My Last Empress: A Novel by Da Chen

Author:Da Chen [Chen, Da]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 9780307381309
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2012-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

20

After cleansing myself and consuming a beastly breakfast of dried sweet dough, buttered cornbread, and coils of lamb sausages exceptionally rendered by my prodigious young cook, I secretively appeared, suit wearing and hatted, at a deserted eastern gate where I was met by a four-man sedan. Behind the drapery was my pubescent mate leaning on her side of the cushioned seat, powdered and coiffed, dressed in the hunting attire of safari pants and knee-high boots. Her eyes were downcast, staring at her own knees, with a pink blush that even her white powder could ill cover.

“What took you so long?” she asked, slanting her eyes to peep out the tiny sedan window.

“A meal and a bath,” I answered while taking my seat, gazing her up and down. Those slender thighs under the manly wear stirred me; she clamped them closed as if sensing my stare.

Outside the drapery, the head of the foursome gave orders, and our carriage went aloft and mobile through a side archway; the main one was reserved for the chosen, and no one else. The glow in my heart animated me to reach over my paw, yearning to touch her.

She slapped the encroaching hand away with her ringed fingers, an inset green jade denting my palm. “Be proper,” she snapped, pasting herself to her sedan wall.

Three willow-lined streets later, she sagged and sighed before leaning her head on my shoulder. I cupped her hot hands between my sweaty palms; she dug her nails, lightly denting my skin. After a silent ride down some leafy boulevards, she tilted her swan neck and hungrily kissed my eager mouth, one long leg swinging over my lap.

By noon—a bound-foot granny could have outrun our hoofed foursome!—we alighted under the awning of Union Hospital. A turbaned concierge of Indian descent chased away the scattered paupers before greeting us with his shiny, white-toothed smile.

Among a cluster of nurses and doctors crowding the white-walled corridor, Q followed me, as a minor would with a father or uncle. Beyond that fortress, outside the maroon wall, she was but a helpless child.

We were courteously greeted by the hospital administrator, a jovial old chap from the coast of Maine, Blue Hill to be exact, a peninsular hamlet south of Bangor: a predial digit dipping in a pellucid Atlantic sea whereupon I had once swum in a quarry pond with some local lads. Colonel Putnam, the hospital administrator, a crippled soldier of the Spanish War, refused to grant me privy to the underground vault of the hospital even after I hinted of my tacit liaison with Colonel Winthrop of the American legation. The one-legged letch kept leering at my escort sitting in the corridor, whom I merely introduced as a lady of enormous means and whose concern over the lineage of an invented friend would, when adoptive identity known, lead to a possible future donation. He only yielded after planting a prolonged wet kiss on the back of Q’s hand. His cursed lips lingered inappropriately long for an initial encounter, or any encounter for that matter.

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