The sunlight was dazzling, and the pleasure boat rocked gently with the ripples of the water; from far off came the faint buzz of tourists’ voices. Ning Yi sat with Xiao Chan on the side of the boat facing the lake. In his field of view, boats still drifted past in the distance, and flocks of birds crossed the sky in pairs.

“All right, what’s the matter, really?”

After they sat down, a certain silence settled over the two of them. Xiao Chan wasn’t sitting upright but perched sideways on the edge of the chair — a rather constrained way of sitting, the kind a maidservant might adopt in an ordinary household, not daring to sit squarely in front of her master. But Xiao Chan had long since dropped that sort of formal deference in front of Ning Yi; that she’d suddenly reverted to it now could only mean that something difficult to decide was weighing on her mind. Watching her fingers twisting tightly together, Ning Yi reached over and took one of her hands in his. Her palm, small and fair, trembled slightly once it was in his grasp, but it was enough to make her take a breath.

“Y-Young Master…”

“Hm?”

“Young Master… could you promise me something?”

The girl asked timidly, her words trailing off lower and lower. Ning Yi smiled slightly: “If you don’t tell me what it is, how would I know whether I can do it or not?”

“I… I want Young Master to promise that whatever I’m about to say… if… if Young Master doesn’t agree to it, you won’t tell Miss, all right…”

“Oh? Can’t tell your mistress?”

“It’s not that, exactly…”

Xiao Chan shook her head slightly, her voice soft. With one hand held in Ning Yi’s, she felt a little more at ease, and after thinking it over a while longer, she decided to speak, her face gradually flushing red.

“Young Master, Young Master, could you… tell Miss… say… say… tonight, no, or tomorrow night… any day would do… could Young Master and Miss set aside one night, and not stay together…”

The words came out with difficulty, laden with ambiguity, and for a maid to be asking the two masters of the house not to share a bed for a night was already an outrageously presumptuous thing to suggest. Ning Yi was taken aback for a moment. Xiao Chan seemed to realize the ambiguity of her own words too — her face turned red, then pale, then anxious all at once. Her usual expression was one of simple, innocent cheer, but now all sorts of emotions were tangled together on her face. Her left hand, held in Ning Yi’s, flinched as if to pull away, but Ning Yi tightened his grip and wouldn’t let it go, so she pressed her right hand against it instead, lowering her head, her body curling forward on the chair. Ning Yi could no longer see her face, only felt her skin growing hot as if it might catch fire — not just her palm, but her originally fair neck had flushed red as well.

“Young Master only needs to keep Xiao Chan company, keep Xiao Chan company… Young Master just needs to spend one night with Xiao Chan, that’s all.”

She forced the words out, then lowered her forehead onto Ning Yi’s hand. In the shadow of the boat’s side at that moment, the girl’s slight frame seemed to curl itself into a tight ball before him. Ning Yi thought it over, then shifted closer and drew her forehead onto his shoulder, sighing: “Once we get through the ceremony in a few days, won’t that solve it?”

Boats passed in the distance; if one looked carefully, they might well be able to make out what was happening here, but for the moment Ning Yi wasn’t concerned about that. Against his shoulder, Xiao Chan shook her head slightly: “No — not… not after the ceremony…”

Having said this, she shifted her body back a little, reached up and wiped at her eyes, then raised her head slightly and managed a forced smile: “Xiao Chan has thought it over. Forget the ceremony — after Xiao Chan and Young Master… do that… it’ll be fine for Xiao Chan to just be a bed-warming maid. No formal status needed, that’s fine too.”

Ning Yi looked at her without speaking. His way of thinking was different from people of this era’s — status, rank, and the like meant nothing to him. But for someone like Xiao Chan, that simply wasn’t possible. In the concepts of this time, the one who attended a master at night could be a bed-warming maid, or she could be a concubine; with a proper ceremony came an additional status. Even a concubine’s standing wasn’t particularly high, but for many bed-warming maids, that status was the utmost they could ever hope for — and for them, it might carry some genuinely important symbolic meaning.

Even though Ning Yi could use his own influence to make this household as harmonious — as unconventional — as possible, there were still some things that couldn’t be erased for people like Xiao Chan. It wasn’t only a matter of concubine status, either — given how close Ning Yi and Xiao Chan already were, the two of them could easily have gone much further already. The reason Ning Yi hadn’t pushed forward was that he knew that, at least for Xiao Chan, those ceremonies would carry real meaning.

She was only a maid, but she could still have a ceremony — one that might be small, that might involve only a handful of people in the household, but within which, at least, she too could be treated with the same regard as any other woman: bowing to heaven and earth, offering tea, having a wedding night with candles lit. These things would carry meaning in her life, and so Ning Yi wanted her to have the full experience of them. That she was now saying all she wanted was a single night — the feelings behind that were not hard to imagine.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say. Xiao Chan looked at him with pleading eyes. This was something she, a mere maid, couldn’t bring up with her mistress herself — it was precisely because she knew Ning Yi held real standing in the household that she’d come to beg him to speak on her behalf. After a long pause, she added: “I… I’ve thought about this for a long time…”

She tried her best to calm herself, speaking in a low voice: “Juan’er and I weren’t originally Miss’s maids from the start — only Sister Xing’er followed Miss from the very beginning. Later, when Miss said she needed two more hands to help out, Juan’er and I came to be by her side. We’ve always been the ones helping Miss with things. If I really go through with the ceremony, people in the household will see things differently — they might say Xiao Chan is a concubine now, and it wouldn’t do for her to show her face so freely anymore, and there’d be things I used to manage that I couldn’t manage anymore, or else people would say I’m being unruly. I… even if I belong to Young Master, I still need to keep working for Miss…”

Having gotten this far, she looked up at Ning Yi again: “Young Master, don’t get the wrong idea — I like you very much, very much, but… but… anyway, Xiao Chan can manage both — I can help Miss and also serve Young Master, it’s fine, no trouble at all…” Her voice trailed off again, then returned to normal. “And also, there’s Juan’er and Sister Xing’er — we’re all maids, after all. If I go with Young Master, my status will be different afterward, and getting along together might not be quite the same as before… I get along really well with Juan’er, and I think of Sister Xing’er like a real elder sister — I don’t want to be pushed away from them…”

By the time she’d said this much, whatever courage she had left was spent. Ning Yi collected his thoughts for a moment: “I… won’t say anything foolish to your mistress. But knowing how sharp she is, if I told her I was going to handle things exactly the way you’ve described — do you think she wouldn’t work out that this was your idea? Or that she wouldn’t figure out what you were actually thinking?”

“Eh?”

“Think about it — after I relay this to her, what do you suppose your mistress will do?”

“I… can’t imagine…”

“She might come find you and pretend to be angry, but in the end the result will be the same regardless…” Ning Yi toyed with her slender fingers. “Some things are simply dictated by the times we live in. But as far as I’m concerned, I really do… like you very much, and I don’t want to let you go, Xiao Chan…” He pressed his two hands together, cradling the girl’s palm between them. “As for the rest of your life, there’s only one thing you need to think about: do you want to marry me?”

Some of Ning Yi’s phrasing clearly went over Xiao Chan’s head, but at this she blushed a little regardless: “Xiao Chan — Xiao Chan already belongs to Young Master and Miss both, married or not… but I don’t want to make Miss unhappy…”

“Since that’s how it is, just let me handle things with your mistress, all right?” Without answering the second half of what she’d said, Ning Yi smiled and made his decision. Xiao Chan blinked, stunned for a moment, then nodded, a bashful smile spreading across her face. Not everything has a perfect solution — at that moment Ning Yi felt genuinely moved, without necessarily having any concrete plan in mind. Of course, some matters didn’t really need to be truly resolved at all; sometimes it was enough just to give Xiao Chan the sense that someone had her back.

In his previous life, having once stood at the very top of a certain kind of world, in the environment around him wives had been rarer than mistresses, and one-night stands were often more practical than love. Money and power couldn’t buy real affection — quite the opposite, in fact: the more material desire there was, the more twisted everything around it became. After enough experience of that, once weariness set in, one came to long for something pure — though that didn’t mean he idealized such things completely.

The feelings that had suddenly welled up in Su Tan’er, and this endearing, self-sacrificing compromise from Xiao Chan — both were part of that purity. The distress that had arisen between the two of them, meanwhile, was simply part of this era; in a time without the concept of monogamy, it wasn’t really that serious a matter after all.

Having taken this matter onto his own shoulders and offered a few words of comfort, Xiao Chan — trusting in Ning Yi — found her spirits lifting as well. Recalling now how she’d just begged him to spend one night with her, she grew bashful again, chattering a bit of idle nonsense — “the clouds up there look just like fish scales, how strange” — before scurrying off. Ning Yi had meant to take her ashore to watch a crowd of great talents composing poetry, but of course, by now there was no finding her.

With all this delay, most of the day’s expected guests had by now essentially all arrived. Xiaoyingzhou itself was a long, narrow ring-shaped island; though it made for a beautiful garden on the water even now, it hadn’t yet reached the scale it would in later ages, and there was no single spot on the island that could accommodate a great crowd of people. Though it was called a “poetry gathering,” with so many people coming, folks mostly ended up strolling and sitting about among the trees admiring the scenery — the whole thing had something of the feel of a spring outing.

That said, there was, of course, still a proper poetry gathering to be had. At this point, boats of every size were moored so densely along the shore they nearly formed an unbroken line, and the actual poetry gathering itself was held not on land at first, but aboard several of the larger boats moored at the water’s edge.

“Early autumn is still too hot a season for a poetry gathering to be the usual custom — this all started a few years back with a precedent set by Xiong Runing, who was serving as prefect here at the time. Various regions had suffered disasters that year, and though it wasn’t yet the autumn harvest here in Hangzhou, supplies everywhere were running thin — though, mind you, the actual problem wasn’t all that severe. Prefect Xiong invited a great many people out to this island to enjoy themselves, asking the wealthy households to contribute supplies and the men of talent to write poems, composing verses on the spirit of shared hardship. At the time he invited people like Elder Qian Xiwen, Elder Mu Bochang, and Elder Chang Yu’an to help bolster the occasion. Elder Chang has since passed away, but the tradition of holding this poetry gathering at the start of autumn has been kept up ever since. If not for that origin, this gathering of literary men would hardly have needed to invite so many merchants along to bolster the numbers.”

By this time, Luo Tian, who had been wandering around below for a while, had also come up onto the pleasure boat, preparing to fetch his wife for the formal gathering. He mentioned in passing the origins of this Start-of-Autumn poetry gathering. Ning Yi considered it: “I’d imagine it’s not always terribly harmonious?”

“There have been high-minded types who’ve used their poems to mock the merchants for their vulgar wealth, though there are also those who bring up the events of that year to counter them. Back then, those with money contributed money, and those with strength contributed strength, and it won them all a fine reputation. And besides, those invited generally have some background in poetry and letters too — take my own humble wife, for instance, who was something of a noted talent in her day. Heh… in truth, this Start-of-Autumn gathering isn’t nearly as utilitarian as it was in the beginning anymore. People stroll the gardens, write poems, and by evening the chefs of Fuqing Tower will have prepared a fine banquet; at night they set out water lanterns to pray for good fortune — it’s quite lively, all in all…”

Having said this, Luo Tian led his wife off. As Juan’er was clearing away the teacups and fruit plates, Su Tan’er pulled Ning Yi aside and said quietly: “I just noticed Xiao Chan’s eyes were red — she must have said something to you.”

Ning Yi relayed to her the request Xiao Chan had made. Su Tan’er was silent for a moment, then rested her forehead against Ning Yi’s shoulder, saying nothing.