A Bride for Wen Hui Read online

  Tears gathered in her eyes as with each word, he brought the memory to the forefront of her mind. Well she recalled the pain, the stabbing needles in her foot. How she was ordered to stand walk for long distances in order to continue to crush and shape the foot. The unwrapping and wrapping every day, each day the bindings getting tighter and tighter than the previous day

  “My husband,” she began in a slow voice. “I had no choice when my feet were bound.”

  “Your mother did it the day she discovered us.” Wen Hui interrupted. His eyes narrowed as he moodily stared off into the distance. “I heard her say, ‘You will become the wife of a worthy man, not some put upon wife of a poor one.’”

  Yuping recalled those words, too. She remembered how her mother’s voice was latent with determination as she pulled, tugged, and wrapped as tight as possible the ten-foot long cloth over her broken feet. “You’ll be the first wife, the principal one. Not a concubine who is little more than a mistress.”

  Two years had passed before Yuping had lost all feeling in her feet.

  “Don’t you see, my husband?” She moved her feet away and leaned forward, “When I was a child, I was under the rule of my father. And even after having my foot bound, I was still made to become a third wife. But then you came, and now, I am your wife.”

  “Through dishonor and shame,” he clipped out.

  “How could becoming your wife, no matter how it happens, be a dishonor? Does it matter, shao ye? Does it matter for us?”

  With tentative fingers, she reached out and caressed the side of his face. The hard jawline. The light scruff of her hair against her inner palm. His eyes burned into hers with a fierceness she felt in the center of her body.

  “You and I were destined to be and we are,” she whispered into the burgeoning tension that crackled like streaks of lightning. “Isn’t destiny to be obeyed?”

  Long after night had fallen over the ocean, long after he heard the even, rhythmic breathing of his wife in the bed below his own, Wen Hui still felt the impact of her words, “Isn’t destiny to be obeyed?”

  The day she offered herself to him, like some sort of willing sacrifice, curving her soft body into his, it had felt like the call of destiny. Everything inside of him wanted her with a passionate craving that bordered on uncontrollable. Had he not thrust Yuping away from her, he would have taken her as she begged him to.

  He knew he loved Yuping with a fervor that would never die away. He had an inkling that, perhaps, her own feelings for him carried the same intensity. Intoxicating to think that maybe Yuping desired him as much as he desired her.

  This afternoon, after two days of avoiding all but the most necessary contact with her, he’d been drawn to her once more. Seeing her lotus feet unbandaged and without the tiny shoe to distract from its malformed arch and flattened toes, it reminded him of how much he detested this curious practice.

  Particularly since Meiling had bound Yuping’s feet not in any sense of making her daughter attractive for marriage but to keep her away from him.

  The sound of quacking mandarin ducks had permeated the area as he’d gone to the yuanyang ting – the pavilion of mandarin ducks. He’d found Meiling in the section of the pavilion facing north. Dark red sunlight poured over the pavilion like an angry flood. Mandarin ducks with their brightly colored plums catching glints of the waning sunlight. Meiling sat overlooking. He’d come to her, his heart thudding in his thin body. She seemed to know what he wanted because before he could say anything, she said, “I will never allow my daughter to be with someone like you.”

  He heard Meiling’s voice as if she stood next to him in the darkness. Her image in his memory was clear it was the day she devastated his heart.

  “Why? I…care very much for Li Yuping. Please, speak to Honorable Li Fuhai on my behalf. When I become a man, I will make her my wife.”

  How did he ever think a ten-year-old’s heart-felt naïve mutterings would have an effect on a woman as wounded as Meiling? All he could see was the pain on Yuping’s face as her feet were bandaged and then stuffed in the tiny shoe no bigger than his hand.

  “Love is meaningless, Chen Wen Hui,” Meiling had said with a bitterness that still rang in her voice although fourteen years had passed since she uttered that phrase. Her eyes had gazed with something akin to disdain she stared at a pair of mandarin ducks cuddled together. “You can love with all of your soul, with every fiber of your being, and in the end, it will destroy you.”

  He turned over on his side. How hurtful her words had struck him but then he remembered the strange thing she’d said as he walked away. “You would be too easy to love, Chen Wen Hui. I will not have my daughter suffer as I have.”

  He frowned in the darkness. Could it be that Meiling had seen the bond that existed between her daughter and himself? The red threat of fate had coiled about their ankles, drawing them to each other. How often had the story been repeated down the ages of the young boy who had met Yue Xia Lao, the god of marriage and love, who showed him a young girl who was destined to be his wife. The young boy, having no interest in obtaining a wife, picked up a rock and threw it at the girl who ran away. Years later, after his parents arranged a marriage, on the man’s wedding night, he finds to his pleasure that his wife is a beauty. But when she removed her veil, she wore a jeweled adornment on her eyebrow. When he questioned her, she told him as a young child, a boy threw a rock at her which left a scar.

  Could a man really interfere with destiny?

  Or was it what Pastor Jones had told him when it came to Christian vows of marriage and fidelity? “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

  Had fate—or God—brought Yuping to him? And if so, did he have permission to claim her as his own?

  Wen Hui sat up in bed, giving up the pretense of sleep.

  Meiling hadn’t been able to keep them apart, neither had Time. Neither had his own desire to perform the charge to bring her to America.

  What was he to do? He had dishonored her. For that reason alone, he had no right to take her.

  But she offered herself to me. She wants me. And I want her.

  But, he argued fiercely with himself, wanting did not give permission. If he were to establish based on wanting, then he would be no better than Peng Jinwei. Taking women for his needs alone.

  “Shao ye?”

  He stiffened. The rhythmic breathing had stopped, leaving behind it a strained silence.

  “Chi tzh? I did not mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t. I slept lightly. You are troubled.”

  He sighed and slid off the bunk to the floor. The darkness of the room prevented him from seeing anything. “Let me light a candle.”

  “No, shao ye. Don’t.”

  Wen Hui froze. “Why?”

  “I want you to tell me your troubles. What is it that keeps you from seeking the comfort of sleep?”

  He could hardly tell her that his love and desire for her kept him awake, could he? “It is nothing.”

  “Can we not pretend? Pretend that we are not husband and wife. Or, that we are even friends?”

  “Then what shall we be?” His chest expanded, charmed despite his anguish by his wife’s imagination.

  “I am an old woman who smokes by a well. I never see the day and nor the night. Just the grayness of the twilight. I listen to all but say nothing.”

  Wen Hui fell a little more in love with her. With her play, she was saying she would make no judgements or advice upon him. “And what I am when I speak to the old woman by the well?”

  “You are a young boy, searching for a lost jewel. And you come to the woman and ask if she’s seen it.”

  “A jewel?” he murmured. “Like a pearl?”

  The quiet pulsed with his meaning as more than once, he referred to his hopes and dreams with her as his pearl. “A pearl.”

  His eyes accustomed themselves to the dark and he made out the dark shape of the chair. Not nailed down like some of the other f
urniture, he grabbed it and swung it around, to sit by the bed. He made out the dark outline of her figure, against the sheets. “Old woman, I have lost a pearl,” he began.

  “Did you, young man?”

  He grinned. She’d even mimicked the rasp of an old woman.

  “Yes.”

  “And what did this pearl look like?”

  “It was lustrous, old woman,” he said. “A perfect circle with a sheen that threatened to rival the glow of the sun.”

  “Nonsense, young man. No jewel can outshine the sun.”

  “This one could,” he said, a crack in his voice. “I found this pearl a long time.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “At the bottom of a pond,” he said, “next to a thrashing fish seeking to get back into the water. I tossed the fish into the water. The fish, in gratitude brought his father and his father’s wives to the surface. They thanked me for bringing their son back to them. As their way of thanking me, they used their powers and drew me into the pond.”

  “But a young boy like you can’t swim under the pond.”

  “With them, I could. I held their fins and sunk into the pond. I had never seen such a wonderful sight. For the pond was unlike anything I could ever imagine above it.”

  His voice deepened. “It was there that I found the pearl, guarded by the fish family. A pearl so beautiful that I wanted the very moment I saw it.”

  “What did the pearl say?” Her voice had changed but still managed to keep the old woman’s rasp.

  “It said nothing. Just glowed with a wonderful hue. I would do anything to have her but I couldn’t stay in the water indefinitely. After all, I’m only a boy.” Bitterness soured the words as he thought of what Meiling had told him.

  He heard the subtle movement of Yuping on the bed and then felt the lightest touch of her hand upon his. Though the darkness still prevented him from seeing her, he could just make out the dim hue of her skin but none of her features. He clutched her hand in his.

  “I returned to the surface, promising myself that I would return so I could have the pearl for my own. But when I returned to the pond, I saw a man had come and had negotiated with the father fish that the pearl would belong to him.”

  “But the man couldn’t go into the pond and retrieve the pearl so the man asked me to do it for him.”

  “Did the pearl speak to you?”

  Her voice held an edge to it. “It did?”

  “What did the pearl say?”

  Wen Hui’s hand clutched around her hand. “It said, that it wanted to go with me.”

  “So how did you lose the pearl?”

  He heard her movements in the narrow bed. Drawing her hand away, he heard her push down the covers that draped her and come to the edge of the bed.

  Warily, he continued the game. “I didn’t lose it but the pearl came to me when I reached for it. It does not belong to me.”

  “If the pearl chose to go with you, then the pearl belongs you. Or maybe, you belong to each other.” Her old woman’s voice kept up with the subterfuge.

  With start, he felt her move and before he could even think of it, she had sat on his lap.

  Wen Hui froze. “What are you doing?”

  Her arms went around his neck and she pressed close to him. “I’m not doing anything, young man. I’m just an old woman at a well.” He felt her hand reach out and draw him down to her, resting his head against her.

  “No old woman ever felt like this,” he said hoarsely, feeling his body respond to everything about her—her scent, her softness, her touch.

  “Have you had held many old women, young man?”

  Despite himself, and the tension tightening his body, he laughed. “Chi tzh!”

  Then, she took her fingers and lifted his head. Before he knew what was going to happen, he felt the press of her lips against his.

  For a moment, he didn’t move, shocked beyond all reason to feel Yuping’s mouth upon his. He’d wanted it for so long that now he experienced, he could scarcely believe it was happening. Then her mouth moved, tentatively and without experience, much as he. But beneath the shy exploration was the eagerness. He sensed it within her. He sensed it within himself. How delightful to learn this with her and only her.

  He knew there was more. Having visited one than more brothel with Jinwei without having participating in the play, he’d seen men kiss the women there. Aiming to mimic what they did, he turned his head and open his mouth a little more. Her mouth opened as well and a moist heat from them seared his lips. Something awakened in him. Something that had always been there but had never seen the light of day. It was an instinct born within him. It compelled his arms to wrap tighter around her. It urged him to explore the deeper recesses of her sweet cavern. It implored him to drag one of his hands through her loosened hair and hold her more firmly against him.

  It also lit a fire within him. Every part of his body seemed to be burning up with a need for more. More of her sweetness. More of her softness. More, and more. Until he could drown in her. Until he was engulfed by her.

  She made a sound, and it seized his muscles. Without being aware of it, he stood and lifted her into his arms. Now, heat exuded from her, the inferno he’d always known she possessed roaring like a wildfire. That which blazed from her eyes that nothing could ever dim.

  She ripped her lips from his and sent kisses along his face, his jaw, his eyes, his ears. Tiny, moist kisses that made the fire within him burn hotter and hotter. Sweat beaded his brow. His hand roamed over her, her slight curves a testament to her womanhood.

  His lips unerringly found the long slender column of her throat and he inhaled her rich scent while trailing kisses along her clavicles. A strangulated cry of pleasure erupted from her throat. Wen Hui couldn’t prevent a fierce stab of masculine pride as he repeated the action, only have her make the same, faint sound again.

  Her cry titillated his ears like music and he felt as if he were drowning in a sea of hot and glorious delight.

  “Take me, please, my husband,” she begged once more, the anguish and desire blatant. “Please.”

  At her plea, he stopped, his mouth locked on a spot between her neck and shoulder. What was he doing? He couldn’t let this happen! No, he would treat her honorably. He should not, could not, would not take her.

  He groaned as he set her down and release her. A gaping emptiness centered in his chest. “I cannot.”

  The darkness still prevented him from seeing her but he heard the tears in her voice. “Don’t you want me?”

  “Like air,” he breathed out, shuddering at the sensations foreign to him. They threatened his control and he clenched his fist to keep from reaching out to her. “But I cannot.”

  “Why?” Her frustrated voice tugged at his heart.

  “Because you were not meant for me. I am a poor man, not a rich one. I can’t give you the life you deserve.”

  “I deserve you, my husband. I’ve never cared about material things. I am your bride! I want to capture the dawn. I want to be by your side. Haven’t I offered myself to you? I want us joined by both the heavens and each other so no one can take us away from each other.”

  “Should a man only what is offered simply because it is offered?”

  As soon as the words came out, he knew they were the wrong thing to say. “Chi tzh, let me explain—”

  “There is no need, shao ye.”

  Her voice was devoid of any emotion. “I will not offer myself to you again. You do not want me and I must be content with that.”

  “Li Yuping—”

  “I am tired, my husband. I will go back to bed now.”

  He heard her move and get back under the covers. Then all was still. He wanted to make her understand but he knew it was impossible.

  Knowing that sleep would elude him, he found his shoes and put them on in the dark. Opening and closing the door, he went up to the deck just as the first light of dawn began to crack the sky. A beautiful gem of color over the se
a. Yet, it held no wonder for him because Yuping wasn’t there to share it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  September 1869

  Chinatown

  San Francisco, California

  “I think you will be pleased to meet Pastor Jones,” Wen Hui told her as they got out the small buggy stopped in front of a tall church. “He is a very kind man.”

  She nodded, saying nothing more than what was required. In the past week, she felt like a bamboo, empty of everything vital. Wen Hui did not desire her. He loved her but wouldn’t consummate their love because he felt as if her honor was more important than her heart.

  The wild excitement that had coursed through her in the darkness that night had changed her. She almost became a woman in his arms, caught up in a man’s passion that was both gentle and firm. The things he’d made her feel—how could she not want to experience those things again with him? She’d felt powerful and subdued at the same time. Feeling his responses he couldn’t control and being affected by him the same way.

  Her mother’s stance became a bit clearer. No wonder her mother was bitter. For her to share physical love with a man she cared for with all her heart—to have him do those same things to his other two wives, it must kill her. Her mother’s constant refrain, “Love is meaningless” all of sudden made an awful kind of sense.

  Yuping felt pity for her father as well. Obligated to marry one woman, possessive of another, and bound by a third, how could he give all of himself any of them?

  Would Peng Jinwei had been the same way as Wen Hui? Could he make her heart sing and her sense leapt by a mere look? She shuddered in revulsion. How she could even want another man to touch her when Wen Hui had branded her and marked her his own?

  As she had him.

  Though, despite his resolve, she’d seen his eyes flare since that day, flare with a gleam of fire. Heard his soft intakes of breath when she passed by in the small quarters of their cabin she was heartily sick of. Felt the tension when she laid a hand on him to ask a question.