Breaking Bamboo by Tim Murgatroyd

indiscreet to mention his name. Actually it was Market Clerk Chi. Anyway, he told me his cousin is a servant on Peacock Hill and that he drank wine with him last night.
    Hey, Lan Tien, leave a thicker centre!’
    The girl rolled her eyes but continued to work silently.
    ‘Your guest is very bold by his account,’ continued Widow Mu. ‘She almost supplanted His Excellency’s wife. Imagine it!
    If Wang Ting-bo had not been afraid of offending his wife’s family – they own great estates down South – he would have found an excuse to divorce her. Some say Lu Ying used sorcery to captivate him. Not that it takes magic for a man to lose his head.’
    The women worked in silence. Cao digested this news.
    ‘Servants’ gossip,’ she said, touched by a vague desire to defend her guest.
    ‘Watch that one!’ remarked Mu, and the doctor’s wife didn’t know whether she referred to the discarded concubine or was admonishing her daughter.
    ‘Lu Ying has been no trouble to me,’ said Cao. ‘She seems a fine lady. Indeed, I do not know why she stays with us at all. I believe she wishes to obey her former master. So one might call her very filial.’
    Widow Mu had reached the stage of filling the dumplings.
    The task gained importance when two longshoremen from the basin near the Water Gate of Morning Radiance cleared the last of her stock.
    ‘Market Clerk Chi told me that, for all her beauty, this Lu Ying is of no family,’ remarked Mu. ‘Perhaps she has nowhere to go. The miracle of it is that the Pacification Commissioner did not have a child by her. Then again, his candle has never been good at lighting fires. For all the fine ladies he keeps, there is only one son.’
    Lan Tien sniggered as she rolled out dough. Cao pretended to fuss over vinegar for the sauce; she knew her friend’s insensitivity was well-meant.
    ‘What happens in a palace may happen in an alley,’ said Mu.
    ‘And another thing. Your fine guest has a taste for the best, according to Chi’s cousin. Silks that took a whole village a year to make and are worn only once. Make-up so finely ground the powder runs like water. She ended up with more elegant clothes than His Excellency’s wife!’
    Cao sighed. Really this was too much! Yet she wondered what would happen if Lu Ying asked Shih for extravagant make-up or perfume.
    ‘Nevertheless, I pity her,’ she said, doggedly. ‘And Dr Shih is too sensible to spend more than we can afford.’
    Widow Mu placed nuggets of filling on the dough circles.
    ‘Let a beggar in your house and he’ll soon have his feet on the table,’ she declared.
    The doctor’s wife concentrated on the garlic sauce. Although Mu meant well, she lacked delicacy. Cao didn’t mind when the gossip concerned someone else’s troubles, but found it less diverting when applied to her own. Still, Mu was a neighbour and friend. No one prospered by quarrelling with a neighbour.
    The little shop filled with the spit and scent of frying. Cao glanced out of the window while Mu used chopsticks to drop and retrieve dumplings from a pan of hot oil. Willows overhanging the canal, planted to ensure the bank did not crumble, stirred in the light breeze. Leaves shimmered like jade pendants catching the sun. And she wondered where a good wife’s duty lay.
    *
    Madam Cao knew all about the duties of a doctor’s wife. Her earliest memory was of a patient in her father’s medicine house on Black Tortoise Street in the capital. He had been a water-carrier with a misshapen back, screaming as the smouldering moxa burned his bare skin. It made a great impression on her.
    Afterwards the man seemed grateful to her father rather than angry.
    Mother had died when she was two years old. Of course no portraits of her had been painted for they were humble people.
    And Father was hopeless at describing her. So, as a little girl, Cao painted pictures in her imagination – Mother as a beautiful lady, bobbing in a gilded sedan chair down the Imperial Way,