Chapter 6 #3
Gigi could smell the lingering perfume, deep in the sheets. Sandalwood, carnation, jasmine. A scent that she imagined men wished the women they fucked smelled like between their legs. Not a scent for a woman whose father demanded a dowry in exchange for how well she played piano or brewed tea.
This wasn’t a marriage bed; it was a mistress’s bed. She had been here long enough to recognize the presence of another woman whose body was her currency.
Behind her, through the window, the sun was lowering itself into the horizon. In the room, the shadows grew thicker, more opaque, and it wouldn’t be long before the dark settled and nothing could be seen.
Gigi felt a light brush on top of her head, as if a spider had landed in her hair and was delicately walking across, looking for a place to launch itself back into the air.
But when she lifted her hand to flick it away, she did not feel the feather-light, pin-skinny legs of a bug.
What she felt was the cold solidity of flesh. A hand.
She sat up and turned around: a woman with an impossibly smooth chignon and burgundy-painted lips, standing in the box bed’s doorway.
Her long silk robe was gold and covered with translucent beads that glittered even in the failing light, even inside this tight wooden space.
She was luminous, her presence glowing beyond the confines of a human body, accumulating mass with shine and gloss.
Gigi knew she should be terrified, but she was awestruck by the strangeness of this woman standing in a room that no one seemed to know existed.
Was this the ghost of the mistress? Gigi closed her eyes tight.
She could hear a strident, precise voice whispering insistently, “They will never understand us. Even if we could one day tell everyone our story, they will never understand. They won’t even hear us.
” The woman reached out and grasped Gigi’s ankle, her red nails sharp through Gigi’s thin stockings.
“There isn’t any point in trying, don’t you see?
But what we don’t speak of will eat us alive.
” Her nails dug even deeper then, threatening to break through the skin.
Gigi could not open her eyes. She would not. She could feel a rushing in her ears, as if a tidal wave was swallowing her alive. No , she thought. This is nothing more than my own stories and daydreams coming to haunt me. It’s my own fault. This is nothing.
And yet. In this room, the ghost of a woman ruined by a rich silk merchant was almost certainly trapped, waiting all these years for someone to find her and listen.
It was understandable, no? Gigi knew what it was to be imprisoned, knew exactly how it felt to question her own brain, to wonder if she really was unravelling in this house that was both beautiful and horrific. She knew. She knew.
“The longer you stay, the less you will be remembered out there in the real world. You have to make a life. You have to make a life, even if you have to steal one to make it happen.”
When Gigi opened her eyes, the woman was standing with one hand on the window, as if testing the cool glass for its strength against the weight of a body determined to jump.
The sun had almost completely set, with only a sliver of its surface visible through the trees.
Gigi was breathing heavily, the way she used to when she ran through the rain, dodging cars and people, trying to get home.
Her heart pushed against the walls of her chest, painfully yet also not, as if her heart was pushing at an old soreness, one that felt good to remember because it was no longer acute, only a reminder of continued survival.
“There is a lot of pain here. Be careful you don’t let it consume you. Trust me.” And at this the mistress laughed, her dark lips stretched across her pale, unlined face.
Gigi nodded slowly. “I trust you.”
“You should not.” She pointed at the light fading through the window. “Look. It’s going to be dark soon. You have yourself to take care of; that is, if you want to escape this place.” The woman nodded at the open door. “They will soon begin looking for you.”
Gigi jumped to her feet and hurried out the door and down the stairs.
She knew she had to be back in her room before dark, getting ready for whatever soldiers were coming tonight.
Like every evening, Auntie would check her over, and if anything was messy or askew, she would deny Gigi her dinner or make her sleep with the soldier who had bad breath.
She knew she had to run through the halls, past the tall cobwebby windows, without looking back, even if a parade of sad, womanly ghosts with eyes just like hers was chasing her down, even though Gigi wanted to ask a hundred questions, even though she was breathless with confusion and fear and panic.
She ran on the old, worn carpet, her steps a beat slower than her pounding heart.
it was then that Gigi’s stories grew quieter, darker, as if they were emerging from hidden corners of Nam Koo, where they had been nursing their old hurts and feelings in secret.
In the mornings, when the girls were supposed to be resting, they instead gathered in Gigi’s room, some lying on the bed, others sitting on the floor, their skirts pulled up around their knees, and listened to her stories.
“The silk merchant had a mistress,” she began.
“ Of course , he did,” shouted Xuan, and the other girls burst into giggles.
Gigi frowned at the disruption but then continued.
“He built her a wondrous bedroom, full of hand-embroidered sheets and dresses that were all the colours of ice cream—baby pink, barely orange, the softest yellow you could ever imagine. But she was a beautiful and dangerous woman, with bright pink lips and the blackest, shiniest hair. She only wanted to wear the most saturated reds and the highest of high-heeled shoes. And the silk merchant was so in love with her that he commissioned one hundred seamstresses to make a fearsome red cape stitched with a golden dragon, a fire-breathing dragon.”
The youngest girl, Mina, knitted her eyebrows together. “Why do the most interesting and powerful women become mistresses? Why are they never wives instead?”
“Because a man can’t live every day with a woman more powerful than him. His ego would shrink and die!” Xuan cackled at her own joke. “So they marry meek little mice and just fuck the women they really want on the side.”
Gigi sighed. “Do you want me to finish the story or not?”
“Have a sense of humour, Gigi. Fine, go on with your story .”
“Whenever the rest of the house was asleep, the mistress put on her red cape and walked the long hallways, careful to stay away from the wing where the silk merchant, his wife, and their children slept. The servants knew about her—after all, they had to clean her room and fix her meals—so she didn’t care if they saw her marching down the halls, her red cape trailing behind her.
Every night, though, she got closer and closer to the forbidden wing, where the merchant’s family was tucked into their beds, unaware of the dragon lady stalking the halls.
“Then one night, the mistress stopped in front of the bedroom the merchant shared with his wife. None of the servants had stopped her, even though the merchant had told them time and again that she was to be kept away from his family. He wasn’t a good master, quite the opposite really, cheap on wages and mean when something didn’t go his way.
And so, the servants watched the mistress as she inched closer and closer, and they whispered from their hiding spots when she stood outside that door, her long red nails on the knob. ”
Mina gasped. “Did she go in?”
“She did, and the servants heard nothing, not a voice, not a struggle, not any movement at all. In the morning, the mistress was gone and the family acted as if nothing had happened. The maids thought they had imagined it all, except the mistress’s bedroom was still there, still full of dresses and silks. But no one slept in it ever again.
“Years later, though, one of the gardeners was in the farthest corner of the property, where a tree needed to be pruned. When he climbed it, he found an owl’s nest and it was made of red silk, cut into ribbons. He left it where it was, and that was the last anyone ever saw of the Dragon Mistress.”
The girls applauded, although Mina was wiping away tears. Xuan put an arm around her shoulders. “Why are you crying?”
“It’s so easy to disappear if you are a certain kind of woman,” Mina whispered.
And no one replied, because what she said was so very true, it hurt to think of it.