The Spring the Customers Wanted

Ten days before the Spring Flower Fair, Yao Liao took Gu Qing to look at the display tables in a guild hall in the East Market. There would be three days of sample displays. Cloth merchants, scented powder sellers, and makers of headwear and sashes each had a corner, and Liao's Flower Shop had rented two tables by the window. Gu Qing had imagined an occasion like the Wen family's belated New Year's meal, with people sitting and eating. When she arrived she saw that the tables were given even more thought than the guests. The edge of a curtain, the light from a window, and the direction of a draft could all change whose eye a flower caught first.

She wore a blue skirt washed almost white and folded the patched part of her old sleeve inward, though a bit still showed when she carried the box. A woman in charge of tea stopped her at the door. Deliveries went to the back courtyard, she said. What was Gu Qing doing here? Gu Qing said she was with Shopkeeper Yao. The woman looked over at Yao Liao before making way. As Gu Qing carried the box across the threshold, its corner struck with a dull thud, and shame fell into her heart like a drop of hot oil.

Yao Liao heard the thud, turned, and helped her steady the bottom of the box. She made no remark about the woman's poor judgment and just told Gu Qing to mind the flowers. Gu Qing felt slighted even by that and walked the rest of the way with her back particularly straight. By the window a customer asked which shop the flowers came from. She spoke before Yao Liao could and said Gu Qing had made them. The customer just nodded and asked the price, and Gu Qing realized that saying her name brought no thunder.

They tried setting out the twenty curled-petal samples, with the flat-petal design along the outside. One curled blossom reached out into the light from the window. Some people said it looked as if it had grown wild, while others thought it looked untidy. Yao Liao swapped the two designs around and invited people to look more closely. At first Gu Qing kept a secret tally of which one people picked up more often. By the ninth time she was tired of counting. She let go of the little contest and paid attention to which part the customers touched first after picking a flower up.

Luo Yi came on the seventeenth as well. Her new shop in Shixian had opened, and she wanted to find someone in Yunjin who could supply small batches regularly, eight sprays or twelve at a time, for displaying incense boxes and as little clip-on gifts for customers. She had stopped asking for a single shade of blue. Now she wanted pale blue and new-bud green, simpler than full sprays, with flowers that could be lifted off an incense box and pinned to a sash. If the sample was good, she would want fifty flowers in five deliveries by the end of the fourth month, at twenty cash each. The materials and detachable clasps had specifications of their own, and she expected nobody to rush through the lot in a night.

Gu Qing’s eyes lit for a moment at the mention of a thousand cash, then went to the five delivery dates. Ten blossoms per batch, eight to ten days apart. Xiaoman could do the first stages, she could choose the colors and finish them, and they could use the clasp design they had already tested without trying it out on every flower. Forty sprays were still due at Yao’s shop on the twenty-fifth. Only the days after that were free for her to promise. Seeing her work out the time, Luo Yi simply took one of the empty boxes with her and agreed to wait three days for the first finished sample. She left the arrangement open at the gathering.

Gu Qing walked her out to the corridor, where a young woman in crimson handed her two cups of tea and told her to take them in to the guests. She had the flower samples in her arms and the patch on her cuff was showing again. It was like being splashed with hot oil all over again. She said she hadn't come to serve tea, so sharply that several people along the corridor turned. The woman stopped short, said hastily that she'd mistaken her for someone else, and was about to take back the cups when Gu Qing added, “And a flower maker doesn't come running just because someone tells her to.”

Luo Yi didn't rush to smooth it over with a smile. She waited until the woman in charge of tea came to take the cups, then asked quietly whether Gu Qing had been angry at being asked to serve tea or at being taken for someone without a name. More embarrassed still, Gu Qing said both. Then she shouldn't have sent the woman reeling when she'd already said she'd mistaken her, Luo Yi replied. She was there to look at flowers for her family and had no idea who Gu Qing was. She hadn't said flower makers were beneath her.

Gu Qing looked back and saw the woman in crimson sitting on a low stool by the door, talking over the flowers for a hat with an older woman. Her clothes were plainer than those of the best-dressed people at the showing. She held two of the least expensive little camellias and still seemed to be making up her mind. Gu Qing remembered the instant her fingertips had touched the tea cups, when she had wanted the whole room to know who she was. She went over, her knees suddenly feeling as if something weighed on them.

She began by saying she had spoken too harshly. The woman said it was all right and looked down at the flowers again. Gu Qing let her decide whether she wanted to buy. She only explained that the fine pin at the back tended to lift if it did not go in deep enough, and that two extra loops of thread would make it more secure on an older woman’s hat. The older woman raised the brim to reveal gray-white hair and asked whether she could take the flower off to wash the hat. Gu Qing demonstrated with a scrap of thread and let her try undoing it herself. The two women talked it over and bought just one flower for eight cash.

Gu Qing went back to the counter, her face still hot. Yao Liao simply handed her a cup of tea the woman had sent over. She held it without drinking, feeling the side of the cup first. After a while, she took her hand off her patched sleeve and moved a silk flower from the window to a spot where customers could reach it without standing on tiptoe.

Those three days of displaying samples did not mean three days spent making goods. Gu Qing stayed at the counter for only two two-hour periods each day; at other times, Yao's staff handled sales while she went home to do her own work. If new customers wanted something complicated, she noted its purpose and required date without taking full payment first. One household wanted twelve flowers by the next day, but after reckoning the work she had on hand, she could promise only four. The customer turned to find another maker. She followed them to the doorway but did not change her answer. Back home, she regretted those eight flowers for half the night before finally falling asleep.

Luo Yi's finished sample was the green of early spring buds. Xiao Man made the outward curl of the petals shallower, edged them in a slightly darker thread, and left off any beads that would be hard to replace. Between them they spoiled two flowers. The third still fastened after being slipped into the scent box and taken out again, so they took it to Luo Yi. She wore it for an afternoon and came back asking them to shorten the point behind the clasp so it wouldn't catch on clothes. Gu Qing made the change, and only then was the order for fifty settled: two hundred wen on acceptance of each batch of ten, with no advance. The twenty in the original design were for a separate purpose and didn't count toward the order. Xiao Man was to receive ten wen per batch for the design and two wen per flower for the preparatory work.

Gu Qing had done the sums. A thousand cash for fifty flowers was a large sum. Materials came to about five cash per flower, and after paying Xiaoman for labor and design, she still had a little over ten cash apiece for her own work and profit. The flowers came without full branches, saving her the long stems. The tricky parts were the side clasp and the finishing, and making one from scratch still took nearly four hours. Xiaoman could take on about an hour of it, leaving Gu Qing three. The first batch was set for the end of the month, leaving her no room to promise two more large batches of sprays at the same time.

She circled those dates and left the remaining blank spaces for small orders and the camellias she usually sold at the West Market. Luo Yi hadn't bought up all her time to come. If the flowers didn't sell at the shop, they would stop in the fifth month. Any that turned out spoiled would still be returned. Looking at those five circles, Gu Qing felt for the first time that an order could be five stones she could step across instead of a wall that was always meant to grow higher.

When Yao Liao heard that Gu Qing had taken a separate order from Luo Yi, her face showed something besides pleasure. She reminded Gu Qing that if those forty stems got pushed aside, a word of apology wouldn't put it right. Gu Qing said she would finish this batch for Yao's shop before starting the first batch of boxed flowers. The two stood in the back courtyard in silence for a moment. Then Yao Liao said suddenly that when she was young, she too had wanted every customer to remember her. Later, with three people busy in the shop, it was enough for customers to remember the flower shop. The people who stood behind the counter deserved a share of the credit too.

With that, she went to measure the workbench she had just rented, without waiting for Gu Qing's sympathy. Gu Qing followed and held the other end of the leather measuring tape. Many of the marks had been darkened by oil and wear. The tape was there for everyday use, and the path Yao Liao herself was making still ran through this shop. When they reached the doorway, a worker said she had guests coming that evening and needed to leave early. Yao Liao frowned and finally moved the most urgent piece of work within reach of her own hands. Gu Qing quietly gathered the tape, coiled it along its worn creases, and put it back in the drawer where Yao Liao usually reached for it. She saw that even with a shopkeeper who could make the decisions, everyone there still had things to worry about.

On the twenty-first, another customer, a maker of hats and sashes, asked for twenty apricot-colored sash flowers in two batches of ten in the fourth month. She quoted twenty-two wen each. The customer thought it expensive and picked up the sample to ask why. Gu Qing went beyond praising the materials and workmanship this time and explained the removable clasp, the wear-resistant edges, and the work involved at each stage. She also admitted at the end that this design wouldn't take well to being pressed for long inside a small lidded box. The customer went back to measure the gift box and came in the next day to ask for one fewer layer of petals, with the price still twenty-two wen and a design that would hold up better. Gu Qing took the order independently of Yao's shop and wrote her own name and Xiaoman's on separate lines.

If both orders were delivered and paid for on time, they would cover most of the trip. The fourteen hundred and forty copper coins were still some way from being in her hands. She didn't take the papers home to wave in front of her grandmother. She checked the delivery date for the forty flowers she was already working on and stopped that night when it was time to stop. Her grandmother asked if the guild hall had been any fun, and she couldn't think of a single thing at first. After a while she said the light was very good by the window, and someone in a flowered hat had looked as if they'd put spring greens on their head.

Shen Su laughed heartily and asked what color it was. Gu Qing found a few scraps of silk and layered them for her to see, and the old woman really did put the green cloth on her head. They crowded into the narrow bronze mirror, one behind the other. The mirror was dim and the green was dim too, yet to Gu Qing that shadow looked a little prettier than all those bright clothes at the guild hall.

On the twenty-third, as Gu Qing came out of the guild hall, the woman in crimson was helping an older person into a carriage, the little eight-coin camellia pinned firmly to her hat. The wind turned a petal over, and she reached up and pressed it back into place, content to let it move again. Gu Qing watched for a moment from across the street, then went to buy beans for supper and afterward to Sister Ji's to pay cash for a batch of small supplies. She was still dressed as herself, and she no longer hid the cloth bundle in her hand behind her back. A wisp of pale green showed at one corner and brushed her mended cuff with every step.