Ch.3- The loser of the fight between the Di and Shu households
Before we began, some terms one must know:
- Di: The main/official household within a family. The “Di wife” is the official wife of the family and a man can only have one Di wife unless she dies or is divorced. Children of the Di household are considered heirs/legitimate children that carry on the family’s title. Examples of how the term is used: Di daughter or Di son.
- Shu: The side household within a family but not to be confused with a branch family. The “Shu wife” is basically a side hoe that was brought back home. They are more commonly known as concubines and there can be several Shu wives. Children born from these concubines are considered illegitimate and cannot call their birth mother ‘mother’. Examples of how the term is used: Shu daughter or Shu son.
Note*: In the novel, the Second Furen is the Di wife of the Second Master. The Second Master is the second son of the Marquis’ household.
Meanwhile, on the Marquis’ household side of things.
Ever since that day, the atmosphere among the Second Household* has been gloomy. (T/N: The Second household here refers to the family of the Second son)
The Second Furen held the Sixth Young Lady, her own flesh and blood, in her arms and almost fainted when she had learned the news. On that day, everyone who served by the Sixth Young Lady’s side that day was severely punished and then sold to middlemen who quietly took care of the loose ends.
However, in the end, there was nothing they could do to reverse the situation.
That day, under the clear blue sky, the Sixth Young Lady was rescued out of the pond by a man. Her clothes were thoroughly soaked through and she was even hugged by an unknown man. Their bodies had touched each other so intimately and thus her innocence, in the eyes of the public, was thoroughly ruined.
For her reputation and the Marquis’ reputation, the Sixth Young Lady had no choice but to marry that man.
The Old Matriarch had scolded both the First Furen and the Second Furen that day.
Although she didn’t favor the Sixth Young Lady, the girl was still her granddaughter. Someone who grew up spoiled in the Marquis’ household and she wanted to wait until she was of age to marry her off to a good family. A favorable marriage is good not just for the girl but for the household as well. However, this horrible thing just had to happen!
No matter how angry she felt, the past cannot be changed. The Sixth Young Lady would have to be abandoned and the old lady understood this fact very well.
There are still many unmarried daughters in the household, she must let what happened to the Sixth Young Lady affect the others.
So when she opened her mouth again, she uttered an ultimatum that acted as the final word. The marriage was set, nothing could reverse it now.
The Second Furen had cried and made a ruckus, but nothing could be changed. She could only resign herself to fate and try and comfort her daughter.
After thinking about it again, she felt saddened by her daughter’s date.
“Daughter, my poor daughter!”
The Second Furen’s eyes turned red as she laid her eyes on her precious daughter who has lost weight after being bedridden for a few days. She rushed over to hug her daughter again. The Sixth Young Lady had been thrown a tantrum for several days now and her entire residence did not know peace. She has always been an ill-tempered and prideful child, how could she simply lay down and accept this?
The Old Matriarch had punished her by confining the Sixth Young Lady inside her boudoir for a few days and wanted the girl to use this opportunity to calm down.
However, she didn’t expect that the Sixth Young Lady not only did not calm down but did not stop making trouble.
The Sixth Young Lady hated the Old Matriarch with all of her heart. She felt resentment towards the Old Matriarch’s ruthless attitude and she blamed her mother for having no power. Finally, she naturally hated the Fifth Young Lady the most.
“Mother, I won’t marry him! I won’t even marry him if I die!” The Sixth Young Lady cried in her mother’s arms. She felt really scared deep down, her tears were flowing down freely and then she suddenly fiercely pushed the Second Furen away from her and ran towards her bedroom. With her clothes and hair disheveled, she threw everything she could find onto the floor.
The Second Furen was both frustrated and anxious. She was afraid she might startle the Sixth Young Lady and hurried over to pull her daughter into her arms. She sat down on the edge of the bed and frantically whispered, “My child! My darling little girl, you’re making mother worry to death, seeing you like this!”
In the middle of April, the air was still cold and the Sixth Young Lady was running on the cold ground without any shoes. The maids in her room were kicked out early in the morning and so she did not wear any proper clothes. The Second Furen had to cover her daughter with a blanket to keep the cold out. She only wanted to have a conversation with her daughter but ended up scolding her in her anxiousness.
The Sixth Young Lady was still crying and her voice had grown hoarse from all her crying. A little while alter, she finally raised her head and said sharply, “It’s better to give this daughter some white silk to hang myself with than to ask me to marry into that shabby family! If mother’s heart really hurts for this daughter, then mother shouldn’t have agreed to the Old Matriarch’s words!”
“Y-You…..how did I give birth to such a vile spawn!” Although Second Furen said these words, her heart was still full of distress as she finally cried sadly with her daughter in her arms, “My poor daughter!”
“It’s all because of that slut, Gu Qingwan! She was the one who harmed me! She was the one who pushed me into the water! You should marry her to that man instead! Let her take my place! Only a lowly spawn of a dirty concubine like her should marry such a poor family! Marry her off instead!”
Sixth Young Lady Gu’s eyes burned with hatred as she yelled hysterically.
How could the Second Furen not hate that mother and daughter seductress pair? Unfortunately, those two had deeply entrenched themselves in the Second Master’s heart and they were so tightly guarded that she didn’t dare to make a move.
When that lotus pond incident happened, the Fifth Young Lady was also present and one could tell that the little wench had a hand in her daughter’s misfortune. Yet, the Second Master only scolded the Sixth Young Lady for causing trouble while only sending the Fifth Young Lady to her room to reflect on herself.
The Second Furen hated the mother and daughter pair so much that she wished to cut them in half with her own hands.
The Second Furen and her daughter continued to cry as they could do nothing about it.
The Old Matriarch felt a headache coming as she waved away the momo in her room who had gone to ‘discuss’ with the Li family. These things should not be delayed and she should get these marriages over with before the rumors get out of hand.
Second Furen also understood that her daughter had no other way out. In this entire Marquis residence, only her daughter will have to be married to such a lowly person.
She suppressed the anxiety and anger in her heart as she straightened up. The people beside her openly watched her with laughing eyes, but she could not let them get to her. The Second Furen only has one son and one daughter. Now that her daughter has suffered such a big loss, her daughter’s life was considered ruined. She wanted to at least compensate her daughter by putting together an enormous dowry for her.
There are rules and regulations among each household concerning the dowry. The Di daughter receives 2000 taels worth of dowry while the Shu daughter receives only 1000 taels. Naturally, this was just on the surface. The actual size of the dowry was decided in private by the family of the daughter.
Since the Sixth Young Family is the Di daughter of the Second Household, she naturally gets at least 2000 taels worth of dowry. The Old Matriarch was somewhat compassionate. There were so many daughters in the residence, but only the Sixth Young Lady will have to marry so humbly. She was afraid that they would never see each other again and so she privately added another 1000 taels and even gave her a set of golden butterfly hairpins, a box of pearls, and 200 Mu of land.
The Second Furen couldn’t help but blush. The Old Matriarch didn’t do this because she cared about her granddaughter. Three other of her granddaughters had been married off before, but none of their dowries had been added on to personally by the old woman. However, she only did this for the Sixth Young Lady not because she was favored, but because the old woman was feeling pity for her granddaughter.
This was the final nail in the coffin and the marriage cannot be taken back.
The Second Furen had quietly sent someone to inquire about the Li Family’s situation.
The more she learned, the more heartbroken she became. To live in such a poor residence, what kind of evil has her daughter done in the past life to deserve this?
“They don’t even have a clean residence for my child to live in, just how is she supposed to live!”
A few loyal momos tried to soothe her anger and they said a lot of words but the look on the Second Furen’s face did not get better.
Naturally, the Second Furen could buy an entire residence for her daughter but wouldn’t the husband’s family just move in with her daughter if she does that?
She can’t use her daughter’s dowry to raise that family.
She thought about it. If she did so, it would only whet the other family’s appetite and raise a nest of jackals and tigers that would be greedy for more later on. It will only harm her daughter if she helps her too much.
So, instead, she sent a few people to the Li family to give them a few ‘pointers’ and one of them was buying a residence for her daughter to live in.
Second Furen calculated everything in her heart. She was planning on telling her daughter everything later to prepare her for the worst.
Although the Second Master was disappointed to lose a valuable Di daughter, there was no sadness on his face and he couldn’t even compare to the cold-hearted Old Matriarch as he took out only a check for 1000 taels to add to his daughter’s dowry. He also had no sense of shame when he reminded his daughter to wear more makeup.
The Second Furen felt so much shock in her heart that her nails broke from how hard they dug into her skin!
She didn’t care about her face anymore and fought with him for another round before finally forcing him to hand over a business deed to add to the dowry.
The Second Furen came from a good family and her dowry was plentiful. Apart from the piles of treasures, she also had eight prosperous businesses in the city and thousands of Mu of land.
Before, she had planned to give her daughter two of the business and then leave the others for her son. After all, the daughter is to be married but the son is the one to be dependent on when she grows old. But now, she has changed her mind.
She added on four of her shops, a residence on Swallow Lane, another residence somewhere else, and a title deed of 200 paddy fields to the dowry. She put the deeds in a mahogany box along with the land deed and business deed given by the Old Matriarch and The Second Master. Then she took out an additional 2000 taels to top it all off.
Therefore, the private dowry before the initial 2000 taels from the public fund were added, was 4000 taels, five shops, four hundred Mu of paddy fields and two residences.
After gathering all of it together, Second Furen locked it all up and put it away. The 2000 taels from the public fund were used mostly for the wedding, from clothes to the wedding bed and even small things like cups and saucers.
Fortunately, the bed for her daughter’s marriage had already been prepared from the age of eight or nine, so there was no need to rush. (T/N: The Chinese wedding bed is a Chinese wedding custom wherein the bride and groom’s new bed is set up and decorated in preparation for their new life together. It is often very extravagant.)
Immediately afterwards, there were even more negotiations with the Li family to make sure the three letters and six rites were followed. (T/N: bunch of rituals like exchanging birth cards and sending betrothal gifts. Learn more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_pre-wedding_customs)
The daughters of the Marquis’ household usually have three to five years to prepare for their marriages and the wedding date is chosen and selected very carefully. This was to show how precious and how valued the daughters of the Marquis’ household are.
Only the Sixth Young Lady’s wedding was hastily rushed because she had lost face for the Marquis’ household.
The Li family sold half of their land and a large sum of their money that they have saved for many years to buy the residence next door and hired someone to repair it.
The original Li residence remained the same but now the two residences were connected through the side doors. They built an outer wall to connect the two residences so that the entire structure looked like an inverted “吕”.
When everything was done, including the repainting, refinishing and repairs, the Marquis’ household sent someone over to inspect it.
Meanwhile, the Sixth Young Lady was essentially forced to bow her head and accept her fate while Second Furen ran around desperately to organize her daughter’s dowry. In addition to gathering money and items for her daughter, she also needed to arrange the servants who will be sent over with the Sixth Young Lady when she gets married.
If this was a normal marriage, the daughter of the Marquis’ family would marry into a Duke or at least a Count’s family. Therefore, the servants that are chosen were handpicked and skilled in ‘many’ ways.
But now, those two beautiful high-ranking maids were no longer needed.
Instead the servants who were chosen were her daughter’s nanny, two close maids, two sewing maids, two kitchen maids, and two coarse maids for heavy work.
She counted the lot and found that there were only nine. Such a singular and unlucky number would not do so she added another errand maid to bring the total up to ten.
And this number was in consideration of the poor Li family’s social status as the number of servants was reduced to a mere fraction of what it was supposed to be.
Time flies by quickly like how a white steed flits past a crevice, and soon September came. (T/N: a white steed flits past a crevice: an idiom that basically means time moves swiftly)
Sixth Young Lady Gu was not very old, just under fifteen and her birthday was at the end of year in the twelfth lunar month. Due to her hasty marriage, she had to move the celebrations for her birthday forward and invited over many of her close acquaintances .
Meanwhile, because the Li family had bought another residence and their wealth had been exhausted, they couldn’t even slap their faces to swell it up even if they wanted to. (T/N: slap one’s face to swell it up: an idiom that means to seek to impress by feigning more than one’s abilities allows.)
The bride price was personally overseen by Bai shi, and the overbearing Marquis’ household made her complain angrily inside her heart. She gritted her teeth and sent over a commoner’s list of betrothal gifts.
- One load of gift cakes, three sacrificial animals (chicken, pig, duck), two fish tails, two packages of seafood, including abalone, sea cucumber and shrimp.
- Four-colored pastries, fruit, two trays of wedding candy, and two catties of tea leaves and sesame seeds.
- Two red mahogany boxes filled with lotus seeds, lilies, red beans, peanuts, melon seeds, red dates, longans, and walnuts.
- Two dou of rice, six catties of noodles, and six jars of wine. (T/N: 1 dou = 600 liters in ancient times.)
- A pair of dragon and phoenix candles, a pair of incense sticks, a stack of ancestral papers and a pair of dragon and phoenix firecrackers.
Then finally a pair of live geese.
The bride price was set by Grandmother Li and she was not as short-sighted as the petty Bai shi. For the sake of her grandson’s face, she added a few more things.
The old woman had her golden hairpin from her own dowry melted down and then commissioned into something more fashionable and in-style with current trends. Then she ordered a pair of artisanal dragon and phoenix bracelets, a pair of silver bracelets, a silver comb, a pair of jade earrings, and finally, 100 taels, which she put in a small box.
To the common people, these betrothal gifts were more than enough.
Twin Dragons Translations 