Chapter 5

Zhou Wanrong turned, and her tears came too.

“Lianqiao!”

They stared at each other through reddened eyes, then clung together and sobbed. It looked as though they would be at it for some time.

I went into the kitchen to cook. A bone broth would build everyone up, I thought, along with three steamed eggs and some fried eggplant.

Half an hour later, I came out carrying a bowl and could hardly believe my eyes.

It was as though the fairy maiden from the river-snail tale had paid us a visit.

The room had been swept again and scrubbed with water. Everything shone so smoothly I scarcely dared step onto the floor.

All the things I never had time to sort were neatly in their proper places. Bedding lay spread in the courtyard to air, and the clothes I had been too tired and lazy to wash hung in a row on the pole.

Three people sat around the table.

Zhou Wanrong’s desolation had vanished. Like a withered tree touched by spring, she was gently telling Xiaohua a story.

Lianqiao crouched to braid Xiaohua’s hair, weaving in wildflowers she had found somewhere. The child gazed at her in adoration.

What a cozy scene.

I set down the bone broth and told them to leave off for a moment and eat.

Lianqiao hurriedly finished the braid and went to fetch the food.

I failed to stop her and had to let her busily serve everyone.

Eggs laid by our old hen made a rich, fragrant steamed custard.

The fresh marrow bones, carefully selected, had simmered over a low fire with medicinal herbs for an hour.

They were nourishing indeed.

Everyone’s cheeks glowed after a bowl.

Lianqiao took on the washing-up too, then coaxed Xiaohua through a bath and a hair wash before taking her into the bedroom to play.

Then she turned, dropped to her knees with a thud, and knocked her forehead firmly against the floor three times.

Good heavens!

A grown girl kowtowing to me—I would lose years off my life!

I tried to get out of her way, but she caught me around the legs.

“You have such a kind heart. Even if I have to work like an ox or a horse, I will repay you.”

I nodded wildly and hauled at her with all my strength.

The girl meant every word. Her forehead was bright red.

She could not see a chore without doing it, either. She fetched chairs herself and asked us to sit.

Only then, bitterly, did she tell us the truth.

The marchioness whose supposedly premature baby I had delivered—

Was indeed an impostor: the cousin the little maid had mentioned.

But not Zhou Wanrong’s cousin.

The marquis’s.

Those two adulterers had been sleeping together since before Zhou Wanrong married him. By the time his lawful wife arrived and became pregnant, the false wife’s pregnancy was already nearly three months along.

And she had used her status as a widow to install herself in the household.

The Marquis of Yongning could not bear to lose Princess Huayang’s support, but neither could he bear for his beloved to be a mere concubine with no place in the family register.

After much thought, he devised a plan wicked enough to get his whole clan executed and its property confiscated.

Why not kill the real Zhou Wanrong and let his sweetheart take her place?

Lin’an and Kaifeng were eighteen hundred li apart.

Princess Huayang was deeply cherished by His Majesty and lived in the capital. She was most unlikely to travel south, and her reach did not extend to Lin’an, where the Pei family held sway.

All they needed to do was send letters to Kaifeng as Zhou Wanrong always had, send gifts for festivals, and plead ill health: she could not endure the journey and had to rest in bed.

With no one meeting her face-to-face, who would suspect that Lady Qinghe had been replaced?

What followed was simple enough.

Lianqiao had accompanied Zhou Wanrong when she married. They had grown up together, bound by a love stronger than gold.

After Zhou Wanrong’s carriage fell, Lianqiao had fought to escape the driver and get back to the estate, hoping the marquis would send men to rescue her mistress.

But the instant she returned, she saw that cousin playing the marchioness, wearing clothes from Lady Qinghe‘s dowry and gold ornaments Princess Huayang had given her daughter, all while simpering at him.

“Zhou Wanrong should be dead by now, shouldn’t she? If she hadn’t relied on Princess Huayang and used an imperial decree to force her way between us, I should have been the wife you married properly, Cousin.”

The marquis fondly bent a finger and brushed the tip of her nose.

“Silly girl. You are Zhou Wanrong now. My lawful wife.”

Lianqiao went mad on the spot and scratched the impostor’s hand.

Enraged, the marquis had her beaten twenty times with a staff, then sold her out of the household on the pretext that she had tried to seduce him.

It removed someone who might expose him and warned the others to keep quiet.

The Marquis of Yongning would have liked nothing better than for Lianqiao to die outside his gates.

As long as it could not be connected to his household.

Thanks to Princess Huayang, the family had lately been basking in imperial favor. No other household in Lin’an dared cross them.

Given those instructions, if the broker could make no money from her, he would probably sell her cheaply to a brothel.

Luckily, he wanted this unprofitable business off his hands. For convenience’s sake, he had let me have a bargain.

After all, how comfortable could life with a midwife possibly be?

It hardly went against the marquis’s orders.

I had suspected something, but suspicion was nothing beside having the truth hit me in the face.

I gaped. Every fine impression I had of that supposedly perfect couple shattered.

I wanted to run straight to Sister Li and laugh at her judgment.

Who had always said that a woman who married a man like the Marquis of Yongning, a man who would take no concubines, was the luckiest woman alive?

Beneath that handsome mask of constancy lay nothing but deceit. Behind all that tenderness, all those vows to love only one woman, lurked a wolf’s ambition.

Who said women’s hearts were the cruelest? This man’s looked crueler to me.

How blind we’d been!