chapter 4
chapter 4
After a leisurely month at the country estate, Steward Li arrived with the proceeds from selling my belongings.
On the day I left the General’s Residence, I packed the personal effects, clothes, and jewelry from my dowry. I asked my steward to sell the larger pieces that were difficult to move—the carved canopy bed, the jade screen, and even the fine silks my sister had given me.
Until Yun Zheng was gravely wounded at forty, he remained stationed at the northern frontier and we rarely saw each other. Most of the time, I stayed in the General’s Residence with a succession of his concubines, each favored after becoming pregnant and discarded soon afterward.
Across those decades, two emperors succeeded one another and the capital endured three rounds of warfare. I fled to the estate three times and eventually moved there for good.
The Yun family had risen through Father’s military achievements, while Mother had married from afar and brought her dowry in silver. Every time we fled, my bulky dowry was the hardest thing to transport, so I decided to sell it all now.
The pieces fetched forty-three hundred taels. I spent four thousand on the neighboring estate and had Steward Li’s family move there to manage it.
East Mountain was remote, but its isolation spared it from war. The soil was rich, and everything grew well.
The estate Mother had purchased on a whim eventually became a refuge for the entire family.
We planted in spring and harvested in autumn. Grain we could not sell could be stored or eaten ourselves.
I also rented out the two shops in good locations that my mother had included in my dowry. One brought in eighty taels a year, the other a hundred.
Neither had ever earned much. After several wars, both lost nearly everything. The ventures I joined with noblewomen in the capital fared no better. I lost more to fraud than I ever made in profit.
Eighty years of life had taught me one thing: I possessed no talent whatsoever for business.
My only real talent was being born into wealth. If I could safely preserve the money my parents and sister had given me, that would be achievement enough.
On the first day of winter, the season’s first snow fell over East Mountain.
I opened my window at dawn. A thin layer of white covered the eaves, the reeds by the stream had become silver wands, and sparrows hopped over the snow in search of food.
Wrapped in a padded coat, Mother stood in the corridor directing Yun Ting and Yun Hui as they swept.
White breath puffed from the boys’ mouths while their brooms flew. Snow scattered everywhere. When Mother looked away, Yun Ting packed a snowball and struck Yun Hui on the back of the neck. Yun Hui leaped at the icy shock.
They began a snowball fight. Mother reached for a broom to beat them, but I stopped her.
“They rarely get a holiday. Let them play for a while.”
“You spoil them!” she scolded, though her eyes were smiling.
The snow grew heavier that afternoon. We sat together in the warm chamber while I brewed tea and Mother peeled roasted chestnuts, watching flakes settle one by one on the old plum tree in the courtyard.