Chapter 5
Chuntao later summed it up neatly: “Second Miss Xu certainly knows how to make trouble.”
During one short banquet, she found fault with me more than ten times in rapid succession.
Snide remarks and petty criticism were only the beginning.
In front of everyone, she announced that she had heard His Highness and I were brought together by music. As it happened, she had brought a superb zither and invited me to entertain the guests.
Rumors had already spread that Prince Chen had taken a country woman as his concubine.
Everyone present was well informed. They all knew that apart from inventing a few rustic lyrics and singing them, I understood nothing about music.
They waited eagerly for me to make a fool of myself.
Unfortunately for them, I was not amusing at all.
I stood and sang a verse of the Purple Bamboo Song.
Through its lyrics, I explained that what His Highness truly loved was a rural Suzhou melody farmers sang to ease their weariness.
He had toured Pingjiang by imperial command and witnessed the lives of ordinary people.
He kept me at his side as a constant reminder never to forget them.
When the song ended, no one was laughing.
Lord Zhang, who had bought me, nodded vigorously to the men beside him. “Yes, yes! Exactly! That is precisely it!”
Prince Chen had looked somewhat displeased before. Now he was delighted.
His reputation must have suffered since he took me in. In an instant, I restored all of it.
A frivolous affair had acquired a noble purpose.
Whether the guests believed it or not, they could only flatter him with solemn respect, praising him as the realm’s model prince and my song as pure and transcendent.
Nor did he need to fear an imperial rebuke any longer. If someone reported him to His Majesty, he could offer the same explanation.
It was dignified, righteous, and beyond criticism.
From the heated glances he sent me, he seemed to love me more than ever.
Had we not been in public, Heaven knew how far his madness might have gone.
My attention, however, remained on Xu Hui, who had slipped away unnoticed.
After so many defeats, she would not let the matter rest.
I sent Chuntao to investigate. When she failed to return for a long time, I grew concerned.
While His Highness composed poems among the flowers with several scholars of the Hanlin Academy, I left the banquet too.
Passing through the second moon gate, I caught an unfamiliar fragrance.
It struck violently, then vanished.
I might have dismissed it as imagination if heat had not begun spreading through my body with every step.
But I knew better.
I had been poisoned.
And the poison demanded a man as its antidote.
The garden was full of guests. I could not turn back now. I slipped into a nearby grotto in the rockery.
I held out until my thoughts began to blur, then collapsed into a man’s arms.
Deep within the cave, someone had covered a broad stone with peony petals, turning it into a natural bed.
I cared for nothing. Clinging to the man, I tore open his collar and sought relief with desperate hands.
His voice was low. “Greedy little cat. Such impatience.”
Before he finished, I bit down on his throat.
He grunted in pain but did not grow angry. He tore my silk dress open and gave me everything I demanded.
We rose and fell in that sea of flowers, lost to heaven and earth.
By the time my senses returned, voices clamored outside the cave.
Someone shouted that a man and woman had been seen sneaking into the rockery to commit adultery, defiling the prince’s grounds without the slightest shame.
The crowd loudly agreed that the vile pair must be dragged out and paraded through the streets as a warning.
I slowly opened my eyes, brushed sweat from my temple, smiled faintly at the man before me, and struggled to dress.
He had been holding me with great satisfaction, even pinning down my hands in hopes of beginning again.
At the interruption, his brows drew sharply together. He threw on his outer robe and stormed out first.
“Who has come to catch adulterers?” he demanded. “And whose adultery do you mean?”
The guests, ready moments ago to rush inside, stared at him and retreated behind Xu Hui, who had raised the alarm.
In speechless unison, they looked toward the sky.
When I emerged, Xu Hui was kneeling rigidly on the ground, her face ashen and her eyes wide.
She knocked her head against the stones and babbled that a maid had told her what happened. Afraid that someone truly was fornicating in the rear garden and staining His Highness’s reputation, she had brought people to investigate.
“I never imagined… I never…”
She could say no more. She bowed to the ground, trembling violently.
No one remained behind her.
Only Zhang Han stepped from the shadows and asked softly, “His Highness drank some wine and favored his own concubine inside his own residence. What is wrong with that?”
Xu Hui raised her eyes to the now-presentable Lord Zhang. Only despair and terror remained in them.
She had planned meticulously and arrived certain of success. Never in her dreams had she expected the man in the grotto with me to be someone other than Zhang Han, whom she had poisoned too.
It was Prince Chen, Li Jinxuan.
Her chance to teach me a lesson was gone. So was her dream of entering the residence as secondary consort.
The princess consort, who had watched everything from the shadows, had no use for such an inept chess piece.
Xu Hui had failed to harm me and to implicate Zhang Han, the man who had placed a woman in Prince Chen’s bed.
Instead, she had deepened the prince’s obsession with me.
That same night, he ordered craftsmen to find a piece of Taihu stone large and whole enough for his purpose.
He wanted another rockery built in my Purple Bamboo Court, complete with a winding cave, so that our old dream could be revisited again and again.
Out of respect for Xu Hui’s father, His Highness pursued the matter no further. He merely barred her forever from his gates.
Even so, her future was destroyed.
The capital was the realm’s greatest marketplace for rank and advantage. No respectable son would marry a woman who had angered Prince Chen.
Chuntao later recalled that someone had knocked her unconscious and left her in a pavilion. Through the haze, she heard one person say to another, “We have taken an enormous risk. You must succeed in one strike, or never come before me again.”
The other boasted that both eyesores would be eliminated in a single night.
Few people considered both Lord Zhang and me eyesores.
Prince Chen’s consort was one.
I would continue to respect her nonetheless.
She was useful.
Chuntao could not understand. “Madam, how did you turn Lord Zhang into Prince Chen?”