Chapter 2

Chapter 2

When I was little, I was an excellent swimmer-better than many men. I could hold my breath underwater for a very long time.

But from the day Mother grabbed me and bound my feet, I never swam again.

I cried and screamed that it hurt.

Mother cried too. She said it was for my own good. Only with tiny bound feet would anyone want me.

“Only when someone wants her can a woman survive.”

I thought I had long since forgotten how to swim, how to hold my breath.

But when the well water closed over my head, my will to live awakened that skill once more.

The music at the bottom of the well vanished.

In its place came the noisy chatter of voices.

I dove down to the bottom and, through the opening, saw a place that looked like a private school.

The children there wore identical, strange clothes. Then a woman who looked like a teacher walked in through the door.

No. How could a woman be a teacher?

She put on a stern face. “How long has it been since the warning bell rang? Why are you still talking?”

I did not understand.

But her words quickly silenced that place.

She seemed to begin teaching foreign letters.

Had her husband taught her those foreign letters too?

I could not understand any of it.

But I did recognize one foreign word.

“tomorrow.”

Before I could look any longer, the thick, clumsy iron chain hauled me up.

No one had expected my husband to return early.

I saw that gentle, handsome face of his.

The same face that, when he was seventeen, had once kept watch outside our manor gates for an entire night, too excited to sleep because he was going to marry me.

Now his lips moved, but I had been frozen at the bottom of the well for too long, and my ears could not hear clearly.

I thought he was worried. Hurriedly, I called out in a hoarse voice, “Husband, I-”

Before I could finish, I finally heard him clearly.

He said, “You should not have provoked Yi’er.”

I looked past him and saw Jiang Yi behind him, sobbing, her face the picture of innocence.

“Young Madam wanted to discipline me and locked me in the well. Who knew she would fall in herself instead?

“I was so frightened. Thank goodness you came back, Young Master.”

His arms around me loosened, bit by bit. At last, his expression darkened, and he said to Jiang Yi, “Young Madam is gentle by nature and studied Lessons for Women. Why would she raise a hand against a concubine like you?”

Jiang Yi’s face turned pale. Clearly, she had not expected my husband to see through her trick.

Not because he loved me.

But because he understood even better than I did the timidity of old-fashioned women, taught to take their husbands as heaven.

My husband sent me back to my room.

Physician after physician came. It took several basins of water before all the blood was washed clean.

The physician said, “Fortunately, the rusty iron did not pierce too deeply into the lower abdomen. It is already a great blessing that her life can be saved. But in the future, I fear it will be difficult for her to conceive again.”

I turned my face away. My husband took my hand.

“Since Yi’er is already mine, I cannot send her away.

“She is only sixteen. She merely lacks discipline.”

And so, that very night, my husband disciplined her in the study.

At first, she wept and admitted her mistake.

But as she cried, her sobs turned soft and seductive, drifting into my bedchamber again and again.

The next morning, my husband’s attendant came to see me at dawn.

He said Jiang Yi was with child.