My elder sister refused to marry him, so I was carried into the second branch of the Earl of Jing'an's household in a small bridal sedan.
On our wedding night, my husband didn't touch me. Instead, he looked through my dowry ledger and remarked, "Your accounts are more thorough than the Ministry of Revenue's."
My mother-in-law had managed the household for thirty years, and never let the keys out of her hands.
My sister-in-law was in charge of purchases and spent twenty thousand taels a year.
The entire household was waiting to see me, a daughter born to a concubine, make a fool of myself.
I did nothing at all. I only did one thing: kept the books.
The day my mother-in-law handed the purchasing over to me, I worked through the accounts until dawn. Over three years, thirty-one thousand taels had been siphoned away.
Everyone was waiting for me to turn the tables. I cut just eight hundred taels.
My sister-in-law added thirty percent to her own share on the gift list. I picked up my brush and wrote two words: Approved as submitted.
At the Mid-Autumn banquet, I read out an account in front of the whole hall: two hundred and thirty-four taels. Who had quoted the price, and who had altered the bill?
After listening, my mother-in-law said only, "You won today. But you've shown your hand."
She was right.
I was eight when my mother died. Over the next eight years, I went through the Wen household's accounts three times and found half of an old purchase order. It was dated the third day of the eighth month in the fourth year of Yonghe, and my mother's name was obscured by a blot of ink.
My mother-in-law pushed the keys to her private treasury toward me and said, "You know how to balance the books, but your heart has never been right."
On a snowy night in the twelfth month, she said again, "What happened to your mother wasn't done by anyone in the inner household."
If it wasn't done inside the household,
then it was the authorities.
