Chapter 3
In the end, I persuaded them.
I had always known my own mind. Once I decided on something, no one could turn me back. Mother had once loved that trait and praised it endlessly. Now she hated it, wishing I could waver just a little.
The date for my entry into the palace was soon settled.
The night before, we held a family dinner. Mother kept filling my bowl until her tears began to fall. My younger brothers and sisters cried with her, and it took a mountain of reassurance to soothe them.
I rose to offer a toast, deliberately walked halfway around the table, and spilled the wine on Ye Man, who sat at its far end.
Everyone looked over.
I bent down with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Sister. I didn’t mean to.”
As I dabbed at her clothes, I pulled up her long sleeve and held down her struggling hand. Her exposed arm, pale and smooth as cream, was mottled with bruises and crossed with terrible wounds.
Before, Concubine Fan’s cruelty
had happened behind closed doors. It had never occurred to Ye Man that she could complain.
Now that it was out in the open, Mother was the first to lose her composure.
She slammed the table, truly furious.
“Bring that brazen vixen here! Whatever Man’er may have done, she’s a daughter of this house. What right has that woman to treat her so? She only became a concubine because she carried a child. She’s a servant to the bone, yet she dares beat her like this. Has she lost all sense of propriety?”
Everyone at the table nodded, their faces grim.
Ye pride ran deep. We rose and fell together. However disagreeable or solitary one of our own might be, outsiders had no business trampling on them.
Concubine Fan knelt in the courtyard all night. At first she sobbed with her hair hanging loose. Then they gagged her, leaving only hoarse whimpers. Still angry, Mother had her rooms searched and cut her allowance. Through it all, Concubine Fan watched with lowered eyes, thick with resentment and madness.
Ye Man huddled beside me.
She was shaking. She could already imagine how her mother would take all that anger out on her, worse than ever. Before she could kneel to beg for mercy, I took her hand and smilingly drew her toward Mother.
“Concubine Fan really has gone mad. I think we should send her to a temple and have those demons driven out.”
“Mother, since I’m leaving, why not take Manman into your care? She’s a daughter of our family, after all. We can’t let people laugh at her for knowing nothing.”
She was sixteen already, with no marriage arranged. Mother worried it might be too late to set her upbringing right. But this was my last wish before I married. She could not bear to refuse, and agreed.
As dinner drew to an end,
Ye Man put a morsel of food in my bowl too.
Her fingertips trembled. She rarely spoke, preferring action to words. When she did say something, every word carried her awkwardness and sincerity.
Softly, she said, “Big Sister, why don’t I go in your place after all? I… I want to…”
“Hush.”
I stroked her head. “Getting nine degrees of our family executed is no game. There’s only one thing you must never forget. You’re not Ye Man, some weed growing in the corners of our house. You’re Ye Shuman, my sister, the chancellor’s daughter. Look at the people at this table. They’re your family, the people you can rely on for the rest of your life.”
She listened with her head quietly bowed.
Her outline was dark against the candlelight. At last, before that tiny measure of warmth she had longed for, she seemed to come apart, revealing the soft, childish heart beneath her heavy shell. She lowered her head and wept.
Her tears made no sound. They gathered on her chin, then fell in great drops.
A breeze carried the chill of early autumn.
I drew her fur robe closer around her. “Once I enter the palace, move into my courtyard. Shuman.”
My gloomy little powder keg.
In this life, beneath Mother’s watchful eye and our family’s protection, find your way back to the bonds of family. Let us snuff out the fuse and scatter that bitterness. Leave the battle to me.