Chapter 1

Chapter 1

When the servants came to take my daughter away, the heir’s wife, Xu Jingniang, held my icy hands in hers and looked at me with guilt in her eyes.

There was a family banquet at the estate that day, she explained. Old Madam Lu was in high spirits and had ordered her to bring the baby over for a look.

We both knew what that meant. Once my child crossed those gates, she would never be returned.

She was only three months old, plump and fair and sweet as new snow—the age when babies were at their most lovable.

To Old Madam Lu, I was filth beneath the earth. But the child I had borne carried the blood of the Yongchang Marquis’s family. She could not be allowed to remain tainted by the mud that was her mother.

The old madam had sent people to take her several times after her first month. Each time, Zheng Lanci had stopped them, pleading that the birth had nearly killed me and left me gravely weakened.

But today he had been summoned to the palace on official business. At last, his mother had got her wish.

Tears spilled down my face like bright drops of dew.

Xu Jingniang supported me with one arm and wiped them away with a lake-blue silk handkerchief embroidered with symbols of peace and prosperity.

“The family gathered today because Seventh Brother received an imperial appointment as vice director in the Ministry of Personnel’s Bureau of Evaluations,” she said. “Mother suddenly remembered the eldest young lady and insisted it could not be called a reunion without her. His Lordship did try to reason with her, but then His Majesty summoned him to the palace.”

Her voice was gentle, her face serene and lovely—the very image of a well-bred noblewoman.

“Miss Susu, please don’t grieve too deeply. Mother only said she wished to see the child. Even if…” She hesitated. “Even if the child stays with the mistress of the estate, she will never suffer. Her future will be limitless.”

The words were tactful, but I understood.

I was Liu Susu. My parents had died when I was young, and my relatives sold me to Madam Liu, who ran Swallows in Flight, the largest pleasure house in Yongning. At fifteen I became an arts courtesan, entertaining men without selling my body. At sixteen I rose to be the city’s most renowned beauty.

Zheng Lanci, heir to the Yongchang Marquis Estate, was a wealthy and uninhibited young lord. He paid a thousand pieces of gold for my first night, then took pity on my circumstances and bought my freedom. My low birth barred me from the estate, so he purchased a small two-courtyard house on Jing’an Lane, far from his family home, and installed me there.

He was no ordinary libertine ruled by beauty. He loved his wife dearly and visited me only two or three times a month. Nor was Xu Jingniang jealous. After the house was purchased, she never once came to make trouble for me.

I had thought life might continue quietly that way. I would scrimp and save, learn embroidery, and prepare for the day age stole my looks or Zheng Lanci no longer wished to keep me. Then I could still earn my bread instead of being left destitute.

But a year later, I found myself pregnant.

Zheng Lanci was delighted. I had long since left the pleasure quarter and lived modestly, never once overstepping the bounds he set. He never doubted the child’s parentage. In private, he even promised that once I had given birth, he would use the child to argue for my admission into the estate.

My thoughts, however, were nothing like those of other kept women.

I did not want to enter that household.

It was true that the estate could have sheltered me for life. Even if I could not be a concubine, I might become a bedchamber maid and never lack food or clothing. But a noble house was a sea without shore. With a birth as wretched as mine, I would spend my life curled in some forgotten corner of the women’s quarters, watching every face and begging for every breath. What did all that silk-draped splendor have to do with me?

I wanted to live as a person who could hold her head high.

The emperor was wise, the realm peaceful and prosperous, and women were not constrained as harshly as they once had been. I wanted to save a little money, master a trade, register a household in my own name, and go somewhere no one knew my past. There I would live a quiet life. If I met a good man who did not despise me, I would marry him. If I did not, I could still stand straight and support myself.

I could never tell Zheng Lanci those secret hopes. I pretended to be overjoyed while searching in private for a way to end the pregnancy. Yet no one from the estate bothered us, and the matrons and maids around me watched over me so carefully that I never found an opportunity.

After ten months and a labor of blinding agony, I gave birth to a plump baby girl.