The first time Grandmother Sheng played matchmaker, she got off to a fine start. Kang Yun’er’s mother came to meet Changwu. This elder Wang sister had suffered enough in her life from the arrogance, lechery, and incompetence of a bookish, ineffectual husband, so the moment she laid eyes on Changwu, she took an immediate liking to him. He was tall and long-limbed, carrying himself with an air of natural dignity, warm and sincere in his dealings with others — not particularly handsome or fair-complexioned, but with the wholesome, honest look of someone who faces the sun. The very end of spring, the Kang family had agreed to the match. Given that both parties were already well past the usual age for such things, both families were unanimously in favor of arranging the wedding as quickly as possible.
On that side, things were going smoothly. On the Yu family’s side, however, matters were looking quite bleak. Elder Yu, though long retired, still had connections in the capital, and despite however many flattering words Pingning Junzhu had put in, several rounds of investigation had yielded deeply discouraging results — entirely confirming Molan’s unfortunate assessment. The second young master of the Ningyuan Marquessate truly was “peculiar.”
From a young age, he had been impossibly arrogant and overbearing, constantly galloping his horse through the streets and picking fights, always keeping company with the wastrel sons of ducal and marquessate households. As he grew a little older, he had somehow fallen in with people of the criminal underworld, frequenting pleasure houses, keeping performers as kept companions, and accumulating a truly staggering number of disgraceful debts. The Gu family had finally managed to secure him a suitable match, but the second young master was dissatisfied and wanted to break off the engagement. When the old Marquess and his wife refused to allow it, he went directly to the girl’s family home on the very day they were hosting a grand banquet for their guests — in full public view, with all eyes on him — and proceeded to mock and humiliate the family so thoroughly that they were nearly driven to contemplate their own deaths in shame. The engagement naturally collapsed. After that, no family of any standing in the capital dared to offer their daughters to him. Growing desperate, the Gu family had extended their search beyond the capital.
Minglan sat frowning, staring out the window. Yan Ran, having no one else to confide in, had taken to inviting Minglan over to the Yu residence every five days or so to share the latest news Elder Yu had gathered, and to talk through her feelings. The updates arrived like episodes of a doom-laden serial. The most recent had it that this Gu individual apparently also had a taste for men — he had been seen consorting closely with several notorious capital nobles known for their preference for the same sex, and had been spotted with them visiting establishments of a decidedly particular variety!
Good heavens! As a former legal professional in her past life, Minglan knew perfectly well that reality did not work like it did in romantic novels. A scoundrel is a scoundrel, no hidden depths, no convenient reformation. And a man who prefers men is a man who prefers men — not easily redirected. One need only look at the tragic domestic life of the famous Japanese author Mishima Yukio’s wife, who had gone into the marriage with every hope of changing him — only to find that even after producing two children, Mishima remained, with great vigor and international renown, exactly as he had always been.
In the relatively few novels of that particular genre Minglan had read in her previous life, the love between the male leads was portrayed as beautiful and soul-stirring — while the female character was almost invariably treated as cannon fodder. There’s a reason why the reader and the character’s position differ. How many women who enjoy reading such novels would actually want to marry a gay man?
Minglan certainly would not. And she was fairly certain Yan Ran had no such inclination either.
On a particular day, Minglan was again invited to the Yu residence. She held Yan Ran — whose eyes were red from crying — and listened to her sob through the situation in fits and starts. Recently, Elder Yu and Yan Ran’s father had been exchanging increasingly heated letters. Elder Yu wished to break off the engagement; Yan Ran’s father flatly refused, insisting that a daughter’s marriage was to be decided by her parents — implying that it was none of the grandfather’s business. Elder Yu’s response had been to send his son a blank divorce letter with no sender’s name, stating that his daughter-in-law was guilty of disobedience and disrespect, and ordering his son to sign it and divorce her.
Now Yan Ran’s stepmother was threatening to take her children back to her parents’ home, while Grandmother Yu was in tears begging the father and son to stop fighting. Yan Ran was the flame at the center of it all — how could she not feel grief and humiliation? She wept: “…Minglan Sister, I am truly unfilial — my family is in chaos because of me. I may as well just agree to marry him and be done with it!”
Minglan rallied all her efforts to encourage her: “Hold on to the end and victory is yours! What fault do you have in any of this? It’s your stepmother’s scheming that’s dragged a good person into the mud. They want to climb higher — so why don’t they put forward your half-sister? She’s only two years younger than you and is old enough to be proposed to as well. But no — they shove you out in front instead. How is that anything other than doing you harm?”
Yan Ran had been weeping so much these past days that she looked worn and fragile: “Grandfather is old. He can’t take much more of this strain. He’s been confined to his sickbed for many days now — if anything were to happen to him…”
Minglan sighed: “Ah, what is there to be upset about? Your father hasn’t betrayed the emperor or turned traitor — he simply got muddled by someone’s persuasion and made a poor choice. Everyone stumbles at some point in life. I once stole offerings from the altar in front of my grandmother’s Buddha statue and got my hand smacked for it. Once this hurdle is cleared, will a father and his blood-born daughter really end up as enemies? And you — yes, things have become strained right now, but once you marry the right man and live well — ten or twenty years down the road, when you come home with your husband and children in tow, laden with gifts and good things — do you really think your father would refuse to acknowledge you?”
Yan Ran brightened through her tears: “Could it really be so?”
Minglan gave Yan Ran’s shoulder a firm pat: “Trust me. Your grandfather weathered storms far greater than this when he was Chief Grand Councilor — he won’t founder in some small ditch now. Ahem — not that I’m calling your father a small ditch! And you have to pull yourself together too. Go and tend to your grandfather at his bedside and put on a smile for him. This isn’t such a great calamity — no formal gifts have been exchanged and no betrothal items sent over. This doesn’t even qualify as breaking an engagement!”
In Minglan’s estimation, the situation was still quite salvageable. Elder Yu was furious enough that Yan Ran’s father in the capital wouldn’t dare push further — that blank divorce letter alone was enough to keep him in check. If he had truly intended to force things through, he would have finalized the engagement first, without asking permission. Backing out after that would have been far more difficult. Hearing Minglan lay it all out in careful detail, Yan Ran finally felt some of the tension ease from her chest.
And so the standoff continued. To Yan Ran, Minglan was like a lantern shining in the dark — whenever she wavered and doubted, she would bring Minglan in, talk through the news and her feelings, and hear some joke or bit of comfort, and her anxiety would ease for a while. As a close friend, Minglan never considered not going. And through all these visits, Elder Yu and Grandmother Yu — and even the second uncle’s family — praised Minglan warmly to anyone who would listen, commending her for her good nature and sincere character.
Whether it was a reversal of fortune or simply the natural course of things, after a few more days, the situation began to improve. According to the reports, that second young master of the Gu family had personally paid a sincere visit to Yan Ran’s father and requested the match directly. The old Marquess had also written an earnest letter proposing the marriage. After reading both, Elder Yu and Grandmother Yu began to waver somewhat. After all, he was the son of a noble house, and if the young man were truly willing to mend his ways, it might not be an entirely bad match.
Yan Ran, who was by nature gentle and soft-hearted, found herself moved by what her grandparents said, and felt a stirring of temptation. Minglan pressed her lips together and said nothing.
A cattle taken to the capital is still cattle. Having spent years attending court as a record-keeper in her past life, Minglan held firmly to a line from that old drunkard Gu Long: a woman may change herself for a man, but a man will never truly change himself for a woman — it is only a question of how long the performance lasts.
Sheng Hong fixed Changbai’s wedding for the beginning of the following year, to be held in the capital. Since his term of office would end at year’s end, the Sheng household began, from the end of summer, another round of inventorying property and servants. Farmland and properties acquired locally were either sold off or released where appropriate; hired servants and laborers brought in from the area were dismissed when the time came. Minglan began calling each of her maids in the Mucang Study in for individual conversations, asking if any of them wished not to follow the family.
The bond-maids who had grown up in the household needed no asking. As for those purchased from outside — there were only Xiaotao, Ruomei, and one other young maid. The Sheng family treated their servants generously, and Minglan was an easy-going mistress. None of the girls wanted to leave. She went through a dozen or so of them and found only two who wished to stay behind with their mothers.
Then Minglan turned to taking stock of her own belongings. Truth be told, she had very little in the way of private funds. Although Grandmother Sheng gave her a generous allowance, a fair amount had gone toward gifts and gratuities for the maids and matrons, and she had perhaps only a few dozen taels in hand. By the prices of the time, that was roughly enough to keep a farming household of six or seven going for two years — not an insignificant sum in itself, but enough to accomplish very little in a household of officials. What she did have in abundance, accumulated over these years, were gold and silver ornaments, jewelry, and decorative objects. The calligraphy and paintings and books that Elder Brother Changbai had given her were genuinely worth a good deal of money. Minglan took care to draw up an inventory ledger, recording all her belongings by category, item by item, checking and cataloguing each one.
The year before she moved into the Mucang Study, Grandmother Sheng had had a set of jewelry cases sent up from the old family home in Jinling — a complete set of nine cases in all. The largest was a full foot tall, with nine tiers containing forty-nine openly visible compartments and eighteen concealed ones. The smallest was no larger than the palm of a hand, yet when opened still held nine tiny compartments within. Case fitted inside case, and each compartment could be detached and rearranged. All were crafted from superior ebony wood in a crabapple flower openwork design, inlaid with gold and black mother-of-pearl, and fitted with nine paired-fish locks of varying sizes — nine large ones and eighteen small exquisite half-fish locks.
The whole set showed its age, yet the wood was still smooth and lustrous, and every piece of brass and white copper had been polished until it shone like new, gleaming with a beautiful warmth in the light. The craftsmanship was ancient yet refined, and Minglan could scarcely bring herself to close her mouth in admiration. In the days when the Tiangong Workshop was at its height, the finest master craftsmen had worked day and night for an entire month to produce this masterpiece — it had been one of Grandmother Sheng’s dowry pieces. One of them!
When this set was moved into the Mucang Study, Rulan had taken it relatively well — she had seen enough fine dowry pieces on Wang Shi’s side of things, and made only a few sour remarks before spending the following days giving Minglan pointed looks. Molan, however, nearly turned red in the eyes on the spot and looked as if she could have eaten Minglan alive. She went back and wept to Lin Yiniang, who in turn wept to Sheng Hong.
Sheng Hong threw up both hands: these were Grandmother’s dowry pieces, hers to give to whoever she wished — what could he do about it? To put it bluntly, after Grandmother had married into the Sheng family with no blood relatives here, if one day after her passing the Yongyi Marquessate came to claim the remaining dowry and estate, he would not even have standing to object.
Lin Yiniang, after much deliberation and determination to rise where she had fallen, resolved to try again to pay her respects at the Shou’an Hall — only to be stopped at the door by Nanny Fang. Lin Yiniang knelt outside the door, weeping and pleading, drawing the attention of everyone in the household. In response, Grandmother Sheng began ailing conveniently in her bed. The physician who came to take her pulse had the same two things to say every time he came and went: congestion of the heart meridians, blocked and stagnated qi.
In plainer terms: the elderly lady was in a bad mood. Sheng Hong hastily dragged Lin Yiniang away.
At first, Minglan felt guilty, thinking she had brought Lin Yiniang’s wrath down upon the situation. But Grandmother Sheng had reacted with an air of complete familiarity: “This is not the first time she has done this. Every time she sets her mind on getting something more out of me, she comes here to make a scene!”
Minglan was deeply curious, and quickly asked what she meant.
Grandmother Sheng made no attempt to conceal it, speaking plainly: “…When her affair came to light back then, the family wanted to turn her out. Your father protected her, threatened to take her as a kept mistress outside the house if she were refused entry, and refused to drink the tea she offered at the ceremony. So she came to me weeping and pleading, kneeling on the ground for hours and hours, begging me to allow the match — saying it was her heartfelt devotion. She cried and begged day and night, claiming that if I would not relent, she had no choice but to dash her head against a wall and die. I was worn out from the commotion. I finally dismissed everyone and asked her one question directly: ‘Why is it that you must become this master’s concubine?’ She swore up and down it was because she admired his talent and character! Hmph. If she had simply said outright that she had grown up in poverty and hardship and craved wealth and comfort, I could have swallowed the indignity. But she insisted on deceiving me with talk of true feeling and genuine devotion! She thought she could exploit my former reputation and use those words on me at every turn! Hmph — what does she know about true feeling? True feeling should be… true feeling should be…”
“True feeling should be: undimmed by riches, unshaken by poverty, unbowed by force.” Minglan finished the sentence.
“Ha — those are the words of the great Sage Mencius. You’d better not let your teacher hear you using them in such a way!” Grandmother Sheng was inwardly delighted, but put on an expression of mock displeasure and tapped Minglan’s palm a few times.
“And what happened after that?” Minglan asked, eyes bright.
“I found it revolting. So I called your father before her and said: I could allow them their arrangement, but from that day forward I did not wish to see her face again. If she agreed, I would consent on the spot to let her enter the household — but she was never to approach me afterward. She cried and carried on at first, all tragic expressions about being torn between feeling and duty, putting on a false performance for a few days — and then, half-protesting and half-yielding, she gave in. I pressed through and had her brought into the house.”
Minglan said nothing. Grandmother Sheng let out a long sigh: “She said nothing that could ever be taken at face value. After she entered the household, over the years she has come to make peace with me more than once — crying, pleading, kneeling and kowtowing as if they cost her nothing — asking me to forgive her what she called a heartfelt devotion, asking me to overlook what she called a harmless mistake… So I went straight to your grandfather and told him: if she comes to torment his wife again, I will move out and live separately. Only then did your father issue a firm order forbidding her from coming near!”
Minglan listened for a long while, then sighed quietly and slowly. She had long ago sensed, beneath the surface of Grandmother Sheng’s tranquil, still-water composure, a deeply hidden current of fierce and burning emotion. She was a woman who loved intensely and hated intensely — the kind of absolute, uncompromising nature that could wound others, and wound herself even more.
Recalling the time Molan had come to try to curry favor with Grandmother Sheng, Minglan gradually came to understand a peculiar trait of hers: if someone showed no desire for something, she was willing to give it freely; but if someone calculated and schemed to obtain it from her, she would dig in and refuse to yield no matter what. The moment Minglan realized this, she felt quietly relieved.
In her past life, Minglan had been in the full bloom of her youth with a bright future ahead of her — and had had it all swept away in a mudslide. When she was reborn into this life, her circumstances were grim from the start. She had become a thoroughgoing pessimist. From the day she first entered the Shou’an Hall, she had never once asked for anything. She estimated everything about Grandmother Sheng from the most pessimistic possible angle. Seeing that the Shou’an Hall, unlike Wang Shi’s quarters, did not keep any snacks or sweets on hand, she had even saved up her own pocket money to buy little treats and bring them to share with Grandmother Sheng — leaving the old woman at a loss between laughter and tears.
Lin Yiniang and Molan lacked nothing — skill, cunning, or ambition. And yet neither of them had ever grasped the simple truth: what Grandmother Sheng valued most was precisely the quality of not contending.