onto the street. She followed the glimmer of the lanterns back to the heart of the district. Drinking houses and tea parlors lined either side of the street, marked by colourful banners.
As a musician, she was accustomed to the comings and goings of the North Hamlet. Strangers arrived, became fast friends in an hour, and didn’t remember a thing the next morning. You couldn’t trust anyone in the entertainment district.
Cheng didn’t know what a treasure he’d had in his grasp. Most likely he’d taken it as a souvenir after one drunken night in the Lotus Pavilion—though Jia was certain she’d never seen him there, or at any of her other performances, now that she thought of it.
She returned to the musicians’ hall where her troupe stayed. A string of tattered yellow lanterns marked the front gate. The troupe was out in the open courtyard, sharing a jug of wine beneath the stars.
“Goddess of Beauty and Light!”
Jia affected a tigress snarl at them and they laughed. She supposed it was better than the other names they used to tease her. Grandmother. Hag. Spinster. She was not even twenty-four, but in the floating world of courtesans, she was becoming a relic.
Perhaps if she was better at smiling pleasantly and being coy, every coin wouldn’t have been such a struggle. As it was, no one wanted to watch an aging pipa player when they could watch a young, pretty one. If she didn’t gain her freedom soon, she could be turned out to the streets to beg by the time she’d reached thirty. Like most of the entertainers in the district, she owed her troupe leader for taking her in as a child and training her. Every mouthful of rice she’d ever been fed was accounted for and with each performance, he collected two coins to her one. The cash would continue to dwindle as time went by and the debt would keep growing. She could play her fingers raw every night for the next six years and never earn enough.
“Where’s the book?” she demanded.
The flute player held a bloodstained cloth to his nose. “Your lover hits hard.”
“He is not—” Jia exhaled slowly. They only did this because she always rewarded them by getting angry. “He is not my lover. The book. Now.”
The men nudged each other, grinning and remarking cheerfully about women scorned. The lot of them still insisted she’d paid to have the scholar robbed as an act of revenge. Let them spin their less than imaginative tales. She was getting out of here and would never have to look at their ugly faces again.
A fellow pipa player pulled out a bag from under his feet. “Here,” he said, dangling the sack before her. “And don’t forget, you owe us cash.”
She counted out the coins from her purse and slapped them into his outstretched hand. In the same movement, she grabbed the pack.
Before she reached her door, she was already working at the knots. She’d missed out on a night’s wages by passing up the chance to entertain at a court official’s banquet. Another fifty in cash she’d given to the dogs in the courtyard for waylaying Cheng, but the journal was worth a hundred times that.
She slipped into her room and closed the door before loosening the last knot. Her hands shook with excitement as she lit the oil candle. There were several bound books in the pack. She flipped through the first one, searching for the precious lines of poetry that would signal her freedom.
It was a treatise on the history of the later Han dynasty. She cast the book aside and flipped through the smaller notebook. The cover was plain, with none of the adornment she’d expected.
She scanned through the pages, her chest growing tighter with each column of neat black characters. Page after page, backwards then forwards, the characters didn’t change. There was no poetry there. No words of wit and genius worth thousands in cash. She could feel the coins slipping through her fingers like desert sand.
This was going to be the death of her. She was already headed to the afterlife. How had this gone so wrong?
She could storm back to the courtyard and demand her money back, but that would only get her ridiculed. Somehow this was the scholar’s doing. Luo Cheng had what she wanted, and she was going to get it even if she had to search heaven above and earth below.
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