Chapter 19: The Princess of West Lake

The Princess of West Lake came to inspect him on the twentieth, at the end of the afternoon, and she came as a passenger. Mei didn't know that at the time. All she knew was that a woman was standing on the south landing waiting for the ferry, and that the woman was the most beautiful person who had ever stood on that landing, and that she was going to charge her double for it. She was tall. She wore silver-blue, a long robe the color of a lake under a high sky, with a sash of darker blue, and there were pearls in her black hair, river pearls, small and uneven and gray-pink, a whole net of them, worth more than the ferry and the landing and Auntie Tang's tea shed put together. Mei's hand went to her headscarf, where there was no pin, and never had been. Her…