Did she resent her?

It seemed she had never seriously considered the question before.

Eleventh Young Lady thought it over and said quietly: “No, I never did.”

Xu Lingyi was taken rather aback.

“In truth, I never gave it much thought.” Eleventh Young Lady’s gaze was calm and candid. “Because I know that resentment has never once changed my circumstances. And I had more important things to do than resent.”

She had to apply herself diligently to needlework in order to find her footing in this world as quickly as possible. She had to demonstrate her worth to First Madam without appearing to do so. She had to find ways to balance the household accounts and maintain a decent standard of living so that the Fifth Young Lady and the others would not look down on her — there had simply been no time for brooding over life’s sorrows.

This was perhaps what people meant when they said: “Those living in poverty have no right to sorrow.”

Xu Lingyi gazed at Eleventh Young Lady’s face — budding like a gardenia blossom, not yet fully open — and felt, quite suddenly, a pang of something close to heartache.

She and Tenth Young Lady were the two sisters closest in age, both born in Fujian, both raised in Yuhang, and both married to Yanjing. Would Tenth Young Lady have borne the name of disloyalty and ingratitude — choosing to wound First Madam even as she lay paralyzed and helpless — simply because Tenth Young Lady was cold and heartless by nature?

Xu Lingyi could not help reaching out to stroke her face gently.

Beneath his fingertips, her skin was smooth and delicate as rose petals.

His thoughts drifted back to that night following his first disastrous campaign to the Miao borderlands, when his forces had been routed at Jiming Mountain.

The moonlight, pure and cold, had fallen across the sapphire-brocade quilt, shimmering with a dim, subdued luster — like a pool of frozen water pressing down upon him, heavy enough to make it difficult to breathe. Yet when Fan Weigang, who had been dispatched by the Emperor to guard his safety, asked him in a trembling voice, “My Lord, are you afraid?” — the hand hidden beneath the quilt had clenched silently into a fist, while his voice remained as light as wind, as easy as cloud: “All this time spent being afraid, and we haven’t used it to think about what to do tomorrow.”

It had been said merely to keep up appearances. Yet even as the words left his lips, they struck him like a jolt of clarity.

He had risen at once and dressed, summoning Fan Weigang to call all his commanders together to deliberate on a strategy — and it was from that resolve, shared by every officer present, that the turning point of the Miao borderlands campaign had come, and that the battle honors he now held had been won.

The two replies were so remarkably alike.

Was Eleventh Young Lady at this moment in the same position he had been then — not without fear, not without regret, not without uncertainty, not without the thought of turning back, but knowing that she could not afford to be afraid, could not afford to regret, could not afford to hesitate, could not afford to turn back? Ahead lay towering mountains; behind lay a sheer precipice — the only course was to empty the mind and press forward with determination, no matter what lay ahead.

It had been a long time since he had known that feeling — that solemn, desolate determination, as when the wind blows cold over the river and there is no turning back.

But Eleventh Young Lady — who had only just passed her coming-of-age ceremony that early summer — what of her?

Was she, like him at that time, lying awake in the stillness of the night, asking herself: “If it had been Father facing this, what would he have done?” “If it had been Second Elder Brother, what would he have done?”

And who would she ask?

Xu Lingyi recalled First Madam’s merciless reproofs on the day of the three-day return visit, and the evasiveness in Fifth Yiniang’s eyes when bidding farewell. His heart was pierced with something fine and sharp.

Something he had deliberately pressed down deep inside himself rose up now, beyond suppression.

His hand pulled back as if it had been burned.

“Moyan,” he said, gazing at her steadily, “was your health always poor from childhood? Or did it begin to decline after coming to Yanjing?”

Xu Lingyi was strangely different today.

First he had teased her like a trusted old friend, cautioning her not to actually provoke Tenth Young Lady into a real collapse. Then, without any apparent reason, he had asked whether she had ever harbored resentment toward First Madam. Then his eyes had held a look of tender concern as he stroked her face. And now, with an expression of gravity, he was asking about her health.

Eleventh Young Lady thought of the medicine she had been taking these past several months.

Speaking of which — it had been over a year since she and the Marquis had married. He was asking about children, wasn’t he?

Eleventh Young Lady lowered her eyes. “I fell ill once when I was small. I spent more than half a year recovering. After that, I was never seriously ill again.”

“What was the illness?” Xu Lingyi pressed.

Eleventh Young Lady hesitated for a moment. “Tenth Elder Sister and I had a quarrel. The ground was slippery from winter cold, and I accidentally struck my head against one of the standing columns alongside the corridor.”

Xu Lingyi was so astonished that for a long moment he could not speak.

The Luo family was a distinguished Jiangnan clan — not some minor impoverished household. For a young lady raised in the inner quarters to come to blows with another, with no one to intervene, and then to knock her head against a standing column — where were her maids and matrons? If someone had not tacitly permitted it, how could it ever have come to this?

His lips compressed tightly into a single line.

The atmosphere turned suddenly chill.

Eleventh Young Lady felt abashed.

What Tenth Young Lady had done was already shocking enough. Now Xu Lingyi’s impression of her was likely even worse. Had she known this would happen, she would not have told him.

She smiled, trying to ease the mood: “Fortunately, only a scar of less than an inch remains, and it is hidden within my hair…”

But before she could finish, Xu Lingyi had already said: “Let me see.”

Eleventh Young Lady paused.

Xu Lingyi’s fingers were already moving through her hair, searching.

So he wanted to see the scar.

Eleventh Young Lady simply tilted her head and guided him straightforwardly: “Right here!”

Xu Lingyi traced the scar carefully with his fingertips. Thinking of how dangerous it must have been at the time, he asked: “Were you frightened, then?”

Frightened?

Of course she had been frightened!

To wake and realize she had somehow come to exist in a strange and foreign world. To be terrified that in relating to others, someone would detect that something was not right. To be afraid that in an unfamiliar environment, some misstep in her behavior would mark her as something altogether strange and apart.

That feeling — she would never forget it for as long as she lived.

Even now, recalling it, her heart would go cold.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

She had promised herself to forget. And she had to work at forgetting.

“It was too long ago, and I was young at the time — the memory isn’t very clear.” Eleventh Young Lady began calling to mind the times that had brought her joy. “I only remember lying alone in bed for a very long time. Each time I turned my face to the side, I could see outside the window that wisteria vine twined around the banana tree. It bloomed with little flowers, purple and white, and when the wind blew, a faint fragrance drifted in. But if you opened the window, insects would come inside. So you could only open it when the sun had risen… The sunlight would come in, casting a round halo of light, glimmering with five-colored radiance, floating in the air — a little dazzling, but very beautiful… In spring, two swallows came and made their nest under the eaves… I watched them hatch four little swallows, who would stretch out their necks and cry when hungry, their mouths open wide — their beaks were a tender shade of yellow, I think…”

Xu Lingyi listened quietly, a tenderness flickering in his eyes that he himself had not noticed.

When he had been ill, he was always surrounded by a crowd of people. His only thought was how to get rid of them all so that he could sleep. He would never have noticed what was planted outside the window, or what kind of flowers were blooming there.

To have observed it all so carefully — one could only imagine how solitary those days must have been.

He drew her close from behind, holding her tightly.

Eleventh Young Lady’s waist was slender and supple as a spring willow.

She was of middle height, but her waist was narrow, her legs long, and her frame small — which made her figure seem particularly graceful and elegant, and also made her appear somewhat taller than she actually was. Beautiful as she looked, it was not a build well-suited to bearing children.

The thought flashed through him, and something stirred within Xu Lingyi’s chest.

He fell into quiet reflection, then pressed close to her ear and murmured softly: “When did your monthly cycle first come?”

Eleventh Young Lady was in the middle of speaking when she heard his words. Her voice faltered, and her face flushed scarlet all the way to the tips of her ears.

Xu Lingyi asked again, gently: “When?”

“After I came to Yanjing!” Eleventh Young Lady answered in a voice taut with embarrassment.

The distance from Yuhang to Yanjing was a thousand li. Master Luo and Luo Zhensheng had gone first, and then First Madam had brought along Fifth Young Lady at eighteen, Tenth Young Lady at fifteen, and Eleventh Young Lady — who had not yet had her first cycle — in the end, the one who married him had been Eleventh Young Lady.

Eleventh Young Lady was so perceptive — had she ever carefully turned this over in her mind and considered the reason behind it?

Xu Lingyi gazed at her face, flushed like a red lotus — the knit brows and endured pain of their wedding night, the patient and gentle words spoken by lamplight, the unrestrained delight as she skipped rope with Zhun Ge, the soft tenderness with which she taught Jie Ge to recognize characters, the composed calm with which she handled the unreasonable demands of the yiniangss — these images flickered through his mind like the turning of a lantern wheel, endlessly cycling.

His decision to marry Eleventh Young Lady had been partly prompted by Yuan Niang’s words about how she was still young, and partly by his own tacit willingness to defer siring another legitimate heir for a while longer. But he had long since revised that intention — it had been four months since Eleventh Young Lady’s coming-of-age, and yet there was still no sign of anything. Could there be some other reason?

The thought arose, and his expression shifted to something subtly peculiar.

Eleventh Young Lady, feeling Xu Lingyi’s silence, turned to look at him, curiosity in her gaze.

Wide almond-shaped eyes, the irises black and white in clean contrast. Like a mountain spring — clear, transparent. He could even see his own reflection in them.

Xu Lingyi looked away from Eleventh Young Lady’s gaze.

And even if he knew — what then? On one side stood her maiden family; on the other, her husband. It was the hardest position in the world to occupy. And yet since entering the Xu household, just as she had said herself — knowing that complaint could not change her circumstances — she had always done more and said less. Because there were more important things to do than complain, she had always been gracious and broad-minded, warm and kind…

Without realizing it, he pressed his face against the scar at the crown of her head.

In this moment, he found himself almost hoping that Eleventh Young Lady did not know.

There were times when not knowing was its own kind of blessing.

After a few days, the household servant Eleventh Young Lady had sent to gather intelligence at the Wang household came back with a report: “…Well, I must say, our Tenth Young Madam really does things in her own inimitable way. First she summoned the Duke to her and gave him a series of instructions, ordering him to call back all the people who had previously served under the late Duke. She gave the Duke three days to have everything settled. That young Duke — still so young — where would he know how to handle such matters? The reason the household affairs had been seized by the Duke’s birth father and birth mother in the first place was that the Duke himself had been favoring them. Naturally he paid no heed to our Tenth Young Madam’s words. But our Tenth Young Madam is no one to be trifled with either. She immediately declared: if matters were not attended to in accordance with her instructions, she would go to the Court of Judicial Review herself and report the Duke for ‘insubordination and filial impiety’ — that he had been adopted as another family’s heir and yet summoned his own birth father and birth mother back to run the household, showing complete disregard for his adoptive mother. The Duke’s birth mother replied coldly: the Luo family was a dynasty of officials, a distinguished Jiangnan household; the Xu family was an illustrious noble clan; Senior Official Yu was in attendance at the Imperial Court — if Tenth Young Madam no longer cared about any of this, she was perfectly welcome to go ahead and file the complaint. And then — you’ll never guess what happened!”

This was her plan?

To report her own adopted son to the Court of Judicial Review for ‘insubordination and filial impiety’?

Eleventh Young Lady was already speechless.

Hupo, standing nearby, quickly said: “So what happened?”

The old servant said with a gleam of pride: “Well, our Tenth Young Madam didn’t say a single word more. With Jin Lian supporting her, she simply set off for the Court of Judicial Review. When the Duke’s birth mother saw that things were going badly, she went herself and brought Tenth Young Madam back. And so every last one of the things Tenth Young Madam had instructed were carried out to the letter without a single omission!”

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