They Jilted the Broken Scholar, So I Married Him novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: Fever

The physician came before dawn and stayed an hour.

He lifted Chengzhi's eyelids, listened to his chest, and pressed two fingers under his jaw.

"A fever like this is the bruise drawing back, or it is the bruise turning," he said. "I cannot tell which. Keep him cool. Give him water in small sips. Send for me if he stops sweating."

"And if he stops breathing?" said Madam Lu, in a flat voice.

"Then you will not need to send for me."

She sat down on the bedroom stool and did not get up again for three nights.

I will say that for her.

We worked in turns without ever agreeing to.

She wrung out cloths in the basin, and I laid them on his forehead and his wrists and the soft places behind his knees.

She held his head while I trickled water between his lips.

In the small hours of the first night she began to hum, a tune I did not know, and I understood it was the one she had sung to him as a baby.

I did not look up, and neither did she.

On the second morning a servant in the salt merchant's blue knocked at the gate with a lacquered box.

"From Miss Hua," he said. "Wild ginseng, for Master Lu's health. She asks that you give her regards to the household."

Madam Lu took the box in both hands.

Inside lay a root as long as my forearm, pale and fine, packed in red silk.

I had never seen one like it.

A root that size cost more than my mother earned in a year.

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