Chapter 458: unique vision
Chapter 458 Unique vision
Princess Zhaoqing's flower viewing banquet was held as scheduled, and among the forty-six girls selected by the emperor and empress who met Xie Yuan's requirements, nine found various reasons not to attend the banquet.
Among the nine people, some are unwilling to marry a sensitive person like An Lehou, and some family members are unwilling to have anything to do with the last emperor of the former dynasty.
However, although they themselves did not attend, their family members rushed to the banquet in a pinch of time.
After all, it was the first flower viewing banquet hosted by Xie Yuan's only sister. While these people didn't want to get involved with An Lehou, they also really wanted to be in the eyes of Princess Zhaoqing.
Princess Zhaoqing was well aware of their carelessness, but she didn't show any dislike for it. She still remembered what her imperial brother said, this marriage needs to be based on your love and my wish.
For those official wives who refused the marriage by not bringing their daughters to attend, Princess Zhaoqing directly asked the servant in charge of leading the way to take them to the lake pavilion where the banquet was held.
There are other official wives who have received the lotus post with the same treatment as them. These official wives have no suitable girls to marry An Lehou, so they are here simply for a banquet.
The treatment was the same as theirs, and the wives who tactfully rejected this marriage naturally didn't have to suspect that Princess Zhaoqing was deliberately ignoring them.
As for the remaining thirty-seven wives who brought their daughters or nieces, Princess Zhaoqing took the trouble to meet all of them in person in order to confirm for the last time whether the girls from these families were really voluntary.
By observing the speech and behavior of these girls and their female elders, Princess Zhaoqing easily picked out those girls who were forced by the family to come to this banquet from the thirty-seven people.
She saw through the truth, first smiled and gave each girl a greeting gift, and then let the maid who accompanied them lead them to the table.
Twenty-six girls who showed no signs of coercion, she rewarded each of them with a hollow twisted gold bracelet, and eleven girls who did not dare to resist or the resistance was invalid, and were forced to come over by the elders of the family, she rewarded each of them with a gold bracelet. Each of them has an exquisite hollow gold hairpin carved with wishful cloud patterns.
The gold hairpin and the bracelet are not heavy, the only advantage is that the workmanship is exquisite and the style is unique, which is just suitable for daily wear by unmarried cardamom girls like them.
Because each of their families was invited in by the maid to meet Princess Zhaoqing alone, so neither the girl who received the gift nor the official wife who brought them over noticed that Princess Zhaoqing was announcing the selection results in this way.
They were led by the maidservants who had already been ordered, and took different paths to the Huxin Pavilion to attend the banquet.
The twenty-six girls who showed no signs of reluctance walked the bluestone road that could be seen from a distance by An Lehou, who was sitting by the window on the second floor of the library building of the Princess Mansion. With it, I walked through the nine-curved corridor of the carved beams and painted buildings of the Princess Mansion.
When all the guests were present, Princess Zhaoqing had already received the candidate list given by An Lehou.
To Princess Zhaoqing's surprise, An Lehou, who was still only a young boy, didn't check any of the outstanding girls to be selected.
He chose a total of three people, one of whom could only be considered handsome, and the other two had dignified eyebrows and eyes, so beautiful that they were neither showy nor dewy, and they were not aggressive at all.
She showed the list and portraits to her husband, Pei Huaiyu, "An Lehou, is this the one who only picks for average looks?"
Of the twenty-six official ladies who walked the road next to the library under the instruction of Princess Zhaoqing, twenty-three of them were beautiful and fresh, very outstanding, but An Lehou accurately picked out the least conspicuous three. Well, what kind of strange vision is this?
She couldn't figure it out, but Pei Huaiyu only glanced at it, and had a guess about An Lehou's selection criteria in her heart.
He sighed, "Think about the empress dowager of Da Zhou."
"Uh," as soon as he reminded her, Princess Zhaoqing immediately recalled the glamorous face of the former Empress Dowager of the Great Zhou Dynasty, and she followed Pei Huaiyu's sigh, "What a crime."
After so many years, An Lehou is still instinctively afraid of someone who is only slightly similar to that empress dowager. I really don't know how many painful memories that empress dowager left for this child that will never be forgotten.
Pei Huaiyu patted his wife's hand, "She has already received her retribution."
Although Xie Yuan didn't kill her, for a woman like the Empress Dowager, the pain of losing power and status was far more unacceptable to her than death.
And An Lehou is still very young, he still has a lot of time to spend the rest of his life in a happy life and heal the many misfortunes that the empress dowager brought to him.
The couple briefly said a few words, Princess Zhaoqing took her maidservant to Huxin Pavilion to entertain the guests, Pei Huaiyu went to the library, and made an appointment with An Lehou to arrange a close distance for him and the three girls look at each other.
An Lehou trusted Pei Huaiyu very much. He carefully read the information provided by Pei Huaiyu, and finally decided to meet one of the girls whose parents died first.
The girl is one of the two girls with dignified eyebrows and eyes, and she is not aggressive at all. Her name is Yang Xintong.
An Lehou planned to meet her first, firstly because the only official in this girl's family - her own uncle was only a fourth-rank Taipusi Shaoqing, who didn't have much authority in his hands, and secondly because both of her parents died, Since he was a child, he lived in the home of his uncle and aunt who monopolized all the property of the Yang family.
Although theoretically speaking, Yang Xintong's father is the eldest son of the Yang family, and he should have the majority of the Yang family's ancestral property, but the problem is, who made him unlucky and died in the chaos of war.
The second uncle Yang Xintong, who picked up a leak because of the brother-in-law's death, did not deliberately treat his niece Yang Xintong harshly, but the niece is different from his own children after all, because Yang Xintong has always been separated by a layer of belly. Not very well received by uncle and aunt.
She is in an embarrassing situation in the Yang family, which cannot be hidden from those who belong to the same family as the Yang family.
These families don't want to marry a daughter-in-law who can't help them, so naturally they won't invite a matchmaker.
And those families who are one or even two grades lower than the Yang family, they want to marry the Yang family, but at the same time they are not qualified to marry Uncle Yang Xintong's biological daughter. Many of these families are willing to use Yang Xintong to make do Yes, but Yang Xintong's aunt and uncle didn't want others to poke their backs, saying that they treated the dead brother's only daughter poorly.
In addition, they were also reluctant to part with the property that Yang Xintong's grandmother gave Yang Xintong as a dowry before her death. In order to keep these properties in the Yang family as long as possible, Yang Xintong's aunt simply rejected several households who came to inquire. people.
(end of this chapter)