Daughters of the Silk Road: A beautiful and epic novel of family, love and the secrets of a Ming Vase

“
T
heir god
, named T’ung, was once himself a potter. In former times during the Ming Dynasty, after the large dragon fish bowls had failed in the baking year after year, the eunuchs in charge inflicted the most severe punishments, and the people were in bitter trouble. The god, throwing away his life for the rest, leaped into the midst of the furnace and died there, and the dragon-bowls were afterwards taken out quite perfect. His fellow-workmen, pitying him and wondering, built a temple within the precincts of the government manufactory, and worshipped him there under the title ‘Genius of Fire and Blast’, so that his fame was spread abroad. The potters offer annually reverent sacrifice, just as others worship the gods of agriculture and the land. In my day, when the people are content and trade brings success, when work is well paid and life is easy, the fame of this genius should not be forgotten.”

T
he girl looked
up at the soft blue sky, glimpsed through the bars of the high window. A cloud blew in from the lagoon, its shape swirling and changing. Was it a snake, its scales mirrored in the high cirrus cloud? The form changed with the high winds; it grew a leg, then two, floating down from its body. She heard the rustle of trees in the unseen garden below as the wind gusted suddenly. The cloud continued its journey past her window until she saw now that it had metamorphosed into something quite different. Her hand scrabbled at the rough-hewn stone wall. She eased a section out and laid it silently on the floor; there stood the vase hidden in a small niche. Her fingers touched the dragon that snaked its way around the centre and she looked again at the cloud. The head – for there was indeed a head now – gazed down at her with benevolent eyes, before a sudden gust of wind blew it onwards and out of her eyeline. The dragon had been looking down on her…

T
he vase stood
on the hall table. A pair of dusty dried hydrangea flowers jutted awkwardly from its narrow neck. One had been a bright pink when Miranda had first brought it inside in the last dying months of summer. Now its petals took on a dusty greenish tinge. The other had been white, but had long lost any resemblance to the clear sparkling flower that had glowed out that late summer evening when Miranda went out with her secateurs in search of something to ‘cheer up that vase’.

Slam. The door juddered as it closed. Its base, swollen by a particularly wet summer, caused it to catch on the mat, so that whoever was trying to open or close it had to use extreme force, shoving it hard, sometimes kicking it, sometimes leaning their entire body against it, or even, on one particularly wet day, taking a sledgehammer to its base.

The slamming sound reverberated around the empty hall. The vase wobbled imperceptibly on the narrow console table.

‘Hi Mum, it’s just me.’ Georgie flung her coat onto the Shaker pegs that had been inexpertly screwed into the wall a few months earlier. Miranda had found them in a car boot sale and was rather pleased to have discovered something so chic for just a few pounds. She had made an attempt at hanging them correctly – DIY being just one of the many things she had had to ‘take on’ over the years, but her skills with a drill were adequate at best and the wall on which the pegs hung was made of old lathe and plaster and simply did not have the resilience for something as heavy as a wooden coat rack. The pegs strained under the weight of Georgie’s damp army surplus wool coat. The coat’s grey edge grazed the side of the vase; a fine spray of dust flew out from the flowers. A pale green petal fell onto the console table.

‘In here,’ Miranda called out to her daughter. Miranda sat at the kitchen table, bills spread out all around her.

‘What are they?’ Georgie asked as she casually opened kitchen cupboards.

‘Trouble,’ her mother replied.

‘Oh?’ Georgie hovered anxiously near her mother, before she returned to her searching, finally slamming the door of the cupboard under the sink with a dramatic flourish.

‘There are no biscuits. I mean nothing.’

‘Well you won’t find them in there,’ Miranda said curtly, gesturing towards the sink.

‘Well where are they?’ Georgie asked irritably.

‘What?’ Miranda asked distractedly.

‘The biscuits?’

‘Oh. There aren’t any. I’ve not done a shop. Sorry. Why don’t you make some? I’ve got flour and stuff.’

‘Never mind.’ Georgie mooched across the kitchen and, grabbing her heavy school bag, clattered up the stairs. Halfway up she turned round and leapt back down onto the hall floor, landing heavily, before reaching over to her grey coat and feeling in the pocket for something. She brought out a crumpled packet of gum, knocking the dried hydrangea with her elbow as she did so. The vase trembled.

Miranda filled the kettle and gazed out at the wintry garden. Frost clung on late in the day, carpeting one side of the lawn and the adjacent flowerbed with a fine film of white ice. The other side, the sunny side, lay green and damp, the earth of the flowerbed dark brown and crumbly. The hydrangeas on the shady side of the garden drooped sadly, their leaves turning brown as the frost did its work in the late afternoon light.

She switched the kettle on and sat back down at the table – ninety-five pounds, forty-three pence for electricity; eighty-four pounds for gas; thirty pounds for the Internet; seventy-five pounds for council tax. Her bank statement bore witness to the necessary expenditure at the garage for fixing the ancient Volvo’s exhaust pipe. That and a few meagre presents she had bought the previous month for Georgie’s fifteenth birthday were the only ‘extravagances’ she had allowed herself. She totted it all up on her calculator. In all, it was more than her ex-husband Guy paid her in child support each month.

She heard Georgie clump down the stairs. She heard the struggle with the door.

‘Where are you going?’ Miranda called out.

‘To Cassie’s.’

‘Why?’

‘They’ve got food there.’ And she was gone. The door juddered behind her as she yanked it closed using the letterbox. The vase rocked, before settling once again on the console table.

Miranda opened the fridge and peered into its interior, hoping to be surprised by some previously overlooked delicacy. The near-empty fridge stared back. It yielded only a few strips of bacon, three eggs, and the edge of what had once been some quite good cheddar that she had bought the previous week at the farmers’ market. She took flour and a little butter that was left in the dish and rubbing it together made some pastry. She rolled it out on the kitchen table and lined an old rather discoloured flan dish, one of several domestic items she had inherited from her mother’s Aunt Celia.

The old lady had lived in the tropics for many years with her engineer husband, but had ended her days in a romantic vicarage near Cheltenham. Miranda had had to guard against disappointment when she received a letter from a solicitor earlier in the year, informing her of her great aunt’s bequest. Ripping the letter open she had initially hoped that the huge house and its splendid contents were to be hers, but reading on, she discovered that her aunt, who had been childless, had left the majority of her estate to be divided between the local donkey sanctuary, the Ghurkha’s association, and prostate cancer research – the condition that had taken her beloved husband from her. Delighted for the splendid Ghurkhas and the sweet donkeys in equal measure, Miranda was about to throw the letter in the bin when she read on. It appeared that her aunt had left her a selection of “domestic” items that she hoped Miranda might find both “useful and aesthetically pleasing”.

When the large removal chest was delivered a couple of weeks later, she had to stifle the desire to send it back where it came from, marked “not known” next to her name and address. Instead, she dragged the box into the sitting room and taking the contents out, tried to decide if she found any of them either useful or pleasing.

There was a set of ancient French flan dishes decorated with yellow and green flowers that would, she decided, look attractive on the kitchen dresser. So, both useful and aesthetically pleasing. There was an early Victorian carriage clock, that she remembered admiring one afternoon when visiting Celia. It was sweet of Celia to remember that she had liked it. Miranda had a fleeting thought, quickly dispelled, that it might even be worth something - as she thought of the gas bill that had landed on the mat that morning. There was a leather-bound set of Dickens novels and a complete set of Walter Scott – neither of which were exactly unique, but nice to have. She placed them on the bookcase in the sitting room. There was an early edition of Jane Austin’s
Pride and Prejudice
that was in good condition and might be worth taking to the bookshop where she worked three times a week. Jeremy, who owned the shop, would be able to tell her if it had any value. In the corner of the chest, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt which now lay across her bed, was the vase. Blue and white porcelain, it featured an angry dragon chasing around the centre, its face staring ghoulishly ahead, its back decorated with what looked like the sharp teeth of a buzz saw.

Incredibly, given its mode of transport, it appeared to be completely undamaged. Miranda took it out and wandered around the sitting room trying to decide where to put it, before finally settling on a central position on the mantelpiece. But Georgie had pronounced it ‘spooky’ when she came home from school, declaring that she couldn’t concentrate on the telly with ‘that thing’ staring down at her. So Miranda moved the vase to the hall table, and there it had stayed – a useful receptacle for dried flowers, unwanted keys and unpaid bills.

She put the flan dish lined with pastry in the fridge to chill and turned on the oven. Rummaging in the drawers of the ancient dresser she found the baking beans wrapped in old and much-used greaseproof paper. She laid the paper and beans over the chilled pastry case and put it in the oven to bake blind. She inspected the vegetable basket. There were a couple of elderly potatoes, two large onions, a slightly manky leek and a tomato – already beginning to wither. She put the tomato in the fridge, hoping to save it for another day, and then carefully sliced a large onion. She washed and trimmed the leek and cut that up too. She took the three strips of streaky bacon and snipped them into small pieces before frying them off a little. Once the pastry case had been baked, she removed the paper and sprinkled the cooked bacon over its base. She added the onions and leeks to the bacon fat and cooked them delicately until the onion was almost translucent before transferring them to the tart shell. Then, mixing the eggs with the old cream – slightly off, she noted, but no less useful for that – into a thick batter, she poured it into the tart, topping it off with salt, pepper and grated cheese, and placed it in the oven to bake.

She washed the potatoes and put them into the oven next to the tart, then sat back down at the kitchen table to study her bank statement. It revealed an alarmingly small amount of money, barely enough to get her through to the next payday. On the back of the statement she wrote a list of all the bills that would need paying before that date and deducted the total from her available balance. It did not make comfortable reading. The phone rang. It was Georgie.

‘Mum, I’m going to stay at Cassie’s for supper. I’ll see you later.’

‘But darling, I’ve made a…’

The phone clicked before she could tell her daughter of the culinary delights awaiting her at home.

Resisting the temptation to cry, Miranda picked up the pile of unpaid bills and dumped them back in an old rattan tray that served as her office on the kitchen dresser, and laid the table for one.