Chapter 9
Chapter 9
There was still plenty of rain that spring, but once summer came, the sun beat down day after day. The vegetables I planted grew in batch after batch, all thanks to the well in the courtyard.
Everyone was wilted by the heat. No one wanted to go out unless they had to, and business was not as good as usual.
Back in Boling, the girls of our household never had ice in summer either, so I had long since grown used to it.
As always, I stayed at the shop. For the orders that had been arranged in advance, I would deliver them to people’s doors in a few days.
Ah Tao feared the heat, so I had her mind the shop instead.
This year’s harvest would be poor. It was a year of disaster, and with the world in such chaos, who knew what autumn would bring?
There was a business opportunity, but I did not have enough money, nor did I have the right connections.
I thought of Pei Qian. I still owed him a great sum of money! I wondered if he would be willing to try it with me.
For someone as serious as him, I had no idea whether he was interested in money.
I invited him, and at a windless dusk, he came as promised.
The shop was closed, so he came to my home.
He also held a fan in his hand, with ivory ribs and a landscape painted on its face. It was elegant and handsome.
He wore a loose robe with wide sleeves, and when he walked, his posture was perfectly upright. He was tall, and he did not let his hair hang loose; every strand was bound high atop his head.
He was exceedingly refined and graceful.
There were no fine dishes at home with which to entertain him, only fresh seasonal vegetables from the courtyard, cooked by my own hands.
I seldom drank, but today I wanted to offer him a cup.
“First, I thank you, my lord, for the kindness of your gift of gold.” I raised my cup and drained the wine in one breath.
“Second, I thank you, my lord, for the painting. Without you, Ke Ying would not know what she might look like today.”
Again, I drained the wine in my cup in one go.
He watched me drink and froze for a moment. The corner of his mouth tugged faintly. For him, that probably counted as a smile.
“You should have given me time to stop you,” he said, then raised his own cup and drank.
It was only one cup of wine, yet he drank it with striking ease.
“Why stop me?” I poured him another cup.
“You are a young lady. It is not quite proper for you to get drunk.”
“What is improper about it?” I asked with a smile.
“If the man drinking with you had ill intentions toward you, and you became drunk, what would you do then?”
His hands rested lightly clenched on his knees, his back straight. He did not look like a scion of an aristocratic family; he looked more like a military officer.
The way he spoke was no joke at all. He truly was that serious a person.
“You need not worry, my lord. If such a moment truly came, it would not necessarily be me who should be afraid. I invited you here today because there is something I wish to discuss. Since that is so, I ought to show you some sincerity. You only know that I am Fifth Lady Cui. How much do you know about my family?”
“When I was young, my family was already in poor shape. My father was lecherous, and who knows how many young concubines there were in the household. After some time, when he tired of them, he would turn around and give them away or sell them off. Some died in childbirth, or later of illness, mostly because the family was poor and could not afford good medicine.”
“I had more than a dozen brothers and sisters at home, all raised by my mother alone. From the time I was little, I had to wash clothes and cook alongside several of my elder sisters.”
“Every time I saw my mother counting the money in her hands with a worried frown, unable to help her, I would curse that father of mine in my heart ten thousand times over, the man who only knew how to swallow drugs and run around naked.”
“Through a thousand hardships and ten thousand difficulties, my mother still hired and kept a tutor for us sisters, so that when we married one day, we would have at least some confidence to stand on.”