Since the day two years ago when Nie Yunzhu and Hutao, mistress and maid, walked out of Jinfeng Tower, they had lived together like sisters and each tried to shoulder whatever work she could. But mistress and maid they still were, in the end, and most of the housework fell to Hutao; Nie Yunzhu only did the simple things.
Every day she embroidered some fine brocade, now and then stitched shoe soles and handkerchiefs, and every few days went to Jinfeng Tower to teach a qin piece — that was how she kept the household going.
Her embroidery, of course, followed the self-indulgent connoisseur's road: fine quality, but the hours and the cost were high, and in the end it did not earn much.
Since Hutao had fallen gravely ill last month, Nie Yunzhu had unavoidably had to take these things on herself. Simple dishes she could still manage, and washing clothes was no great matter — she was unpracticed, that was all, perhaps not as clean as Hutao got them. Only a few days before Mid-Autumn she had bought that old hen, meaning to stew it and build Hutao up, and that was when she ended up making one blunder after another.
She caught the hen but did not dare kill it; then she let it get away and chased it right into the river, threw away the cleaver as well, and got a kindly passerby who tried to pull her out into trouble as well. After the man hauled her onto the bank, her first act on waking was to slap him across the face. Then the next day, when she went back to fish out the cleaver, he happened to see her again, and even helped her kill the chicken...
Ordinarily she was a composed, unhurried sort of woman. After so many years in a pleasure house she had seen a great many people, and she set some store by how she appeared.
Who would have thought that every single time this man had laid eyes on her, it was in the middle of something humiliating — the very thought of it made her squirm. A few days ago she had fallen ill along with Hutao; luckily the cold had not been serious, but she had not recovered until after Mid-Autumn either.
And then, thinking back, she had not even managed to ask her benefactor's name.
Huyan Leifeng...
Huyan Leifeng, she was not even sure she had it right. Who could have guessed she would run into him here today.
Nie Yunzhu had in her time known a good many people. This young man was probably just past twenty, and he looked scholarly; but thinking back on it, there was something in the way he did things that set him apart from other men. The way he spoke, the way he acted, all of it.
He seemed calm and easygoing — from the moment he saved her, to the way he reacted after she slapped him, to the way he helped her kill the chicken, said his piece and left.
Following him now, she saw that he did indeed seem to want to buy charcoal; only after he had looked the charcoal over and exchanged a few words with the shopkeeper did the situation turn a little strange.
It was nearly late autumn and winter was coming on; most households would be laying in charcoal, and there were naturally places that sold it loose. But this shop bagged its charcoal and sold it by the sack.
After the man spoke with the shopkeeper, he actually tipped a whole sack of charcoal out onto the ground, took up a cloth bag, squatted down and began picking through the sticks one by one. Few of them passed his inspection; often he had to scratch a few marks on the ground with one before tossing it into the bag.
The shopkeeper was not angry, only asked a curious question or two, and then went about his own business.
She watched a moment, then went up and stopped just behind and to one side of him, and bent over. "Benefactor?"
"Hm?" The man turned his head and glanced at her, and evidently recognized her. "Oh, it's you. What a coincidence." His hands never stopped, still busy sorting charcoal.
The reaction and the words were both a little odd.
Confucian culture had by now reached its height, and its rules of courtesy and address were intricate and exacting; an ordinary man, seeing a woman come up to him, would at the very least straighten and bow, treating her with gentle courtesy — that air of refinement had become a habit of the whole society.
Yet "Oh, it's you, what a coincidence," said so offhandedly, was the first of its kind Nie Yunzhu had ever met with, and somehow it felt entirely natural. She blinked, a little taken aback, then gathered her skirt and squatted down beside him.
"Benefactor..."
"Ha, it was only a chicken. It's nothing. No need to keep calling me benefactor." The man waved a hand with a smile, saying it as if it were nothing at all.
"Does my benefactor remember only the chicken, and not pulling me out of the river?"
"Ah..."
He was blank for a moment, and then it registered. Nie Yunzhu could not help bursting into laughter. The two of them were squatting side by side in front of that heap of charcoal, and she tilted her head to look at him. "My name is Nie Yunzhu." She waited a moment, making sure he had taken the name in, before going on, "Is my benefactor's name Huyan Leifeng?"
"Hu— Huyan Leifeng..."
For a moment the man's expression seemed to twitch several times, very complicated; then he laughed. "Heh. Ning Yi," he said. "Ning Yi, Ning Liheng."
At that name, Nie Yunzhu went blank as well.
"Shui Diao Ge Tou..."
"That man's name is Ning Yi, courtesy name Liheng..."
"The Su family's live-in son-in-law, oh..."
"He probably bought the poem to fish for a name..."
The shock of first seeing that ci at Jinfeng Tower still clung to her mind, and the girls' chatter came flashing back through it. Ning Yi, Ning Liheng. At the time she had simply admired the lines; she had not yet digested the charm of the ci itself, and had little taste for gossiping about people, so the name had been nothing to her at all — she had not even thought about it. But now it struck her mind like a blow.
She stayed dazed for a good while before she came back to herself. "Young Master Ning... may I ask what you want the charcoal for?"
"Mm, for writing." Ning Yi tapped the wooden board on the ground, which had been coated with a layer of white paint, then took a stick of charcoal with fine powder and wrote the character Nie on the ground. He had probably meant to write out the name he had just heard, Nie Yunzhu; but at the last stroke of Nie he paused, evidently thinking it a little rude to write her name out just like that, and shifted to a fresh spot and wrote the two characters "Ning Yi" instead.
The characters followed the regular script, vigorous and powerful; as he finished the final stroke, the charcoal snapped in his fingers. Nie Yunzhu was accomplished in calligraphy herself, and she weighed it in her mind: holding a stick of charcoal was not the same as holding a brush. If she had written with charcoal, the result would have been far inferior. That he could produce this with charcoal, offhand like that — his grasp of calligraphy must already make him a master in his own right.
In these times poetry and calligraphy were one house; a man of deep accomplishment in calligraphy was generally reckoned a great scholar of his generation, or near enough. Someone who could write like this, writing that Shui Diao Ge Tou — there was no reason to doubt it. So the rumors really were mostly not worth believing, Nie Yunzhu thought.
Little did she know that Ning Yi's brushwork was merely passable; it was with chalk and pen that he had drilled every sort of fancy lettering. Later, once he had rank and standing, and a certain state of mind behind him, the characters he wrote had gained a little more force.
Looking at those two characters now, they were a slight step down, but still good enough to put one over on people.
Calligraphy isn't the work of a single day. I can't very well let those students who slave over their brushes all day think their teacher's handwriting is ugly...
"Take it into the classroom, write on this whiteboard, wipe it off when you're done. With a sand table the outlines aren't clear enough, and you have to keep sweeping it smooth; besides, a sand table lies flat, and the students' necks get tired looking at it. This can hang upright."
"Classroom... a school? Is Young Master Ning a teacher at a school?"
"Mm, a small school. Teaching a few students so hopeless they could fly to the heavens and burrow into the earth a thing or two about reading and writing..."
"Heh... Young Master Ning, will this one do?"
In the brothels and pleasure houses, the art of getting on with people naturally was much prized; given a little preparation, Nie Yunzhu was confident she could talk easily with anyone without a trace of awkwardness. This time too the talk had come naturally — but it was not her own doing, she felt; it came from his manner instead.
Between them they picked over the charcoal sticks and soon filled that little cloth bag, and their hands were black by then. When it came time to pay, Ning Yi handed over a dozen-odd coppers extra for that small bag of charcoal.
"That shopkeeper is being quite unreasonable, charging a dozen coppers more for a few sticks of charcoal," Nie Yunzhu said once they were outside.
"Ha, well, I did put him out. I imagine it was only because he heard I was taking it to a school that he let me pick and choose at all. A teacher's standing does come in handy."
"If you need more next time, Young Master, you might as well buy a few sacks and sort them at home. You'd be using them at home in any case, and you'd save the money."
"Haha, next time I won't be doing the picking. I'll have those students bring in whatever suits them to the school themselves."
A little later the two of them washed their hands clean in the Qinhuai River — one carrying the board and the charcoal, the other a cloth bundle and a packet of medicine — and walked on, one behind the other. Nie Yunzhu brought up again how he had pulled her from the river; Ning Yi merely waved a hand and said it was no great matter, brushing the whole thing off lightly.
The two exchanged a few words now and then, and the mood between them was natural in a rather strange way. After they had gone some distance, Nie Yunzhu, a step behind him, thought of the spirit of the Shui Diao Ge Tou, and it suddenly came to her that perhaps only a man this free and unhurried could have written such a poem.
They walked a good way like that, until they came to a bend in the river, where Ning Yi finally stopped to take his leave. Not far off the riverbank lay calm and bright, willows green along the water; a teahouse and a few small shops stood there, and beside the teahouse was a little chess stall where two old men were placidly playing a game. One of them was dressed head to toe in satin and brocade, a man of obvious wealth and consequence.
She bowed to him in farewell. After a few parting words she paused a moment, then set off. He too walked on a short way, straight toward the teahouse and the chess stall; the two old men seemed to know him, and said something with a laugh. His voice drifted faintly back to her.
"...these last few days you two have done me in but good... this morning that Yu Zixing actually came looking for me..."
She walked on. When she turned for a last look, the man was sitting there watching the game, a cup of tea in his hand, taking a light sip. There had been no great involvement between them; with the pretext of repaying a kindness gone, in a Jiangning this large there might never be another chance to meet.
In the way he spoke and dealt with people there seemed to be so little calculation, so little design — something she had scarcely ever seen among the talented scholars and famous gentlemen she had met.
All along the way he had been easy and natural, unconstrained and free, with little of fuss or formality, and yet he never made one uncomfortable; and all the while he had kept a real distance — quite like the bearing of the Tang literati she had heard tell of.
Nowadays every man of letters spoke of the gentleman; perhaps a gentleman ought to have just such elegance and bearing.
Perhaps they would not meet again, and he had not made much of those "kindnesses" either — but a figure like that she had already set down in her heart.
Ning Yi, Ning Liheng...
So Nie Yunzhu thought as she turned her steps homeward.