Gu Zhao had never spent much time in the manor growing up. Recalling now, he did occasionally encounter female physicians attending to his grandmother’s consultations in the past.
The women who came out as physicians were mostly matronly women in their forties or fifties, and given their age, there were few taboos to observe when practicing medicine outside.
Since this was the same physician who had attended to the old lady before, Gu Zhao saw no reason to object. He acknowledged the matter with a simple “understood” and did not press further.
After finishing the account book, he had a clear plan for the next day’s audience with the emperor. He ate a hasty late-night meal and lay down in bed, but sleep eluded him for a long time.
How could he, who had always prided himself on being composed and well-versed in propriety, have been so careless as to mistake the wrong person?
Why had he so readily assumed it was her? If not her, then who was she?
She had appeared at his grandmother’s residence. With her talent and beauty, she had not been among his grandmother’s candidates—clearly her status made her unsuitable to be his tongfang.
Recalling their two encounters, he was grateful he had not made any frivolous or flirtatious advances. Had word gotten out, it would have been a case of lust clouding judgment, destroying his own prospects.
It was also fortunate he had realized it early, before anyone could detect anything amiss. It was merely two chance meetings, merely a misunderstanding. After a few days, he was certain he could cast her from his mind and let the matter drift away like smoke on the wind.
In the front courtyard study, Gu Zhao tossed and turned in the dead of night, unable to sleep.
Meanwhile, at Fu’antang in the rear courtyard, Zhu Qingyu had stayed up the entire night attending to the old lady without closing her eyes.
Just past the hour of Yin, Old Madame Gu’s fever finally broke. Her breathing had steadied, and she was out of danger.
After leaving behind a prescription for recuperation, Zhu Qingyu took her leave of Duke Ding and Madame Gu.
Madame Gu tried to persuade her to stay:
“You’ve gone to such trouble to make this trip and labored through the night. How could we let you depart hungry and exhausted? That would make us seem utterly lacking in propriety as hosts. Do stay for breakfast, Lady Zhu, and leave once dawn breaks. I’ll have the steward arrange a carriage to see you off.”
Zhu Qingyu declined politely:
“Thank you for your kindness, Madame. It’s not that I’m being difficult or ungrateful, but today I must leave the capital with my husband to return to Yangzhou. We’ve already booked passage on a boat, and I need to hurry back to pack. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll miss the departure time.”
Since she had legitimate business, Madame Gu did not insist further. She had the matron prepare the consultation fee and saw Zhu Qingyu off from the manor.
The Gu family steward was about to arrange a carriage when, just as they stepped out the main gate, they saw the Zhang family’s carriage already waiting outside.
Hearing the sound of the Duke Ding manor’s gate opening, Zhang Shen, who had barely slept all night, quickly got down from the carriage and hurried over:
“Wife.”
After bidding farewell to the matron and steward who had seen her off, Zhu Qingyu climbed into the carriage carrying the bag of consultation fees. The moment she was inside, she opened the bag to look.
Zhang Shen held up a lamp to light her way, also peering eagerly into the bag, and said:
“I was worried sick. You went out for a consultation and didn’t come back by midnight. The messenger the Gu family sent couldn’t explain things clearly—just said you had to stay for a night consultation. I wanted to come find you, but the curfew wouldn’t let me through. I had to wait until the curfew lifted at Yin hour before I could come out. Oh—ten taels of silver. Just as expected of a duke’s manor. Generous indeed.”
This invitation to come from Yangzhou to the capital for a consultation would take two months round trip. The Gu family was indeed generous—when paying the fee, they had accounted for Zhu Qingyu’s travel expenses both ways, two months’ worth of lost income, plus the consultation fee itself. When she had previously cured the old lady’s back injury, the Gu family had paid her a full hundred taels of silver.
Adding today’s ten taels, it now exceeded a hundred. Zhu Qingyu only provided prescriptions at the Gu residence, not medicine—the Gu family supplied their own—so this hundred taels was essentially pure profit. Zhu Qingyu couldn’t save this much money in a year of running her own medical practice.
Moreover, the Gu family was not only generous but also refined. Whether it was Old Madame Gu, the mother of the Empress Dowager, or Madame Gu, the duke’s wife, despite their exalted status, they both spoke very courteously to Zhu Qingyu, a physician’s daughter from a merchant family. They were practically ideal patrons.
So despite being up nearly the entire night, hungry and exhausted, Zhu Qingyu was in excellent spirits—she had cured her patient and encountered an ideal patron. She tucked away the bag, leaned against the carriage wall, hugged the money pouch, and said cheerfully:
“Share and share alike. I’ve struck it rich this trip—I’ll make you new clothes when we get back to Yangzhou.”
Though ten taels of silver was less than a hair’s breadth of worth to Zhang Shen—he wouldn’t even bother to bend down and pick it up if he saw it on the roadside—he had been peering eagerly precisely because he was waiting for her to say those words. So he smiled too:
“Then please, wife, do me a kindness. This time, can you not be so stingy? Since you’ve struck it rich, be generous—buy a few extra bolts of cloth and make me several sets. I don’t have any underclothes left to wear; the old ones are all worn through with holes.”
Though they were husband and wife, Zhu Qingyu had always kept her finances clearly separate from Zhang Shen.
Because they had agreed from the start that this was merely a mutual cover, Zhu Qingyu initially only took the allowance Zhang Shen gave her—twenty taels a month, treated as wages. As for the Zhang family’s money, she had never felt it had anything to do with her.
The clothes and jewelry Zhang Shen bought for her, she treated as work uniforms—wearing them when going out as Lady Zhu of the Zhang family, decked out in fine silks and gold headpieces. But when making house calls as the physician Lady Zhu, she wore the cotton clothes she’d bought herself, with no jewelry at all.
As time passed and they grew closer, she came to see Zhang Shen as family. Treating him as she would want to be treated, returning kindness for kindness, she didn’t want to keep spending only his money. She wanted to use what she’d earned herself to buy things for him, to be good to him.
She couldn’t afford anything too expensive, but anything too cheap wouldn’t suit Zhang Shen’s status as a wealthy merchant. After mulling it over, she bought some cotton cloth, learned from the household embroiderers, and made Zhang Shen several sets of underclothes as a gift.
After all, for outer garments, you had to worry about the fabric, the tailoring, and the embroidery patterns—there was no way she could manage that.
But underclothes were different. They were worn underneath, where no one could see them, and they didn’t need embroidery. Just cut the cloth and sew it together. It took Zhu Qingyu a while, and her work still wasn’t great, but she eventually learned.
And even if the workmanship wasn’t good, it didn’t matter—she was mainly giving the clothes to express her feelings. Who would have thought that Zhang Shen, a young master raised in luxury, would actually quite enjoy wearing cotton clothes, cycling through those few sets of underclothes again and again.
Accused by Zhang Shen of being too stingy, Zhu Qingyu was utterly exhausted, her eyes closing as she drifted toward sleep. She mumbled a groggy defense:
“You can’t blame me for this—is your household short on clothes? Silks and satins piled up like mountains! Every season change, the embroiderers make your clothes first, and the finished pieces stack up in trunks you never even wear. You just keep grabbing those same few cotton ones day after day…”
Zhu Qingyu’s voice grew softer and slower, and before she could finish her sentence, she was already asleep.
Zhang Shen fetched a blanket and covered her with it, watching her silently for a long while. Only when he was certain she was truly asleep did he speak softly:
“That’s different.”