Chapter 24: A Letter to Shuyi

The new stall stood under the arch of the garrison's east gate, and it had a signboard.

The one-eyed sergeant had carved it himself, with a great deal of swearing, and it read QIN SHUYI, COPYIST, LETTERS WRITTEN AND MENDED.

Shuyi sat behind the counter three mornings after the Drum Tower, with her brush case open and the sun on her hands.

A line had already formed.

A cook wanted a letter to his sister.

A boy of nineteen wanted a letter to a girl, and blushed to the ears when she asked what he wanted it to say.

Tan Bao came by at noon with a basket of steamed buns and sat on the wall beside her.

"I am to read the sixth letter at New Year," he said.

"The general asked me."

"Will you cry?"

"Every year," said Tan Bao, with great dignity.

"I have decided it is part of the duty."

He left her half the buns and went off whistling.

Madam Xiao arrived in the afternoon in a sedan chair, carried by two grinning recruits.

She had been given the sunny room in the east wing of the residence, and she pronounced the kitchen, the tea and the quartermaster adequate.

"She is a good one," she told Shuyi, and was carried away.

All day the letters came and went.

At dusk Shuyi shut the stall, carried the ink pots in, and walked through the plum garden to the residence.

The house was quiet.

Mo had gone off to find his dinner and a bone-setter for his knee.

The study door stood half open, and a single candle burned on the table.

Lanxin sat there in her inner robe with her hair down and a brush in her hand, writing.

She did not look up.

Shuyi leaned in the doorway and watched her.

It was a different way of writing.

She used to write like a soldier firing arrows, fast and steady.

Now she bent over the page with her tongue between her teeth, and rubbed out a stroke, and wrote it again.

At last she blew on the ink and held the page out without turning her head.

"I am told this is a thing people do," she said.

"Read it."

Shuyi took it.

The hand was upright and square and a little uneven, plain and strong.

It was the first time she had seen Lanxin write something that was neither an order nor a lie.

Shuyi,

I have written sixty letters to a man who was not there.

This is the first I have written to a person who is.

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