Lisa See - Peony in Love

Doctor Zhao had tried this with me many years ago and it hadn’t ( 2 6 2 )

worked, so I watched in dismay as they dragged Yi from the bed and yelled in her ears that she was a bad wife, an incompetent mother, and cruel to the servants. Her legs hung limp beneath her torso. Her feet slid along the floor behind her as they pushed and pulled her, trying to irritate her into barking at them to stop. She didn’t oblige. She couldn’t. She had too much goodness in her. When she started vomiting blood, they put her back in bed.

“I can’t lose her,” Ren said. “We were meant to grow old together, spend a hundred years together, and share the same grave.”

“All that is very sentimental but not terribly practical,” the doctor reasoned. “You must remember, Master Wu, that nothing in the world is permanent. The only permanent thing is impermanence.”

“But she has lived only twenty-three years.” Ren groaned in despair. “I had hoped we’d be like two birds soaring in flight for many years to come.”

“I’ve heard that your wife has been indulging herself with The Peony Pavilion. Is this so?” Doctor Zhao asked. When told that, yes, it was, he sighed. “I’ve confronted problems caused by this opera for too many years. And for too many years I’ve lost women to the disease that oozes from its pages.”

The whole family followed dietary restrictions. The diviner came to write charms and the like, which were burned. The ashes were gathered and given to Willow, who took them to the cook. Together they brewed a decoction made from boiled turnip and half the ashes to relieve Yi’s cough. A second brew was made of weevil-eaten corn and the other half of the ashes to lower Yi’s fever. Madame Wu lit incense, made offerings, and prayed. If it had been winter, Ren would have lain in the snow to freeze himself, come to the marital bed, and pressed his chilled body next to Yi’s to cool her down. But it was summer, so he did the next best thing.

He went out into the street to find a dog and put it in Yi’s bed to suck out all the illness. None of these things worked.

Then strangely, over the next few days, the room turned cold, and then colder. Thin mists gathered along the walls and under the windows. Ren, Madame Wu, and the servants draped quilts over their shoulders to keep warm. The brazier roared, but Ren’s breath came in great white clouds from his mouth, while only the lightest vapor escaped Yi’s lips. She stopped moving. She stopped opening her eyes. She even stopped coughing. Long were her slumbers, deep her stirrings. Still, her skin burned.

But it was summer. How could it be so cold? At any deathwatch, ghosts ( 2 6 3 )

are suspected, but I knew I wasn’t causing any problems. I’d lived with Yi since she was six and, apart from her footbinding, had never caused her pain, sorrow, or discomfort. Rather, I’d protected her and given her strength. I lost all optimism and fell into heartsickness.

“I wish I could say that fox spirits were protecting your wife,” Doctor Zhao said in resignation. “She needs their laughter, warmth, and wisdom.

But already ghosts have gathered to take her. These spirits are filled with disease, melancholy, and too much qing . I hear their presence in your wife’s erratic pulse. It’s disordered like tangled threads. I feel their presence in her burning fever as they boil her blood as though she were in one of the hells already. Her heart fluctuations and flaming qi are sure signs of ghost attack.” He bowed his head respectfully before adding, “All we can do is wait.”

Mirrors and a sieve were hung in the room, limiting my movements.

Willow and Madame Wu took turns sweeping the floor, while Ren swung a sword this way and that to scare away whatever vindictive ghosts were lurking, waiting to steal Yi from life. Their actions kept me up in the rafters, but when I looked around the room I didn’t see any creatures. I lowered myself straight down to Yi’s bed, avoiding the swinging sword, sweeping women, and refractions from the mirror. I put my hand on her forehead. It burned into me hotter than coals. I lay down next to her, let down the protective shields I’d built around myself these past years, and let all the coldness that I’d trapped inside myself come to the surface and seep into her in an effort to lower her fever.

I hugged her close. Spirit tears dripped from my eyes and cooled her face. I had raised her, bound her feet, cared for her when she was ill, married her out, and brought her son into the world, and she had honored me in so many ways. I was so proud of her—for being a devoted wife, a caring mother, a . . .

“I love you, Yi,” I whispered in her ear. “You have not only been a wonderful sister-wife, but you saved me and made sure I was heard.” I hesitated as my heart swelled and nearly burst from the pain of mother love, and then I spoke the truth of my heart. “You have been the joy of my life.

I love you as though you were my daughter.”

“Ha!”

The sound was cruel, triumphant, and definitely not human.

I swirled up, careful to avoid the swinging sword, and there was Tan Ze. Years in the Blood-Gathering Lake had left her hideous and deformed.

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Seeing my shocked look, she laughed, which caused Willow, Ren, and his mother to stop their actions and shiver with fright and Yi’s body to heave and shake with a bout of brutal coughing.

I was too stunned to speak for a moment, too terrified for those I loved to think quickly. “How are you here?” Such a stupid question, but my mind was in turmoil, trying to figure out what to do.

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. Her father knew the rites, and he was rich and powerful. He must have hired priests to pray for her and given them long strings of cash, which were then offered to the bureaucrats who supervise the Blood-Gathering Lake. Once released, she could have become an ancestor, but she’d obviously chosen a different path.

A swoosh of Ren’s sword sliced away a piece of my gown. Yi moaned.

Anger roiled up inside me. “I’ve been burdened by you my whole life,”

I said. “Even after I died, you caused me trouble. Why did you do that?

Why?”

“ I caused you trouble?” Ze’s voice grated like a rusty hinge.

“I’m sorry I frightened you,” I confessed. “I’m sorry I killed you. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I can’t accept all the blame. You married Ren. What did you think would happen?”

“He was mine! I saw him on the night of the opera. I told you I’d chosen him.” She pointed a finger at Yi. “Once this one is gone, I’ll finally have him to myself.”

With that, many of the events of the last few months became clear. Ze had been here for a while. After Yi found my poems, Ze must have caused the book holding the pages she’d torn out of the commentary to fall from the shelf, shifting Ren’s attention back to her and stealing my poetry from his eyes. She must have drawn Yi to comment on what she’d written in the margins of the opera. The freezing temperatures on the day the Shaoxi edition burned also had to have been caused by Ze, but I hadn’t understood what I was seeing because I was too entranced by Ren and Yi dancing in the snow. The cold in Yi’s bedchamber . . . Yi’s illness . . . and even farther back in time, when the boy had been born. Had Ze been inside Yi, trying to strangle the boy with his cord, yanking it tighter and tighter around his neck even as I tried to loosen it?

I took my eyes off Ze, trying to figure out where she’d been hiding all this time. In a vase, under the bed, in Yi’s lungs, in her womb? In the doctor’s pocket, in one of Willow’s shoes, in the decoction of weevil-eaten ( 2 6 5 )