Chapter 145 — Bereavement
Purple Streets of Chang'an · Page 1 of 4
The Duchess of the Duke of Britain's household, Song Zhi's mother, had died of illness!
.
In the previous life, the great change in Song Zhi had begun with his mother's death.
But in that life, the Jiang family had been exterminated root and branch. Lady Jiang, who had fought desperately to save her mother and brother, was consumed by self-reproach and remorse, brooding until her heart was knotted with grief; she took to her sickbed and lingered there—that was entirely understandable. In this life, however, the women and children of the Jiang family had been spared; the men were exiled. Though Jiang Lansun was dead, and the Jiang family might have lost its chance to rise again and return to court, the line endured. Lady Jiang had held firm when the family's pillars, Jiang Meisun and the warrior Jiang Songsun, had died; afterward she had remained well enough. Now she had become the Jiang family's greatest support. By all reason she should have grown more resilient, not fallen ill and died without warning.
Could there have been signs beforehand?
Only no one had the chance to notice them.
But Song Ke could not possibly have missed them!
Since Lady Jiang had entrusted even so grave a matter as the guardianship of her orphaned son to Song Yan, it was clear how highly she regarded her eldest son. And Song Yan was the sort whose mind missed nothing and whose plans were thorough in every detail—he could not have failed to notice.
If Lady Jiang had shown anything strange, why would Song Yan have come to deliver her thank-you gifts?
And there was more: in the previous life, Song Yan had been impeached by a censor for getting a maidservant with child during his mourning for his mother.
A boy of fourteen, still muddled and ignorant of the world, raised in cosseted luxury—such a lapse was possible. Dou Chi had found the Duke of Britain's reaction to the affair somewhat odd, but with the Duke of Dingguo condemned, the Duke of Britain might well have done such a thing to curry favor with the imperial house. There are no parents who are always in the wrong; whatever faults the Duke of Britain may once have had, during the years Song Yan served as heir apparent he had doted on the boy. And yet in the end Song Yan killed his father and his younger brother—and by such bloody means. That was precisely why Dou Yan held Song Yan in such dread.
Consider: a man who cannot even forgive his own parents' failings—how extreme his nature must be, how narrow his heart!
But in this life, she had come to know Song Yan, and her understanding of him had changed.
A youth who at thirteen could force her to resort to tricks and snatch a child before she could even get him to sit down and talk—even if he had gotten a maidservant with child during mourning, Song Yan commanded the Jiang family's entire information network in the capital. How could he possibly have let matters deteriorate to the point of impeachment by a censor?
Dou Yan had been the wife of a marquis.
In houses of hereditary nobility, the eldest son was valued even more highly than in families of officials.
Official families brought honor to their name through the examinations; the eldest son was not necessarily the one who studied best. But once any son of the house passed the examinations and entered office, he gained a voice in the family—some even founded their own branch and split off from the ancestral line. The rise and fall of a clan often turned on this.