Chapter 28: Don't Underestimate the Merchant's Wife

Mama Li had told him, at some point, that this young woman was not mild-tempered when the situation called for something else. When craftsmen cutting corners on the shop renovation had tried to hold their ground, she had stood alone against three grown men and argued until they reduced their wages and apologized for the shoddy work without flinching once.

So why was she sitting here at his feet, eyes threatening to overflow, over a few sets of clothing?

Either she had discovered — during the episode with the divorce letter — that tears produced results that direct requests did not, and had filed the information away for future use. Or she genuinely felt something. With Miantang, it was not always easy to determine which.

Cui Xingzhou let the pause stretch out and then said, with deliberate laziness, "Don't bother. Too much trouble."

Miantang did not press further. Her eyes filled completely, and she held the tears back through evident effort, bent her head, and continued massaging his legs in conscientious silence. The teardrops sat at the very edge of falling, suspended, going nowhere.

Cui Xingzhou found this considerably more difficult to ignore than the direct request had been.

After a reasonable amount of endurance, he concluded that making someone cry over something this small was, in fact, pointless. He reversed himself without particular ceremony. "If you don't mind the laundering, I'll have Mo Ru bring two chests over. It would be convenient to have clothes here for changing anyway."

The effect was immediate and complete. The threatened tears vanished. Her expression reorganized itself into something bright and warm, and she moved her attention to his shoulders with renewed enthusiasm. "I've already set aside the neighbors' gifts. What should we bring your honored teacher? I could come with you to the chess house to deliver them — that would be more respectful, wouldn't it?"

Cui Xingzhou had, over recent weeks, developed a certain facility with necessary untruths. He had not, however, gone so far as to actually construct a chess house. An actual visit from Miantang would produce problems he had no interest in managing.

He answered without a pause. "The teacher's wife is the jealous kind — she doesn't like him receiving other women. It wouldn't be appropriate for you to come." He let this settle, then added, "The chessboard you purchased is fine work. That would make a suitable gift for him."

The chessboard in question was, of course, the mutton-fat jade set Miantang believed she had bought for three taels from a charitable shopkeeper.

Miantang's hands stilled slightly. "But... I bought that one for you, husband."

Cui Xingzhou understood the situation with perfect clarity. The board had not been bought — it had been given, arranged by Lu Wen through an obliging shopkeeper. If Miantang grasped this, the right course of action was obvious: sever all connection to anything originating from that man. If she kept the board, it would remain a thread between them, however invisible to her. Generosity on his part would become considerably more complicated.

He said, with gentle reasonableness, "In that case, there's no need to give him anything at all. The other things you've prepared would seem too ordinary for someone of his taste."

Miantang heard this and found it persuasive. The other gifts were modest. A chess master of proper standing deserved something with actual quality. And besides — she had been thinking, since she began earning real money, that she could commission something better for her husband. The three-tael board was imitation jade anyway. She had seen enough genuine pieces lately to recognize the difference.

But she wanted to see it used before it went anywhere. Just once.

She slipped on her shoes, carried the board to the small table, set it out, and looked at him. "Since we're giving it to your teacher, why don't you try it first? Just one game, to see whether it suits him."

Cui Xingzhou glanced at the board and then at her. "Do you play?"

Miantang thought of the chess match outside the academy — the way she had been able to follow the moves, anticipate them, feel the logic of them as though she'd traced those patterns before. She blinked. "I wasn't skilled at it in my maiden home, but somewhere along the way I seem to have learned something. I can't quite remember how."

He was willing to be diverted. He settled across from her.

The board was, in truth, beautiful. The white jade pieces caught the afternoon light, and against the pale surface, Miantang's hands arranging them looked like something a painter would have stopped to record — her wrists fine-boned, her fingertips luminous.

Cui Xingzhou was not blind. He noted this and placed his pieces with the casual ease of a man who is not troubled by anything on the board.

Before a cup of tea could be finished, Miantang asked, with careful hesitation, "Husband — haven't I won?"

Cui Xingzhou looked at the board. He held his silence for a moment.

Then he nodded.

Liu Miantang had won in a few moves.

She burst into laughter at his nod, then covered her mouth, looking pleased and slightly embarrassed. "You let me win, didn't you. We should play properly — I want to actually improve."

Her husband was not joking with her. His lips drew into a slightly tighter line. He gathered the pieces without comment and reset the board.

This time, he played to win. He moved with the particular economy of someone who has stopped performing and started thinking — pieces placed like troops being positioned, each one carrying the weight of what it would force the other player to respond to.

Miantang played on instinct. It was the only way she knew how. Each move her husband made tightened the space available to her, and she found herself thinking carefully, reading the board, navigating by feel through terrain that felt simultaneously unfamiliar and not. When she looked across at him — face unreadable, attention fully committed to the game — her admiration was real and unguarded.

She lost, but narrowly. She didn't mind. Losing to someone of his ability was simply what losing should feel like.

What she did notice was that winning hadn't made him happy.

She had learned, over time spent in his company, to read the difference between his genuine expressions and the polished surface he showed the world. Right now, neither was quite present.

She packed the pieces carefully into their box and asked, without making it too much of a thing, "Are you unhappy about something, husband?"

Cui Jiu's lips curved, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Not unhappy. I was only wondering who taught you to play like that."

Liu Miantang's style was not simply competent. It was recognizable. The patterns she reached for, the instincts that shaped her moves — they bore an unmistakable resemblance to the way Ziyu had played outside the academy. It was not a difficult chain to follow: a woman who had spent time in the mountains with a man, filling idle hours with chess and conversation, learning his rhythms until they became her own.

This was considerably different from the picture Cui Xingzhou had originally formed — of a delicate young woman roughly handled by mountain outlaws. The picture had been quietly revising itself for some time. He was not entirely sure what to do with the revised version.

That afternoon, Cui Jiu left North Street in a mood that had not improved. Miantang stood at the door watching him go and made a private resolution to have a hot meal ready when he returned from the chess house.

---

Back at the military camp, Cui Xingzhou found his mood only marginally better by the time he was engaged with actual work again.

In recent days, deploying troops to Qingzhou under the stated purpose of assistance while actually conducting a survey of the defensive situation, he had been learning things he had not previously known.

The Yangshan rebels had not survived on their own momentum. Behind them, in the quieter registers of local power, certain gentry families had been providing support — financial, informational, and otherwise.

The young emperor had come to the throne in fragile circumstances. The court's significant decisions were in practice controlled by the former Concubine Xi, now titled the Holy Mother Empress Dowager Wan'an. When Empress Zhou had been deposed and Crown Prince Liu Dan had died, the Zhou family had collapsed almost overnight. The Xi Concubine's relatives, the Yang family, had moved efficiently into the space left behind.

The Yang family governed with an appetite. They had discarded the previous emperor's careful approach of allowing the country to recover and develop, replacing it with a succession of heavier taxes and new levies. Their most recent instrument was a land reallocation law — designed to redistribute wealth from local gentry into imperial coffers, wrapped in the language of reform.

This law had been implemented in other regions. In Zhenzhou, it had effectively stalled. Officials sent to carry out the reforms had been killed on the roads. The ongoing presence of organized rebels and the memory of recent famines had provided useful cover, and the reform had been quietly set aside and not mentioned again.

Now Cui Xingzhou could see the shape of it more clearly. The reason the rebels had been allowed to sustain themselves was not separable from the interest certain gentry families had in keeping tax reform out of their territories.

With Lu Wen now seeking amnesty, those families would need to find new instruments. It was worth watching what they reached for next.

The Yang family, meanwhile, had not been idle. A distant relative had established the Tongli Money House — a chain of silver shops spread across the prefectures, backed by Yang family influence. Local county offices, wanting to maintain good relations with the family at court, deposited a portion of their tax revenues in these branches. The arrangement was genuinely profitable, and it had grown accordingly.

For several years, following standard practice and common political sense, Cui Xingzhou had deposited substantial sums from Zhenzhou's revenues into the Tongli Money House annually.

This year's tax silver had arrived, and the military advisor had presented it with the expectation that the usual arrangement would continue.

Cui Xingzhou hesitated.

The image that came to him, without particular invitation, was Miantang kneeling over a half-dug hole in her bedroom floor, explaining why she divided money into thirds. One part for circulation. One part for investment. One part buried in the ground, because when real chaos comes, the people who run money houses run too and take what they can carry.

He sat with this for a while.

The relationship between Zhenzhou and the court was not stable. If it deteriorated sharply, deposits in a Yang family institution could be frozen, seized, or simply inaccessible at the moment they were most needed. A reasonable-seeming amount of precaution was not paranoia.

He made his decision. Retain sufficient funds for the year's local expenses. Move the remainder into Zhenzhou's own treasury, which had been largely empty for years. Begin withdrawing the previous years' deposits from Tongli in monthly installments, in amounts that would not immediately attract scrutiny.

The pretext was ready-made — his wedding to his cousin Lan Shuilan was being planned, and a prince's wedding carried significant expense. Large transfers of funds in advance of a ceremony were entirely expected. No one would find it remarkable.

Both members of the North Street household were, in their own ways, attending to money. The scale was different. The instinct was not entirely dissimilar.

---

Miantang's concerns were of the more immediately satisfying variety.

With the proceeds from the colored plates, the shop had genuine cash flow for the first time since she had arrived in Lingquan Town. She spent some of it thoughtfully: new door curtains, private rooms separated by screens for distinguished guests who wished to browse without being observed, celadon vases arranged with peonies, silk-wrapped chairs, good tea and seasonal fruit kept ready. The kind of environment in which a person of taste would feel comfortable spending time and money.

She also traveled to other workshops and acquired representative pieces from around Lingquan Town's broader porcelain community, which elevated the shop's standing from one good source among several to a destination.

As the shop's reputation settled into something recognizable, a gold-embossed invitation arrived.

Guisheng, who had worked in the porcelain trade for years before joining their shop, read it and immediately congratulated her with genuine warmth. The porcelain merchants' association of Lingquan Town had a membership threshold that most outsider-run shops never reached — they typically closed within a month of opening, before any association would consider them a permanent presence. The Jade Fired Porcelain Workshop had not closed. It had, instead, become notable. The invitation was the association's acknowledgment of this fact.

Miantang took the matter seriously. On the morning of the association's monthly incense-burning ceremony, she rose early, bathed, put on the new silk dress, applied the powder her husband had given her with a light hand, and set out with the composure of someone attending to something that deserved composure.

The association's meeting hall was provided by the He family — the oldest and most established shop in Lingquan Town, a royal supplier, the kind of institution whose wealth and influence the other shops in town simply did not compare to. Being a new member, Miantang's first obligation was to pay respects to the association president, the He family's Second Master.

Second Master He was forty-seven years old, in full command of his authority, and had been the man responsible for all arrangements when the Imperial Consort had visited the porcelain district some years prior. He had seen people come and go from this trade for two decades.

When the announcement came that the Jade Fired Porcelain Workshop had arrived to pay its respects, he looked up with the unhurried attention of a man who is always slightly more important than whoever is being shown in.

What he saw was a woman who had not yet reached twenty years of age.

She was beautiful, which was noted and set aside as irrelevant. What was more relevant was that they had sent a woman at all.

New shops joining the association were expected to send someone of standing. Someone whose presence communicated that the shop understood the weight of what it was joining. Sending a young woman — regardless of how she looked — said something about how seriously they were taking the occasion.

Second Master He was already forming his opinion before she had crossed the threshold.