I opened a tea shop in Bianjing

Chapter 53
"Take the sedan chair!" The servant yelled, and the sedan chair carrying Mo Yunxiao fell down, and the sedan chair bar was pushed down, forming a steep slope, allowing the people inside to get out.

Mo Yunxiao got out of the sedan chair and looked up, only to see towering and tall houses all around, full of royal style.There are also pavilions, terraces and pavilions, rockery and flowing water, and countless exotic flowers and plants competing for beauty.As the breeze blows, the fragrance of flowers is refreshing and very relaxing.

The original Mo residence was also magnificent enough, but it pales in comparison to this even more magnificent Prince Jian's residence.Even Mo Yunxiao, who was born a thousand years later, couldn't help being amazed in this beautiful courtyard.

"Flowers, plants, mountains and rocks look a bit like Suzhou gardens." Mo Yunxiao commented, and the servant behind her said with a smile: "Ms. Linglong must be a well-informed person who knows the layout of this garden." beauty of."

Chinese garden art originated in the Ming Dynasty. Although it was not yet mature in the Song Dynasty, it had already taken shape.Mo Yunxiao studied calligraphy and Chinese painting since childhood, and naturally dabbled in garden art, so he could tell at a glance that this was the style of Jiangnan, and others who had never been to Jiangnan would certainly not understand it.

Mo Yunxiao smiled slightly, and said to the boy: "I just said it casually, I don't know if it's right."

"Yes, that's right." The boy bowed his waist, with a flattering expression on his face.

Mo Yunxiao didn't like him like this, so she walked forward.The servant also hurriedly followed, Mo Yunxiao couldn't get rid of him, and couldn't help but feel irritable.But then it occurred to him that this young man must be an old man in the palace because he was so flattering. He must know the whereabouts of Huan'er.

She made up her mind, so she asked insincerely, "How many girls entered the palace before me?"

The little servant was a little embarrassed, and hurriedly said: "Our king is good at paying. Many ministers and dignitaries in the court have come to flatter him. Naturally, there are some offerings. There are about thirty of them. But you also know that just this moment After a while, those thirty girls were all sent out."

"Apart from them, are there any other servants and servants?" Mo Yunxiao asked while pacing.

"This..." The boy replied hesitantly: "Yes, there are. The palace is not like ordinary people's homes, and there must be someone to take care of everything big and small. But the small ones don't care about buying people, how many people have entered, How many more people came out, but I don’t know.”

Mo Yunxiao nodded and didn't ask any more questions.But she thought in her heart that the best result would be that Huan'er was among the thirty girls who were sent out.But this possibility is very small.

She entered the palace as the singer of Zengfu.If you judge others by yourself, the thirty girls must be similar.And Huan'er can't sing and dance, so naturally she can't be a singer.So she was probably bought in as an ordinary maid.

But that's fine too.If it was an ordinary maid, Zhao might not pay attention to her deliberately.Then the possibility of her keeping her innocence will naturally increase greatly.So no matter which possibility is possible, there are pros and cons.Next, just wait and see what happens, and then react appropriately.

Mo Yunxiao was in a daze, but the servant following her called softly: "Miss Linglong, Miss Linglong."

She was startled suddenly, "Ah!" cried out.

The little servant laughed, looked up at the sky again, and said, "It's getting late, I'll take you back to the attic."

Mo Yunxiao responded, and said, "Brother, please lead the way."

"It's easy to say. You come with me." The servant led Mo Yunxiao to his room.

This is a spacious and bright bedroom.Although it is a bedroom, it is a suite consisting of three parts: study room, living room and bedroom.There is a screen between the bedroom and the living room.What is engraved on this screen is a thin old man sitting cross-legged with a kind face.The old man's eyes were closed, and his face was ferocious, which made people shudder.Around him are cranes and colorful clouds.Although the picture is slightly weird, the carving technique is still very sophisticated.

The focus of Chinese art lies in the word artistic conception.But Mo Yunxiao stopped in front of the screen for a long time, but couldn't see what kind of artistic conception this picture wanted to express.

The servant giggled and said, "Miss Linglong, what do you think?"

"Let me ask you, do you know who is the person painted on this screen?" Mo Yunxiao asked suddenly.

The little servant was stunned, a little embarrassed, and couldn't help but smiled wryly: "This little guy doesn't know, but the girls in the past have never asked about it."

"Oh." Mo Yunxiao didn't say much.

"Miss Linglong, you are tired all the way, so I will ask someone to boil water for your bath." The boy said.

"Ah?" Mo Yunxiao was a little surprised, but also a little embarrassed, and hurriedly said, "That's unnecessary."

"I want it, I want it, every new girl in the mansion wants it. You don't have to be polite, Miss Coral, just wait for a while." He backed out before Mo Yunxiao could reply.

Mo Yunxiao wanted to call him to stop, but she didn't know what to say, and she was left alone in the room after just being so dazed.

She looked around and found that the decoration of this room was also very delicate.Looking at the bed again, it is covered with soft silk woven sheets, and there is a gauze curtain hanging on the head of the bed, which can play the role of shading and mosquito repellent.The pillow is also very soft, the inside is cotton and buckwheat, and the outside is wrapped and sewn with silk cloth. When you sniff it, there is a faint fragrance.

She has not slept in such a bed for a long time.Since her home was ransacked, she has hardly slept a single day.

Sleeping on that kind of hard bunk, and being squeezed together with Yunxi and Yunxiang, even turning over is very difficult, and when I close my eyes, I can hear Yunxi's snoring, and I finally fall asleep, but I can always see her in my dreams. Seeing Mo Chenglin covered in blood, he tortured her over and over again: "Did you avenge me!"

She often wakes up to find herself drenched in sweat and her heart pounding.

But now, she can sleep on a soft bed, don't have to squeeze with anyone, don't have to listen to other people's snoring, and can sleep until she wakes up naturally.What a pleasant life that was.

She was sitting by the bed, stroking the head of the bed with her hands, and she couldn't help thinking: "If you come here, you will be at ease. You might as well do a fake show and enjoy it for a while, it's not a waste of time."

At this moment, several maids came in one by one, curtseyed to Mo Yunxiao at the same time, and said, "The little one is here to help Linglong take a bath."

Mo Yunxiao didn't understand what "bath and wash" meant for a while.But looking at the trays in their hands containing snow-white bath towels, bottles and jars of unknown contents, flower petals and saponins, one should understand that these are the toiletries of the ancients.

Several other girls brought in wooden barrels containing hot water, poured them into the large bath tub one by one, and then retreated respectfully.

Mo Yunxiao sized them up, but seeing Huan'er, they asked each of them their names and ages, and they turned out to be girls in their teens.

Although I don't see Huan'er, it's a good thing to see so many people waiting for me to take a bath, so Mo Yunxiao is no longer polite.

She first tested the temperature of the water with her hands, and found that the water in the bathtub was scalding hot but did not hurt her skin, and then she took off her clothes under the service of several girls.

A girl helped her take off her shoes and socks, and she couldn't help laughing when she saw a pair of delicate and beautiful "natural feet".

Mo Yunxiao knew what they were laughing at, so she said, "You must be wondering why King Jian likes a woman with natural feet, aren't you?"

"The little ones don't dare." The girls laughed and helped her into the tub.Some of them scattered flower petals, some wiped her back with soap horns, and some opened those bottles and cans, and slowly poured the liquid inside into the bathtub.

Mo Yunxiao was a little strange and asked, "What's in here?"

"It's honey." The girl replied, "There is also some water squeezed from medicinal materials, which has the effect of whitening skin and leaving fragrance."

"Oh." Mo Yunxiao also smiled, and said: "The ancient dignitaries really enjoyed it. It's just that the custom of footbinding is not good."

The girls looked at each other, and one of them asked boldly: "Hasn't Miss Linglong ever bound her feet since she was a child?"

"Of course not." Mo Yunxiao said: "I have seen X-ray photos of the feet of women with bound feet. They want to break the toe bones alive and press them under the soles of the feet. Tsk tsk tsk, it hurts to death just thinking about it. Such a deformity aesthetics, I don’t want it.”

The girls were taken aback for a moment, some were puzzled and some snickered.Although they didn't know what an X-ray photo was, they also felt that she was full of loopholes after hearing Mo Yunxiao's description.

"It seems that Miss Linglong has never bound her feet before, and there is such a big misunderstanding about it." said the girl who wiped her back.

"Misunderstanding?" Mo Yunxiao was a little curious, and couldn't help asking: "What misunderstanding did I have?"

The girl explained: "The wind of foot-binding originated in modern times. Although it wraps women's feet and looks like rice dumplings, it is not so cruel to break the toe bones."

"Oh? Really? But I saw..." Before Mo Yunxiao could say anything, another girl said, "Oh, if you meet a cruel woman, you can break your bones." After she finished speaking, she also made a miserable expression.

The girl earlier also nodded and said, "That's true. I heard Zhang Xiucai from our village say that women in the previous dynasty didn't have their feet bound. They could ride horses and play cuju. But many women today have to catch up with this trip, saying Don't let it pass a few hundred years, when the women's entanglement is even tighter, it's no problem to have a broken bone."

They chatted with each other like this, and Mo Yunxiao finally understood.It turns out that although the foot binding in the Song Dynasty was painful, it was not as good as the so-called "three-inch golden lotus" like in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.She recalled it carefully, Yunxi's foot release was nothing more than removing the foot wrap, and then massaging it to make the blood flow back and the meridians to relax.And if her foot bone is broken, no matter what, she must ask a bone-setting doctor.

"Well, fortunately, we are all children from poor families, so we are not so particular." The girls chatted while helping Mo Yunxiao take a bath.

Mo Yunxiao suddenly interjected: "Even if you are not a child from a poor family, you may not be so particular about it."

"Oh? What do you say, girl?" A girl asked her.

"Do you know Mo Yunxiao from Minglou?" She asked suddenly.

The girls looked at each other, and then burst out laughing. They laughed and said, "Daughter Yan Luo, you can inquire all over Tokyo, who doesn't know."

"Well, what do you think of her?" Mo Yunxiao asked again.

The girls grinned and replied, "It's not very good. I heard that she is a east east lion, a hag."

"You..." Mo Yunxiao almost sat up from the bathtub.But she still suppressed the anger in her heart, and asked again: "How do you start with this?"

"That's what people say." A girl replied, and after thinking for a while, she added: "A few days ago, their Tea House was ransacked. I don't know the charges, but all the family members broke up. It seems... like a girl The envoy also bought someone into the palace."

Mo Yunxiao's eyes suddenly lit up, and she quickly crawled over and asked, "What? Where is this maid?"

The girl was startled, and several other girls also slapped her quickly, signaling to stop talking nonsense.She could only smile embarrassingly, and said, "Young lady, please don't take offense at what you say."

"I'm not surprised, tell me, where is she?" Mo Yunxiao hurriedly asked as if she had caught a life-saving straw.

The girl was even more frightened, and couldn't help but take two steps back, almost crying out.

Mo Yunxiao felt strange, she was just asking about an ordinary female envoy in the house, why did she have such a big reaction?

"Miss Linglong, please take care of yourself." Another girl said, "Although it is inevitable that you will be a little bit wronged in the palace, since the king can send those thirty girls out for you, he still loves you."

There is something in this girl's words.Mo Yunxiao only got a rough idea.She could only respond vaguely and said nothing more.

After taking a bath, the girls had already prepared new clothes made of colored silk for her.

Originally, they had also prepared a pair of "wrong to the end" for her, but seeing that she was "natural feet", they couldn't wear the "wrong to the end" anyway, so they had to temporarily change to ordinary white embroidered shoes.

"Miss Linglong, I didn't know you were heavenly feet before, so I couldn't be caught off guard for a while, so I had to wrong you to wear the girls' embroidered shoes first. Tomorrow morning, I will send the servants from the house to buy silk shoes."

The girl who put shoes on for her giggled, looked up at her, and said, "Don't take offense."

"Where is it, I am already grateful to you for serving me like this, so I dare not take offense." Mo Yunxiao also said: "The so-called reciprocation will never let you work in vain."

As she spoke, she took a golden willow hairpin from her head and said, "Here is this for you. I will take it to the pawn shop and exchange it for some money to spend."

The girl was so taken aback that she dared not reach out to pick it up.Mo Yunxiao was very determined, grabbed her hand, and put the hair fork in her hand.

The girls looked at each other, all beaming with joy.One of them came over and said, "You are very enlightened. Unlike the girls who came here before, they are bossy, and when they lose their temper, they can make somersaults."

"That's right, otherwise, how could our girl be loved by the prince."

After getting along for less than half an hour, "Miss Linglong" has become "Miss from our family".It can be seen that these women are very fond of her.

Mo Yunxiao is also complacent, and feels that she is also good at buying people's hearts.These girls took care of the tubs and toiletries, and retreated one by one with shy smiles.

At this time, it was already on the branches of the moon, only the chirping of insects could be heard outside the house, and the candlelight was flickering inside the house.Mo Yunxiao stretched, yawned and was about to sleep.Suddenly a voice came from outside the door: "The person in front of the Silver Mirror Terrace is like jade, and the oriole's pillow is like a flower. Linglong girl, such a beautiful day, don't you feel lonely when you sleep alone?"

Mo Yunxiao, who was making the bed, was startled suddenly, she could hear Zhao Si's voice, and understood what he meant.

"Oops!" she thought to herself. "There is no such thing as a free lunch. This guy is going to collect debts."

(End of this chapter)