About the Author
Classic British crime fiction is the best in the worldand Ruth Rendell is crime fiction at its very best. Ingenious and meticulous plots, subtle and penetrating characterizations, beguiling storylines and wry observations have all combined to put her at the very top of her craft.
Her first novel, From Doon with Death, appeared in 1964, and since then her reputation and readership have grown steadily with each new book. She has now received eight major awards for her work: three Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America; the Crime Writers Gold Dagger Award for 1976s best crime novel for A Demon in My View; the Arts Council National Book Award for Genre Fiction in 1981 for Lake of Darkness; the Crime Writers Silver Dagger Award for 1985s best crime novel for The Tree of Hands; the Crime Writers Gold Dagger Award for 1986s best crime novel for Live Flesh, and in 1987 the Crime Writers Gold Dagger Award for A Fatal Inversion, written under the name Barbara Vine.
THE SPEAKEROF MANDARINRuth RendellARROW BOOKS
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Epub ISBN: 9781409068846
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First published by Hutchinson 1983
Arrow edition 1984
Reprinted 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988 (twice), 1989 (twice), 1990 (twice) and 1991
Kingsmarkham Enterprises Ltd 1983
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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ISBN 0 09 932810 0
For Don
AUTHORS NOTE
For the transcribing of Chinese words and Chinese proper names into English I have used both the Wade-Giles and the Pinyin systems. While Pinyin is the officially endorsed system in the Peoples Republic, Wade-Giles, which was evolved in the nineteenth century, remains more familiar to Western readers. So I have used each where I felt it to be more appropriate and acceptable; e.g. the modern Pinyin for Lu Xing She, the Chinese International Travel Service, but Ching rather than Xing for the name of the last Imperial Dynasty, and I have used Mao Tse Tung in preference to the Pinyin Mao Zedong.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The poem quoted on p. 69, To Wang Lun by Li Po, the poem quoted on pp. 109 and 119, Drinking Song by Shen Hsun, and the two lines on p. 189 from Song of a Chaste Wife by Chang Chi, are all from the Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, translated by Robert Kotewall and Norman L. Smith, translation Norman L. Smith and Robert Kotewall, 1962, and are reprinted here by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
The perfectly preserved body of the woman they call the Marquise of Tai lay, sheathed in glass, some feet below them on the lower level. Two thousand odd years ago when she died she had been about fifty. A white shift covered her thin seventy-five-pound body from neck to thighs. Her legs were a fish-like pinkish-white much marked with striations, her right arm, on account of a mended fracture, was rather shorter than her left. Her face was white, puffy, the bridge of the nose encaved, the mouth open and the tongue protruding, the whole face bearing an expression of extreme agony as if she had died from strangulation.
This, however, was not the case. According to the museums brochure and Mr Sung, the Marquise had suffered from tuberculosis and a diseased gall bladder. Just before she died of some kind of heart attack she had consumed a hundred and twenty water melon seeds.
She have myocardial infarction, you know, said Mr Sung, quoting from memory out of the brochure, a habit of his. Very sick, you know, bad heart, bad insides. Lets go.
They moved along to look down through a second aperture at the Marquises internal organs and dura mater preserved in bottles of formaldehyde. Mr Sung looked inquiringly into the face of his companion, hoping perhaps to see there signs of nausea or dismay. But the other mans expression was as inscrutable as his own. Mr Sung gave a little sigh.
Lets go.
I wish you wouldnt keep saying that, said Wexford irritably. If I may suggest it, you should say, Shall we go? or Are you ready?
Mr Sung said earnestly, You may suggest. Thank you. I am anxious to speak good. Shall we go? Are you leady?
Oh, yes, certainly.
Dont reply, please. I practise. Shall we go? Are you leady? Good, I have got it. Come, lets go. Are you leady to go to the site? Reply now, please.
They got back into the taxi. Between the air-conditioned building and the air-conditioned car the temperature seemed that of a moderate oven, set for the slow cooking of a casserole. The driver took them across the city to the excavation where archaeologists had found the bodies of the Marquise, her husband and her son, clay figures of servants, provisions, artefacts to accompany them on their journey beyond the grave. The other bodies had been skeletons, their clothing fallen to dust. Only the Marquise, hideous, grotesque, staring from sightless empty eyes, had retained the waxen lineaments of life, wrapped in her painted gown, her twenty layers of silk robes.
Wexford and Mr Sung looked through the wooden grille at the great deep rectangular burial shaft and Mr Sung quoted almost verbatim a considerable chunk from Fodors Guide to the Peoples Republic of China. He had a retentive memory and seemed to believe that Wexford, because he couldnt decipher ideographs, was unable to read his own language. It was even Wexfords Fodors he was quoting from, artlessly borrowed the night before. Wexford didnt listen. He would have given a good deal to have been rid of baby-faced pink-cheeked slant-eyed Mr Sung. In any other country on earth a bribe equivalent to a months wages and here that would easily have been within Wexfords means would have freed him for good of his guide-interpreter. Not in China, where even tipping was banned. Mr Sung was incorruptible. In spite of his youth, he was already a party member. A fanatical light came into his eyes and his flabby muscles tautened when he spoke of the great statesmen, Mao Tse Tung included, his own native place of Hunan Province had produced. Wexford sometimes wondered if the day would come, twenty years hence perhaps, when if he still lived he would open his Times and read that the new Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party was one Sung Lao Zhong, aged forty-seven, from Chang-sha. It was more than possible. Mr Sung came to the end of his memorized paragraph, sighed at the call of duty but refused to shirk it.
Light, he said. Shall we go? We visit now porcelain factory and before evening meal teacher training college.
No, we dont, said Wexford. A mosquito bit him just above the ankle bone. The heat was enormous. Like the imagined casserole, he was slowly cooking, a gravy-like viscous sweat trickling stickily all over his body. It was the humidity as much as the ninety-eight degree temperature that did it. No, we dont. We go to the hotel and have a shower and a siesta.
