Cruel Suppression

Count Boles's half-month, nonstop inspection of the grassroots was no cursory, flowers-seen-from-horseback tour. It was a long-premeditated surgical strike, precise as a scalpel, aimed straight at Herwenham's deep-rooted, chronic disease.

With the core team and elite guards he had brought from the Royal Capital, he was like a red-hot dagger, stabbing viciously into the deepest reaches of the tangled web of interests formed by local strongmen and corrupt officials in collusion.

This move was, without question, digging up the ancestral graves of those local gentry and corrupt bureaucrats!

They had originally thought the new governor was merely lighting the three fires of a newly appointed official—losing his temper in the Governor's Office, killing a chicken to scare the monkeys, and leaving it at that. Never had they imagined that this old fellow, already past sixty, would be so utterly ignorant of the "rules," personally stepping into the fray, rolling up his trouser legs, and plunging straight into the mud-choked countryside as if he would not rest until every last mu of swallowed-up land had been investigated until the stones sank and the water ran clear!

"That old undying bastard! Does he really think Herwenham is his family's back garden?"

"He's simply mad! A man in his sixties, instead of enjoying himself in the manor, runs out here to make trouble for those of us who scratch food from the dirt!"

"Let him investigate! I'd like to see what tricks he can dig up! The sky over Herwenham isn't something he, Boles, can pierce alone!"

In secret, curses and abuse spread through the gentry's hidden rooms and banquets. More than a few viciously hoped that this obstructive old bastard would work himself to death in some desolate wilderness, or else meet with "bandits" and die in an accident.

However, they had