Chapter 4
Actually, I understood without his saying a word.
Confucian loyalty, filial duty, and propriety had soaked into his very bones. He was terrified of his mother.
Even when her control suffocated him, he dared not resent her.
To resent her would be unfilial.
So I became the object onto which he displaced his hatred.
But even that was self-deception. In the end, he had been driven mad.
After taking first place in the metropolitan examination, he had tried to punish his mother by burning himself alive, to make her regret what she had done and admit her fault.
He had imagined the marchioness would weep bitterly and confess that she had been wrong to push him so hard all those years.
How childish. How pitiful.
Faced with my merciless analysis, he had no defense. That was exactly what he had thought.
I sighed.
“Is it worth trading your life for your mother’s remorse?”
“Besides, after you died, she wasn’t sorry.”
“She didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. She decided I must have used some trick to bewitch you.”
“She kept imagining that if you’d lived, you might have come first in the palace examination, entered the Grand Secretariat, become chief minister—what a glorious future you could have had…”
The sound of breaking porcelain cut me off.
Liang Yanchun stumbled back in terror, shaking his head.
“I don’t want the examinations! I don’t want to come first!”
“I don’t want to spend every day reading policy essays and writing compositions without end!”
“I don’t! I don’t want to live it all again!”
“A fire striker! Where’s a fire striker?”
He began wildly trying to kill himself again.
“Go ahead, my lord. Kill yourself once more. Everyone at Cloudrest Study will be buried with you—a dozen lives or more. Are you willing to bear that?”
“And even if you are, how do you know you won’t be reborn yet again?”
He stopped rummaging through chests and cupboards and looked at me in despair.
“Am I not even allowed to die?”
“Must I be a puppet for someone else to control all my life?”
Ignoring his desperate cries, I calmly began speaking of my own seemingly unrelated past.
“Before I came here to serve you, my lord, my brother almost pledged me as a wife to Groom Li in the outer courtyard.”
“You read only the sages’ books, so I’m sure you don’t know what sort of man he is. He had bought three women under such arrangements. When none bore him a child, he beat every one of them to death.”
“My brother owed a gambling house fifteen taels of silver. He wanted to pledge me to Groom Li too, and make me his fourth dead wife.”
“I persuaded Mother to negotiate with him for a higher price to buy myself time. Meanwhile, I worked out when the marchioness went to Chengjiao Temple each month to pray for you. I broke the carriage step beforehand, then knelt down at just the right moment to let her use my back to climb in.”
“She saw how obedient and attentive I was and transferred me to her courtyard. Only later did I get the chance to serve you.”
“On the day you passed the examination, she promised to make me your concubine. When I went back to Mother’s room, she treated me almost like a mistress. A woman who’d never spoken a kind word to me was suddenly trying to please me, making longevity noodles and bringing them to me with both hands.”
“And my brother, who used to beat and curse me and had almost pawned me off like an object—if I told him to stand, he wouldn’t dare sit. If I called him a worthless bastard, he had to smile and agree.”
Liang Yanchun’s gaze gradually steadied.
I knew he understood.
Smiling, I moved a little closer and lowered my voice, making it coaxing.
“So you see, there’s only one way to escape someone else’s control.”
“Climb. Climb higher than the people who rule you, until you have more power than they do.”
“Think about it. Once you’ve earned your degree and become the marquess in your own right, won’t everything be for you to decide?”
“As for the marchioness, she’s only a woman confined to the inner household. Keep her in comfort and observe the outward forms of filial duty. That’s enough.”
“There’s no need to throw your entire life away in despair.”
“Why not try again, my lord? Take first place in the palace examination. Find out what power tastes like. What freedom feels like.”
“I’ll help you.”
“As long as… once you’ve got what you want, you’ll grant me one request.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t ask for anything unreasonable.”
I held out my hand.
He hesitated for a long time.
In the end, he caught my wrist hard, as though clutching his last chance of survival.
“All right.”