After seeing Li Qingquan off, Qian Jiaoniang fed Dingxi Marquis his lunch. In Great Xie, wealthy households ate three meals a day, while common folk ate two—but ever since Jiaoniang moved into the manor, she kept to two meals. Only after the Marquis moved in did the kitchen begin delivering three meals a day to her courtyard.
Once full, one naturally wanted a nap—especially after the Marquis’s tantrum the previous night. After finishing his meal, the Marquis rubbed his belly, lay down on the rocking chair, and immediately fell asleep.
Jiaoniang had two buckets of ice brought in, but her eyes were already too heavy to stay open. After shoveling a few quick bites of food into her mouth, she returned to her room for a nap.
The midday heat made it hard to sleep peacefully. Qian Jiaoniang kept hearing someone calling her name. She tried to respond and get up, but her body wouldn’t move. Just as she was struggling, someone shoved her hard—Jiaoniang gasped and opened her eyes.
Qingya sat at the bedside, smacking her with a fan. “I’ve been slaving away in the accounts room sorting the books for you, and look at you—sleeping like a baby!”
Jiaoniang groaned and sat up, wiping her face. Her voice was hoarse. “Sleeping? I was being crushed by a ghost.” Her chest still felt stifled. She got out of bed, went to the backyard, and used one hand to splash her face with well water—finally feeling a bit more awake. Then she filled a basin with water, grabbed a clean cloth, and returned to the room.
“Has the Marquis woken up?” she asked Wang Yong.
“Replying to Madam, the Commander has been awake for a while now, but he’s still listless. Ah Da is feeding him goat milk.”
Qian Jiaoniang entered Xing Muzheng’s room. Dingxi Marquis was lying lifelessly in the rocking chair, eyes open and staring blankly at the ceiling. Ah Da was holding the bowl of goat milk, but the Marquis didn’t even glance at it.
Qian Jiaoniang set the washbasin on the rack. “Ah Da, leave the goat milk here and go rest with Wang Yong for a while. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Understood. Thank you, Madam.”
Qingya brushed past Ah Da on her way in and sat herself at the table with a mischievous look on her face. “Jiaoniang, guess what I found while checking the accounts?”
“What did you find?” Qian Jiaoniang tossed the cloth into the basin and was about to wring it out when she remembered her right hand was still bandaged. “Come here and wring this for me.”
Qingya pouted but went over, wrung out the cloth for her, and handed it back unfolded. Qian Jiaoniang took it and immediately began wiping Xing Muzheng’s face. After two rounds of this, Qingya rinsed the cloth and hung it on the rack to dry. She clapped her hands, pulled out an account book from her sleeve, and held it out in front of Qian Jiaoniang. “See for yourself—page one.”
“What am I looking for? I can’t read.” Even as she said this, Qian Jiaoniang still took the book.
“There are a few characters in there that I taught you. Consider this a pop quiz.”
Qian Jiaoniang knew Qingya was literate. She had been learning to read from her daily—until all the chaos after Xing Muzheng’s arrival interrupted her studies.
A maid teaching her mistress to read—Xing Muzheng had never heard of such a thing. But this maid Qingya… in both manner and bearing, she truly seemed more like the master than Jiaoniang. He thought: How did someone like this end up as her maid?
Qian Jiaoniang casually shoved the goat milk into the Marquis’s hands and sat down with the ledger. Qingya sat beside her, eager to see her reaction as she opened the first page. Qian Jiaoniang scanned through it and immediately spotted the two most familiar characters: “Madam Qian… that’s me? That says me?” Qingya had first taught her how to write her own name: Madam Qian Jiaoniang.
“That’s right. The character before it says ‘Madam.’ So ‘Madam Qian’—that’s you,” Qingya said, pleased with herself like a schoolteacher.
Qian Jiaoniang smiled and looked down to read, “Er… shi…” Qingya had also taught her the characters for one through ten, and made her copy each of them a hundred times. “Is this… my age?” She’d been over twenty for several years now.
“Age? That’s twenty taels of silver! This is the payroll ledger, and it says you received twenty taels as your monthly allowance!”
“Oh, so that’s wh—what?!” Qian Jiaoniang had been reading half-heartedly, but once she processed the meaning, she blew up, slamming the table and standing up. “Twenty taels?! Where’d twenty taels come from? I only got two!”
Xing Muzheng was also stunned. Two taels? Her monthly allowance? For the Madam of the Marquis’s household?
Utterly absurd. He remembered this matter clearly. Feng Yuyan had asked him directly, and he’d told her to give Qian Jiaoniang twenty taels a month—because that was standard for noblewomen in the capital.
“Is it a mistake? Maybe they added an extra character by accident?” Qian Jiaoniang squinted at the ledger, but no matter how she looked, the “shi” (ten) character was clearly written.
“No mistake. I asked Steward Zhou Mu. It definitely says twenty.”
Qian Jiaoniang looked up from the ledger, eyes sharp. “That old fox Zhou Mu is skimming my allowance?” Twenty taels of pure silver! And all she got was a pitiful two? Her heart bled at the thought. With twenty taels a month, she could save up two hundred taels in a year. And just imagine how much silver that is!
“No, Zhou Mu admitted to everything else, but not this. He said it was Feng Yuyan who told him to write that, and she also ordered him to only give you two taels. The other eighteen taels—straight into her purse.”
The ghost-thing suddenly smashed the wooden bowl.
Qian Jiaoniang glared at the mess and, gritting her teeth, bent down to pick up the broken pieces. “Feng Yuyan… who would’ve thought she had such a refined, ‘lady-like’ way of handling things.” Was this her way of forcing her out?
Qingya leaned her cheek on her palm and lazily waved her fan. “If you ask me, it might not have been her. Could’ve been the Marquis pulling strings behind the scenes too. That’s how big families in the capital treat unwanted concubines—starve ‘em out till they leave on their own.”
What nonsense! Xing Muzheng fumed. Do they really think I can’t even afford to support a woman?
The ghost-thing howled in anger.
“Oh, so you’re all fired up now that you’ve had your milk?” Qian Jiaoniang growled at the Marquis, then calmly tossed the bowl shards into the basket. Her voice softened. “It wasn’t him.”
Qingya narrowed her eyes. “And how do you know that?”
Qian Jiaoniang shot her a glare. “Can you use your brain for once? This manor is run by Feng Yuyan. She told Zhou Mu to fake the ledger so no one would find out. But tell me—aside from those two, who else even sees these books?”
Of course—the master of the house, Xing Muzheng.
“Well, when you put it that way, it does make sense.” Qingya shrugged, readily admitting she misjudged. “So? What are you going to do about it?”
“Do about what?”
“Feng Yuyan! She’s stepped all over you—aren’t you going to teach her a lesson?”
Qian Jiaoniang glanced at Xing Muzheng, then lowered her gaze. “Let’s wait and see.”
Later, Qingya returned from a day of auditing the books and collapsed against the table, waving her sore arms. “Jiaoniang, have mercy on me—I can’t do this anymore!”
Qian Jiaoniang looked up from her embroidery, poured her a bowl of sugarcane root tea. “What now?”
“The ledgers—two months of records are missing. How am I supposed to reconcile the accounts?”
Qian Jiaoniang frowned. “How could perfectly good ledgers just go missing?”
“How would I know?” Qingya took a sip of the tea, found it bland, and set it down again. “The bookkeeping room says Feng Yuyan took them. Feng Yuyan says they’re with Zhou Mu. Zhou Mu says they’ve been in the bookkeeping room all along. In short, no one knows where they went.”
“What months are missing?”
“Wouldn’t you know—it’s exactly the months from when the Marquis started going mad.”
Qian Jiaoniang glanced at Dingxi Marquis, who was lying in the rocking chair asleep. “It really is quite the coincidence.” Could it be that Zhou Mu had already started scheming back then? Or was it the accountant who took advantage of the chaos? Or perhaps… Feng Yuyan?
“How much silver is missing, exactly?”
Qingya propped up her chin. “Roughly… twenty thousand taels of silver.”
“Tw-twenty thousand taels?!” Qian Jiaoniang’s eyes widened in shock. Such a large sum of silver, in just two months, gone?
Qingya curled her lips. “Look at you, acting so petty. Your Marquis doesn’t lack that bit of silver.”
“What do you mean my Marquis? The Marquis isn’t mine,” Qian Jiaoniang glared at her.
While the two of them were chatting, that “ghost thing” was sleeping, but Xing Muzheng was wide awake. He clearly heard Qian Jiaoniang say: “The Marquis isn’t mine.” Xing Muzheng thought: Haven’t we already bowed at the bridal ceremony? Aren’t we properly husband and wife? Even if he hadn’t cared for her before, she was still his wife.
“But what did you say just now? The Marquis’s salary is generous?”
“His salary? That’s the least worth mentioning. General Xing pacified Western Li and was summoned to the capital to receive rewards—just a single decree from the imperial family bestowed ten thousand taels of gold and the fief of Yuzhou. Do you know what a fief means…”
“Gold?! Ten… ten thousand taels?!” Qian Jiaoniang was so shocked her tongue twisted. She had lived half her life and never even heard of that much gold. “You’re talking about gold, not silver?”
“Could’ve been silver, hard to say.”
“What do you mean, gold or silver—which is it?” Qian Jiaoniang was getting thoroughly confused.
“Great Xie’s been at war for years. Who has time to mint that much gold? Replacing it with silver wouldn’t be unusual.”
“You mean… the equivalent of ten thousand taels of gold in silver?” Qian Jiaoniang’s eyes were now picturing a room full of sparkling white silver, practically blinding her.
So Xing Muzheng was that rich?
Qingya said, “But I didn’t see that much silver or gold in the storeroom, so the Marquis must have another treasury.”
Qian Jiaoniang wiped her greedy drool, but after thinking it over, gold mountains and silver seas had nothing to do with her. “A monthly expense of ten thousand taels for the marquisate—realistic?”
Qingya snorted, “This hundred-person household has more pomp than a thousand-man estate. And in the month before the Marquis went mad, the expenses were under a thousand taels. Social favors and such are accounted separately. If the money was for the Marquis’s treatment, why hide it? The ledgers went missing—clearly something fishy is going on!”
“I quite agree,” Qian Jiaoniang said. “You can’t just let all that shiny silver vanish. There’s got to be a trail. So how about this—from tomorrow—no, from today—cut everything off and start the ledger from scratch. Let’s figure out where those twenty thousand taels went, carefully…”
Qingya raised her hand to interrupt. “Wait, wait, me again? I don’t know how to do accounting!”
“But didn’t you just say you’ve managed the accounts for over a thousand people before? Doing it for a mere hundred should be easy.”
Qingya glared at her. “When did I say that?”
“Didn’t you just mention knowing what a thousand-man estate looks like?”
“I was bluffing! Who really knows what kind of pomp a thousand-man estate has?”
Qian Jiaoniang raised a brow at her. “Oh? So you do bluff?”
Qingya raised her chin proudly. “And what if I do? It’s none of your business. Besides, use your brain—this whole marquisate only has a hundred or so people. How could there be over a thousand? If you say that out loud, people’ll laugh their teeth off.”
Qian Jiaoniang poured herself a bowl of maogen soup. “I’m just a country bumpkin who’s never seen the world, but still—I figure in such a big world, there’s got to be estates with over a thousand people. Like royal clans or noble families, for instance…”
Qingya downed the maogen soup in one gulp and stood up. “I’m exhausted—I’m done arguing! In any case, I’m not doing the work. I’m not even the lady of this house—just a little maid who gets one string of coins a month. Who’s got the energy to manage books? Find someone else!”
What kind of little maid talks so outrageously? Qian Jiaoniang almost laughed. She waved a hand helplessly. “Alright, alright, let’s do it together. That should be fair enough, right?”
“That’s more like it.” Qingya flicked her sleeve. “After I finish my afternoon nap!”
Qian Jiaoniang waved her off. “Not today. The weather’s perfect—not too hot, not too cold. I’ve asked Ah Da to send everyone in the residence off on errands. I want to take the Marquis outside for a walk.”
Qingya frowned. “Why go to all that trouble? If he’s calm, just let him sit there. The Marquisate’s huge—if he causes trouble again, how would we find him?”
Qian Jiaoniang looked over at Xing Muzheng and let out a soft sigh. “Still, we can’t keep him locked up in this little courtyard forever.”
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