"I came back early today because there's something I need to—"
These words fell on Shen Qingyin's ears, making her fingertips, hanging at her side, quietly clench.
She deeply believed in the gods. Earlier, in order to pray for Tang-jie'er's fever to break, she had made a solemn vow to fast for seven days.
But such a vow required her parents to observe it together in order to take effect, and she had long since told Pei Yu about this—
Yet just yesterday, Pei Yu had broken the fast. He got drunk, forgot her words, and tormented her—and that was bad enough, but there was a vow before the gods.
With one promise voided, the retribution fell entirely upon their daughter.
True, in three years of marriage, Pei Yu had never once heeded any of her advice, and Shen Qingyin thought she had grown used to it…
But in this moment, a sense of helplessness still welled up in her heart despite herself.
She didn't wish to dwell on this distressing matter any longer. She shook her head at Nanny Qing and said, "It's nothing. Perhaps it's just the strange weather lately—she simply caught a chill."
When Shen Qingyin was very tired, she wanted to plunge headfirst into water. So after speaking, she turned and returned to her bedchamber, walking into the bath almost like a soulless shell.
As her body sank into the scalding hot water, Shen Qingyin felt all the tangled thoughts in her mind drifting away through her hair, dispersing into the water.
When did things start between Qingniang and that Wei Chang?
Her mother had known all along—why had she deliberately concealed it from her?
Yu-niang had warned her that Pei Yu was dirty, told her to keep her distance from him. But how could she refuse a man who took what he wanted without asking?
Lately she'd been suffering frequent aches in her lower back, her monthly courses hadn't come, and she had suddenly fainted in Youhuang Courtyard…
Had she contracted some filthy disease from Pei Yu?
The more Shen Qingyin thought about it, the more alarmed she became. Whether it was real or merely psychological suggestion, that place actually began to itch a little…
And also—
Shen Qingyin sank lower still, until the bathwater submerged her lips and teeth, leaving just her delicate nose above the surface to breathe.
And also—since the "Madam Pei" the human trafficker mentioned today wasn't her, then it must have been the person who schemed against her two years ago, who nearly caused her and Tang-jie'er, still in her womb, to die together.
That person's method of harming her had been through bribing servants.
Who was that person?
The only name Shen Qingyin could think of was Madam Wei.
If it was Madam Wei, her motive was most likely resentment at Shen Qingyin for taking Liang Luoying's place, driving her to attempt murder.
And now that Liang Luoying was newly widowed and had returned from Youzhou to Shangjing—would Madam Wei try to harm her just as she had back then?
Countless thoughts, impossible to cut through or untangle.
The scalding hot water had been soaked lukewarm by Shen Qingyin before she felt some of her strength return.
When she finally rose from the bath and changed into a loose inner garment, before she had even stepped out of the bath chamber, her daughter's shrill, piercing cries rang out in her ears once more.
Faster than worry came an uncontrollable weariness.
Shen Qingyin closed her eyes, instinctively wanting to let her daughter cry it out—a little crying would do her good—when she suddenly remembered—
If those cries reached Xueqing Pavilion and disturbed Liang Wanyou, or if Madam Wei in Bishan Courtyard, separated by just a wall, heard them, then tomorrow she would inevitably face another round of relentless scolding.
With that thought, Shen Qingyin no longer bothered to straighten her clothes and hurried out of the inner chamber to check on her daughter.
But the moment she stepped into the main hall, her entire body froze abruptly.
There, at the table in the main hall, a tall, cold, austere figure was sitting—who knew since when—
Pei Yu's long lashes shadowed his frost-like face as he bowed his head, flipping through the very book she had begged her mother to procure through untold effort!
Shen Qingyin's breath caught. She had hidden that book beneath her jade pillow—how had it ended up in Pei Yu's hands?
Could it be that Nanny Qing had changed the bedding earlier and swapped out her pillow as well, thus exposing the book—
"My lord!"
Shen Qingyin's heart sank, and her steps grew flustered as she approached him.
Pei Yu assumed she was once again trying to throw herself into his arms, and leaned back slightly.
Shen Qingyin noticed this small movement of his and stopped awkwardly in her tracks.
"Why have you returned to the residence so early today, my lord?"
As usual, Pei Yu would only come after she had fallen asleep, forcibly waking her regardless of her wishes.
He seemed to take the greatest pleasure in this.
To his wife's words, Pei Yu turned a deaf ear, his fingertips idly brushing over the pages, the air around him frighteningly oppressive.
Shen Qingyin, however, was burning with anxiety, wishing she could simply snatch the book away.
But reason told her she could not do that.
So she could only look left and right to distract herself, and it was then that she noticed, on the desk at Pei Yu's hand, the small wooden waterwheel she had just given to Tang-jie'er.
In an instant, Shen Qingyin guessed why her daughter had been crying again.
She ventured carefully, "My lord, this isn't—"
"It is."
It was the small wooden waterwheel he had snatched from their daughter's hands when he returned earlier, even as she cried her heart out.
Pei Yu closed the book and looked up at the woman standing there, his narrow, cold eyes devoid of any warmth.
"Shen-shi, I remember telling you repeatedly that Xutang is not to touch anything related to water, much less be allowed to play in it."
Shen Qingyin instinctively defended herself: "My lord, that day Tang-jie'er wasn't playing in the water—she was learning to swim. Swimming is a survival skill. I learned it early in my own childhood, so that if Tang-jie'er ever faces danger, she can save herself. It can do her no harm. And that little wooden waterwheel, I made it with my own—"
"So what?"
Pei Yu cut her off, raising the book in his hand and saying coldly, "You've studied these fringe skills since childhood. Have they taught you how to manage a household? How to keep accounts? How to be a proper, virtuous wife?"
His string of questions struck Shen Qingyin as if countless arrows had pierced her head, her ears ringing.
"And this book—"
Pei Yu flung the book to the floor, his voice full of contempt.
"This sort of idle reading, scribbled together by some common tradesman, unfit for polite company. If I hadn't come home early today and found it on your bed, were you planning to keep teaching my Pei family's daughter with such vulgar trash?"
Vulgar… trash?
Unfit for polite company?
Before Shen Qingyin's eyes appeared the scene from three years ago, when she had compiled this book together with that man.
She remembered how, as she dictated and he transcribed, their eyes would accidentally meet, and the tenderness she saw on his face.
She also remembered asking him whether it was vulgar of her to be unskilled at needlework and bookkeeping, knowing only these offbeat arts—and his reply that useful things ought to be appreciated by refined and common folk alike.
She remembered even more clearly how, three years ago, she had deliberately abandoned this book, and how she had suppressed her joy when she received it back from her mother just days ago.
In this moment, Shen Qingyin seemed to understand her younger sister's protectiveness toward that Wei Chang.
This was her beloved's handwriting.
One of the few things he had left to her.
A treasure she had lost and regained.
She could not—and would not—allow Pei Yu to slander it like this.
And so, for the first time in three years, Shen Qingyin summoned her courage and met the man's frost-cold gaze.
"Sir, this book is not the lowly trifle you claim it to be—it is full of practical techniques. If you truly hold its contents in such contempt, you are welcome to simply not read it. But I ask you not to read on while gagging, all the while sneering—"
Shen Qingyin spoke with growing relish, but the moment her words fell, she caught the sudden frost in Pei Yu's eyes.
"Madam Shen, do you know whom you are speaking to?"
The man's imposing pressure crashed over her like towering waves, and in an instant, it cut off the rest of Shen Qingyin's words, forcing them back into her throat—reminding her that she ought to remember who she was, what her station was.
Shen Qingyin blinked as if waking from a dream.
Yes. She had nearly forgotten.
Forgotten that she had married into the Pei household.
Forgotten that she must obey its rules.
Forgotten that this was a storied family of a hundred years, where rules reigned supreme—a lineage where the husband was the wife's master, where a husband was his wife's heaven and her superior officer, and a wife could not defy her husband in the slightest—a patriarchal clan that devoured women without spitting out their bones, a fortress of human flesh—
And she was nothing more than the tamed wife of the Pei family.
Realizing this, Shen Qingyin almost instinctively bent her knees and lowered herself, reverently and directly before the man.
She knelt.
Pei Yu looked down at the woman kneeling beside his leg, still thinly dressed from her bath just now.
Watching the inch of exposed cleavage—was it unintentional, or deliberate?
Watching her lower herself so practiced-ly, begging for his forgiveness just as she did upon the bed.
The impatience in the man's eyes deepened.
"Enough. You need not keep putting on this act."
His voice was cold and heavy, his brows and eyes shrouded in a frost that had not melted in three years.
"Time and again you deliberately provoke my anger, only to lower yourself and seduce me at the end. Such a push-and-pull scheme is novel once or twice, but used too often, it only wearies me."
Almost against his will, Pei Yu found himself recalling the long-absent, serene figure he had seen at noon in Qingfeng Tower.
Facing that person, he had been perfectly composed. Yet for some inexplicable reason, whenever he faced this Madam Shen, an unnameable fire always smoldered within him.
At this thought, Pei Yu tugged irritably at his tight collar and said to Shen Qingyin:
"I returned early today because I have something to tell you."
His gaze settled on the woman along with his words.
But in that instant, a strange thought suddenly struck Pei Yu—
The plump wife before him bore a faint resemblance, in figure and outline, to the young girl riding a horse in the portrait he had seen that day.