Extra Chapter 22 · The Iron Box

1. Sheung Wan

It was raining in Hong Kong when the plane landed.

Liu Zhijiang hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder and watched Wang Guanshu stop at the arrivals hall exit, pull out the address copied in Quanzhou. The paper's corner had gone soft with damp.

"Sheung Wan, Bonham Strand West," she said. "A pawnshop. The old kind."

The taxi slid over the wet streets. Signboards stacked layer upon layer on both sides, their lettering swollen with rain. Liu Zhijiang looked out the window and suddenly thought of the long streak of lamplight on the water in Quanzhou's inner harbor. One night apart, one sea apart.

The pawnshop was at the end of a slanted alley, its iron gate half-drawn, a fluorescent light on inside. The counter stood taller than a man's head; behind the glass sat an old man polishing a pair of reading glasses with a flannel cloth.

Wang Guanshu passed the photo of the silk cord through the gap.

The old man glanced at it, then raised his eyes behind the lenses and let them rest on her face for two seconds.

"Wang Shouzhuo," he said in Mandarin, very slowly. "Twenty years ago. Iron box. Never redeemed."

"Still here?"

"Still here." He set down the cloth. "I kept it for him twenty years. The pledge period expired long ago; by the rules it should have been disposed of. I didn't dispose of it."

"Why?"

The old man pulled a hardcover ledger from under the counter, flipped to a page, and pushed it across. One line in blue-black ink, the strokes hard: The claimant must present the silk cord; without the cord, the box shall not be opened.

"He left two sentences," the old man said. "One written here. The other, spoken."

"What was it?"

"Orchids are not to be placed together with what is in the box."

Liu Zhijiang and Wang Guanshu exchanged a look. The old man had already bent down and dragged out an iron box from the deepest part of the counter. Its surface was rusted, the clasp intact, and around it was wound a faded cotton thread—the very mark left when that half of the silk cord had been removed.

2. Inside the Box

The iron box opened without a sound.

Inside lay a layer of moisture-proof paper, and on the paper a stack of thin transparent sheets, folded with great neatness. Liu Zhijiang drew one out and held it up to the fluorescent light.

It was a tracing.

Fragments of the "Six Aromas Manual," traced stroke by stroke. The characters were tiny but clearly structured. The tracing was extremely accurate—accurate enough to show the wormholes and creases of the original pages.

"That's not my father's handwriting," Wang Guanshu said.

She spread the sheets one by one on the counter, her movements very gentle. There were seventeen pages of tracings in all, from "Orchid" to "Byakudan," one page for each aroma, and tucked into the last page was a thin bronze piece.

Half a bronze piece, Chu-style in form, its seal face carved with one character: fen.

"Half," Liu Zhijiang said. "Where's the other half?"

Wang Guanshu did not answer. She turned to the last page of the tracings; besides the manual text, there was a line of very faint pencil writing at the foot of the page, almost swallowed by the paper's grain. She held the paper up to the light.

"Agarwood must not be gathered together; gathered, it loses that by which it is agarwood." She read it aloud. "That's not a line from the manual."

"It's an annotation," Liu Zhijiang said. "Added by the tracer."

"The tracer wasn't my father." Wang Guanshu set the paper down. "I've seen my father's tracings. His copybook style was grounded in Yan Zhenqing—thin horizontals, thick verticals. This is Ouyang Xun style, with exposed brush-tips at the start of strokes."

The old man had been listening all along, and now interjected: "When it was brought in, the box was wrapped in two layers of oil paper. Inside the oil paper was another layer, with a name written on it. I didn't recognize it, so I wrapped it back the way it was."

"A name?"

The old man fished out a yellowed slip of paper from under the counter. On it was Wang Shouzhuo's handwriting, just two characters:

Qu.

3. Rainy Alley

They came out of the pawnshop; the rain had let up a little, and water ran down the stone steps of the alley.

Liu Zhijiang tucked the iron box under his arm, took a few steps, and stopped.

"Your father knew the Qu family," he said. "Knew them twenty years ago."

"He studied painting and calligraphy restoration, and he'd handled Chu bamboo slips," Wang Guanshu said. "But this name appearing here isn't an academic acquaintance."

"He sent the box to Hong Kong, not to Beijing. Pawnshops don't check identity and don't keep records." Liu Zhijiang said. "He didn't want this thing entering any registered repository."

"He also didn't want the silk cord and the box kept together," Wang Guanshu said. "The cord has orchids on it. The box has the 'fen' seal and the tracings. The orchid is the mark of the mother agarwood; the fen seal is the mark of division and keeping. He split the two marks and stored them in two places."

"Why?"

"Because together they make a complete message." She looked at the streetlamp at the alley mouth. "He was telling someone: I know that Ranjatai is the measure, and I also know the six aromas should be divided. But he wouldn't let that message rest complete in one place."

Liu Zhijiang was silent for a moment. Rain dripped from the eaves into the puddle at his feet.

"The other half of the seal," he said. "Is it in Qu Huaisha's hands?"

"I don't know." Wang Guanshu put the slip of paper bearing the character "Qu" into her bag. "But I know who my father met twenty years ago, and that person is still in Beijing."

She turned and walked toward the alley mouth, took two steps, and stopped again.

"Liu Zhijiang."

"Hmm."

"My father sent the box to Hong Kong three years before he died," she said. "In those three years he never said a word about it."

The rain lamp at the alley mouth stretched her shadow long. Water flowed down the stone steps level by level, very softly, like someone turning pages far away.

"That other half of the seal," Liu Zhijiang shifted the iron box to his other hand, "we'll go back and ask Qu Huaisha."

"No." Wang Guanshu said. "First we ask my mother."

She walked into the rain and did not look back.

—To be continued · Extra Chapter 23