Riding the Long Wind – Chapter 8

Chapter 8

After a long while, Su Wan spoke. Her voice was rough and hollow. “Yuru. It is my fault. I am useless.”

She had never given her husband a son. She lived every day in quiet terror of being cast out, and if she were cast out, the shame of it would leave her with nothing. She had spent her whole life walking carefully and keeping small, with only one wish: to make sure her daughter found a way out.

And now here they were.

She knew how much Liu Yuru had put into reaching the Ye family. She knew that every bit of it had been dismantled by her father for a pile of silver.

The rage in her was almost unbearable.

Su Wan clenched her fists. She wanted to drag Liu Xuan and Zhang Yue’er and every person in this household to ruin with her. But she could not. If she did anything reckless, what would become of Liu Yuru’s name? Gu Jiusi might not marry her at all, and then where would her daughter be?

She was trapped in her despair with nowhere to turn, and Liu Yuru, watching her, tightened her grip on her mother’s hand and quickly wiped her own eyes. “Mother. Do not think that way. I want this.”

Su Wan looked at her slowly. Her eyes were full of complete understanding.

“Want it?” Her voice was raw. “All these years you have always told me things were fine. Always the good news and never the bad. But do you think I do not know how you actually feel? I just could not do anything about it. So I sat here and watched you swallow your grievances and make yourself pleasant to Zhang Yue’er, hoping she would be a little kinder to you for it.”

“And what good did it do?” The tears ran down Su Wan’s face. “She sold you.”

“Mother, no.” Liu Yuru smiled, though her own eyes were wet. “I mean it. Gu Jiusi is actually a good person. The reason the Gu family came to propose was because he and I had already met. He helped me once, and we both thought well of each other.”

And then Liu Yuru invented a story from nothing, weaving their brief and hostile encounters into something that sounded like a gentle beginning, adding all manner of qualities to Gu Jiusi that he did not possess, until the brawler and gambler she knew had become a warm-hearted young man who simply had an unfortunate habit of getting into trouble.

“That rouge he gave me at the shop. He bought it for me. He could see I wanted it but was hesitating over the price, and he knew that sending a gift to a young woman alone would damage her reputation, so he bought out the whole shop’s stock and gave everyone a case. It was all just an excuse to give me mine.”

“He treats me well. I truly will not suffer.”

She wove truth and invention together so evenly that Su Wan, for all her knowledge of her daughter, could not quite separate one from the other. She sat there crying silently, holding Liu Yuru’s hand, blaming herself over and over for her own helplessness.

Once Su Wan had calmed enough, the physician arrived, examined her, and confirmed that the shock had sent her qi rushing in the wrong direction. He wrote out several prescriptions, administered a round of acupuncture, and then took his leave. After he was gone, Liu Yuru hesitated a moment, then took Su Wan’s hand gently and said: “Mother, the engagement is done and cannot be undone. There is no use dwelling on it. What matters now is something else.”

Su Wan looked at her.

“The Gu family’s betrothal offer must have been substantial. Father would not have risked offending the Ye family otherwise. Knowing Zhang Yue’er, my dowry will be as thin as she can make it, and if I arrive at the Gu household with almost nothing behind me, I will never be able to hold my head up there.”

Su Wan straightened, focusing. “Then I must fight for your dowry.”

“Mother, not yet.” Liu Yuru was calm. “The Gu family has only just made the offer. There is still time before the wedding. You and Father have never been close, and Zhang Yue’er has his ear. If you challenge her now, you will not win.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Yunyun.” Liu Yuru said the name clearly. Yunyun stepped forward from beside Yin Hong and bowed to Su Wan with quiet composure. “Good day, Madam.”

“Mother,” Liu Yuru said, steady and low, “after I leave, Yunyun will be here to look after you in my place.”

Su Wan looked at the girl who had come to stand before her. She looked to be no more than eighteen or nineteen, with a striking, gentle kind of beauty. Liu Yuru had dressed her simply, yet the effect was such that she might have passed for a daughter of any fine house.

Su Wan stared at Yunyun, and the moment she saw that face, a painting in Liu Xuan’s study flashed into her mind.

Liu Xuan had once truly loved a girl. She had died young, barely past her coming-of-age ceremony, carried off by illness. He had mourned her his whole life. Both Su Wan and Zhang Yue’er had been chosen partly for their resemblance to the portrait he kept of her. And this Yunyun had a face that was more like that painted face than any of them.

Su Wan understood at once what Liu Yuru had done.

“Mother, I kept Yunyun in the outer courtyard all this time for two reasons. One was to avoid making an enemy of Zhang Yue’er, since we have managed to live alongside each other well enough. The other was that I did not want to cause you pain. But things are different now. I am going away, and I cannot leave you here alone.”

“I understand,” Su Wan said. There had been a time when she might have felt something complicated about this. But looking at her daughter now, she reached out and took Liu Yuru’s hand and said simply: “I understand everything. Leave her with me. Tomorrow I will make myself ill and have your father come to see me.”

The three of them talked until deep into the night. When Liu Yuru finally stepped out of her mother’s room, she stood in the courtyard for a moment, then said quietly: “Yin Hong, go and find out what was in the betrothal gifts today. All of it.”

In a household like this, the full list of betrothal gifts would have been read aloud at the gate when they arrived. Anyone in the courtyard would have heard it. Yin Hong said she would ask around and went off to do so. Late that night, she came back and reported everything.

Liu Yuru listened to the end, pressed her lips together, and said at once: “Yin Hong, find a few people you trust completely and go to the gambling house tonight to find Gu Jiusi. If you find him, give him this letter from me and ask him to have the property deeds transferred into my name.”

Transferring a deed required an official red seal, and the Gu family had moved too quickly to have obtained one already. The shopfronts on East Street had been listed in the betrothal offer, but the deeds themselves had not yet been formally handed over. They were the only item in the entire offer that was both enormously valuable and not yet physically in the Liu family’s possession. She needed to act before the Gu family had the deeds drawn up in Liu Xuan’s name instead of hers.

Yin Hong hesitated. “Miss, will doing this make the Gu family think less of you?”

“Do you think the Gu family does not already know what this household is like? Everyone in Yangzhou knows. Did Old Madam Ye ask after my mother? Did Madam Gu? No, because everyone already knows that in the Liu family the concubine outranks the wife, and my mother has no say in anything.” Liu Yuru gave a short and humorless laugh. “I have been a joke for years. What is there left to be embarrassed about?”

“Miss…”

“Stop worrying,” Liu Yuru said, sighing. “I am sending this message because I am confident that Gu Jiusi is not a bad person at heart.”

Even with all his noise and arrogance, the fact that he had given her the rouge that day told her something. He was the kind of person who was protective of those he felt some connection to, and who cared very little for the rules that governed everyone else. If his family had come to propose, there must be some goodwill toward her on his part. The most he would do, if he found the letter presumptuous, was laugh at her later.

Yin Hong thought about it and decided Liu Yuru was not wrong. Once the letter was written, she sent a few reliable household staff out that same night. By early morning, they had found him.

Gu Jiusi had been at the gaming house for a full day and night by then, and had gambled himself down to nothing. He came out into the morning light yawning, heading home with empty pockets. He had barely walked a few steps when someone blocked his path.

He looked the man up and down, unimpressed, and said through a yawn: “You had better have a good reason for stopping me. Otherwise I am going to hit you.”

“Young Master Gu.” The man held out the letter and repeated Yin Hong’s exact words with careful precision. “My mistress says, since you have intentions of becoming husband and wife, she hopes you will extend her some protection.”

Gu Jiusi stared at him. He unfolded the letter, read the first few lines, and frowned. “What are you on about? Have you got the wrong person? I am Gu Jiusi, what husband and wife are you talking about…”

He stopped. Something cold moved through him. He read a little further, then thought of his father’s way of doing things, and looked up sharply. “Who is your mistress?”

“The eldest daughter of the Liu family…”

“Liu Yuru?” His voice went up. The man looked at his reaction with some confusion. Gu Jiusi drew a long slow breath, and understood immediately what had happened. He said, through clenched teeth: “Right. Very good.”

Then he turned and started toward home at speed. The man rushed after him. “Young Master Gu, the deeds…”

“Never mind the deeds! What kind of person agrees to a marriage like this? Is your mistress out of her mind?”

He shoved the man aside. “Try to stop me again and I will break your legs.”

That was enough to make the man stand back, and he could only watch as Gu Jiusi stormed off in the direction of his home, muttering loudly the whole way: “That old man. Does he listen to a single word I say?”

The man had no idea what to make of any of it, and went back to the Liu household. Yin Hong was standing at the gate waiting. The moment she saw him, she came forward. “Well? What did Young Master Gu say?”

The man’s face went red. He would not quite look at her. “Tell me!” Yin Hong urged.

“Young Master Gu said…” He swallowed. “He said the miss has lost her mind.”

Yin Hong carried that word for word back to Liu Yuru.

Liu Yuru was sitting with her tea. Her hands shook with fury.

Yin Hong dismissed everyone else from the room and looked at her mistress with growing alarm. “Miss, please do not let it upset you. Let us think of another way. Young Master Gu does not seem the least bit reliable. If your mother cannot get the dowry sorted out and you arrive at the Gu family with nothing, what will you do?”

“Lost her mind…” Liu Yuru’s hands were still trembling. She bit the words out quietly. Yin Hong looked at her, confused. “Miss?”

Liu Yuru lost, for the first time in her life, every last scrap of her composure. She slammed the teacup down and shouted at the top of her voice: “The entire Gu family has lost their minds!”

Now she understood the full picture.

The old ones had gone ahead and made a betrothal offer without checking the facts. The young one went around saying reckless things, gambled his days away, and knew nothing about his own marriage. They were treating another person’s entire life like a passing joke, every last one of them, from top to bottom, useless.

The whole family had lost their minds.

Liu Yuru had not truly hated many people in her life.

Even Zhang Yue’er was a woman pursuing her own interests, not so different in that regard from anyone else.

But in this moment, she felt something clean and sharp and real take root in her chest: a genuine and thorough dislike of Gu Jiusi.

Hearing what the servant reported of his reaction, and reading it alongside everything the Gu family had done recently, she could piece together roughly what had happened. The Gu family had been looking for a suitable match for their son. Gu Jiusi, being Gu Jiusi, had declared he wanted nothing to do with it. Then the words he had thrown at her in the rouge shop had somehow reached his parents’ ears, and they had taken him at his word and moved without telling him. Everything she had worked for over fifteen years had been wiped out because of one sentence that had fallen out of Gu Jiusi’s mouth.

A wave of grief came up in her so vast it almost had no edges, and underneath it, a deep and bone-level helplessness. This was what it felt like to be an insect beneath someone else’s foot. Her entire life had been nothing more than a throwaway line in someone else’s afternoon.

She did not know whether Gu Jiusi would help her. She suspected that in his mind, she had probably jumped at the chance to marry up into his family.

As it happened, he did think more or less exactly that.

He could not understand why she would have agreed to the engagement at all. His parents had appeared at her door, but she could have refused. Why had she not?

She was going to throw herself in a lake, was she not?

A woman with that much calculation behind her eyes…

Then it came to him. Perhaps it was the calculation. Perhaps Liu Yuru had seen his family coming and decided that the Gu family was exactly the opportunity she had been waiting for. Perhaps she had engineered all of it herself.

If that was the case, Gu Jiusi did not think any less of her for it. He held Liu Yuru’s scheming in a certain cold regard.

He stormed home and went straight to his father’s gate.

“Father! Gu Langhua! You terrible old man! Get out here!”

Gu Langhua and Jiang Rou had only just gotten out of bed. Hearing their son making an uproar outside, Gu Langhua reached for the stick he kept by his bed without thinking. “That little wretch is out of control again!”

He flung open the gate and roared: “You dare come back!”

“What is this about Liu Yuru!”

Gu Jiusi stood his ground in a way he never quite managed when his father had the stick out, holding Liu Yuru’s letter and not retreating an inch. “You went to the Liu family and got me engaged? Without saying a single word to me?”

“Without saying a word? You are my son!” The anger had knocked all caution out of Gu Langhua. He had entirely forgotten his original plan. “Marriage is a matter for parents to decide! I say you marry who I say you marry, and you dare defy me?”

“I told you before,” Gu Jiusi shouted back, “no engagement I do not agree to counts for anything! Unless I say I want to marry someone, I will not do it, and it does not matter that you are my father!”

“But,” Jiang Rou said carefully, watching father and son face off against each other, “is this not the girl you wanted to marry?”

“When did I say that?” Gu Jiusi looked genuinely baffled. The steward came forward helpfully. “Young master, you said it at the rouge shop. Many people heard you.”

“Yes, yes,” the maidservant behind Jiang Rou chimed in eagerly, “the whole city knows by now.”

Gu Jiusi stared at them all. Then he remembered. He deflated slightly. “I was joking. You cannot take a joke seriously.”

“Marriage is not a subject for jokes!” Gu Langhua drew himself up. “A man says something, he stands behind it. Otherwise you are destroying a girl’s reputation, and that is no small thing. Your daily foolishness I can overlook. But if you ruin a girl’s prospects, that is something she carries for the rest of her life!”

“And her marrying me is not something she carries for the rest of her life?” Gu Jiusi shot back. He waved his hand. “I do not care. Call it off. She was about to be engaged to Ye Shi’an. What are you all thinking?”

“Oh, is that what you are worried about?” Jiang Rou immediately adopted the expression of a mother who understood everything. She assumed her son was suppressing his own feelings because he did not want to stand in Liu Yuru’s way with Ye Shi’an. “We asked about that when we made the offer. There was nothing to it. The Liu family said that Miss Liu has been fond of you all along.”

It was as if a thunderclap had gone off directly above Gu Jiusi’s head.

Liu Yuru was fond of him?

Liu Yuru had rejected the upright, scholarly, bright-futured Ye Shi’an in favor of him, the gambling, brawling wastrel?

Her mind must be broken.

Then quickly, the thought resharpened itself.

Her mind was not broken.

Because compared to Ye Shi’an, the Gu family had more money, fewer rules, and only one son. And that son was constantly causing his parents grief, which meant that the moment he married, his mother would hand over the household management to a capable wife. Marrying him, purely in terms of financial outcome, was in no way a bad deal. And while he liked to have a good time, he had no real vices beyond that. If a woman’s goal was material security, marrying him was by a significant margin the better choice.

In that single moment, Gu Jiusi felt a thorough and uncomplicated disgust. He became suddenly certain that Liu Yuru had manufactured the entire story about wanting to marry Ye Shi’an as a lure. She had used it to make him pay attention to her, to draw him in and set the trap.

The fury came up in him fast. “I do not care how it happened. I am not going through with this marriage. I will go right now and call it off.”

“Enough!” This time Gu Langhua brought out a gravity he had never quite used before. “The engagement is made. If you break it now, what happens to Miss Liu? You would be ruining that girl’s entire life.”

“She is ruining mine!” Gu Jiusi roared. Then: “If I am going to marry anyone it will be someone I actually want to marry. Why should I have to marry a woman who trapped me and be pushed into it by you?”

“Pushed you? You pushed yourself.” Gu Langhua laughed coldly. “Who was it who said he would marry no one but her?”

That stopped Gu Jiusi cold. After a moment he recovered: “You believed that?”

“A real man says what he means and means what he says. You said you would marry no one but her. We went and got her for you. If you want to break the engagement now, you had better think very carefully about what that does to her life.”

“What does it do to her life?” Gu Jiusi was genuinely baffled. “She should find someone she wants to be with, do things she wants to do. If the engagement is broken, it is broken. Would she take a white sash to the rafters over a broken engagement? Is there nothing in her life worth living for besides getting married? You are all being completely unreasonable!”

“Jiusi!” Even Jiang Rou, who had always indulged him, had reached her limit. She frowned and said, with real force: “A woman’s situation is not the same as a man’s. If you break her engagement, what will people say about her? How will they see her? Who will marry her? Jiusi, would you marry a woman who had been through a broken engagement?”

“If I loved her, why would I not?” Gu Jiusi answered immediately.

Gu Langhua and Jiang Rou both stopped.

In that moment, they understood fully what years of loving and indulging their son had produced: a young man with ideas completely at odds with the world he lived in.

He was so far outside the rules of the age that he could only see those who lived within them as cowardly and without imagination.

Jiang Rou had no answer to give him. After a long silence, she said, with a kind of exhausted gentleness: “Jiusi, Yuru is not like you. She is a well-bred young woman in every conventional sense. She does not have your courage. If you break the engagement today, she may very well take her own life out of shame by tomorrow.”

“Then why were you in such a rush to get me engaged in the first place?” Gu Jiusi looked at Jiang Rou coldly.

Jiang Rou sighed. She came down the steps and said, more quietly: “Your uncle had already written to us. He wants to bring you to the capital and find you a position there, and see if there is a chance for a princess to take notice of you. But marrying into the imperial family would cost you your entire future. A prince consort has a fine title and nothing else. You would spend your life managing your wife’s moods and never hold any real power. Your uncle is determined once he sets his mind on something, and once he arrived we would not be able to stop him from taking you. So we had to get your marriage settled before he got here. You have never shown any interest in any girl before, and for once you had finally said something that sounded like interest in someone. We just wanted to move quickly and get it done.”

“Nonsense. I would not go. Could my uncle actually force me?”

Gu Jiusi’s expression was unyielding. Jiang Rou smiled, and the smile was tired.

“Jiusi, in a person’s life, there is always something they cannot get out of. Even in a family like ours. When power comes into it, we have no more choices than anyone else.”

“That is just an excuse.”

Gu Langhua could see that Gu Jiusi was past reasoning with. He stopped trying and said flatly: “If you will not listen, go back to your room and think about it. Stop trying to get out of it. You will wait quietly for the wedding.”

“I am not getting married. I am going right now to call it off…”

“Take him.” Gu Langhua’s voice cut across the courtyard. The household guards came at Gu Jiusi from every direction. He ducked and wove and fought back, and it took the better part of the entire household guard to get him subdued and bound up properly.

“Lock him in his room until the wedding day. No one is to let him out for any reason.”

Everyone could see that Gu Langhua had been pushed past his limit. They watched as Gu Jiusi was hauled away, still kicking.

He yelled from his room until he had shouted himself hoarse. Then, with nothing else to do, he picked up Liu Yuru’s letter again.

He had to admit the letter was well written. The words were genuine and carefully chosen, with the natural voice of a young woman caught in a difficult position, explaining her situation and asking for his help with the property deeds.

He read it again, still furious, still feeling that her calculations were transparent as glass. But after a while, reason reasserted itself, and he had to acknowledge that at least eight parts in ten of what she had written were probably true.

The Liu household was a mess that everyone in Yangzhou knew about. He was not stupid. His family had arrived at her door with a fortune in betrothal gifts, and naturally the whole household would have gone mad over the money.

He had no regard for Liu Yuru. But he had even less regard for the Liu family, and the thought of all that silver going to a man who put his concubine above his wife, and to that concubine herself, made him feel thoroughly disgusted. He thought about it for a while, then called for Jiang Rou.

When she came in, she saw Gu Jiusi sitting cross-legged on the bed. He opened his mouth, and the rawness of his voice hit her immediately. She said at once, with a pang: “My poor boy. I will have someone make you pear broth.”

“Actually, Mother,” Gu Jiusi said, with a slight awkwardness that he clearly did not know what to do with, “I have a favor to ask.”

“Tell me.”

“The thing is,” he started, and then something about what he was trying to say made him feel strange in a way he could not quite account for. He looked away from Jiang Rou and kept his voice deliberately light. “Since we are going through with this marriage regardless, that Liu Yuru is more or less already halfway a member of this family. And her household, you know what it is. Most of those betrothal gifts are going to end up in the hands of that concubine. That is just revolting.”

“I understand,” Jiang Rou said, and she smiled, warmth spreading across her face. Her son was finally learning to think about someone other than himself. He might be denying it with every word out of his mouth, but he was looking out for Liu Yuru all the same. “I have already thought of this. The most valuable items in the betrothal offer are the farmland and the East Street shopfronts. I have had all of them registered in her name. Once the official seals are on the deeds I will send them over personally, and while I am there I will make a point of pressing them about her dowry and insisting that it be handled by her birth mother.”

Gu Jiusi relaxed a little.

He still looked vaguely annoyed with himself, and said with a slight curl of his lip: “I am just saying it because that concubine is revolting. I do not mean anything else by it.”

“Yes, yes.” Jiang Rou pressed her lips together to hold back her smile. “I quite understand.”

Liu Yuru knew nothing of any of this.

Once she had made sense of how everything had unfolded, she stopped hoping for anything from Gu Jiusi. She let her mother arrange Yunyun in her room, and that very night, Liu Xuan came and stayed in Su Wan’s quarters.

Su Wan managed things quietly, as Liu Yuru had suggested: she did not officially raise Yunyun’s position, but simply let Liu Xuan come to Su Wan’s rooms whenever he wanted to see Yunyun. Liu Xuan felt too guilty to say anything to Zhang Yue’er about it, and so he came day after day under the pretext of visiting his wife.

Yunyun was sweet-tongued and charming, and Liu Xuan forgot himself thoroughly in her company. Su Wan, for her part, set aside the resentments of years and carried herself with a composed and dignified grace she had not shown in a long time. Liu Xuan found himself feeling a tenderness for her that surprised him, along with a considerable measure of guilt about how he had treated her.

And so half a month passed, with both the Liu and Gu families busy with wedding preparations. Gu Jiusi remained locked in his room, and Liu Yuru spent her days practicing her calligraphy, trying to find some stillness in the motion of the brush.

At the end of those two weeks, Jiang Rou came in person, bringing the farmland deeds and the property deeds and handing them over herself.

Liu Xuan welcomed a guest who came bearing gifts with considerable warmth. After Jiang Rou had exchanged a few pleasantries with Zhang Yue’er and Liu Xuan, she said, almost as an afterthought: “I have been here all this time and still have not met Madam Liu or the young miss.”

Zhang Yue’er’s smile went rigid.

In the past, Liu Xuan would have deflected with a word about Su Wan’s health and the matter would have been closed. But he had been carrying guilt about Su Wan recently, and he knew she would want to be part of their daughter’s wedding preparations. He cleared his throat, and under Zhang Yue’er’s startled gaze, told a servant to bring the Madam and the young miss out.

Zhang Yue’er’s composure slipped for just a moment.

A short while later, Liu Yuru came in with Su Wan on her arm.

Jiang Rou looked at Liu Yuru properly for the first time.

Everyone said she was plain, but Jiang Rou saw what others had missed: Liu Yuru’s bone structure was actually very fine. Her face had simply not finished growing into itself yet. There was still a trace of youth in her features, soft and unformed, which kept the parts from adding up to more than ordinary. But in a few years, when those bones came forward and her features settled into place, she would be a quietly beautiful woman.