The Daily Life Of Mei Furen Doting On Her Husband - Chapter 25

Wu Zhen also smelled the smell, and instantly realized that it was not a good job. She looked at the suspicious water stains on the floor of the cell with some hesitation, twitched a few whiskers in disdain, and finally jumped lightly and ran over the wall to catch up with Mei Zhuyu.

Interrogating prisoners and recording their confessions was not difficult, but it was very annoying, especially in a bad environment, which made people particularly impatient. If there was an uncooperative and annoying person added to the mix, it would be a disaster.

The prisoner was a middle-aged man with a sad face. He had killed his wife by mistake and was sentenced. He started crying when he saw Mei Zhuyu, crying with snot and tears. Mei Zhuyu sat in his seat with a blank expression, writing down the notes, occasionally stopping to ask a question. The man was vague at first and refused to answer, just crying, but Mei Zhuyu was very patient, so he just watched him cry coldly and continued to ask questions after he finished crying. After a long while, the man shrank his head and stammered to answer the questions.

Wu Zhen stood on a lamp oil rack in a hidden position. During the process of recording the confession, she counted how many times the clerk behind Mei Zhuyu rolled his eyes in impatience, and how many times the man cried out, “Sir, please forgive me! I really didn’t mean it!” 

Mei Zhuyu, on the other hand, really didn’t even raise his eyebrows during the whole process. He pulled up his sleeves and dipped them in ink to record, asking simple questions about his identity, hometown, and the process of committing the crime, without a single extra word.

If it were Wu Zhen, she might have been so annoyed that she would have directly reached out and pressed the man into the record book when the man bowed and begged for mercy for the second time. Wu Zhen admired the young man’s patience and good temper, and at the same time, she once again felt that the young man who panicked when she had seen him before might have been a fake.

Halfway through the interrogation, Wu Zhen declared her surrender, abandoned the young master, and walked out of the prison. However, she did not go home, but wandered around the Ministry of Justice, and accidentally heard someone talking bad about the young master behind his back.

The good thing about being a cat was that if she saw people chatting, she didn’t have to avoid them. She could just squat beside them and listen openly.

There were two people chatting in the corridor. One was a middle-aged man in a red robe, who seemed to be a minister of the Ministry of Justice, and the other was in a green robe, who was probably a minor official. It was more like the middle-aged man was saying bad things about Mei Zhuyu, and the minor official was flattering him.

“This Minister Mei is really cunning. He didn’t even leave any evidence. Next time, I wonder if he can be so lucky every time.”

“Why are you angry, Minister Xu? Even if you can’t find fault with Minister Mei, can’t you still make trouble for him and make him unhappy? Your official position is higher than his, so it would be easy to make trouble for him.”

“It’s not that simple. Don’t be fooled by his noble appearance. He is actually the Minister of the Ministry of Justice because of his relationship with the Imperial Concubine. You think he is a simple-minded person. Who knows how terrible he is in private. Besides, if he is like that, how could he marry Lady Wu of Duke Yu’s Mansion if he didn’t have some powerful relationship? She is the Empress’s biological sister.”

“Speaking of this, I really admire Minister Mei. In order to please Duke Yu and Her Royal Highness the Empress, he even dared to marry Lady Wu. Just for this reason, we little people cannot compare with his broad-mindedness. I’m afraid he would change his black gauze fu hat into a green one.” The blue-clothed clerk’s tone was full of contempt.

Wu Zhen squatted on a rockery nearby and wagged her tail.

Minister Xu sneered, touched the two small mustaches under his nose and said, “I think they are a perfect match. Our Minister Mei never goes to music houses or brothels. Think about it, which normal man is like him? I think he is simply a homosexual. And that Wu Zhen, she wears men’s clothes all day long, she doesn’t look like a woman at all, and she has ambiguous relationships with the ladies in the brothel, and often takes those ladies out for fun. In the early years, her marriages were ruined one after another. These two people are sick, they are a perfect match.”

Wu Zhen rested her head on her paws and looked at the two men below…the small mustaches on their faces. Recently, it became popular among men in Chang’an to grow beards. Young and old, all had the same beards. She heard that many men were secretly competing with each other for the length of their beards. Wu Zhen didn’t know what was so good about the beards that looked like inverted eyebrows. She felt that it was an eyesore. Fortunately, her young master didn’t grow a beard, otherwise she might not be able to resist asking him to shave it.

Wu Zhen disdained the short beards of the two men in front of her and listened to them calmly as they continued to chat.

“If you really want to embarrass Minister Mei, you might as well give him the responsibility of the most important case. That will surely make him suffer to death.”

“Hmph, I do want to, but if I really torture Minister Mei too much, he might go and complain to his aunt, the Imperial Concubine, and then I’ll be in trouble for nothing.”

“That’s true. Even if he doesn’t look for the Imperial Concubine, he can still look for Second Miss Wu. With her personality, if she really meddles in matters here, it will be more troublesome than the Imperial Concubine’s… Uh… Minister Xu, do you think Lady Madam Wu cares about him?”

Minister Xu had a look of superiority as if he had seen through the truth. “I don’t think Second Miss Wu would care about him. She doesn’t have the time. This marriage is just a good thing to make it sound good. Duke Yu disliked the shame of his second daughter who had never married, so he found a man who could be manipulated to marry his daughter. Minister Mei is a coward and just wanted to find a backer, so they hit it off. How could it be that they may have some feelings for each other? Even after Second Miss Wu got engaged, she still frequented brothels. I guess she never even looked at Minister Mei.”

The two were still talking, but Wu Zhen didn’t want to listen anymore. It was just the same few sentences over and over again, nothing new to say, boring. She stretched out on the rockery, jumped over the wall, and left the Ministry of Justice.

On that afternoon, when the officials of the Ministry of Justice were about to leave their duty and go home, they found a woman in bright clothes at the door of the office. She was wearing a red robe, a necklace, eight pieces of gold around her waist, cloud-climbing boots, and holding a horse whip inlaid with gold and jade. She was leaning on a horse with an idle look on her face, playing with the horse whip in her hand, and looking up at the door of the Ministry of Justice from time to time.

The officials passing by couldn’t help but look at her a few more times and whisper to each other.