Chapter 121 — Setting the Scheme (Bonus update for 1,200 pink votes)
Purple Streets of Chang'an · Page 1 of 4
Dou Yan smiled faintly, the confidence that spilled from the corners of her eyes and the tips of her brows lending her a radiant, glancing charm.
"When I read the histories, I always felt the thing an emperor fears most is a great general who grows too strong and keeps his own troops," she said lightly. "The Duke of Dingzhen was impeached for slaughtering good men to claim their deeds as merit, and for keeping rebels alive to inflate his own importance. Those charges must be grave indeed?"
Surely any educated man would know that much.
Yan Che laughed. "It is a bit of a nuisance, I suppose." His tone was perfunctory.
Dou Yan acted as though she had not noticed. Slowly she went on, "When an ordinary man is wrongly accused, he weeps before the upright magistrate, lays out the facts, presents the evidence, or gathers his neighbors to testify for him."
Yan Che was taken aback; he looked toward Song Yan.
He saw that Song Yan, who had been rubbing the lid of his teacup with his finger, had suddenly stopped, while Dou Yan's clear, bell-like voice continued at his ear: "If the official judges wisely, the truth will out soon enough. If the official is muddled, the man will take his beating and suffer wrong into the bargain. And besides—the emperor is not the one hearing the case!"
Both men found themselves listening intently.
"However sage the Son of Heaven may be, he has his own private concerns," Dou Yan said coolly. "Say you are loyal to the sovereign and loving to the people, and so you are. Say you harbor treacherous designs, and so you do."
That was saying...
Yan Che could not help wiping his forehead with his sleeve.
Song Sui quietly straightened his seat; he had been watching Dou Zhiwei all along, and now a dazzling light flashed suddenly in his eyes, and his gaze grew bright.
Dou Zhiwei's attention was wholly on Yan Che, and she knew nothing of this. Still unhurried, she continued: "Han Xin rested on his laurels and lost all military power; he could no longer rebel, and yet Empress Lü still had him killed. Xiao He held the Han king's treasury and grain and civil affairs in his hand, yet he went about buying land and houses, and the Han king never suspected him. Wang Jian led the whole nation's army on campaign and sent envoys again and again to beg the Qin king for wealth and estates, and the Qin king laughed aloud. But I have heard that the Duke of Dingzhen was diligent in governing and caring for the people, honest and devoted to public duty—a pillar of the state and a mainstay of the court. Is that so?"
Yan Che stared at Dou Yan, his face full of shock.
When the Duke of Dingzhen was called to account, everyone felt he had been wronged. The lady had already contacted some of the Duke's former subordinates to appeal against the injustice.
Others had made suggestions like Dou's, but the lady felt that it would not only stain the Duke's reputation—and what if the emperor truly believed it?
The proposal was quickly drowned out by other voices.
Could it be that they had truly misjudged?
What the emperor cared about was not at all what the censors had impeached the Duke of Dingzhen for, nor what the Duke himself had done, but rather—now that the Duke's reputation grew daily—what would he do to the emperor? To the court?
If those memorials appealing the Duke's injustice were submitted...
At the thought, it was as though he had drunk a bowl of cold water in the depths of winter; a chill seeped through his whole body.
Song Sui bowed his head in thought.
As a child, his mother had often taken him back to her maiden home. His earliest memory was of standing in the Jiang family's drill hall, pushing stone rollers about at play with his cousins.