Chapter 4

He laughed until his shoulders shook, then placed the wooden hairpin in my hair.

"Cheng Heng," he called softly.

"Once this is over, I'll take you to the Prince of Ning's residence. There's a garden of flowering crabapples. In spring, the blossoms are magnificent."

I touched the hairpin.

"Clear the poison from your body before you start talking about spring."

9.

Gong Chenglu quickly came up with another scheme.

He produced a forged letter claiming that while Gong Yan was mentally unsound, he had mortgaged the ancestral estate to the Cheng family, and forced Cheng Yubai to testify. My brother led several Cheng family stewards to the gate and demanded that we surrender the house.

I sat in the main hall, leisurely drinking tea.

My brother glanced at me, his voice softening. “Heng, I only want what’s best for you. The Gong household is in chaos. Bring Gong Yan back to the Cheng residence, and our parents can still take care of you.”

“Take care of me?” I laughed. “Giving my dowry to Cheng Wanrou and making me take the lashes—is that what you call taking care of me?”

My brother’s expression turned ugly. “I didn’t think things through before.”

I set down my teacup. “You wanted to protect her. I couldn’t stop you. But you sacrificed my marriage to make her match work, without even warning me. And now you think saying you didn’t think it through is enough for me to pretend it never happened?”

My brother’s face turned pale.

Gong Chenglu impatiently interjected, “Niece-in-law, the deed is right here. You don’t get to be unreasonable.”

I took the letter, glanced it over, and tore it to shreds.

“It’s forged.”

Gong Chenglu sneered. “And what makes you say that?”

“The ink used for the seal.” I tossed the scraps onto the table. “The Gong family’s ancestral estate deeds use vermilion seal paste mixed with pine soot. The seal on this letter was made with cheap blue ink sold at the western district’s Wenbao Shop. It fades as soon as it gets wet. Also, Gong Yan once injured his left hand. When he writes, his strokes tend to slant slightly to the right. The strokes in this letter slant left. It was clearly imitated by a right-handed person.”

Gong Chenglu’s expression changed at once.

I dusted my hands. Physician Chu entered with two constables from the Jingzhao Prefecture. One of them carried a medicine jar. The residue inside had been tested and found to contain Cold-Sink Powder.

“Gong Chenglu is suspected of poisoning the prince, forging a deed, and embezzling public property.” I looked at my brother. “Cheng Yubai, you gave false testimony for him. The Cheng family won’t escape guilt either.”

My brother suddenly turned to Gong Chenglu. “You never told me he was a prince!”

Gong Chenglu ground his teeth. “He was just a madman. Who could have known…”

The inner door opened.

Gong Yan had changed out of his plain blue robe and now wore dark brocade. Behind him stood more than ten armed guards, the command tokens at their waists reflecting the cold sunlight.

Everyone in the hall froze.

My brother stared at the tokens, his lips pale. He often discussed court affairs in public, so of course he recognized the Imperial Guard’s insignia. The Cheng family stewards grew even more frightened and quietly edged toward the door. After two steps, the guards blocked their way.

Gong Yan didn’t hurry to deal with them. He took a thin account book from his sleeve and opened it to a page marked with red paper.

“Second Uncle thought that when the study burned down, the account books would disappear too,” he said. “But the original books my father left behind were delivered to the Court of Judicial Review three years ago.

“The copy you have is one I deliberately left in the western courtyard.”

Gong Chenglu looked up sharply. The color drained from his face.

“You also paid Madam Wei’s gambling debts,” Gong Yan continued, turning a page. “You told her to set the fire. She thought burning a few pages would clear her debt. That pawn ticket and the money her maid received are both in the constables’ hands.”

Madam Wei had been locked in the woodshed. Hearing this, she shrieked from the crowd, “Gong Chenglu! You said the main branch was finished, and that the family residence and the Gong family’s waterways would belong to us!”

A vein throbbed at Gong Chenglu’s temple. He turned and shouted at her to shut up. But Madam Wei had completely lost her nerve. She fell to her knees and confessed that he had switched the physicians and persuaded the Cheng family to help him move silver.

Cheng Yubai stood frozen, as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over his head. He looked at me, his voice hoarse.

“Heng, I truly didn’t know it would come to this.”

“You didn’t know about the grain transports,” I said. “But you knew they meant to sacrifice me to make the match work. That day on the platform, you watched my silk ball fall with your own eyes.”

He lowered his head and couldn’t bring himself to look at me again.

Gong Yan came to my side and first asked, “Madam, does your hand hurt?”

The edge of the paper had cut my hand a little when I tore the letter. Somehow, he was the first to notice.

I hid my hand behind my back. “It doesn’t hurt.”

He still pulled it out and carefully wrapped a strip of cloth around the cut. Only then did he look up at Gong Chenglu.

The smile that usually lingered in his eyes was gone. The temperature in the hall seemed to drop.

“Second Uncle, you’ve left me quite a lot over the years.”

Gong Chenglu collapsed into a chair, his lips trembling.

10.

The day after Gong Chenglu was taken away, the Jingzhao Prefecture sealed the Cheng family’s front gate.

For years, the Cheng family had helped falsify the waterway grain-transport accounts. Father had used his business to help Gong Chenglu move illicit silver. My brother had helped him contact the merchants in the clan, and Cheng Wanrou’s biological father had kept the books for the operation.

Behind Mother’s protection of Wanrou lay the debts hanging over the Cheng family.

She had long known Wanrou’s true parentage. She also knew Father owed Gong Chenglu a large sum. She had taken my dowry to cover the shortfall, and tried to use my marriage to curry favor with the Lu family—all to leave the Cheng family a way out.

When Cheng Wanrou knelt outside the old Gong family residence, she was ashen.

I was having breakfast with Gong Yan. When the servant reported her arrival, I put down my spoon.

“Let her in.”

The moment she crossed the threshold, she dropped to her knees and knocked her head against the floor again and again.

“Elder Sister, please, I beg you to save my parents!”

“Who are your parents?” I asked.

Her whole body trembled.

“The Cheng family raised you for years, and my mother treated you well enough. No one can help your birth father after the crimes he’s committed. Begging here is useless.”

She shook her head, crying. “I truly didn’t know about the books. I wanted to marry Zhixing, but I never meant to hurt you.”

“If you wanted to marry Lu Zhixing, you should have told him yourself from the beginning.” I looked at her. “But when they wanted me to take the lashes, you didn’t say a word in my defense. You wore the hairpin and accepted the shops. Now that there’s trouble, you’ve come to me. Why should I help you?”

Her mouth opened. Tears clung to her cheeks, but in the end she had nothing to say.

Gong Yan spooned more sweet lotus-seed soup into my bowl, his tone even.

“Someone, see Miss Cheng out.”

As she was escorted to the door, Cheng Wanrou turned back and asked, “Lu Zhixing is willing to marry me now. Why aren’t you happy, Elder Sister?”

I looked at her.

“I’m delighted. You two are a perfect match.”

The Lu family did come calling.

After learning Gong Yan’s identity, Lu Zhixing’s expression grew worse by the day. At first, he had hoped to use the Cheng family’s trade network to secure a promising future. Now that the Cheng family had fallen, his engagement to Cheng Wanrou had become the laughingstock of the capital.

He waited outside the old Gong family residence and begged to see me. I had the steward pass along one sentence:

“Marry the person whose ball you caught that day. Don’t sully my doorstep.”

Gong Yan was so pleased when he heard that he had two more of my favorite dishes prepared that evening.

11.

The Cheng family’s case took a month to reach its verdict.

Father was stripped of his merchant status, and all the family’s property was confiscated. Because Mother had helped transfer illicit silver, she was sent to a nunnery outside the city to repent. My brother’s crime was less serious, but he was barred from taking the civil-service examinations and could never enter government service.

Gong Yan asked whether I wanted to see them one last time.

After thinking it over, I decided to go.

The seal on the Cheng family gate had faded. Weeds grew higher than the stone steps in the courtyard. Mother sat in the empty main hall. When she saw me, a glimmer of hope appeared in her eyes.

“Heng…”

“Mother.” I stood outside the threshold and didn’t enter. “I came to retrieve the last thing.”

She looked at me blankly.

I asked Nanny Feng to open the old chest and take out an embroidered screen my maternal grandmother had left me. It showed wild geese returning to a river in spring. In one corner was a small flower I had clumsily embroidered as a child.

Mother suddenly began to cry.

“When you were little, you were always attached to me. How did things end up like this?”

I rolled up the screen and looked at her.

“When I had a fever as a child, you left me alone in the western room to care for Cheng Wanrou. When I told you Lu Zhixing had bullied me, you said he only did it because he cared about Wanrou. On my wedding day, you didn’t even step outside the gate.

“Mother, you were the one who stopped wanting me first.”

She covered her face and sobbed.

I held the screen close and turned to leave.

Gong Yan was waiting at the end of the alley with an umbrella. When he saw me, he took the screen and tucked a hand warmer into my arms.

“Are you cold?”

I shook my head.

He looked at me for a moment, then pulled me beneath the umbrella. It tilted toward me until nearly half his shoulder was exposed to the rain.

I rose on my toes and pushed the umbrella back toward him.

“Are you an idiot?”

He smiled. “If my wife says I’m a fool, then I’m a fool.”

I reached out and pinched his cheek. He let me, then lowered his head and kissed my forehead.

The alley was long. Rain fell upon the bluestone paving, rising in a pale mist. We walked slowly onward, and neither of us looked back.

12.

When spring arrived, the poison in Gong Yan’s body was finally completely cured.

The emperor issued an edict restoring his title as Prince of Ning’an and returning the former Prince of Ning’s residence to him, along with a generous reward in gold and silver. The gloomy old Gong residence was left to the junior branches of the clan, while we moved into the princely estate in the southern part of the city.

Just as promised, the estate had a spacious courtyard filled with flowering crabapples.

When the flowers bloomed, Gong Yan stubbornly refused to go to court. He lingered beneath the covered walkway, helping me check the accounts for my incense shop. He wore ordinary clothes, his fingertips stained with ink. When he mistakenly totaled an entry, he tried to cover it with his sleeve.

I caught it with one glance and tapped the back of his hand with a ruler.

“Your Highness, you’ve turned two hundred taels into twenty!”

He answered solemnly, “My wife makes so much money I can barely see straight.”

“Stop talking nonsense.”

He set down his brush and leaned over to embrace me.

“Then let me think of a way for you to make even more.”

“What way?”

“There’s an empty shop on the street behind the princely residence. You can open an incense shop, or an embroidery house—whatever you like. I’ll find you an accountant, shop assistants, and suppliers.”

I looked up at him.

He gently squeezed my hand, his voice tender.

“The people in the Cheng family always liked making decisions for you. This time, you’ll decide what kind of business to run.”

I deliberately asked, “And what if I lose money and go bankrupt?”

“Then I’ll sell wooden birds.”

Remembering the wooden bird that could fly, the one he’d given me on our wedding day, I couldn’t help laughing.

He took a brocade box from beneath the desk. Inside was a small ball carved from jade, wrapped in a thin red ribbon.

“What is this?”

“Your silk ball from that day,” he answered. “Once I’d snatched it, I was afraid someone else would take it, so I hid it.”

I was stunned. “Didn’t you pick it up by the roadside?”

“I had my people push the others scrambling for it aside.” His ears turned red. “I’d only gone to watch the spectacle that day. But when I saw you standing on the tower… I wanted to catch your ball.”

“Had you known me before?”

“Two years ago, at an incense shop in the southern part of the city. You stood up for a little maid who was being bullied by the shopkeeper. You scolded him terribly.”

I didn’t remember it at all.

He remembered every detail, though—not even the color of the clothes I’d worn that day had escaped him.

I held the jade ball, trying not to smile as I glared at him.

“Gong Yan, you’d set your sights on me long ago, hadn’t you?”

“Yes.” He admitted it readily. “Will my wife punish me?”

I reached up, pulled him down by the collar, and kissed him lightly on the lips.

“Your punishment is to stay by my side and help me run my shop properly.”

13.

Half a year later, a new shop called Heng’s Fragrance House opened in the southern part of the city.

I personally blended all the incense sold there. Behind the shop, I also opened an embroidery workshop that employed women with nowhere else to go. Nanny Feng sat behind the counter, working the abacus. Its beads clicked briskly and crisply. No one hoping to take advantage of us could get past her.

Gong Yan stopped by every other day. He never put on princely airs. Dressed in an ordinary blue robe, he sat in the back courtyard helping me smooth the incense boxes.

When a customer recognized him and hurried to bow, he pointed at me and said, “The proprietress has ordered that customers come here to buy incense, not to bow to anyone.”

One afternoon, Lu Zhixing and Cheng Wanrou passed by on the other side of the street.

They had married. Lu Zhixing could no longer pursue an official career and could only teach at a private academy. Cheng Wanrou had lost the comfortable life she’d enjoyed in the Cheng family. She no longer had that frail, haughty look.

She stood outside the incense shop for a long time. At last, she lowered her head and quietly followed Lu Zhixing away, until they disappeared into the distance.

I glanced at them only once, then lowered my eyes and continued to gently brush the incense ash aside.

Gong Yan came up behind me, put his arms around me, and rested his chin on my shoulder.

“What are you looking at?”

“Passersby.”

“Good-looking?”

“Not as good-looking as my husband.”

He smiled like a child who’d just been given candy and held me even tighter.

The late-spring breeze slipped through the shop, carrying the scent of freshly cut brocade and agarwood incense. The little wooden-bird wind chime beneath the eaves softly chimed, its small wings swaying back and forth.

I closed the account book, took Gong Yan’s hand, and walked with him into the courtyard, where the crabapple blossoms were in full bloom.

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