Chapter 7: The Sound of Eating

Jiang Linchuan had not eaten a full dinner in company for fourteen years, and he knew the exact date it had stopped.

He was seventeen. It was the night Grandmother's funeral reception ended.

He had sat at the foot of the long table, as he always had, and watched the dishes go round to the head first.

By the time the plates reached him they were cold and half gone.

That was how he had learned the rule of the seat.

The house fed its heir first, its elders second, and its borrowed son last.

Nobody was cruel about it. It was simply the order.

At eight years old, when his father's best friend took him in from the wreckage of a car, he had been told only one thing.

"You will be useful, and you will not be a burden."

He had been useful ever since.

At six in the evening, he sat at his desk in the Lakeside Court and did not read the quarterly report in front of him.

He listened to the moon gate instead.

On the other side of the wall, Wei Anzhi was talking to his friend about corn prices, with his mouth full.

It was a loud, careless, happy sound.

Linchuan had spent six years teaching every servant in this house to be quiet.

He found that he could not stop hearing it.

A knock came at the door, and it was Madam Su.

She stood in the doorway in her grey jacket, and for the first time since her husband's funeral she looked old.

"Linchuan," she said. "Close the door."

He did.

"I want you to ask the trustees to postpone the hearing," said Madam Su.

"Until spring. Until we can run a third test, at a better laboratory."

"A third test is a month's delay at least. Second Uncle will call it stalling."

"Let him," said Madam Su.

"Why?"

She did not answer. She was looking at the pen tray on his desk, very steadily.

"I am asking you as someone who has never asked you for anything."

That was true. She had asked him for nothing in twenty-three years, and he had understood what her silence meant.

It meant that he was not hers, and she would not make a claim on him.

"No," said Linchuan, as gently as he knew how.

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