Chapter Forty-Five: Green Silk

An innocuous emerald square spurs a troubling confession.

Amah had no illusions about her popularity amongst the young ladies of the Xi household. She was a dedicated nurse and, at heart, a kindly old woman. She was also strict, indomitable, and far too savvy about even the finest details of etiquette, and had a tendency to be quite a bully when her girls tried to go against her established laws of gentility. It wasn't terribly unusual, therefore, for her day to be graced with a tweaked nose, a sour face, or a sulky pout from a handmaid or young mistress.

But for Amah to get outright attacked—that was certainly not an expected consequence of her iron rule. As the old woman stepped inside the gates to her Young Miss's court, she immediately found herself ambushed on both sides by a pair of raging hostile…peacocks. Her lungs emptied in a massive squawk, as she reflexively leapt back from the overwhelming assault of tiny golden beaks and gigantic emerald-starred plumage. In the process, she dropped her basket of exquisite rainbow-bright orchids that she'd so meticulously clipped and collected for over an hour.

"Yinchun! Firelight!" the poor woman hollered shrilly, sounding decidedly less dignified than the tone she'd perfected over a period of half a century. "Get your skinny, lazy selves out here immediately and explain what is going on!"

If her voice didn't convey the urgency of her quandary, her soprano shrieks more than made up for that deficiency. By the time the two requested handmaids finally emerged from inside the house, they found their plucky old nurse stubbornly doing battle against a pair of equally plucky peacocks for possession of the succulent flowers now scattered on the ground.

"Scat! Go on!" Amah blustered impressively, flapping her heavy brocade sleeves in the birds' unimpressively small faces. "Go on! I wasted an hour collecting these for my Young Miss, and I'll make coats out of you before I let you steal them! Qu(1)!"

There it was—the redoubtable Amah, fighting and obviously losing against two peacocks. The sight proved too much for Yinchun and Firelight, who collapsed against each other's shoulders and dissolved into a fit of giggles. Amah, unsurprisingly, did not look amused by their lighthearted treatment of her plight, but she was currently too preoccupied with kicking off her shoe and throwing it at the infernal birds' heads to discipline the handmaids.

At last, Yinchun regained her composure and moved to help out the hapless nurse. She clucked softly at the rabid peacocks, getting their attention and gently ushering them along, while Firelight went to check on the outraged loser in this brief interspecies duel.

"Poor, poor Amah," the crimson-clad maiden cooed sympathetically, trying in vain to hide her merry dimples as she helped the old woman up.

Amah glared at the foolish girl, huffily straightening out her clothes and stepping back into her discarded shoe.

"When did we suddenly acquire a pair of peacocks?" she demanded indignantly, as she shrugged off Firelight's laughing "help" and strode toward the house, unassisted.

"Oh, General Jiang brought them over while you were gone—as a present to Miss Xi Tian, you know," Yinchun spoke up.

However, it was doubtful that Amah, frozen by the front steps with a bewildered look on her face, had even heard the girl's excuse.

Row upon row of copper and bronze birdcages were hung up alongside the mahogany awning of the veranda. Inside these little enclosures, a dozen canaries, nightingales, and golden orioles were twittering and flapping impatiently about. The trained songbirds immediately raised their voices and began singing their little hearts out as soon as Amah stumbled upon them, explaining for her dumbfounded expression and sudden stop at the entrance.

"General Jiang felt quite bad about the Lin Gu Niang incident earlier this week," Firelight added her own voice to the birds,' as she crept up behind Amah's ear and gleefully singsonged her explanation.

Amah turned a sour face to the handmaid.

"Then I suppose the young man thinks that he can apologize by turning Miss Xi Tian's court into an aviary?" she remarked sarcastically, before harrumphing one last time and barreling toward the front doors amidst a whirlwind of bird calls and fluttering feathers.

She heard the handmaids tittering to themselves as she marched up the low granite steps, and made a mental note to reprimand them later. But she made sure to conceal these lines of annoyance from her face when she entered the house: Xi Tian had been particularly moody lately, flittering from mild irritability to melancholic contemplation to long periods of spiritless reticence. But Amah, long familiar with her charge's temperament, thought she understood the girl's current state of mind. After all, her first engagement to Lu Bu had ended on disastrous terms. It must only be natural that she feel uneasy about her upcoming nuptials to Jiang Wei.

Well, these ought to cheer her up a bit, Amah confidently told herself, sparing a glance down at the basket of satiny blossoms looped over one of her arms. With her free hand, she pushed aside the draping velvet portieres leading to Xi Tian's room. The faint sweetness of fragrant incense wafted to her nostrils, as she opened her mouth and bellowed in her jolliest voice, "Miss Xi Tian?"

An equally jolly chirrup answered her call, shrilling back, "Xi Gu Niang prettier than Lin Gu Niang! Xi Gu Niang prettier than Lin Gu Niang!"

Amah's eyes shot up incredulously toward the source of the squeaky sayings, only to discover a pair of beady avian eyes gawking back at her. A new parrot was perched inside its little copper cage, a parrot which Jiang Wei must have trained better than its loudmouthed predecessor, judging by the bird's more flattering choice of vocabulary. The little house pet looked down curiously at Amah, before noisily flapping its clover-green wings and squawking, "Old hag! Go away! Xi Gu Niang prettier than old hag!"

The parrot was lucky—its "old hag" was too practical to hold on to any feminine vanities about her looks. Yet at the same time, Amah was lucky as well, in her own way—the racket raised by the opinionated bird attracted the attention of its owner, saving the old woman the trouble of having to go look for her.

Xi Tian eventually emerged from the inner chamber where she'd been hiding in, her eyes lowered modestly to the floor as she scrambled to greet her nurse.

"Amah." Her voice cracked faintly, so she amended by lowering her pitch to a barely audible whisper: "I'm sorry; I was reading. I didn't hear you come in."

Amah laughed heartily at her flimsy excuse.

"I don't blame you—with all the birds fluttering around your court, it's a miracle we can hear ourselves talking right now," she joked good-naturedly.

Xi Tian briefly lifted her head to offer a weak smile, before turning around and shuffling slowly toward a window-side seat. Carefully, almost gingerly, she settled down on the sky-blue upholstery, tucking her legs neatly underneath her the way she'd done a thousand times as a child.

A stretch of awkward silence passed between nurse and charge. The nurse shifted uncomfortably on her feet, while her charge occupied herself with gazing intently at a painting on her wall. Amah recognized the scroll as a scene from the famous folk tale of the Cow Herd and the Weaving Girl—recognized and disapproved, for that tragic tale of two lovers forcibly separated by the bride's Heavenly parents and allowed to reunite only one night a year was not an auspicious image for an engaged woman to become fixated on.

Quickly, as if hoping to tear Xi Tian's attention away from the ill-omened painting, Amah plunked down her basket of flowers before the girl, startling her out of her reverie.

"I thought this place could use some splashes of fresh new color," she beamed, scooping up a handful of the tantalizingly bright blooms and cheerfully waving them around. "Wouldn't you agree?"

Xi Tian frowned.

"They're orchids," she murmured cryptically.

Amah blinked in surprise. That wasn't exactly the enthusiastic response she'd been expecting.

"Why…yes, they are orchids, but—" she started to stammer.

"I don't like orchids," Xi Tian interrupted in a die-away whisper. "They remind me of…In any case, I don't like orchids."

Amah frowned suspiciously. This was not the pouty little tantrum of an emotional bride-to-be that she'd deluded herself into believing for the past several days. The listlessness, the uncharacteristic silence, the hollow-eyed fascination with tales of lost love—it was all a startlingly far cry from the charming girl who'd never known anything but dimples and laughter, the girl Amah had lovingly raised since childhood.

And then her eyes settled on the vibrant, silver-embroidered green handkerchief clutched between Xi Tian's fingers. Even though it was pressed against the gossamer folds of the girl's silk skirts, Amah had no trouble distinguishing that the material was damp with recent tears. Her expression immediately turned grim, as she pushed aside the beautiful collection of orchids that she'd so painstakingly gathered for her young mistress, and reached over to tilt the girl's face upwards.

As she'd suspected—nay, feared—a pair of sickly red rims circled Xi Tian's dull gold eyes, giving testimony to earlier weeping.

"Miss Xi Tian!" The words soared into a screech of alarm. "You've been crying! Miss Xi Tian, what's going on?"

Xi Tian turned her face away and fidgeted with her green silk handkerchief.

"Nothing," she insisted, carefully avoiding eye contact with the old woman who'd been a part of her life from the day she was a born. "I was just saddened by the poem I was reading earlier. 'A Peacock Flying to the Southeast.' You've heard it before, haven't you, Amah?"

"Miss Xi Tian—"

"Liu Lan Zhi was a virtuous and beautiful young woman, in love with a young man named Jiao Zhong Qing," Xi Tian went on quietly, as if in a dream, as if she'd never even noticed her nurse's distressed interruption. "But Jiao Zhong Qing's widowed old mother disapproved of the match, and broke up their happy marriage. Of course, Liu Lan Zhi's family was no better: they immediately promised her hand to another man, thus forcing her to remarry when her heart was already broken."

"Miss Xi Tian, I know the story," Amah broke in tersely.

Her voice was serious, almost stern. There was no way her charge could hope to argue with her, as she added pointedly, "I also happen to know that tales like 'Cowherd and Weaving Girl' and 'A Peacock Flying to the Southeast' are highly inauspicious works for a soon-to-be-bride to be reading. Please. Tell me what's wrong, Miss Xi Tian."

"In the end, Liu Lan Zhi and Jiao Zhong Qing chose to take their own lives, rather than be apart from each other." Xi Tian closed her eyes and paused for a reflective moment. "In any case, it's quite a tragic narrative. That's why I was crying earlier. But other than that, nothing's wrong. No, nothing's wrong at all. Everything's just fine."

"Miss Xi Tian, don't you try to deceive your own amah. I've raised you from when you were a baby. Raised your sisters too. Don't think I don't know all you Xi girls better than that." Serious. Stern. No way to argue with the stout, gray-haired figure looming before her.

Xi Tian heaved a silent sigh, before drawing her knees to her chest and tiredly resting her cheeks upon them. Her emerald handkerchief dangled limply from her hands, as she finally admitted that something, indeed, was wrong.

"The green silk," she murmured enigmatically. "The green silk…reminded me of him."

1. Go away.