After Three Years of Slavery, the Entire Mansion Begged Me for Forgiveness novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Roll
The steward reads the substitute bride's name before the whole mansion, and Wanning's one friend has put it there; Wanning signs only if her bond contract burns in front of everyone, then finds fresh poison in her new husband's pulse.
By the second bell the steward had every servant in the Marquis's mansion standing in the front courtyard.
The snow had not been swept.
Wanning stood in the third row with a scrub bucket still in her hand.
She had been on her knees in the east corridor when the gong sounded.
The Marquis sat in a high chair on the steps with his wife beside him.
His daughter Yuxin stood at his shoulder in a peach silk jacket, holding a brass hand stove.
The steward unrolled a sheet of red paper.
"By the Empress's order, the house of Pei will send a daughter to marry Prince Wei, to bring him luck while he sleeps."
Everyone in the courtyard knew the Prince.
Three years ago he had been carried home from the northern border with a poisoned wound.
He had not opened his eyes since.
The soldiers still called him the War God.
"The bride will be Miss Pei Wanning, the Marquis's adopted daughter."
Nobody in the Pei family was called Wanning.
The steward looked up from the paper. "That means you, Shen Wanning. Come forward."
The girl beside her stepped away from her, afraid of catching the bad luck.
Wanning set the bucket down in the snow and walked to the foot of the steps.
She looked at Yuxin.
Yuxin came down slowly, with every servant watching, and pressed the warm hand stove into Wanning's cold fingers.
"Listen to me," she said softly. "The Empress wants a Pei daughter in that bed, and Father would have sent me."
"You put my name on the list," Wanning said.
"I put it there so it would be you and not some stranger." Yuxin squeezed her wrist. "You'll have silk and a house of your own. He can't even lift a hand. I'll visit every month, I swear it."
For three years Yuxin had taught her letters by candle in the woodshed.
For three years she had brought rice cakes up the back stairs and promised, every New Year, that she would buy back Wanning's contract.
The stove was the first warm thing Wanning had held all week.
She gave it back.
"Three years this house has fed you," the Marquise said from her chair. "You should kneel and thank us."
Wanning did not kneel.
As long as that contract existed, she would still be the Marquis's property, even in a Prince's bed.
She turned to the Marquis.
"I'll go, my lord. But not on this paper."
"Papers?" he said, and frowned. "Go on."
"The Empress's people will ask to see the bride's family papers before the wedding."
Wanning kept her voice even.
"What will you show them? A contract for a servant, with a price on it?"
The Marquis's face went stiff.
Nobody in the courtyard moved.
The steward bent and whispered in his master's ear, and the Marquis stared at her for a long moment.
"Fetch it," he said.
The steward came back with the strongbox and the paper that had owned her for three years.
It said Shen Wanning, daughter of the condemned physician Shen, twenty taels of silver.
"Burn it here," Wanning said. "Where they can all see."
The Marquis flicked it into the brazier at the foot of the steps.
She watched the edge curl black, then the name, then the number.
When it was ash she turned and walked toward the back stair, and nobody stopped her.
Her bundle was small.
It held two grey dresses, a wooden comb, and the jar of ginger sugar that had come to the back gate this winter with her name on it.
A jar came every year, with no sender, and the cook handed it over without a word.
She had always thought it was pity.
She took it with her anyway.
The sedan chair that carried her across the city was red, and the bearers did not speak.
Prince Wei's estate sat on the east side behind a high wall, and the guards at the gate wore black with a silver wolf on the chest.
They bowed to her without looking at her face.
The wedding rites would be tomorrow, the captain said.
Tonight she was to wait in the Prince's chamber.
The room was large and dim, with one lamp burning beside the bed.
The man in the bed lay on his back with his hair spread over the pillow.
He was thinner than the stories said, but his shoulders were still wide, and his face was calm.
Wanning stood at the foot of the bed for a long time.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm only here because nobody else would come."
He did not answer.
She sat down and took his wrist, the way her father had taught her.
Three fingers, light first, then deep.
The pulse was slow and even, and under it there was a thin cold thread that did not belong.
She knew that thread.
Her father had made her feel it on a dying dog when she was nine years old.
Monkshood, in small doses, taken for a long time.
She looked at the table.
A medicine bowl stood beside the lamp. She touched the side of it with her palm.
It was still warm.
Someone had fed the Prince this morning, on the day his bride arrived.
The pulse under her fingers said someone had done it every day for years.
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