Though after she learned Ning Yi's identity that day, Nie Yunzhu had thought that with no bond of gratitude left between them, in a Jiangning as big as this, two people who knew nothing of each other but their names might never meet again. A few days later, though, she found that this notion was not necessarily accurate.
Waking that morning, she heard the faint sound of running footsteps from the road outside the house. When she opened the window, she saw Ning Yi's figure run past across her field of view — and only then did she remember that even without all that business of her dragging him down into the river, this Master Ning ran up and down this road every morning as a matter of course.
In an age that prized the pen over the sword, and among scholars especially, few people trained their bodies like that. The first time she saw him she had thought he was being chased; only later was she certain that this Young Master Ning, unlike everyone else in every respect, really was doing his morning exercises — and over these days the distance he ran seemed to keep growing. She was a little puzzled, but more than that she admired him.
It was early morning, of course, so she could hardly run into him every single day, but the occasions were frequent enough. Nie Yunzhu turned over in her mind whether she ought to go out and greet him, and then decided that she was being affected.
Everyone she had met and known before had wanted something from her — she had seen enough of it to be afraid — and now this Young Master Ning had not only saved her, but that day she had seen plainly that he wanted nothing from her. Some dealings ought to come naturally.
Looking back on it, she had been overthinking the whole thing.
She laughed at herself and gave herself a scolding or two in her heart, and that morning, when she saw him run past again, she came out quite naturally to greet him. Yet he merely waved a hand and ran off without stopping for an instant. She stood there dumbstruck for some while, until Hutao, her illness now fully recovered, came out after her. "Who's that? Do you know him, Miss?" Then she pursed her lips. "How rude..." But Nie Yunzhu had already begun to laugh softly.
Ha. The friendship of gentlemen — plain as water. An attitude like that: is that how he treats me, as a friend...?
Cold Dew passed, then Frost Descent. After the Start of Winter, with his heightened, systematic training and all the months of groundwork before it, his physique had seen its first real improvement. Nothing showed on the outside, but inside he now at least had the healthy body of an ordinary man.
In these times scholars did nothing but study, and nutrition rarely kept up; most people's bodies were in worse shape than a modern-day shut-in's. The Six Arts of the gentleman did include archery and charioteering, but among the Six Arts that was basically just a slogan, no different from slogans like "an all-around quality education in morals, intellect, physique, aesthetics and labor." Ning Yi's body had been of that same standard; to recover from twenty years of frailty in half a year was already quite good.
Every morning as he ran along the Qinhuai River, he would occasionally exchange a greeting with Nie Yunzhu — no more than nodding acquaintance. Her earlier business of killing a chicken and falling into the river had been clumsy enough, but seeing her a few more times told him she was no natural airhead.
In fact, that much had been clear from the conversation they'd had walking together after he bought charcoal. Her dress was always plain, but she was extremely beautiful, her figure slender and tall. Sometimes she happened to meet him at the door, and would wave and say with a smile, "Master Ning."
Sometimes he saw her in the kitchen beside the little house, the kitchen window propped open toward the street, and she would be lighting the fire or cutting vegetables, and look up to give him a smile.
Sometimes he saw her carrying a wooden basin out to the riverside terrace to pour water, and when she saw Ning Yi running toward her she would wave in greeting.
The morning wind was strong, and as it swept across the terrace it caught up her skirts; with the dawn light shining from the horizon behind her, she was like the Goddess of the Luo treading the waves.
A maid lived in the house with her — not much to look at, and short besides. Ning Yi could roughly guess that the girl had been ill not long ago.
It was in the tenth month that he and Nie Yunzhu finally had some simple conversation. That morning he had left the house without drinking any water and had lengthened his route; on the way back, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath, his throat parched to death, he stopped and asked her for a cup of water, and they exchanged a few words. The next day she was there again when he came back, and it seemed rude to just run past, so he stopped and rested a while. After that it gradually turned into a habit.
"Master Ning, you really do have a strange temperament, running for such a long time every day. Doesn't it tire you?"
"It only works because it's tiring. What's so strange about going for a run?"
"Yunzhu spent some years in Jinfeng Tower... and I've seen a good many scholars and talents there, but never one like Master Ning..." As she spoke she was looking at Ning Yi. But Ning Yi had long since guessed that she had a past like that; he only found it odd that she was so frank about it, and was not about to look too astonished. After a moment Nie Yunzhu asked, puzzled, "Could it be that you mean to take up soldiering, Young Master?"
"Ha, with the body I have now, how could I ever go to a battlefield? It's just that a scholar is good for nothing. A little exercise can only help."
"'A scholar is good for nothing'... if anyone else heard that, I'm afraid it would bring you some criticism, Young Master."
He never lingered long on these occasions, and they spoke only a sentence or two at a time, but as the days went by the outline of her situation grew clearer. She had spent some years in a brothel, then bought freedom for herself and her maid and purchased this rather pretty little house by the river; knowing little of how ordinary people lived, she had made a fair number of embarrassing blunders.
Nie Yunzhu might consider his temperament strange, but to Ning Yi her temperament was in fact somewhat strange too.
He guessed that she had been the daughter of an official family as a child and been sold to a brothel afterwards, and that once she had bought her own freedom she was unwilling to walk that road again — which was why her life was more or less pinched. There had to be a stubborn streak in the woman.
On a day at the end of the tenth month, when Ning Yi and Xiao Chan passed the vegetable market in the East Market, he had seen her from a distance.
The market was crowded that day. Ning Yi and Xiao Chan had gone up into a restaurant, and looking out from there he saw that Nie Yunzhu and her maid Hutao were both present, several meters apart in the crowd — it looked as though they had come to buy vegetables, or perhaps she knew one of the vendors.
Nie Yunzhu was still plainly dressed, and had wrapped a rather ugly kerchief around her head. She was crouched behind a stall that sold chickens and also slaughtered them for customers, one hand gripping a hen and the other holding a cleaver; she slit the hen's throat and let the blood run into a bowl on the ground.
She must have found it disgusting, because her head was shrunk back as far as it would go, yet her hands did not loosen their hold in the slightest. When the blood was drained she tossed the hen into the pot of hot water beside her and stood up, satisfied.
Then she seemed to glance toward Ning Yi's side — most likely an accidental sweep of the eyes; he could not tell whether she had seen him.
"Son-in-law, what is it?"
Noticing that Ning Yi was standing at the head of the stairs looking toward the market, Xiao Chan asked in puzzlement. Ning Yi shook his head. "Nothing. Let's go in." He turned around with a smile.
In these days people rarely got to eat chicken. Even when they bought one, they would generally take it home and keep it a few days before killing it; that a vendor would sell you one and then slaughter it for you was a service you would likely find only in the market of a big city like Jiangning — and only if the stall owner had some imagination.
The next day, as he sat on the steps of the little riverside house to rest, Nie Yunzhu asked, "You saw me at the East Market yesterday, didn't you, Young Master?"
"Mm. What did you go all the way over there to kill a chicken for?"
"Erniu from the Zhao family, who live over that way, is sweet on Hutao." Nie Yunzhu smiled and pointed to a house in the distance. "His family sells vegetables over in the East Market, so Hutao and I went over, and we got to know some of the people there. Yesterday when I went to buy something, Auntie Liu at the chicken stall was too busy to manage, so I went over and said, 'Let me give you a hand' — and then I actually did kill the chicken..."
She laughed happily over it. Ning Yi was taken aback for a moment, then shook his head with a smile. "Why go to all that trouble?"
Nie Yunzhu had been in a brothel, and to have bought her own freedom at that age showed that she must have been much sought after in those days.
A woman like that had never had to lift a finger at household chores; in many respects she was probably more of a proper young lady than the proper young ladies themselves.
From the day she bought her freedom until now, however bumpy her life might look, it was still much better than an ordinary household's — not knowing how to kill a chicken was really no great matter.
He would never have guessed she was stubborn to this degree: the moment she saw a chance, she had to go and learn the thing.
"It's always a joy to learn a little more." Nie Yunzhu gazed into the distance and smiled. After a moment she looked back toward Ning Yi. "Oh — Master Ning, will you stop here again tomorrow as well?"
Resting here had already become a habit; she needn't have said a word about it. Since she had brought it up, there must be some reason. Ning Yi asked, "What is it?" Nie Yunzhu shook her head with a smile. "You'll know when you come tomorrow."
When Ning Yi came the next day, Nie Yunzhu carried a bowl out of the house. In it were several pancakes, freshly fried.
"You haven't had breakfast yet, have you, Young Master? Take these and see how they taste."
Ning Yi normally ate breakfast only after he had finished running and rested up. This time he looked at her in some puzzlement, sat on the steps and rested a while, and then simply started eating. "What's all this about?"
Seeing him eat, Nie Yunzhu's smile held a note of delight, and she sat down beside him. "How do they taste, Master Ning?"
"Not bad." Ning Yi nodded.
"Then... do you think they would sell, if I took them out to market..."
"Hm. You're thinking of selling pancakes..."
Nie Yunzhu smiled. "Apart from the days when I pleased people with my looks, or sewed handkerchiefs and shoe insoles, the only thing Hutao and I make that doesn't look much worse than other people's is this. Hutao picked up a bit of it back at Jinfeng Tower and can make several flavors; they should still be edible... So we're thinking of getting a little pushcart and selling some tea and such on the side..."
Ning Yi had no interest left to speak of in matters of business. Of course, Nie Yunzhu was not really asking his opinion. This woman was tough by nature: she looked beautiful and delicate, but in truth she had a will of her own.
After leaving the brothel she had cut off all contact with her former patrons at a stroke; having sensed that ordinary life might require killing a chicken, she had swallowed her disgust and learned a thing she had once avoided at all costs; and now she wanted to do this work that hardly suited her air.
Ning Yi found it interesting.
In the first days of the eleventh month, in the Su family compound, Ning Yi changed rooms: he and Su Tan'er both moved down from the upper floor, which had begun to turn cold, to the ground floor. By now the chill of winter ran deep, and in the evenings everyone gathered in the parlor on Su Tan'er's side, where a charcoal fire was lit and the room was warm and cozy. And so Ning Yi's contact with Su Tan'er became all the more frequent...