Chapter 116 — The Jiang Family

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Chen Yanzhou gave a bitter smile.

A coward who abandoned his city and fled, heedless of the lives of the common people! A sinner!

Anyone who learned of his past would surely turn up their nose at him in contempt.

He could not help lowering his head, murmuring, "My lady, I am advanced in years. Whenever the wind blows and the rain falls, my knees ache so badly I can scarcely bear it. I fear I can no longer attend you. When this rain lets up, I will return to Zhending..."

The hall was silent. Dou Yan neither spoke to urge him to stay nor seized the chance to let him go. The oppressive stillness made the sound of the rain outside all the more distinct, and the hall seemed all the more hushed.

Chen Yanzhou raised his head in surprise and saw Dou Yan sitting there blankly, her eyes fixed and vacant.

A chill of alarm shot through him, and he called out loudly, "Fourth Young Lady!" "What—what has come over you?"

Dou Yan was in a daze and had not caught a word of what Chen Yanzhou said.

She was struggling to recall the events of the past.

In her previous life, not long after trouble befell the Jiang family, the Duchess of Yingguo fell ill and died. While the mourning period was still in force, Song Yan was driven out of the Yingguo Duke's residence, and no one knew where he went.

None of this had she lived through.

Song Yan was one year younger than she.

At that time her heart had been wholly consumed with how to marry into the Jining Marquis's household, and she had cared nothing for anyone or anything beyond it. It was only after she married into the Jining Marquis's household and entered the circle of the capital's nobility that she began to hear, in fragments, of the events of those years.

The Dingzhen Duke's household had been founded on military merit. Its sons were usually cast into the army camps to be tempered the moment they turned fourteen, and so no small number of them rose in rank, amassed wealth, and commanded great armies—though more still perished in obscurity on the battlefield. To ensure a flourishing line of heirs, the Jiang family was in the habit of taking concubines in abundance, and made little distinction between sons born of the wife and sons born of concubines: all trained in martial arts under the same masters and studied in the Jiang family school, with only one measure—who had the gift for leading troops. This drew considerable criticism from the capital's great houses. Yet for that very reason, the Jiang family produced famous generals in every generation, and its marriage ties spread across the land, north and south.

Jiang Meisun was the sixth Duke of Dingguo. He had twelve brothers, of whom only five reached adulthood. In the third year of Yongming, he was ordered to garrison Fujian. Apart from his fifth brother, Jiang Baisun, who remained in the capital on account of his youth, his second brother Jiang Zhusun, third brother Jiang Lansun, and fourth brother Jiang Songsun all followed him south.

In the eighth year of Yongming, Jiang Zhusun fell on the battlefield, and the Emperor posthumously enfeoffed him as the Marquis of Qinghai.

During the eighteen years Jiang Meisun served as commander-in-chief of Fujian, his military exploits were illustrious; he all but wiped out the Japanese pirates along the coast, so that even by day the private vessels of Fujian and Zhejiang dared not put out to sea. The great merchant houses and wealthy gentry of the south who trafficked in contraband were left howling in misery, and the enemies he made were beyond counting. Yet he happened to be on good terms with several Grand Secretaries, and no matter how the censors of the Censorate impeached him, he remained unscathed and never lost the Emperor's favor. Gradually, no one was willing to touch so thorny a matter.

But that time, for reasons unknown, a censor suddenly impeached Jiang Meisun for slaughtering innocent people to counterfeit merit and for nurturing the pirates to strengthen his own position. Upon receiving the memorial, the Emperor not only issued an edict of condemnation but also ordered the Embroidered Uniform Guard to escort the Jiang brothers to the Grand Court of Judicial Review in the capital for interrogation.

Stranger still, the brothers Jiang Meisun and Jiang Lansun died under torture on the way back to the capital; Jiang Songsun took his own life out of fear of punishment the moment he was thrown into the Grand Court; and afterward the entire Jiang household was exterminated.

It was said that when the Jiang matriarch, Lady Mei, received the imperial edict, she took advantage of the Embroidered Uniform Guard's search of the house to lead the women of the Jiang family, including two granddaughters aged three and two, in taking poison and ending their own lives.

When the executions were carried out at the Caishikou market, there were only the men of the Jiang family and no women.

In the dozen or so years that followed, there was no one left in Fujian who could withstand the Japanese pirates, and time and again they came ashore to massacre whole cities.

Whenever the people of the capital heard of such things, they would shake their heads and sigh, "If only the Duke of Dingguo were still alive."

After the Prince of Liao ascended the throne, he cleared the Jiang family's name. Jiang Meisun's portrait was placed in the Shrine of Loyalty, and the Dingzhen Duke's residence, which the late Emperor had bestowed upon the Grand Princess Ningde, was taken back. The Prince of Liao even summoned Song Yan specifically to ask whether any of the Jiang family had survived.

Song Sui replied that the Jiang family had no descendants left.

Yet rumor had long persisted in the streets that Jiang Baisun, Jiang Meisun's youngest brother, had left behind a posthumous son still living in the world—that when disaster struck the Jiang family, loyal servants had secretly carried the child away and raised him in the lanes and alleys of Qu Street.

When Lady Guo, wife of the Marquis of Xuanning, told her this, she had laughed and said, "Since the whole household was to be exterminated, the Embroidered Uniform Guard would surely have counted every head. Never mind Jiang Baisun's son—not even a personal servant or a steward of any standing would have been missed. Those common folk simply love to invent such tales, to make people believe that good men must surely be rewarded..."

Reckoning the time, Song Yan had been driven from the household in the fourteenth year of Chengping.

Counting backward, the Duchess of Yingguo must have died in the summer of the fourteenth year of Chengping... or perhaps the spring, or the winter of the thirteenth year of Chengping...

The Jiang family's trouble must have come in the thirteenth year of Chengping.

It was now the fourth month of the thirteenth year of Chengping...

Dou Yan sprang to her feet.

In other words, the edict condemning Jiang Meisun might be issued at this very moment!

Dou Yan thought of that infant not yet a hundred days old.

Instantly she was drenched in sweat, and she asked Chen Yanzhou, "Old Chen, tell me—could something have happened to the Duke of Dingguo?"

Chen Yanzhou was utterly baffled by her question and pondered, "I should not think so? The Duke of Dingguo seems rough and bluff, but in truth he is meticulous; everything is weighed in his mind. He is a great general guarding a whole region—if something had happened, word should have come out. We have heard nothing at all, and the Duke of Dingguo and Zeng Yifen were on very close personal terms..."

Here he stopped short, his expression stiffening, and he looked toward Dou Yan.

Dou Yan was already looking his way.

Their eyes met, and as if by common accord they both cried out, "And now Zeng Yifen is dead..."