The fourth month brought a premature heat to the Yangtze Delta, a wet, suffocating blanket that trapped the smells of the canal within the walls of the Yang estate. In the western wing, the air was heavy with the scent of mildew and the phantom odor of the tofu shop that seemed to emanate from the very pores of the wood.
For Little Cabbage, the heat was a fever in the blood. Ge Pinlian had not returned. He had sent word that the vats required tending overnight, leaving the bed in the tenant quarters empty. It was the first time in weeks the "Dwarf" had not been there to claim his space with his jagged snoring and the sour smell of garlic.
She placed a single white camellia on the stone bench in the courtyard—a silent semaphore.
When the moon rose, Lord Yang Naiwu came.
He did not come as a landlord inspecting his property, but as a thief. He slipped through the shadows of the moon gate, his silk robes rustling like dry leaves. Inside the cramped, dirt-floored room, the encounter was frantic, stripped of the poetry he usually courted. It was a collision of appetites. Yang, bored by the bloodless propriety of his own wife, devoured the peasant girl's vitality; Little Cabbage, starving for a life she could not name, drank in his refinement even as he used her body.
They were not making love; they were consuming each other. In the tangle of the rough cotton quilt, amidst the smell of dust and cheap oil, they built a fragile, desperate kingdom.
Then, the kingdom fell.
"Xiugu! Open the door! It's stuck!"
The voice was a splash of ice water. It was rough, impatient, and utterly familiar. Pinlian.
Yang Naiwu froze, his hand still tangled in her hair. For a second, the aristocrat vanished, replaced by a terrified man caught with his trousers down. The power dynamic evaporated.
"He's back," Yang hissed, scrambling off the bed. He gathered his robes with trembling hands, his dignity in tatters. "Stall him. Say you were asleep."
He forced the window open and vaulted into the darkness of the garden, leaving Little Cabbage alone in the wreckage of their intimacy.
She lay there for a heartbeat, the terror expanding in her chest like a physical mass. She smoothed her hair. She forced air into her lungs. She lit the red candle, her hand shaking so violently the shadows danced macabre waltzes on the walls.
"I'm coming," she called out, infusing her voice with the grogginess of deep sleep.
She unlatched the door. Pinlian stood there, framed by the night, smelling of sweat and brine. He looked small, tired, and dangerously ordinary.
"Why the delay?" he grumbled, shouldering past her. "A man works until his back breaks, and he has to wait on his own doorstep?"
"I was dreaming," she lied. The taste of the lie was metallic.
Pinlian didn't answer. He walked into the bedroom, stripping off his tunic. Little Cabbage followed, holding the candle high, praying the light would blind him to the truth written on her skin.
But the light revealed everything.
Pinlian stopped. He looked at the bed.
The quilt, usually folded or smoothed flat, was a chaotic sculpture of ridges and valleys. The pillows were crushed. It looked like a battlefield.
He turned to his wife. In the flickering light, he saw the flush that stained her neck, the wildness in her eyes, the way her chest heaved. She looked ravaged. She looked like a woman who had just been thoroughly, exhaustively handled.
A silence stretched between them, taut as a bowstring.
"Go to your room," Pinlian said. His voice was quiet, devoid of its usual bluster.
Little Cabbage opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She retreated to the small side room where she usually slept, blowing out her candle, leaving him in the dark with his suspicions.
Pinlian did not sleep. He stood over the bed, the heat of the room pressing against him. He felt a sickness in his gut, a churning mix of humiliation and rage.
He reached out and stripped back the quilt.
The evidence was not subtle. Nestled in the depression of the mattress lay a small, embroidered sachet—a xiangnang. He knew it well; he had watched Xiugu stitch the ducks and lotuses by the light of the oil lamp. She wore it tied to her inner sash. For it to be here, detached, meant the sash had been undone.
But it was the second object that stopped his heart.
A handkerchief.
It was not the rough hemp cloth of his class. It was pale blue silk, cool to the touch, bordered with a fretwork pattern of silver thread. Pinlian picked it up. His callous fingers snagged on the delicate weave. He brought it to his nose.
It didn't smell of tofu. It smelled of sandalwood, old ink, and the expensive musk of a gentleman.
He knew that scent. He had smelled it when he paid the rent. He had smelled it when he bowed to the Master in the courtyard.
Yang.
The realization was a physical blow. The "Green Hat"—the eternal, mocking symbol of the cuckold—was no longer a joke told by old men in the teahouse. It was clamped tight around his skull.
He gripped the silk until his knuckles turned white. He wanted to roar. He wanted to kick down the door to the side room and beat the truth out of her. He wanted to march to the main house and burn it to the ground.
But he did neither.
He sat on the edge of the bed, the anger curdling into a cold, paralyzing fear.
He was a dwarf. A nobody. Yang Naiwu was a Juren, a man who dined with magistrates and wrote poetry with the governor. If Pinlian accused him, who would listen? Yang would crush him with a single petition. He would be jailed for slander, his family ruined, his livelihood gone.
And Xiugu? If he cast her out, he would be alone again—ugly, poor, and wifeless. The laughter of the town would be unbearable.
He was trapped. The silk in his hand was not a weapon; it was a leash.
He shoved the handkerchief and the sachet into a crack in the plaster wall, hiding them away. He lay down on the bed that still smelled of another man, and stared into the dark, plotting the only move a weak man could make.
Across the courtyard, in the main house, the night was not as still as it seemed.
Lady Zhan, Yang Naiwu's wife, sat by her window. She was a woman of the old school—quiet, invisible, and observant. She had not been sleeping. She had been mending a robe when she heard the commotion in the tenant quarters.
She had blown out her lamp and waited.
Through the paper screen, she saw the shadow detach itself from the western wing. She saw her husband, shoeless and disheveled, sprinting across the moonlit stones like a common thief, clutching his robes to his chest.
She watched him disappear into his study.
Lady Zhan placed her needle back in the cushion. She did not weep. She did not rage. She was a daughter of the gentry; she knew that men wandered. But this... this was dangerous. To bed a courtesan was a dalliance; to bed a tenant's wife, under one's own roof, was a violation of the cosmic order.
She sat in the darkness, her face a mask of porcelain calm. She would not speak of it tonight. But she knew that the rot had entered the house, and she would have to find a way to cut it out before it consumed them all.
The sun rose over Cangqian, indifferent to the secrets of the night.
Pinlian left the house before Little Cabbage awoke. He did not go to the tofu shop. He walked with a grim, hobbling purpose to the house of his uncle, Yu Jingtian.
Yu Jingtian was eating breakfast when his nephew burst in. He listened to the story in silence, chewing on a pickled radish. When Pinlian finished—when he described the sachet, the silk, the smell—Yu stopped chewing.
"You have the handkerchief?" Yu asked.
"I hid it."
Yu Jingtian wiped his mouth. His face, usually a mask of merchant conviviality, hardened.
"This is bad, Nephew. Very bad. The Yang clan is powerful. If you bite a tiger, you must be sure you can kill it. Otherwise, it eats you."
"So I do nothing?" Pinlian cried, his voice cracking. "I wear the hat and smile?"
"No," Yu said slowly. He looked at the ceiling, calculating. "We do not fight him with fists. We fight him with fear."
"Fear?"
"Yang Naiwu is rich. He is proud. He has a name to protect. If the town learns he is bedding his tenant's wife... his reputation is ash. The magistrate would strip his title. His enemies would feast on his bones."
Yu leaned across the table, his eyes narrowing. "He knows this. If he knows that we know... he will pay to keep the silence. We can get more than twenty-five dollars, Nephew. We can get a shop. We can get land."
Pinlian stared at his uncle. The idea was repulsive—to sell his honor for silver. But it was also seductive. It was a way to regain power.
"And the girl?" Pinlian asked. "What of the whore?"
"The girl," Yu said coldly, "is the bait. We proceed with the wedding. Once she is your wife, locked in your house, she is your property. You can beat her, you can starve her, you can keep her. But for now... we let the scholar think he is safe. And then we squeeze him."
Pinlian nodded. The shame was still there, burning in his gut, but it was now tempered by the cold comfort of greed.
But the Yang estate had too many eyes.
While Pinlian plotted, a man named Liu Zihan stood outside the back gate of the Yang compound. He was a former servant, dismissed for theft, who nursed a grudge like a bottle of old wine.
He had been in the garden the previous night, too. He hadn't seen the handkerchief, but he had seen the Master fleeing the western wing. He had seen the panic.
He knocked on the gate. When the steward opened the slot, Liu grinned, revealing yellow teeth.
"Tell the Lady," he hissed, "that I have a story for her. A story about where the Master leaves his shoes at night."
The steward slammed the slot shut, but the message was delivered.
The web was tightening. The scholar, the wife, the husband, the uncle, and the spy—everyone held a thread. And in the center, dreaming of a silk she would never wear, Little Cabbage slept on, unaware that she had ceased to be a person and had become a currency in a transaction that would end in blood.
To see how the blackmail unfolds, read the next chapter.