The day before, they had gone to the Liu household next door to the Li residence to search for clues, and had asked three questions:

1. How did Li Qianggui die?

2. Why did the village start bolting its gates at night after the Li family died out?

3. Why did the woman known as Li never have children?

Old Liu had answered all three questions, in considerable detail, and Shen Mo remembered them clearly.

But what had Old Liu’s wife said?

She had chimed in at a few points…

Bai Youwei narrowed her eyes and said slowly, “When we first arrived, that old woman said the village was too poor — anyone who could leave had already left. What remained were only the elderly who could no longer move, and old bachelors too poor to find wives. Since the girls born in the village had all married out to other villages, the old bachelors here had no choice but to purchase brides. What about the bachelors who had no money? Later, the old man touched on this too — he mentioned that Li Laizi was too poor to afford a wife, which was actually a hint pointing us toward the suspicious origins of the woman known as Li.

“Then when we asked how Li Laizi died, the old man gave a long answer. Do you remember what the old woman said? She said, ‘The woman known as Li — she was a pitiable soul.’ But the person who had died was Li Laizi. She called the woman pitiable instead, which tells us the woman suffered greatly at his hands.

“And the last question — that one’s the most interesting. We asked why the woman known as Li never had children. The old man said she was young when she bore a child and it damaged her body. But what the old woman actually said was… that the woman known as Li was too delicate.”

“Delicate…” Shen Mo murmured pensively. “An ordinary peasant farmer’s daughter wouldn’t be described that way.”

Bai Youwei gave a measured nod. “Following that thread — the village people all mocked Li Laizi for being unable to get a wife, so in a fit of anger he went outside and abducted a young girl. I suspect the woman’s original family wasn’t nobility — those households with maids and matrons in tow would be too difficult to get to — but they were probably a minor prosperous family. She would have grown up without hardship, with a gentle and trusting nature.”

“Young, her body not yet fully grown, forced into childbearing — that would have damaged her,” Shen Mo said, considering. He added, “Though there’s also the possibility that the woman known as Li didn’t want to give birth and deliberately damaged her own body. In that case, she would certainly have suffered terribly in the Li household.”

“If things were that miserable, why didn’t she go home?” Bai Youwei couldn’t quite make sense of it. “Even if her virtue had been compromised, surely she would have tried at least once?”

Shen Mo said, “Perhaps her family placed great importance on reputation and propriety.”

Bai Youwei shook her head. “In ancient times, only the upper classes were bound by such strictures. Among ordinary common folk, if everyone adhered rigidly to those rules, life would be impossible to live. In reality, even in the most conservative of dynasties, widows remarrying and divorced men taking new wives were ordinary occurrences.”

She gave an example: everyone knows Arab women are considered conservative, covering their entire bodies and showing only their eyes. Yet if one actually visited a poorer rural village there, one would find that the women needed to do field work — they simply could not dress that way. Consumed with getting enough to eat each day, they had no time to observe such formalities.

Bai Youwei slowly pushed her wheelchair forward, thinking carefully.

“‘She could be held back for a time, but not for a lifetime’… something must have happened that caused the woman known as Li to abandon the idea of going home…”

She looked toward the old scholar’s house in the distance — and then stopped. Her eyes slowly widened.

“I know now… why she couldn’t go back…”

Shen Mo also stopped and gazed at the old house in the distance.

It had not registered before, but seen from afar now, the old house sat noticeably lower than the village itself. Before its front gate stood an enormous natural rock formation, which made the house look like… a tomb.

“What if…” Bai Youwei spoke softly, “she had an older brother — or a younger brother — who passed the imperial examinations and became an official?”

—