Chapter 18: Willow Lane

Madam Xiao was awake, as Shuyi had known she would be.

The room above the stall was cold and neat, with one lamp and a pot of weak tea on the brazier.

The old woman sat propped on her pillows in her patched blue gown.

Her white bun was tight, and her thin hands were folded over a stack of paper.

"You are early," she said.

"Not by thirty days."

"I was sent home."

"So I see."

Madam Xiao patted the bed beside her.

Shuyi put down the brush case and sat, and the old woman took her chin in her fingers and tipped her face to the lamp.

"Crying, and not wanting me to see," she said.

"Who is she?"

Shuyi opened her mouth to lie, and found she could not.

"A general," she said.

"Ah."

"Tall?"

"Very."

"Cross?"

"Always."

"And you love her."

"I do."

Madam Xiao nodded.

"Then why are you here and not there?"

"Because she sent me away."

"And you went?"

"What was I supposed to do, sit in the road?"

"I did, at your age," said Madam Xiao.

"For three hours, in the rain."

"She came out, in the end."

"Who?"

"Never mind who," the old woman said, and smiled at something far behind her eyes.

Then she lifted the stack of paper.

"Your debt is paid," she said.

"A man in a quartermaster's coat came three days ago with sixty taels in a cloth and said it was from the garrison."

"He would not give his name, and he had a grey beard and a bad knee."

Shuyi put her face in her hands.

Mo, she thought, and could have laughed or wept.

"Now you owe nobody, and you are free to be as stupid as you like," said Madam Xiao.

"Look at these."

She held out the papers.

They were cheap grey sheets, folded in four, printed in thick black type from a woodblock.

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