Now that the corruption case surrounding the levee had just begun to yield results, Lord Li Guitian—the very official presiding over the investigation—had met with disaster.
And what was more, it was entirely possible that Lord Li had been made to die in place of the Sixth Imperial Prince. How could anyone fail to suspect the Ninth Imperial Prince?
Every eye in the court stole glances at Prince Rui’s face—while Prince Rui himself was seething with a fury that looked as though his eyes might burst from their sockets, like a painting of the demon-vanquishing Zhong Kui.
The Ninth Prince had been caught completely off guard by his Sixth Brother’s ambush. He stood there in the middle of the court unable to leap forward and cry injustice without appearing to incriminate himself, and yet equally unable to escape the suspicion gathering around him. Naturally his face cycled through shades of pale and ashen by turns, and his discomfort was considerable.
His affiliated ministers and officials, however, were not ones to simply fold their hands. As both factions gradually gathered their wits and found their footing, blades came out of sheaths at once and the battle of words began in earnest.
But all the energy of the assembled court was bent on arguing over the rights and wrongs of the matter, and who the hand behind it all might be. As for the two pillars of the nation who had been swept away by the water—no one seemed to spare a thought for whether they were alive or dead.
In the end, the Emperor said only that the two men were to be found as soon as possible and given a proper burial.
Evidently, everyone had already concluded that those two were beyond saving.
Young Master Li had not originally intended to say too much to a woman who lived in the inner quarters like Su Luoyun. But there was so much anguish and frustration pent up inside him that he could not contain it.
If the Sixth Imperial Prince had been willing to dispatch rescue boats at the time, his father and the Shizi might not have been beyond saving.
And so, though he had not wanted to presume to discuss affairs of state, the oppressive weight on his chest became too much—and with Su Luoyun’s gentle, patient coaxing, he spoke, little by little, about what had transpired at court.
Of course, when he recounted these court struggles to the Shizi Consort, he confined himself to stating what had happened without expressing much personal opinion. But Luoyun, listening to the tone of his voice, could hear the fury underneath it plainly enough.
All because of a factional power struggle at court, the Yan County disaster—and two living human lives—had been turned into nothing more than a fuse for attacking political enemies.
The Sixth Imperial Prince had deliberately withheld the news, all so he could detonate it on the court floor and catch Prince Rui off guard—and in doing so, had squandered the critical window for rescue.
Now the entire attention of the court was consumed by the contest between the two Princes.
Apart from Prince Beizhen’s household and the Li family, it seemed that no one cared in the least whether those two missing men were alive or dead.
On the second day after the letter was sent, condolence messages began arriving one after another at Prince Beizhen’s Shizi household. The palace also sent people to deliver gifts of consolation.
These gifts of condolence were, in spirit, rather like the white envelopes one sent in advance to a funeral.
Everyone evidently assumed the men were gone, and urged the womenfolk of both households to restrain their grief—and to begin making preparations for the funeral rites. Even if the bodies could not be recovered from the water, a proper burial mound with the deceased’s belongings would eventually need to be arranged, so that wandering souls might have somewhere to return.
Even some of Han Linfeng’s old drinking companions and social acquaintances sent letters—with breathtaking shamelessness—expressing their tender concern for the Shizi Consort.
Perhaps afraid that their departed brother’s mind had been addled by the cold water, they had written with the apparent intention of fitting a green hat onto a dead man’s head. The letters were full of insinuating and suggestive language—lines along the sort of “how pitiable that such a lovely face goes unwashed by rain; come nightfall, open the western gate and find sweet springs within,” or “my heart longs to tend this bloom and plant it on a jade terrace; yet no peach blossom has fallen upon a pillow to share.”
They might as well have simply come knocking at the widow Shizi’s chamber door in the dead of night, to offer their own services as bedwarmer and fill the void their departed friend had left behind.
Aside from this shameless brigade, Su Hongmeng also caught wind of the news and came running to see his daughter. After offering a brief word of consolation, he got directly to the point and asked her what she intended to do next.
If Han Linfeng had drowned, this did not count as a formal dissolution of marriage. For a woman so young to be widowed—if she remarried and left the Shizi’s household, she could take her own dowry and the original betrothal gifts, and might also negotiate some portion of the Shizi household’s properties as compensation.
Su Hongmeng urged her to start making plans early, so that when people from Prince Beizhen’s household in Liangzhou arrived, she would not be in an awkward position when she had to leave.
Su Luoyun had no intention whatsoever of laying claim to any part of the Shizi household’s assets. Hearing her father speak in the manner of a petty merchant, she could not help but frown slightly.
“What is Father talking about? There isn’t even any news yet—why have you already counted him among the dead? You need not come and sit with me. I am perfectly capable of waiting for news on my own.”
Su Hongmeng, who had considered himself to be giving his daughter a thoughtful and well-intentioned nudge, was met with ingratitude and could only wave a hand in mild resignation: “When you married into this household, I thought your fortune had finally turned—and now it comes to this. One of these days I’ll find you a reputable fortune-teller to improve your fate. Your destiny is simply too overpowering, child—you bring misfortune to your mother and now to your husband. Without adjustment, how can this go on?”
This time, Su Luoyun had absolutely no patience left for it. She called out directly to the gatehouse attendant beside her: “Go—see Master Su out! Before the inauspicious air in here does him some harm, and he starts claiming afterward that the misfortune-bringer finished him off!”
Su Hongmeng saw that his daughter had turned sharp and did not take it to heart. He rose with tolerably good humor: “All right, all right—look at you now, quite the commanding presence! The day will come when you crawl back to me in tears, and you won’t know fair words from foul ones anymore! This stubbornness of yours—whoever did you inherit it from?”
Su Hongmeng shuffled off, muttering to himself. Xiangcao came to urge Luoyun: “Young miss, it is terribly cold here—why not go back to your room to wait? It is not so many steps away.”
Though the gatehouse had a fire burning in the brazier, it was a thoroughfare where people came and went constantly, and even the heavy curtain at the door could not keep out the drafts. Deep autumn had set in and the air had turned cold. The young miss had also not slept in a night—catching a chill would be dangerous.
Luoyun was already beginning to feel a faint, dull ache in her head. But lying down in her room felt impossible—she might as well stay here and wait.
Just then, the little lion-cat Axue leapt up into her arms, curled itself into a tight ball, and let out a soft, coaxing meow.
In the days since Han Linfeng had left, it had been Axue warming her bed at night. She still remembered saying once, in the Su family’s small courtyard, that she wished she had a cat to warm her bed in winter.
And not long after, Han Linfeng had given her this little kitten.
She had never dwelt on it before—but now she could not help but wonder whether Han Linfeng had heard that careless wish of hers.
She could not think of anyone who had ever been so kind to her in quite the way he was.
Running her fingers through the cat’s long, soft fur, she found herself turning over every small moment she had shared with the Shizi. For reasons she could not explain, the more she thought, the more a quiet grief pressed in on her.
The sorrow that had come too late resembled a chest sealed with clay and sunk to the depths—once the thick mud casing had been softened and worn through by the water, the dull ache beneath could no longer be locked away, and it crept upward through her heart, inch by inch. She could not even tell whether she was grieving for herself, or for him.
She had no desire at all now to think about her own future prospects. She only wanted to find him quickly and bring him back.
She was still lost in these scattered thoughts when someone knocked at the gatehouse door again.
The gatekeeper answered it and found that it was the attendant Luoyun had stationed at the small courtyard to look after Hongyun who had come back.
She reported that Hongyun had quietly packed up her belongings and slipped away with her maid, without a word to anyone.
It turned out that news of the Shizi being swept away in the flood had reached the courtesan Hongyun’s ears as well.
At first, Hongyun had held onto hope, praying that the Shizi would come home safely.
But two days later, her young maidservant had pointed something out to her: if the Shizi truly did not come back, she ought to be careful—she might find herself unable to leave, and be kept for the burial rites. After all, the Shizi had no sons as yet. Even if a nobleman of the imperial family died, the household could not simply be left without a successor. High-ranking households sometimes invoked the practice of having concubines follow the master in death. Though they would not go so far as to force the legitimate wife to accompany him to the grave, there was precedent for giving poison to concubines and lesser companions.
Hongyun listened to her little maid spin this tale and broke out in a cold sweat—it was as though she had already found herself standing inside a tomb. Whatever lingering affection she had held onto was frightened clean out of her.
She thought it over and concluded that the wisest course was to put some distance between herself and the Shizi’s affairs before anything could be decided. After all, she had paid for her own freedom—she owed the Shizi’s household nothing. And if the Shizi did return, she could simply come back to seek him out.
After this many days, anyone with eyes could see that the Shizi’s body would probably not even be easy to recover.
Her mind made up, she immediately had her little maid help pack her belongings, and while the attendant sent by the household slept during the night, she took a hired carriage and slipped away with her maid—to wherever some former patron of hers might have taken her in.
When the attendant told Luoyun about Hongyun’s disappearance, Luoyun only let out a quiet sigh and said mildly: “She paid her own way to freedom—naturally she may come and go as she pleases.”
But she could not help feeling a quiet pang of sorrow on Han Linfeng’s behalf. It turned out that the story of undying devotion Hongyun had wept and pleaded through with such feeling was something this fragile all along.
That evening, Manager Geng had a day-bed moved into the gatehouse for the Shizi Consort.
The old steward had originally assumed that the Shizi’s decision to marry this girl had been one of necessity, with no other choice available.
But sometimes it takes a great event to show you who someone truly is.
This girl was a genuinely good young woman. When the entire household had been thrown into chaos—when the young Commandery Princess could do nothing but weep—it was this apparently frail young woman who had first steadied everyone around her, and then thought to contact the Li household and dispatch the letter to find boats and launch a search.
Now everyone had written the Shizi off for dead—even this old retainer, who had served for so many years, had lost hope himself.
And yet this blind young woman continued to sit in the gatehouse with stubborn persistence, waiting.
She was not putting on a performance for anyone to see. The anxiety was written plainly in her unseeing eyes, and with each passing day her face had grown more drawn and worn.
The old steward understood: she genuinely cared about the Shizi.
When taking a wife, one could set aside questions of beauty—what mattered above all was that husband and wife were truly present with each other, not living with a wall of distance between their hearts. Only now, at last, did Manager Geng find himself truly accepting this Shizi Consort of undistinguished birth.
The pity of it was that though the Shizi had found himself a good woman, he had not had the fortune to enjoy a peaceful life with her—and now no one even knew where the currents had taken him.
The thought brought a tightening to his throat, and he pressed his sleeve to his eyes for a moment before letting out a quiet sigh and suggesting that the Shizi Consort rest on the day-bed.
He also took care to have his own wife bring several additional cotton quilts and a brazier, so that the Shizi Consort would not catch cold in the gatehouse.
And so Luoyun spent another two days living in the gatehouse.
As time continued to pass, the warmth slowly ebbed from her heart. So much time had gone by, and still no news had come—surely by now the odds of a good outcome were very poor. The only hope she could still allow herself was that his body might be found. She could not bear the thought of that empty grave containing nothing but a set of silk robes saturated with the vulgar fragrance of face powder.
Perhaps the world would never know that the man behind that painted, powdered face—the one who appeared to do nothing and care about nothing—was not truly the Han Linfeng the world imagined him to be. That man who could have stood tall and proven himself had been swallowed, without ever having had the chance, by the lightless depths of a bottomless abyss.
Deep into another agonizing night, Luoyun sat on the day-bed with the cat in her arms and the small bamboo volume of poetry Han Linfeng had carved for her between her fingers, drifting in and out of a vacant reverie.
Sometime in the dead hours before dawn, she finally slipped into a dull, muddled half-sleep.
Eyes closed, her spirit seemed to scatter and drift somewhere beyond the room, and her dreams were fragmentary and broken—a voice, sometimes near and sometimes far, calling her Ah-Yun.
She was somewhere between sleep and waking when she suddenly heard a commotion near the main gate of the household—the sound of what seemed to be several carriages pulling up all at once.
But her eyelids were far too heavy to open.
It was not until she heard someone give an angry shout, followed by the sound of something being kicked to pieces, that Su Luoyun jolted upright and called out sharply: “Xiangcao—go quickly and see who has come to the gate!”
Xiangcao, barely awake, rubbed her drowsy eyes and scrambled up, draping her outer jacket over her shoulders as she rushed to look. But the moment she lifted the heavy padded curtain of the gatehouse doorway, she walked headlong into someone coming through it, and let out a shriek of fright.
Luoyun, unable to see, could only call out urgently: “Xiangcao—what is it? What’s happened?”
And then a large hand came to rest against her face, and a voice like something out of a dream spoke: “Ah-Yun… I’m back.”
Luoyun went still. Her nose did not catch the familiar scent she knew—instead there was an unpleasant smell of river water and sweat.
But the voice—the voice was unmistakably his.
She reached out abruptly and caught the man’s wrist with both hands, feeling up along his arm, needing to confirm that she was not still dreaming.
The man crouched down beside the day-bed and guided her hands to trace his own cheek, his brows, his eyes, saying softly all the while: “Ah-Yun—it really is me. I’m still alive.”
Su Luoyun drew in a sharp breath—and then the tension went out of her entire body at once. In a surge of emotion, she threw her arms around the person’s neck and said, voice catching slightly: “I thought… I would never see you again.”
This was the first time the little hedgehog had ever thrown herself willingly into his arms. Han Linfeng, who had not bathed in days and nights, gave a faint, wry smile. If only he could have been clean and presentable—he would not have wanted to waste this embrace.
Thank goodness she could not see. His straggly beard, his hair tangled and caked with mud—the sight would surely have alarmed her.
Xiangcao, the poor girl, had already been badly frightened—after her shriek, she had rolled her eyes back and crumpled to the floor in a faint. She must have thought that a drowned ghost had come back in the middle of the night looking for a replacement body. The other maids, once they had shaken off their own shock and joy, were now fluttering around Xiangcao pressing her pressure points and pouring cold tea into her mouth.
As Luoyun’s elation settled, she became more acutely aware that the smell of river water coming off the man was getting quite strong indeed.
But she had no attention to spare for that—she went straight to asking Han Linfeng what on earth had happened over these past days.
Before Han Linfeng could answer, footsteps sounded again from outside the door, and then a familiar, gruff voice rang out: “You—not telling your uncle a word about your own marriage! A matter this significant—why was I not informed?”
The person who had returned with Han Linfeng turned out to be Luoyun’s uncle, Hu Xuesong.
Between the two of them, speaking in turns, Luoyun finally came to understand the full picture of what had happened.
When the levee had first cracked, Han Linfeng and Lord Li Guitian had been standing at some distance from the section that exploded. This had given Han Linfeng a few moments to react when the disaster suddenly struck. He immediately pulled off his belt, grabbed Lord Li—who was closest to him—and threw an arm around him and a large wooden plank that was floating on the water’s surface. He then used the belt to bind both their hands to the plank.
It was this action that had allowed the two of them to survive the first, most violent onslaught of the waves.
Han Linfeng had initially spotted a bend in the levee and, using the surge of the floodwaters, had managed to grab onto a protruding stone in the embankment wall and shelter there from the initial collapse of timber and rock.
But when the full force of the waves hit, there was no controlling where the body went. He had held on for only a short while before the waters swept him away entirely.
As it happened, neither man’s time had come. Though Lord Li had been struck by a timber beam carried in the current and suffered a broken leg, he had not sustained any injury that was immediately life-threatening.
Han Linfeng himself had nothing worse than a gash on his left arm from a tree branch.
By the time the waves had eased even slightly, the two men lying on their plank had already been carried far downstream. Had the current taken them much further, they would have been swept into the river’s mouth and out to sea.
Drawing on his formidable physical strength, Han Linfeng seized his opportunity and grabbed hold of a large tree that had half of its trunk above the waterline, and hauled the agonized Lord Li up with him into the sturdier fork of its branches.
What followed in the days after was a contest of human will against impossible circumstances.
For miles in every direction there was nothing but water—not a rooftop in sight, and no sign of rescue. By the distance they had drifted, they had to have been carried well beyond Yan County.
With no rescue forthcoming, thirst quickly became unbearable.
Lord Li wanted to drink from the floodwater—but Han Linfeng held him back. The flood had drowned no small number of people and animals alike; this was exactly the season for pestilence to take hold. One mouthful of such water could lead to consequences that would haunt them long afterward.
In the end, it was Han Linfeng who twisted together a loop from some rope-grass floating on the water, connecting it to his own belt, and fashioned a lasso with which he caught a large goose that was honking away as it floated past. He wrung its neck and the two of them drank the raw goose blood to relieve their thirst—blood drunk raw, like men reduced to animal survival.
In the days that followed, virtually every creature or bird or domestic animal that drifted past their perch was caught by Han Linfeng and had its neck wrung. It was entirely due to Han Linfeng’s powerful physical capabilities that the two of them did not simply starve to death.
But Lord Li was injured, and beyond that had spent his whole life in conditions of comfort and refinement. Thrust suddenly into such extremity, his spirit had begun to crack.
Gradually, Lord Li’s reserves wore thin. Several times he lost his grip on the tree trunk.
Each time, Han Linfeng had hauled him back up—and then, in his characteristically leisurely way, proceeded to mock and needle him with cool sarcasm, hurling back at Lord Li the better part of the choice words Lord Li had used on him in the past about being a useless sack of wine and food. This managed to rouse Lord Li’s will to live, and they held on just long enough for the rescue boat to reach them.
That they were rescued in time was entirely thanks to Su Luoyun’s letter.
After Uncle Hu Xuesong received his niece’s handwritten letter, he immediately mobilized every connection he had—beyond the military vessels available to him, the majority of the search fleet had been cargo boats and civilian bamboo rafts he had arranged through his personal networks. They had spread their search across a wide area for two full days before finally locating the two men in an abandoned, flooded stretch of broad waterway, and pulling them out after their ordeal.
The whole account was so extraordinary and improbable that even Hu Xuesong, who had witnessed it with his own eyes, could barely imagine how the two of them had managed to survive.
When he had caught sight of that man up in the tree fork—stripped to the waist, tall and powerfully built—with a face caked in grime and tangled hair, and not a trace of despair or panic in his expression, even managing to smile and cup his fists in a greeting from across the distance, Hu Xuesong had been struck still for a moment.
As for Lord Li—due to his injury, he was running a high fever and had become somewhat delirious. Han Linfeng had lashed him to the tree fork with grass rope collected from the water, trussed up like an infant in swaddling, to prevent him from falling in a moment of weakness.
Hanging from the same branch were two animal pelts—which, Han Linfeng explained afterward, he had recovered from the carcasses of dead animals floating in the water and skinned with his own hairpin, one careful scrape at a time, to use as covering for the two of them against the cold at night.
It was deep winter, and even this far south, the nights were bitterly cold. Had they held on one more day without rescue, Lord Li would probably not have survived it.
As for that disheveled, powerfully built man—he looked like nothing so much as a lone wolf. Even if no rescue had come, Hu Xuesong suspected, he would have found a way to keep himself alive.
This was Hu Xuesong’s first meeting with his niece’s husband.
He had previously heard that Luoyun had been married off to the capital’s most notorious idle wastrel, and his heart had taken a violent lurch at the news. In the past two days, after hearing further rumors about the circumstances of their marriage, he had been so angry he could have put a fist through a wall.
Hu Xuesong had even thought to himself: if this man truly was the reprobate people claimed and had simply seized Luoyun and taken advantage of her, it might be better to use this opportunity to see him gone—anything was better than allowing him to wear his niece down to nothing.
But having now seen this so-called useless wastrel Shizi in person—surviving in circumstances like these—Hu Xuesong had completely dismantled his own prejudices.
Han Linfeng bore not the faintest resemblance to the sniveling, tear-soaked image of a pampered playboy he had imagined. This man—setting everything else aside—with that composure and that particular quality of nerve, was no creature meant to swim in small waters. He was worthy of his niece.
Not wanting his family to worry, Han Linfeng had not traveled back with Lord Li in the carriage. Instead, he had taken a fast relay horse and ridden through the dust all the way back, reaching the Shizi household ahead of everyone else.
Hu Xuesong had suggested there was no need to rush like this—it would be better to bathe and get cleaned up first. But Han Linfeng had said without a moment’s hesitation: “If I don’t get back quickly, Ah-Yun will be worried.”
That earned another quiet nod of approval from the uncle. It seemed this Shizi was not merely a man of iron constitution—he also kept Luoyun genuinely in his heart.
There were things, of course, that Han Linfeng could not very well say to Uncle Hu.
He had ridden the whole way back with a knot of uncertainty in his chest. He was genuinely afraid that the woman might have already packed her things—confirmed his death—and left the household bag and baggage in her characteristic decisive fashion.
After all, she had made it clear to him more than once that this was a marriage of convenience between them, nothing more. If he was gone, naturally the arrangement dissolved—how could he expect her to sit here and keep an empty vigil for him?
So the whole ride back had been one long stretch of anxious uncertainty. Sometimes, picturing that woman having already left without a backward glance—carelessly, without a care in the world—he had felt his back teeth clench with irritation, and drove his riding crop down harder.
And then he had arrived at the Shizi household’s gate, full of worry, and the first thing he had asked the gate attendant was: “The Shizi Consort—has she left yet?”
The gate attendant had been dozing off in the chair at the gatehouse and was startled half out of his skin when the Shizi materialized before him like a drowned spirit, glowering fiercely. Half-awake and not quite catching the question, he had only caught “has she left” and assumed the Shizi had somehow heard about the flower queen Hongyun running off from the outside courtyard and was quietly seething about it.
And so the gate attendant had nodded blankly and said: “Left—she left long ago, packed up everything with her maid and slipped away quietly.”
Han Linfeng had anticipated this all along—and yet it still sat in his chest like a cold stone. He let out one furious shout, and kicked the chair beside him to splinters.
And then, the moment he had kicked the chair, he heard what sounded like a familiar voice from somewhere inside the gatehouse.
He paused, frowning, and lifted the door curtain uncertainly—and there she was: that woman, her face bare and unadorned, wrapped in a quilt with the cat in her arms, sitting up on the day-bed with sleepy, disoriented eyes and a blank, searching expression on her face.
In that instant, the whiplash of emotions hit him so fast that Han Linfeng felt the strength go out of him. Through Xiangcao’s still-ringing shriek, he had to reach out and brace himself against the doorframe.
He heard afterward from Manager Geng that after the two of them had rushed around mobilizing help and sending the letter, she had then simply stayed in the gatehouse and waited for news.
That clear, lovely face was shadowed with the exhaustion of too many sleepless nights. The hollows under her eyes were a heartrending dark. The fullness she had only recently begun to recover in her cheeks had wasted away again.
She had been worrying about him—wanting to know the moment there was any word of whether he was safe.
When he understood this, something bloomed in Han Linfeng’s chest like late-night fireworks—bright and brilliant in all directions.
When Luoyun finally came fully back to herself, it dawned on her that Han Linfeng smelled absolutely dreadful.
Luoyun quickly pushed him back and ordered the maids to prepare hot water—the foul-smelling man needed a thorough scrubbing down. She also gave instructions to the kitchen to begin preparing everything from bird’s nest to ginseng broth, so the Shizi could be properly restored and nourished.
Translator’s Note — Yun Bin Tian Shang – Chapter 54
Yun Bin Tian Shang – Chapter 54 brings the novel’s first genuine crisis to its resolution with considerable emotional and narrative payoff. The court scene that opens the Yun Bin Tian Shang – Chapter completes the political tableau established in Yun Bin Tian Shang – Chapter 53—Prince Rui’s speechless fury at his Sixth Brother’s ambush, the assembled court consumed by factional combat, and the disquieting absence of anyone, including the Emperor, who shows any real concern for whether Han Linfeng or Lord Li are alive. The Emperor’s single line—that the two men are to be found and given a proper burial—functions as a quiet indictment of what court politics does to human lives.
The middle section of the chapter, in which Luoyun waits in the gatehouse, is the emotional heart. Her grief is rendered obliquely and with restraint: the cat gifted on the strength of a careless wish, the carved bamboo poetry collection, the image of him floating alone under a pale moon that she forces herself to stop imagining. Manager Geng’s changed assessment of her—his final, reluctant acknowledgment that this low-born Shizi Consort is a genuinely good woman—arrives as a quiet form of vindication.
Han Linfeng’s survival story, told in retrospect, delivers exactly what the novel has been quietly building toward his hidden character: the man beneath the painted, powdered surface of the court idler. The detail of him skinning animal pelts with his own hairpin to keep Lord Li warm at night, of wringing a goose’s neck to drink the blood raw, of using sarcasm to keep a breaking man alive—this is the Han Linfeng that only extremity reveals. Hu Xuesong’s judgment—that this man is no creature for small waters—stands as the novel’s clearest external confirmation of what Luoyun has been sensing in fragments all along.
The comedy of the gatehouse reunion—the gate attendant’s misunderstanding, the kicked chair, Xiangcao’s faint—provides the emotional release after the extended tension, and Han Linfeng’s wry wish that he could have been cleaner for this particular embrace gives the moment a warmth that is entirely characteristic of the novel’s tonal blend.