Chapter 46 — Half
Purple Streets of Chang'an · Page 1 of 4
Dou Yan returned to East Dou in the family carriage.
In the carriage, Dou Duo asked his son, "What did Yuanji say to you?"
Just now, with Steward Dou present, he had not dared probe too deeply. He knew only that Dou Bingheng had returned, and he guessed Bingheng had most likely come over the Zhao family's conditions—yet he could not fathom what use Bingheng's return could possibly be. The conditions the Zhao family had put forward were plainly meant to corner him, to shift the blame onto his shoulders. Unless Zhao Ruifu got half the West Dou fortune, he would never agree to put his signature to a consent. Ruifu held all the winning cards; he would not abandon them at a few words from Dou Bingheng. He would not cede half of West Dou's property to Dou Yan merely on Bingheng's word of acknowledgment. And the Wang family would never let Wang Shuying remain in the Dou household without the Zhao family's consent.
The more he thought, the more it seemed a dead end.
Dou Huaiying said bluntly, "Fifth Brother told me everything that has happened at home during this time."
That said, he said nothing more, so that Dou Duo waited in vain for a good while and had to prompt again, "And then—what did Yuanji say to you?"
"Fifth Brother said that our brother-in-law's demand is reasonable in sentiment but not in principle," Dou Huaiying replied. "But with what happened to Guqiu, our brother-in-law's anger will not be appeased, and he demands that the Dou family compensate Shouyuan. If we put ourselves in his place, we would likely do something even worse. Had this not come just as Lord Wang was touring Gansu as grand coordinator, our three families could have sat down and talked it through properly, renegotiated a sum the Zhao family would find reasonable and you could accept—we might even have refused our brother-in-law's demand outright, and Lord Wang, I daresay, would have understood. But the timing is wrong. The Zhao family can afford to wait; the great affairs of the court cannot be delayed. If Lord Wang is impeached, I fear no one else will have the prestige and the resolve to shut down and investigate the frontier horse markets. The Emperor's wish to pacify the northwest would become empty talk, and Lord Zeng would likely face the danger of being forced into retirement once more. Fifth Brother asked me to counsel you: think of the larger picture, and think thrice before you act."
Dou Yan pursed her lips.
In her past life, Wang Xingyi had in the end only managed to close the horse market at Lianguan; he had never succeeded in banning the horse trade outright.
If the court forbade it, did the garrison commanders of the Nine Border Regions have no means of their own? What, then, were the commissioners of the Five Army Command living on? What were they drinking on?
In the end, the horse market was hard to ban because it was the private treasury of every military officer in the northwest—which was precisely why Wang Xingyi opposed opening the market in the first place. And it was for the same reason that the censors had never been able to bring down Shi Ruilan, for all his arrogance and tyranny. This was no longer a simple question of whether or not to open the horse market; it was a covert struggle between the civil officials and the military officers. In the end, Dou Yan had been able to impeach Shi Ruilan only because the new emperor ascended the throne, decided to take the Lianguan horse market into his own hands, and dispatched Han Wei, a eunuch of the Directorate of Ceremonial, to serve concurrently as supervising censor of the Shaanxi Regional Military Commission, permanently stationed in Xi'an, in charge of the frontier horse markets…
Dou Duo gave a cold laugh. "We merely eat by the grace of the East Residence. The larger picture? What has the larger picture to do with us? Where would we get such foresight?"
He was still angry over being left to cool his heels all day and all night in the East Residence by the Old Madam.