Chapter 1

# Chapter 1

Concubine Su wore a pale green jacket, her steps quick and light as she led me through the estate.

She took me first to meet the Old Madam and the Lady of the House. Her back remained bent low, and when she spoke, there was a nervous stiffness in her voice. She explained that my mother and she had once belonged to the same opera troupe. They had gone their separate ways across the country and had not seen each other for years. None of them had expected my mother to die and leave her orphaned child in the care of an old sister from those distant days.

The Old Madam sat in a rosewood chair, slowly turning a string of prayer beads through her fingers. Her gaze passed over my ragged clothes and the body beneath them, thin as a reed, then paused.

“Poor little thing.”

The Lady’s voice was gentle. “Since an old friend entrusted her to you, she is half a daughter to you already. She can stay in the residence and keep you company. Let her settle here without fear.”

Both the Lady and the Old Madam were kindhearted.

I dropped to my knees and kowtowed. When I raised my head, I caught Concubine Su quietly breathing a sigh of relief.

Her rooms were not large. A flowering crabapple grew outside the window, and several other concubines lived in the same courtyard. Her treatment in the household was decent enough: she never lacked food or clothing. Her only regret, perhaps, was that she had neither son nor daughter to rely on.

Once she had brought me inside and shut the door, she asked urgently, “How did your mother die?”

I smoothed my wrinkled skirt and answered as evenly as if I were speaking about a stranger. “She killed herself.”

After failing the imperial examinations again and again, my father had taken to gambling and run up a mountain of debt. Mother washed clothes and embroidered handkerchiefs for other people. She wore herself down for three years before she finally paid it all off. The moment the burden was gone, the will that had kept her upright left her too. Her health collapsed completely.

Concubine Su spat hard when she heard.

“That fool! If I’d known this was what she was choosing, she should have come into the Yu household with me. At least she’d have worn silk and gold instead of bleeding herself dry over a few miserable taels of silver!”

Her eyes reddened.

She and my mother had come from the same opera troupe. Both had been peasant daughters bought by the troupe master, and both had taken his surname, Su. My mother was called Su Wuniang; Concubine Su had been Su Liuniang. There were other girls numbered above and below them. They had all stumbled into womanhood beneath the troupe master’s cane, and hardship had made them as close as true sisters.

Later, disaster befell the troupe. My mother and Concubine Su barely escaped with their lives. With no one else to depend on, they played music and sang in roadside teahouses to survive.

Concubine Su was beautiful. When Master Yu encountered her during his travels, he wanted to bring her back to the capital as a concubine. She urged my mother to come with her. The capital was full of wealthy households; whichever one my mother entered, she would at least be fed and clothed. And if no such opportunity came, they could still perform for a living and earn more than they ever had in a small town.

But my mother refused.

By then she had already fallen in love with my scholar father. She took out every coin she had saved over the years, determined to support him through the examinations.

Concubine Su said that when he left to sit the exam, she had accompanied my mother to see him off. On their way back, she warned her that scholars were often the most faithless of men and begged her to keep her wits about her. My mother would not listen. She even became angry.

“If she’d listened to even half a sentence I said, she wouldn’t have died so young!” Concubine Su scoffed, though her voice caught in her throat.

I smiled faintly. My mother truly had been blind where he was concerned.

My scholar father possessed scarcely a shred of scholarly talent. After several failures, he put away his books in humiliation and reached instead for the wine jar and the dice.

The scholar became a beast.

My mother never had the chance to regret him.

“Enough of that.” Concubine Su sighed. “Your mother and I grew up together. She was two years older and always looked after me. From now on, you’ll live here with me. I may not be able to give you riches and honor, but you’ll never go hungry or cold, so long as you learn the rules-”

I had already darted into her inner room. I lifted a pipa from its case and asked if she could teach me to play.

It had been covered with a thick velvet cloth and looked as though no one had touched it for years. Somehow, however, I had spotted it at once and dragged it out.

“Mother said that when the two of you performed in teahouses, you played while she sang the little songs. She said your pipa was so beautiful it could make a person’s very bones melt.”

“What nonsense did Su Wuniang tell a child?” Concubine Su cried, snatching the instrument from my hands.

She said such music was too vulgar for a great household and told me never to think of it again.

I did not understand. She had caught Master Yu’s attention with that very pipa. Why did she now consider it shameful?

But Concubine Su had already put the instrument away, and she forbade me from touching it again.