'And you spent all day on the nineteenth day of the ninth month with this beggar here.'

Age in Chinese reckoning was calculated by taking the lunar year of one's birth as year one, and adding a year at each lunar New Year's Day.

'Enough of it to know he could not have gone to the town market and back. Naturally I worked at the loom in the afternoon.'

Another silence in the chamber. Then the Manchu official gestured to the magistrate irritably.

'Question the man further.'

With a vicious glance at Kang, the magistrate leaned over to shout down at Bao, 'Why do you have scissors in your bag!'

'For making talismans.'

The magistrate tapped the wedge harder than before, and Bao howled again.

'Tell me what they were really for! Why was there a queue in your bag?' With hard taps at each question.

Then the prefect asked the questions, each accompanied by a tap of the mallet from the angry magistrate, and continuous gasping groans from Bao.

Finally, scarlet and sweating, Bao cried, 'Stop! Please stop. I confess. I'll tell you what happened.'

The magistrate rested his mallet on the top of one wedge. 'Tell us.'

'I was tricked by a sorcerer into helping them. I didn't know at first what they were. They said if I didn't help them then they would steal my boy's soul.'

'What was his name, this sorcerer?'

'Bao Ssu nen, almost like mine. He came from Soochow, and he had lots of confederates working for him. He would fly all over China in a night. He gave me some of the stupefying powder and told me what to do. Please, release the press, please. I'm telling you everything now. I couldn't help doing it. I had to do it for the soul of my boy.'

'So you did cut queues on the nineteenth day of last month.'

'Only one! Only one, please. When they made me. Please, release the press a little.'

The Manchu official lifted his eyebrows at Widow Kang. 'So you were not with him as much as you claimed. Perhaps it's better for you that way.'

Someone tittered.

Kang said in her sharp hoarse bray, 'Obviously this is one of those confessions we have heard about, coerced by the ankle press. The whole soul stealing scare is based on such forced confessions, and all it does is cause panic among the servants and the workers. Nothing could be worse service of the Emperor 'Silence!'

'You send up these reports and cause the Emperor endless worry and then when a more competent investigation is made the string of forced lies is revealed 'Silence!'

'You are transparent from above and below! The Emperor will see it!'

The Manchu official stood and pointed at Kang. 'Perhaps you would like to take this sorcerer's place in the press.'

Kang was silent. Shih trembled beside her. She leaned on him and pushed forward one foot until it stood outside her gown, shod in a little silk slipper. She stared the Manchu in the eye.

'I have already withstood it.'

'Remove this demented creature from the examination,' the Manchu said tightly, his face a dark red. A woman's foot, exposed during the examination of a crime as serious as soul stealing: it was beyond all regulation.

No woman of breeding ever referred to her feet or revealed them in public. This was a bold person!

'I am a witness,' Kang said, not moving.

'Please,'Bao called out to her. 'Leave, lady.

Do what the magistrate says.' He could barely twist far enough to look at her. 'It will be all right.'

So they left. On the way home in the guard's palanquin Kang wept, knocking aside Shih's comforting hands.

'What's wrong, Mother? What's wrong?,

'I have shamed your family. I have destroyed my husband's fondest hopes.'

Shih looked frightened. 'He's just a beggar.'

'Be quiet!' she hissed. Then she cursed like one of the servants. 'That Manchu! Miserable foreigners! They're not even Chinese. Not true Chinese. Every dynasty begins well, cleansing the decay of the fallen one before it. But then their turn for corruption comes. And the Qing are there. That's why they're so concerned with queue clipping. That's their mark on us, their mark on every Chinese man.'

'But that's the way it is, Mother. You can't change dynasties!'

'No. Oh, I am ashamed! I have lost my temper. I never should have gone there. I only added to the blows against poor Bao's ankles.'

At home she went to the women's quarters. She fasted, worked at her weaving all the hours she was awake, and would not talk with anyone.

Then news came that Bao had died in prison, of a fever that had nothing to do with his interrogation, or so said the jailers. Kang threw herself into her room, weeping, and would not come out. When she did, days later, she spent all her waking hours weaving or writing poems, and she ate at the loom and her writing desk. She refused to teach Shih, or even to speak to him, which upset him, indeed frightened him more than anything she might have said. But he enjoyed playing down by the river. Xinwu was required to stay away from him, and was cared for by the servants.

My poor monkey dropped its peach The new moon forgot to shine. No more climbing in the pine tree No little monkey on its back. Come back as a butterfly And I will be your dream.

One day not long after that, Pao brought Kang a small black queue, found buried in the mulberry compost by a servant who had been turning the muck. It was cut at an angle that matched the remnant at the back of Shih's head.

Kang hissed at the sight, and went into Shih's room and slapped him hard on the car. He howled, crying 'What? What?' Ignoring him, Kang went back to the women's quarters, groaning, and took up a pair of scissors and slashed through all the silk cloth stretched over the frames for embroidering. The servant girls cried out in alarm, no one could believe their eyes. The mistress of the house had gone mad at last. Never had they seen her weep so hard, not even when her husband died.

Later she ordered Pao to say nothing about what had been found. Eventually all the servants found out about the discovery anyway, and Shih lived shunned in his own house. He did not seem to care.

But from that time, Widow Kang stopped sleeping at night. Often she called to Pao for wine. 'I've seen him again,' she would say. 'He was a young monk this time, in different robes. A huihui. And I was a young queen. He saved me, then we ran off together. Now his ghost is hungry, and he wanders between the worlds.'

They put offerings for him outside the gate, and at the windows. Still Kang woke the house with her sleeping cries, like a peacock's, and sometimes they would find her sleepwalking in between the buildings of the compound, speaking in strange tongues and even in voices not her own. It was established practice never to wake someone walking in their sleep, to avoid startling the spirit and causing it to become confused and not find its way back to its body. So they went in front of her, moving furniture so she would not hurt herself, and they pinched the rooster to make it crow early. Pao tried to get Shih to write to his older brothers and tell them what was happening, or at least to write down what his mother was saying at night, but Shih wouldn't do it.

Eventually Pao told Shih's eldest brother's head servant's sister about it, at the market when she was visiting Hangzhou, and after that word eventually got to the eldest brother, in Nanjing. He did not come; he could not get away from his duties.

Note that if it had been his father sick at home, or beset by ghosts, he would certainly have been given leave to go.

He did, however, have a Muslim scholar visiting him, a doctor from the frontier, and as this man had a professional interest in possessions such as Widow Kang's, he came a few months later to visit her.