Beyond the West Peace Gate and across Stone Bridge lay the outer city.
Ordinary folk lived here, amid narrow streets and cramped alleys, adjoining eaves, and children chasing one another with noisy cries.
Compared with the deep courtyards of princes and nobles beside the Great Ming Gate, where horses neighed and carriages rattled, the difference was as vast as that between clouds and mud.
Wang Kan lived deep within this alley.
His home had a single courtyard, neither lavish nor grand, with gray walls, blue tiles, and a pair of old wooden doors.
Without wife or servant, he lived alone in austere solitude.
Only an old woman from the neighborhood came every other day to wash and starch his clothes.
The Analects recorded of Yan Hui: "With a single basket of food and a single gourd of water, living in a humble alley-others could not have endured such misery, yet Hui never let it diminish his joy."
Wang Kan's alley was just such a humble alley.
Wang Kan's home was just as poor and plain.
In Court, he was the blade of the Wei Faction; before those old wooden doors, he was Wang Zhanzheng.
In Court, he upheld order and discipline; in the alley, he held fast to honest poverty.
A man who could hold fast to both was not truly poor. He was truly unyielding.
At that moment, a lone lamp flickered unsteadily inside the room.
Wang Kan sat alone, the Book of Documents lying half-open on his desk, but his attention was not on the words, nor his heart on the book.
In his mind, he recalled what Wei Nisheng had said at the Regular Court Audience the other day.
[The might of the Wei Faction]
Though those words had come from Wei Nisheng, even now,