Louis Cha - The Deer and the Cauldron

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blood on it. Trinket handed the knife to the Prefect, who confirmed that it was indeed blood. One of the tribunal attendants identified it as the sort of knife used by stable’boys for cutting grass.

Trinket nodded. One of the guards came in with a pail of water, and sloshed it all over the floor of the room.

‘What are you doing that for’’ asked Trinket.

To see if the water forms a puddle anywhere. That way we’ll know if the ground has been disturbed recently. It’s a standard method used by detectives investigating a crime.’

Sure enough, the water formed a puddle immediately beneath the bed. They lifted the bedstead away, and began digging with pick and shovel. Eventually they uncovered a corpse-a headless, decomposing corpse, dressed in the clothes of a nobleman.

‘Why,’ cried the astonished Prefect, ‘it’s Lord Feng!’

‘Are you sure’’ said Trinket.

‘Yes!’ cried the Prefect. ‘All we need to do now is find the head and we can make a positive identification.’

He turned to one of the attendants.

‘Whose room is this’’

They went to enquire. It turned out to be the bedroom of the concubine Orchid Scent, the one who had run away. And the young man who had run away with her was one of the grooms from the stables, who would have had easy access to such a knife.

The stables were searched and sure enough the severed head was found stuffed under a feeding’trough. Lady Feng tearfully identified it as her husband’s. The coroner came and delivered his verdict’ that Feng Xifan had been murdered and then decapitated.

There was loud wailing throughout the Feng household, and word of the murder soon spread throughout Peking. The Prefect made out a warrant for the arrest of the stable’boy and the concubine, and was greatly relieved to have ‘solved’ the case.

The Way of the Prince

Armed with the Prefect’s report, Trinket went to see Rang Xi.

‘My congratulations!’ exclaimed the Emperor. ‘You are not only a great general, it seems you are a great detective as well!’

‘I owe it all to Your Majesty! Any success of mine is entirely the result of your great kindness.’

‘Even the substitution of one corpse for another’’

CHAPTER 28

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Trinket shuddered. He should have known. Nothing could be kept a secret from the Emperor. Kang Xi must have planted a spy in his household guard.

‘Majesty! Forgive me!’ Trinket fell to his knees. He could not think what else to say.

‘Tamardy! Forget it! Why shouldn’t you, anyway’ At least this way the case is officially solved, and people won’t ask any awkward questions.’

The instant Kang Xi uttered the ‘t’ word, Trinket knew that all was well. He could not be really angry. He looked up and saw a smile on Kang Xi’s face.

‘Majesty,’ he said, never slow to capitalize on an opportunity, ‘may I dare ask you a favour’ I would very much like to go to Yangzhou, to see my mother.’

‘Of course you must go! And you must bring her back with you to Peking. I shall make her a grand lady at Court. But before you go, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. It’s a new book I’ve just been reading, by a gentleman called Huang Zongxi. It’s called The Way of the Prince. It talks about the way to rule a country. It argues that the Emperor should be held accountable to his people. I absolutely agree with that. There have been too many tyrants on the Chinese throne. I know this man has been suspected of being an anti’Manchu element, and plenty of my people would like to get their hands on him. But I must say, I found what he had to say very interesting and sensible. There were some people who wanted to call him in and question him, but I told them to leave him alone. He is obviously a highly intelligent and thoughtful scholar. We need people like that!’

Trinket nodded, though quite why Kang Xi was telling him all this (when he was incapable of reading any book at all, let alone a serious treatise on the art of government written in high’flown classical Chinese), he had not the least idea.*

Having taken his leave of the Emperor, Trinket lost no time in packing his bags, assembling his family, and setting off for Yangzhou.

* Our esteemed author, in a note, has intimated that the still young Manchu Emperor was at this early point in his career already preoccupied with the need to win over the recalcitrant Chinese intelligentsia, of whom Huang was a prominent and widely admired member. He was merely using Trinket as a glorified message’boy, knowing full well that his comments would be relayed straight to the scholar himself. Not Today, not Tomorrow, not Ever!

They made their way by land eastwards as far as Tongzhou, the northernmost point on the Grand Canal, and there they embarked on an official flotilla of barges going south down the canal. It was a long journey, taking them first through the big city of Tianjin, then to Linqing on the northern border of the province of Shandong, further south to the junction of the Grand Canal and the Yellow River, and on to Jining in southern Shandong. They reached the small canal’side town of Siyang, some miles north of the county town of Huaiyin, in the northern part of Jiangsu Province, and moored their boats there for the night.

They spent the evening in high spirits, and had just finished their evening meal when the arrival was announced of the Four Gentlemen of the Resistance’ Gu Yanwu, Zha Yihuang, Huang Zongxi, and Lii Liuliang. Trinket felt obliged to meet them, though he remembered finding their company exceedingly boring, and gave instructions that they were to be welcomed and served tea in the main cabin, while he went off to change into something more formal.

Gu, Zha, and Huang he had last seen in Yangzhou, when they were arrested by the obnoxious Prefect Wu Zhirong. On that occasion he had saved their lives. Lii he had never met before. As he entered the formal ‘reception cabin’ of the main barge, he saw that Lii was accompanied by two young men in their early twenties, who turned out to be his sons.

Gu Yanwu came straight to the point. There was an important matter they wished to discuss with Lodge Master Wei, but the official mooring at Siyang was not the place for such a discussion to take place. It was far too dangerous. There were too many eyes and ears. Could they prevail upon him to move a few miles downstream, to a more secluded spot’

Trinket agreed to this and explained his decision to the crew of the boat by saying that he and his distinguished scholar’friends were in the mood for a night of moon’watching and poetry’writing, and therefore needed a quieter and more romantic location. They set off in two boats, his womenfolk following in the second boat. (Su Quan had insisted that they be close at hand, in case anything untoward occurred.)

Once they were well and truly alone, Gu began by thanking Trinket once more for coming to their rescue in Yangzhou. They

It was Zha who spoke next. ‘None of us believes the slanderous rumours about you, that you killed the Helmsman. We know you better than that. And we are expecting Great Things of you now!’ ‘Great Things’’ thought Trinket to himself. ‘Oh no! Here we go again! Please Lodge Master Wei, will you go and bump off the Emperor for us’-I’d better squash that idea as quickly as possible!’ ‘You’re much too kind in your praise,’ he protested. ‘There’s really no need. It was nothing. As a matter of fact, I’ve finally decided that the time has come for me to retire. I was never much good at doing anything, I’m afraid, let alone Great Things!’ They all laughed. Understandably the gentlemen found the notion of this young whippersnapper ‘retiring’ rather comic. Trinket had other surprises in store for them. First of all, on the subject of Huang Zongxi’s book, The Way of the Prince’ ‘Oh, by the way, Mr Huang, I thought you might be interested to know that the Emperor’s just finished reading your new book.’ Startled glances were exchanged. Did this indicate that another Literary Inquisition (or to put it more bluntly, another purge) was on its way, like the one several years earlier that had started with the Ming History and had ended up wiping out several families’ Trinket hastened to reassure them. ‘As a matter of fact, the Emperor was deeply impressed by your book. He told me so. He found it “very interesting and sensible”. He said to me, “We need people like that!” And he’s told “them” to keep their hands off you!’ There were now expressions of relief and surprise. ‘All in all, I’ve decided that the Manchu Emperor is rather a good Emperor,’ continued Trinket. ‘Come to think of it, which of those Ming Emperors that we’re supposed to be so keen to restore, was actually as good as him’ Name one. I can’t think of one myself.’ The Four Gentlemen looked at one another a trifle sheepishly. This was certainly not the sort of thing one said in Resistance circles; but there was something disarming about Trinket’s naivety in matters political, which had the effect of making them unusually honest themselves. And if they once started to be honest, they knew that Trinket was, in a sense, absolutely right. The Ming Imperial House had, for the most part, produced a string of disastrous rulers’ cruel, debauched, foolish, incompetent. In all sincerity they were obliged to nod their agreement with Trinket’s startling (and politically incorrect) conclusion. Kang Xi was not so bad after all.