Chapter 2
“She really left?”
A jackdaw perched on the high terrace, leisurely preening its feathers.
Beneath the eaves stood Rongqi in black robes.
“Yes, Your Majesty. Aunt Feng has gone.” Chen Jing understood what his master wanted to know. “I took the liberty of asking. She said she was going to Suzhou.”
“…Did she show any regret? Did she say anything else?”
Chen Jing groaned inwardly.
“No. Aunt Feng merely said goodbye.”
“Nothing about a title? No words of resentment?”
“Feng Chun’er said nothing at all.”
Xu Wanzhen was right. Feng Chun’er was only retreating in order to advance.
Within three to five days, surely she would yield and return, gladly accept the rank of Noble Lady, and settle down without causing trouble.
Rongqi had seen too many such people, shamelessly using past kindnesses to extort rewards.
When the retired emperor had fallen on hard times, someone had once given him a meal.
After returning to the palace, the retired emperor rewarded that man with ten taels of gold. Instead of being grateful, the man thought it too little.
He went about telling everyone how the retired emperor had once been reduced to drinking horse urine and gnawing bark, and how he had now forgotten his debt and mistreated his benefactor.
The retired emperor flew into a rage and had him dragged away and beheaded.
Only then did the gossip subside.
Xu Wanzhen was different. She and her family had honored the promise made with his mother. A daughter of a noble house, with princes and aristocrats enough to choose from, she had waited until he was twenty-six. She had become an old maid rather than marry anyone else.
Xu Wanzhen said servants were all alike. They either flattered a master whose fortunes were rising or staked their hopes on one who had lost favor. Choose correctly, and wealth and honor would be theirs for life. With someone like Feng Chun’er, they could devise a test to see whether she was truly loyal.
If she served him sincerely, she wouldn’t care about wealth or rank.
If she was calculating, she would regret her decision bitterly and behave herself thereafter.
Yet she had asked for nothing. She had invented a lie and left.
Five days passed without news.
Rongqi began to grow restless.
She must have taken away plenty of gold, silver, and valuables.
After all, she had spent so many years in the palace. She was kind and honest, and many masters valued her. Even the servants eagerly offered her gifts, flattering her with the title of Aunt. Rongqi had seen influential eunuchs and senior attendants, every one astonishingly rich. With rewards from above and offerings from below, she must have saved a great deal.
“You watched her leave. What did she take?”
“Her Majesty forbade the servants from taking their palace rewards. Aunt Feng had served twenty years, and those with twenty years’ service receive only the customary thirty taels in severance. That was all she took.”
What could thirty taels buy?
After the boat fare to Suzhou and the cost of finding somewhere to live, how would she eat?
Had she really begun to believe her own lie, imagining a good man waiting for her at home?
“She took nothing else? What about the gifts you all gave her? I don’t believe she saved no private money.”
“We offered them, but Aunt Feng never accepted. She said palace servants all led hard lives.” Remembering her kindness, Chen Jing wiped his eyes. “Before she left, she repaid money she had borrowed. Thirty taels was only my rough estimate. After settling her debts, she may have had less than that.”
Rongqi couldn’t speak.
A dull heaviness settled in his chest.
He had considered so many possibilities.
That Feng Chun’er was shrewd and calculating. That she had wagered twenty years beside him in disgrace and misery on the chance of wealth and honor.
The one thing he had never considered was that she might have cared for him sincerely from the beginning.
If she had offered him her whole heart, and he had hurt it so badly, how was he to win her back?
“…Shall I make some inquiries?”
Perhaps—perhaps she was living very well after leaving the palace?
“How do former palace servants support themselves?”
“To be frank, Your Majesty, people like me buy property and houses, so we have somewhere to retire.”
Rongqi knew Feng Chun’er had none.
“And if they have no property?”
“Oh, then it’s hard! I’ve seen respected palace aunts go out to wash clothes and cook for others, only to be beaten and cursed.”
…Beaten and cursed.
Rongqi felt uneasy.
As they spoke, Xu Wanzhen sent a maid to ask where His Majesty would dine that evening.
“I’m not eating. We’re going to Canglu Palace.”
Canglu Palace was all but a place of banishment now.
It had fallen into disuse during the late emperor’s reign. No consort wished to live there; they all thought it ill-omened.
After his accession, Rongqi had forbidden anyone to touch its contents.
Behind the main hall was a little room for servants. The woman he called Sister had lived there for a time.
A broken-winged kite hung inside. Bought outside the palace, it was shockingly crude.
Rongqi remembered envying his elder brothers their kites. His sister had paid someone to bring one in for him.
But it was cheap, and he was young. He accidentally caught it in a tree and broke its wing.
She comforted him, saying they would fly it tomorrow, tomorrow.
She really had been comforting him. She had no money, only an endless pile of laundry, and very little time to spend with him.
There was the lantern too. She had carried it through the rainy night and found Rongqi weeping beneath the palace wall.
He had been so absorbed in missing his mother, so overwhelmed by grief.
He never noticed that his sister had fallen in her haste and injured her leg, or that she limped when she walked.
Only when they returned did he see her torn skirt and bloodied knees.
Her legs had never been sound. After that hard fall, she suffered still more from the cold, and even walking could hurt.
Rongqi sat beside the bed for a while, then noticed a little booklet left near it.
It was his sister’s account book.
A servant’s possessions: poor paper, poor ink.
After so many years and the damp, few of its words were legible.
Rongqi could just make out income, rewards, and expenses.
Those little sums—a string of coins, half a tael—were added and subtracted until they reached the two small characters for “Rong” and “illness,” and then dwindled to nothing.
Rongqi remained silent for a very, very long time.
He suddenly remembered keeping watch beside his mother’s sickbed twenty years ago.
She had been gravely ill. When her heart lost hope, she didn’t even wish to live.
No matter how he knelt beside her and begged, she spat out every dose of medicine.
He had been afraid then too. Afraid his sister would leave him just as his mother had.
He had begged and begged, but his mother still went away.
It seemed he had never been able to keep anyone beside him.
Not even the sister who had stayed with him for twenty years.
So a heart could be strong enough to endure twenty years of wind and snow with him.
And fragile enough to be torn apart by the slightest, baseless suspicion.
Seeing Rongqi silent in his grief,
the shrewd Chen Jing slapped his forehead and hurriedly knelt.
“Oh! I must make inquiries. Aunt Feng took my umbrella when she left, and she hasn’t returned it.
“It’s genuine tribute from Luzhou, with seventy-two ribs of nan bamboo from Shu. You couldn’t find ten umbrellas that fine in the whole palace. We absolutely mustn’t lose it.”