Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The day Nanny Tao came to fetch me, I was loosening the soil out in the fields. Laughing and crying all at once, Mother called to me, “Baoxi, hurry back. Your good days are finally here.”
Baoxi was my mother’s simple wish as a country woman. She hoped I would be treasured all my life and live joyfully. I heard she had even spent several copper coins back then to have a scholar in town choose the name for me.
Nanny Tao grabbed my hands and cried for a good while too. She told me how difficult it had been for the Liu Family to find me all these years, how some wicked servant had deliberately abandoned me out of revenge, and how my birth mother had missed me so much that she cried herself blind.
But I thought her tears seemed a little fake. Liu Manor also sounded awfully far away, and I didn’t really want to go. It had taken me so long to grow up and gain enough strength to help out, and I hadn’t even repaid Mother for raising me yet. How could I just leave?
But Mother smacked me on the back. “Repay me? What repayment? Did I raise you for that? A life of gold and silver is waiting for you, and you’re not going? Did I raise you into a fool?”
She stroked the calluses on my hands. “Silly girl, rich families don’t worry about food or clothes. You won’t have to work the fields or do laundry, and you won’t even have to pick up your own food at meals. From now on, don’t call me Mother anymore. Don’t upset your family there. Just… just call me Aunt Jiang.”
See? She treated me so well. No wonder I had never realized before that day that I had been picked up and raised.
And so, for the sake of her wish that I live a better life, I left Lianshui Village, the place where I had grown up, and went to the capital, which was so far away it felt endless.
Only after I arrived did I learn that my birth mother had passed away long ago. Now there was a troublesome marriage arrangement in the manor. The step-madam couldn’t bear to part with her own daughter, but the family needed someone for the alliance, so she had anxiously had me found and brought back.
It was an especially cold winter. Liu Manor opened only a side gate for me. Several old maidservants stood in front of it, pointing at my luggage, firmly refusing to let me bring my old clothes into the manor.
“Eldest Miss, forgive me for saying this, but what exactly have you packed in that bundle? If we really let you carry these things into the manor today, what will become of our madam’s reputation? Won’t outsiders say she mistreats her stepdaughter and makes you wear these ragged things?”
Those clothes, shoes, and socks had been rushed out by Mother over several sleepless days and nights. She had bought the best fabric in town and spent all the dowry savings she had put aside for me to afford it. They were not rags.
They could insult me, but they could not insult what my mother had given me. I rolled my wrists, ready to go up and scratch their faces bloody. In the countryside where we came from, if you dragged someone’s mother into it, a beating was getting off lightly.
But before I could stretch out my hands, a long leg kicked them far away, and a voice snapped, “Where did these insolent slaves come from? Since when do you get to run your mouths about my future wife?”
That was the first time I met Shen Sui’an. He was tall, strongly built, and had a handsome face.
It was only much later that I learned people in the capital were very strange. They thought what Shen Sui’an had done just then was reckless, ill-bred, and unfit for polite society. But where I came from, that was called protecting your woman, an exceedingly rare fine quality in a man looking for a wife.
After kicking them away, he glanced at me. “So you’re the wife I’m marrying next month? My mother told me to come give you some nerve. You’re way too thin. Just wait. Once you’re through my door, I’ll take you to eat all kinds of good food. I guarantee I’ll fatten you up until you’re fair and plump.”
Mm. He was even willing to take responsibility for fattening me up. Now I wanted to marry him even more.