Chapter 2
If I accompanied the young miss into her husband’s household, I would most likely become a bedchamber maid.
If I did not follow her when she married, then I would ask that a match be found for me.
Master Cen sighed. “If you were a man, there would be a place in this vast world for all you could accomplish.”
As he spoke, I was sorting through ten years of astronomical charts. I paid little attention to his words; one record had caught my eye because it seemed unusually wrong.
“Could this entry be mistaken?” I asked.
“Perhaps. But to prove it, you would have to wait another ten years, twenty years, or even longer.”
“Mingyue, how many times have I told you? You cannot put heavy things on this kind of fabric. It will crease.” The dress our young miss planned to wear to the next day’s flower banquet had been crushed under something, and the wrinkles made my head ache.
Before Mingyue could answer, our young miss rushed to defend her. “Oh, enough. I can simply wear something else!”
She had always protected Mingyue because she was younger. Every attempt I made to discipline my own sister ended the same way—nowhere.
“Young Miss, you cannot keep doing this. One day she will have to stand on her own,” I said with a sigh.
“One day is one day. Today is today.” Our young miss always had a way of twisting an argument to suit herself.
Mingyue looked at me timidly after her mistake, standing to the side with no idea where to put her hands. “I’ll be more careful…”
I was about to say more when the young miss shoved me toward her desk. “That is the end of it. Come help me decide how to answer all these letters.”
“Young Miss, you must reject your own suitors. You cannot always make me write for you!” Before I had cleaned up one mess, she had thrown another vexing task at me.
The Feng family’s daughter had come of age, a peerless beauty to rival the goddess of the Luo River.
Although our young miss had long been betrothed, her admirers never diminished. The letters that arrived each day outnumbered the pear blossoms knocked into the courtyard by a sudden storm.
Those men were delighted even when all they received was a rejection. If they discovered that the replies they treasured had been written by a maid like me, they would probably cough up blood from outrage.
The most pitiful of them all, I thought, was our young miss’s fiancé.
Young General Shen had been sent to the army camp as a boy. Just as he reached the age when romance first stirs, he received a portrait of his betrothed and began writing every month to nurture their attachment.
Little did he know that I answered every love letter. With a blank face, I invented ornate phrases and poured out the sort of maidenly longing that exists only when one has no real sorrows to speak of.
Over the years, our young miss rejoiced that such trivialities did not trouble her, Mingyue delighted in the amusing stories in his letters, and I gladly escaped physical chores by doing the writing. Only foolish Young General Shen misplaced the pure heart of an innocent youth.
Poor Young General Shen, toyed with in the palms of three women.
Still, a person’s writing reveals something of their character. From his letters, I believed him upright and honest. Our young miss would surely live well if she married him.
Now and then, I even put in a good word for him.
The young miss always teased me. “If he is so wonderful, why don’t you marry him?”
“Young Miss is forever making such jokes. How could a household slave marry into a great clan? I would not even qualify to be his concubine.” My solemn reply always bored her.
Mingyue said I had been born missing whatever part of a woman’s heart understood romance. She wondered whether she would ever live to see me fall in love.
And so I continued answering Young General Shen’s letters on time. Whenever I read his accounts of the frontier’s scenery and strange sights, yearning stirred within me.