"We were going to be outlaws running from Sun Haowei's wrath! There was no guarantee if our plan would even succeed. The less people knew about it the better. If you didn't know anything, you'd be safe."
"And after we were gone, someone needed to look after Bi Yu." Tai Cheng added, with an awkward shrug. "We couldn't trust anyone else. It was just…the right thing to do."
Yue Niang glared at her husband. He should have just kept his mouth shut! Did he not realise what it sounded like?
"So you left me behind. And used me." Lady Yu said morosely. Her posture, normally perfect, had collapsed under the realisation, her shoulders folding forward like a paper crane drenched in water.
She felt terrible. All the anger she held leached out of her, leaving behind an uncomfortable grief, and what made it worse was that she actually understood why they did what they did.
Lady Bi Yu was fragile in the first few years after they left. She had no friends left for support, and her new fiance Sun Haowei was bitterly upset over his friend's betrayal. He had a perpetual thundercloud over his head, lashing out at everyone and everything, and no one bothered with helping Lady Bi Yu, too afraid of his wrath.
Only Yu Ming Yan had extended a helping hand, but it wasn't without any ulterior motives.
She just wanted to have someone understand how she felt - everyone around them was cursing the selfishness of Yue Niang and Li Tai Cheng, calling them all sorts of foul names, but Ming Yan remembered their kindness and their understanding and most of all, she missed them dearly.
Lady Bi Yu understood her all too well. She missed them as much, if not more. And then Lady Bi Yu died too, leaving Lady Yu to grieve for her, all alone. She thought they would have returned then, or perhaps sent a message, a sign, to let her know they still cared.
But nothing ever arrived, and Lady Yu was left to miss them.
Now she was hit with the realisation that her feelings, her devotion, was merely one-sided.
Once a servant, always a servant.
Even if Lady Yu had loved the lady she served, she would never be anything more than an afterthought in her mind.
She bowed, every inch the polite servant, not a hair nor movement out of place.
"Forgive me for my presumptuous behaviour. I won't bother you with this again." She said woodenly.
"Wait - I didn't mean - Ming Yan - wait - " Yue Niang began but Lady Yu whirled around, refusing to cry in front of her.
She was just a servant girl after all, and her tears had no place in front of Li Yue Niang. She opened the door without warning, nearly knocking over the three eavesdropping maids that had their ears plastered to the door.
She knew from personal experience, they would hear nothing but muffled words - the doors were made with high quality oak after all. The secret was safe.
"Lady Yu! Oh no! Are you alright?" The young maids cried out in panic, noticing her red and swollen eyes.
"I'm fine. Get back to your duties," Lady Yu said, her voice choked with tears as she moved faster than they thought possible, storming away to her quarters. They tried to follow her, fluttering around her like anxious butterflies, but she waved them away with strict instructions to serve their guests well.
The maids doubled back to the room, only to be faced with the closed door.
"This is too much!" One of them cried out, stomping her foot. "How could they upset Lady Yu!"
"We're servants, why can't they upset us? They can even beat us if they want." One girl pointed out. Life in the Sun household was pretty good in comparison to working in some other households. She heard horror stories from maids from the Zhou family.
"Excuse you, we have some rights!" The first girl exclaimed. Her name was Ruoruo, and she was fuming mad! Lady Yu was her boss, and she had always treated them with kindness and respect, even when her job was 20 times harder than theirs.
"And even if we don't, Lady Yu certainly does. She has been working here for decades, how can someone that just entered simply walk in and bully her like this? She's not even the new mistress of this house! She's just Li Xue Ning's mother from the countryside!"
"There's… no guarantee…Lady Yu was bullied though," a third voice said hesitantly. Her name was Mianmian. "Maybe… maybe we're overreacting? Lady Yu was already… upset before. At the entrance." She had noticed the strange way Lady Yu acted when they greeted their guests.
"Isn't that even weirder? Have you seen Lady Yu cry before? Something terrible must have happened!" Ruoruo thought for a moment, and a lightbulb went above her head. "I got it - she must have been her bully!"
"Huh?" A plethora of confused faces met her statement.
"That woman inside bullied Lady Yu before, so badly that even now, Lady Yu is scared to face her and cries when she has to talk to her! She must be so traumatised!"
Everyone pondered that for a moment. It made a frightening amount of sense.
"Do… do you think… she did something… to those men?" Mianmian asked worriedly. They had arrived with bloodied bandages, and their injuries were severe enough that a doctor was called down to treat them.
"It must be." Ruoruo agreed with widened eyes. "She's a real monster! We have to stop her!"
The other two looked at her doubtfully.
"Trust me! I have a plan! But for now, we're going to make sure no one helps them!"
=====
Meanwhile back in the room…
Yue Niang tugged at her own hair angrily.
"Yah Li Tai Cheng, why did you have to say it like that? No wonder she thought we were abandoning her to the dogs!"
"We technically did, but at least the dogs were rich." Tai Cheng shrugged. "We can apologise again later if you want, but I know that she understands why we had to do it. It just hurts."
"She thinks she's just a servant!" Yue Niang exclaimed, distraught.
"You were his bodyguard, there's a difference."
"Wife, that's not true. Have you forgotten? In this world, if you're not a master, you're a servant," Tai Cheng replied.
His wife was a master - mistress. He didn't even dare to phantom the thought of getting together with Yue Niang until she pursued him.
"Next time we see her, just apologise for overstepping your boundaries. This is technically her domain now, not yours. Don't pick a fight with her over stupid things - you haven't seen her in decades, is this how you want things to end?" Tai Cheng continued.
Yue Niang grumbled and sighed, but she saw the virtue in her husband's words. "Fine. You're right. I'll apologise later. Come to think of it, maybe I should ask her where Bi Yu's grave is. I didn't see it when we were driven in, did you?"
"No I didn't," Tai Cheng frowned as he thought about it. "Maybe there's an altar with her tablet in the house."
"There better be, if not…" Yue Niang said ominously, as she opened the door and peered around. It was now regrettably empty. Just when she wanted to ask someone for directions!
No matter, she had been here before, surely nothing would have changed.
"Come on husband, let's go pay our respects to Bi Yu. I have a lot of things to say to her."
"Likewise."
However, finding the altar tablet seemed to be an impossible task. Yue Niang peered into every room and was sorely disappointed every time. There was an obscene amount of chandeliers, carpets and canopy beds, but the tablet was nowhere to be found.
Even more strange was how there were no servants to be found anywhere.
Whenever Yue Niang caught the tail gaze of a maid, she would bow and scuttle away, terrified as though Yue Niang was lioness hunting them for sport!
It just pissed her off. Was Yu Ming Yan so bad at her job that this household became so lax?
"Do you think Bi Yu is outside? And why is no one coming to help us?" Yue Niang lamented. She could have asked Jingwei, but then how could she explain wanting to visit his mother's grave? They weren't that close.
And she would never ask Captain Mu - that was just sheer insanity! If he wasn't paranoid about them before, he definitely would be after that.
The only person that could understand was the same one she made cry hours ago. Yue Niang cursed her own big mouth. And her husband's.
"The grounds are beautiful," Tai Cheng said as he gazed outside the window. "If I were Bi Yu, I wouldn't mind being buried outside with the flowers."
"Good point." Yue Niang sighed. "But I'm going to catch a servant and question them first before I go walking. I've already wasted too much time in this place!"
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