“Thank you, Fourth Sister!”
Yu Lehuan’s voice was very light, carrying a trace of secret delight. She glanced at Xie Fuling, then quickly lowered her head again, her lively manner just like a little rabbit.
Xie Fuling felt she could get along well with this little sister.
“Lehuan, take Fuling back to her room to rest. Mother’s going to make dinner, we’re eating meat tonight.” Zhang Qiaofeng took the meat from the cart and walked toward the kitchen. Yu Qingshan, keeping his promise, started fixing the cart wheels in the courtyard while there was still some daylight left.
“Father, Mother!”
Just as Xie Fuling was following Yu Lehuan and hadn’t yet stepped through the door, someone suddenly rushed into the courtyard from outside, clothes in disarray, eyes full of anxiety.
“Yu Heng, so you do remember to come back?” Zhang Qiaofeng stormed out of the kitchen to scold her eldest son, but the next moment he dropped to his knees with a thud, startling her back a step. “What, what’s going on?”
“Father, Mother, I beg you, I beg you to help me.” Yu Heng pressed his palms together, bowing and kowtowing repeatedly. “I really have no way out.”
“What do you mean, no way out? Speak clearly!” Zhang Qiaofeng bent down meaning to pull her eldest son up, but he dodged, refusing to rise, and suddenly she thought of something. “Is it your father-in-law? Has he given you trouble again?”
Yu Heng’s body stiffened, a flash of panic in his eyes. He stammered, “It’s, it’s actually not exactly trouble…”
“Then why do you say you have no way out?” Zhang Qiaofeng saw through her eldest son’s little scheme at a glance and scolded him loudly. “How did your father and I tell you? We told you to wait for us to come back, and we’d go call on them together another day. But you insisted on going alone, and now that you’ve hit a wall, you come running back crying to your father and mother?”
“Lehuan, what exactly is going on here?” Xie Fuling asked her younger sister quietly, lowering her head.
Xie Fuling’s instinct told her this had something to do with the eldest sister-in-law selling Xie Leyi.
Yu Lehuan glanced at her eldest brother kneeling on the ground, a look of pity in her eyes. “To pay for Fourth Sister’s medical treatment, all the money in the house was spent, and there was no more money to hire a midwife or prepare things for Eldest Sister-in-law. Eldest Sister-in-law got so angry she sold Fourth Sister off.”
“Was Eldest Sister-in-law afraid Father and Mother would give her trouble, so she went back to her own family’s home?”
“It was Eldest Brother who secretly sent her back! He was afraid Father and Mother would send Eldest Sister-in-law to the authorities.” Yu Lehuan’s tone quickened a little as she spoke of it. “After all, Eldest Sister-in-law is carrying a child of the Yu family. Anyway, now that Fourth Sister’s been brought home, Father and Mother’s anger has cooled. He’d meant to bring you home first, then go together with Eldest Brother to speak clearly with the Li family, but Eldest Brother couldn’t wait and went alone, and unsurprisingly the Li family gave him trouble.”
“What ten taels?”
Zhang Qiaofeng’s shocked and furious voice reached her ears. Xie Fuling’s heart gave a jolt, and she edged forward a little, straining to listen.
“You know very well what state our family is in right now, couldn’t you at least discuss it with us?”
“Mother, this is already the price I talked my father-in-law down to with a lot of pleading, otherwise he wanted thirty taels.” Yu Heng was at a loss too, both sides were close family, and it was genuinely hard to decide. “Shuiqin has been staying at her family’s home for so many days now, eating poorly, sleeping poorly, she’s gotten thinner. If our family can just scrape together ten taels for her brother’s bride price, she can come back.”
“If you hadn’t sent her back behind our backs, would this problem even have come up?” Zhang Qiaofeng raised her hand in anger, but looking at her son growing more haggard by the day, her palm finally landed on her own knee instead. “I never should have agreed to your marriage in the first place, the Li family is a bottomless pit!”
Hearing this much, Xie Fuling had already understood most of it. She took the pearl out of her pocket, walked up to Zhang Qiaofeng, and opened her palm. “Mother, pawn this, and there will be silver.”
Yu Heng, the first to look up, stared in astonishment at the girl who had suddenly appeared in the household. “You… you’re…”
“Didn’t your father and I already tell you before, she’s your real younger sister Fuling!” Zhang Qiaofeng’s heart ached and felt guilty at once, aching because her eldest son had eyes for nothing but his wife, and guilty that her real daughter had just come home only to witness the family’s shame. “Mother doesn’t want it, you found it, you keep it for yourself.”
“Mother, if Fuling is willing to help me, why can’t…”
“You still have the nerve to ask?” Zhang Qiaofeng’s voice drowned out her eldest son’s, her eyes glaring fiercely at him. “You’re a grown man with hands and feet, already married, can’t you earn ten taels of silver yourself? All you know is to open your mouth and ask for it!”
Scolded by Zhang Qiaofeng until he couldn’t lift his head, Yu Heng could only grab at his own hair and wail. “But all I know is farming, the grain from our few mu of land isn’t even enough to eat. It’s my own uselessness that’s making Shuiqin suffer alongside me!”
“You… you…” Zhang Qiaofeng’s lips trembled with anger.
“Mother!”
Xie Fuling reached out to steady Zhang Qiaofeng, who was swaying on her feet, and forcibly pressed the pearl into her hand. “First find out whether the pearl is real or fake. Pawn it for whatever it’s worth. Eldest Sister-in-law is about to give birth. If she gives birth at her own family’s home, it won’t be good for her or for our family.”
Having grown up in the Marquis’ estate, she understood very well how much a family’s reputation mattered.
“But…” Zhang Qiaofeng looked troubled, the pearl in her hand feeling as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “You’ve only just come back, you haven’t even warmed the bench yet, and already I’m letting you pay for this. In my heart, I…”
“Since I chose to come back, I can’t just enjoy the good times, I should share the hardships with you too. But…” Xie Fuling’s tone shifted, and she looked at her eldest brother. “There are a few words I need to say to Big Brother.”
“Say it, as long as you’re willing to help your big brother this time, I’ll listen to whatever you say from now on.” His younger sister Fuling was, right now, his lifeline.
“First, this money is borrowed from you, and you’ll have to pay it back one day. Second, as a husband and a father, you should have a man’s sense of responsibility, you can’t rely on Father and Mother for everything, both money and effort. Third, if you were even a little more reliable, would Eldest Sister-in-law really have been driven to sell Xie Leyi?”
In three sentences, Xie Fuling laid bare all the problems the Yu family had been carrying for a long time.
“It’s not that I’m not trying to find ways to earn money, it’s just that this time, I didn’t expect my father-in-law to be so hard-nosed, giving me only one day to raise the money.” Being scolded in public by a younger sister who had only just come back, Yu Heng felt he couldn’t save face, but the sister’s pearl could solve his crisis, so he could only quietly defend himself.
“If Eldest Sister-in-law’s family really cared about her, they shouldn’t be making outrageous demands right when she’s about to give birth, chilling her heart like this.” Seeing how her parents behaved, Xie Fuling realized that her eldest brother, though the firstborn son, wasn’t at heart someone who couldn’t tell right from wrong, he simply had no one to point it out to him. “The legs are attached to Eldest Sister-in-law’s own body, if she truly wanted to come back, who would dare forcibly stop a pregnant woman?”
“Fuling, are you saying… Shuiqin was in on this too?” Zhang Qiaofeng, after all, had been through marriage and childbirth herself, and once you had children, there was much more to consider.
“Does Big Brother still not understand, even now?” Xie Fuling’s gaze fell calmly on her eldest brother. “The reason they dare to squeeze you like this is, first, they think you’re useless, and second, they look down on our Yu family!”