Chapter 4
After Shen Rou left, I remained lost in thought.
In my previous life, we had been friends for three years and enemies for more than twenty.
Our friendship had been so brief, our enmity so long.
That small measure of affection had long since worn away through countless nights of resentment and pain.
Besides, I had indirectly caused her death.
She had fallen out of favor by then, and another concubine had exposed the wicked things she had done.
Of course, I had put that concubine up to it.
Qi Wenkai ordered her beaten with a heavy board.
She was badly injured, and the other concubines made her life miserable.
A fever set in and would not break. In the end, she did not survive.
Yet her death had brought me no joy.
Only after I had stumbled blindly through an entire lifetime did I understand, on my deathbed, what had troubled me.
She had been fifteen when it happened. Qi Wenkai had been twenty-two.
An older man and a young girl. A man who had studied and passed the provincial examinations, and someone who spent her days at her needlework.
Even if Shen Rou had truly behaved foolishly, Qi Wenkai could hardly have been blameless.
In this life, I had discovered her innocence by chance and wanted to find a better future for her.
But much of that wish came from wanting to ease the burden I had carried from my last life.
We had opposed each other for so long that I no longer knew how to be close to her.
And now the woman whose death I had helped bring about was embracing me in this life, full of trust and gratitude, telling me, “Thank goodness I have you.”
It was unnerving.
I shook my head, chasing away those useless thoughts.
First, I had to find Shen Rou a way out.
Qi Wenkai was corrupt at heart, but when I returned to this life, I was already carrying the child I had borne before.
For now, I could make no easy decision about the rest of my own life.
Once Shen Rou knew what Qi Wenkai really was, she devoted herself wholeheartedly to choosing a husband.
Within two days, she and Mother had settled on someone.
He was the son of a minor official. His family was modest in standing but comfortably wealthy.
The young man was good-looking and had already earned his first degree in the civil examinations. There were few people in his household, and their relationships were uncomplicated.
Apart from its social standing, the match had everything to recommend it.
Shen Rou ought to have a good life there.
Since both she and Mother were willing, I began the preparations.
Together, Shen Rou and I set about assembling her dowry.
She was an adopted daughter, not a blood relation of the Qi family, so Mother gave me eight hundred taels of her private silver to make the arrangements.
It was a substantial sum. Put toward farmland, it could buy a hundred mu.
Add the clothes and jewelry she already owned in the Qi household, and she would have a very respectable dowry.
Watching Shen Rou happily embroider her wedding gown, I could not help remembering how she had worn a pink silk skirt to serve me tea in my last life.
Then, she had worn pink and offered me tea.
Now, she would wear bridal red, and I was preparing her dowry.
I sighed softly at the thought, feeling a little easier. Then I took eight hundred taels of my own and privately gave them to her as well.
Looking at the banknotes, Shen Rou waved her hands in protest.
“I can’t accept this. You have already gone to so much trouble for me. I can never thank you enough. How could I let you spend all this money too?”
I pressed the notes into her hands. “It will make me happy to see you living in comfort.”
To marry a good man as his wife, and live out her days content and at ease.
That was the fate she should have had in her previous life.
Preparing her dowry meant buying silk one day and timber for furniture the next. With so much going on, we could hardly keep it from Qi Wenkai.
When he learned what it was for, he said very little.
His silence made me wary.
Sure enough, on the third evening, my maid came quietly to report to me.
“Madam, the master… has gone to buy that drug again.”