Chapter 8

The Songs did not remain in Duanjing for long.

After his injuries healed, Song Zhang could find no way to earn a living. He was unfit for manual labor and had no talent for trade. The entire family lived on Lady Huang’s dowry, but that could not last.

The Songs still owned a few plots of land in their old home of Anyang. Song Zhang decided to take the whole family back there.

Utterly heartbroken, Liu Sanniang asked to enter a nunnery.

The day before they left, Song Zhang and his wife saw Yingyue. He told her to serve me well. She gave them a packet of banknotes. Spent carefully, it would support them for the rest of their lives.

Before leaving, Song Zhang bowed three times at the gates of my residence, striking his head against the ground.

Yingyue kept none of this from me.

After a moment’s silence, I said, “They are your parents, after all.”

Not long after their return, Song Heqing died.

He could not bear the gulf between his old life and his new one, or the resentment of his clan. The Songs who had lost their offices vented all their anger on him. They mocked him for mistaking fish eyes for pearls and cursed him for losing his wits. Those who had once envied him or quarreled with him took the opportunity to kick him while he was down.

Song Heqing hanged himself.

Yingyue went back for the funeral. When she returned, she brought a final letter he had left specifically for me. I did not read it. I burned it.

Yingyue remained unmarried. “I’ve been thinking about what happened to you, Grandmother,” she told me. “You are a princess. With imperial power and wealth behind you, you could stand your ground against Grandfather, whatever he did. If you were younger, you could even marry again. But what if you were an ordinary woman?”

A woman from a poorer family would be at other people’s mercy. If Liu Sanniang had been cunning and resourceful as well, there would have been no need to wait until sixty or seventy. The wife would have been driven out or reduced to a concubine decades earlier.

A woman from a grander family, at this age, would still have grown distant from her birth family. Divorce would only make her a laughingstock. She would have to swallow her disgust for her descendants, for the family. She would tell herself it was only a concubine, only another daughter; the property would still go to her own children and grandchildren.

Only a princess, whose rank placed her above ordinary people as a sovereign above her subjects—and one as stubborn and unwilling to suffer a loss as I was—could secure justice for herself.

“Grandmother,” Yingyue said, “I want to do something for the women of this realm.”

I secured her the title of County Lady and placed most of the tax revenues from the fief at her disposal. She established women’s academies across the realm, teaching them not only to read and exercise sound judgment, but also the skills to support themselves.

It was hard. There were many voices raised against her.

She often wept to me. “This world is unfair to women.”

The more she saw, the more oppressive it felt, and the more she hated how little she could do.

I founded the women’s academy in Duanjing myself. The emperor wrote its signboard, and many high officials and nobles were happy to send their daughters there. I had rubbings made of the inscription and sent them to the other academies. With the emperor’s calligraphy to lend them prestige, many people were eager to share in its reflected glory.

The results came slowly.

Twelve years later, a new emperor ascended the throne. A woman named Fu Luanshi entered the imperial examinations disguised as a man and took first place.

This was, of course, against the rules.

But the new emperor was benevolent, and the Grand Princess interceded. He made an exception and confirmed her as the top scholar of that examination year. At the same time, he decreed that women could sit the examinations and enter government service.

Thus Fu Luanshi became Great Jin’s first female top scholar—and its first female compiler at the Hanlin Academy.

I lived to eighty-six and watched more and more women stand on their own feet.

As I lay dying, Yingyue wept inconsolably. Nanny Gao had gone before me. In those last years, Yingyue was the only person close to me who remained at my side. She dressed as a married woman, though she had never wed.

My son, Song Zhang, hurried from Anyang with Lady Huang. He knelt by my bed in tears. “Mother, I know I was wrong. I don’t deserve to be your son.”

He had become a teacher at the women’s academy in Anyang and was highly respected. Several women now serving at court had once been his students.

I knew he had always been clever, as gifted at his studies as his father. But as the Grand Princess’s son, he had never needed to endure years of arduous study. Little by little, he had lost his way.

With an effort, I stretched out my withered hand and stroked his head as I had when he was a boy. “You are my son. Since you know you were wrong, your mother forgives you.”

He broke into loud sobs.

In the eighth month of the fourteenth year of Jinglong, the Grand Princess died.