“Ah! Yes! I was too distracted by the stream of words. This one.” And he pointed to a miniature celadon vase in the archaic style of a bronze urn but shimmering, pale green. It bore the mark and period of Qianlong. A minor piece. And that was the first thing for which she kicked herself-that once again she’d failed to look as closely as she might have, precisely because it was modest.
She had to remind herself that most of the pieces up in Beijing, some five hundred of the group in fact, were modest pieces, good pieces, no more. Dread cut through, a ripsawing cord in high wind. She ought to go back and check things again. Maybe she wasn’t even close to being finished. “You made this?” she said, picking up the celadon and spreading her fingers all around it.
“I made it.”
“It’s terrific,” she breathed. The truth was, modest or not, it had fooled her. Now that she knew, of course, she could feel it; the newness of it, the calculation of composition and glazes, the twenty-first-century science applied to every aspect of it. She had to be more careful. Focus better, go deeper, accept nothing but the real truth.
A knock sounded then and the glass door pushed open. A man with a poor chin, a long, ropelike body, and an upsweep of black hair stepped in. “Ei,” he said. “Old Yu.”
“Miss Fan,” Yu said, “meet Mr. Bai.”
“Hello.”
“My pleasure,” Bai said.
If she had not already known by his slickly provincial style that he was an ah chan, she would have known when he made no move to produce a card. Ah chans used multiple names, changed numbers frequently. They moved among their wives. Business cards were not for them. “My pleasure too,” she said.
“What brings you to Jingdezhen?” He was looking at her with undisguised curiosity, but that was normal-she was a foreign woman.
She smiled. “As a porcelain person, I am always needing to learn more about pots.”
“My feeling exactly,” he smiled, and then he and Yu switched over to Jiangxi dialect. She was able to follow only the faintest outlines. The man Bai was coming to pick something up. He was hoping Potter Yu had it ready for him. Something like that.
Yu left the room and came back with a small box. He presented it to Bai with pleased formality. The younger man lifted the lid and a glow of pure happiness suffused his face.
“Can I see?” she asked.
“Of course.” Bai turned the open box toward her.
She looked into it and almost lost her balance.
It was a chicken cup.
Oh, she would kill for this. It was perfect. Ineffably right, perfectly potted, it was executed with the light touch that looked so easy though it was so hard. The best thing was the warm, white glow of the clay, the Chenghua light perfectly reproduced. Oh, why can’t I have it? I want it. I’d be so good to it. “It’s devastating,” she said with deep appreciation. “It’s wonderfully good.”
“Old Yu can really make a pot.”
“That he can.” She watched Bai stare down at the cup with the slack-mouthed pleasure of love. He might have been looking down at a beautiful woman, arms and legs open. He had scored. Here was a thing that had the power to make him feel whole.
She wondered what he planned to do with it. It seemed unlikely to be a money transaction, the acquisition of something to resell as a forgery. The chicken cup was too rare. No knowledgeable buyer would fall for it, as the whereabouts of those still known to exist could be verified with a few phone calls.
No, this ah chan wanted the cup for himself. He loved it. She could tell.
“Xingsi rongyi, shensi nan,” Bai said, To attain physical likeness is easy, to capture the spirit, hard. “That is what distinguishes Potter Yu.” He held the cup up to the light. “I have many books, you understand. I study them all the time. Now I have a cup I can study too.”
So he was one of the would-be scholars. Among the ah chans, one always met those who were book hounds. They were frantic for learning. They were the ones always pestering you for catalog references and attributions. After any exchange, they were always the ones who stayed around for ten minutes of probing questions. And in return, they’d tell you who was making fakes. “Congratulations, Mr. Bai. It’s a wonderful purchase.”
“Nali,” he said, but acknowledged her compliment with a small laugh as he turned the cup. God, the clay, she thought again, the warm light; it’s perfect. And the design. Grasses waved in the summer breeze, baby chicks scuttled, a hen bent over and scratched. Another hen turned and looked at her, her own tail feathers flouncing high in the air-
Lia stopped. She cleared her mind. She looked away for a minute, glanced out through the plate-glass door to the work yard with its tables, its potting wheels, its thousands of pots in the heavy, still light of late afternoon. Had she just seen that? Then back to the cup, carefully. Yes. The tail feather curled. It was the ruffled feather. She pulled a photo image of the collection’s chicken cup, its fang gu copy, from her memory. The same. The feather had the flip.
“Mr. Yu,” she said, turning now to the potter, “I cannot bow low enough.”
“No, no,” he said appropriately. “Nonsense.”
“No, I mean it. It’s devastating. But if I may ask. Have you ever made another with this… feather?” She motioned lightly with her eyes. She knew he understood. A signature such as this was always perfectly conscious.
“Oh yes. The feather itself? More than a few times, when the chicken motif is used. But this exact style, after the Chenghua prototype-we did another one of these too. If I remember it was the year before last.”
“And what became of it?” she asked carefully.
“I sold it to a businessman.” His eyes slid to Bai. “One of them.”
She nodded. From there, of course, it could have gone anywhere. But Potter Yu was the one. He had to be. “Mr. Yu.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know you are famous among pots people? Do you know what we call you?”
“What?”
“We call you the Master of the Ruffled Feather.”
Yu smiled.
“It’s true, it’s true, we do.”
“Ei! I confess, here in our studio we curl the feather, that is our style. Isn’t it amusing how people say a thing, and it sticks, then others say it! Well, similar sounds echo each other, isn’t it so? Ei? But the truth is, the Master of the Ruffled Feather is not I! I don’t do the painting anymore. I’ve not done so for a long time.”
“What?” Lia looked at him.
“Really, it’s the truth, the Master of the Ruffled Feather is someone else! I haven’t the eyesight to paint anymore.” He looked at her strangely. “Don’t you know this? It’s true for many families here. All the generations may work together, but it’s the young people whose painting reaches the highest marks. Especially the teenagers. They have the hands and the eyes.”
“I didn’t know this,” Lia admitted, stunned at herself-here she was, led along by her fantasy: Old man equals master. How clichéd. And yet her colleagues thought the same. They often talked about how much they feared any fang gu artist who could truly, gorgeously paint-since it was so often the “rightness” of the painting that made a piece real and not fake-and this most respected foe was always imagined as a man, and never a young one. Certainly not a teenager. She gathered her composure. “If I may ask,” she said, “these years, who has been the master painter in your family?”
Yu let out a pleased growl of a laugh and used the flat of his hand to push open the glass door. “Yu Ling!” he bawled, sticking his head out. He pulled back in, grinning. “You’ll see for yourself,” he said, and he and Bai exchanged looks.
The door cracked open and a young girl stepped in sideways, her hair back in two braids, dark soft eyes. She looked like a child, though she could have been fifteen. “Laoyeh,” she said in greeting to him.