Chapter 82

Far off in the southeast, Zhuo Siheng, back at the vice-prefect's residence, laid out a whole table of dishes with his sister Ciheng, and the two of them hugged and wept for joy over Huiheng's taking the woman top-graduate's place, and then ate the table clean.

The thing gave Zhuo Siheng great heart and a great happiness. At the table he said to Ciheng, "I came first myself once, and my heart raced then too, but for a stir of a hundred feelings at once, it has to be this first place of your sister's."

Ciheng put it plainly. "When people get old they think too much. You're no spring chicken yourself, Elder Brother."

Zhuo Siheng protested at once. "Your elder brother is only twenty-five!"

Ciheng said, helpless, "That 'a hundred feelings at once' you've said to me a dozen times since you got home. Tell me yourself, is it not only an old man who harps on one line over and over?"

There was so much small business since he'd come to Jinzhou, and all of it, down to the least thing, had to pass through his own weighing. Zhuo Siheng did feel himself turning into more of a nag by the day. Could it be he truly was getting old?

Being a magistrate to the people, it seemed, truly did age a man faster.

By the time he was He Mengchun's age, he might look older than Lord Zeng.

No sooner had he finished fretting than the next day Zhuo Siheng met a worry that would bring his wrinkles out ahead of time.

That day Zhuo Siheng was listening to Pan Guangling tell how He Mengchun had resolved to take up the Daoist way, to make his peace with himself and heal the hurt Cui Lu had done his spirit, and to seek out the natural Way between man and man, when someone came in to report that the station-master Lu Hui had come to call.

"I've found you a partner who knows documents. You must get on well with him from now on!" Zhuo Siheng said to the baffled Pan Guangling in a tone of deep earnest.

Only afterward did he feel his words had been rather like a senior-kindergarten teacher's, presenting a new child to the class.

His nature had begun to be worn down roads he'd never looked for.

Pan Guangling was curious, and decided to stay and have a look at this man of talent Zhuo Siheng had raised up. But Zhuo Siheng turned at once into high-school-homeroom-teacher mode, and put to him the three soul-piercing questions. "Have you finished the documents I set you? Did you check them when you'd done? And having checked them, do you feel you understand them?" At which Pan Guangling bolted off to finish Teacher Zhuo's homework, and when Lu Hui came in, the inner hall was still, with only the cicadas outside carrying in now and then.

"Have you thought it over?" Zhuo Siheng bade him sit to talk.

"I've asked my mother." Lu Hui still stood, and spoke in that same mild tone. "My mother said I was to weigh it myself."

"Then tell me your own thoughts." Zhuo Siheng felt the young people of today truly hard to draw out, every one of them wanting coaxing before a word of the heart would come.

"I make bold to ask you one thing, my lord." Only now did Lu Hui look straight at Zhuo Siheng. "Why did you choose to raise me up out of turn?"

Zhuo Siheng shook his head with a smile. "You needn't be so suspicious. I don't plant my own men or build a faction. That takes too much work, and these next two years I'll be run off my feet, and need able clerks at my side to share the load. To do everything myself isn't always the best way. And you are just the kind of officer I've long been looking for: steady in a crisis, and able to turn a thing round, to smooth and settle it, with a sense of the great right and wrong besides. Over the station business I looked through a good many clerks' records, and you were the only one who'd sat the qualifying exam, so you can surely handle documents. That's why I want to move you to the commandery yamen."

For a long while Lu Hui only looked at Zhuo Siheng with a still gaze. The young man's eyes were deep, out of keeping with his clear, fine looks, and the air of it made Zhuo Siheng think, for a moment, of Gao Yongqing.

"Do you truly not know who I am, my lord?"

The question came from nowhere, and left Zhuo Siheng wholly at sea.

"And who should you be?" he asked, careful.

Lu Hui did not answer. He drew a letter from his sleeve and handed it to Zhuo Siheng in both hands. "My lord, my mother told me that if you did not know who I was, and valued only my work and my conduct, then I was to give you this letter."

Zhuo Siheng still did not follow, but seeing his grave, respectful look, he took the letter in both hands and asked, "I truly don't know. But suppose I did?"

"Then I would resign my post and leave, and take my mother away from our old home for good." Lu Hui lowered his eyes a little, and said softly, "When you have read it, my lord, you will understand the root of it."

With a puzzlement he had never felt before, Zhuo Siheng opened the envelope, its outer paper gone a little brittle and yellow, and drew out the sheets, only two pages. At the first character, his mind went blank, and he rose from his chair without meaning to, and with the letter trembling in his hands looked at Lu Hui, standing to one side, past all believing. "Who are you? Why do you have a letter in my father's own hand?"

He rarely lost his calm so, his voice three parts out of its clear, even order, for this hand he knew better than any, the hand he'd copied and copied as a boy. A single glance told him it was Zhuo Yan's.

For the first time a grief came into Lu Hui's eyes. He only shook his head, and said nothing.

Zhuo Siheng drew a deep breath, forced himself calm, and read on.

Your elder brother Yangu, in haste. In reply to my brother Wujiu. The other day our old friend's old illness came back, and a palace physician was asked to attend him and was refused. My father holds it to be no illness but a poisoning, and fears some change has already risen within the palace. My father would beg an audience to speak before the throne, but is blocked at every turn and cannot gain it. You, brother, are now confined at home over the remonstrance memorial, and already stand in the emperor's displeasure. For your safety's sake, whatever you may hear, say nothing of it, I beg you, remember it well. For the sake of the old bond, my father and I will do all in our power to guard our old friend's household, and with it the days to come for us former officials of the Eastern Palace. With no road of retreat left, we must go forward, and heaven's justice stands yet. You, brother, are hasty and blunt, and I fear that, not knowing the root of the matter, you may hear the sound of wind and rain and act rashly. My father bade me write this letter to set your mind at ease. Respectfully.

Zhuo Yan's hand was very hurried, written perhaps under some hard press of the hour. But at the very end, as if something more had come to him, Zhuo Yan had dipped his brush again and added two lines in a hand a shade less scrawled.

Your sister-in-law asks after your wife. Your wife is within a month of her confinement, and with you kept at home much is awkward. Do not fret. Your sister-in-law has sent two of our own household's women, a midwife and a wet-nurse, to wait on her, and if anything must be smoothed over, it will be seen to. Let your wife rest easy for the birth, and be without care. Again, respectfully.

Zhuo Siheng felt as if a great stone lay on his chest. The dizziness of the reading would not pass. He struggled in the fog a long while before he caught a thread of calm again, and saw the thing that did not fit, and said coldly, "No. My father told me Wujiu was the courtesy name of Lu Zai, Librarian of the Eastern Palace. They knew each other from boyhood and were companions-in-study to the crown prince. There can be no mistake. But Lu Zai was there the day of the kneeling remonstrance, and was put to death for it. He may have gone bravely all the same after reading this letter of my father's, or things may later have turned past what I know. But there was no former official of the Eastern Palace surnamed Lu like yours, and none among the disgraced officials surnamed so either. Who are you, then?"

The Zhuo Siheng of this moment was not his usual mild, easy self. His voice rose without his meaning it, his eyes so sharp they might have burned two holes in Lu Hui's face, waiting only for the answer.

"My lord, I am... a person who does not exist." Lu Hui's voice shook a little too. "Lord Lu sent his wife back to her own family, and then went himself to the Tianzhang Hall to be with his teacher and his friend, and knelt in remonstrance before Jingzong. What came after, my lord knows. But the fate of Lady Lu my lord does not."

Zhuo Siheng, moved by the sorrow in his eyes, nodded for him to go on.

"Lady Lu's own family was very poor, the daughter of a petty clerk Lord Lu had come to know on a posting away. The two were of one heart, and so Lord Lu did not, as his family wished, seek a wife from a house of rank, but made his match with this Lady Lu. His family were not pleased, but with his teacher, the Grand Academician of Shugu Hall, Zhuo Wenjun, standing matchmaker and setting the betrothal, they ceased to object. Lady Lu could not read a word, but the two were deep in love, and not long after the wedding she was with child. Later Lord Lu was condemned for the remonstrance against Jingzong's harsh usage of the deposed heir, stripped of office and kept confined at home. After that came the matter my lord knows from the letter... And in the end Lord Lu was put to death together with his teacher, my lord's grandfather. Lady Lu did not see her husband a last time, for by then her own family had already taken her away to escape the ruin, and the child, when it was born, drew no breath... Caught up in the case of the disgraced officials, when the soldiers came to take Lady Lu, she was long since broken in spirit by her child's death, and hearing her husband was dead she threw herself on a guardsman's blade and died."

Zhuo Siheng listened in silence. A chill went through him. For a moment he seemed back in the labor camp at Shuozhou, where in memory there was always snow that would not stop and ice that would not melt.

"Lady Lu had a younger sister, three years her junior, strong of will and fearless of death. When word reached their home of the elder sister's happy news of a child, she could not bear her longing, and went to the capital of her own accord, and it was she who cared for her sister in the worst of the danger and saw her safely through the birth... My lord, these two sisters were surnamed Lu, though a different Lu from the father's house." Lu Hui's last words came light as a weightless feather, yet seemed to cost his whole strength to say. "The child who should have carried his father's name did not die after all, but the two sisters knew he was a condemned man's son and would hardly be let to live. So the elder sister had the younger take the child away, change his name, and carry him back to their old home to raise him to manhood, far from the troubles of office, safe to his old age. The one thing that could prove this child had ever been in the world was a letter wrapped into his swaddling. Lady Lu could not read, but Lord Lu had once read her this letter, and she knew it told of a thing of the greatest weight, and spoke of this child too. Perhaps to prove that something that did not exist did in truth exist, or perhaps only in her grief and confusion, she had her sister keep the letter safe. But the sister could not read either, and did not know what was in it. So the child grew up safe and happy in the Jinzhou countryside, and at eleven found the letter, and pressed his mother about his birth, and so learned that his mother was in truth his aunt... For this he threw himself into his books, and sat the qualifying exam, meaning to go back into the world and set his own name right. But his mother forced him to give up the examinations, and keep to his true mother's dying wish, and never touch officialdom... And he agreed."

"Later, because he could read and write, he took a small clerk's post to keep himself and his mother. He thought his life would pass so... And then a man surnamed Zhuo came to the commandery as vice-prefect, and everyone was talking of this top-graduate Lord Zhuo, saying what a tale his life was, a condemned man's son who had risen through the examinations... I took some note of you, my lord. You looked nothing at all like a condemned man's son. There was an ease about you, as of a man who had never met hardship, and for a while I both envied you and was bitter..." Lu Hui paused, and smiled as if at himself. "Thinking of it now, which of us, people like us, can be free of the pain of what we are? It is only that my lord is broad of heart, and never speaks his cares aloud... And is that not the very art of living we learned from our fathers' generation?"

"Then why today are you willing to bring me the letter and show it to me?" Zhuo Siheng's voice was no longer so hard as before. While Lu Hui spoke, the shapes of a good many people had crossed his mind, Gao Yongqing, and Huiheng, and Ciheng, and Xiheng too.

Lu Hui bowed his head and smiled, and when he raised it the old stillness was back in his eyes. He said slowly, "Just as I told you. If my own birth had been found out by you, my lord, then all my lies would be no use, and if you meant to hold it over me, you would have some design, and that I could bear, only my mother cannot be left with no one to keep her, so of course we would flee far away... But if you did not know, that was another thing... Perhaps there is such a thing as fate after all. And besides, the letter tells not only of my birth, but of a matter of the greatest weight. As the son of a man who was within that time, I thought, you ought to know it."

"You mean the thing my grandfather suspected, that the deposed heir was poisoned during his confinement." Zhuo Siheng had never heard this from Zhuo Yan. Why, when his father had told him the whole of the old story and everyone in it, great and small, had he passed over this one thing alone?

Lu Hui, when he did not smile, was a little like Gao Yongqing, even a little like Xiheng. He said in a low voice, "What my lord does to handle the secret in this letter, you must weigh for yourself."