My Sworn Sister's Cousin-by-Marriage Walked Into My Teahouse novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Sergeant's Tea
Qiao must stay silent overhead while the sergeant watches the hall. Her cousin Pei Mingshan walks in, smiles, and Jinyu lies to his face. That night Qiao comes to her door.
By ten o'clock the Tingsong Teahouse was full, and every customer knew the sergeant by sight.
They knew him because he had not moved.
He sat at the corner table with one pot of Longjing gone cold and a second ordered.
He watched the kitchen door.
Jinyu carried trays the way she did every morning.
She smiled at the boatmen, scolded the printer for putting his elbows in the sweet cakes, and let the old storyteller climb onto his stage.
She did all of it with her ears turned upward.
Above the kitchen the floorboards had been silent for three hours.
Auntie Hu came out of the kitchen with a basket of steamed buns.
She put it down beside Jinyu hard enough to make the buns jump.
"There's a girl in the back room," Auntie Hu said, very low.
"My cousin from Suzhou."
"You haven't got a cousin in Suzhou."
"I have now."
Auntie Hu looked at her over the basket for a long moment.
"She's tall for Suzhou," she said, and went back to the stove.
The storyteller began his tale of the Three Kingdoms, and the hall settled.
Jinyu poured the sergeant's third cup herself.
"The tea's on the house," she said. "You're a man who works hard, Sergeant. Is there a thief in my teahouse?"
"There's a thief somewhere in Nanshi," he said.
"Lin Qiao. Twenty-four, tall, glasses, ink on her fingers. She's a bookkeeper, so she'll have clean boots and a polite way of lying."
"I've no bookkeepers here."
"Everybody's got a cousin from somewhere," he said mildly.
He looked at her.
Jinyu kept pouring.
The cup was exactly full when the door opened and the whole hall changed.
A man in a grey silk gown came in out of the sun, with gold-rimmed glasses and a smile that arrived before he did.
He was perhaps thirty-six, with smooth hands and a neat part in his hair, and the customers made room for him without knowing why.
The sergeant stood.
"Banker Pei."
"Sergeant. Sit, please. I'm only a visitor."
He crossed the hall to Jinyu with both hands out.
"Sister-in-law," he said warmly. "How long has it been?"
Jinyu felt her own face go smooth and polite.
Pei Mingshan had married her sworn sister six years ago, and in six years he had never once come to her teahouse.
"Banker Pei," she said. "Ruolan didn't say you were coming."
"Ruolan doesn't know. She thinks I'm at the bank." He smiled again. "I came for the tea."
He sat at a table near the kitchen and ordered a pot of ordinary leaf.
When she brought it he turned the cup slowly in his fingers and spoke in the voice of a man mentioning the weather.
"My cousin Qiao has been unwell. It's a sorrow to the whole family. She has delusions about money."
"She believes she owes people, which is a terrible thing in a girl who works in a bank."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"If she were to come to you," he said, "you would send word to me at once. Wouldn't you?"
"For her sake," he added. "A doctor is waiting."
"Of course."
"Because Ruolan and I would be so grieved if a friend of the family let her hide."
Above them, a board creaked.
It was a very small sound, and Jinyu heard it.
The storyteller's voice rose to a drumroll, and the boatmen at the next table roared at the battle.
Mingshan's eyes had flicked upward, then back to her face, as pleasant as before.
"Old building," Jinyu said. "The mice come down for the sweet cakes."
"I'm sure they do."
He drank his tea.
He didn't ask to see upstairs.
He left a silver dollar for a ten-cent pot.
He laid a printed card on top of it, with his name and the Hengtai Bank's address in gilt.
"For when you remember something," he said.
Then he thanked the sergeant by name, and the whole hall watched him go.
That night Jinyu closed the shutters and counted a poor day's coins.
The sergeant had left at dusk, with a constable stationed outside the door.
She went up the stairs to her own room at the top.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with her hair coming out of its pin.
She hadn't lit the lamp.
She was too tired to make a joke of herself, and too awake to sleep.
A knock came at the door, so soft it was almost a scratch.
She opened it.
Qiao stood in the narrow landing in the borrowed gown, holding her glasses in her bandaged hand.
Her eyes, without them, were wide and dark and unprotected.
"I'm sorry," Qiao said. "I know it's late."
"What is it?"
"I heard his voice through the floor. I heard everything." Her mouth shook once and steadied. "I can't sleep in a room he's been under."
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