Chapter 7

送宫花贾琏戏熙凤

宴宁府宝玉会秦钟

Baochai gives Zhou Rui’s wife details of her illness and complex medication. Aunt Xue 薛姨妈 gives her artificial flowers for the girls, and she discovers that Caltrop 香菱 is Zhen Shiyin’s daughter, Yinglian. She delivers flowers to Yingchun 贾迎春, Tanchun 贾探春 and Xichun 贾惜春, who is playing with Sapientia 智能 from Watermoon Priory, but Wang Xifeng is detained in her bedroom with Jia Lian 贾琏, so Patience deals with them. Daiyu is playing with Baoyu, who snatches the flowers which Daiyu sneers at. Zhou Rui’s son-in-law, Leng Zixing, is in trouble; Zhou Rui’s wife is confidant in Wang Xifeng’s power to influence.

Xifeng is invited to Ningguo and agrees to take Baoyu; they are greeted by Youshi 尤氏 and served tea by Qinshi, who tells Baoyu that her brother Qin Zhong 秦钟, who he had wanted to see, was here, and he is led in. Each is extremely taken with the other, and they talk at length about the clan school and tutoring arrangements, moving to a different room while the others play (with the result that Qinshi and Youshi owed Xifeng a night of drinks and entertainment). The Ningguo staff offend a surly old servant who had once saved the grandfather’s life; he is restrained in the stables, and Baoyu repeats some of his bad language to Wang.

Chapter 2

贾夫人仙逝扬州城

冷子兴演说荣国府

Feng Su is summoned to the yamen to find Jia Yucun is the magistrate, who gives them money and silk and requests Lucky’s hand in marriage. Yucun had been successful in the examinations but had fallen from favour, and, short of cash in Yangzhou whilst travelling, became tutor to aristocrat Lin Ruhai’s 林如海 only child, daughter Lin Daiyu 林黛玉, whose mother died a year later and so who had suffered from recurrent sicknesses, leaving Jia idle.

In a temple, he meets an antique dealer acquaintance, Leng Zixing 冷子兴. Leng tells Jia that his relatives, the Jias of Rongguo and Ningguo, who Yucun consider too exalted for him, are feeling the pinch of extravagant living. Jia Zhen 贾珍 at Ningguo was degenerate, along with many Jia males, and Jia Zheng 贾政 at Rongguo, was a scholar and now Under Secretary in the Ministry of Works. He had a son and daughter, then twelve years later a boy called Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 born with jade in his mouth. Zheng has little affection for him since, on his first birthday, he reached for feminine objects instead of masculine, but his grandmother adores him. Leng says he is now ten, very bright and a future libertine, but Yucun interprets the description as someone philosophically astute and declaims on the subject – he had a similar case when tutoring in Nanjing.

Leng explains the Rongguo family tree, and Jia learns that Lin Daiyu’s mother was Jia Zheng’s sister.