Chapter 5

Xiao Yunqi treated the ceremony for taking me as a concubine with unusual seriousness. Pearls and brocade streamed into Spring Breeze House. Madam Sang beamed as she painted my face, calling me fortunate and urging me to soften my temper. Yunqi, she said, had searched everywhere after I vanished and nearly demolished the house. Where had I been?

Looking at the brilliant stranger in the mirror, I smiled. “Nowhere. I owed someone a favor and sold wontons on the street.”

Everyone laughed. Xiangsi, whose hands had never touched kitchen water, had once walked away when Yunqi offered a casket of pearls for one bowl of noodles. Another man would have beaten me to death, they said; only his deep affection spared me.

I waved them silent. “I want wontons.”

Madam Sang offered the famous new stall on East Street. I insisted on Willow Alley in the south. She objected that the district was filthy and low. I repeated, one word at a time, “I want Willow Alley’s wontons.”

They could not be bought. A panting steward reported that the scholar who ran the stall had drowned and the stall was gone.

“What was his name?”

The steward stammered. “His surname was He. He… something.”

He Xizhou, I supplied silently. I knew the wontons were gone. I had buried their maker myself. Before marrying, I had only wanted another person to speak his name—one of the few traces he left. The steward remembered every servant in every rich household, yet forgot a poor street vendor.

Alarmed by my expression, he added that the scholar had planned to wed that very day. He had supposedly spent all he owned rescuing an orphan girl, but after his death she stole everything and fled. The neighbors said whores were heartless and actors faithless; such an ungrateful woman did not deserve him.