Chapter 5

The Baofang, Beijing, Early Autumn, 1519

They gave her two days.

She used them the way she used everything — completely, without waste, with the focused attention of a woman who understood that information was the only currency she currently possessed and that she needed to spend it wisely.

The room they kept her in was not a cell, which told her something. It was a genuine room in a genuine building on the grounds of the Western Park, with a paper window that let in the morning light and furniture that had been chosen with care rather than expediency — a low bed with proper bedding, a lacquered table, a brazier that wasn’t needed yet but would be, a bronze mirror that she stood before for a long time on the first morning not from vanity but from assessment.

She looked at herself honestly.

The journey had taken something. Not her face — her face was her face, had always been her face, the thing she had been born with that operated on the world around her like weather. But the months showed in other ways. She was leaner than she had been in Bandar Abbas, the riding and the sparse food having stripped everything from her that was not essential, and what remained was a leanness that was not diminishment but something closer to the opposite. She had arrived in China harder than she had left Persia. She noted this without sentiment. It was simply true.

Her hair they had done something with — washed it, which she had been allowed to do herself with the water they brought, and it had dried into the long waves that were their natural state, blue-black in the morning light coming through the paper window, and she looked at it in the bronze mirror and thought about the merchant’s wife in Khotan and the sun and the night sky and allowed herself, briefly, to find it funny.

Daughter of the sun and the night sky. Chained in a room in Beijing.

Her father would have found this funny too. That was the thing about him that she had loved most fiercely — his ability to find the absurdity in catastrophe without diminishing the catastrophe. She had inherited it imperfectly. She could find the absurdity. She just had to work at it harder than he did.

She was working at it.

On the first day a woman came to see her. Not staff — or not only staff. She was perhaps thirty-five, Han Chinese, with the posture of someone who had learned to move through powerful spaces without touching the walls, which was its own kind of skill that Mei-Lin recognized and respected. She introduced herself in careful, accented Arabic as the head of the Baofang’s female household, the woman responsible for the organization and management of the Emperor’s personal residence.

Mei-Lin answered her in Chinese.

The woman’s composure was excellent, but not quite good enough to fully conceal the quality of her surprise. She recovered in perhaps two seconds and continued in Chinese as though the shift had been her own idea.

Her name was Madame Fang. She had held her position for seven years. She had, in those seven years, received women from a considerable range of origins — Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur, Vietnamese — and had developed a thorough and practical method for assessing new arrivals, which consisted of a conversation that appeared to be welcoming and was actually a systematic evaluation of intelligence, temperament, language capacity, and the specific quality of obstruction the new arrival was likely to present to the smooth functioning of the household.

Mei-Lin understood this within approximately four minutes and answered every question with the precise amount of information that was useful and not one grain more. She was cooperative. She was pleasant. She asked questions about the household routine that were exactly the questions an intelligent new arrival would ask and no others.

Madame Fang looked at her for a long moment at the end of the conversation.

She said, “The documents I received described you as dangerous.”

Mei-Lin said, “The documents were accurate.”

Madame Fang said, “You do not seem dangerous.”

Mei-Lin looked at her steadily and said nothing, which was the most accurate possible answer.

Something shifted in Madame Fang’s expression — not fear, not quite. Recognition, perhaps. The specific recognition of a woman who had spent seven years managing powerful men’s complicated appetites and had learned to identify immediately the things that would and would not bend.

She stood and smoothed her robe and said that Mei-Lin would be formally presented to the household the following morning and that someone would come before dawn to assist with her preparation.

At the door she paused. She did not turn around. She said, in a voice stripped of all professional neutrality, “There are women in this house who have been here a long time. Who have built what they have built carefully. You would do well to understand that before tomorrow.”

Mei-Lin said, “I understand it now.”

Madame Fang left. Mei-Lin sat with the shape of what had just happened and thought about the women she had not yet met and what it meant to arrive in a place where other women had already made their accommodations with the same walls she had not yet agreed to inhabit.

She did not sleep much that night. She lay in the proper bed and listened to the sounds of the Baofang settling into its nighttime self — distant music, somewhere, a stringed instrument she could not name, played with the ease of someone for whom playing was as natural as breathing. Voices, occasional, too far away to resolve into words. An animal sound, once, that was large and close and which she identified after a moment as a big cat of some kind, the particular resonance of a chest cavity built for producing sound that carried.