Chapter 660 — Fee: Paid

CHAPTER 660

Fee: Paid

Tao Erniang tripped over the crate on her way to the slop bucket and nearly went down the back step headfirst.

“Who leaves a box on a step?” Tao Erniang shouted at the yard. “Who? I’ll break their...”

Then she saw the handwriting on the lid, and she stopped shouting.

She knew that hand. It was on every contract in the shop, and on the sign out front that the whole lane complained about. It was square and cramped, with the same crowded strokes he used when a bill had too many items for one sheet.

She set down the slop bucket and knelt beside the crate. Her knees cracked as she knelt, the same painful sound she’d heard every morning for twenty years.

Inside were bottles. Rows and rows of small white bottles, packed in rice straw, every one with a paper label. Tao Erniang wasn’t a fast reader. She read them one at a time, moving her lips, the way she read the rice merchant’s bills.

The top bottle had a red string around its neck.

Auntie Tao. Knees. Soul Formation-grade long-life tonic, Perfect. One drop in the broth, not in the bowl. Never two drops. Not with wine. Not with ginseng. Not if you’re angry. (You’ll be angry. It still works. I tested.)

Tao Erniang read it twice. A Soul Formation-grade tonic. She didn’t know exactly what that was worth, but she’d seen what one Soul Formation-grade pill did to the City Lord’s steward. He’d sat down right where he stood and couldn’t get up.

“That brat,” Tao Erniang said to nobody. “One drop in the broth, he says. As if I’d waste it on the customers.”

The next row was tied with blue string.

Xiaoyu. Growth. One a year on her birthday, sixteen to twenty. Do not sell. (She will try to sell them. Don’t let her.)

“Ha!” Tao Erniang said loudly. “He knows her!”

The last rows were plain. There were ten of them, and every one had a year written on it. Year one. Year two. All the way to year ten. Each label said what it was for: fever, the cobbler’s cough, Old Kuang’s back, the well water when the river flooded. The last line on each was the same.

For whoever in the lane is sickest. Xiaoyu keeps the book.

Tao Erniang sat back on her heels. She was close to tears. She blamed the stove smoke, though she’d been sitting outside the kitchen all along.

Under the bottles was a bundle of papers tied with string. She knew what deeds looked like, because the landlord’s cousin had waved them in her face for twelve years. These had Notary Liao’s red stamp on every page.

She untied the string.

The first deed gave the shop to the Taos, rent-free, for ten years.

The other ten deeds were the lane. All of it. Every house from the canal bridge to the oil seller’s corner, in her name, Tao Erniang, written in that square fee-charging hand. And under each one, in bold, the clause: the rents stay at the old price, and no owner may ever raise them.

Tao Erniang read every page. Then she put them back in order and tied the string again, with great care. She was shaking too much to trust herself with the loose pages.

Then she sat down on the back step, and she didn’t shout.

The cobbler found her there an hour later. Then the washerwomen. Then Fan Baoshou, with his cudgel, because he’d heard the noodle shop hadn’t opened and assumed the worst.

“Erniang? You’re not shouting,” the cobbler said nervously, leaving space between himself and the crate.

“I’m thinking,” Tao Erniang said.

“About what?” the cobbler asked, looking from the bottles to her face.

“The deeds,” Tao Erniang said, pointing at the bundle. “I’m your landlady now. All of you.”

The lane stared at her.

“Is she sick?”

“The landlady is Erniang?”

“Then who do we complain to?”

“…”

Fan Baoshou read the deeds over her shoulder, and his cudgel slowly sank to the ground.

“Old rents,” Fan Baoshou whispered. “Forever. He bought a whole street for six hundred thousand and gave it away at the old rents. This Fan has seen everything now. Everything!”

Nobody said anything after that. The washerwomen looked at their feet.

“Remember who filled these bottles,” Tao Erniang said, and stood up. Her knees cracked again. “Remember that, all of you. Now get out of my yard. I have broth to make.”

Tao Xiaoyu came home at midmorning with the Commission Book under her arm and her shoes on the right feet.

Her eyes were red.

“Have you been crying?” Tao Erniang asked.

“It’s the wind on the river,” Tao Xiaoyu said coldly. “It’s very windy. Everyone on the dock was crying.”

Tao Erniang didn’t say anything. She put a bowl of broth in front of her daughter. There was one drop of something golden in the pot it came from. Tao Xiaoyu smelled it, looked at her mother, and didn’t ask.

After she ate, Tao Xiaoyu opened the Commission Book on the counter. It was nearly full. Eleven months of clients, fees, damages, waiting charges, queue-cutting charges, and one entry for a cup, forty stones, and a floor, sixty.

She turned to the last page. At the top, in his square hand, he had already written the client’s name.

Client: Lamp-Oil Lane.

Under it, the line for the fee was empty.

Tao Xiaoyu dipped her brush and wrote it in her best hand.

Fee: paid.

Then she closed the Book and put it on the shelf where he’d always kept it.

Outside, the lane was waking up. One by one, the shutters went up along Lamp-Oil Lane, the cobbler’s, the oil seller’s, the washerwomen’s, Old Tao’s Noodles, and last of all the shop with the FENG SHI board, and under it the sign that still said COMMISSIONS. FEES HIGH. QUEUE ON THE LEFT.

Nobody took it down.