Terrible light.

  Sui-Wei had to strain to hear their weak voices above the wind.

  So hot. So bright.

  “Did you see how the fire started?”

  From the sky. From the floor. From the sky. From the floor.

  Sui-Wei frowned. They were not making any sense.

  “Did you see who started the fire?”

  The couple began to dance. The old man jumped about, holding an imaginarybuk barrel drum over his shoulder and hitting it with an imaginary stick.

  Tum-tum, tum-tum. The old man and woman chanted as they danced.

  “You are celebrating,” Sui-Wei whispered. An idea hit her. “A celebration involves fireworks. You’re saying that the fire began when someone launched lit fireworks into the house? That’s what you meant by ‘from the sky’?” But that couldn’t be. Somebody would have seen or heard the explosions.

  The old couple ignored her and began to bicker.

  She’s your flesh and blood!

  I’ve done all I can for her.

  Not nearly enough.

  Sui-Wei shook her head. She had come too late. The spirits were old, and the destruction of the house must have shocked them and driven them mad.

  Jiyin was flabbergasted. For a man to visit an unmarried woman at such a late hour was scandalous. But Sui-Wei told her that it would be even ruder to refuse him entry.

  Jiyin made a show of banging the teakettle in the kitchen as loudly as possible.

  Oblivious of the lack of welcome, Ben-Ni sat down. “Miss Far, I hope the investigation is going well.”

  “Actually, I’ve made no progress at all.”

  “You seem exhausted. Perhaps a conversation with a foreigner would help you think of a new perspective on familiar persons and things. Ah, perspective, that is what I have come to show you, a marvel of European ingenuity.”

  Ben-Ni pulled out a metal tube from his traveling pouch and went into the courtyard. Sui-Wei was intrigued. Like her father, she enjoyed learning about all sorts of subjects.

  He set up the instrument on a stand so that it pointed into the sky, peered through the lower end, made some adjustments, and gestured for Sui-Wei to take a look for herself.

  It was a view of the Moon, but a Moon that was much closer and bigger. She gasped and pulled back.

  Ben-Ni laughed. “This is a telescope. It employs the principles of optics to magnify distant objects.”

  Sui-Wei bent down again. The Moon appeared as a piece of jade etched with dark shadows and patterns. She looked in vain for signs of the Rabbit and the Osmanthus Tree from the fairy tales of her childhood.

  “Astounding,” she murmured.

  “The mechanical inventions of Europe are as delightful as the fine water silk of Korea, and such marvels ought to be shared. But Korea forbids her merchants from selling to us because we sell weapons to Japan.”

  “Is that why you wanted to trade with Master Hae-wook Lee here in Dawul, to get around the restrictions?”

  Ben-Ni nodded. “I was willing to offer him higher prices and an exclusive on European goods, but Lee was suspicious and did not want to offend his buyers in China, and he saw no use in my mechanical clocks and other ‘toys.’ His son, however, is much like yourself, and intrigued by the possibilities of the new. I understand that father and son did not get along.”

  Sui-Wei filed away this information in her head.

  She asked Ben-Ni to explain the principles of optics, and pressed him to sketch out the means by which lenses focused and bent light. Ben-Ni then excitedly trained the telescope on another part of the sky. As Sui-Wei bent to look through the tube, Ben-Ni hovered behind her and put one hand on her shoulder.

  Sui-Wei froze and looked back, but Ben-Ni’s guileless face, eagerly anticipating her reaction, showed that he had not meant to insult her. She tried to relax, and gazed at the rings of Saturn through the telescope. But her mind was not among the stars. She blushed at the heat of his body, transmitted through his hand and her thin dress.

  Long after Ben-Ni left, she remembered the feel of his hand.

  “Did your father have enemies?”

  They were walking back from an interview with Kyoon’s parents, a simple couple. The mother had moved to Yiefeng from the countryside twenty years earlier and found work as a maid for Hae-wook Lee, and the father was a Jurchen laborer. They shed no light on the situation.

  Yeon-joo chose his words carefully. “I don’t know my father very well. As a boy, I was sent away to study in China, and returned only last year. But I believe that he was a careful and fair man. While he made sure that he got his due, he did not exact unfair advantage from his trading partners. The only man who might dislike him is Aguda. My father and he were fierce competitors, but it was my father, not Aguda, who won the license to import Korean silk. They were civil to each other though, and Aguda visited my father during his illness.”

  “But he was away on the day of the fire.”

  “Right. And he’s been pleasant to me since then, offering to acquire my father’s – my – Korean silk license and our entire inventory on hand until I can get my affairs sorted out to buy the license back from him. Indeed, I’m staying with him now. His offer is low, but I might have to take it. The fire destroyed all our business records, and it will take a while to reconstruct accounts and customer lists.”

  They had passed by the Lee warehouse earlier. Sui-Wei remembered glancing at the lifeless building, doors locked, the snow in front pristine, unsullied by the footprints of laborers and buyers, as though it were in mourning for its master.

  Sui-Wei stopped at the market to purchase food for dinner. She had been running the household since her mother’s death, and she didn’t mind doing the errands herself.

  “Could I have some rib tips?”

  “I’ve none left,” the butcher said. “Everybody wants rib tips for soup in the winter. You have to come early if you want them.”

  Disappointed, Sui-Wei settled for some inferior pigs’ feet.

  “I’ll walk you back to Aguda’s,” she offered.

  Aguda’s house was in the style of a Jurchen hunting lodge. There was no central courtyard, and all the rooms were in a row.

  “Please excuse my appearance,” Aguda said, laughing as he wiped the sweat from his face and neck with a cloth. “I was not expecting visitors.”

  “Master Aguda has been pursuing his hobby,” Yeon-joo said. “He’s the best ice sculptor in Yiefeng.”

  “Young Master Lee is far too kind.”

  “Why don’t you show Miss Far your workshop?” Yeon-joo asked.

  “Oh, it’s dark and damp and cold, hardly a place for a lady.”

  Sui-Wei’s face grew hot at this. “No, I do want to see it. I am not so delicate.”

  Reluctantly, Aguda led them through a shed into an underground ice cellar. There was an empty workspace in the middle, lit by several large oil lamps backed with curved, silvered mirrors to focus the light. Sui-Wei appreciated the novel design of the lamps, now that she had learned something about optics from Ben-Ni. Aguda was clearly a clever man to have discovered such principles on his own.

  “I keep this cellar insulated with straw and stock it with river ice all winter so I can work even in summer.”

  The sculpture he was working on was a great ice dragon, half finished, so that it seemed as if the translucent creature was leaping out of a block of ice. Chisel and hammer lay on a bench nearby, testifying to Aguda’s exertions.

  She looked around the cellar and saw ice wolves, soldiers, dancers lifting bukdrums over their heads.

  “Was this one of the sculptures you gave to Master Lee?”

  Aguda nodded, his face clouding over with sorrow.

  She walked closer to examine the sculpture. The ice dancer stood on her tiptoes, lifting the buk high over her head, one of the flat surfaces tilted slightly downwards. Sui-Wei imagined the statue outside the window of Hae-wook’s bedroom. Even lying down, the old man would have been able to see the girl’s head and arms, and of course the drum, glowing bright with the sun behind it.

  “I stand in the presence of a great artist,” Sui-Wei said.

  Aguda brushed away the compliment with a laugh that sounded forced.

  The cold and stale air in the ice cellar made Sui-Wei uncomfortable, and the flickering shadows unsettled her. Aguda’s demeanor was not exactly warm. Everything made her want to leave.

  She grew annoyed with herself. Her father had often gone into shadowy places and met with distrust. If she was going to carry on her father’s legacy, she had to be bolder. She decided to ask for something from this cellar to prove that she was not frightened.

  “May I ask for a memento of my visit?” She asked. “I truly admire your art.” She pointed to a small, rough cylinder of ice on a workbench.

  Shadows flickered across Aguda’s face, but he soon grinned. “That is nothing more than the core I drilled out of the model of a well.”

  Sui-Wei forced herself to overcome her natural instinct to be diffident. She had to learn to push. “Nevertheless, I’d like to have it, if you would honor me so.”

  Aguda handed it to her wordlessly. One end of the cylinder of ice had carved markings that imitated the rim of a well. He was telling the truth.

  She thanked Aguda, and the three emerged from the cellar to take tea in the backyard. It was a bright day, but still not too warm.

  Sui-Wei placed the ice core next to her on the swept earth. In natural sunlight, she noticed that the ice cylinder seemed to be grey. Looking closer, she saw that many fine particles were suspended in the translucent ice, giving it the dark coloration instead of the expected brilliant, cloudy white.

  The warm teacup in her hands chased the memories of the chill and dank ice cellar away. They chatted of inconsequential things.

  After tea, Sui-Wei stood up to say goodbye. But as she bent down to pick up her memento, she saw only a tiny frog carved from ice, but ice so clear that the frog almost disappeared against the ground.

  She picked it up in her palm, amazed. “How was this done?”

  Aguda scratched his head and mumbled, “I was trying to make a sculpture of the frog at the bottom of the well. I wasn’t sure it would work.”

  Sui-Wei remembered the dirty appearance of the ice cylinder. “You carved the frog first, out of the clearest river ice, with no trapped air or imperfections. Then you immersed it in a solution of water and fine river silt, so that the frog was frozen inside a column of dark ice. Just like how we sprinkle coal dust to melt ice before doorways, the dark ice of the ‘well’ melts first to reveal the clear ice frog within.”

  “Miss Far is indeed wise,” said Aguda. “I’m certain that the truth of Master Lee’s murder will soon be revealed to your gaze just as this frog has been revealed by the heat of the sun.”

  As Sui-Wei handed Jiyin the basket of groceries, she paused and considered the pigs’ feet, a poor substitute for rib tips.

  You have to come early if you want them.

  “You lied,” Sui-Wei said.

  Kyoon began to cry. She put her arms around her knees and rocked herself.

  “You bought rib tips on the day of the fire. Many favor the cut for its richness in these cold winter days, and the butcher generally sells out by early afternoon. The distance between the butcher’s and your family’s house is only a quarter of an hour’s walk. Yet you told me that you could not see the Su family’s dress display in the shadow of late afternoon. There’s a missing hour or more in your account of the day.”

  Mixed in with Sui-Wei’s disappointment was also some pride. This was a detail that even her father might have missed. A woman’s detail.

  “Tell me how you really spent the hours between the butcher shop and your family.” Is the girl guilty after all?

  “I can’t. I just can’t.” The girl wiped the tears with her sleeves. “I didn’t start the fire. I would never do anything to harm the old master.”

  Instinctively, Sui-Wei believed the girl. But, she is hiding some other secret.

  The maid’s face was porcelain white from the lack of sunlight and nourishing food, pale like the pristine snow before the Lee warehouse.

  No one had been there since the last snow, which was on the day before the fire.

  Sui-Wei shuddered. Yeon-joo did not go to the warehouse on the day of the fire. He had lied too.

  In her mind, she saw again how the frightened girl had looked to Yeon-joo for direction the last time she was here.

  She took a gamble.

  “You met Yeon-joo.”

  The girl stopped crying and stared at her, her mouth open in shock.

  Sui-Wei’s heart pounded in her chest.

  “He gave you those jewels, didn’t he? You were in love and he wanted to give your parents your bride price.”

  But the girl emphatically shook her head. “No, no. The young master … it’s ridiculous, what you suggest.”

  Again, Sui-Wei believed the girl. If Yeon-joo was not in love with her, then what was he doing meeting the maid in secret?

  She made a show of nodding in approval. “Good. That shows the proper mindset of a servant. Young Master Lee already told me everything. He could not allow you to speak freely last time because prison guards were around. Just now, I was testing you, to make sure you weren’t getting any wrong ideas after all he’s done for you.”

  Kyoon sighed in relief. “Thank you, Miss Far. But you’re like the young master, kind, yet unpredictable.”

  “He really shocked you that day, didn’t he?”

  “Oh yes. That morning, when he and the old master shouted and argued, I was so scared that I ran into the kitchen and hid behind the woodpile. But he caught me later on my way to my parents’ and insisted on giving me the bag of jewels. I was so confused.”

  Sui-Wei tried to keep her voice level. “He told me you had a nice long chat.”

  Kyoon nodded. “He asked me so many questions. What it was like when I was little, what foods did I enjoy, what did I think of the old master. And then he asked me whether I heard what he and the old master were arguing about. I said no because I was so scared that I stuffed my fingers in my ears. He said that was fine. Just don’t ever talk about the argument, or our chat. And he said that the jewels were from the old master. ‘It’s what you deserve.’”

  Sui-Wei’s mind was a chaotic mess. She paced around her room and waved Jiyin away in irritation when she came to inquire about dinner.

  Kyoon and Yeon-joo were the only two who had access to the Lee house on the day of the fire. They were the only plausible suspects.

  The good news is that her client was innocent. The bad news is that her employer was probably the murderer.

  Yeon-joo had admitted that he was not close to his father. And Ben-Ni had indicated that there was tension between the father and the son over the direction of their business. Impatient with the old man’s conservative approach, was Yeon-joo tempted by the idea of getting his father out of the way?

  The argument that morning was probably the last straw. Once Kyoon was out of the house, Yeon-joo had ample opportunity to start the fire and leave, or even kill Hae-wook in sleep and use the fire to destroy the evidence. The chase after Kyoon, the jewels, the extracted promise of secrecy—these were the actions of a man intent on silencing a witness with bribes to cover his tracks. His insistence that the jewels were a gift from his father was a lie to get Kyoon to accept the jewels. The questions he asked the girl were probably intended to test whether she lacked sophistication and could be easily dominated and manipulated.

  Or, even more deviously, were the jewels an attempt to make the authorities suspect Kyoon? In that case, hiring Sui-Wei Far to defend Kyoon just added another layer of deception. After all, who would suspect the person paying to defend the accused of intending to frame her for murder?

  Sui-Wei gritted her teeth. Yeon-joo probably picked Sui-Wei Far as the litigator specifically because of her lack of experience. He thought she could be easily fooled.

  “Which would you obey,” she asked, “your employer or your conscience?”

  Sui-Wei had agreed to help Ben-Ni select a suitable jade ornament from Aguda’s eclectic collection of curios and antiques. Aguda was away for the moment to take care of some business while he left his guests to browse in his shop on their own.

  She could not decide on the right course. To save Kyoon she had to find out the truth, but if the murderer really was Yeon-joo, then her investigation also seemed a kind of betrayal. Ben-Ni was the only one she felt she could talk to.

  Ben-Ni stopped his examination of a small jade horse and turned around. “I’m not sure. Life is often about compromises. But there’s a satisfaction in giving the truth its due that is sweeter than anything else.”

  Sui-Wei nodded and mulled over Ben-Ni’s words as she continued to look around the cluttered storeroom. Scholars’ rocks and corals were in one corner, and bronze weapons and ritual vessels in another. Shelves along one wall held clocks, jade figurines, intricate jiguan models and Tang porcelain. Aguda had acquired his collection with little organization or taste.

  She picked up a metallic tube from one of the shelves. It was a telescope, smaller than the one that Ben-Ni had shown her.

  “Where did you get that?” She heard Ben-Ni’s shout and saw that his face was drained of color. Startled, she dropped the telescope, and it cracked against the ground, scattering rolling glass lenses around the floor.

  As they both knelt to collect the pieces, Ben-Ni lowered his voice and apologized. “I’m sorry to have startled you. I was surprised that Aguda had such a thing in his possession.”

  “He must have gotten it from another European.”

  Ben-Ni nodded. “I beg you not to mention this mishap to him. He will gouge me on the price for the jade if he is in a bad mood. Please hand me the pieces.” He hid them away in his pouch. “After the purchase, I will show him these and explain that it was my fault.”

  Aguda came back, and they haggled over the price for the jade horse a bit before concluding the deal.

  “Miss Far, would you mind departing on your own? I have some additional matters I’d like to discuss with Master Aguda.”

 

1 2 3