Chapter 2
The year I came of age, a match was arranged for me. I had a future husband and only needed to wait three years for the bridal sedan to carry me away.
His birth was distinguished. I had forgotten which branch of the Earl of Rong’s household he belonged to, though he was its eldest legitimate son. I knew neither his looks, his build, nor his temperament. Everything I knew about him amounted to a single name.
That name, however, was quite something.
He was famous.
The moment my close friends heard it, they sighed and shook their heads. That man, they said, had a dreadful reputation.
Rumor had it he had begun sleeping with the maids at an early age, then gone on to prey upon even the prettier young manservants around him.
After that, his debauchery only worsened.
Every pleasure house in the red-light quarter had seen him cross its threshold.
Young girls were simply not worldly enough. We knew we should not gossip about another family’s affairs, yet we could not help protesting the injustice.
“How could your parents promise you to a man like that?”
For once, fury carried me all the way to my stepmother’s courtyard.
But I stopped outside the gate.
The breath of anger lodged in my chest dissolved the instant I heard cheerful voices and laughter beyond the wall.
Who cared?
I counted on my fingers, beginning with my own father and moving down through my uncles. If even one person with authority had cared, this match could never have been made.
Even cloistered young ladies had heard the rumors. How could they possibly not know?
I returned to my room, took out the grudge ledger I had not touched in ages, and charged this debt to that woman.
When I finished, I remembered her red-rimmed eyes on the day she left and blotted out every word with ink.
White paper. Black ink.
If only life could be divided so cleanly into black and white.
My love was never wholehearted, my hatred never complete. I remained suspended between the two.
How irritating.
I had heard that profligate young lords who haunted brothels were the most likely to catch foul diseases.
Rotting sores would pass from his body to mine, and then I could do nothing but wait in silence as they spread over every inch of me.
Surely that counted as a terrible death.
Three years later, at eighteen, I would reach the age at which I was destined to die one.
I picked up my brush again, intending to write a farewell letter.
But to whom?
There seemed to be no one who would read it.
Then I would write it to myself.
Dear Zhou Yining,
May this letter find you in poor health.
By the time you receive this farewell letter, you will already have died with festering sores all over your body.
You have kept grudges since childhood. You were not especially obedient either. In secret, you called your father a rotten bastard and your grandmother an old demon. You never learned to work with your limbs or tell one grain from another. Even so, you never truly did anything wicked in your whole life. At heart, you were quite a good person. When your third brother beat a little yellow sparrow to death, you were the one who built its grave.
Remember to tell the King of Hell. Tell him you were a good person, so he must not sentence you to the cauldron of boiling oil.
As for that woman, you do not want to meet her in the underworld.
Let her spend the rest of her life regretting you… No. Let her strike her head and forget—not her intelligence, nor her skills as an escort guard, but only the fact that she once had a daughter.
Wherever she is like a fish in water, let her ride the wind and rise still higher.
After all, you forgave so many people… though perhaps you never truly blamed her at all.
A farewell letter ought to have some dignity. I could not keep taking it out to revise and cross things out.
I found a small box, placed the letter and my grudge ledger inside, locked it, and prepared to take it with me when I married.
Once it was there, I would not need to concern myself with it.
When someone died of a foul disease, all her possessions would be burned.