Raising the Chancellor – Chapter 1

Such a Scandal — and Third Lady Tang Has the Gall to Ask

Zitan’s brow hadn’t unfurrowed once. She looked at Tang Jianwei, worry written all over her face.

“We don’t know whether the Tang family is out searching everywhere for you two. Third Lady, let me go instead.”

            

Tang Jianwei tucked the valuables Zitan had smuggled out of the Tang household into her purse and shook her head.

“You couldn’t talk him down on price — he might not even take them. I’ll go. Zitan, look after my sister for me, and whatever you do, don’t let her wander off. In the state she’s in, if she got outside and lost her way… I’d have to bash my head open.”

The reek of mold in this ruined house had Zitan’s nose in open revolt; she sneezed several times in a row, pinching her nostrils as she answered:

            

“Don’t worry, Third Lady. I’ll keep a good eye on her.”

“Mm.” Tang Jianwei let out a soft sigh. “These days, you’re the only one left following me.”

Her words brought heat stinging to Zitan’s eyes.

            

“Third Lady, if you hadn’t been kind back then — if you hadn’t paid five liang of silver to buy me, saved my life, and buried my parents¹ — by now I’d long since have gone down the gullets of wild wolves and stray dogs along with them. How could I still be standing here? So long as Third Lady doesn’t find me wanting, I will follow you for the rest of my life!”

Tears shimmering, Zitan tugged at Tang Jianwei’s sleeve, and every word rang with utter earnestness.

Tang Jianwei’s heart twinged sour in answer — but she had no time to linger in sentiment.

            

“All right. I’m off.”

She cinched the purse tight, and just as she turned to leave, her eldest sister, Tang Guanqiu, lunged forward and seized her shawl, nearly dragging her off her feet.

“Mama, Mama! Where are you going!” Tang Guanqiu clutched at her, frantic, her face flushed scarlet, refusing to let her go.

            

Tang Jianwei felt her one head swelling into two. “Sister, look at me properly. I’m your little sister, not Mama!”

But Tang Guanqiu seemed to hear none of it and went right on calling her Mama.

Her grip only tightened, ten fingertips — already frozen red — going white where they clutched.

            

Tang Guanqiu grew more agitated by the moment, her breath coming quick and ragged. Twenty-one years old, and she looked for all the world like a small child terrified of being abandoned by her mother.

When had Tang Jianwei ever seen her eldest sister like this?

The people of Boling knew only that Third Lady Tang — Tang Jianwei herself — was a prodigy of dazzling brilliance. In Tang Jianwei’s own heart, from childhood on, her eldest sister had been the person she loved and admired most.

            

The two of them had grown up side by side. Before Tang Guanqiu married out, they’d been all but inseparable, deeply close.

Never in any imagining could she have foreseen that her sister would collapse into dementia overnight — raving, deranged, mistaking her own little sister for her mother…

But how could anyone blame her?

            

After a catastrophe like that, no one could have borne it.

These past days, the family’s upheaval had driven Tang Jianwei stumbling forward with gritted teeth, without a single moment to stop and think.

Now, looking closely at her sister’s tangled hair and cold-reddened hands, exhaustion already bone-deep, she felt herself sway on the edge of toppling…

            

She steadied herself at once and folded her sister’s hands into her own palms — which had little warmth to spare.

She breathed on them, rubbed them, and in her mother’s cadence, smiling, called her sister by her childhood name:

“Ah Jing, be good. Mama is going out on a little errand. She’ll be back very soon.”

            

The trick worked — Tang Guanqiu stopped fussing and watched her, half doubting, half trusting.

Tang Jianwei soothed her on: “When Mama comes back, she’ll bring Ah Jing the milk porridge² from Yongning Ward. Would you like that?”

Tang Guanqiu blinked. “Truly?”

            

The milk porridge of Yongning Ward was the snack her sister had loved best as a little girl.

“Truly. When has Mama ever lied to you? You stay here and mind Zitan, no running off — understood?”

Tang Guanqiu nodded, obedient as anything.

            

Tang Jianwei cupped her sister’s hands a while longer, and only when she felt some warmth come back into them did she hurry out the door.

The place she stood in was Boling Prefecture.

Boling, capital of Great Cang — founded as a capital by Gaozu of Cang in the first year of Guangxing — had now stood for over a hundred years.

            

Since the dynasty’s founding in Guangxing Year One, through the glory of the “Jianxing Golden Age” and the “Yanlong era of good governance,” Boling and all of Great Cang had grown ever mightier, ever richer.

Now it was Tianxian Year 6, and this century-old city showed not the slightest fatigue.

Teeming with people, abundant in goods, flourishing as lush pines and thriving bamboo — the capital radiated the vigor of its prime.

            

It was in this great metropolis, coveted by countless souls, that Tang Jianwei had grown up.

The sun slanted west now, curfew not yet fallen; the East and West Markets seethed with carriages and horses, and the taverns and shops rang with human cries and equine whinnies.

She threaded her way through the sky-filling din, walking with practiced ease toward its deeper reaches.

            

The black-market shop she sought would never show its face on the main streets of the two markets.

Through a hidden door, the hawkers’ cries fell away behind her in an instant.

She needed ready cash — but she couldn’t pawn these pieces for silver at the legitimate deposit counters³ on the open streets.

            

Leave a paper trail, and the Tang family would find her soon enough.

Her only option was a shady broker of the black market.

By the customs of Great Cang, men and women alike could hold office or trade; the old rule that a woman mustn’t show her face in public had long since died out.

            

Tang Jianwei’s father was a career official — the Vice Director of the Bureau of Provisions, Ministry of Revenue, in charge of the court’s expenditure budgets, a sixth-rank post, second in command of the Bureau of Provisions.

Her mother, meanwhile, was a merchant, running more than ten restaurants and taverns in the liveliest quarters of Boling, money flowing in like spring water.

In Great Cang there was no taboo against an official’s kin going into trade.

            

So long as the kin weren’t dealing in government business, one could open a hundred shops and nobody would say a word.

The laws of Great Cang were strict, yet its markets and popular customs were lively, tolerant, and open.

Indeed, the decree permitting marriage between two of the same sex had been promulgated by Gaozu of Cang, and it had now stood for a full hundred years.

            

From the age of ten, Tang Jianwei had helped at her mother’s side — by now she commanded the wok in her mother’s taverns herself, a cook of renown in Boling.

To learn the merchant’s trade and buy provisions, she had walked every great street and small alley of the city.

Every ward, every market, every shop and every tavern, every hidden door and every underground channel — she knew them all like the lines of her own palm.

            

Where to find a shady broker, she naturally knew as well.

She knocked at a wooden door; the man inside revealed a pair of wary eyes, then recognized her.

“Third Lady Tang — got some business for this humble one again today?” The broker grinned and pulled the door open.

            

Tang Jianwei stepped into the pitch-dark little courtyard, upended her purse onto the table, and said:

“Pawn the lot.”

Spread across the table lay hairpins and trinkets of no small worth — and an exquisitely carved peacock-patterned jade comb back.

            

The broker looked the ornaments over, then looked at Tang Jianwei, eyebrow cocked, mouth skewed.

“Oh — right.” Tang Jianwei paused, took off her earrings, and slapped them down on the table too.

“One thousand liang,” she said.

            

The broker sat, unhurried, examining piece after piece, pointing out the worn spots and going on at length, before he finally named his figure:

“Three hundred liang.”

Tang Jianwei’s face went thunderous. “Sir, that’s robbery, plain and simple. All this jewelry together would pawn for at least one thousand five hundred liang at a deposit counter!”

            

“Oh.” The broker smiled, two rows of teeth gleaming pale. “Then by all means, Third Lady Tang, go pawn it for silver at the deposit counters out front. Or try the establishment behind mine — who knows, they might offer you fifty liang less.”

“…”

Tang Jianwei glared at the shady broker as though she could bore a hole clean through him by staring.

            

---

Purse clutched tight around three hundred liang in silver notes, Tang Jianwei walked out through the hidden door, and the lamplight fell across a face that looked ready to eat someone alive.

A black-market broker indeed — of course he knew all about the Tang family’s fall, and his gift for looting a burning house was first-rate.

No help for it. What she needed now wasn’t jewelry — it was ready cash.

            

Thank heaven Zitan had been quick-witted leaving the Tang household, secretly carrying out some of Tang Jianwei’s personal effects. Without that, she wouldn’t even have this three hundred liang.

Three hundred, then. Better than not a penny to her name.

Tang Jianwei gave the purse another squeeze.

            

This three hundred liang might well have to serve as her livelihood for a long stretch to come.

A mere three hundred liang…

She had to cross the West Market to return to the “ghost residence.” The evening wind rose; she pulled her shawl closer, her spirits dimming.

            

Half a month ago, she could never have dreamed she and her sister would come to this.

Still less could she have imagined that a calamity of such magnitude was about to descend upon the Tang family — upon her own head.

---

Half a month ago, Grandfather had died of illness. Before her father had even caught his breath from the grief of losing his own father, he was dragged into a massive military supply case.

            

Tang Jianwei didn’t know exactly what had happened — only that the affair’s reach was vast.

That day, before the funeral rites had even begun, men from the Censorate and the Court of Judicial Review had stormed the gates together and taken her father away, still clad in mourning hemp and sackcloth.

Ten days gone, and every one of those days Tang Jianwei and her mother had pressed connections for news of him.

            

Word trickled back, hazy, that the military supply case had been touched off by Lord Wang, the Vice Minister of Revenue — her father’s teacher, and his official superior besides.

Lord Wang was already in prison; in all likelihood, her father had been detained through his entanglement.

A major case involving military provisions — that was the sort of affair that cost men their heads!

            

For ten days her mother could neither eat nor sleep, worn visibly to a shadow, coughing through the night, the funeral itself left unattended.

It was Tang Jianwei who ran herself ragged on every front — fetching and brewing her mother’s medicine, handling Grandfather’s funeral affairs with Grandmother and Second Uncle’s household, all while still hunting news of her father.

She went to everyone she could find. Every last one, on hearing the matter, could only shake their heads and shut their mouths.

            

Slowly Tang Jianwei understood: this affair was deadlier than she had imagined.

She was only seventeen, after all. Panic was unavoidable. She wanted to consult her eldest sister, but couldn’t tear herself away — so she sent Zitan to the Shen manor to find her.

Tang Guanqiu, eldest daughter of the Tang family, had been married to Shen Yue, the Shen clan’s di-born eldest daughter, for three years.

            

Shen Yue was a military officer; two years ago she had marched out on campaign to Suichuan, and she had not returned to Boling since.

The two were deeply devoted. Even with Shen Yue in the northwest, every month her express letters snowed down upon Boling.

In Tang Jianwei’s heart, these two were a match made in heaven — the very picture of enviable bliss.

            

Tang Guanqiu, keeping to Boling, would come back to her natal home whenever she had a free moment.

Whenever anything great or small befell the Tang family, she was the first to appear, ready with plans and counsel.

Now that a calamity this enormous had struck, how could her eldest sister have made no move at all?

            

Even then, a thread of dread had begun to wind through Tang Jianwei’s heart.

Zitan went several times, and came back saying the Shen manor was acting strangely — never mind laying eyes on Tang Guanqiu, she couldn’t even get the door opened.

Baffled, Tang Jianwei went to the Shen manor herself. The great gates stood wide, and a flood of white and crimson mourning silks filled the eye.

            

For one dazed instant, Tang Jianwei thought she had walked back into the Tang house, back into Grandfather’s funeral.

Who had died?

Not daring even to blink, she walked straight in — and suddenly saw the funeral banner hung at the western steps, inscribed with four black characters: “The Coffin of Shen Yue.”

            

Tang Jianwei’s mind went off like a thunderclap — Shen Yue was dead?

Wasn’t Shen Yue in Suichuan?

She had fallen in battle, in the northwest?

            

In a flash, Tang Jianwei threaded the past days’ events together.

Shen Yue had been fighting in Suichuan — and the military supply case seemed bound up with the northwestern war as well.

Embezzled provisions, delayed chances to strike, a front line collapsing in rout.

            

Could it be that because of this very case, Shen Yue had…

Tang Jianwei’s mouth and tongue ran dry; her head buzzed and rang.

Then — what of her eldest sister?

            

Tang Jianwei seized a passing Shen house servant. “Where’s my sister? Where’s your Eldest Madam?”

Of ten she grabbed, nine hurried off pleading ignorance.

At last one told her: “Third Lady Tang, your timing is perfect. Take your sister back to the Tang house. From this day forward, she is no Shen of ours.”

            

Tang Jianwei was utterly at sea. “What do you mean?”

The speaker was the Shen manor’s steward. He gave a cold snort, and his indignation flared:

“Committing adultery with a house slave while our Eldest Lady was away fighting for the nation — such a scandal, and Third Lady Tang has the gall to come asking the Shen family about it.”

            

“What?”

Adultery? With whom? Her sister — with a Shen house slave?

Tang Jianwei believed none of it. “My sister is no such person! How dare you spew such filth and smear my sister’s honor!”

            

The steward sneered. “What manner of person she is — is that settled by a wag of the tongue? Our Eldest Lady has died on the battlefield; Tang Guanqiu has nothing more to do with the Shen family. The letter of repudiation has already reached her — she simply hasn’t been able to move, given the state she’s in. Now that Third Lady Tang has come, you’ve spared the Shen family some labor. She’s in the sleeping quarters. Third Lady Tang, if you please.”

While Tang Jianwei stood frozen, the steward made off with all haste.

---