The moment Gu Tingyu died, Shao Furen’s mind and body collapsed entirely; all the accumulated exhaustion and grief that had built up over so long finally burst forth at once, and she took to her bed half-dead and desperately ill. The Madam, meanwhile, indicated that she too was “heartbroken beyond bearing” and could only lie in bed making faint, plaintive sounds.

Minglan saw at once that the situation was precarious. After careful deliberation, she made a quiet but firm decision: she could absolutely not take on the responsibility of managing Gu Tingyu’s funeral arrangements herself. Setting aside the fact that she was unfamiliar with the Gu family’s customs, whatever she did in these circumstances was bound to give someone something to talk about; yet as the newly installed Marchioness, it would be very difficult to simply decline. She thought it over from every angle, and then made a point of going formally to invite Elder Brother Tingxuan to come and help.

“It is not that I am shirking and unwilling to make an effort, but I am still so young and have never managed anything of importance. Elder Brother’s funeral matters are of the utmost consequence—if something were done wrong, who knows what people might say.” Minglan was direct about it and simply laid everything out in the open. “Of all the people in this household, the one I feel most at ease trusting is Elder Sister-in-Law. If you will not help me, I truly do not know where else I would turn.”

Tingxuan’s wife was by nature someone who enjoyed taking charge and loved to step in and manage things. Seeing how genuinely sincere Minglan was, with her full reliance upon her, and feeling greatly gratified in her heart, she agreed on the spot and went home at once to discuss it with her husband.

“An affair this large and you just agreed to it?” Gu Tingbing was about to depart for the northwest in just a few days; Gu Tingxuan was busy running about making arrangements everywhere. He came home to this news and immediately felt it was not a good development, and said urgently to his wife: “We’d better stay out of the main branch’s business—no getting tangled up in things and stirring up trouble. Better to have fewer affairs than more!”

“What do you know!” His wife glared at him and drew close to explain in detail. “I thought about this from both sides, and though it is a bit of a bother, there is something to gain from it. For one thing—Second Sister-in-Law genuinely has a difficulty here. If the funeral is held on too grand a scale, Second Brother may very well be displeased; if it is too modest, people will certainly find fault. Taking the affair off her hands is a kindness she will remember. And second—”

She carried a cup of warmed tea to her husband and lowered her voice. “Look at the way things stand in this household—it is only a matter of time before it becomes necessary to live in a separate establishment. When that day comes, we will have to rely entirely on our own resources. But all these years, Father had Second Brother handle everything major and minor, and we have no connections, no contacts, and not much silver to speak of. This is an opportunity—while we manage this funeral, the two of us can make more useful acquaintances.”

Gu Tingxuan was, at heart, a man who avoided conflict; but when he thought of his sons and daughters all growing older—marriages to arrange, official positions to seek, and long futures ahead where they couldn’t depend on Gu Tingye for everything—he finally let out a sigh and nodded.

To show good faith, the very next day Minglan went personally to Shao Furen’s side to seek the household seals and storehouse keys. It took half a day and a great deal of explaining before she managed to make clear her predicament and the necessity of calling in outside help—only to hear Shao Furen, barely breathing: “…They’re all with Mother…”

Why hadn’t she said so earlier! Minglan went directly to the Madam’s quarters.

The Madam sat propped up in bed with a pale yellow silk cloth wound around her forehead, looking pallid and unwell as she drank her medicine. After Minglan had made her earnest and eloquent request for a second time, the Madam seemed to freeze for a moment, fixed Minglan with a long, steady stare—her eyes slightly red-rimmed—that made Minglan’s heart grow uneasy. At last she called Nanny Xiang to bring the required items.

Minglan silently wiped the cold sweat from her brow. With the satisfaction of mission accomplished, she handed over the seals and keys to Tingxuan’s wife, and held firm to her position of “being too young and inexperienced to manage such a matter alone.” She was equally confident that the Madam would not dare hand the arrangement over to Zhu Shi instead.

The rumors flying about outside at this point were pointing directly at the Madam as a stepmother whose motives over these decades had been suspect. If, at this juncture, she were to let Zhu Shi take charge, there would be even more to talk about—here she has been holding the reins for decades, and even now, on the excuse of elder brother Tingyu’s illness and frailty, she lets her own daughter-in-law manage everything, and still refuses to let go at a time like this!

Tingxuan’s wife was a capable and clear-headed woman, and with no one obstructing her and everything going smoothly, she arranged the funeral in a manner that was graceful and polished: dignified yet understated, the proprieties fully observed without being fussy or excessive. When the weeping was called for, the sound of grief rose from the entire household and could be heard clearly half a li away. When guests were to be received, the servants moved deftly in and out, everything in orderly and proper sequence.

And Minglan had only to keep a small bottle of osmanthus oil about her person, go to weep before Gu Tingyu’s spirit tablet a few times each day, and still have the energy left over to familiarize herself with the Ningyang Marquis household’s personnel and relationships—and to steal a glance or two at the storerooms and treasury she had long been curious about.

She felt deeply that she had made the right choice of person to ask. Every other day, without fail, she made a point of expressing gratitude to Tingxuan’s wife—each time with different phrasing, never repeating herself once—praising her until that sister-in-law was so happy and content that she completely forgot the exhaustion of sleeping only two hours a night.

Beyond this, the remaining portion of her time Minglan spent in Shao Furen’s rooms.

According to the physicians, the Madam’s condition was a matter of the heart and its healing; Shao Furen’s illness, however, had come crashing down upon her like a mountain, furious and overwhelming, with every appearance of a fire burned down to its last wick. Minglan was thoroughly alarmed. She thought: rather than going outside and performing the appearance of grief, it would be far more satisfying to nurse the living back to health—and in the long run, they would be easier to get along with.

Shao Furen had no desire to acknowledge Minglan’s presence. Whatever Minglan said or did, she responded with eyes closed and a cold, expressionless face. Minglan did not take offense; she continued to attend to her quietly and warmly—checking the prescriptions, testing the medicine before it was served, picking out a few important items from the day’s news about the guests and business at the mourning hall to recount to her, and bringing Rong Jie’er along to keep Xian Jie’er company. Day after day, she sent over good food and amusing things from the Emerald Garden, so that the children could forget their sorrow for a little while and at least manage to eat and sleep. Shao Furen was not, by nature, a hard-hearted person; seeing Minglan’s careful and considerate attentiveness, she could not help but soften. She reminded herself, too, that these old accumulated grievances should not be laid against a new daughter-in-law who had only been in the family a few months—and gradually her expression changed, and she became gentler and more courteous toward Minglan.

Seeing that Shao Furen’s despondency and listlessness were causing her condition to worsen by the day, Minglan, with or without occasion, would recount episodes from her own childhood—greatly exaggerating, with dramatic color, her own “terror,” “confusion,” “loneliness,” and various feelings of helplessness after Wei Yiniang’s passing.

“…They always say a child without a mother is like a blade of grass—and that saying is not wrong in the least…” Minglan said, eyes reddened (she had just made another round of weeping at the spirit altar), her voice catching softly. “My family was fortunate—but the mistress of the house still had the whole inner and outer household to manage, and all those older brothers and sisters to see to… If not for Grandmother’s pity and care, I—I truly don’t know what would have become of me…” The rest dissolved into a long ellipsis, leaving Shao Furen to fill in the rest with her own imagination.

Shao Furen was indeed deeply shaken by what she heard. Even if she still thought the Madam was “a good person,” she did not feel at ease entrusting her daughter to such a person’s care. The thought of her daughter, already without a father, losing her mother as well—who could say what kind of life the girl would face? With this resolve in her heart, more than half of her illness cleared at once; by the day of the funeral procession, she was well enough to rise and come out to express her thanks to the family’s guests and friends in person.

Of course, Minglan also received great praise all around. The Madam smiled and said a few kind words to commend her; Minglan expressed her modesty in return, while privately thinking: with you as my model, I will do my best to learn.

Come to think of it, this was the first time in Minglan’s life that she had gone to this kind of trouble over the full observance of mourning rites. Not only were the maidservants in her own courtyard forbidden from wearing any bright colors—Rong Jie’er, too, had new outfits made in plain subdued shades. And Minglan herself, from head to toe, gave no one anything to fault.

A pale, undyed jacket with a willow-branch pattern, an entire set of snow-bright millet-pearl and silver ornaments, with not a hint of color—even the coral fringe tassels at the toes of her shoes had been removed. Minglan turned herself out in this attire for Gu Tingye to look over and asked what he thought.

Gu Tingye curved his lips wryly. “I suppose if I were to die, this is more or less the ceremony I’d get.”

The lanterns at the Marquis household’s gates were all wrapped in plain white; Minglan was thinking about hanging a couple of small white lanterns at the Emerald Garden entrance as well, as a gesture. “About a month should be sufficient, I suppose?” To her surprise, Gu Tingye said: “When the old man went, we only hung them for a day. If we hang them this long, anyone who doesn’t know what’s happened might think it’s I who’ve died.”

Minglan sighed.

Very well—this man had been in a foul temper of late, and whenever he spoke, there was a sour edge to everything.

It was rather like having gathered all your strength to deal with an enemy, only to find that before you could truly come to blows, the enemy had gone off and died on his own—and died well, with a proper and dignified funeral, attended by all those who owed Gu Tingye their courtesy, the majority of them genuinely ignorant of the truth (since there had not yet been time to spread the story). These people competed to perform the most extravagant display of grief before the spirit tablet, and he had no way to say: The late Marquis and I were enemies bound together by past and present lives—you needn’t exert yourselves so.

In truth, Minglan was not especially at ease either. Managing the funeral was one thing—but all that stream of condolence gifts being sent into the Marquis household… It made her chest ache. The main and branch households had not yet divided, and so all the gold and silver presents had to go into the main household treasury. Yet the human obligations accumulated in this way would likely fall largely to her to repay in future, and she did not know how much would be left after the household division was settled.

Nevertheless she was broad-minded enough to counsel him gently: “After all, the dead must be respected. The man is gone—what is left to hold a grudge against?”

“From the time I had any understanding, I always knew he wouldn’t last long.” Gu Tingye was expressionless. “That didn’t stop him causing no small amount of trouble.”

His deepest childhood impression of his elder brother was of Gu Tingyu half-dead, being helped upright to take his medicine—all the while letting his eyes flash with ill-intent as he whispered slander to their father. From childhood to adulthood, he had eaten quite a share of suffering at that invalid’s hands. In his view, illness did not cancel out wrongdoing; compassion did not prevent also feeling contempt. A person who did wrong should still be held to account, even from a sickbed.

This rather modern way of thinking, Minglan felt, deserved her utmost endorsement. “My lord is indeed clear in his sense of justice. A true man of character.”

Gu Tingye shot her a sideways glance; his mood improved not a little. He laughed and scolded: “Sharp-tongued creature! It’s a real waste that you’re not up in the main hall sparring with all those scholars!”

He had been holding a low opinion of scholars lately. Well—that was, in fact, his second source of irritation these days.

From the sixth month onward, he had formally taken on the concurrent post of Deputy Director of the Five Military Commissions and taken charge of the Left Military Commission, with the honorary title of Junior Guardian conferred upon him. With his elevation in status came the consequence that he now participated directly in military and state policy discussions. As the situation gradually stabilized, every undercurrent was converting itself into open battle; the main audience hall became a jousting ground for the various factions, and crowds of men stood about spraying spittle in all directions.

They quarreled over the posthumous honorary title to be granted to the late Emperor; they quarreled over the differences in the ceremonial protocols for the two Empress Dowagers; they quarreled over promotions and transfers; and when it came to administrative arrangements and national policy decisions, they quarreled so vigorously they could go without food. The founding institutional rule of this dynasty was that civil officials held authority over military commanders; speechifying and disputation were the civil officials’ province. Military men, for the most part, submitted reports.

In the past, when Gu Tingye had only his own small patch of ground to manage, he could stand in the audience hall and let whatever was said go in one ear and out the other; the important matters would be transcribed in several copies and distributed to senior officials for their own study anyway. But now that he was half civil and half military, he had no choice but to prick up his ears and listen with real attention, because whenever the Emperor was cornered by the civil officials and could not get a word in edgewise, he most liked to say: “Minister X, what is your view on this matter?”

This Minister X was a role that rotated among Shen Congxing, Elder Yao, and a certain individual surnamed Gu, with others playing supporting parts as needed.

How was he supposed to have a view? If he had that kind of ability to argue, why would he be in this line of work, relying on the knife’s edge for his livelihood?

Whether the posthumous honorary title of the late Emperor should or should not include an additional character denoting “sagely”—what in the world did that have to do with anything? And over this one petty point, two factions with long-standing grievances could line up their full complement of men and argue from dawn to nightfall, mouths full of classical allusions and citations going back from the Five Emperors and Three Sovereigns of antiquity all the way up to the late Emperor’s ill-advised favoritism toward the Minor Consort Rong in his final years.

That sort of quarrel was relatively mild—the Emperor had no strong feeling about it, and could watch his subordinates tear into each other with a certain detached amusement.

The new Emperor had clearly not yet been hardened to the dangerous terrain of court. When the two factions were deadlocked, they demanded the Emperor arbitrate.

If the Emperor declined—then he was unfilial. The late Emperor had personally brought him in from the distant border regions, nurtured him, supported him, established him as Crown Prince and put him on the throne—and now he could say his predecessor was unworthy? His conscience was thoroughly rotten!

And then on and on and on, a torrent of classical citations.

If the Emperor agreed—then he was showing a lack of wisdom. Because the late Emperor had dragged out the business of establishing an heir for more than ten years, plunging the entire empire into bloody turmoil—even the capital had been washed in blood, and so many loyal and capable officials and generals had died in the two upheavals that followed. After all that, and still no clear verdict? Your Majesty—you must be willing to sacrifice your own filial reputation for the sake of justice and the hearts of all your subjects!

And then on and on and on, another torrent of classical citations.

The new Son of Heaven was brought to the point of utter collapse. Heaven help him—he was being hit from all sides and had done nothing to deserve it.

Fortunately he had allies as well. After half a year of quarreling back and forth, with enormous effort expended by all sides, the matter was finally settled.

Not long before, another quarrel had erupted at court over the question of ceremonial standards for the two Empress Dowagers.

The Emperor naturally hoped to secure a higher standard of treatment for his birth mother—but a large faction of officials refused to consent, claiming that before his death the late Emperor had given a verbal instruction before a room full of attending ministers: After I am gone, treat the Imperial Noble Consort with full consideration—in all ceremonial matters, let everything be equal to that of the Empress.

In truth, the old Emperor had been delirious in those final moments of illness—lying there at death’s door, barely conscious, recognizing only the Empress Defei who had been at his side for so many years. By the standards of modern law, a verbal testament made under such circumstances could not in fact be considered valid.

For fully half a month the quarrel went on, and the Emperor ground his teeth in fury. That faction showed not the slightest inclination to yield a single point—they even clamored loudly about counting years of precedence and seniority, demanding that the Empress Dowager Shengde be moved to the larger and more prestigious eastern side-palace.

At the time, old Lao Geng, who had been quietly daydreaming, was unexpectedly called upon by the Emperor to give his view. Momentarily off-guard, he blurted out: Well naturally, one’s own birth mother outranks someone who isn’t blood-related.

This statement stirred up a hornets’ nest.

Old Geng’s fellow officials descended upon him at once in a roiling avalanche of rebuke and denunciation—”ignorant and incompetent,” “devoid of any understanding of ritual and propriety,” “absurdly uninformed”—that was the lighter end of it. More severe critics went straight for “harboring insidious motives” and “acting with undisguised ulterior intent.”

Poor old Geng was battered and bewildered until he was nearly senseless, and reportedly had to be walked home by Zhong Dayou.

In Gu Tingye’s estimate, the Emperor actually felt considerable sympathy for Lao Geng.

In the straightforward culture of the Sichuan borderlands, the common method of resolution was swift and satisfying: when there was a problem, everyone drew their knives, stabbed the necessary number of holes in the person, and the matter was settled. Old Geng, by the look of it, had not had much experience with the peculiar species known as the civil official—creatures who, for all their outward veneer of refined and scholarly civility, were inwardly ruthless and ferocious to the last degree: never using their hands, always using their mouths, capable with a single brush of tracing your failings from your ancestors down through to the nephew of your second maternal uncle’s wife who had visited a certain establishment recently and left without paying. The art of killing a man without shedding blood, perfected to an art form.

The very next day, the memorials impeaching Lao Geng flew into the Grand Secretariat like snowflakes.

By the laws of ancient clan and ritual propriety, a blood birth mother ranked lower than a ritual legal mother. If a son born of a concubine achieved great things, it was the legal principal wife who received commendation and honorary titles—the lowly concubine-mother had no claim to any of it. (Her day-to-day life might become considerably more comfortable, but that was a separate matter.) If, by special exception, the concubine-mother was to be honored, the protocol demanded that the legal mother come first, with the honor then descending in diminishing measure to the concubine-mother.

Old Geng had been deeply wronged. He had had no intention whatsoever of challenging the mighty edifice of ritual law.

In truth, carefully analyzed, the Emperor’s situation was not analogous to this standard case.

The Empress Sheng’an had not been elevated from a consort rank directly to the position of empress; she had been formally invested as Empress through all the proper ceremonial rites and proclamations. It was in fact the Imperial Noble Consort Defei who had leapfrogged from a consort position to a posthumous recognition as empress—and yet she had not produced a son who became Emperor. By what justification?

That faction of officials had clearly been muddying the waters, seizing on old Geng’s one misstep to tie and tangle everything seven times over, dragging the argument ten thousand miles from the original point.

The new Emperor had clearly been overwhelmed by their human-wave tactics in the early days after his accession, his head left spinning by the sheer volume of flying spittle, and had in a moment of weakness agreed to invest the two Empress Dowagers simultaneously; as a result, he had faced persistent obstruction in the inner palace ever since, and must by now have been regretting it bitterly.

It seemed that someone had offered him a well-considered piece of guidance, for the Emperor thought things through and became ever more resolute in his position. For the sake of his own mother, and for the sake of his own future quality of life, even when the Empress Dowager Shengde went to the temple and wept before the late Emperor’s spirit, he would not yield a single word.

He dismissed five or six of the officials who had been pressing most aggressively at the front of the charge, demoted over ten more in rank, and at last suppressed the momentum of that faction. He simultaneously laid the blame for the Empress Dowager Shengde’s taking ill at the door of these same officials, on charges of “stirring up discord among the imperial family and acting with ulterior motive.”

A decisive victory in that engagement. Only poor old Geng, to this day, had been claiming illness and staying home, still somewhat too embarrassed and reluctant to face the world in public.

Elder Yao had noted, however, that this heavy-handed approach should not be used too frequently. This time around, the Emperor had the moral advantage on his side, and the case did not touch on truly fundamental matters of governance. If the Emperor made a regular habit of suppressing opposition through sheer force of authority, his reputation would begin to suffer for it.

Minglan nodded. Elder Yao truly did have the wisdom of age and experience. Those words struck directly to the point.

One should indeed welcome remonstrance and widely heed the counsel of one’s ministers, pooling wisdom and resources—after all, the Emperor and his circle of men like Gu Tingye were still relatively new to experience, still learning in many areas of governance. The differences in customs and conditions between north and south, east and west, were enormous; the factions at court were numerous and intricate. To go one’s own way with no regard for others—if things went wrong, there would not even be a pretext to place blame elsewhere. Every error would rest squarely on the Emperor’s own shoulders.

And so Gu Tong had no choice but to apply himself.

In order not to disappoint the Emperor, and still more to avoid repeating the fate of poor old Geng, he had to spend his evenings working through stacks of reports and case files, analyzing and deliberating. He had to keep his mind fully alert through court sessions while the scholars argued with each other, not daring to lapse for a single moment—and after returning to the household, still had to go to his bitter enemy of a late brother’s spirit tablet and wail, squeezing out tears if he could, and making do with a dry howl of grief if he couldn’t, just to keep up appearances. With all that on his shoulders, it would have been strange if he were not in a foul temper.

Fortunately he was a man of sharp intelligence; by the time the forty-ninth day of mourning for his departed elder brother had passed, he had already reached the point where he could interject a remark or two during court debates—and, according to Elder Yao, those interjections were made with considerable skill and precision.

A few days prior, the court had taken up the question of salt administration.

For years the salt trade had been in disorder: private, illicit salt was rampant, official salt yielded no tax revenue, and the account books were doctored into an appearance of perfect smoothness—every level colluding together from the top down. The late Emperor had sent out several inspection missions over the years; every one either returned empty-handed or ended up so entangled in the affair that the investigators themselves were brought back to the capital sitting in prisoner’s carts.

The current Emperor wished to bring order to the situation. The civil officials, as customary, fell into uproarious argument; the broad consensus being that one should not stir things up, that any upheaval would drag in complications and threaten national stability yet again.

Gu Tingye listened for a full morning, then fixed his attention on the one who had been shouting the loudest, put on an expression of polite humility, and asked: Setting aside all other considerations for now—should the salt administration be reformed, or should it not?

The official’s face swelled purple for a considerable length of time, after which he produced a great deal of noise about consequences, ramifications, and the manifold difficulties involved.

Gu Tingye asked again: So your position is that it should not be reformed? That it should simply be left to rot?

Regardless of how their tongues twisted and their arguments turned, Gu Tingye kept returning to one question: is it, or is it not, in the interest of the nation and its people to reform the salt administration?

Salt revenue was one-fifth of the imperial treasury’s income; as things stood, it barely amounted to one-fiftieth. With the salt administration in such a state of decay, there was not an official present who dared say it should not be reformed. For a moment the audience hall fell silent. Seeing this, the Emperor’s confidence surged.

Very good—since everyone agreed that the salt administration needed to be reformed, the next questions were: how to reform it, whom to send to conduct the reform, and whether to proceed gradually or cut to the heart of things at once.

Minglan was full of admiration. Gu Tingye was clearly finding his footing—it had not even been two days of policy discussion before he had already mastered the technique of separating out the argument into stages. But when the court began to debate the choice of person to be sent to reform the salt administration, Minglan could not help but feel a twinge of anxiety. “Do you… want to go yourself?”

Gu Tingye swept his sleeve elegantly and sat upright in his high-backed chair, smiling serenely. “I told the Emperor this very morning—this kind of painstaking, detailed work is not something I am suited for.”

Minglan patted her chest and breathed a very large sigh of relief.

It was not easy being a woman in ancient times. One did not want one’s husband to become a self-sacrificing moral paragon—but one feared equally that he might become a ruthless opportunist. Best of all was to be like someone in the mold of Tan Lun—loyal and principled, old acquaintances everywhere, a long and honorable career with a graceful conclusion, and blessings extending to one’s children and grandchildren.

Gu Tingye, seeing her this way, laughed and gently pinched her earlobe. He said warmly: “Don’t worry. The Emperor made his move at this particular time with careful calculation: with the recent two-Huai military uprising just settled, the garrison forces in various regions have been reshuffled, and commanders at the level of regional military commissioners are largely loyal to the imperial command. It was only after securing all that that the Emperor resolved to make his move.”

Minglan wrapped her arms around the man’s, smiling brightly like a morning glory, and rested her head against his solid shoulder. In a quiet voice: “As long as you are safe and well—no amount of riches or glory means anything to me.” Her tone was soft and tender.

Gu Tingye felt a tingling warmth spread through his chest. He wrapped an arm around Minglan in return, his eyes darkening, the corner of his mouth curving into a smile; one hand moved slowly downward toward her waist.

Minglan pressed his hand—that kept moving lower—and her face went red. “We are still in mourning.”

There was no form of contraception that was entirely reliable, and at this point in the month she was at a particularly risky time.

Gu Tingye’s face fell. He held Minglan and squeezed her for a good while, then finally straightened himself, stood up, and strode out. Seeing his displeased expression, Minglan called after him in a small voice to ask where he was going.

“To take down the lanterns.”