Chapter 27: Silver Under the Floorboards

 

The two plates found themselves at the center of a bidding war that climbed with the particular energy of wealthy people who have been cooped up too long and have decided that acquiring something beautiful is an appropriate response. The final price reached two hundred and thirty taels. Those who lost the auction pressed deposits into Miantang's hands before leaving, with instructions to send agents to Zhenzhou later for additional pieces.

The name of the Jade Fired Porcelain Workshop had arrived in Qingzhou.

Walking out with a hundred-tael banknote folded against her palm, Miantang felt that lighting a few extra sticks of incense for the assassin — whoever they were and wherever they were now — was the very least she could do.

The more immediate problem was getting home with it.

Miantang's suggestion was to hire escorts from a local security bureau. Mama Li felt this was unnecessary spending. Miantang disagreed with some feeling. Her maternal grandfather's family had run a security bureau; she had grown up knowing exactly what methods bandits used on travelers who looked worth robbing. If she herself had been standing beside a road right now, watching a small group of women with a donkey cart and a heavy cash box, she would have found it a tempting proposition.

Mama Li's objections did not prevail. Miantang spent ten taels on two capable-looking guards from the bureau and hired a river passage back to Zhenzhou, switching to a carriage for the final stretch. The money traveled home intact.

---

Cui Xingzhou arrived at the North Street residence for the midday meal between duties and found no one at the door.

Miantang had a habit of appearing the moment she heard his footsteps. Her absence was notable enough that he turned a questioning look on Mama Li without speaking.

Mama Li pointed helplessly toward a firmly closed interior door. "She's been in there since this morning," she said, keeping her voice low. "Right after she came back from exchanging the banknotes. Won't come out to eat, won't answer."

Cui Xingzhou walked to the door and pushed it. It didn't move — barred from the inside.

He was in the process of deciding whether to simply kick it open when a voice came from within. "Who is it?"

"Me."

The bar scraped back. A slender arm reached through the gap, took a firm hold of his sleeve, and drew him inside.

Miantang was dressed in short work pants and a close-fitted short-sleeved shirt, her hair pinned up in a rapid, impractical arrangement that was already coming loose. Her forehead was sheened with sweat. She was holding a small iron shovel.

Cui Jiu looked her over without visible expression. "What are you doing?"

Miantang, whose arms had reached the point of trembling, felt the particular relief of a person whose help has arrived at the precise moment it was most needed. She shut the door carefully behind him, led him to the inner room, and pointed to where the wooden bed frame had been pushed aside.

Beneath it, she had begun excavating a hole.

"I'm making a place to put the emergency money," she said, with the tone of someone explaining something self-evident. "You've come at exactly the right moment, husband. Help me keep digging."

Cui Xingzhou looked at the shallow pit. He looked at the tidy arrangement of silver ingots stacked on the surface of the bed. He said, with measured patience, "You understand that depositing silver in a bank produces interest. Burying it under the floor produces only effort and no returns."

Miantang went to the bed and ran her hand lightly over the nearest ingots with an expression that could only be described as affectionate. "I've divided everything into thirds," she said. "One third is in the bank already, earning interest as you say. One third goes back into the shop as purchasing capital. This third is the reserve — what we live on if everything else goes wrong." She looked at him with reasonable directness. "A world that seems peaceful can stop being peaceful without much warning. We both watched what happened in Qingzhou. If real chaos came, the people who run banks would take their own assets and run like anyone else. Silver notes won't buy you a bowl of plain congee when that happens. But silver ingots in the ground will still be there." She held out the shovel. "Please, husband. Just a bit deeper."

Cui Xingzhou had spent the morning in the military camp doing work that mattered to the empire. He had not come to North Street to dig holes in a bedroom floor.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, moved the silver to one side to make room, stretched out his legs, and opened his book.

Miantang looked at him. She decided this was fair. Burying silver was, truthfully, the kind of activity that only someone very new to having money would engage in, and asking a man of her husband's refinement to participate was indeed a bit much. Her wrist had rested sufficiently. She picked up the shovel and continued.

Cui Xingzhou read.

After a while, he stopped reading. His attention had drifted without permission to the woman working on the floor.

He had been present when she was pulled out of the river — barely alive, badly injured, a bundle tied around her waist. Inside the bundle, a small cosmetics box with some jewelry. And inside the soles of her shoes, wrapped in oiled paper and sealed with wax: silver notes.

Multiple hiding places. Like a careful animal with several burrows prepared against winter.

He remembered watching her, once she could move again, reach immediately for her possessions, checking them the way a person checks that they are still themselves. He had found it, at the time, mildly absurd.

He watched her now, working through the hard-packed soil one small shovelful at a time, jaw set, lips pressed closed. Her injured wrist was not made for this. The shovel was too heavy for the work she was asking it to do, and she knew it, and kept going anyway. Large drops of sweat traced slow lines down her forehead, followed the line of her neck, and disappeared into the loose collar of her work shirt.

Cui Xingzhou returned his attention very firmly to his book.

The room was not quiet. Her breathing had become audible — the particular cadence of someone doing hard physical work on insufficient reserves, each breath a little shorter than the last.

He endured it for approximately as long as it took him to read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a word.

Then he set the book down, removed his outer robe, tucked in his inner hem, crossed the room, and took the shovel directly out of her hands.

He dug. He had the advantage of actual strength and the additional motivation of wanting the task finished. The hole reached the necessary depth in a time that made Miantang's entire morning's effort look rather less efficient in retrospect.

He handed the shovel back and looked at her. "Is this sufficient?"

Miantang, still glowing with the warmth of watching him work, nodded without any attempt to hide her admiration. "It's perfect. There's room to add more in future, too."

She had not quite finished speaking when Cui Jiu set down the shovel, retrieved his outer robe, and walked out of the room without further comment.

Miantang shook her head at the closed door with mild resignation. Scholarly men had their limits and digging holes in bedroom floors was clearly one of them. In future she would simply manage it herself.

---

That afternoon, Mama Li produced a meal that announced, in the clearest possible terms, that the household's circumstances had changed. Braised perch. A fat salted duck. A soup built around whole large shrimp. The preserved radishes that had once formed the reliable backbone of the table were nowhere to be seen.

During the meal, Miantang remembered the Qingzhou specialties she had packed for the neighbors and turned to Cui Xingzhou. "Husband, after we finish, let's do the neighborhood rounds together. We've been away long enough that it would be right to bring gifts and thank people for their care. It won't take long."

The afternoon of digging appeared to have expanded Cui Xingzhou's tolerance by a modest but measurable amount. He glanced at her and did not object.

So after lunch, while the neighborhood households had returned home for their midday rest, Mama Li followed the couple down North Street with baskets of wrapped specialties, delivering them door to door.

The street was washed in early summer light. Courtyard walls on both sides were threaded through with flowering vines in several colors. Miantang wore her newly made light dress and her fashionable cloud-bun, and stood beside the man in his scholar's robes looking precisely like what she believed herself to be — one half of an ordinary married couple on a pleasant afternoon errand.

They did look well together. The kind of well that people stop and let their eyes linger on for a moment before moving along.

These were not observations available to Miantang. But they were available to the woman sitting in the plain carriage that had stopped at the entrance to North Street.

The young maid beside her made a small sharp sound under her breath. "Miss — she — she's still alive."

Yunniang's face, usually warm, had gone cold and flat. "Be quiet."

At that moment, the man walking beside Miantang lifted his head in the direction of the carriage. His eyes were direct and reached further than seemed probable at that distance. Yunniang felt them arrive and gave the driver a swift, quiet instruction. The carriage moved.

Once they had turned away from North Street, the maid — properly chastened but unable to contain herself entirely — asked in a low voice, "Are you certain it was her in the market? Selling porcelain?"

Yan Chi, Yunniang's trusted man, spoke quickly. "I followed the young master until he stopped at that stall. When I saw her standing there I thought I was looking at something that had come back wrong."

Yunniang's eyes moved over both of them, cool and measuring. "In future, if you encounter Liu Miantang, keep your expressions ordinary. Whether she lives or not has nothing to do with us. If you act as though it does, people will draw conclusions."

The maid nodded and then, after a pause, ventured, "But if the young master tries to see her again—"

Yunniang's nails pressed into her own palm. "Yan Chi said she spoke to him as though he were a stranger who had wandered too close. She doesn't want anything to do with him. And she's married now." A pause. "The husband is low-ranking and a merchant. But he isn't ugly." Another pause. "A woman who has lost her fighting ability and chosen a stable household wants to live quietly. Let her. She's not our concern. It's that daughter of General Shi's we need to keep our eyes on."

The maid agreed, with audible relief, that the miss had clearly thought everything through.

But Yunniang's expression did not ease. She was thinking of Miantang's face as it had appeared just now on that sunny street — present, bright, entirely undefeated.

She had not looked like a woman who had accepted her lot. She had looked like a woman who had chosen it.

My dear sister, Yunniang thought, the words going nowhere in particular. You've truly set it all down, haven't you. Settled into your merchant's wife life as if it were exactly what you wanted.

The carriage, as if it had taken a wrong turn and simply wandered here, moved away from North Street as quietly as it had come.

---

Miantang had waited until her husband was resting before she made her approach. She prepared his tea herself, set it before him, and settled at the foot of the bed to work on his legs with careful, conscientious hands. Then, with the expression of someone testing ground before committing their weight to it, she said, "Husband, you mentioned that you keep your clothes at the chess house for convenience. That makes sense. But shouldn't a few things stay here as well? Otherwise I have no way to wash them or see to any mending, and what kind of wife am I if I can't even—"

The sentence stopped. Her eyes had gone soft and reddened at the edges, with the particular quality of someone who has been carrying a small, persistent grievance and has finally allowed it to show.

Cui Xingzhou looked at her sideways.

He was not entirely certain she wasn't performing it.