The Magistrate's Cell

It was not a week before the yamen runners came. They were rough men in faded uniforms, and they carried a writ sealed with the county seal. Feng was dragged from his table before he could finish his morning tea.

The charge was not what he expected. The petition, Wang's lawyers had argued, was a libel upon a respectably connected family; it had been signed by a scholar of no standing, evidently suborned. Feng was lodged in the county jail to await his trial.

The jail was a low, damp room cut out of the courtyard wall. The straw on the floor was black with old damp. Through the grating he saw the sun pass overhead and vanish, and another sun, and another. On the third day he was beaten, not hard, but enough to remind him whose will held the key.

The magistrate was a man named Shen, who had bought his own rank and hated scholars because he could not have been one. He looked over Feng's case with a cold smile and asked, in a low voice, what a rash young gentleman expected to gain by setting the county's gentry at loggerheads.

Feng, bruised and afraid, said nothing. He thought of Siniang's quiet warnings, and the shame of it sat heavier than the blows.

Meanwhile, in the town above, Siniang had taken a small room near the prison gate. She had brought with her a small bundle and a casket of things that gleamed dully in the dark — a few pieces of old jade, a pair of pearl ear-rings that she had never worn. A-Qing moved among the prison officials with modest smiles and small gifts.

Siniang learned what there was to learn. The magistrate was greedy, but not foolish; what he feared most was the higher court, and the favor of his own superiors. She learned, too, that Wang the bully had enemies of his own — old debts, a poisoned cousin, a maid who had been wronged and knew too much.

A-Qing, meanwhile, sat in the kitchens of the yamen and heard the cooks complain. She learned which clerks took which side at dinner, which runner had a sick child and which was in debt to a wine-shop. She brought these small facts home to her mistress, who laid them out on the table like pieces of a puzzle.

"A-Qing," she said one evening, smoothing her hair before a cracked mirror, "the case will not be won in this cell. It must be won one street away, in the magistrate's own antechamber."

She sold the jade for a fair sum, and spent it not on bribes but on information. She sat for three days in the tea-house across from the yamen, listening. By the fourth evening she had a small sheaf of facts in her head, and a plan as quiet and as cold as moonlight.

Within the prison, Feng had fallen into a numb despair. He no longer heard the other prisoners. He had forgotten, in his pride, that a wife could do anything for a husband; and yet, outside the gate, a woman he had never rightly questioned was moving, step by step, to bring him home.