chapter 3
I asked for a divorce.
When I, Zhao Wenzhi—Princess Huayang—married, my dowry filled one hundred and eight chests. The Empress Dowager had done everything in her power to pack them with treasures.
I intended to take every last thing that belonged to me.
Naturally, the Wei family refused.
My mother-in-law went to the palace in tears, insisting I had misunderstood. “Dou Fenglan is merely a widowed relation who came to us for shelter. She is no concubine. Besides, demanding a divorce because one’s husband might take a concubine will damage the princess’s reputation as well.”
As mistress of the house, a wife was supposed to find concubines for her husband herself and add descendants to the family line.
Jealousy was no proper ground for divorce.
“Mother is right.” I lowered my lashes and appeared to think it over.
Wei Xu came to the palace and took me home.
The Wei family sent Dou Fenglan away.
After my return, the atmosphere in the household grew stifling. My mother-in-law even fell ill from anger.
“Mother, Grandmother is sick. Go cook a few dishes for her,” my son, Wei Chang, told me.
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“Whenever Aunt Lan cooks something delicious, Grandmother recovers in no time,” my son said. “And when I was ill, Aunt Lan stayed beside my bed. Where were you, Mother?”
I smiled faintly. “For your father’s advancement, I helped his master, the Crown Prince, frame the Third Prince, then willingly exiled myself to an estate.
“Without the charge that he had shot and gravely injured Princess Huayang, leaving her wounds slow to heal, how would your grandfather’s former officers have gradually turned away from the Third Prince and pledged themselves to the Crown Prince?”
My son stared at me.
He was ten and had studied for years, enough to understand the basics of court politics.
In my previous life, I could not bear to expose his father’s hunger for power in front of him, so I had never told him any of this.
My son had always blamed me, saying I was too jealous to tolerate another woman. So what if Dou Fenglan became his father’s second wife? What noble household did not keep a wife and several concubines?
Compared with other noblemen, Wei Xu was already exceptionally faithful.
No one could expect him to have only me.
In this life, I no longer cared about this son. What he thought meant nothing to me, so I told him the whole ugly truth.
“Don’t use the imperial family to give weight to your lies!” After a stunned pause, he flared up at me.
“If you don’t believe me, go to the country estate and see for yourself whether your father, supposedly away on official business while your grandmother lies ill, is meeting your Aunt Lan in secret.”
My son spun around and left.
My daughter was distressed as well.
She was not as overbearing as her brother. Instead, she complained in a wounded little voice, “Mother, I promised to present a piece of double-sided embroidery for the Empress Dowager’s fiftieth birthday. I cannot make it without Aunt Lan.”
“Is she teaching you, or doing it for you?” I asked.
“Teaching me.”
“I will find you another teacher,” I said. “Dou Fenglan is not the only person in the world who knows double-sided embroidery.”
“But Aunt Lan is the only one who knows how to make this design. It has to be unique if it is going to please the Empress Dowager.”
“You are my daughter. You could give the Empress Dowager a scrap of torn cloth and she would be delighted. If you were not, even work of divine craftsmanship would mean nothing to her. Do you imagine the palace lacks embroiderers?”
My daughter burst into angry tears. “Mother, you cannot belittle Aunt Lan like that.”
I laughed softly. “You never noticed when she exaggerated her own worth, yet the moment I tell you the truth, I am belittling her?”
My son was foolish, my daughter naive—just as I had once been.
Our bond had come this far. Whatever happened next, I would let it happen.
I brushed off my sleeves.
After the divorce, I would ask my chief steward to keep an eye on the children. I would leave them a modest sum, enough to live on until adulthood and see them married.
I would fulfill a mother’s duty. I had given birth to them, after all.
Beyond that, I expected nothing.
They had been six when I left home, old enough to know better.
I had left trusted servants to look after them.
By the time I returned, every attendant around them had been replaced.
My mother-in-law had done it. My people and hers had competing interests, so naturally she could not tolerate them.
My children’s feelings for me had been replaced along with the servants.
But it did not matter. I was no longer obsessed with forcing love where none existed. If this was all the bond fate had given us, I would ask for no more.