Auspicious Maiden

On the Frost's Descent of the sixteenth year of Zhengde, fine snow drifted over Yangzhou. Li Zhen knelt in the center of the mourning hall, incense ash settling on her plain white mourning clothes. Three sticks of incense smoldered in the bronze burner before her, their thin trails of smoke blurring the gilded words on the coffin: "Spirit Coffin of the Late Master Li, Given Name Chengye." She lowered her eyes to her knees, pressed together beneath her. The edges of her mourning shoes, embroidered with entwining lotus vines, had worn white. Her mother had made them overnight, the stitches crooked, much like the crooked line her father had drawn in the account book while clutching her hand in his final moments.

"Zhen-niang, it's time to burn some account books for your father," her eldest uncle, Li Cheng'en, said from beside the offering table. A half-withered lotus was embroidered on his dark cotton robe, and silver powder from last night's card game still clung to his cuffs. "Your father spent his whole life buried in silk. Without those books, he'll be at a loss down there."

The clan members kneeling in the mourning hall chuckled under their breath. Li Zhen looked up and saw her second uncle, Li Chengzong, grinding the incense ash in a crack between the blue bricks with the sole of his shoe. His narrow, triangular eyes reflected the coffin. She suddenly remembered accompanying her father to Suzhou last month to collect debts. On the way back, he had stroked the top of her head and said, "Zhen-niang, you look like your mother, but you have my eyes. You can see through the false figures in an account book."

"Eldest Uncle jests," Li Zhen replied, her voice cold as frost and snow. "Before he died, Father said the Li family's account books should be left to someone who can understand them." Her fingertip brushed her knee. Hidden there was half a crumpled sheet of Xuan paper, which she had snatched from beneath her father's pillow amid the confusion that morning. It showed the locations of twelve silk shops in Yangzhou, drawn in cinnabar, with three circles around the words "Chengqing Hall," the Li family's main shop in the eastern market.