The Lin family breathed a sigh of relief when the Killer died; only to find themselves being pestered by a mysterious woman. She arrived from somewhere outside the province and demanded to see the head of the Lin family. Once he admitted her, she just got down on her knees without another word and started to cry. Pointing to her protruding belly, she said: ‘This is young Mr Lin’s baby!’ The Lin family knew that if you wanted to put all the women that the Killer had seduced out to sea, you would have enough to pack out half a dozen boats; but so far none of them had turned up at the house claiming to be pregnant. What is more, this woman came from another province, so they were suspicious as well as angry. They literally had her kicked out of the door. The woman thought that the kicking would result in a miscarriage, a prospect that did not particularly bother her. However, in spite of the bruising and the pain that she had suffered, the baby stayed put. She balled up her fist and punched herself hard in the stomach a couple of times, which also had no effect. She was so upset that she sat down in the middle of the road and started bawling. She ended up being surrounded by a circle of onlookers, one of whom felt sorry for her and suggested that she go to N University to try her luck there. After all, they were the Killer’s family too. The woman staggered off to the university, to kneel in front of old John Lillie. Old Mr Lillie was a very upright and highly principled man who was deeply upset at any evidence that other people had behaved badly. He was very sympathetic to anyone who had suffered an injustice, so he took the woman in. The following day, he ordered his son, Rong Xiaolai — the one that people called Young Lillie — to take her to his old home town of Tongzhen.
The Rong mansion at Tongzhen occupied half the village. The roofs of the different buildings were still as closely packed together as the scales on a fish, though they were starting to get old. Flaked-off bald patches had appeared on the paintwork of the pillars and eaves, making it clear that times were changing. After Old Lillie set up his academy in the provincial capital, many members of the Rong family moved there to study with him, which began the decline of the mansion from its glory days. One of the reasons for this precipitate decline was that very few of the young people who had left were interested in returning to carry on the family business. Furthermore, things were looking very bleak anyway — after the government introduced the state monopoly on salt, the Rong family were deprived of their chief source of income. The attitudes of many of the members of the Rong family who studied with Old Lillie were deeply affected by these developments: they had become interested in scientific method and upholding the truth; they were not at all interested in making money and living in the lap of luxury. Isolated in their ivory tower, the collapse of the family business and the concomitant decline in their fortunes did not seem to affect them in the slightest. Within a decade, the Rong family lost virtually all that they had once owned, though they did not like to talk openly about how this came about. In fact, everyone could see the reason hanging up over the main gate to the mansion. It was a placard with five huge words picked out in gold: ‘Supporter of the Northern Expedition’. There was a story behind this. Apparently, when the National Revolutionary Army reached C City, Old Lillie saw all the students out in the streets collecting money for the cause, and he was so moved that he went back to Tongzhen that very night to sell the docks and half the shops that represented the business empire the Rong family had built up over the generations. He used the money to buy a boatload of ammunition for the Northern Expedition, for which he was rewarded with this placard. Because of this, the Rong family came to be regarded as great patriots. Unfortunately, not long afterwards, the famous general who wrote the calligraphy for the inscription became a wanted criminal, on the run from the KMT government, which significantly dimmed its lustre. Later on, the government had a new placard made with exactly the same wording and identical gilding, but with different calligraphy. They asked the Rong family for permission to exchange it for the old one, but Old Lillie simply refused. From that moment on, the Rong family seemed to get into endless trouble with the government, so their business was guaranteed to suffer. Old Lillie didn’t mind the business suffering, but he did want the placard to stay. He went so far as to say that the placard would be taken down only over his dead body.
The Rong family had to accept that they were getting poorer all the time.
The Rong mansion, which had once been bustling with life as masters and servants went about their business, was now desolate and quiet. When you did see people about, it quickly became apparent that many of them were old and that there were far more women than men, far more servants than masters. The place was obviously falling into ruin, as things went from bad to worse. As fewer and fewer people lived there, particularly young lively people, the house seemed even larger than normal and much more silent. Birds built their nests in the trees, spiders spun their webs in front of the doors, the paths between buildings became lost in the weeds as they wound their way into the darkness, the pet birds flew off into the sky, the artificial mountain became a real one, the flower garden became a wilderness and the rear courtyards turned into a maze. If you say that in the past, the Rong family mansion had been like a beautiful, elegant and brightly coloured painting, you could say that now, although the traces of the original pigment still remained, the lines of the earlier sketches had reappeared, blurring the purity of the finished work. If you wanted to hide an anonymous and mysterious woman with an unsatisfactory background, you could not have found a better place.
Young Lillie really wracked his brains over how to make Mr and Mrs Rong accept this woman. All the members of the seventh generation of the Rong family were now dead, with the exception of Old Lillie living far away at the provincial capital. That made Mr and Mrs Rong the undisputed heads of the Rong clan in Tongzhen. Mr Rong was now well on in years and had had a stroke, which had destroyed his faculties and forced him to spend all his time in bed. He was reduced to the status of a cipher; all real power had long ago slipped into Mrs Rong’s hands. If it was indeed the Killer that had got this woman pregnant, then Mr and Mrs Rong were indisputably the baby’s aunt and uncle, but that didn’t mean that they were going to like it. Remembering that Mrs Rong was a devout Buddhist, Young Lillie started to feel the beginnings of a plan germinating in his mind. He took the woman straight into Mrs Rong’s prayer chamber and there, wreathed in incense and accompanied by the sound of her tapping a wooden fish, Young Lillie and Mrs Rong began their discussion. Mrs Rong said, ‘Who is she?’
‘A woman.’
‘Whatever it is that you want, you had better make it quick, because I want to get on with reciting my sutras.’
‘She’s pregnant.’
‘I am not a doctor, what do you want me to do about it?’