Chapter 21: The Grey Ledger

The steward did not sit.

He stood in the middle of the study with the lacquer box in his arms and his eyes on the door.

"I am not here," he said.

"If anyone asks, I came to beg you to withdraw a complaint about my master's rudeness."

"Sit," said Lanxin, in a voice that was not an order.

He sat on the very edge of a stool.

Lanxin poured him tea herself and set it by his hand.

He did not touch it.

"Eleven years I have served Censor Du," he said.

"I have kept his accounts, his seals, and his letters."

"I have never once asked where the silver came from."

"Today I understood that I would be the one hanged for it."

He opened the box.

Inside lay two ledgers, one bound in blue, one in grey.

"The blue book is what the Ministry sees," he said.

"The grey one is true."

He pushed it across the table toward Shuyi.

"I cannot read his private hand," he said.

"He writes the figures in a shorthand of his own.

I only know where to put the stamp."

Shuyi took the grey ledger.

The characters were small and cramped and slanted hard to the right, with every cross-stroke too long.

She knew it at once, because it was a hand, and she had never met one she could not learn.

"It's a clerk's private cipher," she said slowly.

"The numbers are merchants' marks, and the names are in short forms."

"Give me a moment."

She read down the first page with her finger.

Lanxin watched her without breathing.

After a while Shuyi looked up.

"Grain," she said.

"Du's nephew's family holds the contract to feed the Northern Garrison."

"Six thousand men, three seasons a year."

"The rice is mouldy, and half the weight is sand."

"And Du takes four parts in ten from the merchant, for signing the quartermaster's receipts."

Lanxin said nothing.

She had gone very still.

"The bad grain started three winters ago," the steward said.

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