Chapter 4
I followed Madam Ren and the chancellor into the main hall.
Ren Jinying was there as well.
The man standing opposite him must have been Xu Linghuai.
I had the feeling I had seen him somewhere before.
The refined young gentleman had been standing perfectly straight. When he saw the chancellor, he bent slightly at the waist.
He was exceedingly respectful.
Yet he had come to break off the engagement.
“Break it off?” The chancellor looked baffled.
Xu Linghuai answered with neither servility nor arrogance. “The marriage between me and your family arose from a betrothal made before birth by Madam Ren and my mother. The second daughter Madam Ren carried then was clearly not Suihuan, but all these years we were kept in the dark and believed she was. Now that the true second daughter has returned, my engagement to Suihuan is void.”
Madam Ren clasped my hand and drew me forward. “We have found Suixi, but she is already married. How could she marry into the Xu family now?”
“That is precisely why I have come to end the engagement,” Xu Linghuai said.
Ren Jinying gave a cold laugh. “Suihuan may not be our blood, but you have cast her aside with remarkable speed. Are you certain you haven’t already given your heart to someone else?”
Xu Linghuai was silent for a moment. “That has nothing to do with this.”
Before leaving, he glanced at me. His steps suddenly halted, and he studied my face. “You look familiar.”
His words confirmed my suspicion.
I raised a hand to demonstrate. “When you went hunting in the mountains, you injured a rabbit I kept.”
Xu Linghuai had mistaken it for a wild rabbit, when in fact it had escaped from my hutch.
He paid Zhao Zisong and me some silver in compensation.
He had been generous, and he possessed a handsome face unlike any I had seen among the villages and mountains, so I remembered him clearly.
“Are you and Brother Zhao doing well?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Madam Ren cut in. “Suixi’s husband—the second son-in-law of this house—is surnamed Li.”
Xu Linghuai froze. He looked at me, then lowered his gaze to my swollen belly and said nothing more.
After he left, the chancellor’s worried expression remained. “Suihuan is in love with that young man. Who knows what kind of scene she will make now?”
Ren Jinying said, “He has only ever felt brotherly affection for her. Suihuan was the only one who could not see it. Now he has finally found a pretext to escape the marriage.”
Madam Ren snorted. “Then let it end. The Xu family’s glory was dishonorably gained to begin with.”
I was puzzled.
They explained that all the favor the Xu family enjoyed had been bought by Xu Linghuai’s father selling his own daughter.
Years ago, when our court negotiated a truce with the Jinshui tribe, Jinshui demanded a princess in marriage.
The court could not bear to send a woman of imperial blood to suffer, so it planned to choose a daughter from an aristocratic family and grant her the title of princess.
At that moment, Xu Linghuai’s father stepped forward and offered up his eldest daughter—Xu Linghuai’s own sister.
From then on, his father’s career soared.