On a winter night in the twenty-first year of Jiajing, nine palace maids tried to strangle the emperor with yellow silk. The official historians wrote just two words: "Rebellious slaves." No one asked them why.
Sixteen years later, a bride is found dead in her new room in a silk shop in the western market. The door is bolted from the inside, and everyone says she hanged herself. Lu Chen, an official in the Ministry of Justice, notices that the snow-mud on her shoes doesn't match the dust on the stool. Someone had lifted her onto the beam.
That single observation leads to seven old cases. Among the files is an unsigned note in a woman's handwriting. For the next three years, pieces of paper keep finding their way into his hands: a note, a piece of lead, a plum blossom seal.
Only when a copy of the manuscript is sewn into the cover of a book of lectures for the emperor and delivered to the imperial desk does the entire court learn who opened the door first that night.
