The monk bowed his head. 'I don't know how, lady. I come from Soochow. Perhaps you've visited there?'

She shook her head, still disturbed, peering intently into his eyes. 'I know you,' she whispered.

Then to the servants she said, 'Let him sleep by the back gate. Guard him, and we'll find out more in the morning. It's too dark now to see a man's nature.'

In the morning the man had been joined by a boy just a few years younger than Shih. Both were filthy, and were busy sifting the compost for the freshest scraps of food, which they wolfed down. They regarded the members of the household at the gate as warily as foxes. But they could not run away; the man's ankles were both swollen and bruised.

'What were you questioned for?' Kang asked sharply.

The man hesitated, looking down at the boy. 'My son and I were travelling through on our way back to the Temple of the Purple Bamboo Grove, and apparently some young boy had his queue clipped about that time.'

Kang hissed, and the man looked her in the eye, one hand up. 'We're no sorcerers. That's why they let us go. But my name is Bao Ssu, fourth son of Bao Ju, and a beggar they had in hand for cursing a village headmaster was questioned, and he named a sorcerer he said he had met, called Bao Ssu ju. They thought I might be that man. But I'm no soulstealer. Just a poor monk and his son. In the end they brought the beggar back in, and he confessed he had made it all up, to stop his questioning. So they let us go.

Kang regarded them with undiminished suspicion. It was a cardinal rule to stay out of trouble with the magistrates; so they were guilty of that, at the least.

'Did they torture you too?' Shih asked the boy.

'They were going to,' the boy replied, 'but they gave me a pear instead, and I told them Father's name was Bao Ssu ju. I thought it was right.'

Bao kept watching the widow. 'You don't mind if we get water from the river?'

'No. Of course not. Go.' And she watched him while the man limped down the path to the river.

'We can't let them inside, she decided. 'And Shih, don't you go near them. But they can keep the gate shrine. Until winter comes that will be better than the road for them, I suppose.'

This did not surprise Shih. His mother was always adopting stray cats and castaway concubines; she helped to maintain the town orphanage, and stretched their finances by supporting the Buddhist nuns. She often spoke of becoming one herself. She wrote poetry: 'These flowers I walk on hurt my heart,' she would recite from one of her day poems. 'When my days of rice and salt are over,' she would say, 'I'll copy out the sutras and pray all day. But until then we had all better get to the day's work!'

So, after that the monk Bao and his boy became fixtures at the gate, and around that part of the river, in the bamboo groves and the shrine hidden in the thinning forest there. Bao never regained a normal walk, but he was not quite as hobbled as on the night of Guanyin's enlightenment day, and what he could not do his son Xinwu, who was strong for his size, did for both of them. On the next New Year's Day they joined the festivities, and Bao had managed to obtain a few eggs and colour them red, so that he could give them out to Kang and Shih and other members of the household.

Bao presented the eggs with great seriousness: 'Ge Hong related that the Buddha said the cosmos is egg shaped, and the Earth like Giving red eggs: this was a south China custom, called 'sending happiness for the new year'.

Possibly the author means to suggest the monk Bao had lied about his place of origin.

As he gave one to Shih he said, 'Here, put it longways in your hand, and try to crush it.'

Shih looked startled, and Kang objected: 'It's too pretty.'

'Don't worry, it's strong. Go ahead, try to crush it. I'll clean it up if you can.'

Shih squeezed gingerly, turning his head aside, then harder. He squeezed until his forearm was taut. The egg held. Widow Kang took it from him and tried it herself. Her arms were very strong from embroidery, but the egg stood fast.

'You see,' Bao said. 'Eggshell is weak stuff, but the curve is strong. People are like that too. Each person weak, but together strong.'

After that, on religious festival days Kang would often join Bao outside the gate, and discuss the Buddhist scriptures with him. The rest of the time she ignored the two, concentrating on the world inside the walls.

Shih's studies continued to go badly. He did not seem to be able to understand arithmetic beyond addition, and could not memorize the classics beyond a few words at the start of each passage. His mother found his study sessions intensely frustrating. 'Shih, I know you are not a stupid boy. Your father was a brilliant man, your brothers are solid thinkers, and you have always been quick to find reasons why nothing is ever your fault, and why everything has to be your way. Think of equations as excuses, and you'll be fine! But all you do is think of ways not to think of things!'

Before this kind of scorn, poured on in sharp tones, no one could stand. It was not just Kang's words, but the way she said them, with a cutting edge and a crow's voice; and the curl of her lip, and the blazing, self righteous glare – the way she looked right into you as she flailed you with her words – no one could face it. Wailing miserably as always, Shih retreated from this latest withering blast.

Not long after that scolding, he came running back from the market, wailing in earnest. Shrieking, in fact, in a full fit of hysterics. 'My queue, my queue, my queue!'

It had been cut off. The servants shouted in consternation, all was an uproar for a moment, but it was cut as short as Shih's little pigtail stub by his mother's grating voice: 'Shut up all of you!'

She seized Shih by the arms and put him down on the window seat where she had so often examined him. Roughly she brushed away his tears and petted him. 'Calm yourself, calm down. Calm down! Tell me what happened.'

Through convulsive sobs and hiccoughs he got the story out. He had stopped on the way home from the market to watch a juggler, when hands had seized him across the eyes, and a cloth had been put across his face, covering both mouth and eyes. He had felt dizzy then and had collapsed, and when he picked himself off the ground, there was no one there, and his queue was gone.

Kang watched him intently through the course of his tale, and when he had finished and was staring at the floor, she pursed her lips and went to the window. She looked out at the chrysanthemums under the old gnarled juniper for a long time. Finally her head servant, Pao, approached her. Shih was led off to have his face washed and get some food.

'What shall we do?' Pao asked in a low voice.

Kang heaved a heavy sigh. 'We'll have to report it,' she said darkly. 'If we didn't, it would surely become known anyway, from the servants talking at the market. And then it would look as if we were encouraging rebellion.'

'Of course,' Pao said, relieved. 'Shall I go and inform the magistrate now?'

For the longest time there was no reply. Pao stared at Widow Kang, more and more frightened. Kang seemed under a malignant enchant ment, as if she were even at that moment fighting soul stealers for the soul of her son.

'Yes. Go with Zunli. We will follow with Shih.'

Pao left. Kang wandered the household, looking at one object after another, as if inspecting the rooms. Finally she went out of the compound front gate, slowly down the river path.

The Qing dynasty forced all Ilan Chinese men to shave their foreheads and wear a queue, in the Manchurian manner, to show submission of the Hans to their Manchu emperors. In the years before the White Lotus conspiracy, Han bandits began to cut their queues off as a mark of rebellion.

On the bank under the great oak tree she found Bao and his boy Xinwu, just where they always were.