The Marquis's Daughter Doesn't Play Nice - Chapter 3

Unfortunately for him, that thunderous slap only frightened the people who had to worry about his temper: Mother, Concubine Liu, and Jiang Baozhu.

Mother went rigid and looked at me pleadingly.

I patted her back to reassure her. At the same time, my sharp eyes caught Jiang Yu and Jiang Baozhu secretly holding hands across from us.

I immediately shouted, “Brother, why are you holding Sister’s hand?”

Every eye turned toward them. Jiang Baozhu yanked her hand free, her face scarlet.

“I-I had a splinter. B-Brother was looking at it for me.”

A teasing smile tugged at my lips.

“Oh, a splinter! Let me see. I’m very good at picking at things.”

I made as if to go over. Jiang Baozhu frantically waved her hands and even backed away two steps.

“N-No need to trouble yourself, Sister. It’s out already.”

“Out already?”

I returned to Mother’s side, looking thoroughly disappointed.

The marquis abruptly stood. His face was darker than the soles of his shoes. He looked fit to burst with pent-up rage.

My fault, really. I’d interrupted his volcanic eruption just as it was about to happen. I hoped holding it in wouldn’t do him any damage.

He glared at me bitterly and pronounced each word through his teeth.

“I have business to attend to. We’ll discuss the ancestral shrine when I’m finished.”

So he wanted to use my place in the genealogy to bring me to heel. I rolled my eyes, utterly unimpressed.

Seeing that, he raised his voice, his teeth still clenched.

“From now on, we’ll tell people you’re Baozhu’s twin sister. You were frail as a child and stayed at a nunnery to pray and recover. You’ve only recently returned. If people discover you grew up in a pleasure house, what son of a decent family would dare marry you?”

“You may not care about yourself, but if you ruin the Jiang family’s reputation, how are your brother and sister supposed to marry?”

With that, he swept out, his sleeves snapping in his wake.

I watched him go. Hilarious. I didn’t even care about my own reputation, and he expected me to care about anyone else’s?

Besides, I glanced at Jiang Yu and Jiang Baozhu, watching me warily from the corner.

Couldn’t we just keep those two within the family?

I had intended to sleep in my own courtyard that night.

But Mother kept looking at me with those pitiful eyes.

I knew she desperately wanted to be close to me and was afraid I would resent it.

So I offered to sleep beside her.

While she happily went to order the servants to prepare a change of clothes, Grandmother sighed.

“Spend more time with your mother when you can. She’s had a hard life too.”

She told me a great many things I hadn’t known.

For instance, the concubine who had switched me was named Shen Jiaojiao. She had originally been one of the marquis’s bedchamber maids.

For three generations, the Jiang family had had only one son to carry on its line, and this generation already had Jiang Yu. Shen Jiaojiao had therefore been convinced that the principal wife was no different from herself. Neither of them could lay an egg.

My arrival had upset that delicate balance. Mother received more of the marquis’s attention and affection.

That was why Shen Jiaojiao had done something so outrageous. She had even encouraged Jiang Baozhu from childhood to turn against Mother and keep her distance, suggesting that Mother was unfit to be a mother at all.

Mother had always been gentle. More than a decade of such treatment had made her increasingly timid and insecure.

Seeing my deepening frown and grave expression, Grandmother added, “Lately, though, she’s begun to find some backbone.”

Confusion entered my eyes.

“When she learned what happened to you, your mother lost her temper for the first time in more than ten years. She had Shen Jiaojiao seized and dealt with her ruthlessly.”

“To stop her from damaging your reputation, your mother had her drugged mute. Then she had the tendons in her wrists and ankles severed and sent her to a country estate to fend for herself.”

My eyes widened. Thinking of the woman who had stiffened in terror at the marquis’s outburst just now, I was astonished.

Was this what they meant when they said motherhood made a woman strong?

But another detail in the story caught my attention.

Why had Jiang Baozhu been so easily persuaded, even as a little child, to keep away from her own mother?

At the age when children were most attached to their mothers, why had she attached herself to a concubine instead?