chapter 2

Xidi came to see me often.

She still stuttered, stumbling through every sentence. I hated listening to her. It grated on me.

But she never tired of talking, and she always brought me something to eat—rice cakes from home or a treat from a street stall.

She had little money. Madam Wang and my father were both painfully stingy.

This time, however, she was unusually quiet.

I had just left Gu Zhun’s bed. Suggestive red marks covered my body. I was exhausted and irritable, and the sight of Xidi made it worse.

“Why are you here again?”

She forced a smile. “I’m getting married.”

I froze, suddenly at a loss.

“Oh. That’s… good.”

It was not good at all.

Butcher Li was already thirty. Years ago, he had beaten one wife until she fled. His second wife had been beaten so badly she could not rise from bed; in the end, she threw herself into a river.

Xidi was only sixteen, married off to a thirty-year-old man who drank too much and flew into violent rages.

She lowered her eyes and pulled a handful of sweets from her pocket.

“Wenxi, I brought you candy.” Then, forlorn and pitiful, she asked, “Could I sleep here with you tonight?”

I sent word to Gu Zhun that my monthly bleeding had begun and I needed a few days’ rest.

He agreed readily enough, though he warned that if it happened again, he would skin me alive. I had only had my period a few days before.

That night, Xidi lay beside me in my bed.

She asked where Yan Gui was. I answered vaguely, “Attending evening prayers.”

Xidi murmured in acknowledgment and fell silent.

A long time passed before she spoke again, her voice thick with tears.

“I’m scared.”

Scared? What was there to say?

I did not know how to comfort anyone, so I repeated the words I had heard at the convent.

“This is what being a woman means.”

Xidi wiped her tears.

“Then I don’t want to be a woman in my next life.”

Perhaps that was every woman’s wish.

But this life was already hard enough. Who could count on another?

After Xidi married, she rarely visited. She had to help run the butcher shop.

Once, I saw her from far away. Her thin arms raised a bone cleaver, bringing it down expertly through a rack of pork ribs.

Without realizing it, I began asking after her.

I learned she was six months pregnant, and I breathed easier. Surely pregnancy would make her life less difficult. In secret, I prayed that the child would be a boy.

Night was falling. Gu Zhun had summoned me to serve him.

He was a nobleman and had paid to keep me exclusively. He refused to use anything another man had touched. I was lucky to have encountered him from the beginning.

His bedchamber maids at home were too proper for his taste. None had the abandon of a woman from outside. His wife was the love of his life, but she was frail and could not endure his rougher appetites.

I was different. He could knead and twist me however he pleased.

Gu Zhun did not consider me human.

I fawned over him, terrified that one day he would grow tired of me and I would have to serve man after man.

I knelt to remove his shoes, then loosened his sash and settled on his lap, my clothes parting just enough to tempt him.

His gaze darkened, and he shoved me onto the couch.

I never expected tenderness. To Gu Zhun, I was merely something to spend his lust on.

Afterward, as always, a bowl of contraceptive medicine arrived. It was horribly bitter, and too much of it made my stomach ache.

The carriage took me back to the convent. Yan Gui had returned before me.

She lay curled like a shrimp, and the air was heavy with the smell of blood.

Yan Gui had miscarried.

Four months along—the fetus already formed.

Blood had dripped until it half filled a spittoon. Her face was white as paper. Her lips trembled, tears clinging to her cheeks.

Her client had forbidden her to drink the contraceptive medicine. If she conceived, he had promised, he would bring her into his household.

As I held the spittoon, I told her bitterly, “He lied to you.”

She only cried. “It was still something to hope for.”

There was no hope. Only lives mired in filth.

The Prioress brought a doctor, who took one look and said the miscarriage was incomplete. Yan Gui was already weak and bloodless; several doses of harsh medicine cleared her womb, but she never rose from bed again.

I shared her room. The smell of blood never left my nose.

She began hemorrhaging. Day after day, she lay there like a slab of red meat left to rot.

I sent word to her client. His answer was one of revulsion.

“Why tell me about something so foul? A woman’s bleeding is the vilest impurity.”

Then, with all the dignity of an upright gentleman, he said, “My wife and I are devoted to each other. How could this have anything to do with me? Slander me again and I’ll have you dragged before the magistrate.”

However sweet a man’s promises, they were no match for his reputation, much less his career.

The Prioress wanted to send Yan Gui to the Alley. She would not feed an invalid.

Yan Gui had earned her a great deal of money, yet after only half a month of illness the Prioress had had enough.

I hated her coldness, but I was powerless.

One night, Yan Gui suddenly felt like talking.

“Why do men chase prostitutes when they already have beautiful wives and concubines?”

“He despised me even while he kept lying to me.”

“How could I have been so stupid? How did I ever believe him?”

Then she asked, “Do you think there are any good men in this world?”

I shook my head. “No. Give a man a cock and he will never be faithful.”

Yan Gui laughed. In her next life, she said, she too would be a man.

The same thing Xidi had said.

When I woke the next morning, Yan Gui was gone.

She had swallowed gold and died.

There was no pain on her face. Only the serenity of release.

Her father and brother came to collect her body. In life, she had entered Yuzhen Convent to escape an arranged marriage, only to endure this den of monsters. After all that, her family sold her corpse for twenty taels to be buried as the bride of a landlord’s dead son.

They laid her on a handcart beneath a straw mat. Her body bounced as the cart rolled away. One shoe slipped off, but no one bothered to pick it up.

Two days later, her father and brother returned to make trouble.

Yan Gui was no longer a virgin, they said, so the ghost marriage could not proceed. Yuzhen Convent must have been engaged in some filthy trade.

I hoped they would make enough noise to bring the whole place down. But the Prioress brought out silver and easily stopped their mouths.

They left delighted with the money. No one cared that Yan Gui was dead.

After all, her death had proved so profitable.