Summary
When the County Magistrate knocked on my courtyard gate, I was hunkered down in the pigsty helping a sow give birth.
The amnesiac scholar I had rescued from a ruined temple was tending the fire to boil water for me, his shoulders draped in tattered clothes.
Everyone treated him like he was useless.
That was until the County Magistrate stared at the broken jade hanging from the man’s waist, his voice trembling: “Madam, is your husband’s surname by any chance… Pei?”
Only then did I realize that the man I had been keeping by my hearth wasn’t some poor scholar; he was the very person all of the capital was searching for.