A Noble Romance

Jiang Wu wakes up in the body of a young widow in a marquis's household. The widow's chastity has been recognised with a stone arch raised in her name, which settles what the rest of her life is allowed to be. On her first night there she spends it with a man she does not know, in front of the memorial hall where her husband's tablet stands. After that she starts on the household. Her dowry went into the family when she married and she means to have it back, and she gets it by outmanoeuvring everyone holding on to it. There is a princess who is unstable and dangerous to her, and an ex-husband with no shame about any of it, and she has to deal with both. The arch and the rules behind it are the harder problem, and she goes at them with a way of thinking nobody around her has. The man from that first night is Xie Yuan. They meet again, and what began as one night becomes a matter of each other's lives.