The Saṃsāra of Love (page 61)
A few strands of white were in Tang Lili’s hair, but otherwise it was still black as Shanxi coal. It still shone against the steel of her blades, though now it was plaited up matronly behind instead of streaming loose, as it had the last time she crossed the Silk Merchant’s house and strode into Another Place, the last time when she was still a young woman. In the years since, she and Wang Xiaolong had gotten married, and had a daughter, Wilhelmina Wang, and lived life the way life has always meant to be: the days, the seasons, of quiet family time, family commerce, and family mortality.
The days of jianghu adventure, danger, excitement were replaced by the mundane but even more precious child-rearing, gongfu-teaching, rhododendron and peony growing.
As Wilhelmina Wang grew up, in the windy, imposing courtyards of ancient Chang’an and the delicate, water-filled gardens of old Jiangnan, Tang Lili taught her the weapons dao, qiang, gun, bang and the arts qin, qi, shu, hua. The weapons sabre, spear, stick, cudgel and the arts zither, go, calligraphy, painting. She of course, also taught her daughter the Li family flying daggers.
The rest, Wilhelmina Wang didn’t need teaching. Like how it feels when you fall in love, how it feels when you break your heart, how it feels when you break another’s, these things, these things came naturally. And not only did Tang Lili didn’t need to teach them, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t prevent them from arriving earlier than she was prepared for in the galloping pace of life.
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In that field of Timothy grass, in the coastal beech forest so near Stella Maris of the Ursuline nuns, where Sister Augusta and Tang Lili had met so many years ago, they are to meet again, because of the next generation. The centuries come and the centuries go, and girls, generation after generation, get their hearts broken and break hearts of their own. If there is a rhythm of time, it is counted in the Saṃsāra of falling in and being dashed out of love.
That had been a clear, sun-dappled day, and the mews had flown overhead, calling their caw-caw. The mews are roosted in their nests now, for it is the Prince of Denmarke’s wedding night. The Prince and his bride are on their wedding ship, the little meer-maid, too. Desperate, fever-pitched, and hopeless, she had in her hand the dagger her sisters’ traded their hair for. She could see Emil Hering swimming to her, his steady determined strokes bringing him to the hull. And she had little time to plunge the dagger into the prince’s heart to save her own life, or to throw it away and die of the sea witch’s curse.
On the shore, behind the high moors, past the Stella Maris of the Ursuline nuns, on that dark field of Timothy grass, Sister Augusta is praying for the little meer-maid’s absolution, in anticipation. She, too, had once been incapable of her own distress. She, too, had had her clothes spread wide, and, meer-maid-like, awhile, was borne up by them, before her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled poor Sister Augusta (then known as Ophelia) from her melodious lay down to near sandy death.
But the meer-maids, capricious in their reasons and ways, did not take her to her death, but brought her back to the waterline. In time she took the religious name of Sister Augusta, joined Sankt Ursula, and lived, fully, even without Hamlet prince of Denmarke, though she had not thought it possible in the passionate rashness and hopelessness of her youth. She hoped the little meer-maid could live to an old age, too.