2. A Blank Throne

The man who woke in the leather chair forty-eight hours later was not, in any sense that mattered, the same man who had closed his eyes upon it.

He opened his eyes to gray morning light filtering through gauze curtains, and for a long, suspended moment he simply existed, without context, without history, without the weight of a dynasty pressing down upon his bones. The ceiling above him was unfamiliar—plaster, not the carved cedar of the Forbidden City—and yet he felt no alarm. He felt, instead, a curious lightness, as though some immense and invisible burden had been lifted from his shoulders while he slept.

“How do you feel?” Kaufmann’s voice came from somewhere to his left.

Puyi turned his head. The doctor sat in a wooden chair beside the operating table, a notebook open on his knee. His pale eyes were fixed on Puyi with an intensity that bordered on hunger, the look of a naturalist observing a rare specimen.

“I feel,” Puyi said, and paused, searching for the word. “Clean.”

It was the correct word. He felt clean, hollowed out, as though some dark and festering thing that had long inhabited the cavity of his chest had been surgically removed. He knew his name. He knew he had been an emperor. He knew the Forbidden City and the Dragon Throne and the long, strange arc of his life from enthronement to abdication to the quiet exile of the Tianjin concessions. But when he tried to reach for the memory of the divorce—the courthouse, the repudiation paper, the fifty-five thousand silver dollars—he found only a smooth, blank surface, like a wall that had been freshly plastered over.

“There was a woman,” he said slowly. “I was married.”

“Yes,” Kaufmann said. “Her name was Wenxiu. You divorced her three days ago. The divorce was contentious. She accused you of mistreatment. The newspapers published many unflattering articles. You found the experience deeply traumatic, which is why you sought my treatment.”

Puyi absorbed this information with the detached interest of a man reading about a stranger’s misfortunes in the morning paper. He could recall the factual outline of the events—the courthouse, the magistrate, the signed documents—but the emotional core of the experience had been excised. He could not remember Wenxiu’s face. He could not remember the sound of her voice. He could not remember the particular quality of rage and shame that had driven him to Kaufmann’s door.

He tried, experimentally, to summon some feeling about this absence, and found that he could not summon that either.

“The procedure appears to have been successful,” Kaufmann said, making a notation in his book. “You will find that the targeted memories have been replaced by a neutral association. You may experience occasional fragments—dreams, flashes of imagery—but these will fade over time. The mind abhors a vacuum, Your Majesty. It will fill the empty space with new experiences, new emotions, new connections.”

“I should feel something,” Puyi said. It was not quite a question.

“Should you?” Kaufmann closed his notebook and rose from the chair. “You came to me because you did not wish to feel anything. I have given you what you asked for. Whether that is a gift or a curse remains to be seen.”

Puyi left the clinic an hour later, walking out into the cold October morning with the collar of his coat turned up against the wind. The streets of the German concession were quiet, the plane trees shedding their last leaves onto the cobblestones. He walked without direction, without purpose, simply moving through the city like a man who had been unmoored from time.

He passed a newsstand where the morning editions were being hung on wire racks. The headlines were still dominated by the Manchurian crisis—Japanese troops advancing, the League of Nations deliberating, the world rearranging itself like pieces on a chessboard. But one paper, a tabloid of the sort that thrived on scandal, still carried a smaller headline below the fold: DIVORCED CONSORT WENXIU SPOTTED IN BEIJING. EX-EMPEROR IN SECLUSION.

Puyi looked at the headline for a long moment. The name Wenxiu stirred nothing in him, less than nothing, a faint ripple on the surface of a lake that was otherwise utterly still. He bought the paper, folded it under his arm, and continued walking.

The Quiet Garden Villa was in a state of controlled chaos when he returned. His attendants, who had spent the past two days in a fever of anxiety over his unexplained absence, descended upon him with a flurry of questions that he waved aside with an imperial gesture that came to him as naturally as breathing. He retired to his study and closed the door.

The room was as he had left it, the silk embroideries still hanging on the walls, the rosewood desk still cluttered with papers and seals and the detritus of a life lived in exile. But something had changed. He could feel it in the way the light fell across the floor, in the way the familiar objects seemed slightly askew, as though the world had shifted a fraction of a degree while he slept.

He sat at the desk and unfolded the newspaper. The article about Wenxiu was brief, speculative, padded with rumors about her future plans. She had left Tianjin, it reported, and was residing with relatives in Beijing. She had refused all interviews. She was said to be considering writing a memoir.

He read the words without recognition. The woman they described—courageous, defiant, a pioneer of women’s rights—was a stranger to him. He might have been reading about a figure from the Tang dynasty, some ancient heroine whose story had been preserved in the history books for the edification of future generations.

He put the paper aside and stared at the wall. The blankness where Wenxiu had been was not uncomfortable. It was not anything. It was simply an absence, a space waiting to be filled.

Three weeks passed. The days shortened, the cold deepened, and Puyi moved through the routines of his exile with the mechanical precision of a clockwork figure. He met with the remnant courtiers who still visited him, listening to their endless scheming about restoration and return with a detachment that they mistook for sage composure. He took his meals alone. He read books on European history, tracing with his finger the lineages of Habsburgs and Romanovs who had also fallen from their thrones.

And he walked. Every afternoon, when the light began to fade, he left the villa and walked along the bank of the Haihe River, watching the cargo boats and the fishing junks move through the gray water. The river had become a kind of companion to him, its steady, indifferent flow a comfort in its constancy.

It was on one of these walks, on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of November, that he saw the woman.

She was standing at the railing of the riverfront promenade, her back to the path, her figure silhouetted against the pale sky. She wore a cheongsam of dark blue silk, simply cut, without the elaborate embroidery that marked the women of wealth. Her hair was bobbed in the modern style, and she held a book in one hand, its pages riffling in the wind.

There was something about the set of her shoulders, the angle of her head, that arrested Puyi’s attention. He stopped walking, some ten paces behind her, and simply looked. She seemed entirely absorbed in the view of the river, unaware of his presence, and yet there was a quality of stillness about her that seemed almost theatrical, as though she were waiting for something.

As though she were waiting for him.

The thought was absurd, and he dismissed it immediately. He was no one now, a private citizen with a tarnished name and an uncertain future. There was no reason for any stranger to wait for him.

And yet he did not walk on. He remained where he was, watching the woman at the railing, and felt something stir in the blank space where Wenxiu had been. Not a memory. Not an emotion. Something more primitive than either, a kind of recognition without content, the shadow of a shadow.

She turned.

Her face was oval, pale, with dark eyes set wide beneath arched brows. Her mouth was small and determined, and there was something in its shape that sent a flicker of something—he could not name it—through the hollow of his chest.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, his voice emerging rougher than he intended. “I did not mean to disturb you.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and in her eyes he saw something that might have been surprise, or might have been something else entirely—something guarded and calculating that flickered and was gone before he could identify it.

“You have not disturbed me,” she said. Her voice was low and clear, with the accent of a woman who had been educated in the modern schools. “I was only watching the river. It is peaceful here.”

“It is,” he agreed. “I walk here often. I find the water helps me think.”

“And what does a gentleman think about, on his walks by the river?”

There was a faint note of irony in her voice, a teasing quality that would have been unthinkable from a woman of her apparent station in an earlier era. But this was 1931, and the old rules were crumbling, and here was a woman with bobbed hair and a book in her hand, speaking to a stranger on a public promenade as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I think about the past,” Puyi said, and the honesty of the answer surprised him. “And the future. And which of them is more real.”

She tilted her head slightly, studying him with those dark, unreadable eyes. “That is a philosopher’s question. Are you a philosopher, sir?”

“No,” he said. “I am only a man with too much time and too little certainty.”

She laughed, a soft sound that seemed to warm the cold air between them. “Then we are well met. I am also a person with too much time and too little certainty.” She extended her hand, a gesture so modern, so Western, that he almost did not know how to respond. “My name is Wen Mei. I am a teacher of calligraphy. I have recently come to Tianjin from Beijing.”

He took her hand. Her fingers were cool and dry, and the contact sent a small shock through him, a current of something that was not quite recognition and not quite desire but contained elements of both.

“I am Henry Puyi,” he said, using the English name his tutor Reginald Johnston had given him many years ago. It felt strange on his tongue, a disguise and a liberation at once.

“Henry,” she repeated, as though tasting the name. “You have a foreign name.”

“I have many things that are foreign,” he said. “It is the condition of the modern age.”

She smiled, and the smile did something to her face that made it suddenly, startlingly beautiful. “Then we are both modern people, Henry Puyi. Perhaps we shall meet again on this river path. I walk here often, when my lessons are finished.”

“I would like that,” he said, and meant it.

She inclined her head in a small bow and walked away, her footsteps light on the cobblestones, the book still clasped in her hand. Puyi watched her go until she disappeared around a bend in the path, and then he stood for a long time at the railing where she had stood, looking out at the gray water and trying to understand what had just happened to him.

He did not know that her name was not Wen Mei.

He did not know that she was a teacher of calligraphy only in the loosest sense, that her true occupation was the slow, meticulous weaving of a trap.

He did not know that the book she carried was a volume of Tang dynasty poetry with a photograph hidden between its pages—a photograph of a woman with a small, determined mouth and dark eyes, a woman who had once been an imperial consort and was now a sister in exile.

He did not know that Wenshan, the younger sister of the woman whose memory had been erased from his mind, had spent the past three weeks preparing for this moment with the patience of a spider spinning its web.

He knew only that the blank space inside him, the space where Wenxiu had been, was no longer entirely empty. Something was growing there, something small and green and fragile, a tendril of new life reaching toward the light.

He walked home through the gathering dusk, and for the first time in three weeks, he did not feel like a man who had been hollowed out. He felt, instead, like a man on the verge of becoming someone new.

Behind him, on the river path, Wenshan had stopped at a bench beneath the plane trees. She sat with the book open on her lap, the photograph of her sister visible for a moment before she closed the cover. Her hands were trembling, though her face remained calm.

She had seen him up close now. She had looked into his eyes and heard his voice and felt the warmth of his hand in hers. She had expected to feel hatred, a pure and cleansing hatred that would fuel her through the long, difficult work of revenge that lay ahead.

What she had not expected was the flicker of something else, something small and unwelcome and dangerous, that had stirred in her chest when he said her false name with that strange, tentative gentleness, as though he were tasting a word in a language he had only just begun to learn.

She pushed the feeling aside. She was Wenshan, daughter of the Gobi clan, sister of the woman this man had humiliated and discarded. She had a purpose. She had a plan. She would not be swayed by a soft voice and a lost look in a pair of dark eyes.

But as she rose from the bench and began the long walk back to her rented room in the Chinese district, she could not quite shake the memory of his face, the way his brow had furrowed slightly when he said he thought about the past, the way he had looked at her as though she were something he had been searching for without knowing it.

She told herself that this was good. That his vulnerability was a weapon she could use. That the blankness in his mind was a canvas on which she could paint whatever picture served her purpose.

She told herself many things, walking through the cold November streets, and believed almost none of them.

In the Quiet Garden Villa, Puyi sat alone in his study, the newspaper with Wenxiu’s name still lying on the desk. He looked at it for a long moment, then folded it carefully and placed it in a drawer. He did not need it anymore. The blank space was filling, slowly, with the image of a woman on a riverbank, a woman with dark eyes and a book in her hand and a voice that had stirred something in the hollow of his chest.

He did not know that the woman was a ghost sent to haunt him.

He did not know that the blank space had been prepared for her, that the erasure of Wenxiu had cleared the ground for a new obsession to take root.

He knew only that he wanted to see her again, to hear her voice, to watch the way the wind caught her hair and the light fell across her face.

He wanted, in a way he had not wanted anything in years, and the wanting itself was a kind of rebirth.

Outside, the fog rolled in from the Haihe River, blanketing the city in a soft gray silence. Somewhere in the distance, a gramophone was playing a Western tune, its melody drifting through the streets like a question no one could answer.

And in her rented room, Wenshan opened the book of Tang poetry and removed the photograph of her sister. She looked at it for a long time, at the familiar face with its small, determined mouth and its dark, accusing eyes.

“I will make him pay,” she whispered to the photograph. “I will make him suffer as you suffered. I will destroy him from the inside out.”

But even as she spoke the words, she could feel the flicker of doubt, small and persistent as a splinter beneath the skin.

She had not expected him to be so lost.

She had not expected him to be so gentle.

She had not expected to feel, in the moment when their eyes met, the faint, terrifying stirring of something that was not hatred at all.

She put the photograph away and blew out the lamp. In the darkness, she lay awake for a long time, listening to the distant foghorn sounding over the river, and wondered what she was becoming.