Chapter 3

The next day, white mourning silk hung outside the Lin residence across the street.

Elder Lin, who had once helped shape the affairs of court, had died in his sleep.

His daughter-in-law’s cries carried the length of the street, bringing tears to those who heard them.

When the blind diviner on the corner heard the news, he frowned in puzzlement.

“Old Master Lin? He came to me for a reading only yesterday. I distinctly saw that his accumulated virtue was great, and that he had more than twenty years left to live.”

Then he took out his tortoise shell and cast another divination.

“So that is how it is. Such is Heaven’s will.”

He sighed, then, heedless of the people watching, began to sing the Rhapsody on a Virtuous Daughter-in-Law at the top of his voice.

“Among the gracious women of our age, my household holds a jewel. Her face gleams like a lustrous pearl, her spirit clear as autumn waters. With sweetgrass and angelica for her heart, she walks in gentleness and virtue. When first she wed and entered our home, she filled its halls with fragrance…”

I sat in the courtyard, eyes lowered over the forehead band I was embroidering for my mother-in-law, listening quietly to the funeral outside.

Mother-in-law went to the gate and looked out for a while. When she returned, she patted her chest, still shaken.

“Old Master Lin was perfectly well yesterday. I ran into him when I went to buy vegetables, and he even said you would bring your husband prosperity, that you were blessed by birth. Who could have imagined he would go to sleep and never wake up?”

My mother-in-law was a simple, honest countrywoman.

After Huo Cizhou prospered, he wanted to buy maids and servants for the household, but she refused.

They were all daughters of respectable families, she said. She could not bring herself to work them like beasts of burden.

She and Father-in-law were still young. Between them, they could take care of the work inside and outside the house; I need not concern myself with it. All she asked was that I look after my two children and do a little sewing, making clothes for them.

Huo Cizhou had always left his salary in my keeping too.

With such good-hearted in-laws, I had thought myself happy.

At least until last night.

I still could not believe that Huo Cizhou, who would warm my icy feet against his chest in winter, now wanted to pawn me without mercy because I occupied the position of wife that he meant for his beloved. He did not even care about the two children who carried his blood.

“Mother, before Cizhou married me, was there someone he loved?”

She paused.

“Zhi, why are you suddenly asking this?”

Her reaction told me at once. A trace of self-mockery passed through my eyes.

“So… there was.”

Mother-in-law did not conceal it.

“Yes.”

She looked at me and sighed.

“The year before you married into our family, he rescued a girl from the river. She’d lost her memory and didn’t know how to get home, so he hid her in a cave and looked after her for a month. I kept seeing him run off with bowls of food. It seemed strange, so I followed him one day and found out he’d hidden someone there. As it happened, I’d gone into town that morning to buy rice at the market and heard that a noble family’s daughter had gone missing. I secretly sent word that she was in that cave. That evening, they came and took her away. Cizhou was unhappy for a long time.”

She pressed a hand over mine, looking ashamed.

“I didn’t hide this from your family. Before the matchmaker arranged the marriage, I told your mother. She said she didn’t mind. Only then did we send the betrothal gifts.”

If that was how it had happened, it made sense.

After all, when Huo Cizhou came to ask for my hand, I was already an old maid of twenty, a year older than he was.

Mother had probably been afraid that I would keep finding fault with every suitor and stay at home forever, so she had kept it from me.

“Mother never told me.”

I sighed. I could no longer bring myself to go on with my embroidery.

Mother-in-law looked startled. She watched my face for a long time.

“Are you asking because Cizhou has done something to wrong you?”

When I did not answer, she understood at once, and her face cooled.

“If that’s so, your father-in-law and I will see that you’re divorced, then have that bastard struck from the clan register. The five of us can go back to Luoyang, find you a husband to marry into our household, and never bother with him again. The longer I stay in this capital, the more hollow I feel inside, as though something bad is going to happen.”

I lowered my eyes.

Huo Cizhou was a deputy general now.

No younger member of the Huo clan had achieved more than he had. How could they possibly strike him from the clan register?

For Mother-in-law to say all this…

I looked at the darkness in her eyes, and a suspicion began to form.

“Mother, aren’t you afraid that if Cizhou and I divorce, people will condemn him for abandoning the wife who shared his poverty, and damage his prospects?”

She smiled as though she did not care.

“He’d deserve it. All these years, when you were here looking after us, where was Cizhou? When my daughter Yunruo married, you even provided most of her dowry. I’ve long thought of you as my own daughter.”

I bowed my head and gave a little laugh.

I did not take her words to heart.

A little while later, though, she brought me a bowl of lotus-seed porridge.

“Here. Have some sweet soup to quench your thirst.”

“Thank you, Mother!”

I took the bowl. Looking at all those lotus seeds and white fungus, and the wisp of black vapor that would not disperse, I curled my lips slightly and held it beneath my nose for a careful sniff.

A trace of arsenic.

It would not kill at once, but given time, the poison would work its way into the bones. Then even an immortal could do nothing.

How many women had died by such insidious means in the inner quarters?

I raised my eyes to Mother-in-law.

She was watching me expectantly.

“Go on. Drink it while it’s hot!”

The corners of my lips lifted.

“Mother, did you accidentally mistake the rat poison for powdered sugar? Why does this smell of rat poison? I know the smell well. My family makes its living selling medicinal herbs, remember?”

Her face stiffened. Then she hastily snatched the bowl from my hands.

“Oh dear! You mustn’t drink that. Oh, this head of mine… I’m getting old, getting old…”

She hurriedly poured the lotus-seed and white-fungus soup into the flower bed.

“Oh dear! What a senile old fool I am. I nearly killed my daughter-in-law. Thank goodness… thank goodness…”

I dropped the half-finished forehead band into my basket and went to help her wash the bowl.

“Mother, thank goodness I have a good nose. Never mind if you’d drunk it yourself, but what if you’d fed it to Father or the children? You mustn’t make such foolish mistakes again.”

She looked sheepish.

“I won’t.”