Chapter 2926: Tianjin Wei (5)

"It's barely the first watch, and this isn't midwinter — how come the shutters are up?"

Li Luoyou frowned at his own shop. The Tianjin branch stood in the middle stretch of Guyi Street, a two-bay frontage, and at this hour on an ordinary day its lamps and candles would be blazing, merchants going in and out. Now the door planks were shut fast, only a thread of dim yellow light escaping through the seam. The street, if not so lively as by day, still carried a steady traffic; the grain store and the cloth shop next door were both open, their men at the doors crying their wares — but his own Li family shop sat dark as a closed eye.

He turned and ordered Saoye: "Go knock them open."

Saoye assented, took the steps three at a stride, and pounded with his fist — boom, boom — on the planks. He had hammered a good while before hurried footsteps sounded within; the little hole in the door planks slid open with a clatter, and the doorkeeper, holding his lantern to the light, made out the face outside. His eyes went round, and his voice climbed an octave: "Bro-brother Saoye? The Master — the Master has come?"

"Nonsense. If the Master hadn't come back, who'd be knocking at this hour?" Saoye said, out of all patience. "Open up, quick!"

The little side door beside the shopfront swung open with a creak, and two shopmen stood waiting with lanterns.

"Master, it's terrible — we've been struck by calamity!"

The words were hardly out before the shopkeeper came trotting from behind the counter to meet them, terror all over his face. Shopkeeper Qiao was a little past forty this year, round-faced, lightly mustached, a man who wore smiles every day and radiated good fellowship. Now his face was dead white, beads of sweat the size of beans standing on his forehead, the hand holding his lantern trembling so hard he all but knocked the horn lantern to the floor.

"Silence! None of that talk!" Li Luoyou's voice dropped low and hard. "To the counting room."

The counting room held a single lit candlestick; the whole room swam in gloom. On the counter the ledgers lay open, the beads of the abacus scattered every which way, as though a reckoning had been snatched up short halfway through. The air was thick with the smell of anxiety.

The Tianjin branch's Shopkeeper Qiao was a clansman of his concubine, Mistress Qiao; a man of honest and solid habits, and long in Li Luoyou's esteem. All the years the branch had been in his hands it had never once come to real grief — that he should lose his head so completely today was passing strange.

And then this murky air, sunk in ill omen. Li Luoyou had risen and sunk on the merchant sea a long time; every shop has its own breath, and walking in and taking that breath told you seven parts in eight of how the place was faring.

"Bring a lamp!"

His displeasure was showing now. He seated himself in the grand armchair, rapped twice lightly on the armrest with a finger, and his gaze went round the askew tables and chairs and the ledgers no one had stayed to put right.

A shopman brought a new Australian candle and was easing it into the candlestick when the Master waved him to a stop: "The Nanyang kerosene lamp. It gives more light."

The kerosene lamp came in presently. It stood on a brass base, polished to a shine, its glass chimney clear as ice and without one crack or flaw. Li Luoyou turned the little key at the burner — one turn, two, three — until the wick stood at its full length, then struck a match and set it near; the kerosene caught with a hiss, and warm yellow light swelled to fill the bulb of the chimney, lighting the whole shopfront bright as noonday. The flame gave far more light than a candle and no smoke at all — you could count the cobwebs in the corners of the walls.

Shopkeeper Qiao stood to one side, rubbing his hands together strangely, his eyes flitting about, not daring to meet Li Luoyou's. When the lamp was lit, he came forward trembling and held out a sheaf of paper notes — held it as though it were not paper at all but a stack of death-summonses.

Li Luoyou took the sheaf and studied it closely under the light.

The notes were of the finest mulberry-bark paper, tough and yielding, smooth and fine to the touch. The plate-work on their faces was plainly the hand of the palace Banknote Office — the characters regular, the ornament intricate, the borders printed with a running pattern of lotus scroll. Dead center stood four large characters: "Pinglu Xinpiao" — "Bonds for the Pacification of the Caitiffs" — in the square artisan hand, every stroke set true, without one flourish. Below ran a small line: "Five percent interest per annum," and beneath that, "Principal and interest to be redeemed within ten years." At the foot sat an official seal in vermilion, its seal-script characters neat and legible: "Seal of the Bond Bureau" — five characters you could just make out.

"A thousand-tael Pinglu bond?" Between Li Luoyou's fingers — ten of them, to the note.

His eyelid twitched once, but nothing moved in his face. He only laid the sheaf of bonds on the table and pinned it under a teacup, lest the wind scatter it. The lamplight fell warm and yellow across the paper — and made those four characters, "Pacification of the Caitiffs," stand out uglier than they had any right to.

This Pinglu bond, the newest incendiary bomb lobbed into public opinion — the teahouses of the capital had it, with nose and eyes entire, in forty versions. Before boarding at Tongzhou, Li Luoyou had taken in an earful over his after-tea leisure. The story ran that Tian Hongyu, the imperial in-law, had privately traded in the Australians' government bonds and grown his pile handsomely; having tasted the sweetness, he went and catered to His Majesty — who was tearing his hair over military funds — by offering up this scheme of copying the tiger and producing a cat. His designs, so the story went, were two: profit for himself, and firmer favor for his daughter, Consort Tian. One arrow, two hawks: a beautifully reckoned abacus.

Rumor is hard to sift from truth. But that His Majesty had of late issued a palace rescript establishing a Bond Bureau, ordering Tian Hongyu with the rank of Commissioner-in-Chief to take sole charge of the bond business — that, at least, was fact beyond arguing. A rescript from the palace passes neither through the Grand Secretariat nor through court deliberation; it is the Emperor's command handed straight down. This move stepped clean around the Ministry of Revenue and the Ministry of War and dropped the power of raising funds into the lap of an imperial in-law. Court and country, naturally, had been turned into a boiling pot over the thing — the supervising secretaries of the Six Offices had sent up impeachment after impeachment, and the censors of the Censorate took the field in relays, citing the classics, laying out the perils at length: "An imperial in-law meddling in state affairs is no blessing to the nation"; "How does this differ from the mining agents and tax eunuchs of the Wanli years?" — and so on, and so on.

But the imperial will had gone strangely rigid: the memorials were retained in the palace without answer, rebuked by nobody, adopted by nobody, simply left lying there. To lay all that at the feet of bewitchment by the Tian father and daughter would hardly stand on its own legs. Li Luoyou had lived in the capital long enough to know something of His Majesty's temper — this Son of Heaven, so hesitant in the common run of things, weighing every matter back and forth, will, once his mind is truly made up, not be dragged off his course by nine oxen. The bond business, he suspected, held some share of the Emperor's own inclination in it.

Li Luoyou was in no mood to plumb the imperial mind just now. He lifted his teacup and drank; the tea had gone cold and acrid, leaving a faint bitterness on the tip of his tongue. He set the cup down, raised his eyes to Shopkeeper Qiao, and asked: "Did you tell Intendant Jiang that our house had already subscribed to the bonds in the capital — to the tune of thirty thousand taels?"

"Master doesn't know," said Shopkeeper Qiao, his voice shaking, his hands rubbing on and on until the veins stood out on their backs. "The thing has nothing to do with the Intendant or the Governor at all. The runners serving the papers said only that they acted under orders from Eunuch Deng the army supervisor, and that at the first word of demurral the shop would be sealed and the men taken up for questioning. They recognized no one's card, whatever it was."

"Eunuch Deng?" Li Luoyou's brow gathered. "Which Eunuch Deng?"

"The one — the one — Deng Xizhao." Shopkeeper Qiao dropped his voice, as if the walls might grow ears. "The one they once sent to supervise the Ji garrison — the one who was dismissed afterward. Nobody knows how he's been brought back; now he's overseeing the bonds as supervising eunuch, and he struts across Tianjin Wei sideways. Nobody dares cross him."

Shopkeeper Qiao plainly had the fright still on him; his lips shook as he spoke. "Those runners were brutes, Master. At first they only demanded the silver — wouldn't so much as hand over the notes. When your small one brought out Governor Xu's card and said we had already subscribed in the capital, the runner rolled his eyes and said, 'The capital is the capital and Tianjin is Tianjin — each subscribes his own.' It was only by bringing out Governor Xu's card again and wearing my lips to the leather that your small one got even these notes back. How would I dare go bandy words with the likes of them again?"

Li Luoyou listened, his finger tapping the tabletop — once, once, and once again. The lamplift played over his face, now bright, now dark; on that well-kept countenance no expression could be read at all.

"So it's Deng Xizhao — that old eunuch cur!"

Li Luoyou's hand came down hard, sheaf and all, and even the zelkova armrest of the armchair creaked under the blow. The sheaf burst apart and the bonds went fluttering down across the tabletop like snow, a few sliding to the floor, and Shopkeeper Qiao scrambled to gather them up.

"That creature was sent to supervise the Ji garrison — His Majesty dismissed him in the ninth year of Chongzhen, stripped him of the post outright. How does he come to be employed again?" Li Luoyou's voice was low, but a fury came through it that low tones could not hold down. "And to set a supervising eunuch over the Pacification bonds — is that not the mining agents and tax eunuchs of Wanli come again, to poison the whole empire? Truly and thoroughly: the rot begins at the top!"

The words were of the heaviest kind. Shopkeeper Qiao and Saoye both changed color, traded one glance, and dared not answer. In the shop the silence was such that you could hear the fine burning sound of the kerosene wick — a hiss, hiss, like a snake flicking its tongue.

"Master —" Saoye called softly, worry in his voice.

Li Luoyou's cursing stopped short. Without a word he pointed at the medicine case he carried, closed his eyes, and sank back against the chair. His face had gone paleish, the vein at his temple beating faintly, his lips pressed to a line, as though enduring something. Saoye hastened to open the case, shook out one of the pills Shopkeeper Leng had given, set it in his palm, poured half a cup of warm tea, and attended his master while he swallowed it.

Shopkeeper Qiao spun in circles of distress, hands wringing, pacing up and down the shopfront, his boot soles clattering quick double-strokes on the tiled floor. He called over the shopmen and sent one running to fetch a physician.

"No need for fuss."

Li Luoyou's voice came from behind the chairback — not loud, but steady. His eyes were open again, his color still poor, but far recovered from a moment since. He looked at the ten Pinglu bonds laid on the square table; the jumping flame of the kerosene lamp printed the close-packed characters on their faces into the air — "Five percent interest per annum," "Principal and interest to be redeemed within ten years," "Seal of the Bond Bureau" — every character plain as day, and every one a little knife, paring at his flesh.

"Put them all away."

He waved a hand, and in the motion was a weariness there were no words for. The shopkeeper hastened forward, drew the scattered bonds together sheet by sheet, squared them, wrapped them in a sheet of cotton paper, and laid them away in a case.

Ten thousand taels of good white silver — very nigh the whole of the Tianjin branch's working capital — traded away for these ten strips of paper!

Small wonder the shop had sat like a house in mourning. With no silver to turn over, what does a merchant turn?

Shopkeeper Qiao edged near again, careful as a cat on ice: "Master — what shall be laid on for the evening meal? I'll have the kitchen set to it directly. Or, if not, I'll send a man running to the winehouse for a few dishes—"

"It won't be necessary." Li Luoyou cut him off, and had no ear for the servants' questions about supper either. "Bring the ledgers. I mean to inspect them."

Shopkeeper Qiao blinked, opened his mouth, thought better of it at the look on Li Luoyou's face, swallowed the words, and turned to haul the ledgers out from behind the counter.

The ledgers came down onto the table, four great volumes, red labels pasted on kraft-paper covers. Li Luoyou opened the first and, under the kerosene lamp, began to read, page by page.

These last several years, the Liaohai Trading House's business had gone from bad to worse, much as the court's own fortunes.

He read the figures, and his brow knotted tighter and tighter. The income fell shorter every year; the outgo mounted every year. Ginseng, deer antler, pelts, and Eastern pearls out of Liaodong, shipped inside the pass — the prices would not climb, and the goods moved slow. Silks, porcelain, tea, and drugs from inside the pass, shipped out to Liaodong — at every stage of the road more hands reached out, and the appetites grew larger, and what profit reached his own hands was nothing to what it had been.

Years ago already, Li Luoyou had got wind that the Australians were dealing direct with the Jianzhou caitiffs. When that news came in, he had been genuinely alarmed for a season, thinking the Shorn-hair Thieves would shoulder the Liaohai Trading House's business aside without effort. He had seen the Australians' merchantmen with his own eyes at Lingao — ships big, swift, and deep-laden, that no sea the winds could stir gave any trouble to. If the Australians carried Liaodong's goods south to sell and the south's goods back to Liaodong, what rice would be left in Li Luoyou's bowl?

Very soon he found the thing was not as he had imagined. The Australians seemed to care only for buying up from the caitiffs the great cheap bulks — horses and mules, timber, rosin — and still took little interest in the luxuries: pelts, ginseng, deer antler, Eastern pearls. What they wanted was the stuff that makes guns and cannon and turns machines.

Li Luoyou turned a ledger page, and his gaze came down on a line of figures and stayed there a long time. This last year or two, the movement of Liaodong goods had been falling off, and plainly. The capital shop, the year before last, had still sold five hundred jin of ginseng; last year, three hundred and twenty. At the Nanjing branch, pelt sales had fallen off two parts in ten. Even at so great a port as Jinan, the Eastern pearls would no longer move at all — they lay pressed in the warehouse under a felt of dust. Tianjin alone, thanks to the convenience of the canal wharves and Grand Secretary Xu's land-reclamation works and manufactories, was doing, against the current, rather well.

The only real growth sat in the Lingao and Foshan trading houses in which the Tianbao house held its controlling interest. Those houses sold Australian goods — kerosene, matches, foreign cloth, sugar, paper — every article a tight-market thing that feared no want of buyers, only a want of stock. Those figures in red ink stood red as a wound off the ledger page, as if they were laughing at him.

From which you could see how it stood: under the Australians' rule the land lay quiet, the people dwelt at their work in peace, coin in their pockets — and with coin in the pocket, of course they buy. In the Ming's domain the rivers and hills heaved, roving bandits rose on every side, the government armies passed through like locusts, and the common folk could not fill their bellies with rice — what spare cash would they have for ginseng and deer antler?

Li Luoyou closed the ledger and let out a long, long sigh.

(End of chapter)