Chapter 1

When Lu Zhi was young, he worked as a servant in my household.

Both his parents died because of my family.

How?

Well…

My father and my eldest brother drove them to their deaths.

I watched with my own eyes as Lu Zhi knelt in the snow, kowtowing and begging Father for enough money to bury his parents.

Father was miserly and coldhearted, especially with his workers. The Qing dynasty had only recently fallen, and the country was in chaos. If he could save a copper, he would.

Every day, bodies were carried out of our estate—workers who had frozen or starved to death. Still, there was never any shortage of people willing to work for us.

Father had endless tricks for withholding wages, and my eldest brother learned every one of them.

Lu Zhi’s parents worked under my brother for two months without receiving a single coin. When they came to demand their pay, Father accused them of theft, had them beaten, and threw them out.

That winter was bitterly cold.

Neither of them survived it.

Lu Zhi could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen. He knelt in the snow for three whole days.

When my brother took me out to buy candied hawthorn, Lu Zhi was kneeling there.

When we came back with the sweets, he was still kneeling there.

I sat on the stone steps and ate the entire skewer.

He was still kneeling there.

His young face was red with cold and his lips had turned purple. Each time he collapsed, he forced himself back onto his knees.

At last my brother came out and brought him inside. He would give Lu Zhi money for the burials, he said, but in exchange Lu Zhi had to work for our family without pay for three years.

Lu Zhi agreed.

I still remember him lying there that day, picking up the silver dollars my brother had tossed onto the floor one by one. His face held no expression at all.

Later, I asked him how anyone could arrange two burials with so little money.

“Poor people have poor people’s ways,” he said.

While Lu Zhi worked for us, my brother bullied him constantly. He beat Lu Zhi as if he were livestock, sometimes so viciously that it seemed he meant to kill him.

Once I asked my brother, doubtfully, whether he might actually beat Lu Zhi to death.

“Poor people’s lives are cheap,” he said. “They don’t die that easily.”

Lu Zhi had an endless list of chores every day: chopping firewood, washing clothes, carrying water, cooking, even bathing Third Concubine’s dog and cleaning up after it.

While he worked, I sat nearby and watched.

At first I found him amusing. My brother was always beating him, and he never made a sound.

Then I began to pity him. In the dead of winter, all he had was one thin, tattered jacket.

I stole one of my brother’s coats and gave it to him. Lu Zhi said it was dirty and refused to wear it.

Nothing could possibly be dirtier than that rag on your back, I thought. I tried to force the coat on him, but he stubbornly refused.

My brother caught us and beat him again.

I cried for ages that day. For several days afterward, I did not go to the back courtyard to see him.

When I finally returned, he pressed a skewer of candied hawthorn into my hand.

I was the youngest child in the family.

My mother was Father’s principal wife, and she had been well into her thirties when she gave birth to me. Father and my brother doted on me, calling me their little darling at every turn.

Then my brother fell in love. After that, he stopped calling me his darling. He called Li Yin his darling instead and told me I was to address her as Sister-in-law from then on.

My future sister-in-law was a student at a girls’ school. Her name was Li Yin, and she was as lovely and fresh as spring water.

Whenever she walked by in a blue qipao, I could not resist trailing behind and imitating her steps.

She would laugh, scoop me into her arms, and promise to buy me Western dresses and evening gowns when I grew up. Those, she said, were truly beautiful.

My brother spared no effort courting Li Yin.

Money flowed out of his hands in waves.

She often came to our house in bright clothes, her hair arranged in some pretty new style.

But I noticed that most of the time, her eyes were not on my brother.

When Lu Zhi entered, she watched him.

When Lu Zhi poured tea, she watched him.

When Lu Zhi left, her eyes followed him out.

Then one day I went to the back courtyard and found her in Lu Zhi’s arms beneath the wild pear tree.

That was when I understood. She did not love my brother. She loved Lu Zhi.

When my brother found out, he beat Lu Zhi half to death, demanding to know whether he had fallen for Li Yin.

I tried to stop him, but one careless shove sent me tumbling onto my backside.

Lu Zhi lay on the ground, covered in blood, and did not move for a long time.

I asked my brother if he was dead.

My brother kicked him out the door. “If you’re going to die, die somewhere farther away!”

Lu Zhi lay facedown on the ground, not even seeming to breathe. I crouched beside him and wept.

Only after my brother had gone did one of Lu Zhi’s fingers twitch. He told me not to cry.

He dragged himself back to the woodshed on his injured leg and lay there for days.

Every time I visited, the first thing I did was put a finger beneath his nose to see whether he was still breathing.

Li Yin came too, bringing medicine. Tears ran down her face as she tended his wounds.

She held him tightly and begged him to get well.

The more I watched, the more they resembled the star-crossed lovers in an opera, with my brother playing the villain who tore them apart.

I refused to speak to my brother for as many days as Lu Zhi remained bedridden.

My brother coaxed me every day and bought me delicious food and pretty clothes, but I ignored him.

Then one night I found him drinking alone. He got drunk and wept as he called Li Yin’s name. He seemed rather pitiful too, so I reluctantly forgave him.

As soon as Lu Zhi could walk again, my brother resumed tormenting him.

Once, in front of Li Yin, he ground Lu Zhi’s head beneath his shoe and boasted, “A creature like this is only fit to polish Young Master Song’s shoes.”

Li Yin rushed forward, shoved my brother away, and helped Lu Zhi to his feet. Then she threw herself into his arms, sobbing.

“Let’s leave, Lu Zhi. You never signed away your freedom. We can leave this place.”

Lu Zhi’s face remained cold. It was as though he had long ago become a corpse, stripped of feeling and sensation. That winter’s snow had frozen his body and heart solid, leaving him a puppet moved by other people’s strings.

After that, Li Yin stopped entering through the Song estate’s front gate. She came through the dog hole in the back wall instead.

Every time, she emerged filthy.

She and Lu Zhi met beneath the wild pear tree. More than once, I arrived just in time to see them embracing.

I would sit on the steps where I always watched Lu Zhi work, swinging my legs while the two of them whispered sweetly to each other.

Well, Li Yin whispered sweetly. Lu Zhi’s expression stayed cold, but she smiled more brightly than I had ever seen.

Far more brightly than she ever smiled with my brother.

Lu Zhi began preparing to escape.

He told me he would come back one day. He would return and take revenge on our family.

It was the first time I had ever seen light in his hollow, colorless eyes, even if that light was made entirely of hatred.

Unfortunately, I was too young then to understand what revenge meant.

I only knew that he was leaving, and it made me sad.

I had just learned to write with a brush. Father guided my hand as I practiced my own name within the phrase *anran wuyang*—safe and sound.

Song Anran. My given name was the *Anran* in “safe and sound.”

I wrote out the four characters and gave them to Lu Zhi, though they came out crooked and clumsy.

He accepted them.

Before he left, he turned back and hugged me.

My arms were so short then that I could not even reach around him.

Twelve years passed in the blink of an eye.

The boy who once dared not lift his head had become Military Governor Lu, a man everyone else had to look up to.

Li Yin had become my brother’s lawful wife and my true sister-in-law.

And I had grown into a young woman who wore Western dresses.

Lu Zhi existed only in memories from when I was four or five. Within a year or two of his departure, I had nearly forgotten him.

Later, whenever someone mentioned him, I had to think for quite some time before I remembered who he was.

Only Sister-in-law would sometimes stare into the distance when the wild pear tree blossomed in the back courtyard.

When Father proposed marrying me to Lu Zhi, I fell apart.

At last, I understood what Lu Zhi had meant by revenge.

In the three months since his arrival in Shanghai, he had already carved away half of the Song family’s holdings.

Several major docks and factories were gone.

With his chairmanship of the Chamber of Commerce in danger, Father devised a new method of negotiation: a marriage alliance.

He traded me for the return of one large dock.

I cried. I raged.

It made no difference.

The Song family had long been gilded splendor on the outside and rot within.

Xu Junchu said our only choice was to elope.

I had been raised in luxury and adored all my life. I might lose my temper now and then, but I had never done anything truly improper.

I had never even skipped a class, let alone run away with a man.

“If we don’t elope, you’ll have to marry Lu Zhi. Is that what you want?”

Of course it was not.

But how did one elope? What should we bring? Which road would we take? Where would we go?

What would happen afterward? What would become of my parents? How would Lu Zhi retaliate against the Song family?

I agonized over it until, in the end, I tearfully told Xu Junchu to forget it.

For the first time, he lost his temper with me. His eyes were red as he shouted, “Song Anran! Are you playing with me?”

His hands gripped my shoulders, but his head sagged helplessly and his voice broke.

“Come with me. Please… I’m begging you.”

When Xu Junchu first transferred to our school, crowds gathered outside our classroom just to look at him.

He was handsome and tall, and his family was wealthy. His father was a diplomat and his mother taught piano.

He became every girl’s dream in an instant.

He sat behind me and complained daily that the girls at our school were loud and annoying.

I told him to stop making every basket when he played ball, to leave his Zhongshan suit sloppily buttoned, to quit slicking his hair so neatly, to take off that Western watch, and to stop smiling whenever he spoke to people.

Then no one would bother him anymore.

He studied me for a long moment. “Song Anran, do you really find me that objectionable?”

It was not that I found him objectionable. I disliked him a little.

Or perhaps I envied him.

He had studied abroad, spoke foreign languages, played the piano, and excelled in every subject. He had large eyes, a straight nose, and lips that always looked red and healthy.

There was simply no flaw to find.

It seemed only natural that I would fall for him.

And I could not quite accept that.

I had always believed that anyone fortunate enough to earn the favor of the young mistress of the Song family would come running eagerly.

But this was Xu Junchu.

He would never come running eagerly to me, and I certainly would not go running eagerly to him.

We shopped together, ate steaks at restaurants, and attended banquets side by side. When he visited my home, my parents treated him like a son-in-law. When I visited his, his parents treated me even more warmly than they treated him.

He gave me a bracelet on my birthday. I gave him a tie on his.

To everyone else, we were a couple.

In truth, we were not.

Whenever Father mentioned Xu Junchu to someone, his whole face lit up with pride.

Xu Junchu was indeed remarkable.

Several of his translations had already been published, and his articles often appeared in the newspapers. He had even represented the school in a public address under Mr. Watson’s guidance.

It never felt fair.

He was so much better than me at everything.

“Stop sulking, Young Miss. I’ll buy you dinner.”

“If I’d studied abroad too, and learned piano and violin from childhood, I would be better than you.”

He ruffled my hair, grinning shamelessly even as he humored me. “Mm-hmm. I think so too.”

That winter, I knitted Xu Junchu a scarf and planned to give it to him.

Then he accepted Xue Jiajia’s scarf.

I went home and cut mine to pieces.

Li Yin asked whether I had not planned to confess my feelings.

“Confess? He can dream!”

I decided I had given my heart to the wrong man. Love in a time of war was doomed to tragedy.

My first romance was over.

Li Yin laughed at me and said I did not understand what love was.

I cited example after example to prove her wrong: Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu…

In the end, she merely nodded and said with great sincerity, “You certainly read a great many books.”

She was looking at me, yet her gaze always seemed fixed on some faraway place I could not see.

Li Yin told me love was longing. Love was worry, impulse, pain, and indecision.

There was no single formula for it. Everyone loved differently.

I understood every word she said, but together they made no sense. The conversation always ended with, “You’re still too young.”

What I heard most often was, “You’re too young. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

It was also the sentence I hated most.

By the time I truly understood, would it not already be too late?