Chapter 76

He Mengchun rode home day and night, and coming into Quanzhang City found all he saw and heard no different from the old peace. The afternoon sun, drowsy-making, fell through the gaps in the camphor and banana leaves onto the blue-grey flagstone lanes, the passersby each at their own ease or hurry.

Of the danger his wife's message said the yamen was in, he could see not a trace.

Then Zhuo Siheng came out to meet him too, his face full of care and much thinner, and told him on the road all that had happened. Lord He near fell off his horse, his face no better than Zhuo Siheng's. The two came back to the residence soul-shaken together, and Madam He sent everyone out and asked Lord He straight how he meant to deal with the Administrator held in jail. Lord He hemmed and hawed, said "it grieves me to the heart" and "I failed to see the man," but could not say what should be done.

Madam He slapped the table, and launched an even-handed attack on the persons of both Zhuo Siheng and He Mengchun.

"You two, and readers both! The moment a thing happens you're at a loss, and leave it to a woman to decide! Is there nothing in the sages' books but cultivating the self, and nothing of governing a state? To keep such officials at court, aren't you failing to share the emperor's load? I call this a feeble way to hold office! A prefect and a vice-prefect, bullied to this pass by an administrator! Pitiful and absurd!"

Lord He was used to not daring to breathe loud before his wife. He felt a little shame before Zhuo Siheng, but seeing Zhuo Siheng take his scolding cowed and trembling too, a fellow-feeling came over him, and his embarrassment left him.

"Well, things have come to this. Drag it out without deciding, and though Cui's in our hands, that Wang is still in Yongming. What power have you two to reach him?" Madam He's anger had not cooled a jot.

"Since Administrator Cui... since Cui is taken, and his whole family held, how could he still carry word out... Calm yourself, Madam." He Mengchun meant to soothe his wife, only to send her near leaping with rage. She pointed at him. "You tell me to calm myself? How am I to calm myself? The day we took Cui, if I hadn't guarded against it, we'd have been sold out! This bosom friend you hang on your lips day and night had planted a spy in our own house, who meant to go and carry word the moment he'd learned it. Luckily my princely-house guards aren't useless scholars all talk and no deed, and took the man on the spot and held him fast, so there's no trouble left behind. Had the word truly got out, and he'd gone for broke with us, where would we have the upper hand we hold now? And you've the face to stand there and say 'how could he carry word out' and 'calm yourself'!"

Zhuo Siheng felt that if he didn't speak, Madam He would set about Lord He with her hands. He put in at the right moment, "The man's intent is vicious, and the spy he hid watching was no plant of a single day, which shows how long he'd schemed to be rid of Lord He. Thanks to your quick wit and courage, Madam, we have this witness. Since what Administrator Cui meant to do was slander Lord He, it may be awkward for the lord to send up a memorial himself, so let me draft one, and lay the confessions of his underlings and the evidence of his own guilt together before the Ministry of Justice."

Madam He threw a sidelong glance at her husband, as if to say, look at him, then thought a moment and said, "You alone may not carry enough weight, and since the man aimed at the prefect, for the prefect to say nothing would look too sly. No, there must be a joint memorial from the two of you."

Brought to this, Lord He, timid and trouble-shy as he was, dared not cross his wife's plan, for his life and his career hung on it. He and Zhuo Siheng questioned the spy Cui Lu had planted in the house, and the underling sent to carry the letter, and with the two men's signed and thumb-printed confessions, and the memorial of accusation, Madam He sent princely-house crack riders galloping back to the capital, straight to the center.

Zhuo Siheng's thought was that this way the men could be sent straight to the Ministry of Justice in the capital to be charged and tried, and perhaps a wider web of ties dug out. If the Tang house meant to save this man, under the emperor's own feet they might not have their way.

The emperor was no soft touch.

But two quiet days after all the bustle, a law-office officer came with an urgent report in the night, and pulled Zhuo Siheng from a hard-won sleep. Hearing it, he had no heart to sleep again, changed into his official robe and went straight to the jail, not daring to lose a moment.

Cui Lu's case touched many, so his household were held apart, and Cui Lu had a cell to himself. When Zhuo Siheng came for him deep in the night, he took it his hour of death had come, and seeing his enemy his eyes went red, and he cursed through the bars. "Zhuo Siheng! You tricked me into moving first, and gulled He Mengchun into scheming with you! How could the court hold a reading man as vicious as you!"

Seven or eight days in that place, and the scholarly polish was gone from him, his filthy, matted body seeming ten years older, the breath behind his curses thin and spent.

Zhuo Siheng did not care to waste words on him. He stood outside and said coldly, "Scheming with me? Was it not you and Wang Botang who listed me and He Mengchun as one faction? It's there in black and white, Lord Cui. Don't forget what you wrote yourself. But I'm not here to question you. Have you eaten your supper in the jail today?"

Cui Lu had his sophistries all ready, and hadn't looked for Zhuo Siheng to ask so small a thing. For a moment he was stunned, then laughed aloud. "You came to the jail on purpose for this? Don't you want me dead? Why would you care about this? Or is it to play the honest magistrate for others to see?"

Zhuo Siheng did not care to tangle with him, and went on in a steady voice. "The jail fare is no match for your home's, to be sure, but three meals a day won't starve a prisoner, your sons and their wives least of all. Your family are held on the floor above. At supper today the jailer brought their food as usual, but since you hadn't eaten, he gave your untouched portion to your family as well. Your wife, afraid your son would go hungry, shared it all out for him to eat."

Cui Lu did not see why Zhuo Siheng said this, but a strange dread rose in his heart.

"A law-office man reported just now that your son fell down in convulsions two hours ago. By the time the jailer brought a doctor he was dead. The doctor says he died of poison. His own share came from the same food-pail as the rest of the family's. Had it been poisoned, the whole family would have been poisoned. Yet he alone took it, which shows it was because he ate the food you refused."

Zhuo Siheng was close at hand, yet to Cui Lu his words seemed to drift from far off, with an unreal feel to them. From the three words "died of poison," Cui Lu no longer knew what the man was saying or what he was hearing, and sat dazed and silent, the light going out of his eyes bit by bit.

"We've caught the one who gave the poison. An old jailer. He wasn't even meant to be on duty today. He took another's silver, and so did this thing against the law of the land. Don't you want to know who did it?" There was no rise or fall in Zhuo Siheng's voice, like a water-clock telling off each drop, speaking every word exact.

At the word of a culprit, Cui Lu fell to the floor and wept aloud, his grief ringing round the cell. How long passed there was no telling before he raised his head, eyes near splitting, and looked at the still-calm Zhuo Siheng, and threw himself on the bars. "Who! Who killed my son! It was He Mengchun, wasn't it! It was that vicious wife of his, bent on my death!"

Zhuo Siheng shook his head. "You're wrong. The one who had the jailer give the poison was your own good ally, Prefect Wang Botang."

"You spread lies to fool me! Impossible! Prefect Wang helped me get rid of you on Lord Tang's order! How would he not heed his own father-in-law? Say it! Was it you? Was it you who killed my son!"

Facing the half-crazed Cui Lu, Zhuo Siheng let no feeling show, his voice crisp. "He knows the joint memorial from Lord He and me has reached the emperor. The Ministry of Justice checked it and gave it to the emperor to judge. Seeing local officials turn on one another so for private gain, the emperor was enraged, and means to have you sent to the capital for the Three Judicial Courts to try together. So Prefect Wang wants you dead, because alive you'd give him up, and that is what he fears most. For his own career and his father-in-law's name, he stooped to this. To his mind, Anhua Commandery's government and its officials are in such disorder that your death would surely pass unnoticed. But what he didn't know is that the Anhua Commandery of today is not the Anhua of before. Anything that happens now in the Anhua yamen, I can trace to its root, all in my grasp, and no one dares neglect his work or shirk it. So the moment it happened I took the man and the evidence together."

For a man like Cui Lu no more needed saying. Lay out the cause and the result, and he saw it clear, because meeting the same thing himself he'd have made the same choice.

He knelt on the floor and wept without stop, his whole body shaking, the ox-tallow lamp flame guttering. Had one stood outside under the open sky just then, it would have seemed all things between heaven and earth must change color at this grief of a parent burying a child, all but Zhuo Siheng. He took paper and brush from the table behind him, laid them out patiently and calm on the floor, then rose slowly, and as he ground the ink said, unhurried, "Whether to avenge your son, and how to avenge him, you know in your heart. Write your testimony and set your mark to it. Even if your words meet no end of blocking in the capital, black on white is the last wall left to you."

The weeping faded by degrees. Cui Lu's shaking hand took up the brush, then he doubled over with a cry, again and again, near breathless, and only in broken fits finished the testimony, his withered fingers dipping ink to print his mark amid the wild sobbing, the writing by the end a wretched, tangled scrawl barely to be made out.

Watching Zhuo Siheng fold the testimony with graceful ease, his heart full of hate and pain, knowing that to scheme with a base man and fall in his own trap was his just end, yet never dreaming it would drag down his own son, in the far reach of his regret and grief he beat the ground and cried to heaven. "My son! Zisong! He was only fifteen! Fifteen!"

Zhuo Siheng heard it, then leaned down, and through the bars said, word by word, "Your student Gao Yongqing, parted from his father by a mere twenty li and yet by a gulf of life and death, his wrong cut to the bone and no way to cry it, driven by you to the last ditch, was fifteen too."

Cui Lu froze.

"Your son was innocent. He was killed by Wang Botang, and by your own hand helping it. Had you not thrown in your lot with a tiger and, for your career and private gain, moved in secret to harm me and He Mengchun, he'd not have met this ruin today. The year you forced and broke my worthy brother Yongqing, did it never cross your mind that a day might come when you too would taste this boundless grief of flesh and blood?"

With that he stood, and amid the cries rising one upon another behind him, walked out of the jail.