Chapter 3

I was twelve that year. Mother had been dead barely a year when Father told my grandparents he wanted to take a new wife.

It was bitterly cold, and snow was falling heavily. I lay across the low table on the heated bed, practicing my writing.

Grandfather asked whom he wanted to marry.

Father said she was the widow of his closest friend, Song Jia.

Grandfather slapped him hard across the face. His lips shook, and for a long while he could not utter a word.

Grandmother was so upset with Father that she took to her bed and could not get up for half a month.

My mother’s personal maid, Cuidie, had not yet married then. She held me and wept for half the night.

“And he calls himself a scholar! How can he do something so shameless? The Song family’s boy and our young lady have been promised to one another since childhood. Now he wants to marry his daughter’s future mother-in-law! Have they no shame…?”

I knew Father had a dear friend who was an official in Kaifeng, and I knew I had been betrothed to that friend’s son since I was little.

But I did not understand what Cuidie meant by a future mother-in-law.

Father knelt in the snow all night. Grandmother could not bear to see her son suffer, and Grandfather could not bear to see Grandmother distressed.

In the end, Father married the woman he wanted, and I met Song Jin.

On the second day after his mother married into our family, he was brought to our house.

My father and his father had passed the same imperial examination, though his father was six years older.

I heard they had met at a poetry gathering and become the closest of friends.

Father had remained in the capital, while his friend was posted to the provinces.

After Song Jin’s father died of illness, he and his mother returned to the capital to live with her family.

I heard life at his uncle’s house had been hard. Great families, it seemed, were only grand in name.

His mother brought him with her when she married my father.

So when he appeared at our courtyard gate the next day, carrying a little bundle on his back, no one in the household was surprised except me.

He was already sixteen then. He stood at our gate in an utterly ordinary black cloak, looking more beautiful than a banished immortal in a painting.

I had never seen anyone so handsome. I even forgot the cold look his mother always gave me.

I ran straight to the gate and stared at him, entranced.

He coughed, frowned, and said nothing.

The snow was so white, and he looked so cold. But I was young then, with what seemed an endless store of enthusiasm and energy.

I disliked his mother, but I liked him very much indeed.

I had never once called his mother Mother. Aloof though he was, however, he called my father Father, and treated my grandparents with great respect.

Father told me to call him Elder Brother. I narrowed my eyes and called him Song Jin.

He never liked to answer.

His mother was a woman of exquisite refinement. All day she recited poetry and painted, without even knowing how many copper coins a pound of rice cost.

When spring came, she had our vegetable garden dug up and hired a gardener to plant flowers of every kind.

Every day, all she fretted about was what clothes to wear and what jewelry to put on. To me she had only one thing to say: what sort of girl spent all day scrambling about like that?

But my grandparents were raising me, so she could do no more than say it.

Song Jin attended the government school. Every day, apart from coming out to eat, he stayed in his room after returning home.

In winter, when the cold made him cough badly, his mother did not even think to give him a spoonful of loquat syrup.

I did not know how he had managed to grow up at all, or what my father saw in his mother.

Perhaps it was her beauty. She was five years older than Father, yet looked scarcely past twenty.

Grandmother asked her to take charge of the household. His mother’s face actually went white with alarm. She said money was filthy and she would have nothing to do with it.

Grandmother laughed in exasperation.

A true celestial being, too pure to endure the stink of money.

But why, when she ate and drank, did she never consider that rice and flour had to be bought with copper coins?

At bedtime, Grandmother sat on the edge of the heated bed and told me, “Shengsheng, Song Jin is a poor child, too. With a mother like that, he has a very hard life.”

“But I’ve watched him. He’s exceptionally clever and willing to work hard. He’ll surely amount to something. Treat him kindly, and one day you’ll have someone to rely on.”

“Your father thinks of nothing but his new wife now. When your grandfather and I are gone, who will stand up for you?”

My eyes filled with tears. I did not want to hear Grandmother speak of leaving us.

How foolish I was then. I thought that if my grandparents really had to go, they ought to take me with them. Without them, I would be all alone in the world.

Grandmother’s health had never been good. After Father’s remarriage, it grew worse.

She kept me at her side and taught me to manage a household and its accounts.

Perhaps the Wen family really did have a gift for business. By the time Grandmother died, I could run the household properly on my own.

In the third year, Father had another little daughter, Manman. Song Jin’s mother, meanwhile, became more delicate than ever.