City of God by Beverly Swerling

stick for vengeance.
    Mei-hua looked thoughtful. “You can really understand the foreign devil words?”
    “Only some of them,” Ah Chee admitted. “Always when I go to the market, I practice. Learn to say more. Sometimes easier to say than to hear.”
    Mei-hua nodded. When she still lived on the sampan of her father, she had been tutored in English. It had proved impossible to learn. Sometimes she could make her tongue form the strange sounds, but she could almost never make her ears hear them; always they were noise without meaning. No matter, the Lord Samuel had said. It is not important. You are my princess, whether or not you learn the words of my kingdom. No matter. No matter. But it did matter. Only now was she learning how much. “I should go to the market with you,” she said. “Learn to speak foreign devil language.”
    Ah Chee nodded toward the plum blossom’s three-inch golden lilies. “How you walk on these rock streets? Besides, tai-tai does not go to market.”
    “Rock streets.” That was another of the things she had been thinking of in these three weeks of misery. “When Lord Samuel took us to that place. The houses we saw all nicer than this house. Why tai-tai not in best house? Lord Samuel gives you half a string of copper cash every week to buy food. Very rich man. Why tai-tai not have best house in city?”
    Ah Chee’s heart fell into her belly, just as it used to do when theplum blossom was a child and demanded to know if she was to be sent away from the sampans of her father and everything familiar to her, as the other women said she would be. How to answer? Ah Chee’s own mother had told her that when she did not tell the truth her tongue got shorter. Enough lies and she would have no tongue at all and be silent forever. Maybe go, maybe stay, she had told the girl back then. Who knows anything for sure? “You think any house more beautiful inside than this one? Have pretty things. Now you break them all. Stupid girl. Stupid.” She swept up the last of the mess and dumped it in the bucket, then picked it up and started to go.
    “Wait. You are not speaking true words, old woman. I am not a child to tell maybe this, maybe that. Now I am tai-tai . Why I am not in most beautiful house in this New York place? Why?”
    Ah Chee shook her head and grumbled something under her breath. In the kitchen she dumped the pail of shards into an even bigger pail of rubbish. When that was full, she would pull it as far as the front hall and the man they called Empty Buckets would come and take it away. In the big house far away in the part of the city the foreign devils called up the town—even further than the house of the devil woman whose privates must now be so full of boils she could neither sit nor stand—would there be civilized people to do such things as take away full buckets of rubbish? People who would understand who was the plum blossom tai-tai and how much respect she deserved? Probably not. That must be why the tai-tai was here and the giant size yellow hair concubine was in a far up the town house. One made of stone not wood, with a tree in front whose waving branches kept away evil spirits, so the feng shui would be perfect and evil devil woman not break her promise and steal the child out of her belly. Very bad if concubine have son before tai-tai . Very bad.
    Ah Chee gazed up at the picture of the kitchen god and reached for a joss stick. Then, on second thought, two more.
     
    “Thank you for meeting me here,” Sam said.
    “No trouble at all.” The boat yard was on Thirty-fourth Street and the East River. Nick could look downstream a short way and see the Bellevue dock. According to Cousin Manon, in the summer of ’32, when the cholera was raging and the streets were thick with the smoke of bonfires burning everything the sick had touched, victims were ferried upriver and simply dumped in a heap on that dock. New York Hospital flatly refused to admit cholera patients. Bellevue