Chapter 79 Stepmother
No one present pleaded for the princess or spoke the truth.
Who is so tactless? The eldest princess is going to be beaten, but Concubine Jiang is still in His Majesty's arms!
Princess Tong'an was dragged away crying.
Jiang Shuyi was still hugging Pei Yan tightly, but she didn't say anything. She bit her lips in silence, her eyes moist, and she looked up at him pleadingly.
Pei Yan finally stopped and said seriously: "Why don't you let go? I know you have been wronged, but you can't break the rules like this."
Jiang Shuyi quickly took three steps away from him, straightened her clothes behind her, and was thankful that all the officials and their wives were kneeling on the ground with their heads down and did not see her embarrassment.
Pei Yan waited until she was ready before speaking gently, "Everyone, please stand up. The Queen and the concubines are already at the banquet. Please go over."
Holding a flower-viewing banquet is a rule left over from the time of the previous emperor. The previous emperor loved beautiful women, but no matter how beautiful they were, he couldn't select beauties every year, so he came up with this idea, which was called flower-viewing banquet, but in fact it was an opportunity to see which daughter caught his eye.
But since Pei Yan ascended the throne, the significance of the flower-viewing banquet became to please the empress dowager.
Now there was no need to please the empress dowager, and Pei Yan originally wanted to cancel the banquet, but when he thought about how Jiang Shuyi loved to be flattered, he thought it would be nice to stay and make her happy. After all, he had been busy with the affairs of the Wen family for some time and had not been able to accompany her wholeheartedly, and she was particularly well-behaved.
Pei Yan himself didn't need to show up to entertain a group of officials and their wives. After they all bowed and left, he lowered his eyes and asked Jiang Shuyi: "After all this trouble, do you still want to go to the banquet?"
Jiang Shuyi was afraid that he would tickle her again, so she quickly grabbed his hands and said without hesitation, "Yes! And Your Majesty must come with me, otherwise they will think that Your Majesty also scolded me and asked me to go back to the palace to reflect on my past."
Pei Yan: "Not pretending anymore?"
Jiang Shuyi smiled and said, "How can I hide this from Your Majesty? I know Your Majesty will definitely favor me, so I pretended to be pitiful so that Your Majesty can justify favoring me."
Pei Yan's expression remained calm. He freed one hand, touched her cheek, and asked softly, "Does it hurt?"
Jiang Shuyi no longer needed to play the victim to win the emperor's heart, so she didn't tell him that she had been pinched several times and it still hurt. She just joked lightheartedly, "If your majesty had come a little later, you wouldn't have seen this wound."
Pei Yan's expression softened a bit, "Do you think my treatment of Tong An is OK? If it doesn't vent your anger, I have other ways."
Jiang Shuyi thought for a moment and said, "As long as you don't let me off with the twenty strokes, I will be satisfied. But Your Majesty, it would be best if you can really convince the princess. If she continues to hold a grudge against me and tries to harm me in the future, that will be troublesome."
Pei Yan chuckled and said, "Okay, you can go back to the palace and redo your makeup first. I will go and warn Tong An, and then I will come back to accompany you to the banquet."
Jiang Shuyi nodded obediently, hugged Pei Yan tightly again, and then took the palace servants back to wash and change clothes.
*
Jiang Xianrong is still in Zhaoyang Palace.
She changed into Jiang Shuyi's dress, but her hair was still wet. When she saw Jiang Shuyi coming back, she was stunned for a moment because her second sister's hair was messy, but then she remembered the rules and knelt down to pay her respects: "Your Highness, your humble servant greets you."
Since my elder sister has entered the palace, even her biological father and mother have to kneel and bow to her according to etiquette when they see her, and they cannot regard themselves as the elder.
Jiang Shuyi was disgusted by Jiang Wanqing's constant calling her "sister". Now she felt more comfortable when she called her that: "Get up."
Yuzhu was shocked when she saw the injury. Jiang Shuyi explained that she was fine, and then asked the palace maid to bring a basin, towel, comb and other things to help her put on her makeup again.
She sat upright, glanced at the restrained Jiang Xianrong, and sneered: "Mother has such a strong temper, I thought the daughters I raised would be like the elder sister, taking pleasure in bullying sisters, how could there be such a cowardly temper as you."
Jiang Xianrong lowered her head, not daring to speak for her mother or to defend herself.
Jiang Shuyi was too lazy to embarrass a little girl. If she wanted to vent her anger from her childhood, she had to find the person who caused it: "Yuzhu, go to the banquet and call mother over. Tell her that Xianrong is here with me."
Yuzhu responded and went to do it.
Jiang Shuyi re-combed her hair and went into the inner hall to change her clothes. She knew that the little coward outside would be nervous and reserved when she saw her, so she changed her clothes but did not go out. When she heard the noise outside and knew that her stepmother had come, she leisurely took the arm of the palace maid and went out.
Dou was nervously pulling her daughter to ask her all sorts of questions. She couldn't hide the concern and anxiety in her eyes. It was unknown how long she had been worried ever since her daughter went missing.
When Jiang Shuyi thought of her aunt, her eyes dimmed for a moment, but soon returned to normal and she coughed lightly.
Dou immediately turned around and saw that it was Jiang Shuyi who came out. She quickly knelt down with her daughter to pay her respects.
Jiang Shuyi walked to the high seat slowly and sat down: "Mother, I haven't seen you for a long time. Since your Majesty ascended the throne and I have been deeply favored by the emperor, mother has deliberately avoided me at every palace banquet, but she also feels guilty about what she has done in the past?"
Dou's face looked a little ugly, but she dared not say anything.
In her previous life, Jiang Shuyi had never had the time to raise an enemy and demand an accusation. It wasn't some blood feud, she had more things to worry about, and Dou Shi didn't get close to her, so she gradually forgot about it. But in this life, she doesn't have to worry about anything, so she remembered everything.
"I still remember when I was a child, because I was clumsy, I could never embroider the patterns taught by the female teacher. My mother scolded me with harsh words, and she also called my aunt to let me embroider. My aunt knelt beside me and could not get up until I finished embroidering."
Dou lowered her head and trembled all over.
"I also remember one time when mother lost a gold hairpin. That day, only I and my elder sister entered mother's inner room. Mother called the two of us to interrogate us. My elder sister cried and said it wasn't her. I was just confused and couldn't cry, so mother used this as an excuse to convict me. She didn't even search for the stolen property, but dragged me in front of all the brothers and sisters and scolded me in public. It was not until later that my elder sister suddenly bought a lot of rouge and powder that mother noticed something and knew that it was indeed my elder sister who stole the gold hairpin."
When Jiang Shuyi really calmed down and thought about these things, she seemed to have returned to that time. Her clenched palms could not help but tremble, and she didn't know whether it was the helplessness of being wronged, or the resentment of being humiliated.
Dou was terrified, fearing that Jiang Shuyi would settle the score and implicate her daughter, so she confessed with a trembling voice: "It's all my fault! I was blind and treated the queen harshly when she was young. I deserve to die! But I really didn't intend to deliberately frame the queen. I didn't search for stolen goods at the beginning because I thought the queen stole the gold hairpin because Aunt Gu was in trouble. So I wanted to punish the queen severely so that she would not dare to do it again. The gold hairpin was counted as the queen and Aunt Gu. Later, I learned that it was Yanrou who stole it, and I immediately cleared the queen's name..."
Jiang Shuyi closed her eyes, feeling a tightness in her chest.
She cleared her name, but she only reprimanded her elder sister a few words, and then told her that her mother had wronged her, and that she was also stupid and didn't know how to explain herself. She would suffer for her temper sooner or later, so she could have learned a lesson for her this time...
Dou had done many things that Jiang Shuyi could not bear when she was young, and that she could not let go of for countless days and nights. She had also said many things that made Jiang Shuyi tremble with anger when she thought about them now. But she had never really thought of murdering herself and her aunt.
Her father claimed to be a Confucian gentleman and believed that children should be obedient to their parents. If Dou wanted to poison or deliberately embarrass her, he would not even need to find a reason. Even if Jiang Shuyi went to her father to complain, her father would only use the stories of wearing reed clothes to obey his mother and lying on ice to catch carp to teach her, telling her to still be filial and try to impress her mother.
Therefore, Jiang Shuyi couldn't even hate Dou with a legitimate reason. It seemed that all the injustices she suffered in her childhood could only be let go and fade away with time.
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