A Cup of Light

by Nicole Mones

  “I have to believe there’ll be fakes,” she said to him. “So far, though, I haven’t seen one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” she admitted. “That’s why I don’t want to do this alone. How’s David?”

  “Fine. Getting better every day. He’ll be a few more days in the hospital, then he’ll be flown home. Don’t worry about him. You have enough to think about.”

  “Are you going to send Phillip?”

  “I’m still thinking about it. Let’s hold off. Day by day, eh?”

  “Day by day,” she agreed, and they hung up.

  3

  Lia came to the bottom of a crate the next midday. Checking it, checking it again, waving her hands through the wood shavings, she found a box she’d almost missed. She brushed it off, unhooked it, tilted up the lid, and then stopped.

  Could this really be? She blinked at the small, delicate porcelain for a long, wheeling moment.

  Tilted on its side, surrounded by white silk, it seemed to be one of the Chenghua chicken cups. But that would be impossible. Those delicate little Ming masterworks, made in the late 1400s for the Chenghua emperor, were some of porcelain’s highest stars. Whole careers were devoted to them.

  She ticked through the whereabouts of the eighteen chicken cups known to still exist. The last one to sell at open auction had fetched almost four million U.S. dollars. There were eight in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Two in Beijing. Five of the cups were in museums in the West: three in London, one at the Met, and one in Geneva at the Collections Bauer. The last three cups were in private holdings. None of these could change hands without her knowing it. So what was this? A nineteenth?

  That’s beyond imagining, she thought, but then she looked at it again, so impossibly, radiantly beautiful.

  Up from her world of memory came something the seventeenth-century scholar Shen Defu had written of these cups: The five colors are the crown of the past and the present. True, she thought. The absolute centerline hues of the doucai palette.

  She picked it up. A featherweight. It felt perfectly balanced. She was going to have to take it outside in the natural light. She had to really see it.

  Her heart was pounding as she packed the cup back in its nest and latched it, carried it outside with her square of felt. It was three steps down to the grassy court. Wind frilled the acacia trees along the side.

  She unrolled the felt and lifted the cup out again. She held it to eye level. Fantastic. The proportion, the shape and balance were just what they ought to be. It was a feeling more than anything else, but it was sure and deep and it ran like a stream of light all through her: The cup was right. The porcelain had that vanilla-toned, off-white warmth that came from the clay used during the Chenghua reign, never dead white, always soft, alive. It was an effect almost impossible to reproduce, and this cup had it right. A very good sign.

  I’m not going to turn it over yet, she thought. Everything was moving at half speed. She was aware of a ringing in her ears. Was it the nineteenth cup, or something else?

  She looked at it critically. None of the obvious signs of forgery was present. First of all, it was not a copy of any single other cup. Fang gu artists were usually faithful to one prototype. They rarely thought to combine aspects of different cups. Because many gorgeous full-color photographs of the well-known Dreyfus cup had been published when it changed hands at auction a few years before, this cup had been the recent favorite. If she were to see a fake chicken cup, she’d expect it to copy the Dreyfus. Yet this one didn’t. Another thing: The painting was sweet, easy—not overdefined as most modern copies were.

  She turned the cup over. For a lurching instant her whole consciousness was a digital player on skip. The characters were perfect. Da ming cheng hua nian zi. Made in the great Ming Dynasty, reign of Chenghua.

  Or was it a replica from a subsequent reign? The Chenghua chicken cups were so exquisite that they began to be copied almost immediately. She canceled each possibility in her mind. It was not a fang gu made in the Kangxi reign, because the clay in use then was a purer, clearer white. And it was not a copy from the Yongzheng reign, because copies produced then always seemed to reflect the harder Qing palette. The colors on this cup were soft and blurry-edged, following the Ming sensibility.

  Chenghua. But how could it be Chenghua?

  She half closed her eyes now. She lifted the cup and ran her fingers along the rim to feel how it bloomed out to the lip—yes, there, it was right. Then she did the same thing around the base rim. Though unglazed, it would have an inimitable smoothness if it was almost six hundred years old. My God, she thought, touching it. It had the exact worn quality, the softness of centuries.

  Now she needed the loupe. She went all the way around the circular painting, the chickens and rocks and rosebushes. She played with the instrument to get just the right tilt. Then she went in deeper, below the luminous glaze, under the softened fields of color. Here she found the infinitesimal kiln faults, the bubbles and pocks, the singular DNA of every work in porcelain. And then higher up, on the surface tension of the glaze, the near-microscopic wear marks. These were little stilettos of touch, of abrasion, of the movement of air itself. They accumulated. It took centuries. They should appear natural and completely random. She squinted. Unbelievable. They did.

  Then she put the loupe in her pocket and held it away from her eyes and looked at it.

  Oh no, oh no. Something was nagging at her.

  It was the blue wash of color on the rocks. Too forced.

  She turned the cup in the light, looking at it again. It was too good to be true. The painting was masterful, the hens and chicks and fronds of grass glowing, effortless . . . and yet the blue on the rocks was too hard. She had to admit it.

  She looked again at the mark and period on the bottom. This also was a little too perfect. Most of the true Chenghua cups had fainter reign marks. On the underside of the Dreyfus cup, as a matter of fact, one corner of the mark had washed out almost completely during firing. This one was so clean. Why hadn’t she seen that before?

  She hit bottom with a crash.

  My beautiful Chenghua cup, she wanted to wail. She held it up to the light. Real? Fake. Fake. But it was absolutely fantastic, so graceful, so fine. She held the piece out again, fifteen or twenty inches from her eyes. It might be the best fake she’d ever seen.

  She packed it up again, feeling a scraping little fishhook of fear. One fake was enough to start rending the fabric of a deal like this. Through the tear would slip other fakes, and others behind them. It was impossible to have this many great pots. There must be fakes. Lots of them. More of them.

  Ones she had already missed.

  She went back to the first crate and started again. A Song celadon crackleware bowl. Then a Xuande stem cup, a Yongzheng incense burner, a Wanli plate. She was going too fast. She couldn’t stop herself.

  “Xiaojie,” she heard from the door. Miss. She half turned. It was the driver.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Sorry.” She looked at her watch. It was past time. “Deng yixia,” she said, Wait a moment, and quickly packed up the pots to make them safe for the night.

  Back in her room she opened her laptop and dialed up the photos of the little cup, merged the images to move the three-dimensional model around. The emperor himself had commanded this design, drawing his inspiration from the twelfth-century Song painting of a chicken. She turned the image, looked at it from each side. If she could see the emperor with his cups, if she could feel his desire, she’d understand this fake better. She would know this near-perfect thing more fully.

  To see the Chenghua emperor, she had to go into the deeper level of her memory world, the one that was accessed by completely letting go of the present. This was the realm of memory in which pieces of the past showed themselves. Whether it was imagination or erudition or some mix of the two she didn’t like to ask. It just happened.

  To do it, she went back to her silence. She picked ou
t her hearing aids and felt the instant blooming of an empty space. She was alone again. She cleared her mind. She willed herself through the gates and into her imaginary examination yard. She walked down the central avenue, then into the east quadrant. The streets of her world were empty. There were no people. There were sounds—leaves and wind and skating pebbles—but never a human voice.

  It was a bad idea to crowd the memory structure with people. In Rome, twenty-one hundred years ago, the anonymous author of the Ad Herennium—still one of the greatest standing works on memory—had written: . . . the crowding and passing to and fro of people confuse and weaken the impress of the images while solitude keeps their outlines sharp. So Lia saw the clean-swept lanes between her testing cubicles as wide, bare stones, always lit with changing shadows under the leaves of the trees, but empty of people. Though she did let Albert in. He was one of the few. Albert had been her stepfather for a few happy years; he had introduced her to porcelain. She had loved him, and in her memory world he was welcome.

  But she had passed him back near the entrance, his image, never speaking, radiating kindness. She walked the silent avenues lined with all the rooms of her life, all the worlds of porcelain: the purist aesthetic of the Song; the mi-se, or secret color olive-green porcelain of the Tang; the ornate virtuosity of the Qing.

  She came to the Ming Dynasty: hundreds of examination cells stuffed with data and pots and poems and remembrances. Here she was at the reign of Chenghua, ninth emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Marked on his cubicle door was the character hai, or child. She had chosen this character for his cubicle because when he was a man, a child was the thing he most wanted. All Lia had to do was open the door in her mind’s eye, and she saw him at the annual ritual at the Temple of Heaven, Peking; 1474 by the Western calendar. His personal name was Xuantong.

  He was brought here once a year. Before the tallow candles and the brass figure of the god, he prayed on his knees through the night. This was the first phase of the ritual.

  He’d had his eyes on the statue for hours. It glimmered under the leaping candlelight. The metal eyes were flat and dead, but he knew the god’s spirit shone within. The emperor believed in divine providence. Maybe once he hadn’t, but now he did, for he himself had finally been given a son. Moreover, this son had lived—the first of his sons to live—and was safely growing up.

  He had loved only one woman. She was the wet nurse who’d fed him as a baby. When he came of age he made her his concubine. She liked to dress alternately as a man and a woman. He adored her. She bore him a son but the infant died.

  After that, the sons he had by every woman also died mysteriously. Whenever the empress or another concubine managed to bear the emperor a son, the baby died. Soon everyone, even the emperor, knew it was his concubine who was killing them. And now his line would die with him.

  Until he learned in one breath, in seemingly a single heartbeat, that he had a son after all.

  From outside the door Xuantong heard the murmured breathing, the stone-shuffle of men’s feet. The Officials of the Sacrificial Court had arrived. Finally. It must be near dawn.

  He stretched his aching legs and slipped the ritual satin cap on his head, the satin boots on his feet. These were never worn except on this day, at this moment. Like all the other sacred objects, the plum silk robes, the Tablet of Heaven, the blue jewel called Symbol of Heaven, they were hidden away through the rest of the year. Their power was in their concealment. Like the survival of his boy.

  He paced slowly outside the Palace of Abstinence, down a few marble steps into the walled courtyard. The officials swept low and touched their foreheads to the earth.

  As he stepped past them he heard the first boom from the Taihezhong, the Bell of Supreme Harmony. It could be heard miles away. He glanced up at the stone tower. Inside, two men were dragging a suspended log back, pulling it as far as it would go before releasing it again and again. The log crashed into the bell with a bone-ringing reverberation.

  Ahead of him, through the ancient cypress trees, he saw the Temple of Heaven against the lightening sky. The shape so pleased him. The way its circular inner wall exerted itself against an outer square. The way the four Ling Shing Men, Starry Wicket Gates, stood in white marble at the cardinal points.

  The day he had learned of his son’s existence also was the day he reached the bottom of his sadness. Childlessness was bad for any man, but he was the emperor, and his shame soared in all four directions.

  His chief eunuch, Geng Tie, noticed. “Is it headache?” he asked kindly.

  “It’s not headache,” Xuantong snapped. “It’s that which Uncle well knows.”

  Geng Tie felt his frail heart tugged as he looked at this unfortunate, weak-spined, art-minded man he had served for many years. He was ineffective as emperor. He had been born to patronize art. And he needed a son. He had to have a son.

  Was this the time to tell him? They had waited five years. The child lived, the child thrived. And no one knew of his existence beyond a sworn secret handful in the palace. “But your majesty,” Geng said.

  “What?” Xuantong was irritated.

  “But your majesty has a son.”

  Xuantong stared. “Bie shuo,” he said, Don’t talk like that.

  Geng Tie stood trembling. “Your majesty has a son,” he said again. “We have kept him hidden in the Court of Quiet Virtue. Forgive us, your loyal slaves. We sought only to preserve him. He is healthy, ready for schooling. His milk name is Huobu.”

  And so Xuantong had flown, his silk-encrusted robes flapping. He leapt over stones and potted plants, the eunuchs fluttering in a line behind him. He raced from his living quarters to the far northwestern corner of the palace, to the remote court shaded with a lace-leafed elm. Over the sill, around the spirit wall. There was a boy, right in front of him, eyes wide and face as round and tight-skinned as a plum. The nursemaids around him fell to the ground in reverence.

  “Who was it?” he gasped to Geng Tie, now lurching up behind him.

  Geng Tie understood. He meant the woman. “It was a little slave from Guizhou,” he answered. “Right after Spring Festival six years ago. We hid her in this court until she delivered.”

  Vaguely, Xuantong recalled the encounter. He had been walking back to his quarters from an audience with his ministers. His retainers walked a short distance behind. He surprised a girl with a covered bowl stepping out of an arched gateway. Their eyes met and there was an insouciant smile to her, a careless light of laughter, until she realized who he was and froze. He found this diverting. She set the bowl on the sill and made to lower herself to koutou, but he stepped close to her and stopped her. He didn’t want a reverence from her. Instead, he parted her skirts and slid one hand between her legs. He could feel her trembling. After a minute he pulled her skirts all the way up. He lifted her a few inches to sit on the edge of the stone wall, and he favored her, without thinking about it, opening her jacket to play with her at the same time. It only took a few minutes. The eunuchs stood back on the stone path, watching.

  A quick pleasure with a slave. He had forgotten it. “Does she still live?”

  The eunuch nodded.

  “Elevate her rank. And the child . . .” Xuantong considered. Continue to keep him a secret, or name him crown prince right away? He had a son!

  Now, approaching the Temple of Heaven, he felt connected to all the earth for the first time. He watched the pale iridescence come alive on the marble under the rising sun. Flawless, he thought. As perfect as the sacred porcelains waiting on the altars within: the red, yellow, blue, and white, colors of the sun, the earth, heaven, and the moon. Perfect as his paintings, his jades and bronzes, but most especially his porcelains. Porcelain lived forever. And the potters at Jingdezhen were doing magnificent work, the best since the reign of Xuande. He was about to commission them to make a set of wine cups, in honor of his son. The prince.
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br />   Xuantong saw a hen-and-chicks motif, after the Song painter Huang Chuan. It was a supreme paternal symbol. And it echoed the design of a much more ancient ritual cup pictured in the Book of Rites. The cups, the chickens scratching in the dirt with their little babies all around, would invoke the love of a parent for his children, of an emperor for his subjects. They would be truly celestial.

  At last the deep tolling bell ceased. He glanced across the great expanse of trees to the tiled roofs of the capital. He knew that throughout the city, men, women, and children had heard the bell and emerged from their homes. They would be standing in their lanes now, facing the Temple of Heaven, facing him, the Son of Heaven. He smiled. His face was lit with an easy benevolence. In his mind’s eye he saw the chicken cups.

  “I found a fake,” she blurted out the instant Zheng picked up the phone. She’d been beside herself waiting to call him. She knew exactly when he got to his office, when he clicked the lid off his steaming mug of tea. She knew just when he’d be ready to pick up his private line.

  “A fake what?”

  “A Chenghua chicken cup! Can you believe it?”

  “Hmm,” he said with a smile in his voice. “Audacious.”

  “Oh, it’s good too,” she assured him, “it’s beautiful. The clay color is fantastic.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The painting—the painting is awfully good. But it’s too intentional. You know.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And the reign mark is too clear. Too nice. You know, the artist thought of everything. Even the wear marks are random. But to paint with that Chenghua subtlety—this was done by a master! I have to admit.” She swallowed. “It had me going for a while. I had to look at it a long time.”