Chapter 25: Splashed Tea and Clean Money

But the Prince of Huaiyang found that even in the half-dreaming space between waking and sleep, the sweetness of that fragrance simply refused to leave. It was genuinely irritating.

So for the remaining days in Qingzhou, Master Cui Jiu went out to visit friends and did not come back at night.

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On the day of the poetry and painting tea party, luxurious carriages began filling the streets of Qingzhou well before morning had settled. Mud screens were erected along the roads to spare the noble passengers from the sight of ordinary life passing too close.

Miantang had started late and stood on the second floor of the inn, arms resting on the railing, watching the procession move below.

She had come from a family with a respectable name, it was true. But a name was all it had been for some time — the kind of name that still expected to be treated like old money while quietly having none left. Tea parties and calligraphy gatherings had never been part of her actual life. Her father had spoken endlessly of what the Liu family once had been, clinging to those stories of earlier prosperity the way a drowning man clings to something that is no longer floating. He had schemed and hoped and maneuvered, holding his children up against the standard of a past they had never lived.

And in the end? Imprisoned, and dead under interrogation.

Her half-brother, born of the first wife and full of the arrogance that came with it, had never once let Miantang forget that her blood was considered the lesser kind. He had mocked her manners from childhood.

So the sight of carved and gilded carriages moving through the streets, young ladies in jeweled headdresses tilting their chins toward the window — it stirred nothing in her. No wistfulness. No longing. If anything, she felt the particular ease of a person who has been released from wanting the wrong things.

Their carriage was plain and their life was ordinary, and she felt more genuinely comfortable in it than she had ever felt in her maiden home. While those ladies rode toward their tea party, she was heading to the market to sell porcelain. She found she preferred it.

Since she was running a stall, she dressed accordingly. No point in drawing unnecessary eyes. She chose a simple blue cloth dress and wrapped her hair and forehead in matching cloth — capable, tidy, ready to work.

Mo Ru had chosen well. The stall was positioned at a crossroads where the crowd naturally funneled through, giving almost every passerby a reason to glance over. Miantang directed the two older women to arrange the porcelain across the table, and had Guisheng, their assistant from Zhenzhou, raise the Jade Fired Porcelain Workshop banner above it all.

She had learned enough by now to know that aiming only at wealthy collectors was not a reliable way to keep a business breathing. This time, alongside the finer pieces, she had brought a batch of zodiac figurines and white porcelain piggy banks.

Mr. Chen, who had been eating Mama Li's pork dishes with some private guilt while the shop sat idle, had taken it upon himself to paint and decorate the piggy banks without being asked. His hand was unmistakably his own — designs that were neither common nor showy, each one distinctive and full of quiet charm.

The unusual style drew people in almost immediately. Curious onlookers clustered around.

Miantang moved quickly. She had the assistants call out a promotion: buy a piggy bank, receive a small zodiac figurine free; purchase a full plate set and take home the complete set of twelve animals. The offer was simple and the appeal was immediate.

Adults with small children in tow came readily. The banks were generously sized — clearly capable of holding a satisfying accumulation of copper coins — and the little zodiac animals were exactly the kind of thing that made a child stop walking and refuse to be moved until a parent gave in. Collectors, meanwhile, discovered that buying a full plate set for the sake of the bonus animals was not as irrational as it first appeared.

Miantang and the two older women worked without pause, wrapping sold pieces in yellow paper and tying them with straw rope so customers could carry them easily. There was no time to stop.

By noon, when the morning crowd had thinned in search of somewhere to eat and the street grew briefly quieter, Miantang wiped the sweat from her forehead. The braised meat pancakes Mama Li had bought sat untouched beside her. She was too absorbed in counting coins, sorting them into strings, watching the cash box fill with something approaching reverence.

The feeling of it was deeply satisfying in a way that was hard to explain. The weight of earned money was simply its own pleasure.

Then another customer appeared at the stall.

Miantang caught the shape of someone approaching in her peripheral vision and moved to put the cash box away and greet them properly.

Her smile arrived first. Then her eyes did.

It was Ziyu.

He stood there looking precisely as he had before — handsome, pale, with that air of grief worn openly on his face, five or six attendants ranged behind him who carried themselves in a way that made it clear they were not ordinary servants.

Miantang's immediate reaction was disbelief at the sheer nerve of it. Whatever had existed between them before her memory was lost, the man was standing in front of her stall in broad daylight, in a city full of people, while she was a married woman at work. He had the look of someone who had thought about this moment very carefully and arrived anyway.

His eyes fixed on her with an intensity that carried pain in it, and he said, "Miantang — did you leave me just to live like this?"

There was something in his tone. A faint suggestion that this — the blue cloth dress, the market stall, the coins being counted at noon — was beneath what she deserved. Or beneath what he would have given her.

Miantang felt her patience end cleanly, the way a thread snaps when pulled past its limit.

She looked at him sideways, her expression carrying none of the uncertainty it might have held on another occasion. "What exactly is wrong with this life? I have a roof above me and meat in my bowl, and every coin I earn comes in honestly. What concern is any of it to you?"

The young man's face tightened as though the words had struck him somewhere tender. He spoke carefully, slowly. "You're right, this is the life you always wanted. But how could you so casually take up with that man?"

Miantang had no interest in untangling what had or hadn't happened between them before her memory went. What she was interested in was making the current situation unambiguous.

"Young Master, my marriage is not your concern. You appear to be someone of standing — which makes it all the more puzzling why you'd occupy yourself with a married woman's affairs. Was there no one at home to teach you how things are done?"

The long-bearded attendant at Ziyu's shoulder could no longer hold himself back. His voice came out low and sharp. "Liu Miantang, do you know who you're speaking to—"

The cup of leftover tea in Miantang's hand traveled toward them before the sentence was finished. The attendant and those beside him stepped back sharply.

Miantang turned to face the man squarely. "That is how I speak, going forward. He may be your master. He is nothing to me. If any of you comes near this stall again to cause trouble, the next thing I throw won't be tea. Guisheng — sweep the front of the stall. We can't welcome customers with all this standing around in the way."

Guisheng, who had read the room perfectly, took up his broom with considerable enthusiasm and swung it in the general direction of the group, announcing loudly and without apology that they were blocking legitimate business and should kindly move along.

The guards behind Ziyu bristled. Several of them looked to be weighing their options.

Ziyu stopped them with a single quiet word.

He stood for a moment, the color in his face having retreated further, and then said to Miantang, with a flatness that was its own kind of pain, "Since you don't wish to see me, I won't trouble you again. But you should know — my heart has been only yours. What you saw between me and Yunniang was not what you believed it to be."

Miantang was not listening. She was watching Mama Li out of the corner of her eye.

Mama Li's expression was doing something complicated. Her gaze kept moving between Miantang and Ziyu in a way that suggested her imagination was already constructing an elaborate and unflattering account of the scene.

Miantang felt a wave of pure despair. If Mama Li brought this back to her husband wrapped in the kind of interpretation that expression suggested — what then?

She turned back to Ziyu with fresh urgency and said with complete finality, "Whatever you do and whoever you do it with is not my concern. Please go. I have no wish to see you again in this life."

The words landed harder than the tea had. The refined young man's lips moved slightly. Then he turned, and walked away, his attendants closing around him.

Miantang watched him go.

And then, against every intention she had, she kept watching for a moment longer than was strictly necessary. Something indefinable moved through her — bittersweet and sourceless and gone almost before she could identify it.

She came back to herself and was immediately horrified. "Amitabha, what a terrible failing. To have stood there watching that man's back for as long as I did — husband, your coldness toward me is entirely what I have earned."

But there was no time to sit with it.

Not long after Ziyu's group departed, the street changed. People began to shout and run — not in the scattered way of ordinary alarm, but in the compressed, surging way of a crowd that has seen something no one wants to be near. The shouting was continuous. People knocked into stalls as they fled, sending things clattering across the pavement. The chaos spread in every direction.

Miantang had a table full of porcelain.

She made her calculations in roughly one second and started directing people without waiting to find out what had happened. The assistants and older women moved quickly, packing the important pieces into grass-padded boxes, readying them for the donkey cart.

By the time they had the stall secured and the goods loaded, a company of soldiers had moved onto the street in the direction of the disturbance.

When Miantang finally got back to the inn, the ground floor was thick with people talking. From what she gathered, listening while running her hands over each piece of porcelain to check for damage, several people had died on the street. Blood in the open. The sort of thing that got a city locked down.

She finished the inventory, confirmed the cash box was intact and in her arms where it belonged, and let out a long, slow breath. "Qingzhou is not what I expected. The streets here are something else." She paused. "Mama Li — where did my husband say he was going to meet his friends? Could he have been anywhere near that disturbance?"

Mama Li was in her own difficulty. During the rush to pack, one of the crates had come down directly on her foot, which had been throbbing ever since. She was working through it by pressing her hand against the injury and speaking through the effort. "The master went outside the city walls to visit. He'll be well clear of it."

Miantang released the breath she'd been holding. She called for Guisheng to go find a doctor for Mama Li's foot, and settled in to wait.

Her guess — that the city gates would close early with a curfew — proved correct. That night, Cui Jiu did not return.

Miantang pictured him spending the night in some plain roadside cottage, making the best of it with a scholar's composure.

The reality was somewhat different.

The Prince of Huaiyang was on a pleasure boat.

A large and well-appointed one, on the famous Yingri Cai Lake outside the city walls, surrounded by his mother the Empress Dowager and several of her invited companions. The Empress Dowager, along with Lan Shuilan — who was to be the prince's future consort — had arrived in Qingzhou after the tea party had already gotten underway. The prince, displaying all appropriate filial devotion, had skipped the gathering entirely and gone directly out of the city to welcome them. He had then, in the spirit of further filial courtesy, suggested a lake cruise to see Qingzhou's most celebrated scenery.

They were still on the water, pleasantly occupied, when the sun began to lower.

It was only when the boat reached the shore that word reached them: there had been a disturbance in the city. The gates were closed. No one was going in.