It was interesting to speculate what it would take to become an imperial concubine. People fanned out across the kingdom to find lovely young girls—virgins were esteemed as always—for their emperor. Fathers would want their daughters to be chosen. But being chosen or perhaps offered to the emperor just got you into the pool, as it were, sort of like the secretarial pools of old. Then you had to claw your way up through a ranking system in hopes that you would be an imperial favorite, get your own luxury apartment in the palace and an annual stipend that was generous enough to keep you in cosmetics and finery, and maybe even acquire the opportunity to bestow favors, like homes and titles, on your family. For the few who managed this, others, perhaps the majority, probably never got to even see the emperor. So there had to be something exceptional about this Lingfei. Perhaps she was a singer or dancer, or she wrote exquisite poetry. That would appeal to Xuanzong. Above all, she must nave been extraordinarily beautiful.
After about an hour of searching, I gave up. I’d have to have another go later. But I did look up argyria. Yes, it existed; yes, it was exactly as Dr. Xie had described it; and yes, you could make colloidal silver yourself with some distilled water and a battery to run a charge through it and the silver somehow. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this. It didn’t seem to be a useful life skill from my perspective.
I made another attempt at eating and was marginally more successful than the day before. There was a message on my hotel phone from Rob saying his mobile wasn’t working very well, so he might be hard to reach, but given I’d been delayed for a few more days—that was an understatement—-he and Jennifer were taking a short cruise. He said he didn’t know whether his phone would work there either, but he would try to get in touch. Jennifer came on the line at the end to say how much she wanted to see me, and that I was to hurry up and get there. It was all I could do not to sob uncontrollably. Then, after watching Chinese television, hoping to see a photograph of Song Liang pop up on the screen even if I couldn’t understand a word, I decided to try once again to get some sleep.
I boiled the water for my bedtime cup of Dr. Xie’s tea. It did smell a little strong, as he had said it would, but I had not found it that difficult to drink the previous night, and it certainly worked. As I took a teabag out of the plastic baggie in which Dr. Xie had given it to me, I had a sudden flash of memory: Burton taking a similar plastic baggie out of his pocket that day we’d had tea on Liulichang Street when I’d caught him checking out the antique stores. He’d brought his own tea bags.
I got out my magnifier and had a really good look at the teabag. It was of the sort that has a string attached to it to help you dunk it in the water, with a little tag at the end where you hold it that usually gives the manufacturer’s name and the type of tea. This one was blank. The teabag itself was not of the type that is sealed all around. Rather, the staple attaching the string to the bag also sealed the bag. I painstakingly removed the staple, being careful not to tear the paper in any way. Were there two separate staple marks? There were not. Was it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice? I looked at the holes very carefully through the magnifier. I thought it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice.
I decided then and there that Burton had been poisoned, not through his own actions, his pathetic although understandable desire for good health. No, there was something in that awful tea he drank, something that shouldn’t be there, something he would not detect because of the extremely strong and bitter flavor and aroma of the tea. The burning question was, had Xie Jinghe given it to him?
I didn’t drink the tea.
Eight
Lingfei’s petition to have leave to marry the man of her choice was denied. There was to be no further appeal. The reason given was that the emperor’s Pear Garden Orchestra would be diminished by the loss of her voice and her consummate artistry on the lute. I thought back to that evening when I had watched the orchestra perform, and in my mind tried to place Lingfei there. Perhaps she had seen me that evening, creeping out of the shadows the better to see and hear. Perhaps that was why she had chosen me.
The next time I went to visit Lingfei, I took sweetmeats and flowers, peonies in remembrance of my sister. I had decided before I went that I would make no reference to her petition. When I arrived there, however, I was in for a terrible shock.
She was standing, hair disheveled, several locks of it scattered about the floor, a pair of scissors on the writing table nearby. She held a cleaver in her hand. “Wu Yuan,” she said. “You will cut one finger off each of my hands.”
I was aghast. “I will not, madam!”
“I demand it!” she said. “You are my servant.”
“You will not be able to play the lute,” I said, rather naively. “That is exactly the point,” she said.
Light dawned. “And will you also ask me to pour acid down your throat so you will be unable to sing, madam?” I said, no longer caring if she might guess that I knew of her petition. “Or cut off your feet so you will be unable to dance?” I was very angry now, almost as angry as she. “I will not do that, either.”
She raised the cleaver, as if to cut off her own finger. But then she dropped it, and burst into tears, collapsing onto a couch. I did not know what to say. I did not know what to do. I simply sat beside her and held her hand for a very long time. When I left her, I reached down and picked up a lock of her hair from the floor and took it with me.
I got my passport back the next morning. Mira and Dr. Xie had obviously been persuasive, because they were still sorting through the toxicology reports on Burton. According to Mira, his blood was a toxic soup. She said he could be the poster boy for a campaign on the risks of self-medication. His suitcase had contained a very large plastic bag full of all sorts of stuff, from vitamins and minerals of every description, to the silver goo, to teas and infusions for almost every ailment you could think of, and some you’ve never heard of. Over and above the nasty substances in his blood like mercury and lead that all of us who live in developed nations can acquire just by living, there was the silver, of course; arsenic, perhaps acquired along with the lead through some environmental pollutants; and a host of other things. It sounded as if he’d been taking the elixir of immortality for far too long.
However, the cause of death was very probably hepatitis C. Burton had been suffering from this terrible condition, acquired who-knew-how and when. Perhaps that explained why he was so obsessed with his health. Sadly, many of the substances he took to make himself healthier just made him worse. As Dr. Xie explained to me, and as he’d hinted when we’d discussed the subject earlier, Burton’s body had identified these substances, such as the silver, as invaders and had in some sense turned their attention to them, neglecting the hepatitis C, which had gained the upper hand.