Chapter Sixteen
Tea with the Spider
She did not go in her grey.
She went in the colour of a younger widow's mourning — the half-mourning a woman wore in the eighteenth month, when the heavy linen had been retired for the lighter unbleached cotton of a household easing back toward the public eye. She had folded her Daoist grey at the bottom of the second cabinet behind the cistern at the dawn drum and had not, this morning, looked at it again. The half-mourning was the robe she had worn three times in the eighteen months since the body had come back from Hexi — once for a junior censor's wife at Anyi Ward, once for a cousin of her father's at a private memorial in the Eastern Wards, and once for Lady Wei Wan, last winter, when the older woman had asked her to come for a quiet hour halfway through the seventh hour and had not, in the asking, said why.
The half-mourning was a robe that read, at twenty paces on an Eastern Market avenue, as a Han widow of a respectable line returning to small commerce after a long retirement.
It was the robe Master Zhang Cong's apprentice would, at the front of the shop, recognise.
She walked the Eastern Market avenue at noon.
The avenue at the noon-drum was full in the way Chang'an avenues were full only at the noon-drum — the silk-stalls open, the criers at the second arcade calling the day's set prices, the Pingkang girls in their second-best linen sleeves walking three abreast to the wineshops they were permitted to enter before the dusk drum. The smell of the avenue was the smell of new silk and old felt and the particular green of the cut grass the carters had thrown down on the western paving against the dust. She walked at the unhurried walk of a woman who had come to the Eastern Market with a commission that did not, this afternoon, require her to be hurried.
She had brought, in her sleeve, a small fold of paper with the names of three silk-grades and the bolt-weights of two more — the half-real commission of a real cousin of her father's in Anyi Ward who had, three weeks ago, asked her if she could put her quiet eye on a Eastern Market silk-merchant of good account for a bridal trousseau. The cousin had not asked for Zhang Cong. The cousin had asked for any merchant of the second arcade whose lacquer was not, on the eye of a daughter of a circuit-judge, the lacquer of a man who had been recently audited.
She had chosen Zhang Cong.
She had chosen Zhang Cong eight days ago and had set the choice aside, against the day she would walk into the seven-doored compound in the cotton half-mourning of a woman whose grief was, by the avenue's reading, manageable.
The day had been the day of the false confession.
The hour had been the noon-drum of the day after.
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The shop was the fourth gate from the east on the second arcade.
It had a plain Han front in the new lacquer that had been laid down eight days ago. The lacquer was the colour of a vermilion that had been a half-shade more orange than the standard prefectural vermilion she had walked past three weeks ago. Three weeks ago she had registered the shade in the unmarked way her father had taught her was the registering one did when one did not yet know whether one would have a use for the registering. She had filed it in the way a woman who had read every Eastern Market customs filing for seven years filed the colour of a vermilion she had not, on the filing, set a name against.
The apprentice was at the front bench.
He was perhaps eighteen. He wore a clean cotton over-tunic of a quality that did not, by Chang'an's reading, place him among the apprentices of the third tier; the over-tunic was the over-tunic of a household whose master had decided his apprentices would, at the front bench, advertise the cleanliness of his accounting. He was leafing through a bolt-ledger with his right hand and was writing, with his left, in a careful Han hand that was not, on the eye of a daughter of a circuit-judge, the careful Han hand of an apprentice. It was the careful Han hand of a clerk. A clerk eighteen years old in the front of a silk-shop wrote ledgers for a master who had, in his back rooms, accounts no apprentice of the second arcade had been permitted to see.
She walked to the bench.
"Mistress?"
"Mister."
"You are at the second arcade."
"I am, by my cousin's commission, at the bench of Master Zhang. The bolt-weights, this afternoon, of the seven-pearl silk and the eight-pearl silk."
He inclined his head. He set the ledger down. He took, from a hook at the wall behind the bench, a fresh roll of the seven-pearl silk and a fresh roll of the eight-pearl silk. He set them on the bench with the unhurried precision of a young man who had been told that the lady of Yongchong, when she came, was to be allowed to see the bolt-weights without question.
"Mistress."
She inclined her head.
She did not, at the bench, name herself.
"The master is, this afternoon, at his inner study?"
"He is, mistress. He has, by the messenger I sent at the dawn drum yesterday, expected the lady at the noon-drum."
"At the dawn drum yesterday."
"At the dawn drum yesterday, mistress. He has, this morning, set out the celadon."
At the bench she did not lift her hand to the bolt-weight she had been about to lift.
She had not sent a runner. She had told no one but Nanny Zhou and Brother Hui that she would walk into the Eastern Market at the noon-drum. She had told Pei's deputy, in a slip at the tea-house, only that she would be at the Eastern Market in the early afternoon for a silk commission. She had not, in the slip, named the merchant.
Zhang Cong had set out the celadon yesterday morning.
She held the registering against the inside of her chest. She did not give it to her face.
"Then I will, mister, walk through to the inner study."
"Mistress. Through the first door, by the gallery."
He stepped from the bench. He bowed. He opened the first door.
\ \ \*
The compound had seven doors.
She had not counted them at the avenue. She had counted them on the wax tablet of her own writing-desk at the third watch last night, on the testimony of a Liquan widow eighteen days ago in the apartments behind the fire-temple. A Han with too many doors. The widow Datis had said it of the man her husband had been frightened of and had not named. The widow had said too many as if the count itself were the indecency. Wanjun had counted, on the wax tablet, what the Eastern Market customs office had filed in the autumn of 748 for the rebuilding of the Zhang silk-shop: a front gate, a gallery door, a courtyard door, a counting-room door, a back-court door, an inner-study door. That had been six.
She walked through the first.
The gallery was a long narrow gallery with a polished plank floor and the smell of new lacquer at the wainscot. There were no windows in the gallery. There were two oil-lamps on iron hooks at the half-points of the gallery's length, both burning at the height of a half-thumb in the day-time, which was not the habit of a silk-shop's gallery in the noon-drum hour. A silk-shop in the noon-drum hour did not, by Eastern Market discipline, burn its oil. Zhang Cong burned his oil because the gallery had been built to let no daylight in.
She walked the gallery — seventeen paces in the unhurried pace of a Han widow of Yongchong.
She walked through the second door at the end.
The courtyard was a small square paved courtyard with a single chrysanthemum-pot at the corner and a low bench at the far wall. The chrysanthemum was a yellow late-bloomer of the kind a household kept against the autumn drum. The chrysanthemum was, this afternoon, three weeks early.
She walked through the third door at the right hand of the bench.
The counting-room had three clerks at three desks. None of the clerks looked up. The first clerk was writing in a careful prefectural-grade Han hand. The second clerk was writing in a Sogdian merchant-grade hand she did not, at the doorway, allow her face to register. The third clerk was not writing. He was reading, with the unhurried steadiness of a man who had been told to read until the lady of Yongchong walked past.
She walked through the fourth door at the back of the counting-room.
The back-court was a courtyard half the size of the first. There was a brazier at the centre and a pot of barley tea on it. There was a side-gate at the east wall, which was the side-gate the customs office had not, in the autumn of 748, filed for. The side-gate, in the noon-drum hour, was unbolted. She did not look at it.
She walked through the fifth door at the south of the back-court.
The fifth door gave onto a short corridor with a closed door at its end. The corridor was the corridor of a household whose inner study was not, in the floor plan, where the floor plan placed it.
She walked through the sixth door at the end of the corridor.
The sixth door gave onto a small inner court with a single old pomegranate tree in the centre, the bark scarred at the lower trunk in the patient way an old Han household's pomegranate was scarred by twenty years of children who had been forbidden the fruit. The pomegranate was, this afternoon, in its second flowering. There was no one in the court.
She walked across the court to the seventh door.
The seventh door was lacquered in the same vermilion as the front gate. The seventh door was set with a brass ring of the kind a household used for the inner door of a private study. The seventh door was, by the breath she allowed herself at its threshold, the door behind which Master Zhang Cong sat.
She lifted the brass ring.
She let it fall.
The door opened from inside.
\ \ \*
Zhang Cong stood at the threshold.
He was perhaps fifty. He was the height of an averagely tall Han man of the third tier — half a head taller than her, half a head shorter than Anaxa. He wore a robe of the unbleached half-formal cotton a merchant wore in his own study at the noon-drum hour. His hair was set in the plain knot of a merchant who had not, in this decade, taken a private rank. His face was the face of a merchant who had read every customs filing his clerks had set in front of him in the last twenty years and had not, in the reading, ever lifted his eye higher than the next page.
He smiled.
The smile was the smile of a man who had been waiting for her since the autumn of 748.
"Lady Cui."
"Master Zhang."
"You came by the noon-drum."
"I came by the noon-drum."
"I had wagered with myself, lady, at the dawn drum yesterday, that you would come at the noon-drum, by the front of the shop, in the cotton half-mourning of a Han widow of Yongchong on a silk commission for a respectable cousin. I have, this morning, won my own wager."
She kept her face still at the threshold.
"Master."
"Sit."
He stepped back from the threshold.
The inner study was a small room with a low writing-desk at the centre, a celadon tea-set on a clean linen cloth on the desk, a single brazier at the corner with a kettle on it, and a wall of bound ledgers in the corner-shelves of the east wall. The ledgers were perhaps three hundred. The ledgers were the customs-filings of a man who had filed, in the last twenty years, a count of paper an honest merchant did not file. On the desk beside the celadon, in the careful angle of a man who had set it out at the dawn drum and had not since touched it, was a piece of uncut Khotanese jade of the size and pre-cutting grade of half a thumb.
She walked to the writing-desk.
She sat.
He sat at the opposite side. He lifted the celadon kettle from the small linen pad. He poured, into two small celadon cups, the tea.
She watched the pouring.
The pouring was the pouring of a man whose hand had, in fifty years, learned to pour with a steadiness that did not vary by a hair's width between the first cup and the second. The two cups, at the end of the pouring, held the tea to a height she would, in any other shop in the Eastern Market, have read as identical.
She did not read them as identical.
She read them as identical to the unaided eye and very faintly different to the eye that had been counting cups for eighteen months.
The cup at her side held, by a hair's count, two grains' worth more tea than the cup at his.
He set the kettle down.
He inclined his head.
"Lady."
"Master."
"Drink."
She lifted the cup. She did not look at his hand. She did not look at his face. She did not allow her face to read the cup in the angle the light from the east wall fell across it.
She drank.
The tea was Eastern Market barley with the slow patient steeping of a man who knew his barley. It was, at the back of the throat, faintly bitter — not the bitter of an old barley over-steeped, not the bitter of a brick of compressed tea kept too long at the back of a cabinet. It was the bitter of a Sogdian compound that had been measured, at the dawn drum yesterday, by a hand that had measured the same compound, twice, on the night of the autumn of 748.
She set the cup down.
She kept her face still.
"Master Zhang."
"Lady."
"The silk."
"Lady. The silk is, this afternoon, the silk of my apprentice's bench. The lady has not come to my back study to discuss the seven-pearl or the eight-pearl. The lady has come, this afternoon, by the dawn-drum wager I made with myself at the lamp of my writing-desk yesterday, on the matter of a man I knew once. A man whose name, lady, was Cui Yanzhi."
At the writing-desk she did not, lift the celadon cup again.
She held her hand in her sleeve where her hand could not be read.
"My husband."
"Your husband, lady, was a man of a careful kind. He was a man who read, in the autumn of 748, the Hexi circuit filings on a matter of Khotanese pigment imports. He was a man who registered, in his own private hand, in a letter he wrote to a friend that summer, that the prefectural kiln at Hexi did not, by his reading of the filings, produce the volume of pigment its filings claimed it produced. He was a man, lady, who wrote the letter, and did not suspect that the friend was a friend of mine."
"The friend."
"The friend, lady, was a junior censor of the Yushitai who has, since the autumn of 748, retired to the southern wards of Luoyang on the pension of a clerkship he had not, by the autumn of 748, yet earned. The friend, lady, was a friend of your husband from his examination years. The friend, lady, was a friend of mine from my second wife's brother's tea-club at the third arcade. The friend, lady, did not write the letter back to your husband. He wrote it back to me."
At the writing-desk she did not, allow her face to do anything.
She did not yet have words for the registering.
She held the cup of celadon in front of her at the small angle a Han widow of Yongchong held a cup of celadon she had not yet decided to lift a second time.
He smiled the smile of a man who had been waiting for her since the autumn of 748 and had finally, this afternoon, been given the conversation he had been preparing.
"Lady. The tea, this afternoon, is the barley of my own kitchen yard, of the autumn harvest of last year, steeped at the second watch of the morning in the kettle my own cousin's wife pressed at the kiln of Anhua Ward at the second moon of this season. The tea is, by my account, a tea that a Han widow of Yongchong drinks at the noon-drum in the back study of an Eastern Market silk-merchant who has, this morning, set out the celadon she would, by his reading, expect."
"Master."
"Lady."
"You have read."
"I have, lady, read. I read, in the autumn of 748, the letter from a friend. I read, in the spring of 749, a broadside set by the prefecture at the third arcade of the eastern wards. I read, in the summer of 749, the obituary of a junior censor of the Yushitai whose death had been registered, in the careful idiom of the Tang Code, as a death by fever. I read, in the autumn of 749, in the back column of the Pingkang accounts ledger of the Sparrow's Tail, the name of a woman who had been at the wineshop of the Cool Vine in Pingkang for the seven days of the second mourning of a junior censor of the Yushitai. I read, this spring, in the Western Market customs office filings, the measure of three Daoist nuns of Yongchong who had been granted access to Sogdian death-rites in the last eleven months. I read, lady, the seven names. I read the eighth."
"The eighth."
"The eighth, lady, is my own."
He inclined his head.
At the writing-desk she did not, lift her hand from her sleeve.
That afternoon she did not, give him the second word.
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She walked back through the seven doors.
She did not, at the third door, look at the third clerk who was no longer reading. She did not, at the sixth, look at the pomegranate. She did not, at the front bench, take the apprentice's bow.
She walked the avenue at the slow unhurried walk of a Han widow of Yongchong whose silk commission had not, this afternoon, been concluded.
She walked east toward her own gate.
She walked perhaps three hundred paces before she allowed herself the registering.
The tea, at the back of the throat, was the bitter of a Sogdian compound that had been measured at the dawn drum yesterday by a hand that had measured the same compound twice in the autumn of 748. It was the bitter Brother Hui had described to her, in the brick-kiln hut at the dusk of the second day, as the bitter of the slow compound a Sogdian household did not, in any kitchen of any registered Sogdian apothecary of Chang'an, keep. The compound killed within three watches if untreated and within six watches if the dose was half. The dose at the back of her throat was half — by the registering of her tongue at the second sip, by the registering of the steadiness of his pour at the first.
She did not yet know whether the half-dose had been a half-dose because Zhang Cong had wished to kill her slowly, or because Zhang Cong had wished her to know she had been poisoned and to walk out and to spend the night calculating whether she would live to the dawn drum.
She walked.
She kept her face still as she walked.
She reached the third arcade of the Eastern Market mid-eighth hour.
At the corner of the third arcade, where the avenue gave onto the lane that led west to the Vermilion-Bird road, she stopped at the stall of a fishmonger who had, in the autumn of 749, sold her, twice, a small dried fish for her household's brazier. The fishmonger inclined his head. She handed him a single piece of the bronze coin she had kept in her sleeve at the dawn drum.
"One dried fish."
"Lady."
He wrapped a dried fish in a piece of plain paper.
She walked the rest of the avenue to her own ward.
At the corner of her own lane, where the wall of the empty house of the old Mistress Lin gave onto the inner stretch that ran behind her own east wall, a stray cat she had seen at the same corner for three months sat at its post in the slow patient way the stray cat sat.
She unwrapped the dried fish.
She broke it in halves at the spine.
She set one half on the wall in front of the cat.
She wrapped the second half in the plain paper and set it in her sleeve.
The cat ate the fish.
She watched it eat.
She did not, at the wall of the empty house, allow her face to do anything.
She walked, with the wrapped second half in her sleeve, the last hundred paces to her own gate.
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Brother Hui was not at the writing-room.
Nanny Zhou was at the kitchen door. She had been at the kitchen door since the noon-drum, in the steady upright stillness of a woman who had been told, at the dawn drum, that the mistress would be at the Eastern Market until mid-eighth and would not, in returning, be needed for tea.
"Mistress."
"Nanny."
"You walked the avenue."
"I walked it."
"The cotton."
"The cotton."
"Mistress. The brother at the brick-kiln has sent a slip by his own kiln-boy the middle of the seventh hour. The slip is on the writing-desk."
She inclined her head.
She walked past the kitchen door to the writing-room.
The slip on the writing-desk was a single line in Brother Hui's careful kiln-grade Han: Sister. I have, by the kiln-boy midway into the seventh, sent for the second small clay flask of the apothecary's storeroom at the second day. The flask, sister, will be at your inner gate at the dusk drum.
She set the slip back on the desk.
She set the wrapped second half of the dried fish on the corner of the desk beside the slip.
At the writing-desk she did not, lift the lacquered letter-box from its corner. The box had been at its corner since the seventh hour of the night before. The box, this afternoon, did not move.
She walked to the cabinet behind the writing-desk and took, from the third drawer, a clean small slip of paper and the second-grade brush her father had given her at twelve.
She wrote on the slip two lines.
Brother. The fish. By the cat at the corner. By the dawn drum, by Nanny's hand, the answer at the gate.
She rolled the slip.
She kept her face still.
She walked to the inner door.
"Nanny."
"Mistress."
"At the dusk drum the brother at the brick-kiln's kiln-boy will be at the gate. You will hand him this slip and the wrapped half of the dried fish on the corner of the writing-desk. He will, by his own legs, take both to the brother. The brother will, by the dawn drum tomorrow, by his own kiln-boy at our own gate, send word what the cat at the corner will, by the dawn drum, be."
"Mistress."
"You will not, this evening, ask me what I drank."
The old woman did not, at the kitchen door, lift her eyes.
"Mistress."
Wanjun walked back into the writing-room.
That evening she did not, sit at the writing-desk.
She walked to the inner court and stood, briefly, at the edge of the cistern, where the rain of the morning had filled the upper rim to the small dark lip of the cistern's eastern face. The rain of the morning had stopped halfway through the fifth watch. The afternoon had been clear. The cistern's eastern lip was, by the dusk-drum hour, almost dry at the top of the rim. A swallow had set itself on the eave of the kitchen and was at the patient tidy work of tucking the second course of a nest into the joint of the rafter and the wall.
She stood at the cistern.
She did not allow her hand to lift the celadon she had not, since the noon-drum, washed from the back of her throat.
She held, against the inside of her chest, six watches.
The tally of six watches was the picture by Brother Hui's reading of the compound at the back of her throat. The tally of six watches gave her, from the noon-drum of this afternoon, until midway through the second watch of the night. The half of the second watch of the night was the hour Brother Hui's kiln-boy would, by the dusk-drum slip, be at the gate.
She walked back to the writing-room.
She sat at the writing-desk.
She set her hands, palms flat, on the wood of the desk on either side of the lacquered letter-box.
She did not open it.
That afternoon she did not lift it from its corner.
She held her hands on either side of the desk and counted, in the careful idiom of her father mid-night-watch of the seventeenth of the second moon of 738, the breath at the back of her own throat.
It was the breath of a woman who had been poisoned at the noon-drum by a man who had been waiting for her since the autumn of 748.
The breath was steady.
At the writing-desk she did not, weep.
She sat with her hands on either side of the lacquered letter-box for perhaps a hundred breaths.
Then she rose, and lit the second lamp of the writing-room herself, and waited for the dusk drum.