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‘There’s no need to apologise. My husband has been so busy with his duties as the new constable, sometimes I wonder if we’re married after all.’
Jin-mei attempted a smile at the jest, but once again her thoughts returned to Yang. In one part, it was due to grief, but another part was the strange circumstances of how he’d disappeared.
‘I apologise for being so forward, but has Constable Han made any progress on the investigation?’
‘Han hasn’t said much about it, but don’t you worry. My husband will find out who is responsible. He was relentless as a thief-catcher.’
‘It’s so hard to believe that no one was found; not my husband or his attacker. If I could at least see him—if we were able to lay his body in the ground—maybe I wouldn’t feel so empty, as if things were unfinished.’ Jin-mei knew she was being morbid to dwell on it, but she had so few memories of Yang. The details of his disappearance loomed large in her mind. ‘There are moments when I forget that my husband is dead and I have to remind myself that he really is gone.’
Li Feng touched her sleeve sympathetically. ‘Do you want to cry? I can find a private place for us and you can cry as much as you like. I won’t think less of you for it.’
‘No, I don’t want to cry. I don’t know if I even should cry. Everything that happened was so strange, I don’t know what to do with myself now.’
‘I lost my father unexpectedly when I was very young,’ Li Feng confided. ‘And then I was separated from my mother for years. There were many days when I felt part of myself was gone and floating in the ghost world with them. I had so few memories of them, but the few I possessed, I held on to them like pearls.’
‘You understand then!’ Jin-mei’s throat tightened. That was how she felt: like half a ghost herself. ‘My husband was a long-time associate of my father’s, but he never paid any notice to me until right before we were married. But then it was as though he could see me so clearly, when no one else could. The last words he said to me were that we would suit each other quite well.’
For the first time since the tragedy, Jin-mei felt tears gathering. A woman never knew whether her marriage would be one of love, but in that moment Yang’s expression as he looked at her was far from cold and far from uninterested. There had been a half-smile upon his lips and a wicked lift to his eyebrow.
Jin-mei had believed then that her husband was indeed capable of loving her and she him. She could sense the possibility heavy in the air between them as they swayed upon the sedan chairs. She could feel it in the way they spoke with one another, phrases chasing and dancing with one another. Yet hours later, she had gone to wait anxiously on her bridal bed for a husband who would never come.
‘He sounds like a good man,’ Li Feng said gently.
Jin-mei knew it was just something to say, but she appreciated it none the less. It was good to talk about him. ‘Bao Yang was always so charming and clever.’
Li Feng halted in the middle of the busy market and shot her an odd look. ‘Your husband’s name was Bao Yang?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘How curious. I once knew someone by that name.’ She gave her head a little shake. ‘No matter. It’s such a common name.’
But it wasn’t. Before Jin-mei could answer, a loud crash came from the drinking house across the street. A brawl must have broken out on the second floor.
Li Feng grabbed hold of her arm. Startled by the rough treatment, Jin-mei tried to pull away, but the constable’s wife directed her out of the street and into the doorway of one of the shops.
Li Feng glanced over her shoulder as two city guards hurried towards the disturbance. ‘Stay here,’ she instructed. ‘I’ll be back.’
At that, Li Feng flew across the street and disappeared into the drinking house, leaving Jin-mei to stare after her in bewilderment. There was nothing to do but do as she was told. Jin-mei watched the stream of market-goers flow by, oblivious to whatever was happening in the tavern.
A man appeared on the far corner and something about him caught her attention. He was tall and lean of build with a slight crookedness to his nose. She only saw his face for a second before he turned away, but her heart leapt in her chest.
It was him. It was Bao Yang.
He glanced about briefly before stepping into the street. Jin-mei rushed after him, but with his longer stride, he pulled ahead of her until he was just another head in the crowd.
‘Yang!’ Several people turned to stare at her, but she didn’t care. She tried to shove through, but it was no use. Yang was gone.
* * *
Jin-mei was still searching the marketplace when Li Feng found her. ‘I apologise, Lady Tan, but my husband was in there—’
‘I need to go home,’ Jin-mei interrupted. ‘I need to speak to my father.’
The constable’s wife seemed to have lost any desire for an outing as well. The magistrate’s residence was only a few streets away. Jin-mei attempted a hasty farewell once they reached the gates, but Li Feng stopped her.
‘Your late husband... I apologise if this brings up painful memories, but was he from around here?’
‘He was a merchant from the north. Taining County.’
There it was again. The tiniest of frowns flickered over the other woman’s face. Li Feng held her breath for a beat too long before responding. ‘My condolences on your loss, Lady Tan.’
‘Thank you for your kind thoughts.’
They exchanged polite bows and Li Feng hurried away while Jin-mei rushed through the gates into her home.
Their residence was a part of the walled compound of the magistrate’s yamen. Every morning, Father would have his tea in their private courtyard before passing through the gate that connected the living quarters to the judicial offices and tribunal. Jin-mei had never gone through the gate before, but she did so now.
The guards patrolling the grounds of the yamen raised their eyebrows, but otherwise gave her no trouble as she started down the corridor towards the main courtyard. There, a series of buildings and offices spread out before her and she was at a loss. Jin-mei knew petitioners lined up for the tribunal and prisoners were kept in cells at the back of the compound, but it was intimidating to see it all at work.
She had to ask a clerk for the location to her father’s office, but it was surprisingly empty when she arrived. Her father returned a few moments later, surrounded by guards. Constable Han was beside him, engaged in a heated discussion that fell silent when they saw her.
Jin-mei might never be able to read faces as well as her father, but some mannerisms were easy to interpret. Constable Han bowed hastily and excused himself. Father made an effort to compose himself before approaching.
He ushered her into his office and shut the door. ‘Jin-mei, what brings you here?’
‘Bao Yang is alive.’ Her pulse was still pounding. ‘I saw him out on the street, but he moved away so quickly, I couldn’t catch him.’
‘My dear daughter. I know how saddened you are by his loss.’ Her father took hold of her hands and his expression was one of anguish. ‘It is my own failing that I haven’t been able to find his killer.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘Yang isn’t dead. I saw him,’ she repeated fervently. ‘Right outside of the drinking house in the centre of the Seven Alleys.’
Father nodded, but it wasn’t a nod of agreement. It was an obliging nod, a nod of forbearance. ‘Jin-mei, you have always been clear-headed, but this tragedy is one very close to your heart. And with it being so soon after both your wedding and his death... Seven days after a person dies, his spirit returns home.’
‘I didn’t see a ghost. It was him!’ she insisted.
‘I believe you saw something your heart wanted to see.’ Again that nod and a pained look. ‘I know you’ve been lost these last few days. Lonely.’
He drew her into his arms, something he hadn’t done since she was a child. For a moment, she closed her eyes and let her father embrace her. It was reassuring to be held close. Jin-mei had indeed been feeling lost. And she was lonely all of the time now, even in their house among family.
‘I’ve never told anyone this,’ he began, stroking her hair gently. ‘But after your mother passed, I saw her. I was in the garden one morning, drinking tea, and I could feel her there. Then I turned and there she was, just for a moment. I tried to speak to her and she was gone. Not faded away like smoke, just there in one blink and gone in the next. After that I only saw her in dreams, but we never are able to speak to one another, as much as I want to. Is that how it was for you, Jin-mei?’
She was so caught up in her father’s story that she had nearly forgotten about Yang. ‘I called out to him but...but he disappeared.’
Had she imagined it? That was what her rational mind was telling her to accept. She pulled away from her father. ‘I saw him very clearly.’
‘I know,’ he replied with a sad smile. ‘It was the same way with your mother.’
Father looked away and her heart went out to him. It was as Lady Yi had said, Mother was the love of his life and she always would be. Slowly he returned to his desk and made an attempt to organise his case records to compose himself.
A moment earlier she had been so certain Yang was alive, but Father had cast doubt over everything she’d seen. If Yang had survived the fall, why hadn’t he returned to her? She knew of cases where people hit their heads and forgot all their memories. The fall from the ravine could have caused such an injury, but if her husband was indeed wandering through the city in confusion, certainly he would have been found by one of her father’s constables.
‘I was thinking for a while that it might be good for you to spend some time away,’ Father went on. ‘Perhaps a trip to the mountains with Lady Yi.’
‘During the mourning period? That would be disrespectful—’
Jin-mei caught herself. Once again, she was talking about Yang as if he were indeed dead.
‘After the proper mourning period, of course. In the meantime, take comfort that your husband’s spirit is with you. He hasn’t forgotten you.’
She nodded and took her leave, feeling confused and numb. Father was obviously very busy and she was barely making sense. She had so many questions to ask, but she didn’t know where to start. As Jin-mei made the long walk back to the living quarters, she tried to arrange all the pieces. Father’s explanation was indeed the rational one, but some instinct inside her refused to let go.
When she was young, she hadn’t listened to whimsical folk tales. Her father had entertained her instead with famous case accounts. The stories always featured clever officials who knew a lie immediately. They never accepted the obvious solution and were unsatisfied when the pieces of a puzzle didn’t fit together just right.
Jin-mei was unsatisfied.
Once she was back in the familiar surroundings of their house, she realised what was bothering her. Father had returned to his office with Constable Han. The constable’s wife had mentioned that Han was in the drinking house—could that mean her father had been there as well? At the very same time she had seen Yang in the street just outside.
It was possibly all coincidence, but Father was acting strange. Constable Han was acting strange. His wife as well. Perhaps heaven and earth had switched places and Jin-mei was the only one who found any of it odd.
Amah was out in the garden, watching over Jin-mei’s two brothers, which meant the old nursemaid was sitting beneath the shade of pavilion as the boys fought over a wooden boat.
She passed them by with a nod to Amah and went to her father’s study. The room was cool and dark with the shutters drawn. A sanctuary.
She had never, never been in Father’s study without his permission. Her hand trembled as she opened the drawer. A seed of an idea had been planted inside her. If she didn’t rid herself of this suspicion immediately, it would continue to take root and fester.
There were letters in the drawer. She looked quickly through them, finding nothing of any significance. Beneath the letters lay a thin book with a blue cover. She lifted it and saw a folded paper tucked away at the very bottom of the drawer.
Jin-mei opened up the paper to find that it was a note for five thousand taels of silver. Five thousand? It was an extraordinary amount of money. The red seal at the bottom of the note contained the character for ‘Bao.’ The Bao family chop, perhaps.
If this was meant to be a wedding gift, it was an extravagant one. Bao Yang came from a line of successful merchants, but she hadn’t realised how wealthy he was until now. How wealthy he had been...
Slowly, she folded the bank note and put it back beneath the book. There were officials who were corrupt and took bribes, but she’d always been confident that her father wasn’t one of them. He’d never shown any interest in money. When he spoke, it was of honesty, of moral behaviour, of law and order.
She could just ask her father why he had so much of Bao Yang’s money. They had always been able to say anything to one another. She’d always trusted him. She knew him.
Yet Jin-mei’s instincts told her Father had been hiding something for a while now. Ever since Bao Yang had come back into their lives.
Suddenly the details of her wedding night came back to her, not as a personal memory steeped in emotion, but as fragmented pieces. The pieces had always seemed oddly familiar to her, but she couldn’t place exactly why. A wedding banquet. A groom chased into the woods. The story had the mark of a classic tragedy.
Jin-mei went to her father’s shelves and began to look through the books. There were volumes of history and poetry, but the books she’d always enjoyed most were the extraordinary case records. Stories of scheming criminals bested by clever officials. Once she could read, she had borrowed the books from her father and read them herself. He’d always found her fascination for these tales amusing.
When she finally found the account, her heart stopped. There was a wedding. And a murder.
Clutching the book to her chest, she went to her room. Once the door was shut, she opened the book once more. A woman and her lover schemed to rob her wealthy neighbour by seducing him into marriage. On their wedding night, with guests all around, the groom was seen running from the bridal chamber, his hair in disarray. Mad.
The similarities were too much of a coincidence. Had the entire night been staged? But why? She wanted to run back to the tribunal to demand an answer from her father, but she already knew what would happen. He would deflect her suspicions. He would weave together colourful lies and she would believe him because she wanted to be convinced.
With shaking hands, Jin-mei collected her wedding money and a few belongings into a satchel. She didn’t need to read the case record to remember the rest of the details. The groom had thrown himself into the river while the guests looked on in horror. They knew it was him because of his ceremonial wedding robe. Though the river was searched, his body was never found.
Jin-mei had to know what had happened to Bao Yang. Even more than a sense of justice, her father had impressed upon her the importance of finding the truth.
Calmly, Jin-mei informed her amah that she was going to visit the constable’s wife, but instead hired a carriage to take her outside of the city walls to her father’s villa. Being wed and then widowed within a day must have emboldened her.
Her thoughts buzzed in her head like a nest of wasps. When she’d told Father she’d seen Yang alive, he hadn’t argued with her. Instead, her father had nodded sympathetically. He’d listened without judgement, and even agreed with her that she was not mistaken in what she’d seen. Most particularly, he’d brought up her mother. They rarely spoke of Mother, but Father had done so, confiding in Jin-mei and telling her a story that made her heart ache. He’d cast all her doubts aside and effectively quieted her.
Because as a magistrate, he knew how to detect falsehoods and how to create them. Father was a master of lies.
* * *
The villa was no longer draped in red and lit with lanterns. It had been locked down, with only a lone groundskeeper and his family assigned to watch over it. The groundskeeper was a middle-aged man whose hair was thinning slightly on top. He was surprised to see her, but let her in without protest.
‘You and your family attended to my husband while he stayed here, did you not?’ she asked as she wandered from room to room.
‘Yes, Lady Tan—my apologies. I meant, Bao Furen.’
He addressed her by her married title as Bao Yang’s wife. A pang of regret struck Jin-mei as she entered the bridal chamber. The red sheets and decorations had all been cleared away. The bed itself was bare and cold.
She closed her eyes. She remembered sitting on the bed and waiting for Yang. They were supposed to consummate their marriage that night. Perhaps coupling would be as awkward as it appeared on the bronze mirror or as profound and ephemeral as it sounded in poems. Regardless of what it would be, she had been excited to be discovering the answer with him. Excited and frightened and happy.
If she stayed any longer, her heart would shatter into a hundred pieces. Gently, with great care, she closed the door as if shutting it on an invalid on a deathbed, not wanting to disturb what little rest might remain.
‘Did you attend the wedding?’ she asked the groundskeeper.
The man was following behind her solicitously. For all he knew, her visit was nothing more than the whim of a grieving widow. For all she knew, maybe it was.
‘No, my lady. Magistrate Tan freed us from our obligations that day. We went into the city to visit family.’
She continued through the rest of the villa. The banquet room had been swept and all the tables cleared and stored. On the other side of the house, the side facing the woods, she entered a spacious chamber with a canopied bed. This bed had also been stripped of all curtains and bedding. At the foot of the bed, beside one of the legs, was a speck of something. She knelt down to retrieve it, closing two fingers around a candied lotus seed.
There had been lotus seeds scattered on her bed the night of the wedding to symbolise fertility and good fortune. Lotus seeds in two places. Two bridal chambers?
On the night of her wedding, Yang would have left the party, ushered away by the well-wishers who were guests at the banquet. By tradition, they would lead him to her bed in case he was too drunk to make it there himself. But Yang had never appeared in her chamber. Instead, the next time anyone saw him, he was being chased into the woods.
In the story of the tragic wedding, the greedy woman had continued to live for years as a widow, wealthy with her late husband’s fortune. No one knew that there was actually a tunnel connecting the two houses. And that the groom hadn’t thrown himself into the river that night. He hadn’t left the house at all. Years later, the constables found a corpse hidden in the tunnel, still dressed in his wedding robe.
What if the guests had never intended to escort Yang to the bridal chamber? Maybe they had taken him to another room, one with a hidden compartment just as the case record had described.
And maybe, with the suspicious lotus seed in hand, she was standing in that other room now.
Jin-mei searched along the floor for some sort of trapdoor. Next she searched over the walls, feeling all along the wood. Her breath caught when she found a raised edge in the wall.
It couldn’t be true. Jin-mei prayed that it wasn’t true. Holding her breath, she pulled the panel open.
The enclosure was empty, but Jin-mei felt no relief as she stared into the hollow space. On the ground, a dark mark stained the wood like a spill of blank ink. Her head tried to deny what she was seeing, but her instincts wouldn’t be quieted. Blood had been spilled here. Her entire wedding night had been an elaborate ruse, and no one was more deceived than she.
Chapter Five (#ulink_a4a22b79-28fc-5a59-9037-0862f272038a)
When it came to matters of commerce, Yang had a reputation for knowing who to trust and how far, but lately those instincts were failing him. He should have known it was a mistake to try to negotiate a deal with a crooked magistrate and an even worse mistake to return after the staged wedding to try to confront the villain. He’d only managed to get into the same room with Tan at the drinking house before being chased off.
