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At twenty, Anyu had won the annual jewelry competition for three consecutive years; she was the youngest female jeweler in Shanghai and had designed and delivered many pieces of jewelry for the cream of high society in the city.

Her clientele increased at a steady pace, including compradors who made vast fortunes at the Bank of Shanghai, wives of Chinese diplomats, daughters of real estate moguls, and mistresses of American, French, and British entrepreneurs.

She had well-known local clients as well—the famed opera singer Mei Lanfang, the rising movie star Ruan Lingyu, and many more.

She asked to meet all her clients in person in the shop, where she took the measurements of their necks and hands and sketched the pieces before finalizing a design.

The purpose of jewelry, she believed, was to express a woman’s taste, to highlight her fine features, and to accentuate her beauty. A woman’s jewelry was personal.

And her attention to detail was praised all over Shanghai; she was extolled for her talent and unique creations, and with her fame came more commissions. In two years, the jewelry made by the House of Mandelburg became a desired commodity in Shanghai.

With the rising profits the House made, Uncle David considered moving into a bigger, more comfortable apartment, but he quickly realized it was risky as Mr. Du sent word that extra men had to be sent to watch his shop due to heavy traffic, and the protection fees increased tenfold.

Realizing their relocation would be perceived as flaunting their wealth, Uncle David decided to stay where they were.

As an alternative, Uncle David offered to renovate the attic and partition it to improve Anyu’s living conditions and give her more privacy, but Anyu declined.

She was used to the company of the women, and she liked the attic the way it was.

She did accept a new bed for herself next to Esther’s.

The Guild kept its word; Mr. Walters delivered a generous selection of gemstones, agate, garnet, lapis lazuli, and opal at her request. Sometimes, she visited the vault to admire the Winter Egg.

Being in its close vicinity calmed her; sometimes, wearing a glove, she lifted the egg and studied its fine features.

She could replicate it, but there would always be one singular Winter Egg.

Her social life became busy. Mr. Morris requested an interview for his newspaper.

Organizations invited her to attend fashion shows, opera debuts, movie premieres, anniversary parties, and jubilees.

There was even a flower delivery with a note from Pierre Bellefeuille, who requested dinner with her.

She chose to attend several parties and always invited Esther, who bemoaned her lack of a social life, to accompany her. Esther was twenty-seven, rapidly turning into a spinster, so she said. With these parties, Anyu hoped Esther could cast a wider net and find an ideal husband.

Dressed in long gowns handpicked by Esther, who prided herself on her good taste, Anyu and Esther visited the peculiar British clients in teahouses where white-powdered Japanese geishas performed their dances.

They went to a two-story casino in the Settlement and sat at the roulette table while the gray-haired tycoons gambled; they waited in a drawing room with black walls in a mansion rumored to be haunted by vengeful ghosts; they drank gin and soda in a nightclub where wealthy young men paid ten pennies to dance the Charleston with lace-jabot-wearing White Russian women who were said to be former viscountesses and countesses.

Anyu learned to smoke cigarettes, which helped her concentrate, and she often chain-smoked packets of cigarettes in order to work for ten hours straight.

She also befriended her fans, some wealthy Chinese youths with Western educations who shunned the traditional, restrictive Chinese culture.

They had drinking bouts to test their alcohol tolerance, and once, when she took off her glove to clean spilled wine, exposing her hand by mistake, they examined her hand with admiration—the scars from cuts, the thick welts from a blowtorch, the calluses on her fingertips, and the blackened stub where her pinkie used to be.

One of the youths, whose father was a wealthy silk merchant in Shanghai, invited her to his private chambers covered with cushions and pillows and offered long wooden pipes to smoke high-quality opium—the Great Smoke.

She was curious to try and was appeased by the calming sensation that coursed through her veins. When she awoke, it was five days later.

She learned to decline those opium trips, but the talks with the taitais , the wealthy wives of the tycoons, were difficult to avoid.

Meandering along the narrow paths in their private gardens with half-moon-shaped bridges, sitting with a gaggle of children playing on wooden horses, and watching silk-clad girls bowing and pouring tea for their elders in a shockingly pious manner, she realized the inadequacy of her grace and refinement and her utter lack of social aptitude and obedience.

Some of the women probed her about her parentage. An orphan, they’d respond with a dramatic intake of breath. You poor thing.

Then, Are you married? No? You’re twenty years old. Shouldn’t you start a family?

Sometimes, these talks exhausted her, and she grew bad-tempered—convinced that her mother, by choosing to live apart from her family, had robbed her of the companionship, the noisy messiness of an extended family, and the teachings of tradition and values upheld by many; sometimes, she wished her mother had found a way to reunite with the warlord.

Then, at a high-profile party attended by some Nationalist officials and their wives, she came across the Young Marshal, the son of the warlord Zhang from Manchuria, in a cigar room at a party.

It had been eighteen months since Warlord Zhang’s assassination, which the newspapers said was engineered by the Japanese Kwantung Army.

The Young Marshal had inherited his father’s armies and vowed to avenge his father’s death.

He was a tall man with a long face and a straight nose. But they had the same eyes—the peach blossom–shaped eyes.

“I’m also from Harbin,” Anyu said. She was only chatting with a military man, not a blood relative, and she wasn’t expecting anything else, she told herself.

The Young Marshal, who was eight years older than her, nodded. “Your homeland is proud of you, Miss Anyu.”

“Do you like to eat silkworm pupae, too? Warlord Zhang was very fond of them,” she said casually. But if the Young Marshal was aware of her eyes, he would be intrigued.

“It’s a delicacy.”

“I wonder if this sounds strange to you. A girl I used to know kept a necklace with a Guandi pendant. She said your father bestowed that on her mother.”

The Young Marshal puffed out some smoke. “Does she still have the necklace?”

“I don’t believe so. She pawned it. Was the necklace special?”

“It’s my father’s folly. Whenever he was involved with a woman, he gave her a necklace with our family’s god-of-war emblem and told her to go away.

Those women were attracted to my father’s power like a moth to candlelight.

Who knows how many were only too happy to sleep with him, bear him children, and try to extort him. They are nothing to my family.”

They are nothing to my family. The sentence rang in her ears long after she left the party. She might be the warlord’s illegitimate child, but she was the Young Marshal’s threat. Her existence was taboo, a mockery; she would never be part of the Zhang family.

Her mother was not given a choice, she realized, and her childhood had been a gift, after all—her sequestered life at the train station had allowed her to become a woman of her own without the fetters of tradition or the ties of family.

From now on, her life was hers, hers alone; she would build her future, and her own family.

As always, she thought of Isaac.