she could not say that aloud to Ken Jin in English. It would make it too real, somehow. "That you spend time with white women, but they're terrified I can speak Chinese?"

  They were past the commotion now, turning into a street clogged with carts of vegetables and women carrying upside-down chickens. Charlotte stared at one of the poor birds tied by its feet onto a looped line. This particular hen was one of about ten, all still alive, all piled on top of each other as an old woman rushed to market. The chicken didn't move, didn't even cluck, but hung silently upside down like one banana in a bunch, completely unaware that it was destined for the chopping block. Soon it would see stalls that held live scorpions next to a water bin of bulbous squid beneath hanging ducks interspersed with black eels. And in all this chaos, a single white woman speaking Chinese produced screaming horror?

  Charlotte sighed. The Chinese made no sense. She turned to Ken Jin. "So, how many white women must you lie with for it to be unusual?"

  He stared at her, his normally golden brown skin paling. He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. Then the horse demanded his attention as it shied away from an unusually aggressive rickshaw runner.

  While Ken Jin fixed his gaze on the reins, Charlotte could not stop her thoughts from running in a stream from her mouth. For all that she told herself to stop, she simply could not halt the flow. In truth, she had been thinking about this for a long, long time now. It really did not seem fair that Ken Jin would spend so much time teaching her friends about certain forms of man-woman relations without sharing the experience with her. After all, he was her servant.

  "Would the Chinese be more shocked if you spent your evenings with Chinese women?" she asked. "You are most famous among white ladies, so I know you are unusual to us. But is it common for Chinese men to delight in...? To share company with...? Well, you know what I mean. Do you spend time with Chinese women as often as you do with Europeans? And, my goodness, why aren't you more tired? Of course, Sophie claimed you were indefatigable, but surely she must have exaggerated. You cannot have gone on for as long as she claimed. Unless that is typical for your race. So I want you to show me, too."

  She paused to take a breath, barely daring to look at him. But when she did, her breath left her in an embarrassed whoosh. He hadn't moved. His attention was firmly and completely absorbed with driving the cart through the clogged streets. Which meant, she supposed, that he hadn't heard her.

  "Ken Jin?" she said a little more forcefully. "I wish you to show me..." She swallowed, knowing she needed to be explicit. "I want you to touch me." She looked down, horrified to see that her hands were fluttering about her bodice. She slammed them down hard into her lap. Except, she didn't hit the soft cushion of her thighs; she cracked the back of her hand on the hard end of a scroll. She winced, but even that pain did not stop her words, especially as her servant still did not appear to have heard. And he had to hear, because she would never again get the chance to be alone with him in Chinese Shanghai where no one else could understand what she said.

  "I have scrolls," she heard herself say, "with pictures. I don't understand the words; they're written in Chinese. Joanna would have understood, of course. She read all manner of things, but I will need someone to translate them for me. That will prepare me for what I want. For what you will do." She paused. "Or, is there something I need to do first? Sophia didn't mention anything. Well, actually she talked about all sorts of noises which did not sound at all nice; but then she always is making some sort of sound, isn't she? But are they important? She dwelt most particularly on her hmmm and a whee and a hiccup kind of thing. At the time I thou—umph."

  Ken Jin clapped his hand over her mouth. It was a large hand, with lovely calluses that tickled her lips. But even more delicious was the way he leaned close and whispered in her ear, his breath warm even as it made her shiver. "The sun has made you ill, Miss Charlotte. When we get home, I will get you a cool glass of lemonade and all this will be over."

  She didn't answer. How could she, with his hand still over her mouth? So she sat still, smelling the ink on his skin and a lingering whisper of spicy incense. The smell pervaded his clothing too, she realized, and his thick braid of dark hair that slipped over his shoulder to tease her cheek.

  "Do you understand, Miss Charlotte?" he continued. "You have a fever brought on by the heat and tainted Chinese scrolls." She felt him tug at her satchel, trying to remove it from her hands. "Soon you will be home with William. You can take a cool bath and sip a special tea that I will prepare. Then all that has happened today will fade away."

  His voice was hypnotic. The heat from his body added to the noise in her mind and soul. There was a crackling, sparking, burning kind of clamor that seemed to grow louder whenever he was near. And right now he was very, very near. Except, he was pulling away, lifting his one hand from her mouth while the other pulled the scrolls away.

  She almost did it; she almost gave in to the constraints of moral behavior, to the pressure for obedience and purity and absolute holy ignorance on her wedding night. Ken Jin obviously wanted her to forget everything she had seen and heard this afternoon, to continue as she had been continuing every day of her most boring, moral, sterile life.

  "No!" She grabbed the scrolls and hauled them back. "These are mine, and if you will not explain them to me, I will find someone else who will."

  He did not release his hold on the satchel, but his brown eyes darkened to pitch, and his words held dangerous authority. "You are not yourself, Miss Charlotte. I believe I shall have your mother call the doctor the moment we return."

  She trembled in fear, his threat very real. If her mother discovered these scrolls, she would first burn the parchments, then call the surgeon to bleed the ill humors out of her before paying for a full Mass to pray for Charlotte's tortured young soul. Charlotte could not, not, not have her mother involved.

  Charlotte bit her lip then said, "The man is gone."

  Ken Jin frowned, obviously confused, so she waved toward the street.

  "The man with the bamboo poles," she clarified. "The one who was crossing the street. He's gone. We can keep going."

  Ken Jin looked at the street and nodded, slowly refocusing on driving the carriage. Except he did it one-handed. Charlotte had counted on him needing both hands to steer, but he clearly did not. He kept one hand firmly on the satchel while the other steered the horse.

  "These are Joanna's scrolls, Ken Jin. I will not give them up to you."

  "They are Tigress scrolls, Miss Charlotte, and no barbarian has ever seen them."

  She straightened. "I have seen them. Joanna has seen them, too. I'd say a great number of barbarians—"

  "No!" he snapped, jerking hard on the bag. But he had only one hand on the bag, whereas she had two. She did not release it.

  "You will tear them!" she cried. Then she glared up at his hard profile. "If you tell Mother I am ill, I'll say that you took me to a brothel this morning. That I saw your... your... you know. With needles in it! And then—"

  "I'll be fired." He turned to look directly at her, his expression as empty as his tone. "Is that what you want? To have me fired?"

  She swallowed. "Of course not." She lifted her chin. "I want to know what Sophia knows, what Joanna knows." She felt tears burn her eyes. "What everyone knows but me."

  He sighed. It was a quiet sound, more like the creak of a branch in the wind, but she heard it nonetheless, and it made her wonder what exactly went on in his mind when he acted so very, very Chinese. She was so absorbed in scrutinizing his face that she missed his next words. And then, when she realized he'd spoken, she had to forcibly redirec
t her thoughts.

  "What did you say?" she asked.

  They were nearing the gate back into the English concession, so she didn't think he would speak, but he did. He pulled the carriage to a stop and twisted to stare at her.

  "I said I will teach you." Then he narrowed his eyes to emphasize his next words. "But there will be no talk of this to anyone—not your parents, not Joanna, not even to Sophia. Do we understand one another?"

  She swallowed, nodding her head slowly as she agreed to who-knew-what. But as Ken Jin turned back to guide the carriage, she ripped the satchel from his grasp.

  "I'm keeping the scrolls," she said, straightening in her seat. "I have to make sure you're doing things right."

  * * *

  Ken Jin entered his bedchamber and stared at his desk. The old wood was pocked and ink-stained, the drawers stuck, and one corner was frayed to splinters. And yet he had a fondness for the large beast.

  For one thing, it was huge. He had lots of space to work, lots of room for papers and ledgers and all manner of clutter; and yet his elbows were never crowded, his abacus was always within reach, and his brushes never dripped on anything vital. Large and serviceable without beauty, that was his desk.

  That was Ken Jin too. He was not a handsome man, not by white women's standards, but they certainly seemed to enjoy his size and his serveability. They cared little if he was rough to them; indeed, some seemed to enjoy it. So long as their requirements were met—no penetration—all was well in their eyes. He brought their yin rain to full bloom, drinking up their qi like water, and they got to remain virgins.

  An excellent arrangement until the encounters began leaving him exhausted. His yang—so strong at the beginning with Little Pearl—now barely moved despite the stirring perfume of a willing women. Over the last year, his dragon became so weak, he had stopped undressing before Charlotte's friends.