The Red Chamber (20 page)

Xifeng kneels on the
kang
, turning back the rug. She dislodges the
brick and finds a small bag. She empties it out, noticing with a feeling of contempt that it is not quite enough, only about eighty
taels
. She also finds a tiny drawstring bag. She feels it with her fingers and realizes it contains the small stone block carved with Lian’s name, which he uses to imprint official documents.

Concealing her excitement, she says, “There isn’t enough. I’ll have to give you twenty
taels
or so.”

“Thank you. I’m sure Lian will repay you when he gets back.”

She grunts skeptically, wondering at Ping’er’s naïveté.

In the afternoon, she sends Ping’er on an errand elsewhere in the mansion, and goes into Ping’er’s bedroom with an unsigned loan agreement. The Countess of Xiping has repaid her, and now the Abbess has helped her set up an even larger loan. She takes out the chop from its hiding place and prints Lian’s name in the corner of the loan agreement with red ink. Because women cannot make contracts, the agreement will be more binding if Lian’s name is on it. She hears a sound in the front room and hurries out, carefully folding the document.

Chess, Xichun’s maid, is waiting for her. “Mrs. Lian, I wish you’d come over to Miss Xichun’s apartment. Her pearl and gold phoenix necklace is missing!”

“Missing!” Lady Jia had given the Two Springs the matching necklaces last year, the most costly pieces of jewelry that each of them owns. “Did you ask Miss Xichun and the other maids about it?”

“Yes, but they all say they haven’t seen it.”

“Is anything else missing?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Very well. I’ll go over with you.” While Xifeng has resigned herself to a certain amount of petty theft in a household of this size, this is the first time something so valuable has disappeared.

When they arrive at Xichun’s apartments, Xichun has her nose buried in a book on the
kang
.

“What’s this about your pearl and gold necklace disappearing?” Xifeng demands.

“Oh.” Xichun looks annoyed. “It’s nothing. Why did Chess have to go bothering you about that?”

“What do you mean it’s nothing? Do you know where the necklace is or not?”

Xichun shrugs. “I’m sure it will turn up sometime.” She looks back down at her book.

Xifeng snatches the book out of her hands, noticing that it is a sutra, as usual. “What do you mean it will turn up sometime? How long has it been missing?”

“I don’t really know.” Xichun blinks up at her, as if surprised by her anger.

“Where did you keep it?”

Chess answers, pointing. “We kept it in a box in Miss Xichun’s dressing table drawer.”

Xifeng pulls open the drawer. All the smaller pieces, the bracelets and rings and hairpins, seem to be in their places. Only the largest box is empty. “You should really keep better track of your things.”

“Why should I? The sutras say we shouldn’t have attachments to the material world—”

“Is that so?” Xifeng cries, losing her patience. “Why don’t you explain that to Granny when she asks you where your necklace is at New Year’s?”

Xichun looks scared. Xifeng begins to suspect that Xichun knows who took the necklace but is afraid to say.

She sits down on the
kang
beside her sister-in-law, trying to speak calmly. “Don’t you understand that if there’s a thief here, it’s a serious matter? Who knows what she will take next, and not just from you?”

She pauses, waiting for Xichun to speak. Xichun looks down at her hands.

“Well.” Xifeng rises. “If you really have no idea, I’ll have to question the maids one by one. If no one speaks up, I’ll have to beat it out of them.”

“No!” Xichun cries.

“Why not?”

“It isn’t one of the maids.”

Xifeng pounces on this. “If you know it isn’t one of the maids, then you obviously know who did it.”

Xichun starts to cry.

“It’s no use crying. Until I find out who it is, I will beat every person who has reason to come to these apartments.”

Chess bursts out as if she can no longer restrain herself, “Nanny Li took the necklace!”

Xichun starts to cry harder.

Xifeng whirls to stare at Chess. “Nanny Li?” She cannot, for the moment, place the name.

“Miss Xichun’s wet nurse.”

“Ah!” No wonder Xichun is protecting her. “How do you know?”

Chess is almost crying now too. “It’s not the first time she has taken something to pawn. I’ve begged Miss Xichun, but she refuses to do anything about it. I’ve told her again and again that she had to stop it, or else we’d all end up getting in trouble.”

“What on earth does Nanny Li need all that money for?”

“At night, some of the old women in the Garden have a gambling ring,” Chess says.

“What!” In her surprise and alarm, Xifeng takes a quick step backwards and almost falls against the
kang
. She steadies herself quickly. “A gambling ring? Where?”

“They stay up late in the gatehouse after everyone goes to bed. Lots of the stewardesses and gardeners and old nannies play. Nanny Li is one of the bankers.”

“You knew about this? And didn’t tell me until now?” Suddenly, her palm itches to slap Chess. She controls herself, knowing that if she beats the bearers of bad news, no one will ever tell her anything. She turns to Xichun. “You knew, too, and didn’t tell me?”

Xichun and Chess both stare at her as if bewildered by her anger.

“Don’t you understand? With gambling comes drinking, and with drinking comes carelessness, and letting in strangers who have no business in the Inner Quarters! We should count ourselves lucky that all that happened was that a necklace was stolen. What if a man had snuck in?”

She sees Xichun’s eyes widen with fear. She continues, wanting to impress her with the seriousness of the situation, “At night, there’d be no one to protect you but some maids.”

She feels a chill of fear at her own words. Xichun and Chess both begin to sob again. The way they cling to each other, their ineffectual tears, make her feel alone. They can sob all they want, but she will be blamed if any of the terrible things she imagines come to pass. She decides to resolve the matter quickly, before Granny Jia can hear anything about it. She has Nanny Li dragged in and beaten. After a few strokes of the bamboo, Nanny Li breaks down and confesses. It is worse than Xifeng imagined: more than two dozen women gather in the gatehouse nearly every night. She cannot believe that it has come to this without her being aware of it. Two hours later, she has dismissed Nanny Li and the other two ringleaders, and identified the regular and occasional participants. She tells Mrs. Lai to have them all beaten twenty strokes and to dock them two months’ salary.

When Xifeng rises from her chair in Xichun’s room to return to her
own apartment, she is hoarse from yelling. Xichun, who has not offered her so much as a cup of tea, is still weeping on the
kang
. “Why are you crying?”

“Because my wet nurse was dismissed,” Xichun sobs. “I’ve been disgraced in front of the whole household, because she was my servant. None of the other girls’ servants were dismissed.”

Xifeng realizes that this is true. Most of the gamblers were gardeners and porters and gatewomen, rather than personal servants. “Then let this be a lesson to you. You have no one to blame but yourself. It’s your duty to keep your servants in line. If you had done something about it earlier, it wouldn’t have come to this.” Unbidden, an old saying comes to her:
The beast of a thousand legs is more than a day in dying
.

Xichun weeps, “If only I could be a nun, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this shouting and beating.”

“What kind of nonsense is this?” She knows that Xichun constantly pores over Buddhist texts, but she has never heard her mention becoming a nun before. Praying and making offerings at the temple is one thing; it is another matter entirely to shave one’s head and cut oneself off from one’s family.

“If I could join a nunnery, I wouldn’t have to live here, and deal with all the servants—”

“You’d
be
a servant, in all but name! Who do you think does the Abbess’s laundry, and washes her dishes? Don’t you know enough to be grateful for what you have—”

Xichun ignores her. “I want to withdraw from the ‘red dust’ of the world and read sutras.”

“Girls from families like ours don’t leave home to become nuns. Only girls from poor families, who can’t arrange decent matches for them, are sent off like that. It would be considered a real disgrace if someone like you entered a nunnery!”

“I don’t care.”

She shakes Xichun by the shoulders, unable to contain her exasperation. “You’d better not let Granny hear you speaking like that.”

She leaves Xichun crying helplessly, and starts to cross the Garden, fuming at her sister-in-law’s foolishness. Dusk is falling, and it is almost time for her to go to Granny’s to prepare for dinner. It is not enough that Xichun lives pampered and protected from every worry and household care. It is not enough that she never has to lift a finger. She still wants to “escape” to what she imagines to be the peace and seclusion of a nunnery.
Xifeng must speak to Lian when he comes back. He does not usually concern himself with his sister, but he might bestir himself for something like this, affecting the reputation of the entire family.

She is so absorbed in her thoughts as she skirts the frozen lake that she almost screams when a man in dark robes comes out of the leafless rosebushes onto the path in front of her. Her first panic-stricken thought is that her words have come true: the gatewomen have already grown so slack that a strange man has managed to slip into the Garden. Her whole body throbs with a visceral panic, and her instinct is to run away. Then she remembers she is not some innocent girl, to be stricken by terror at the sight of a strange man. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” she shouts. She is pleased by how loudly and fiercely her voice echoes in the silence of the Garden.

The man is only a few feet from her. She sees from his face in the gathering dusk that, far from lying in wait for her, he looks as startled as she is. “I’m sorry I scared you. I’m here with permission.”

“Whose permission?”

“Lord Jia’s. I’m a friend of his.” He lowers his head and shoulders in a little kowtow. “My name is Jia Yucun.”

“Jia Yucun?” she repeats. After a moment, it comes to her: he is the distant cousin that Uncle Zheng had befriended in the fall. “If you are here to visit Uncle Zheng, you should wait for him out in his study, not in the Women’s Quarters.”

“I often visit him here in his private apartments.”

“Really?” She is disturbed. The only men allowed into the Inner Quarters are close relatives. It is unlike Uncle Zheng of all people to break the rules like this.

She peers at the young man curiously. Now she sees through the dimness that he is wearing official robes. He looks young, at most Lian’s age. He is good-looking, with pale, clear-cut features. She notices he is looking back at her, and feels flustered.

“See that you stay in Uncle Zheng’s apartments next time. It won’t do for you to go wandering around with so many unmarried girls living here.” Resolving to speak to the gatewomen, she dismisses him with a nod, then continues down the path.

“Just a minute.” He hurries after her. “You call Lord Jia your uncle. Are you Jia Lian’s younger sister?”

She curls her lip scornfully. Anyone but a rube would realize from her clothing that she is a matron, and not an unmarried girl. “If you must
know, I’m Lian’s wife.” She imagines how her husband must seem to a young man like this, an official at the start of a promising career, and feels a pang of mortification at being associated with Lian.

“Good Heavens!” He sounds shocked.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s just that—it’s just that I would never have imagined that Jia Lian could be married to someone like you.”

She looks away, flattered despite herself.

“What I mean is,” he continues, “you don’t look old enough to be married to anyone.”

She cannot help laughing at his blatant flattery, but then she thinks of the sadness of her situation. “But I have been married four years,” she says soberly. She begins to walk down the path again, and he falls into step beside her.

“What is your name?”

“Why should I tell you?” she says. After a moment, though, she blurts it out.

“Wang Xifeng.” He repeats the syllables slowly. “What characters are they?”

“ ‘Xi’ is ‘brilliant,’ and ‘feng’ is ‘phoenix.’ ”

She is used to having people laugh at her name, for it sounds like it belongs to a boy. Her parents had expected her to be a boy, and her father insisted on giving her the name he intended for a son. Jia Yucun does not even smile.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty,” she lies for some reason. She is actually twenty-three.

“Where did you live before coming here?”

“In Chang’an.”

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“I have two younger brothers.”

“Your parents?”

“They are both dead.”

It has been such a long time since anyone asked her even these simple facts about herself. Even though she has lived at Rongguo for over four years, she does not feel that anyone here knows anything of her history, or who she is. No one imagines that before she was married, she had been as treasured and pampered as Baoyu himself. Although her father had wanted a son, he was soon delighting in her quickness and spirit. Even after her younger brothers were born, she did not lose her
place of eminence in the household. A favorite family story concerned a fierce, half-wild dog that somehow found its way into the compound. The seven-year-old Xifeng managed to heave her brothers into the crook of a tree, and was found holding off the cur by throwing stones.

Her father, a retired general, did not believe that girls should learn more than a handful of characters and basic arithmetic, but Xifeng far outshone her brothers in her facility with numbers. While she knew nothing of such “cultured” accomplishments as calligraphy and landscape painting, her sharp eye and nimble fingers enabled her to excel at the feminine arts: weaving, sewing, embroidery, paper cutting, and knotting. She cannot help sighing when she thinks of how different things are now from her childhood days. Her mother first and then her father had died in the last four years. Now no one bothers to send messages all the way from Chang’an. Despite her seemingly high status as manager of the household, her position feels precarious. She is too busy to spend much time cultivating her relationships with the other women, and the servants hate her for her harshness and attempts to save money.