March morning, sunlight warm against new wood,
spring willows trailing soft beside the canal.
Over the neighbor’s wall, peach blossoms sway
like a drowsy infant stretching in its sleep—
and somewhere beneath that tree, you imagine her:
a girl turning a silk knot in her fingers,
waiting, quietly, for a man who does not come.
***
The old horse was a sorry specimen — legs thin as reeds, coat shaggy and overgrown.
Su Mu led it by the bridle, a long cloth-wrapped bundle slung across his back. Behind him, Lu Qinghua followed with the book chest clutched to her chest, her earlier astonishment not yet fully settled, her steps careful and close.
At the gate of Su Manor, a young servant was going through the motions of sweeping. He glanced over, and his eyes filled with the particular irritation of a man whose morning had already gone wrong.
Xu Sanjin had been at the Su household for just over three months. In that time, he had swept floors, emptied chamber pots, and done every manner of low and thankless work. The grand romantic scenario he had imagined — his striking good looks quietly capturing the heart of the Su family’s young mistress — had not materialized. What had materialized, just yesterday, was a broken porcelain vase and a subsequent visit to the woodshed, where the head steward’s men had applied a switch to his backside with considerable enthusiasm. Today, walking was an adventure. The other servants kept giving him odd looks, and a particularly uncharitable theory was circulating about the precise angle of the switch in question.
In that frame of mind, the sight of this new arrival — neither quite a warrior nor quite a scholar, road-worn and scruffy — did nothing to improve his mood. He gave the broom a few perfunctory swings and turned to go.
“A moment, young friend.”
The man had spoken. Xu Sanjin pressed his fingers to his forehead and thought: I knew I couldn’t escape this. He turned back without warmth.
“What do you want?”
They say the doorman of a prime minister’s house ranks as a seventh-grade official. But the Su family — however proudly they styled themselves among Hangzhou’s ten great gentry clans — were merchants at the root of it, which was a low business by the old reckoning. And Xu Sanjin wasn’t even a doorman. He was a sweeping boy. The attitude, it must be said, was impressive for the role.
Su Mu had long since made his peace with human nature. People had bad days. He held no grudge. But Lu Qinghua had no such equanimity — whether from genuine indignation or a private wish to see Su Mu humiliated, she cut in sharply before he could say another word:
“Open your eyes! Your young master has come home! Go inside and tell them all to come out and receive him properly!”
She said it with no particular pride of association. Which told Su Mu everything: she still didn’t believe him. She was here to watch the disaster unfold.
Xu Sanjin knew Lu Qinghua well enough — she sold buns on the opposite street, a face you couldn’t forget. Seeing her bark orders at him lit what remained of his patience on fire.
“Foul-mouthed bun woman! Coming here to make trouble for nothing! You think I haven’t seen this before? Every few weeks some nobody shows up claiming to be our young master — and every last one of them gets thrown out on their ear! Take your stray man and go home before the head steward comes out and gives you both something to remember!”
“Whose stray man?! Say that again and I’ll tear your mouth off!”
“You dried-up old hag — who do you think you’re pulling your nonsense on here?!”
Lu Qinghua’s most sensitive nerve, everyone in the neighborhood knew, was any suggestion that no man had ever wanted her. She had arrived intending to watch Su Mu fail. Instead she found herself in a shouting match with a sweeping boy, which escalated, by some logic peculiar to street arguments, into a formal wager: if Su Mu truly proved to be the Su family’s young master, Xu Sanjin would work three months at the bun stall for free.
Su Mu watched all this with the expression of a man caught between laughter and despair. A small crowd had begun to gather. He reached into his robe, produced a travel permit — much creased, much the worse for the journey — and held it out to Xu Sanjin.
“If you could pass this inside for me. Much obliged.”
Xu Sanjin was not, in truth, a bad-natured person. Su Mu’s politeness gave him pause. A smiling man is hard to strike, and Su Mu was smiling. But the wager had been made, Lu Qinghua was watching, and his pride had backed him into a corner. With a snarl, he snatched the travel permit from Su Mu’s hand — and tore it in two.
Lu Qinghua erupted. Su Mu’s smile faded.
But the noise had done its work. From inside the manor, servants and household staff began drifting toward the gate, drawn by the commotion. Word was going around: another one claiming to be the young master. They came out to see.
The business of the second young master was an old story in the Su household, and not a happy one. He was the elder son of the first branch — bookish enough to have some standing, but spending that standing on brothels and cockfights and every manner of idle amusement, his reputation in Hangzhou considerably less than fragrant. Six months ago, he had gotten himself into a quarrel over a courtesan at the House of Sifan, the kind of quarrel that embarrassed the whole family. The old patriarch himself had been dragged into it. There was nothing to be done but send the boy away — framed as a journey for self-cultivation, understood by everyone as an exercise in cooling down.
He had wandered into bandit country. Word came back: probably dead. The Su family had spent money and called in favors, sent people to search. Nothing.
The reward offer had produced the predictable results. Informants and opportunists wore out the threshold. Most were after easy silver. A few had gone so far as to produce look-alikes — men who resembled the young master well enough — and told tales of a blow to the head that had left him confused, his memory scrambled, hoping to slip into the life of a wealthy idler.
It had all become rather tiresome.
Su Mu, for his part, was not easy to recognize. More than half a year of hard living showed plainly on him: cheeks hollowed, skin darkened by sun and weather, nothing about his appearance tended or considered. Even setting aside Xu Sanjin, who had only been at the manor three months and had never met the original Su Mu, the servants who now pressed around the gate could not have picked him from a crowd.
Then an old man in a long gown walked out of the manor. One sharp word to Xu Sanjin, and the noise dropped.
“Sanjin! What is this racket first thing in the morning! Have you no sense of how things should be done! You want to make us a laughingstock!”
The head steward Zhang Zhaohe. At his appearance, Xu Sanjin’s mouth snapped shut. He stood glowering at Lu Qinghua. She glowered back, unrepentant.
Zhang Zhaohe’s gaze had moved past them both.
It settled on Su Mu.
Something shifted in the old man’s face.
“…Second Young Master?”
“Uncle Zhang. It’s me.”
***
Strictly speaking, Su Mu was a fraud — though not in any way that could be easily explained.
The original Su Mu and his elderly manservant had been set upon by bandits on the road south. Beaten, left for dead. When the young man regained consciousness, the soul inside him was no longer the same one. The old servant never woke at all. The new tenant of that battered body knew nothing of Su Manor, nothing of the family, nothing of what waited for him here — only a crumpled travel permit as evidence, and the body itself, which at least was genuine.
This was why he had spent the better part of two weeks boarding next door at Lu Qinghua’s, quietly mapping the household before he walked through the gate. He had needed to know what he was walking into. And he had kept open, in the back of his mind, the possibility that he would decide not to walk in at all — that he might simply turn and make a quiet life elsewhere, free of entanglements he hadn’t chosen.
But now Zhang Zhaohe had heard that voice.
The old steward’s composure dissolved entirely. He seized Su Mu’s arm with both hands, his eyes suddenly bright with tears he made no effort to hold back.
“It is the Second Young Master — it truly is — the Second Young Master has come home—!”
The words tumbled out of him, repeated, half-disbelieving. The servants behind him erupted into motion. Xu Sanjin stood in the midst of it like a stone in a stream, not moving, not speaking, his face the color of old paper.
Zhang Zhaohe turned and struck him once on the head, not gently.
“Don’t just stand there waiting for the sky to fall on you! Go tell the master — now!”
“I — yes — yes, at once!” Xu Sanjin stumbled, turned, bolted — caught his foot on the threshold, yelped, patted his backside reflexively, and kept running.
“The rest of you — what are you gawking at! Come help the Second Young Master with his things!”
The household staff sprang forward. They grabbed for the horse’s bridle, looked around for baggage, and finding none, simply relieved Lu Qinghua of the book chest she was still clutching. Then the whole crowd swept inward, carrying Su Mu with it, the manor gates swinging open and then closing behind him.
Lu Qinghua was left standing in the street.
“He actually…” She stood there for a long moment, not quite able to finish the thought.
The gate was shut. The street was quiet. There was a faint, unexpected hollow feeling somewhere in the vicinity of her chest.
***
Su Mu had not gone far inside when Su Changzong — master of the first branch, Su Mu’s father in this life — came hurrying toward him with the undignified urgency of a man who has just received very important news. When he saw his son, he stopped. Then he closed the distance and held on, and did not say anything for a while, because there was nothing to say that the embrace didn’t already say.
A father does not stop loving a difficult son. However the previous Su Mu had spent his time — and he had spent it badly — he was flesh and blood. His father had believed him dead. He was alive.
Su Mu’s elder brother was away handling family business in another province and wouldn’t be seen for some time. But the extended family made up the difference: cousins from the other branches crowded in, studying Su Mu with a curiosity that fell just short of zoological.
Su Changzong was the head of the first branch, but the first branch’s position had been precarious since the disappearance of the second son. With Su Mu now returned, the other branches felt the balance shift. Their welcome was polite. Their feelings about that welcome were complicated.
The consolation they settled on was the rumor that had already begun to circulate: the young master had taken a blow to the head from the bandits. He remembered some things. Not others.
That, they found, made the whole situation considerably more comfortable.
The household commotion lasted the better part of the day. Su Changzong brought him before the family patriarch. By evening, Su Mu had finally earned a moment’s peace.
He sat, let himself exhale, reached for his tea.
A small maidservant appeared in the doorway, hovering.
“Young Master,” she said, very quietly, looking at the floor. “I’ve come… to assist with your bath and to help you change.”
Su Mu recognized her from his observations of the past weeks. Cai’er — a personal maidservant of the previous Su Mu’s, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, just beginning to grow into herself. There was something of an early-summer tendril about her — a little unsteady in her new height, not quite sure what to do with the person she was becoming, a touch of childish roundness still softening what would soon be a striking face. She stood with her back slightly curved, as if she hadn’t quite decided to occupy her own body yet.
She reminded Su Mu, not unpleasantly, of his little sister back in the other life.
“I’ll manage myself,” he said. “Go and rest.”
The girl let out a small breath — relief, unmistakably — but then something troubled her expression.
“But… the master gave instructions,” she said, her voice careful and miserable. “I’m to attend you. If I fail in my duty, I’ll be punished…”
Su Mu considered telling her he would explain to his father himself. Then he considered the probability that this would work. He let the matter go.
Cai’er fetched the hot water and prepared the tub with the quiet efficiency of long practice. She moved to help him undress.
But when his robe fell away entirely, she stopped.
Her hand went to her mouth. A small, involuntary sound escaped her.
In the swaying lamplight, Su Mu’s chest and back were a landscape of scars — thick, ragged, each one a record of something that had happened in that missing half year.
Su Mu smiled tiredly. He had expected this.
He waved her toward the door.
This time, she went without argument, and quickly.
***
Su Mu was still in the bath when Cai’er arrived, breathless, at Su Changzong’s chamber.
“What?! No birthmark?! That’s impossible—”
“I… I looked carefully, sir… It’s not that there’s nothing there… it’s just that where the birthmark was… there’s only a scar now… a very large one… and many others…”
“Many scars?”
“…Yes. Many.”
The night had grown deep. The lamp in Su Changzong’s room burned on. He sat with his thick fingers drumming slowly against the table, his brow furrowed into deep lines.
On the table beside his hand, pieced carefully back together and pressed flat, lay an old travel permit.