It was possibly all coincidence, but Father was acting strange. Constable Han was acting strange. His wife as well. Perhaps heaven and earth had switched places and Jin-mei was the only one who found any of it odd.
Amah was out in the garden, watching over Jin-mei’s two brothers, which meant the old nursemaid was sitting beneath the shade of pavilion as the boys fought over a wooden boat.
She passed them by with a nod to Amah and went to her father’s study. The room was cool and dark with the shutters drawn. A sanctuary.
She had never, never been in Father’s study without his permission. Her hand trembled as she opened the drawer. A seed of an idea had been planted inside her. If she didn’t rid herself of this suspicion immediately, it would continue to take root and fester.
There were letters in the drawer. She looked quickly through them, finding nothing of any significance. Beneath the letters lay a thin book with a blue cover. She lifted it and saw a folded paper tucked away at the very bottom of the drawer.
Jin-mei opened up the paper to find that it was a note for five thousand taels of silver. Five thousand? It was an extraordinary amount of money. The red seal at the bottom of the note contained the character for ‘Bao.’ The Bao family chop, perhaps.
If this was meant to be a wedding gift, it was an extravagant one. Bao Yang came from a line of successful merchants, but she hadn’t realised how wealthy he was until now. How wealthy he had been...
Slowly, she folded the bank note and put it back beneath the book. There were officials who were corrupt and took bribes, but she’d always been confident that her father wasn’t one of them. He’d never shown any interest in money. When he spoke, it was of honesty, of moral behaviour, of law and order.
She could just ask her father why he had so much of Bao Yang’s money. They had always been able to say anything to one another. She’d always trusted him. She knew him.
Yet Jin-mei’s instincts told her Father had been hiding something for a while now. Ever since Bao Yang had come back into their lives.
Suddenly the details of her wedding night came back to her, not as a personal memory steeped in emotion, but as fragmented pieces. The pieces had always seemed oddly familiar to her, but she couldn’t place exactly why. A wedding banquet. A groom chased into the woods. The story had the mark of a classic tragedy.
Jin-mei went to her father’s shelves and began to look through the books. There were volumes of history and poetry, but the books she’d always enjoyed most were the extraordinary case records. Stories of scheming criminals bested by clever officials. Once she could read, she had borrowed the books from her father and read them herself. He’d always found her fascination for these tales amusing.
When she finally found the account, her heart stopped. There was a wedding. And a murder.
Clutching the book to her chest, she went to her room. Once the door was shut, she opened the book once more. A woman and her lover schemed to rob her wealthy neighbour by seducing him into marriage. On their wedding night, with guests all around, the groom was seen running from the bridal chamber, his hair in disarray. Mad.
The similarities were too much of a coincidence. Had the entire night been staged? But why? She wanted to run back to the tribunal to demand an answer from her father, but she already knew what would happen. He would deflect her suspicions. He would weave together colourful lies and she would believe him because she wanted to be convinced.
With shaking hands, Jin-mei collected her wedding money and a few belongings into a satchel. She didn’t need to read the case record to remember the rest of the details. The groom had thrown himself into the river while the guests looked on in horror. They knew it was him because of his ceremonial wedding robe. Though the river was searched, his body was never found.
Jin-mei had to know what had happened to Bao Yang. Even more than a sense of justice, her father had impressed upon her the importance of finding the truth.
Calmly, Jin-mei informed her amah that she was going to visit the constable’s wife, but instead hired a carriage to take her outside of the city walls to her father’s villa. Being wed and then widowed within a day must have emboldened her.
Her thoughts buzzed in her head like a nest of wasps. When she’d told Father she’d seen Yang alive, he hadn’t argued with her. Instead, her father had nodded sympathetically. He’d listened without judgement, and even agreed with her that she was not mistaken in what she’d seen. Most particularly, he’d brought up her mother. They rarely spoke of Mother, but Father had done so, confiding in Jin-mei and telling her a story that made her heart ache. He’d cast all her doubts aside and effectively quieted her.
Because as a magistrate, he knew how to detect falsehoods and how to create them. Father was a master of lies.
* * *
The villa was no longer draped in red and lit with lanterns. It had been locked down, with only a lone groundskeeper and his family assigned to watch over it. The groundskeeper was a middle-aged man whose hair was thinning slightly on top. He was surprised to see her, but let her in without protest.
‘You and your family attended to my husband while he stayed here, did you not?’ she asked as she wandered from room to room.
‘Yes, Lady Tan—my apologies. I meant, Bao Furen.’
He addressed her by her married title as Bao Yang’s wife. A pang of regret struck Jin-mei as she entered the bridal chamber. The red sheets and decorations had all been cleared away. The bed itself was bare and cold.
She closed her eyes. She remembered sitting on the bed and waiting for Yang. They were supposed to consummate their marriage that night. Perhaps coupling would be as awkward as it appeared on the bronze mirror or as profound and ephemeral as it sounded in poems. Regardless of what it would be, she had been excited to be discovering the answer with him. Excited and frightened and happy.
If she stayed any longer, her heart would shatter into a hundred pieces. Gently, with great care, she closed the door as if shutting it on an invalid on a deathbed, not wanting to disturb what little rest might remain.
‘Did you attend the wedding?’ she asked the groundskeeper.
The man was following behind her solicitously. For all he knew, her visit was nothing more than the whim of a grieving widow. For all she knew, maybe it was.
‘No, my lady. Magistrate Tan freed us from our obligations that day. We went into the city to visit family.’
She continued through the rest of the villa. The banquet room had been swept and all the tables cleared and stored. On the other side of the house, the side facing the woods, she entered a spacious chamber with a canopied bed. This bed had also been stripped of all curtains and bedding. At the foot of the bed, beside one of the legs, was a speck of something. She knelt down to retrieve it, closing two fingers around a candied lotus seed.
There had been lotus seeds scattered on her bed the night of the wedding to symbolise fertility and good fortune. Lotus seeds in two places. Two bridal chambers?
On the night of her wedding, Yang would have left the party, ushered away by the well-wishers who were guests at the banquet. By tradition, they would lead him to her bed in case he was too drunk to make it there himself. But Yang had never appeared in her chamber. Instead, the next time anyone saw him, he was being chased into the woods.
In the story of the tragic wedding, the greedy woman had continued to live for years as a widow, wealthy with her late husband’s fortune. No one knew that there was actually a tunnel connecting the two houses. And that the groom hadn’t thrown himself into the river that night. He hadn’t left the house at all. Years later, the constables found a corpse hidden in the tunnel, still dressed in his wedding robe.
What if the guests had never intended