Chapter 2
It was late when we reached home. Chu Lian was attending Xu Zhen at dinner.
She was his concubine, a girl from a respectable family with a sweet tongue and a knack for pleasing people. Everyone in the Xu household adored her.
The moment my sister-in-law Xu Wan entered the reception hall, she went over, linked arms with Chu Lian, and began complaining about me in front of everyone.
Such disregard for rank would never have been tolerated in a great household. But the Xus had been farmers before Xu Zhen’s success lifted them all, and their habits were hard to change.
Xu Zhen understood the rules of propriety perfectly well. Yet he not only failed to restrain his family; he encouraged them to bully me.
When Xu Wan mentioned my visit to a privy outside the house, he frowned. “Disgraceful.”
Xu Wan was about to say more, but Chu Lian stopped her. “Your brother is still eating.”
“Besides,” she said, smiling at me, “everyone has to answer nature’s call.”
I made no reply and excused myself to change.
“Ungrateful wretch,” Xu Wan cursed behind me.
I dug my nails into my palms. What was so kind about Chu Lian?
At the end of the corridor, a wet nurse approached carrying three-year-old Xu Chengxuan.
He greeted me in his little boy’s voice. I turned my face away and hurried past.
Chu Lian had murdered my daughter. Why should her son get to live unharmed?
In the second year of my marriage to Xu Zhen, I had given birth to a daughter. We called her Suisui.
Suisui was unlike anyone else.
She knew nothing of bullying the weak or flattering the powerful.
Her first word was “Mama.”
With gaps still showing between her teeth, she was too young to know what was valuable. She only knew that everything she got should be given to Mama.
Flowers, grass—she brought me them all. When she caught a butterfly, she would release it beside me and clap her hands, telling me how pretty I was.
With Suisui, I could disregard my husband’s coldness, my mother-in-law’s torments, and my sister-in-law’s insults.
But the lower you bow your head, the more readily someone plants a foot on it.
I took my eyes off Suisui for a moment, and something happened to her.
She died horribly.
Her body was hauled from the well in a side courtyard, both hands broken, her whole body swollen from the water.
The maids and older serving women all insisted she had been chasing a butterfly and fallen in.
But those hands had plainly been broken by blows.
Xu Zhen knew there would be no easy end to the matter if the authorities became involved. He threw a white cloth over Suisui and ordered her burial.
When I refused, he had the serving women hold me down and drag me back to my room.
On the way, where no one else could see, Chu Lian gave me a taunting smile.
“What are you smiling at?”
I all but screamed it.
Chu Lian flinched in terror, tears clinging to her lashes. “Madam… I… I wasn’t smiling…”
Xu Zhen shielded her behind him and shouted at the servants. “Drag that madwoman away!”
They covered my mouth as they dragged me. Every wail was forced back down my throat, and no one could hear me at all.