Her feelings were a mass of contradictions. Some motherly instinct within her filled her with joy at the thought of her own child, a darling baby to hold and cuddle. In the wake of losing her parents, she welcomed the hope of someone to love, someone who loved her in return.
But a half-Chinese child? Her feelings recoiled at the thought that Ke Loo was the child’s father, and it made her sick in the pit of her stomach to think of the child being conceived with him on one of those nights in the dreadful inns.
A new idea occurred to her: what if Ke Loo weren’t the father of the child? What if it were Peter MacNair?
Her immediate reaction was a feeling of relief that the baby would not be of mixed blood, but no sooner had that idea crossed her mind than she was filled with anger at the prospect that she might be carrying the child of the one man she hated most in all the world. She would rather die!
Of course, she really didn’t want to die. She had survived so much already. And then she would think of eyes the color of sable, long-lashed and shining; what a lovely child she would be, the daughter of Peter MacNair; and little she would know of her father’s perfidy.
Yet another thought sobered her: would Ke Loo welcome a child who looked like Peter MacNair? Surely not. And as for a daughter, she well knew they were not welcomed in China.
During the journey, they had stopped for a rest near a hillside covered with graves and, with her guards and the nurse following her, she had made her way up the hill to a stumpy little tower, cone-shaped and made of rough-hewn stone. It had struck her as quaint and picturesque, and she had thought it some sort of memorial.
There were a number of baskets strewn about on the ground, and on one side of the structure a rope extended from an opening. A sickening odor escaped from the opening, and in an instant she had realized the nauseating truth: it was a baby tower, and the rope was used to gently lower the babies into the deep pit beneath the tower.
It had left her shaken and ill. She was filled with horror at the thought of her child, her very own daughter, suffering so cruel and ignominious a fate.
A boy, then—she would pray for a son. And she must pray too that he was Ke Loo’s son; else, his gender notwithstanding, he was little likely to escape the mandarin’s displeasure.
No matter who the father, though, no matter what the color of his skin or the shape of his eyes, he would be hers, and she would love him.
And no one would take him from her.
* * * * * * *
It was with such thoughts as these that she arrived in Kalgan, Ke Loo’s city. It lay not far from the Great Wall itself, on the route of the caravans that wound across the vast Gobi desert on their way to Peking.
Summer was waning, and the bleak Chinese winter would soon be upon them. The last straggling caravans, laden with goods of every imaginable sort, hurried southward, and soon the desert route would be closed until spring.
At the moment, however, the city was teeming, even by Chinese standards. Everywhere that they had been, Lydia had been an object of great curiosity, but nowhere more so than here. The amah whom Ke Loo had assigned to attend to her told her that no white woman had ever before ventured into this region of China. Here too, Ke Loo was a great lord, and as such great interest attached to his doings. The news that he had brought with him a foreign devil as a bride had somehow preceded them.
“I don’t see how,” Lydia complained. “We’ve only just gotten here ourselves, and they’ve no trains or telegraph, or anything like that.”
“Men travel on foot,” the amah replied, grinning at the girl’s naiveté. “News travels on the wind.”
Despite her predicament, Lydia could not help feeling a certain excitement at knowing she would be living in a palace. Like most Chinese palaces, Ke Loo’s was in fact a series of separate buildings, joined by numerous gardens and courtyards, the whole contained within a high wall that afforded them quiet and privacy though they were actually in the very heart of the city.
She was to live in a little house of her own, surrounded by a garden with ornamental pools and almond trees. There were only two rooms, a sort of sitting-dining room, and a large bedroom.
“Evidently my lord expects me to do nothing but eat and sleep,” Lydia said when she had explored her quarters.
The amah, who shared the house with her, giggled. She found her new charge shockingly outspoken. It was not a woman’s place after all, to question such matters.
Lydia’s facetious remark, however, proved closer to the mark then she had expected. Immediately upon their arrival, a brief wedding ceremony had been performed, making her Ke Loo’s wife in fact as well as in deed, but she considered this of little consequence. What did that matter, in view of the fact that she was really a slave?
From the moment that her condition had been confirmed, however, the mandarin ceased his nocturnal visits to her, though he came every day and studied her briefly, as if weighing her in the balance.
“I wish for a son,” he declared at the beginning.
“As if I had any choice in the matter,” Lydia complained privately, but she too hoped for a son. She could not bear to think of what might happen if the child were a girl. It would be horrible to have a child for a few minutes, only to have it snatched from her arms and put to death.
At first it had been a great relief not to see Ke Loo except for a few minutes each day, and she was certainly grateful that he had foregone his nightly assaults on her. She reveled in her privacy.
She soon decided, however, that privacy could be a curse as well as a blessing, for excepting the amah and the women servants who came in and out to care for her needs, and who only giggled and averted their eyes when she tried to make conversation with them, she saw no one. Chinese women, especially wives of noblemen, lived in a purdah as complete as that of a princess in a Turkish harem.
Summer became winter, with scarcely a day of autumn, or so it seemed to Lydia. The last caravans had made their noisy way through and a relative serenity settled upon the isolated city. The winds blowing from the desert swept across the garden, leaving a fine sifting of sand on everything. The trees were barren, the earth had turned brown, and the ornamental pools lay as still and black as sheets of polished marble.
She was lonely and bored. She closed her mind to memories of her parents, and the life she had once known. She would not dwell upon such things, nor upon the repugnance she felt for the man who was now her husband. That way lay madness and she could not undo what had been done. She had made up her mind, lying with Ke Loo in one of those inns, that her only hope to survive, and to retain her sanity, was to take each day as it came. The yesterdays were gone, and tomorrow too far away to do her any good.
Still, she longed for conversation in her own language with her own kind of people. She would happily have worked in the palace, but she quickly learned that this was unheard of for the wife of a Chinese prince. The long nails that she had observed on aristocratic Chinese women, often covered with elaborate nail guards, were a visible symbol of their wealth and leisure, for anyone could see at a glance that they did not have to lift a hand in any sort of labor. For her to be seen at household work would cause Ke Loo to lose face, and to a Chinese, losing face was the worst thing that could happen.
“But what do these women do with their time?” Lydia demanded of the amah.
“Time is a luxury,” the amah said.
“Well, I can’t just sit all day contemplating the mountains,” Lydia said, indicating the snow-capped range that could be seen from the garden.
The amah only smiled. She had concluded very quickly that the foreign woman was peculiar. They were, she had been told, a primitive people.
To fill her time, Lydia worked to improve her knowledge of the Chinese language, and even the amah was pleased at how quickly she learned.
Even