Chapter 6

Si Min didn’t like hearing the truth. She rushed inside, lay down, and began to sob.

She could cry all she liked. I wasn’t forgetting the important part.

“Si Min, I washed your dishes. Shouldn’t you give me my ten coins?”

I followed her in to ask.

She flung back the quilt and accused me through streaming tears. “Si Lan, how could you treat me like this?”

The hurt and shock in her voice made it sound as though everything that had happened to her was my fault.

I was baffled. “We agreed at the start. I wash the dishes, you pay. Are you going back on your word?”

For a lowly maid, money mattered enormously. Every copper coin was precious.

And this was ten!

She burst into loud sobs. “Look at me, and you’re still kicking me while I’m down! Have you no conscience? I haven’t got any money! Go away! Leave!”

She was so loud that several sleeping maids woke and scolded us both.

Reluctantly, I returned to my place and lay down. I’d ask again tomorrow.

But the next day, Si Min fell ill. Delirious with fever, she kept muttering about apricot blossoms, fine rain, a horse and a garden wall, like some poor woman abandoned by a cruel lover.

When she remained insensible, the matron took one look and coldly ordered her moved to a side room.

In wealthy households, low-ranking servants who fell sick were moved elsewhere so they wouldn’t infect the others.

Once there, you might survive if you had money for a doctor. Without it, your life was in Heaven’s hands.

If you died, they rolled you in a straw mat and dumped you in the common burial ground.

It was brutal.

That was one reason I saved so desperately. If I fell ill, money could save my life.

Yang Sheng, who had been secretly giving her money and favors, panicked when he heard.

He couldn’t enter the maids’ quarters, so he called me out and ordered, “You’ll look after Si Min for the next few days.”

Using his position as the matron’s nephew, he tried to force me to wait on her in the side room.

I was furious. Not only had I lost my ten coins, now I was supposed to nurse that nuisance?

“Do you know why she was punished yesterday?”

“I heard she went into the inner compound and offended a guest.”

“Then why did she want to go there?”

He froze.

I sneered. “Because she used to be betrothed to the young lord. She used your money to pay your aunt so she could get inside and see him. Why did she want to see him? She says she wanted news of our family. Do you believe that?”

Yang Sheng stood stunned.

“Knowing that, are you still going to make me look after her?”

He said nothing.

I turned and left.

I thought he would take the hint and give up. Instead, he proved surprisingly devoted. He hired a doctor for her and paid Liu Chunhua to nurse her.

Apparently he still saw Si Min as that serene chrysanthemum, unstained by the mud around her.

Well, I had told him the truth. As long as he left me alone, what he thought was no concern of mine.

A few days later, she recovered.

Her illness hadn’t been serious. It was her wounded heart that had kept her in bed.

Even afterward, she often gazed mournfully toward the inner compound, eyes brimming, grieving alone over an heir who knew nothing about it.

Falling leaves made her cry. Withered flowers and drooping willows made her cry. Even a chance remark could touch her fragile feelings and leave her weeping uncontrollably.

“What is she doing?” Liu Chunhua couldn’t fathom all this mourning over the seasons. “If she doesn’t start working, it’ll all land on me again.”

I had the matron’s support. Yang Sheng couldn’t order me around, so he had begun squeezing Liu Chunhua instead.

“Haven’t you ever watched an opera scene?” I said flatly. “A young lady or imperial consort loses her man’s favor and gets shut away in a side room or forgotten palace. She gazes at the sky and broods over their love. We maids clean the rooms and somehow find the money to keep her fed and clothed.”

“Why should we?” Liu Chunhua protested. “We’re maids, not their mothers! Never mind getting shut away with them. If we’re serving them, they should pay us. Since when do we supply both the labor and the money?”

“Perhaps their maids owed them something in a previous life.”

“Si Min isn’t a young lady, and I’m not her maid. Why should I always do her work?”

“Perhaps you owed her something in a previous life?”

Liu Chunhua fumed.

We hadn’t bothered to lower our voices. After a silence, Si Min came over. “I never asked either of you to do my work.”

True. She never had.

If she had any real pride, she would have told Yang Sheng firmly to stop, and Liu Chunhua wouldn’t have to do it. At the very least, when Liu Chunhua took over her work, she could have refused and insisted on doing it herself.

Unfortunately, she had done neither.

Liu Chunhua curled her lip. “Then get on with it!”

Si Min bit her lip and angrily turned to her tasks.

She had only just recovered and was still weak. The work tired her badly.

I called her name.

“What?”

She looked up eagerly, Come and help me all but written across her face.

“When are you paying back my ten coins?”

She was speechless.

Furious, she pulled out her purse and flung it at my feet. “There!”

I picked it up, took out ten coins, and returned it.

She snatched it back. “Si Lan, you were the person I trusted most. I never imagined you would hurt me the most too…”

Asking for the ten coins she owed me was apparently the deepest wound of all.