A heavy snow fell, and the weather turned so cold that water froze the instant it dripped.

It was now the twelfth lunar month, leaving less than twenty days until Chen Wanqing’s wedding.

Xu Suying had earned a good sum of money and, with some free time on her hands, began to focus on preparing her daughter’s dowry.

Qingshui County was an impoverished area. When a local family married off a daughter, a well-off household would provide a dowry of two quilts, two mahogany chests, two new sets of clothes, two washbasins, two wooden buckets, two combs, and two towels.

No one knew the exact reason for this, only that everything had to come in pairs to be auspicious.

As for struggling families, or those who didn’t cherish their daughters, they might just bundle up some old clothes and marry the girl off with that.

Xu Suying’s love for Chen Wanqing was well-known in all the surrounding villages. If it weren’t so, she wouldn’t have viciously cursed out someone for claiming Chen Wanqing was a jinx who would bring misfortune to her husband. Nor would she have endured so many strange looks while keeping her daughter at home year after year.

But now that the apple of her eye was about to be married, and with plenty of silver on hand, Xu Suying naturally wanted to prepare a more generous dowry for her daughter.

She ordered two mahogany chests and bought all the other items needed for the wedding. She made a point of buying dozens of pounds of cotton, and as soon as it arrived, she gathered the village women she was friendly with to help her sew the quilts.

Making wedding quilts was a major undertaking, and a tedious one at that. It was far from a task that could be finished in a day or two.

If one person were to do it all, it would take a good eight to ten days.

Xu Suying planned to make six quilts and six new sets of clothes for her daughter, so she invited eight women over, hoping to get everything finished in three days.

Winter quilts were thick, generally requiring about nine pounds of cotton, with the heaviest ones using up to eleven.

Of course, quilts weren’t just for winter. They were needed for spring and autumn too, so they also made two quilts of about four-and-a-half pounds each, and two of about six-and-a-half pounds.

Xu Suying held a scale, carefully weighing the cotton and dividing it into piles. Meanwhile, Second Aunt-in-law led the other village women, who sat on a floor covered with oilcloth, laying out the quilt covers and the cotton batting.

It was freezing outside, so to keep everyone from falling ill with a cold, Xu Suying had lit two charcoal braziers inside the room.

To make their work easier, she had lit the braziers at dawn. By now, the room was so toasty that you could walk around barefoot without feeling the chill.

With everyone’s hands and feet warm, the work went quickly.

As they worked, they began to gossip.

They started by teasing Xu Suying, remarking how generous a mother she was to prepare so many things. They’d even heard she was having a pair of gold bracelets made for her daughter.

When the Zhao family had come to arrange the engagement, they had brought a gold hairpin, a pair of gold earrings, and a gold ring. With the addition of the gold bracelets Xu Suying was having made, Chen Wanqing would likely be the only girl in their village with a complete set of gold jewelry.

After discussing this, the conversation turned to Chen Wanyue from the old family house. Wasn’t she engaged to Li Cun? They wondered what the groom’s family had given for the betrothal gifts; what was more, none of them had heard a single thing about it.

All they knew was that she’d been promised to two families, but what exactly had the Li family brought when they arranged the engagement?

"How would I go about finding that out? If you don’t know, I certainly don’t. The old family house is keeping it under wraps. I’d wager the Li family sent over plenty of fine things, and the old matriarch is worried we’d try to get a share, so she’s refusing to say a word."

One of the women snorted with laughter. "Oh, you’re just being wicked. ’Plenty of fine things,’ she says! I think it’s more likely they gave nothing at all. That Li Cun used to study here in our village. We never met his mother, so we don’t know what she’s like, but his father is a notorious glutton—all take and no give. He’s petty, too, a real penny-pincher you couldn’t squeeze a drop from."

Xu Suying shook her head again. "You never know. Maybe they really took a liking to Wanyue and decided to splurge, eh?"

"What could they possibly see in Wanyue? Is she prettier than your Wanqing? Are her parents more capable than you and Chen Song? Speaking of the third son in your husband’s family, have those blisters on his body cleared up? Did he actually get syphilis?"

Syphilis, also known as a venereal disease, was something you could generally only catch in filthy places like the brothels at the Red House or other secret dens of vice.

An ordinary man wouldn’t even know where to go to catch something like that, but hadn’t Chen Lin gotten mixed up with that young widow a while back?

To support herself and her mother, that young widow’s fair arms became a pillow for a thousand men, and her red lips were tasted by ten thousand. On the surface, she seemed like a respectable woman, but what she did in secret was no different from the women who solicit customers from their doorways.

As for Chen Lin, he had injured his leg and was on bed rest, just as the doctor ordered.

For some reason, he had broken out in small blisters all over his body.