My Fabulous Forty-Something Father Becomes a Bride - Chapter 4
Chapter 4
“Come along. We’ve shared a life for so many years. We may not be his legal family and can’t escort him as such, but we can at least go watch.”
With a flourish of her handkerchief, Mother led my sister and me through a side gate, across an alley two paces wide, and in through our own side gate.
Father’s house and Mother’s stood side by side, their small gates separated by that tiny alley.
We changed clothes at home and set off for the ducal estate.
The wedding procession swayed its way around half the city. By the time we arrived, the bridal sedan had only just reached the gates.
The wedding attendant was smiling, but the smile was distinctly stiff and peculiar.
Understandable. How many families sent off a forty-something man—an official of the imperial court, no less—as a bride?
In my opinion, that rotten young master was unbelievably lucky. Father was still a handsome, mature man, marrying out for the first time. He was also a high-ranking official and a former Chancellor of the Imperial Academy.
With one marriage, the boy settled the great affair of his life and gained a teacher who could instruct him morning and night. Think of the money the family would save on tutors!
Even Father’s salary would belong to their household now!
Then I remembered how meager that salary was. It was not much, but at least it arrived in rain or shine.
“Look! Look! The bride is getting out of the sedan—” someone nearby cried, then abruptly stopped.
The attendant helped a beauty in red step down.
Had the red robe not been an official’s robe, and had the beauty not been a man, everything would have looked perfectly normal.
The jubilant crowd fell silent.
“Where is the bride?”
The wastrel had already been standing there with a black expression, unwilling from the start.
At the first sign of trouble, he flung down his riding crop and exploded. “A daughter of the Yu family dares flee her own wedding? This young master repudiates her here and now!”
The attendant cut in. “The person sent from the Yu residence isn’t a daughter, Young Master. It’s Lord Yu himself.”
The dandy thought he had misheard. “Who? Who did you say they sent?”
Father whipped off his veil with a flourish and called out, “The one marrying into your family is this old man—Yu Fengdeng.”
The festive courtyard went still.
Utterly still.
Then—whoosh!
Like water rebounding after striking the bottom of a well, a wave of noise erupted from the crowd, louder, fiercer, and far more heartfelt than before.
Some spectators might initially have come for the wedding coins and candy, but now ninety-nine in a hundred were here for the spectacle itself.
Congratulations, Father. Achievement unlocked: An Empty City Turns Out to See Lord Yu the Bride!
“Dear in-law, why go to such lengths?”
The Duke and Duchess rushed out after hearing the commotion at the gates.
Father held his head high, utterly unruffled.
“Her Majesty issued an edict. I have come to be married, just as commanded.”
The Duke’s face turned the color of a pig’s liver. “The edict speaks of a marriage between our children. It can’t possibly mean that you should marry into my household.”
Father had come prepared.
Other brides carried objects with auspicious meanings on their wedding day.
Father had arrived with the imperial edict in one hand and a disciplinary ruler in the other.
He tucked the ruler behind his belt and shook open the edict.
“I see no mistake here. The entire document praises my handsome appearance and exceptional intellect, then expresses the hope that I will discipline your esteemed son and educate the children of your household.”
The Duke was also in his forties, but seldom had he looked so helpless. “That still doesn’t mean—”
“It also says that the Yu household is to send one person in marriage,” Father continued. “The Yu household consists of me alone. Naturally, I am the one who must marry.”
I did not witness what happened next, but the scandal spread so wildly that stories poured into my ears from every direction.
Whether those accounts underwent a certain amount of artistic embellishment along the way…
Well, wise men may form their own opinions.
