Chapter 12

# Chapter 12

With the five hundred taels returned to me, I redeemed half an apothecary.

Why half?

Because my uncle had already sold the other half to the cloth shop next door.

The cloth merchant refused to give it up. I bargained with him for three days. In the end, he rented me half a wall for three taels a month.

My accounting office opened behind that half wall.

The sign was small.

**Xu’s Accounts for Women.**

No customers came on the first day.

Or the second.

On the third day, a woman who sold tofu stopped at my door. She wiped her hands on her apron for a long time before speaking.

“Miss Xu, do you truly keep accounts for women?”

“I keep them for men too. They pay extra.”

She blinked, then laughed, but quickly suppressed it.

Her husband had been dead for three months. His family claimed that the tofu stall was ancestral property and must be returned. But she had bought the cart with her dowry, purchased the soybeans on credit from her own family, and kept every account herself.

She brought out a grease-stained ledger. The handwriting was crooked. The numbers were clear.

I read it for half an hour.

“The stall is yours.”

Her eyes reddened. “But they say a widow can’t hold on to it.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

“Then stop crying for now. You can cry if you must, but I charge extra for handkerchiefs.”

She laughed again.

I drew up a clean statement listing the dowry, supplies, repairs to the cart, and daily profits. Then I had her press her thumbprint onto it and told her to take it to the neighborhood headman.

“How much?” she asked.

“Fifty copper coins.”

After searching every fold of her clothing, she found only twenty-three.

I accepted them.

“The rest goes on your account. I’ll write down your name.”

“I will repay you.”

I nodded.

After she left, the cloth merchant poked his head around the wall.

“You take cases that small, Miss Xu?”

“Small accounts become ruined lives when they aren’t settled.”

He did not understand.

I had not expected him to.

On the fifth day, three members of the woman’s husband’s family came to curse outside my shop.

I carried the ledger into the street and read every entry aloud to the gathering crowd.

By the end, the mother-in-law’s face was purple. She called me a meddler.

“Not much of one,” I said. “This is a fifty-coin case. If you want me to keep reading, the fee rises.”

The crowd laughed.

The family failed to take the cart.

On the seventh day, the tofu seller brought the remaining twenty-seven coins and added two blocks of tofu.

I accepted both the tofu and the money.

That evening, I painted a smaller line beneath my sign.

**Credit requires a name.**

Matron Qi disliked it the first time she visited.

“Vulgar,” she said.

“Vulgar names are easy to remember.”

She had brought Ye Chan, who now lived with her in the southern quarter. Ye Chan sewed for customers during the day and helped me copy accounts at night. She had gained a little weight. There was color in her face.

Qi Tang sent dried horsemeat from the frontier.

It was good enough to sell.

Her letter said that after her father took her home, he punished her by making her wash horses for half a month. Then he discovered that she could calculate grain supplies faster than the army accountants and put her in charge of a small storehouse.

Xu Man, she wrote, does managing a storehouse count as getting myself back?

I answered: Yes. Start by keeping charge of yourself.

Qin Zhaomian visited once. She had grown thinner and wore a veiled hat.

She sat in my shop for half an hour.

“My father wants to marry me to someone in Yangzhou.”

“Do you want to go?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

She drew a sheet of paper from her sleeve.

“Help me calculate my dowry.”

I took it.

“I want to take Mother with me. I cannot leave empty-handed.”

The girl who had once wanted to enter the Eastern Palace was finally calculating for herself.

“Friends pay more,” I told her.

She smiled. “Put it on my account.”

Jiang Yanbai was not the only one learning bad habits.

He left the capital without saying goodbye. A messenger delivered a bundle of books: mathematics, law, and one old evaluation register.

The first page had been torn out.

My page.

Petty man.

Three months later, a letter arrived from Qingzhou.

It was short.

Qingzhou Girls’ School has opened with twelve students. Tuition is posted clearly. Meals are filling.

Signed: Jiang Yanbai.

I read it twice and held it down with my abacus.

I did not answer.

Not because I did not want to, but because I did not know what to write.

“I’m well” felt too light.

“I miss you” felt too expensive.

In the end, I sent only a price list.

Xu’s Accounts for Women. Petitions written for fifty coins. Dowries calculated for one hundred. Tuition recovery priced according to difficulty.

At the bottom, I added: If the Qingzhou Girls’ School goes bankrupt, you may come to the capital and wait your turn.

His reply came quickly.

Four words.

Not bankrupt for now.

I laughed in exasperation.

When the crown prince’s three-year moratorium on marriage ended, discussion of an Eastern Palace wedding began again. He still had no crown princess.

Lanyi Academy never reopened.

Instead, the palace created examinations for female officials and recruited literate women skilled with accounts into the Imperial Household Department. There were few places and still too many rules, but at least women were no longer chosen solely for pretty smiles.

Ye Chan passed the examination.

Before she left, she brought me a handkerchief embroidered with twenty-eight tiny stitches.

“I’m afraid I’ll forget,” she said.

“Don’t be. The account is here.”

I tapped my head.

She smiled.

Matron Qi insisted that the household department was hard, the rules numerous, and Ye Chan would soon come home in tears.

Then she sewed three pairs of insoles for her.

Qin Zhaomian took her mother to Yangzhou. She did not marry. She opened a bookshop specializing in texts for girls’ schools. I calculated the accounts for her first shipment.

Qi Tang managed the frontier granaries for two years. She wrote that her father now took a different road whenever he saw her.

I told her this was good. It meant he had learned her price.

In the spring of the fourth year, Jiang Yanbai returned to the capital to report on his post.

When he entered my shop, I was arguing with an old woman who claimed that because her daughter-in-law had failed to produce a son, the dowry belonged to the husband’s family.

“Since you’re so talented at giving birth,” I said, “how did you fail to produce even half a face’s worth of shame?”

Jiang Yanbai coughed in the doorway.

I turned.

He still wore blue-green. He was thinner, but his eyes were brighter than before.

Emboldened by the arrival of a man, the old woman appealed to him.

“My lord, you judge who’s right.”

Jiang Yanbai glanced at the account sheet.

“By law, a woman’s dowry is her private property.”

The old woman protested. “She belongs to my family.”

“She is not your family’s possession.”

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

The old woman left, muttering curses.

The shop went quiet.

Jiang Yanbai drew a sheet from his sleeve and set it on the counter.

It was the Qingzhou Girls’ School tuition ledger. Every sum was clearly recorded.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“I’d like you to audit it.”

“Lord Jiang, I’m expensive.”

“I know.”

He set down a small packet of cakes.

“Half in advance.”

I opened it.

Chestnut cake.

The same kind he had brought to the side courtyard.

“And the other half?”

“Put it on my account.”

I laughed. “You scholars learn wickedness quickly.”

He laughed too, then looked up at my sign.

“Xu’s Accounts for Women.”

“Vulgar?”

“Easy to remember.”

I put away the ledger.

“Jiang Yanbai.”

“Yes?”

“Does the Qingzhou Girls’ School need an accountant?”

His gaze was very still.

“It always has.”

“Then wait your turn.”

“How long?”

I thought about it.

“Until I finish settling all the accounts in the capital.”

“All right,” he said softly.

Those words were lighter than every rule Lanyi Academy had ever taught.

And truer than any of them.

**End of the Main Story**

## Afterword: Jiang Yanbai

When Xu Man first entered the academy, I did indeed write this on her evaluation:

Least suited to enter the palace.

At the time, I thought I was saving her.

Lanyi Academy was no good place. Neither was the Eastern Palace.

Only later did I understand that what I called saving her was merely choosing a road I considered safe on her behalf.

She did not need that.

She wanted to do her own accounting.

After the final examination that year, I was sent down to Qingzhou. Before I left, I visited the Xu home.

Xu Man’s father was gravely ill, but he insisted on pressing his thumbprint onto the documents for her independent household.

“Lord Jiang,” he asked me, “has my daughter caused a great deal of trouble in the palace?”

“Yes.”

He smiled.

“Good. She was too sensible when she was little. I always feared she would spend her entire life saving money for everyone but herself.”

I remembered those words for many years.

Twelve students came to the Qingzhou Girls’ School on its first day.

The oldest was a thirty-seven-year-old widow.

The youngest was eight and could not yet write her own name.

I taught them arithmetic.

When I reached the subject of tuition, I suddenly thought of Xu Man.

She would certainly have asked about refunds.

So I hung a sign at the gate.

Tuition posted clearly.

Meals are filling.

Withdraw and half will be refunded.

The school did reasonably well.

Every year, when I returned to the capital to report, I visited Xu Man’s shop.

She always said she was busy.

She truly was.

There always seemed to be someone in the capital who needed her to settle an account: dowries, medicine, allowances, funerals, tuition.

She sat behind the counter, her abacus clattering.

When someone cried, she offered a handkerchief.

When someone cursed her, she cursed back.

When someone asked whether a woman running an accounting office was afraid, she answered, “I’m afraid of accounts that don’t balance.”

Later, Xu Man hung the first page of that old evaluation register in her shop.

The paper still read:

Eats too much, writes too stiffly, and smiles like a debt collector.

Least suited to enter the palace.

Beneath it, she added a line in her own hand.

Suited to refunds.

Suited to eating well.

Suited to disobedience.

Whenever I saw it, I thought the original evaluation had not been badly written.

She truly was unsuited to the palace.

She was suited to the living world.