Chapter 2
Meilin
When Ailin came through the back gate of Nuolan Garden with an umbrella that was plainer than any of the umbrellas their household owned, Meilin was certain her older sister had met a man.
The umbrella was too old and weathered to have come from the house of a prosperous merchant like Uncle Chen.
Meilin did not need much evidence beyond the undecorated umbrella because her mind was driven by intuition honed from years of reading romance novels and plays.
Ailin often critiqued Meilin’s ideas as being too easily swayed by “low-class books,” but Meilin knew there was truth in fiction.
If stories did not reflect a reality people believed in, then why would they be so popular?
If the ideas in those stories could be so easily dismissed as false, why did some people copy hundreds of chapters by hand while others hid or burned them?
Meilin had learned plenty from works beyond the Four Books and Five Classics, and everything she had learned told her that something interesting—and possibly romantic—had happened to Ailin.
She could hardly wait to find out what it was.
Leaving her zither in the sheltered pavilion where she had been playing, Meilin ran out in the rain to meet her sister and Begonia.
“Where did you get the umbrella?” Meilin asked as she moved under its protection.
“I’ll tell you later,” Ailin replied as she handed over the box she was carrying.
Meilin looked down at the unmarked box, which was heavier than she expected. “What is in here?”
“How is Mother’s condition?” Ailin purposefully changed the topic.
Meilin’s interest was piqued. It wasn’t every day that Ailin left the house. In fact, the women in their family rarely went out, even when Father had been alive, so the fact that Ailin wanted to hide rather than divulge the specifics of her trip meant the details were momentous.
“Mama should be fine,” Meilin said comfortingly.
“I sent Ming-ming to read to her so I could watch for you outside.” She had actually played the zither for hours to soothe Mama’s nerves while Ailin was gone.
Her fingertips were sore, but that was a small sacrifice compared to the endeavor Ailin had undertaken today.
“You told Ming-ming about me leaving?” Ailin’s disappointed voice hurt Meilin’s feelings.
“Yes, but she didn’t tell Mama,” Meilin hurried to say in defense. “And now you’re back, so everything’s fine.”
“I think things are better than fine,” Begonia said with a smile.
Even though the rain was cold, Ailin’s cheeks turned pink, showing that there definitely was a delectable secret Meilin needed to hear.
“Does the good news have anything to do with this new umbrella?”
Ailin’s face returned to its usual porcelain tone, but her grip around the umbrella handle tightened.
“The good news is that we have funds to help Nurse Liu now, so Mother can be at ease. The boxes Begonia and I brought contain silver, so let’s stow them quickly and get ready for dinner.
We don’t have time to discuss more at the moment. ”
Meilin nodded at Ailin’s suggestion, but her impatient curiosity burned inside.
Ailin was approaching twenty suì in age, and the opportunity to find a good match was growing slimmer by the year, especially now that Father was gone and Junyou was the head of the house.
Action was needed if Ailin wanted to avoid getting matched with someone old or terrible.
The girls put the silver in Ailin’s room, and it took all of Meilin’s self-discipline to hold her questions back while Begonia helped Ailin change into a white mourning dress and brush out her hair.
By the time they walked into their small dining room, Meilin’s curiosity was harder to hold back than a river after a monsoon.
But throughout the meal of rice, fish broth, and stir-fried water spinach, Ailin said nothing about the umbrella or its origins. Instead, she kept the conversation focused entirely on the success she’d found at Uncle Chen’s house and how Mama didn’t need to worry about Nurse Liu anymore.
“We have enough to help her son start a business in her hometown to provide for her, if they are interested.”
Mama dabbed at her mouth with a napkin after taking her first bite of food that day, and Meilin sighed in relief. But then Mama vocalized another worry. “Really, Ailin, I cannot believe that you left the house without telling me. And that you tried to sell part of your dowry!”
Ailin helped herself to a bowl of broth more calmly than Meilin could if she was facing criticism from Mama. “It turned out well, Mother. And I will pay Uncle Chen back with my own paintings.”
Though Ailin had been gone only a few hours, Meilin’s heart felt lighter now that she was home. Ailin’s skill in calming everyone was unmatched.
“Did Uncle Chen really pay you in silver?” At thirteen, their youngest sister Ming-ming’s greatest skill was asking abrupt questions.
Ailin nodded as she deposited a piece of tender fish meat into Ming-ming’s bowl.
Mama sighed. “If your father was alive, you wouldn’t have to do any of this. He would have found you a good family to marry into by now.”
Ailin smiled and turned the discussion to the weather, as she did whenever the topic of marriage came up, but Meilin felt a flush of anger on her behalf.
There was no use in empty talk about how things would have been if Father was still around, because he wasn’t.
Decisions about Ailin’s future marriage would be made by Mama and Junyou, and as much as Meilin loved her mother, Mama wasn’t in the right state of mind to be decisive.
And just because Mama had found happiness with Father did not mean that Ailin should be pushed haphazardly into a match.
If Ailin had accepted Junyou’s friend Huang four years ago, she would now be tied to a dissolute wretch with several concubines.
Such a husband was a guarantee for misery regardless of his fortune.
Junyou and Fan Fulan still acted like Huang was a missed opportunity that Ailin should reconsider, but Meilin thought of Ailin declining him as a narrow escape.
Surely Mama didn’t want Ailin to marry a man like Huang.
Ailin was practical, but she was also prone to sacrificing her own happiness for what she viewed as the good of the family, and marriage was one matter in which selfishness was necessary.
No one should have to settle when making such a life-changing decision.
Though holding out for a better match than Huang was a risk, a girl like Ailin deserved both wealth and love.
Dinner was long, lasting until the darkness required candles. While Mama and Ming-ming retired to bed, Meilin followed Ailin to her room.
Meilin closed the door and plopped herself on Ailin’s bamboo-framed luóhàn bed. “Now that you have no more obligations for the rest of the night, you must tell me all about your day, including where you got that strange umbrella. No excuses.”
Ailin smiled wryly. “Don’t be too excited. Begonia and I met a stranger on the road home, and our umbrellas got mixed up in the rain. That’s all. Please excuse me now; I need to wash my feet.”
“I’ll help.” There was clearly more to the story.
Umbrellas did not get “mixed up” unless there was close contact between their owners, and Ailin’s continued evasion on the subject only heightened Meilin’s interest. But even if she was not dying of curiosity, she would have helped Ailin take care of her feet.
Unlike Meilin, who cried so hard when she reached the foot-binding age of seven that softhearted Mama gave up, Ailin had endured the whole process without tears.
Ailin would do anything to maintain their family’s respectable reputation.
She even tightened her own bindings so Mama would not have to see her in pain.
All Mama needed to do for Ailin was make her embroidered lotus shoes.
Meilin sometimes ached while thinking about the weight of all the expectations Ailin carried.
Would Ailin be better off if she worried less about others and more about herself?
Bringing a basin of warm water, Meilin sat down on the bed and waited while Ailin carefully unraveled her bindings.
Meilin winced when her sister’s unnaturally bent bones came into view.
Bound feet were beautiful when covered in silk stockings and embroidered slippers, but the pain that went into making such beauty was stomach-churning.
“Does it hurt more because you had to walk so much today?” The answer was obvious, but Meilin asked more as an emotional reflex rather than a deliberate question.
With her natural feet, Meilin could have made the trip to Uncle Chen’s much more easily than Ailin, but Ailin had insisted on going herself.
She had said the seriousness of the task was more befitting an eldest daughter than a middle daughter, but what she really meant was that she would rather sacrifice her own dowry than Meilin’s, even if Meilin was willing.
“I’m fine,” Ailin said as she washed her feet and then -sprinkled astringent alum powder on them.
Meilin handed her the scissors she needed to cut new bandages.
“Actually, I didn’t walk all the way. There was a young man—”
“A young man?” Meilin could not contain her excitement any longer.
The man had to be the owner of the umbrella.
Her imagination was already providing her with ideas of the scene, something like the meeting of the White Maiden and the scholar Xǔ Xiān from the legend of White Snake.
A dashing gentleman holding an umbrella, walking through mist and rain to—
“Please don’t overreact. The young man happened to be walking in the same direction as we were, and he had a donkey that he let me ride for part of the way. And before you get any strange thoughts, he turned out to be Fulan’s younger brother.”
Meilin could not stem her shock. “Someone related to her did something nice?”