To Be A Virtuous Wife novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Third Tablet
The ancestral shrine stood at the far end of the mansion, behind the main hall, in a courtyard of old cypress trees.
At midnight it smelled of incense and cold stone.
The prince unlocked the door with a long iron key and held it open for her.
He carried a single shaded lamp, and he held it low so the light would not climb the walls.
Inside, rows of dark wooden tablets stood on tiered shelves, each one carved with a name in gold.
Dozens of dead Lus, three hundred years of them, looking down at two living ones in the dark.
"Lowest row," Yuwei whispered. "Third from the left."
He knelt without a word.
The tablet in front of him was plain, narrower than the rest, with a little dust in the carved characters of its name.
It read: first wife of the old Prince of Anbei.
He did not touch it for a moment.
"I was nine," he said, very low. "When she died."
"I'm sorry."
"She was not unkind. She was just tired." He rested his hand flat on the shelf beside the tablet. "Nobody comes here except at festivals. It's a good place to hide something."
He lifted the tablet in both hands, carefully, with a small bow.
Under it, in a shallow hollow in the wood, lay a flat packet wrapped in oiled cloth.
Yuwei took it and unwrapped it with unsteady fingers.
Inside were two things.
One was a sheaf of folded papers, stamped with the red seal of the Dowager Princess.
The other was a small stack of slips, thin and greasy, covered in a trader's crooked handwriting.
She read the first paper under the lamp.
"These are loans," she whispered. "She borrowed money from a lender in the western ward and put up your pension land as the guarantee. Three estates. And here, she sold the northern one outright."
The prince's face did not change.
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