Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Chicken Quill’s body was carried out through a side gate.
I went to see her off.
Her mother used the silver to buy a coffin. It cost exactly ten taels, neither more nor less.
“I failed her while she was alive,” the woman said. “I cannot let her go without even a place to rest.”
She looked sickly and worn, yet her eyes held a quiet resolve. Behind her stood three children in faded, many-patched clothes, all of them spotlessly clean.
I took a purse from my sleeve. The maids had pooled what we could: two taels from Nanny Wu, two from me, one from Qiuju, and one from Duck Quill. Six taels in all, our final gift to Chicken Quill.
Her mother refused it.
“My Dani was fortunate to have you girls care for her in life. How could I take more from you? If she knew, even in the next world, she would not agree.”
The poor had their pride. She would not allow anyone to look down on her daughter.
However desperate her life, she still guarded the last scrap of dignity left to her child.
When I departed, white funeral streamers fluttered above the low courtyard. A scholar from the neighborhood had volunteered to write the memorial text.
There, for the first time, I saw Chicken Quill’s real name.
Li Ah Sui.
Ah Sui—the “sui” of ripened grain and abundant harvests.
It was an ordinary, humble name, but it carried her parents’ simplest hopes and blessings. It was not a name of birds, beasts, flowers, or insects bestowed by a mistress, nor a joke about brush hairs invented by a young master.
She was a person.
Only a few days after Chicken Quill’s death, something happened to Duck Quill.
She secretly begged the second young master to take her into his household. Young Master Xie the Second was a notorious libertine with a roomful of bedmaids and concubines, but he was generous and treated his servants decently.
With him, at least she would not have to drink mercury.
Asking for a maid was ordinarily nothing in a great household. Han Zhaoyun, however, called it betrayal.
In the courtyard, the cudgel fell again and again on Duck Quill until her back was a mass of blood.
“I knew you were faithless! A cheap little slut trying to seduce the second young master—biting the hand that feeds you!”
Duck Quill sobbed, “Mercy, Madam! I only want to live. I don’t want to end up like Chicken Quill.”
The name made Han Zhaoyun even more impatient.
“What nonsense! That girl had an unlucky fate. When did I ever mistreat her?”
“Since you are so eager to chase men, I will make sure you have your fill!”
She had Duck Quill beaten twenty strokes and sold to a brothel.
Only after venting her rage did she sweep her gaze over the servants assembled in the yard.
“Do you see? This is what happens to those who betray their master.
“A servant should know her place. If a sovereign orders his subject to die, the subject must die. The same law binds master and slave. Reward is reward, and punishment is reward too. Is that understood?”
Every maid and matron bowed her head.
“Yes, Madam.”