chapter 1
“My qin is meant for nobles and high officials. Common rabble like you are not worthy of hearing refined music!”
The patron who had requested a performance slammed the table and shot to his feet. Pointing at my elder sister’s nose, he roared, “You’re already in a brothel, yet you still dare put on airs with me?”
Madam Qin, the brothel madam, hurried over to placate him. “She is a beauty we only just bought. She used to be the daughter of an official, so she still has quite a temper. Please calm yourself, sir. I will make her play at once.”
She offered my sister a graceful way out. “Ye Qingruo, isn’t High Mountains and Flowing Water the piece you play best? Hurry and perform it for our guest.”
“Only an imperial prince deserves to hear me play High Mountains and Flowing Water. What would ordinary men like you know of refined music?”
My sister stubbornly hugged the qin to her chest. “Even if I must sell my art, I will do it with dignity!”
“Then I’ll teach you what dignity means!”
The man was no great figure, but from the look of him he traveled the jianghu and had a little money. After being humiliated again and again by a brothel girl, he flew into a rage and charged onto the stage.
My sister stumbled backward in fright. She cast a pleading look at me where I waited in the wings and summoned me as if I were still her maidservant. “Sister!”
I did not move. I watched coldly, a faint smile at the corner of my lips.
My name was Ye Zhengzheng, and I was Ye Qingruo’s younger half-sister, born to a concubine.
One month ago, we had both been young ladies of the Ye household. Our father, Ye Hong, had held the third-rank post of grain transport commissioner.
Back then, my sister’s only daily concern was deciding whom to marry: should she enter the palace as the emperor’s favored consort, or the Eastern Palace as the Crown Princess?
“His Majesty praised my talent the other day, so he clearly has feelings for me, but he is a little old.”
“His Highness the Crown Prince is still young and strong.”
She hid her lovestruck face behind a handkerchief. “Oh, but the Crown Prince and I are practically brothers. How could I become his Crown Princess?”
“What a difficult choice!”
Before long, she no longer had to choose.
Father lost a struggle at court and was implicated in a grain-transport embezzlement case. The Ye estate was confiscated overnight.
The emperor who supposedly had feelings for her issued the decree, and the Crown Prince she called her dear brother led the troops who came to seize our home.
“All men of the Ye family are sentenced to exile. Every woman is to be sold into servitude!”
Mistresses and maids alike were herded together like ducks. Unable to bear being lumped in with servants, my sister fought her way out of the crowd and rushed toward the Crown Prince.
“Your Highness, it is Qingruo! You once praised my qin playing!”
The guards of the Eastern Palace stopped her before she could get anywhere near him. The Crown Prince did not spare his so-called brother a glance, much less honor their imaginary bond. His men bundled her away to be sold with the rest of us.
That was how my sister and I ended up at the Red Pavilion, the largest house of pleasure in the imperial capital.
The Red Pavilion had a strict hierarchy. The first floor drew every sort of common patron, wealthy merchants and celebrated scholars sat on the second, and private rooms on the third were reserved for nobles and high officials.
On the first day my sister was to play, she saw that the second and third floors were nearly empty while the first was packed. She could not stomach it. After all, she had once been the eldest young lady of the Ye family, with dignitaries and noblemen begging for a single glance.
She had imagined that even in disgrace she was merely granting those men the privilege of rescuing her. Surely the second and third floors would be filled with wealthy, powerful admirers who had come for her.
Instead, there was no one.
There were only the first-floor patrons, the inferiors she believed unworthy of hearing her play.
She cherished her dignity above all else, so she quarreled with the man who had requested her. When he charged forward to teach her a lesson, no one intervened. Such scenes were common at the Red Pavilion, and most people merely jeered and watched for amusement.
In my previous life, I alone had rushed forward and shielded my sister and her qin. Before Father was exiled, he had instructed us to support one another.
I desperately held the man back and told her to run, only to turn and see her fleeing with her qin in her arms. She had not cared whether I lived or died.
The man’s rage fell entirely upon me.
He tore my clothes and violated me before the crowd.
I would never forget the excited shrieks from those men on the first floor, Madam Qin’s grin stretching almost to her ears, or my sister hiding in the shadows and secretly watching my humiliation.
I lost my virginity.
In a place like the Red Pavilion, once a girl had been defiled, she could never again sell only her art.
My sister, meanwhile, was praised after that night as the Red Pavilion’s purest and proudest woman of talent, a beauty unafraid of power.
By then, the scandal surrounding the fall of the Ye family had begun to fade. Wealthy merchants and prominent men soon came expressly to see this talented young lady who had fallen from a noble house into a brothel yet remained, in their words, as aloof as a chrysanthemum and untouched by the world.
The second and third floors filled up, and my sister finally deigned to play her exalted qin.
Many men also lusted after her. Whenever one did, she would say, “I sell my art, not my body. If you truly cannot contain yourself, go find my younger half-sister.”
“She has none of my integrity. She can hardly wait for men to request her.”
Thus I became the tool with which the Red Pavilion’s celebrated prodigy fended off her patrons, while she became its foremost art courtesan.
That reputation eventually attracted Zhou Rongshan, one of the capital’s wealthiest merchants.
One evening, he requested her alone in a private room and paid Madam Qin one hundred taels of gold, instructing that my sister bathe before coming to perform. The implication could not have been clearer.
This time, however, my sister prepared with delight. That night, the whole Red Pavilion could hear the seductive sounds of her throwing herself at Zhou Rongshan.
“Aloof as a chrysanthemum? Untouched by the world? She only wanted to climb into the bed of a rich and powerful man in one leap.”
“You were the one who suffered so she could have her name and fortune.”
Danfeng, the youngest girl in the Red Pavilion, looked at me. By then men of every sort had tormented me past the point of feeling. She tugged my outer robe up to cover the bruises on my shoulder and tried to comfort me.
“That merchant’s hundred taels of gold are a deposit toward redeeming your sister. It will not be long before she is free of this place.”
“You are sisters, and you have done so much for her. She will surely take you with her when she goes.”
I had been naive enough to believe the same.
Zhou Rongshan kept my sister to himself for a month. When the month was over, he formally redeemed her.
As she prepared to leave the Red Pavilion at his side, glowing with happiness, I caught her sleeve. “Sister, please take me with you.”
I had been tortured until I was barely whole, my dignity ground into the dirt. Afraid she would refuse, I dropped to my knees and kowtowed to her.
“Sister, I will die if I remain here.”
Everyone remembered that my sister had once been a noble young lady and considered a little pride and willfulness understandable. They forgot that I too had been a proper daughter of the Ye family. Even if my mother was a concubine, I had been taught modesty and decorum, and I treasured my chastity and reputation.
Was I somehow able to endure the humiliations she could not?
Did she alone care about dignity?
I had shielded her that first time because she was the only family I had left in the Red Pavilion, yet she had never once protected me in return.
Just this once, I begged her to remember that we were sisters and deliver me from that living hell.
My sister released Zhou Rongshan’s hand and personally helped me to my feet. Before everyone present, she promised gently, “Sister, once I find a respectable excuse, I will redeem you and take you out of here.”
I asked blankly, “How much longer must I wait?”
“A little longer,” she said. “This is the imperial capital. The men may enjoy tormenting you, but they would never dare kill you.”
“Wait until I find an opportunity to rescue you.”