Ever since Nie Yunzhu and Hutao, mistress and maid, had left Jinfeng House two years before, the two of them had lived together almost like sisters, each doing what she could to share the household’s work—though in truth, mistress and maid they still remained, and most of the housework still fell to Hutao, with Yunzhu handling only the simpler tasks. Every day she embroidered fine silk pieces, occasionally worked on shoe soles or handkerchiefs, and every few days went to Jinfeng House to teach qin, and in this way the household got by. Of course, since her embroidery followed a painstaking, high-quality style done purely for her own satisfaction, the results were beautiful, but the time and materials it demanded were considerable, so in the end it never earned much.
Since Hutao had fallen seriously ill the month before, Yunzhu had inevitably found herself having to take on all these responsibilities herself. She could manage a simple meal well enough, and washing clothes was no great trouble either—she just wasn’t as practiced at it, and probably didn’t get things quite as clean as Hutao would have. It was only that, a few days before Mid-Autumn, when she’d bought that old hen meaning to stew it up as a tonic for Hutao, things had gone wrong one after another.
She’d been too afraid to slaughter the hen after catching it, then let it get away entirely, chased it right into the river, lost the kitchen cleaver in the process, and even dragged down the kind passerby who’d pulled her out of the water. The man had saved her life, and her first reaction upon waking had been to slap him across the face—and then the very next day, he’d been the one to see her fishing the cleaver back out of the river, and had even ended up helping her slaughter the hen for her…
Ordinarily she was a composed, self-possessed woman. After all these years in the pleasure quarters, she’d met all sorts of people and cared a great deal about keeping up appearances—who would have thought that of all the times to be seen at her worst, it would be by this particular man? Thinking back on it now still made her feel embarrassed. She and Hutao had both fallen ill in the days that followed, though fortunately the chill hadn’t been severe, and it wasn’t until after Mid-Autumn that she’d finally recovered. And to think, she hadn’t even managed to ask the man’s name. Huyan Leifeng… she wasn’t even sure if she’d gotten that right, and who would have guessed she’d run into him again today, right here.
Nie Yunzhu had, in her time, seen a great many people. This young man looked to be somewhere in his early twenties, with a scholarly air about him—but thinking back on it afterward, there had been something rather different about the way he carried himself, in both speech and action, something calm and unrestrained. From the way he’d saved her, to his reaction after she’d slapped him, to the way he’d later helped kill the hen and then simply said his piece and left—all of it had that same quality. Following him now, she saw that he really did seem to be buying charcoal, though after examining it for a while and exchanging a few words with the shop owner, something about the situation shifted slightly.
Deep autumn was nearly upon them, winter fast approaching, and most households were stocking up on charcoal. There were places that sold it loose, but this particular shop packaged it into sacks and sold it by the bag. After speaking with the shopkeeper, the man had a large sack of charcoal dumped out onto the ground, then crouched down with a cloth bag, picking through the charcoal sticks one by one. Very few made the cut; often he’d scratch a stick against the ground a few times before deciding whether to toss it into the bag. The shopkeeper didn’t seem to mind, only asking a few curious questions before going back to his own business.
After watching for a moment, Nie Yunzhu approached, coming to a stop just behind and to the side of him, and bent down. “My benefactor?”
“Hm?” The man turned and glanced at her, recognizing her at once. “Oh, it’s you. What a coincidence.” His hands kept working, still focused on picking through the charcoal.
Both his reaction and his words struck her as rather odd. Confucian culture had, by this point, developed to a peak of refinement, and social etiquette had grown remarkably elaborate and exacting. Ordinarily, if a man encountered a woman approaching him, he would have stood up straight, bowed with cupped hands, and greeted her with courteous formality—that kind of refined, cultured manner had already become second nature throughout society. But this offhand “Oh, it’s you. What a coincidence” was something Nie Yunzhu had never encountered before, and yet, somehow, it felt entirely natural. She blinked, slightly taken aback, then gathered her skirts and crouched down beside him.
“My benefactor…”
“Ha, it was just a chicken. No big deal—no need to call me your benefactor.” The man waved a hand with a smile, speaking casually.
“Does my benefactor only remember slaughtering the hen, and not pulling me from the river?”
“Ah…”
He blinked, caught off guard for a moment, and Nie Yunzhu couldn’t help but let out a laugh. The two of them crouched side by side in front of the pile of charcoal, and Nie Yunzhu tilted her head to look at him. “This one’s name is Nie Yunzhu.” She paused a moment, waiting to make sure he’d remember it, then asked, “Might my benefactor’s name be Huyan Leifeng?”
“Hu—Huyan Leifeng…”
For a moment, the man’s expression twitched in a rather complicated way, before he finally laughed. “Ha ha, Ning Yi,” he said. “Ning Yi, courtesy name Liheng.”
Hearing this name, Nie Yunzhu froze as well.
“Prelude to the Water Melody”…
“That man’s name is Ning Yi, courtesy name Liheng…”
“The Su family’s live-in son-in-law…”
“Might have bought the poem to build a false reputation…”
The astonishment she’d felt on first encountering that poem back at Jinfeng House still lingered vividly in her mind, and the girls’ chatter came rushing back to her all at once. Ning Yi, courtesy name Liheng? At the time, she’d simply been admiring the verse itself, without having fully absorbed its underlying charm, and she’d had little interest in gossiping about the man behind it—so the name had meant nothing to her at all, and she hadn’t given it a second thought. But now, it struck her mind all at once.
She stood frozen for a long moment before finally recovering. “Master Ning… what is this charcoal for, if I may ask?”
“Mm, for writing.” Ning Yi tapped the wooden board on the ground, which had been coated with a layer of white paint, then took a finer-grained stick of charcoal and wrote the character “Nie” on the ground—likely meaning to write out the name Nie Yunzhu he’d just heard. But partway through the final stroke of the character, he paused, apparently thinking better of casually writing out the woman’s family name, and shifted slightly to write “Ning Yi” instead.
The characters followed a regular script style, bold and powerful. As he finished the last stroke, the charcoal snapped in his hand. Nie Yunzhu herself had some accomplishment in calligraphy, and she considered for a moment—holding a stick of charcoal required an entirely different technique from holding a writing brush. If she herself had tried to write with a charcoal stick, the result would surely have fallen far short of this. That he could produce characters like this so effortlessly with charcoal suggested his grasp of calligraphy had already reached a truly accomplished level.
In this era, poetry and calligraphy were considered inseparable arts; anyone with deep mastery of calligraphy was generally counted among the great scholars of the age, or close to it. Anyone capable of writing characters like these, she thought, surely had no need to be suspected of stealing a piece like “Prelude to the Water Melody.” Nie Yunzhu found herself thinking that the rumors, as usual, were probably not to be trusted. Little did she know that Ning Yi’s actual brushwork with a proper writing brush was merely passable—it was writing with chalk and pens in various decorative styles that he’d actually practiced extensively in his previous life. Later, once he’d gained some standing and had the right mindset to draw on, his handwriting had taken on even more presence. Looking now at the two characters he’d just written, he privately felt his skill had slipped a bit, but it would still do well enough to impress people.
Mastering calligraphy took more than a day’s effort—he could hardly let all those students who spent their days grinding away at brush practice think their teacher’s handwriting was worse than their own…
“I’m going to bring this to the classroom—use this whiteboard to write on. Once it’s written, you can wipe it clean. With a sand tray, the outlines aren’t clear enough, and you’re constantly having to smooth it back over, and it lies flat, which makes it tiring for the students to read. This can be hung upright.”
“Classroom… a school? Is Master Ning a teacher at a school?”
“Mm, a small school. Teaching a bunch of kids too dim to see straight how to read and write, that sort of thing…”
“Ha… Master Ning, will this piece do?”
Life in the pleasure quarters demanded a certain social artistry, the ability to converse naturally with anyone. Given the chance to prepare, Nie Yunzhu was confident she could hold a natural conversation with anyone without feeling awkward. This conversation, too, felt natural enough—though the ease of it, she felt, had less to do with herself than with the man’s own manner. The two of them sorted through the charcoal together, and before long they’d filled the small cloth bag, their hands now smudged black. When it came time to pay, Ning Yi handed over more than ten extra coins for the small bag.
“That shopkeeper’s being unreasonable, charging over ten extra coins for so little charcoal,” Nie Yunzhu remarked once they’d stepped outside.
“Ha, well, I did trouble him a fair bit. I’d guess it’s because he heard I wanted it for the school that he let me pick through it like that in the first place. Being a teacher does come in handy sometimes.”
“If Master Ning ever needs to buy more, you might as well buy a few sacks and pick through them at home—since you’ll need the charcoal anyway, that would save you the extra cost.”
“Ha ha, next time I won’t bother picking through it myself—I’ll just have the students bring their own suitable charcoal to school.”
Before long, the two of them washed their hands by the Qin Huai River, then walked on, one after the other—Ning Yi carrying the board and charcoal, Nie Yunzhu carrying her cloth bundle and the medicine. Nie Yunzhu brought up again the matter of falling into the river and being saved, but Ning Yi only waved it off, saying it was nothing much, brushing past it lightly.
The two of them exchanged a few more words here and there, the atmosphere between them oddly natural. After walking a while, Nie Yunzhu, a step behind him, found herself thinking of the mood and imagery of “Prelude to the Water Melody,” and suddenly felt that perhaps only someone this unrestrained and at ease could have written such a poem.
They walked on like this for quite some way, until they reached a bend in the river, where Ning Yi finally stopped and took his leave of her. Nearby, the riverbank lay quiet, its water shimmering gently, willows hanging green along the edge. A teahouse and a few small shops stood there, and beside the teahouse was a small chess stall, where two old men sat playing a leisurely game—one of them dressed head to toe in fine silks, clearly a man of considerable wealth.
She bowed to him in farewell, exchanged a few more words, then paused briefly before walking on. Ning Yi, too, continued on his way, heading toward that very teahouse and chess stall. The two old men seemed to know him, greeting him with smiles and saying something she couldn’t quite make out, though she caught the faint sound of his voice in reply.
“…You two have really put me through it these past few days… this morning, that Yu Zixing actually came looking for me…”
She walked on, and when she finally glanced back, the man was already seated there watching the game, a cup of tea in hand, taking a light sip. There hadn’t been much between them, really; without the pretext of repaying a debt of gratitude, in a city as vast as Jiangning, they might well never cross paths again. In the way he spoke and carried himself, there seemed to be so little calculation or ambition—something she had almost never seen among the talented scholars and famous men she’d encountered before. Calm and natural throughout, unrestrained and at ease, with none of the elaborate formalities, and yet never once making her feel uncomfortable—while still, quite clearly, keeping a certain distance. It was almost exactly like the fabled bearing of Tang-dynasty literati. These days, everyone who called himself a scholar liked to speak of being a “gentleman”—perhaps this was what the bearing of a true gentleman was supposed to look like.
Perhaps they’d never meet again, and he clearly hadn’t thought much of that “debt of gratitude” himself—but all the same, she found she had already committed that figure to memory.
Ning Yi, courtesy name Liheng…
Thinking this, Nie Yunzhu walked on toward home.