They Jilted the Broken Scholar, So I Married Him novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: A Wooden Horse

The wedding is small and the guests came to stare; the salt merchant sends a toy horse as a gift for the fool and Lanxi turns it into Chengzhi's joy. That night she sees Madam Lu pass a box over the wall to Zhiyuan.

Our wedding had eleven guests, and nine of them came to stare.

The two that came for us were my mother and the old man who sold her flour.

Madam Lu had borrowed nothing, as she said she wouldn't.

The hall was swept, and two red candles burned on the table.

The maid had pinned red cloth over the pale squares where the scrolls used to hang.

I wore my mother's wedding jacket.

She had let it out at the sides the night before, with a face that dared me to say a word.

Chengzhi wore a red robe too big in the shoulders.

He stood at my left holding a fistful of dried dates.

Every few moments he looked at me to check that I was still there.

I was.

"Is that her?" a woman whispered behind us. "I thought she'd be bigger."

"She's big enough."

"He doesn't even know it's a wedding."

"Better for him," said somebody else, and a man laughed into his sleeve.

I kept my eyes on the candles.

At the door there was a stir.

A servant in the salt merchant's blue came in with two men carrying a long box between them, and the room turned its head.

"A gift from my master," the servant said, loud enough for the back row. "On the happy occasion."

He lifted the lid.

Inside lay a painted wooden horse on four wheels, with a red mane and a pull cord.

It was the kind a child of five gets for his birthday.

"Our master heard the groom has been asking for a horse," the servant said.

Someone gasped, and someone else stopped trying to hide it and laughed out loud.

Madam Lu went white to the lips.

I looked at the horse.

It was a good one.

The wood was smooth, the paint was careful, and a craftsman had spent a week on that mane.

I turned to the servant and bowed to him, a proper bow, down to the waist.

"Please thank your master from the Lu house," I said. "He is the first person to give my husband anything since the fall."

The servant opened his mouth and shut it again.

"He has been asking for a horse for thirteen days," I said. "Nobody could find him one that wasn't alive."

Then I took the cord, knelt down, and put it in Chengzhi's hand.

He looked at the horse.

Something went across his face that I had not seen since the fall, and it was pure joy.

"Horse," he said.

He pulled the cord.

It rolled across the swept floor with a small clatter, and he followed it with his mouth open, red robe and all, and laughed.

The laughing in the hall died one throat at a time.

A few of the guests looked at their shoes.

The servant went out without his tip.

The ceremony took three minutes.

"Bow to Heaven and Earth," the old flour seller called, because there was nobody else to call it.

Chengzhi bowed to Heaven and Earth, because I did, and he copied my bow exactly.

"Bow to the family elders."

He bowed to his mother, who did not move, and to mine, who bowed back with her eyes shining.

"Bow to each other."

Chengzhi turned and bowed very low to the horse.

A snort came out of someone in the back.

I did not wait for it to turn into a laugh.

I bowed to the horse too, deeply, and then to him.

Then I took his hand and guided his head down in a bow to me.

"Done," said the old flour seller. "They are married. Eat."

They ate and went home fast.

In the back room afterward, while I took the pins out of my hair, I heard Madam Lu in the passage with her sister's maid.

She did not know the paper door was thin.

"A noodle seller's girl, to nurse him," she said. "Of all the lane."

"She seems willing, madam."

"She is strong. That is what she is." There was a pause. "I would rather he had been given to a stranger."

I put the last pin in the dish.

My hands did not shake this time.

That night I laid a straw mat on the floor of the bridal room.

He lay down on the bed with the horse tucked under his arm.

I blew out one of the candles.

"Lanxi," he said in the dark.

"Yes."

"Are you staying?"

It was the longest sentence he had said to me.

I thought of the register, and the three months, and the paper my mother would be keeping in her sleeve.

"I'm staying," I said.

"Okay." He yawned. "Good."

In a minute his breathing slowed.

I lay on the mat and listened to it, and I did not sleep.

Toward midnight a dry leaf rattled outside, and then a latch clicked.

I got up quietly and put my eye to the gap in the paper window.

The courtyard was bright with moon.

Madam Lu was at the low wall by the plum tree in her night robe.

She held a flat wooden box, the kind a scholar keeps his papers in.

On the other side of the wall, with his hand out to take it, stood Bai Zhiyuan.

"Thank you, Madam," he whispered. "He would want it kept safe."

She passed the box over, and he was gone.

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