Chapter 52

Once he'd hit on his plan, Chen Dasheng slept the night through, and meant to set out first thing next morning.

The old ladies were out early that day. Coming out of the lane, Chen Dasheng went over smiling to greet everyone he saw.

Old Madam Tao got quickly to her feet and asked with a smile: "Off so early, Recorder, where are you bound?"

Chen Dasheng answered good-naturedly: "Back to Yanjing on a bit of business."

Seeing the old lady puzzled too, he told her: "Granny, I'll be home by afternoon."

That said, he mounted and rode off alone.

Qi Qian'er looked up at the old lady and said, smiling: "What would we be doing behind your back? It's the brothers who agreed to put the place in order, inside and out. They've gone to find carpenters, stonemasons, tilers." She hesitated, then said: "And to buy a few people, too."

But the words weren't out before the old lady roared: "You said what? Buy people! The little bit of work at home, is it beyond you? Or am I lying paralyzed? I can do the lot on my own and never feel it! Buy people? Ha, good days grown so tiresome you'll fly clean off the handle, more and more past all sense."

The old lady's voice went off like a cannon into the sky, loud, and not one bit polite. It startled even Old Madam Xu beside her.

Old Madam Tao was used to it, and kept her head down and fingered her new prayer-beads as if nothing were the matter, casting Qi Qian'er a worried glance now and then.

Qi Qian'er was not the least ruffled. Sewing silver buttons onto the old lady's new jacket, she explained to her, patient: "So by your reckoning, tomorrow we go plow the Quanqian land ourselves for the spring planting? Fine! I'll pull the plow in front, and you crack the whip behind! I shan't dare say a word! Only right that I be your family's ox and horse!"

The old lady's face went red on the spot. Old Madam Xu and Old Madam Tao traded a look, and each thought: what a fearsome little wife, quiet as a rule, but one word out of her and she skewers you dead.

Seeing the old lady gone silent, Qi Qian'er went on: "And there's more. The manor over there is to be built up soon, and we'll have to hire tenant-farmers. When they come, mustn't we have some shelter ready for them to lodge in? Good, you're so able! The two of us will go over, two court-titled ladies of the sixth grade, and mix the mud ourselves, and mold the bricks, and raise the houses, and fire the tiles ourselves."

The old lady paid no answer, and shut her mouth, abashed.

Old Madam Xu pointed at the old lady, and, hugely satisfied, stuck her thumb up at Qi Qian'er.

Seeing the old lady quiet, Qi Qian'er still wouldn't let her off. There were more and more households living round about now, and all of them official families. In the last life it had been Madam Qiao who did the show for the world's eyes, while the two of them ate the real bitterness behind the scenes.

She couldn't bear to have the old lady suffer now. But the old lady would have to learn to be the matriarch of an official house. She asked nothing grand of her, only to learn to take her ease, the way Old Madam Xu had, and be content.

"Granny!" she called, not looking up. "There are things we can't get round. When money must be spent, it must be spent! You see it as spoiling good things, do you think I don't see it too? But Dasheng, and your cousin-brothers, have to move about out in the world. If they go on as before, it's bad for their name as officials. Said aloud, they're all men of standing. But ask around, and it turns out the man's own old lady pushes her own mill at home, grinds her own flour, cooks her own meals, and that's rank unfilial conduct!"

The old lady muttered: "I look after my own self. Is that wrong too?"

Old Madam Xu scolded her: "That's a load of rot you're talking."

"You're the rot! It's dung-talk you're spouting!"

"You!"

Afraid they'd fall to quarreling again, Qi Qian'er cut in: "Times aren't what they were. Never mind the rest, take just our house: we need an outside steward at the least, a housekeeper, two capable old women by your side, and someone to keep and tidy Qingguan's house and the others'. Seven or eight people, and even that may not be enough."

At the notion of feeding people for nothing, the old lady near went mad, but her hand was caught by Old Madam Xu at her side.

This time the old lady truly did some good. She glared at Chen's old lady, blunt as could be: "You, an old woman, unreasonable the whole day long, why make it hard on the children? You think they want to do it?"

Chen's old lady's lips trembled: "What of it? If they're unwilling, don't hire! We're whole in hand and foot. Why start buying people? In the old days a household of twenty-odd, this old woman ran it single-handed. How is it I can't now?"

Old Madam Xu sighed, helpless: "And what's to be done but buy? It's us old nuisances that drag our children down! They'd get on well enough themselves, but we're decades old, coming and going, and outsiders judge the children by how they wait on us. The least thing not seen to, and there's talk! They'll say, your family's officials now and still stingy with an old mother.

"Aren't the children hard-pressed enough? Toiling for a little silver to keep the house. You don't know the half of it, this of ours is nothing. In the great houses of Yanjing, even a concubine out of favor has four or five to wait on her. Where are we, set beside that!"

The old lady was struck dumb, and it was a good while before she said, her whole face fearful: "This, this is taking one's ease? This is nothing but suffering! What's to be done? I! I've gone and heaped trouble on the children again."

Qi Qian'er caught her hand and looked at her, earnest: "Granny! You're not trouble. You're the one blessing Dasheng and I have in all this world. Think, what do I have? Who else has Dasheng got? Other people live all together, a whole family, round and complete. But if you were gone, then the moment Dasheng leaves it's just me, am I not a pitiful thing? Dasheng comes home, and it's only me at home, the two of us, alone, face to face. What would there be to live for? Look at Old Madam Tao's house, at Old Madam Xu's. Our house can't even fill one dinner-table. How could you be trouble?"

It was hard to hear. All three old ladies fell to wiping their eyes. When she'd wiped hers a good while, the old lady stroked Qi Qian'er's hand without a word and sighed: "From now on, as you will! I'll not manage it! Only, won't my girl be worked to death?"

Qi Qian'er laughed through her tears, and chided her: "What are you dreaming up! Whoever heard of an official's wife worked to death? Our house doesn't want for the silver to keep seven or eight people."

She murmured a while in the old lady's ear, and in the end talked her round into laughing.

And it was so, the house had a great manor now, and one that paid no taxes besides. Things were different now. Truly different.

At that they all began to laugh. And Old Madam Xu, seeing them made up, turned the talk: "As for wealth, what have the two of you ever laid eyes on! Now I, this old woman, saw true wealth back in Shaoshang, I did! My boy's own superior, a third-grade vice-minister at court now, his house."

Old Madam Xu had had a few days of noble-lady living in Shaoshang, and been to banquets besides, and now she launched into it, all pride and glory.

"That day, we went over about sundown, and we weren't even at the mouth of his street yet. You should have seen it! That string of carriages waiting to go in, two hundred! Two hundred at the least! And the great beef-tallow longevity-lanterns down the whole street lit it up bright as day. Think what all those candles must have cost! The vice-minister was a charitable man. While we ate within, out at the street-mouth he'd set up a great opera stage, and hired the finest troupe in all Shaoshang to sing three days for the neighborhood! And set out ten cauldrons handing beggars meat and noodles. And when at long last we got round to the back of his house, my! a whole courtyard of grown girls and young wives, just like little flower-fairies, so lovely, so sweet and fragrant."

Old Madam Xu's talk broke off of a sudden. For this reason: a few days back, when her family had come with the Jiangs, twenty or thirty carriages had seemed a mighty show, yet this procession now coming from afar was something else again.

Old Madam Xu looked over and said: "That'll be making for the chessboard court by the ancestral hall?"

Quanqian Manor had two compound-mansions besides, the kind where a three-court house has four two-court houses joined to it, left and right. So huge were they that even the old lady's crowd of rough women hadn't dared go and take them in the beginning.

And because the compounds were foursquare, like the squares on a chessboard, the women had come to call them the left and right chessboard courts.

This luxurious procession was plainly making for the right chessboard court.

Qi Qian'er looked up too, and saw a good seventy or eighty household guards, sabers at their waists, mounted on tall horses, ringing round the family's carriages, and from the lead carriage you truly couldn't see the tail.

Wearied by the road, perhaps, and tended by a crowd of maids, a company of veiled gentlewomen stepped daintily down, a dozen and more, each ringed about by her own nurses and maids.

Qi Qian'er smiled. Good neighbors indeed!

She knew this house. Tang Jiuyuan, a famed minister of Liang, a future Minister of Personnel, at present a fifth-grade Bureau Director in the Board of Punishments, and third son-in-law to Li Zhang, Grand Tutor to the Crown Prince.

That train of carriages waited, well-drilled, at the gate of the chessboard court. So many carriages, so many people, and yet scarcely a voice raised loud among them.

The old ladies were all quite overawed.

Qi Qian'er had lived here a whole life and never once been inside the chessboard court. The Tang family lived here, but seldom mixed with the ordinary official households of the back lanes. At most, come a festival, they'd pay a neighbor's courtesy and leave it at that.

But on the day of Chen Dasheng's funeral, when every hope in her had died and she trudged back alone from the graveyard, there on the road had stood a little sedan-chair, waiting for her. The nurse who waited had said: the old matriarch of the house, fearing she might come to harm alone, had sent someone to wait here and see her home.

That was the way of a true old family, thoughtful, and thoughtful clear to the softest, tenderest place in the heart.

In a cold, bleak life a kindness had come but rarely, and Qi Qian'er remembered it to this day.

As for the other chessboard court, on the left, under the big willow, that was the house of the family with whom she had a feud over the killing of her son. That, too, she remembered. That she could never forget!

"Girl? Qian'er?"

The old lady, seeing her grandson's wife stock-still and watching, with a cold gleam in her eyes she'd never seen there before, felt a flutter of alarm and reached out to shake her shoulder.

Qi Qian'er's eyes cleared in an instant, and she even smiled and asked: "Granny? What is it?"

The old lady pursed her lips: "What, envying their wealth? Turning up your nose at our poor little Chen house?"

This old lady!

Qi Qian'er burst out laughing, and, keeping her head down over her work, said: "What are you thinking? That's only a fifth grade, one rung above your grandson. What's there for me to envy? That house is four generations deep at the least, forever nattering on, packed cheek by jowl, twenty or thirty masters under one roof, a heap of troubles! Our house is so much the more peaceful for it. I, envy them?"

The old lady wasn't having it, and, feeling shortchanged, asked: "What? Only a fifth grade? Why, that's about the same as Little Hua! Did we, did we take too small a court for Little Hua?"

The moment the old lady spoke, Qi Qian'er caught her meaning: she felt their house had taken too small a court, and come off the loser!

She thought about it, head down, and quite so! Tang Jiuyuan was fifth grade, and Little Hua was fifth grade too. If Tang Jiuyuan could brazenly live in a chessboard court, why must Little Hua live in a two-court house in Guard Lane?

Tang Jiuyuan had a first-grade father-in-law, but their Little Hua had the Emperor! And an earl for a father, and two viscounts for brothers! What was wrong with him living in a chessboard court?

Too timid, that was all, too small in their thinking!

Qi Qian'er set down the basket, cupped the old lady's face in her hands and planted a loud kiss on her forehead, then turned and ran for the house.

The old lady, full of disgust, rubbed hard at her forehead, cross and shamed, and grumbled: "Gone mad, has she! Mad!"

But Old Madam Tao and Old Madam Xu looked on with envy, such a warm-hearted junior, they hadn't half a one between them.

Before long Qi Qian'er came out holding a great sheet of xuan paper and a bowl of ink, and said to the old lady: "Granny! Come on! We'll go claim a house for Little Hua!"

And when that family came, they could go eat wind!

Aiyo, the very thought was a delight!

But the old lady was badly frightened. She stood and stammered: "Really, really going? I only said it! And you, you've taken it for earnest!"

Qi Qian'er held the ink-bowl and said, righteous as you please: "You're quite right, our Little Hua! A proper fifth-grade Roving Cavalry General, and raised by the Emperor as his own son! Why on earth should he live in this shabby lane? That's a loss of face! Come on, come on!"

That said, she carried the ink-bowl off, skirted round the Tang people and horses by a side path, and walked to the left of the ancestral hall.

Uneasy at heart, the old lady grumbled the whole way that Qi Qian'er was making trouble. But Qi Qian'er coaxed her: "Dasheng's going to give you a grandchild yet, isn't he? And with a whole brood, once we can't fit, where do we put the children? Outside the manor, is it? No! Little Hua takes this side, and we take his!"

Put that way, the old lady stopped objecting at once, and instead trailed grinning behind Qi Qian'er, praising her the whole way for doing it so well!

Qi Qian'er looked up at the bright, hall-like gate, and remembered her old self of before, cowering, weeping, hidden behind the willow, and was at once disgusted with that self, and felt a great breath go out of her!

But she'd no sooner finished writing than someone not far off shouted at her: "You there, woman! What are you scrawling on that gate?"

Qi Qian'er turned to look, and saw two men come springing down off the millstone. In front was a yamen runner of some forty or fifty years, and beside him a middle-aged man in a dark-green silk robe, sharp-mouthed and monkey-cheeked.

Hmph! Old acquaintances!

The two came running in some haste. And reaching the gate, they saw the writing already up on the great door.

Merciful Heaven! This was a disaster!

The old runner had had his eye on this mansion for days, thinking to earn himself a reward, and who'd have known that, one glance away, some cloth-clad woman had come and claimed it?

Of late, the houses of Quanqian Manor had caught the eye of the middling officials. A Yanjing mansion had to be won by the Emperor's grant. Those who got no grant could only buy. And as for buying a Yanjing mansion, even the fallen dynasty's old officials, longing to go home, couldn't afford it. So this fat slab of meat that was Quanqian Manor had numberless eyes fixed on it. Qingfeng had good mansions enough, true, but with its water-veins gone, Qingfeng was a wretchedly inconvenient place to live.

The old runner was in no way going to stand for it. And seeing that grandmother and granddaughter were dressed in cloth, he was just about to open his mouth and bluster, when the man beside him gave his robe a quick tug.

The middle-aged man could read. He looked first at the writing on the gate, and his heart went cold and sober: the Son of Heaven's own army! Then he looked hard at the name Chang Lianfang, and felt he'd heard it somewhere, though where he couldn't for the life of him recall.

And since even he felt he'd heard it, all the more must they not give offense.

So he looked Qi Qian'er and the old lady up and down, and squeezed out a smile: "Might I ask, in whose house do you two good women serve?"

How could so great a matter be left to two steward-women coming to claim a house? Wasn't this some trick on him?

At that Qi Qian'er flew into a rage, and glared at the man, blunt: "How rude! And whose house are you? When you set out, did your master never tell you to have a look at where you were going? To mind your tongue?"

This was only an outer-court errand-runner, sent on the job by the head steward. He'd scarcely so much as seen the mistress a few times. And so he was cowed on the spot.

Seeing him mumble and not dare speak, Qi Qian'er pointed at Chang Lianfang's name on the gate and scolded, hard: "Blind, that's what you are! How unlucky your master, to send out a man who can't tell high from low and goes courting disaster! If you don't know it, go and ask after this name, you needn't even ask a soul."

She looked at the old runner too: "By your get-up, the Qingfeng prefecture yamen? Go back and ask your prefect who this young lord is! Even if your third-grade prefect of Qingfeng himself came, ask him, would he dare take Young Lord Chang's mansion?"

Qi Qian'er looked at the pair of them down her nose and gave a cold laugh: "Whose house are you?"

The steward, of course, dared not say.

Qi Qian'er looked proudly at her own hand: "Whosever house you are, it makes no odds, no one who came would be any use! Lend him three men's worth of nerve, and just ask him whether he'd dare! We're off!"

That said, Qi Qian'er took the old lady's arm and marched off, head high.

The old lady was born afraid of officials. Only halfway home did she ask Qi Qian'er, quavering: "You, girl, what was all that nonsense you were spouting! Aren't you bringing trouble down on Little Hua?"

Qi Qian'er was hugely pleased with herself, and answered: "Aiyo, Granny, you really take Little Hua for a soft persimmon! That's only with you! Set your heart right down in your belly! Never mind those two not daring to go ask the Qingfeng prefect, if the prefect himself came, he'd be only too glad to make a good connection of it!"

The old lady didn't follow the twists and turns of officialdom. But hearing Qi Qian'er so sure of it, she said: "Truly! Such power as that?"

Qi Qian'er nodded firmly. The old lady felt her legs go soft under her, and braced herself on a wall: "I can't bear it! It'll cut my years short! People kowtowing to me at any hour, a country old woman like me, I, isn't that cutting my years short!"

Qi Qian'er was satisfied past all telling, and steadied her: "What are you dreaming up! Back then, if not for your careful nursing, who knows what he'd have suffered in the wounded-soldiers' camp! And besides, you cared for him as your own grandson, and Dasheng's his sworn brother! Now the Chang house doesn't refuse the tie either, they've owned it! You accepted the New Year gifts, and so he's your adopted grandson! From now on, you mustn't carry on like this."

At that Qi Qian'er looked down at her own cloth clothes, then at the old lady, and thought: not thorough enough after all, taken for a steward-woman. When they got back she'd have to dress the old lady up properly.

The two of them came back to the mouth of the Board of Works lane, and the old ladies had all gone home. So Qi Qian'er took the old lady back to their own courtyard as well.

But the two of them never knew that Old Madam Xu, once home, had sent her own head steward out to make inquiries.

By the time lunch came round, the steward was back, and said to the old lady: "Old lady, mistress! That young Lady of Guard Lane, she's gone and taken the left chessboard court after all."

Old Madam Xu looked at her eldest daughter-in-law, Ye-shi. And Ye-shi asked the steward: "And the Yang family's steward? Said nothing? He stood for it?"

The steward, too, had a shocked look: "I watched over there a good while, and the young Lady of Guard Lane scolded that steward! And when she'd done, off she went with the old Lady! Not a scrap of fear in her! After they'd gone, those two stood a while and talked it over, and then I saw them hurry off to the Board of Rites lane. I'd guess they didn't dare take that court."

Ye-shi nodded, and asked again: "And do you know what the young Lady wrote on the gate?"

"I do. After they left I went and looked! The young Lady wrote, Residence of Chang Lianfang, Deputy Battalion Commander of the Jinwu Front Guard, Roving Cavalry General."

All this while Qi Qian'er had never once invited the Hu family to sit in her house, and so they'd never set a foot further into her lane. Which was why that slip of Chang Lianfang's name was known to so few. Madam Qiao and the rest couldn't read a word, and had nowhere to spread it even had they wished.

Ye-shi waved the head steward out. And when he was well out of sight, her eyes lit with a strange, shining light, and she fixed her old lady with a look of amazed and envious wonder.

Old Madam Xu was sharp. Seeing her rude stare she opened her mouth and cursed at once: "What are you goggling at me for, with those two blind sockets?!"

In times past Ye-shi would long since have been seething. But today Ye-shi wasn't angry. She smiled and said to the old lady: "Don't be cross, old ancestor, I was only lost in a thought!"

Old Madam Xu knew well enough what she was, and sneered: "Let me tell you! The big Lady and the little Lady over there are honest folk! Good people! If you dare turn those flowery, scheming guts of yours on them, believe me, I'll pull your guts clean out of you."

Old Madam Xu's own father had been a butcher!

Ye-shi was mortified, but forced herself to bear it. Only, in private, she grew ever more watchful over Old Madam Xu's every outing, fearful of the smallest neglect.

And what was that Yang house that had wanted the chessboard court? Listen to them brag in Shaoshang, that their Yang and the Supreme Commander's Yang had joined ancestral lines in generations past!

Pah! It fooled none but the simpletons who didn't know the truth! If your house had joined ancestral lines, how was it you couldn't so much as get into Yanjing? Why would the imperial clan not own you either?

They were all old officials of Shaoshang together. Who didn't know whom! The little earl of the old Chang house, now there was a true god!

No, no, the greatest true god of Quanhou Manor lived in Guard Lane, and above all that adopted son of Chief-Attendant She, the young Lady's own Recorder husband. That one was a man of real consequence in Yanjing.

She'd thought that was the very top of it, and who'd have known the lane hid an adopted son of the Emperor besides! Aiyo! What lofty incense had her old lady burned in a former life? One move, and she'd climbed a connection worth having.

At the thought, Ye-shi smiled the sweetest of smiles, and, just like the most filial and virtuous wife under heaven, said to Old Madam Xu, respectful and soft: "Old ancestor, dear ancestor! Tomorrow your daughter-in-law will dig into her own savings and have two new sets of jewelry made up for you, how would that be?"

What others made of her, Chen's old lady of course never knew. What she knew just now was that her own Scabby was a blockhead!

She was beside herself! She caught her grandson by the ear and scolded: "Scabby! It's not that Granny's getting at you, you're a man of standing now, and you've a living that brings in quick money! You must cherish it well, and give the Emperor your very best strength!

"We mustn't go making trouble, the Emperor! Your teacher's been so good to you, you must never turn into a grafting, dirty official! That's a thing to be struck down by lightning for! And in Qingfeng city, the great stone Heaven flung down is still warm to the touch!"

Chen Dasheng didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and, at a loss how to comfort his granny, could only look pleadingly over at Qi Qian'er.

Qi Qian'er was fretting too. She'd told Chen Dasheng to bring back one reliable household, and who'd have thought, he'd come back with twenty people.

For here is what had happened. Back in Yanjing, Chen Dasheng had puzzled the whole way over how to get his wife's arrangement done right. But the more he thought, the more he came round to it that his wife was only just turned sixteen after the New Year, still a little girl.

And so, treating his teacher as his father, he went to his She-dad.

Chief-Attendant She was mightily pleased that his student brought him every last thing, even the business of doing his own uncle a bad turn he didn't hide! What a friendship this was! This was cutting out his heart to show it him!

Moved a while, She went straight to fetch the Minister of the Board of Works, and the two of them conferred. And from that day the Board of Works' Firewood-and-Charcoal Bureau had a new office under it, called the Forest-Survey Office.

It was a small, seventh-grade office, and its work was simple enough: starting from the ranges round Yanjing, to survey and take stock of the mountain forests, what trees there were and how many, how old they were, and what building timber they were fit for.

Just so! A bitter office, up the mountain all day long with no time to come back down. Everyone has a few good-for-nothing wretches he can't manage. And in under half a day the Forest-Survey Office's twenty petty clerks were filled to the last man, and Chen Siniu, no less, was the head of them, the Grand Office-Director!

Chen Siniu even carried a heavy charge besides: he must go up the mountain with the survey team the year round, and on top of that do the Firewood-and-Charcoal Bureau's work, tallying the tree-species fit for burning charcoal, and every year, on the felled land, replant the charcoal-woods, eucalyptus, oak, however much the court used in a year, so much he must set back, and get the saplings to live besides.

And so Chen Dasheng learned two lessons from this affair: that his wife's ruthlessness was only skin-deep, while his teacher, at a single stroke, had wrung his Fourth Uncle a life sentence of hard labor.

There would never be a second fool in the world to take the Forest-Survey post. And however well you did it, it stayed a seventh-grade office. Plenty of men die of old age at such a post, there'd be no shortage of a Chen Siniu among them.

The arrangement made, She Qingling asked his student where he'd go next. Honest Chen Dasheng said his wife felt the old lady must change her way of living, and they must buy a servant to wait on her.

And it happened aptly enough: now that She Qingling had gone into the palace, his household still kept a good many of its old servants and had no use for so many. So the teacher took it upon himself to decide, and gave Chen Dasheng the younger son of the She head steward, She Jixiang, and his wife, along with a well-trained kitchen-woman, a needlework-woman, and page-boys and maids, picked out one by one: twenty people in all, brought back to Chen Dasheng.

A gift from an elder is not to be refused. When Qi Qian'er saw the people, she was worried half to death!

This teacher of Scabby's truly knew nothing of common folks' hardships. How many coins did Chen Dasheng draw in a month? And here in one stroke the house had twenty more mouths to keep.

Chen Dasheng was fretting too, and sat hunched on the courtyard steps, gazing pitifully at his wife. He was never any good at such things.

While the old court sat there fretting, over at Chen Siniu's it was all joy. Chen Siniu, thwarted day after day, sat at home drinking himself sullen.

Outside was a great clamor, and he grumbled inwardly: this Lanxiang too, how was it she'd not a scrap of consideration now, dragging home a pack of vulgar back-manor wives to chatter and squawk about the place!

The several women had come glad and eaten glad. And just as, meal done, they were pulling on their coarse clothes to lend Madam Qiao a small hand, they heard someone rap at the courtyard gate and call from outside: "Is this the home of Director Chen of the Board of Works' Firewood-and-Charcoal Bureau?"

Madam Qiao started, and looked in at Chen Siniu, who sat dazed within.

The call came a second time from the outer yard, and only then did Chen Siniu jam on his shoes and hurry out.

A long while, and he came back in with an excited face, and never minding the several people about, first swept Madam Qiao up and spun her round in delight, then laughed aloud: "Ha! Ha ha! Wife, wife! Heaven sends down a great fortune! A great fortune! Ha ha."

Madam Qiao, all coy reproach: "Master! Master! Put me down, aiya, put me down."

Only then did Chen Siniu remember there was a child in his wife's belly.

He gave a sheepish laugh and set her down with great care: "These days have been hard on you, Lanxiang!"

Madam Qiao gave him a slap and scolded: "Marry a man, and it's for clothes and food! Hard or not, I'm willing, Master. Who was out there asking for you?"

Chen Siniu smiled, holding himself in, and glanced round at the several dumbstruck women, then said, pleased with himself: "Ha, the great chief of the Board of Works has given me a new post! I'm to go report to the Yanjing yamen straightaway."

Every shadow lifted from Madam Qiao's heart. She swayed a moment, then pressed a hand to her brow and asked: "Truly? Congratulations, Master! My joy to you, Master. How did the man put it?"

Now at last a hesitation crossed Chen Siniu's face: "Not in any great detail, only that the Firewood-and-Charcoal Bureau's opened a new office, called the Forest-Survey Office! The official, clear-sighted, took a liking to my honest, earnest ways and my willingness to bear hardship, and gave me the Grand Office-Director's place, to run the whole office."

Madam Qiao's head swam the more! Was this her official-wife's dream come at last fully true, after all that bitterness eaten, all those wrongs borne? Had Heaven opened its eyes at last?

She swayed, unsteady on her feet. And Chen Siniu, seeing her color bad, quickly helped her to sit on the edge of the kang: "Lanxiang, I'm of two minds now, from what the man told me! To survey the timber of Liang's mountain ranges means being run off my feet on the mountains the year round, and you're carrying a child now."

Seeing Chen Siniu waver, Madam Qiao at once reached up and covered his mouth: "It's nothing! Master, I'm all right, I've eaten bitterness before, you know it, I can bear any hardship! Master's won his superior's regard at long last, from now on."

She could say no more. The road here had been so very hard.

At the thought, Madam Qiao held her belly, and the tears came pouring as she said to Chen Siniu: "Master was born to come into this world and do great things! Leave the house to me! I'll keep it all in good order for you, I promise, only, for the sake of us mother and child, you'll be dragged off to suffer for it."

Chen Siniu gazed, besotted, at her lovely face, and shook his head, hard as iron: "Lanxiang! I'm willing! You know I am!"

The two of them, with no eyes for anyone else, and Guo-Yang-shi and the other two women traded a glance, and could not help shivering, all together.