Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

couple of weeks before Qingming, the First Lady summoned the Magistrate’s loyal follower Chunsheng to the Eastern Parlor.
    Chunsheng entered the hall nervously and was met by the First Lady, who sat in a chair, her brow deeply furrowed, a somber cast to her face, all in all looking a bit like a temple idol. Chunsheng fell to his knees and said, “I have come in response to the First Lady’s summons. What is it you would have your humble servant do?”
    “It’s all your fault!” she said icily.
    “What did I do?”
    “What is going on between Laoye and the woman Sun Meiniang?” she demanded to know. “I assume that you served as a go-between, you little bastard!”
    “Madam, that is untrue. I have done nothing of the sort,” Chunsheng defended himself. “I am merely a loyal dog at Laoye’s side, prepared to attack wherever the Magistrate points me.”
    “Don’t you dare quibble with me!” insisted the indignant First Lady. “You little bastards have led Laoye astray!”
    “I have done nothing of the sort . . .”
    “Chunsheng, you dog-headed wretch, as Laoye’s most trusted follower, instead of admonishing him to be pure of heart and wary of desires, as a good official must be, you have encouraged him to have illicit relations with a common woman, a loathsome deed, and one for which you deserve to have your dog legs broken. But I may be prepared to be forgiving, since you have served him diligently and well for several years, but only this one time. From today on, you are to report to me everything that involves His Eminence. If you do not, you will be punished for your crimes, old and new!”
    Chunsheng nearly soiled himself as he banged his head on the floor. “I thank the First Lady for not having me beaten. You will have no further need to be upset with Chunsheng.”
    “I want you to go to that shop that sells dog meat and inform Sun Meiniang that I wish to see her,” the First Lady said with seeming innocence. “I will have words with her.”
    “Madam,” Chunsheng screwed up the courage to say, “Sun Meiniang is a good-natured woman . . .”
    “Shut up!” The First Lady’s face darkened. “Laoye is not to know about this. If I find that you have had the audacity to breathe a word of this to him . . .”
    “I would not dare . . .”
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    6
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    When news of the County Magistrate’s lingering illness reached Sun Meiniang, she was so upset that she could neither sleep nor eat; her distress eclipsed even that which she had suffered upon the tragic deaths of her stepmother and her siblings. She tried several times to deliver spirits and dog meat to the yamen and, she hoped, see the Magistrate, but she was stopped at the gate each time by guards with whom she had gotten friendly over time. Now they acted as if they didn’t know her, almost as if there had been a regime change within. An order specifically forbidding her to enter had been handed down.
    Meiniang was a woman without a soul, distracted beyond the limits of endurance. Day in and day out, she roamed the streets aimlessly, carrying a basket of dog meat and followed everywhere by malicious chatter, as if she were some sort of monster. She visited every temple in town, large and small, where she offered up prayers for the health of the County Magistrate to a host of deities and divinities. She even lit joss sticks and kowtowed in the celebrated Bala Temple, which was devoted to issues and concerns other than sickness, and when she emerged, she was surrounded by a clutch of children who sang a song that had obviously been written by adults:
    Gaomi’s Magistrate has the lovesick disease, food has lost its taste, sleep can no longer please.
    He spits blood up top and passes filth down past his knees.
    Gaomi’s Magistrate has a beard so long, day and night one thought only, of Sun Meiniang.
    One man and one woman, Mandarin ducks made famous in song.
    A pair of Mandarin ducks, yet unhappily apart, he thinks of death, she has a broken heart.
    But dying and crying the First Lady will not let start.
    On the children’s lips, this sounded like a message from the Magistrate, and it raised towering waves of passion in Sun Meiniang’s heart. Now that she had learned that his illness was more serious than she had feared, tears spurted from her eyes. Silently she repeated his name, over and over, and, relying upon her imagination, conjured up a vision of the damage the illness had done to his face. Dearest, she said