Chapter 4
Chapter 4
I withdrew the needle and lowered my eyes. “Princess, do you still feel any bloating or discomfort now?”
Princess Yongwu cautiously opened her eyes, which had been clenched shut from pain.
She touched her stomach, and her expression was no longer as twisted with agony.
Color had returned to her face. She could already support herself and sit up by clutching her belly.
She looked at me. “This female physician of yours does have some skill.”
I knelt obediently. “It is only that Your Highness is blessed with deep fortune. This servant’s medicine merely adds a little polish.”
The prince consort touched the princess’s belly. “Then is this pregnancy saved?”
“Although this acupuncture technique can treat the root cause, I will need to apply the needles once every seven days to nurse Your Highness’s weakened body back to strength. Once the princess recovers, the little heir inside will naturally remain safe as well.”
“This servant will come from the Imperial Medical Bureau every day.”
“How troublesome.”
“What is your name?”
“This servant is Ning Li.”
As expected, Princess Yongwu said, “Then stay in the princess’s manor and nurse me through the pregnancy. Physician Xu, you surely have no objection, do you?”
Physician Xu looked at me deeply before answering, “Everything should be for the princess and the little heir.”
“Wait.” The prince consort suddenly looked at me. “I think you look somewhat familiar.”
“Since you will be serving the princess up close every day, we naturally need to check your background carefully.”
He stared at my face and questioned me suspiciously. “Where are you from? What do your parents do? Do you have any brothers or sisters at home?”
“Prince Consort, this female physician lost both parents in childhood and has no relatives. She…” Physician Xu tried to answer for me, but the prince consort only gave him a sidelong glance.
“I was asking this female physician. Who asked you to speak?”
He sat down in a chair, pressed the top of my chin with his shoe, and lifted my face as if teasing a dog.
“I think I saw this face on a wanted notice.”
Physician Xu’s face went white.
I kept my chin slightly raised and looked him straight in the eye, steady as anything.
“Prince Consort is joking. Since this servant was able to enter the palace as a female physician, my background must be clean. How could I possibly appear on a wanted notice?”
The prince consort was suspicious by nature. Back then, he had been the one to arrange the framing of the Ye family, and he had seen that wanted notice with his own eyes. It was possible he still remembered my face.
But when the notices were posted all over Yue City, I had looked at one myself. Perhaps the painter had done it on purpose; the features were not especially accurate, only vaguely similar to my own.
To avoid even the slightest chance of exposure, I had even altered my appearance with medicine.
He had only seen the portrait. There was no way he could recognize me.
He was trying to extort me.
“I only wish to help the princess nurse the pregnancy. When the little heir is born, I would be grateful for some reward.”
Keeping my eyes lowered, I remained calm and took the initiative. “If the prince consort doubts this servant, you may have the magistrate’s office verify my identity.”
The prince consort narrowed his eyes, suspicion and scrutiny filling his gaze.
He set down his teacup. “Fine. Then send Yue City’s magistrate Lu Bin to the capital and have him identify you. Let’s see whether you are the same person who was on Yue City’s wanted notice!”
Before Magistrate Lu arrived, the prince consort ordered me locked in the princess’s manor’s underground prison.
The princess still needed me to nurse her pregnancy, so she asked why.
The prince consort said, “Being cautious never hurts. These ants who claw their way up from the bottom, relying on a little skill, quickly forget they are servants.”
“Even if she turns out to be innocent in the end, we still need to beat down her arrogance so we can keep her nearby with peace of mind.”
The princess leaned weakly into the prince consort’s arms. “Husband, you really are thoughtful.”
I was thrown into the dark prison.
Two days later, Magistrate Lu arrived in the capital and entered the princess’s manor.
I was bound hand and foot and taken up to the main hall for a confrontation.
Over these past three years, relying on the princess’s manor, Magistrate Lu had risen in rank and made a fortune. He had grown fat and greasy, his belly round and his brain filled with lard.
He leaned in close to look at me, so close I could hear his breathing and smell the sour stench of a man who had eaten too much.
I lifted my face and did not dodge. After studying me for a long time, Magistrate Lu said cautiously, “You really do look a little like that Ye family fugitive, Ye Gui.”
Back when the plague ravaged Yue City, Lu Bin had spent several days at my family’s clinic.
During those days, I had boiled medicine for him several times. We had seen each other many times, and he had once praised me for being pretty.
But that was five years ago.
A sixteen-year-old girl’s features had fully matured, and I had deliberately altered my appearance with medicine. He could not possibly recognize me at a glance.
Sure enough, Lu Bin was unable to decide. He called out to someone outside. “Scholar Li, come take a look.”
Scholar Li was a cripple. He limped into the hall from outside, and the moment he entered, his eyes met mine.
I remained calm on the surface, but my heart had already tightened.
That year, Scholar Li had broken his leg. My father had treated him.
But Father had only saved the leg; afterward, he still walked with a limp.
That happened to be the year of the imperial examinations. Because of his disability, Li had not even been eligible to sit for the exam after ten years of study.
He had resented my father for that, believing Father had deliberately failed to treat him properly and left him lame so he could not take the exams.
In the early years, he even wrote an article cursing my father as a quack, and ever since then our families had been at odds.
But he was still a scholar. He was gifted, and he painted very well, so he became the magistrate’s court painter in Yue City, the man who drew all the wanted notices.
My wanted notice from the Ye family incident had been painted by him.
Someone skilled at painting portraits never forgets a face.
Scholar Li limped up to stand before me. Seeing my eyes avert his gaze, he suddenly gave a cold laugh.
In a voice only the two of us could hear, he said, “Miss Ye, I have you now.”
I put on an expression of innocent bewilderment.
The prince consort asked, “What did you see?”
Scholar Li studied me for a long time. The prince consort was already growing impatient.
Magistrate Lu was very good at reading his face, and immediately suggested, “Better to kill the wrong one than let one slip by! If the prince consort suspects this female physician is a Ye family remnant, we should just beat her to death on the spot!”
“Reporting to the prince consort.” The lame scholar slowly withdrew his gaze from me and knelt. “This woman…”
“I have never seen her before.”
“What?” Magistrate Lu hurriedly asked, “Did you look carefully? Even I think she looks familiar!”
“My lord, I have been painting in the magistrate’s office for six years. If I glance at a Jiangnan bandit, I can remember his features accurately. If I see only one eye of a night-time flower thief, I can still sketch his face. I never forget a human face, and you know that.”
Meeting the prince consort’s gaze, Scholar Li said, “I have no impression of this woman. This is the first time I have seen her today.”
“If she were truly a wanted criminal from Yue City, there is no way I would fail to recognize her.”
The prince consort asked, “Then why were you staring at her for so long just now?”
Scholar Li smiled. “To be honest, Prince Consort, I think this female physician has rather nice features. On a private whim, I thought I might take her home as a wife, and that is why I looked a little longer.”
The prince consort snorted. “You crippled fool, you dare lust after a woman in front of me? You want to be a dirty old man and marry some young girl? This physician is more than ten years younger than you!”
“A scholar does not care about that,” Li said with shameless ease.
The prince consort rose and kicked him. “Stop disgracing the reputation of scholars! Since this female physician has no suspicion on her, of course she is to remain and nurse the princess’s pregnancy!”
At that moment, the princess’s personal maid, Cui’er, rushed over in a panic and said the princess had been tormented by a nightmare and had woken up crying.
The prince consort had no time to care about anything else. He hurried back to the inner courtyard, then doubled back to tell someone to untie me and bring me along.
As I left, I quickly glanced at Scholar Li and saw that he was looking at me very deeply as well.
When we arrived at the bedroom, Princess Yongwu was already drenched in cold sweat.
“I dreamed that all the blood in my body had run dry! I was left with nothing but a skeleton and a husk, and even my child had curled up in the pool of blood! Ah! Ah!”
The princess clutched her belly in terror and shrank into the prince consort’s arms, shrieking over and over, “How could my blood have run dry? That was my blood!”
“That isn’t your blood,” I said quietly.