Jade had almost forgotten her original intention. Willow! Her husband worked in the court of the King—perhaps Willow would know the answers to her questions.
With the road quiet again, she remembered the child's directions and set out for the house of Lee. The old wooden bridge with its rickety railing was just wide enough for a man to pass with his ox or donkey alongside. Thanks to the excitement caused by the soldiers and their prisoners, the bridge was empty, and she crossed easily. As she walked to the gate of the Lee house, Jade felt a shiver of anticipation. She would soon be reunited with Willow again!
The door in the outer wall opened a crack as Jade approached. She could see the gatekeeper's eye peering through the opening. The gatekeeper barked rudely, "What do you want?"
Jade was indignant at being addressed in such a way by a servant. She drew herself up and made her voice as dignified as possible. "I am here to see Graceful Willow. Please tell her it is her niece."
The gatekeeper scolded her. "You are not her niece! How dare you come to this house in such falseness! Get away with you, pig girl!"
Jade's eyes blazed with anger. "I am her niece! Go and tell her that Jade Blossom is here. If you do not, I will see to it that you are severely punished."
The gatekeeper had been ready to slam the door shut, but as Jade watched, he hesitated and inspected her closely. Jade glanced down at her dirty clothes. She looked up again when the gatekeeper spoke.
"I will tell the mistress that you are here. But if you are not who you say you are..." He did not need to finish the threat. The punishment for such impudence, Jade knew, was a severe paddling. In her own household the heavy wooden paddles hung in the gatekeeper's quarters, ready to be used against impudent peddlers or beggars.
The door closed. Jade waited. It seemed a long time before it opened again.
The gatekeeper seemed triumphant. "The mistress says that no girl from the house of Han would ever dare present herself as you have! She refuses to see you. Now be off with you!"
"No!" Jade cried out in horror. "I am her niece! Please—" She looked around wildly as if for help, then groped for the ivory ball in her pocket. "Take this to her. It will prove that I am who I say!"
The gatekeeper ignored her outstretched hand. "I will not bother the mistress again, you stupid girl! And I do not understand, but the mistress did not wish for you to be punished. She told me merely to send you away. Go!"
The door slammed. Jade staggered as if her face had been slapped. She knew it would be useless to try again.
***
As she trudged back toward the marketplace, Jade's numbed mind slowly recovered. The girl at the gate was not to be punished—those were Willow's orders. She must have suspected that it might indeed be Jade. Why had Willow refused to see her?
Jade did not want to think about it anymore. She arrived at the marketplace just in time to see the servant loading the baskets full of vegetables back onto the cart, and she realized dispiritedly that her failure to see Willow had left her without a plan for the return journey. She had assumed that Willow would order a sedan chair to take her home. And she could not go the way she had come, for the baskets were full now.
There was nothing else for it. Jade walked right up to the servant and asked him to take her home.
The servant's eyes nearly popped out of his head. "Ai-go, ai-go, young mistress—what will your mother say?" Greatly agitated, he ran back into the marketplace and returned with a length of new cloth. He helped Jade onto the seat of the cart and threw the cloth over her, somewhat belatedly hiding her from the eyes of strangers.
Jade was too discouraged to protest. But on the journey home she found she could arrange the cloth to keep most of her head and body covered while leaving a peephole for one eye. She saw the people on the road again, and other things she had not noticed in the earlier turmoil.
She saw the watery green fields of rice beyond the road. She saw a stork picking its way through the water, and cattle grazing at the roadside. And she saw, with awe and wonder, the blue-gray mountains in the far distance.
Jade caught her breath. The mountains towered over the city, yet the mists that shrouded them somehow gentled their power. The mountains seemed at once mysterious and familiar, and Jade marveled that ordinary things like rock and earth and trees could rise to such magnificence.
Somehow their great solidity was a comfort to her, smoothing out the roiled thoughts of all she had done and seen that morning. In spite of the confusion in her head, the mountains would never change. Somewhere on those misty gray slopes were the ancestral graves of her family, where Tiger and her father went with the other men on feast days. She wondered what it would be like to actually walk those slopes, and knew with a pain in her heart that she would do so only in her dreams.
Jade looked at the mountains as long as she could, until the cart turned into the Outer Court and her mother came running.