Chapter 1
The good news: someone really had brought home the wrong baby.
The bad news: that baby was me!
I wasn’t my parents’ real daughter! I wasn’t my brother’s real sister!
I thought of all the ways I’d lorded it over them for the past thirteen years.
At night, even after my parents blew out their lamp, I’d charge into their room clutching my little quilt.
Father would be so angry he wanted to beat me, but one glare from Mother sent him swallowing his protests and going to sleep with my brother instead.
My brother scrimped and saved until he finally had ten copper coins. I stole them straightaway to buy sweets.
Mother sent me to school. I smashed a rich boy’s desk and drank the teacher’s health tonic.
In short,
as Mother put it,
there wasn’t enough of that green bamboo or whatever to write down all my crimes!
Mother had once raged, “Chen Guagua! If you weren’t my own flesh and blood, I’d have thrown you into the swill bucket and fed you to the dogs long ago!”
Listen to that! Ruthless, wasn’t she?
And now the nightmare was coming true!
No wonder Auntie Sun next door was always going “Pah, pah, pah!” to ward off unlucky words.
I gritted my teeth and pinched my thigh, hard.
Then I fell to my knees and knocked my forehead against the floor. “Mother! Brother! Please don’t send me away! I’ll work like an ox, like a horse! I’ll repay you for raising me in this life and the next!”
Mother pressed a hand to her forehead. She couldn’t bear to look at me.
Nanny Feng, who had come from the marquis’s household, had progressed from gaping in shock to watching in silence.
My brother coughed twice, nudged me with his foot, and gave me a frantic, twitching wink to get up.
I remembered the stories I’d heard.
An idea struck. I took his hand. “Brother, why don’t you keep me as your child bride?”
He stared at me in horror. “Have you lost your mind? Or have I?”
Mother couldn’t take it anymore!
She seized the feather duster and gave my backside several solid whacks!
Nanny Feng hurried over to shield me. “Mrs. Chen! This is our lord’s young cousin! How dare you treat her so!”
I shoved her. “Who are you to speak to my mother like that?”
Nanny Feng was a peculiar woman.
Before, she’d been coolly polite to me.
But after I shoved her, her eyes actually grew a little warmer.
Mother said I had another mother.
I said nothing.
She looked at me, struggling to speak, her eyes bright with tears.
Father hurried home and found the two of us staring at each other, one wide-eyed, the other wider-eyed still.
He panicked. “Guagua isn’t going anywhere!”
I wiped my tears and finished what Mother couldn’t bring herself to say.
“I have another mother, and you have another daughter. Is that it?”
If the babies had been switched,
there had to be a real daughter and a false one.
I was their false daughter. They had a real one somewhere else.
My brother scratched his head and walked in several circles.
Hands behind his back, frowning, he glanced at me a few times before forcing out, “What if I marry Guagua when we’re older?”
Father kicked him to the ground. “Go cool your head somewhere else!”
My brother got up, looking relieved.
Thirteen years ago, Mother had been returning to the capital after her father’s funeral.
Caught in a torrential downpour, she’d given birth to me in a ruined temple.
As it happened, the minister’s wife gave birth that very day too.
The other baby and I were wrapped in identical swaddling cloths.
The storm brought the ruined temple down.
In all the chaos, they took the wrong babies.
A year ago, Her Ladyship had died of illness, leaving her daughter to be raised in the marquis’s household.
Only then, through a chance occurrence, had the truth come to light.
Nanny Feng glanced at me. “The old madam intended to betroth Miss Shuyi to the heir. She sent their birth charts to the Temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas to have the match assessed. But the old abbot said the marriage was right—and the girl was wrong.”
Alarmed and uncertain, the old madam investigated carefully and discovered that a careless servant of Her Ladyship’s had taken the wrong baby.
I listened, utterly bewildered. “Heavens! Is this abbot really that good? Could he work out when I’m going to get rich?”
Nanny Feng couldn’t help smiling. “What would you consider rich, miss?”
Lost in a blissful dream, I made an outrageous demand. “Being able to spend two taels of silver a year would be wonderful! I could eat all the candied fruit from Chen’s, Granny Wang’s flaky pastries, and meat buns from under the bridge that I wanted!”
Nanny Feng immediately replied, “If you return to the marquis’s household, miss, you’ll receive five taels a month to spend as you please.”
Five taels!
My eyes grew bigger than a cow’s!
Mother ran an apothecary and earned two taels a month.
Father was a city patrol constable at the government office. He earned three.
As for my brother, he made a little money copying books and writing essays for people while he studied.
If I could earn five taels a month, wouldn’t that make me the boss of this family?
I turned very serious. “Nanny, I’ll take the job. Take me there at once.”
Mother looked as though her head ached. “Chen Guagua, have you understood a word? You’re going there to be someone’s child bride!”