The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 10: The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit (Part One)

Yinghua, lady-in-waiting to the Emperor’s favorite consort, Gyokuyou, was faithfully at her work, as she was every day. All right, so she had fallen asleep on the job the other day, but her gracious mistress had forborne to punish her. The only way to repay her, then, was to work herself to the bone. She would make sure she polished every windowsill, every railing, until it gleamed. This was not normally something a lady-in-waiting would be expected to do, but Yinghua was not above doing a serving girl’s work. Consort Gyokuyou had said how much she liked hard workers.

Consort Gyokuyou and Yinghua both came from a town in the west. The climate there was dry, and the area had no special resources to speak of and was periodically subject to drought. Yinghua and the other ladies-in-waiting were all officials’ daughters, but she didn’t recall her life in her hometown as especially luxurious. It had been the sort of impoverished place where even a child of the bureaucracy had to work if she didn’t want to starve.

And then Gyokuyou was taken into the palace, and the world began to take note of her home. When the consort received the special attentions of the Emperor, the central bureaucracy could no longer hide where she had come from. But Gyokuyou was an intelligent woman. She wasn’t content simply to be a pampered ornament. And Yinghua was bent on following her lady wherever she might go, including into the rear palace. Not all of Gyokuyou’s ladies showed the same dedication, but those who remained simply resolved to work even harder to make up the difference.

When Yinghua went into the kitchen to organize the utensils, she discovered the new girl there, making something. Maomao was her name, Yinghua recalled, but she had proven so taciturn that nobody was sure what kind of person she really was. Consort Gyokuyou was an uncommonly strong judge of character, however, so it was unlikely Maomao was a bad egg.

Indeed, Yinghua felt sorry for her. The scars on her arm obviously bespoke a history of abuse, after which she had been sold into service, and now brought on to taste food for poison. It was enough to bring a tear to a lady-in-waiting’s eye. They kept increasing her portions at dinner, hoping to plumpen the spindly girl, and they refused to let her do the cleaning so that she wouldn’t have to reveal her injuries to the wider world. Yinghua and her two fellow ladies-in-waiting were of one mind in all this, and as a result Maomao frequently found herself with little to do.

Yinghua was happy enough with that. She and the other girls were more than capable of handling the work by themselves. Hongniang, the chief lady-in-waiting, didn’t precisely agree, and at least gave Maomao the washing to take care of. It was just carrying the laundry around in a basket, so her scars wouldn’t be obvious. She also engaged Maomao for miscellaneous chores when necessary.

Carting around laundry baskets also wasn’t the work of a lady-in-waiting, but was properly done by the serving girls from the large communal rooms. But ever since a poison needle had been discovered in Consort Gyokuyou’s clothing once, Yinghua and the others had taken to handling the wash themselves. It was incidents like this that inspired them to debase themselves as if they were simple serving women. Here in the rear palace, they were surrounded by enemies.

“What are you making?”

Maomao was boiling something that looked like grass in a stewpot. “It’s a cold remedy.” She always answered with the absolute minimum of words. It was understandable—poignant, in fact—to realize how hard she must find it to get close to people as a result of her abuse.

Maomao was profoundly knowledgeable about medicine, and occasionally made some like this. She always cleaned up after herself neatly, and the anti-chapping ointment she’d given Yinghua recently was precious stuff, so Yinghua didn’t object. Sometimes Maomao even produced the concoctions at Hongniang’s request.

Yinghua took down some silver dishes and began diligently polishing them with a dry cloth. Maomao rarely said much, but she knew how to be a polite listener in a conversation, so it never hurt to talk to her. And that’s what Yinghua did, telling her about some rumors she’d heard recently. Stories of a pale woman who danced through the air.

⭘⬤⭘

Maomao headed for the medical office with her completed cold remedy and a basket of laundry. It was the doctor’s right to give his imprimatur to any medicine, even if it was only for form’s sake.

Did this spirit suddenly pop up in the last month? Maomao shook her head at the garden-variety ghost story. She hadn’t heard anything of the sort prior to arriving at the Jade Pavilion, and because she trusted Xiaolan to tell her anything worth hearing, she had to think the rumor was a recent one.

The rear palace was surrounded by what amounted to castle walls. The gates in each wall were the only ways in or out; a deep moat on the far side of the barrier prevented both intrusion and escape. Some said there were former concubines, would-be escapees from the rear palace, sunk at the bottom of that moat even now.

So the ghost is supposed to show up near the gate, huh?

There were no buildings in the immediate area, just a spreading pine forest.

Started around the end of summer.

It was the time for harvesting a certain something.

No sooner had she had this naughty little thought than Maomao heard a voice, one she was not pleased by but which always seemed to be after her specifically.

“Hard at work again, I see.”

Maomao met the man’s smile, lovely as a peony blossom, with studious indifference. “Hardly working, sir, I assure you.”

The medical office was beside the central gate to the south, near the headquarters of the three major offices that oversaw the running of the rear palace. Jinshi could be seen there often. As a eunuch, his proper place was in the Domestic Service Department, but this man seemed to have no specific place of employment; indeed, he almost seemed to oversee the entire palace.

It’s almost like he’s over the head of the Matron of the Serving Women.

It was always possible he was the current emperor’s guardian, but considering Jinshi looked to be about twenty years old, it was hard to imagine. Maybe he was the son of the Emperor or something, but then why become a eunuch? He seemed close with Consort Gyokuyou; maybe he was her guardian instead, or perhaps...

The Emperor’s lover...?

Relations between the Emperor and Gyokuyou always seemed perfectly normal when His Majesty came for his visits, but things weren’t always what they seemed. Maomao got tired of trying to play out the possibilities, though, and so settled on this last one. That was easiest.

“Your face says you’re having the world’s most impertinent thought,” Jinshi said, squinting at her.

“Are you sure you’re not imagining it?” She bowed to him and ducked into the medical office, where the loach-mustached quack of a doctor was industriously pulverizing something in a mortar. Maomao grasped that in his case, this wasn’t a step in making some medical concoction, but simply a way of passing the time. Otherwise, why would he need her to give him any medicine she made? The doctor didn’t seem to know but the most rudimentary medicinal recipes or techniques.

The medical staff was perpetually shorthanded, as one might surmise of the rear palace. Women were not allowed to become doctors, and while many men might wish to be, few wished also to become eunuchs. The old quack here had at first treated Maomao like a distracting little girl, but his attitude softened when he saw the medicines she made. Now he would put out tea and snacks and gladly share with her any ingredients she needed, but while she was grateful for this, she did question what it said about him as a physician. Confidentiality seemed of little concern to him.

I wonder if this is remotely all right. Maomao would entertain the thought, but she wouldn’t say anything. The current arrangement was far too convenient for her.

“Would you be so kind as to check this medicine I’ve made?”

“Ah, hullo, young lady. Of course, hold on just a moment.” He brought out snacks and some kind of tea. No more sweet buns; there were rice crackers today. That was fine by Maomao, who preferred a hotter flavor. It seemed the doctor had been so gracious as to remember her preferences. She’d had the continual feeling that he was trying to ingratiate himself with her, but it didn’t bother her. He might have been a quack, but he was a decent person.

“Surely there’s enough for me, too?” a honeyed voice said from behind her. She didn’t have to turn around; she could practically feel his effulgence in the air. You must know by now who it was: Jinshi, in the flesh.

The doctor, with a mixture of surprise and excitement, promptly changed the crackers and zacha—old tea with flavorings—for more-desirable white tea and mooncakes.

My rice crackers...

The beaming smile seated itself beside Maomao. By dint of social difference, they should never have found themselves sitting side-by-side, and yet here they were. It might have looked like a gesture of utmost magnanimity, but Maomao felt something very different in it, something pointed and forceful.

“I’m sorry for the trouble, Doctor, but could you go in the back and fetch these for me?” Jinshi handed the quack a slip of paper. Even without getting a clear look at it, Maomao could see an abundant list of medicines. It would keep the doctor occupied for a while. The quack squinted at the list, then retreated ruefully into the back room.

So that was the plan all along.

“What exactly do you want?” Maomao asked bluntly, sipping her tea.

“Have you heard about the commotion concerning the ghost?”

“No more than rumors.”

“Then have you heard of somnambulism?”

The sparkle that lit in Maomao’s eyes at that word wasn’t lost on Jinshi. A naughty bit of satisfaction entered his lovely smile. He brushed Maomao’s cheek with his broad palm. “And would you know how to cure it?” His voice was as sweet as a fruit liqueur.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea.” Maomao refused to be self-deprecating, but she didn’t want to overstate her abilities, either. She’d encountered virtually every kind of illness, though, and seen many of them in patients. Thus, she could say with confidence what she said next: “It can’t be helped with medicine.”

It was a disease of the spirit. When a prostitute had been afflicted with this illness, Maomao’s father had done nothing to treat it, because there was no treatment to give.

“But with something other than medicine...?” Jinshi wanted to know any potential cure at all.

“My specialty is pharmaceuticals.” She thought that was about as emphatic as she could be, but then she realized she could still see the lovely face, now wreathed in distress, floating in her peripheral vision.

Don’t look him in the eye...

Maomao avoided his gaze, as if he were a wild animal. Or at least, she tried to, but it just wasn’t possible. He slid around so he was facing her. Talk about persistent. Talk about annoying. Maomao had no choice but to admit defeat.

“Fine. I’ll help you,” she said, but she was careful to look very unhappy about it.

Gaoshun arrived to fetch her around midnight. They were going out to witness the illness in question. Gaoshun’s taciturn nature and often expressionless face could have made him seem unapproachable, but Maomao actually rather liked it. Sweet treats went best with pickled foods. Gaoshun made the perfect complement to Jinshi’s saccharine attitude.

He doesn’t come across like a eunuch.

Many eunuchs became effeminate, because their biological yang had been forcibly removed. They grew minimal body hair, had gentle personalities, and a disposition to obesity as their sexual appetites were replaced by culinary ones.

The quack doctor was the most obvious example. He looked like any other middle-aged man, but his speech made him sound like the mistress of some well-to-do merchant household. Gaoshun, for his part, didn’t have much body hair, but what was there was thick and black, and if he hadn’t lived in the rear palace it would have been easy to take him for a military official.

I wonder what brought him to choose this path. Wonder she might, but even Maomao understood that actually asking would be beyond the pale. She simply nodded in silence and went with him.

Gaoshun led the way, holding a lantern in one hand. The moon was only half full, but it was a cloudless night, and all its light reached them.

Maomao had never been out in the rear palace so late at night: it was like a different world. Once in a while she thought she heard rustling, and maybe some moaning, from the bushes here or there, but she determined to ignore it. The Emperor was the only proper man allowed in the rear palace, so it wasn’t the ladies’ fault if romantic encounters here started to take on less typical forms.

“Mistress Maomao,” Gaoshun began, but Maomao felt some compunction at the polite mode of address.

“Please, you needn’t call me that,” she said. “Your station is so far above mine, Master Gaoshun.”

Gaoshun ran his hand along his chin as he considered this. Finally he said, “Xiao Mao, then,” a diminutive form of her name that was very much the polar opposite of “Miss Maomao.”

That’s maybe a little too familiar, Maomao thought, realizing that perhaps Gaoshun had a lighter heart than first appeared, but nonetheless she nodded.

“Perhaps,” Gaoshun ventured now, “I might ask you to stop regarding Master Jinshi in the same manner in which you might look at a worm.”

Damn. They noticed.

Her reactions had been growing too automatic recently; her poker face could no longer hide them. She didn’t expect to be beheaded for it on the spot or anything, but she would have to control herself. From the perspective of these notables, it was Maomao who was the worm.

“Why, today he reported to me that you gazed at him as though he were a slug.”

Well, he certainly seemed especially slimy.

The fact that he informed Gaoshun of Maomao’s every disparaging glance, she thought, spoke to both his tenacity and his sliminess. It didn’t say much for him as a man... or former man, perhaps.

“He smiled so broadly as he told me, his eyes brimming and his whole body trembling. Truly, I have never seen joy so singularly expressed.”

Maomao greeted Gaoshun’s description (surely he knew it could only possibly cause misunderstanding?) with total seriousness. As a matter of fact, she was privately demoting Jinshi from worm to filth as she replied: “I’ll be more mindful in the future.”

“Thank you. Those with no immunity do tend to swoon at a glance. It’s quite an effort to keep on top of it.” The sigh with which Gaoshun accompanied this remark carried an unmistakable note of frustration. Maomao surmised that this was not the first time he’d had to clean up after Jinshi. Having a superior who was too pure was its own kind of difficulty.

The course of this tiring conversation brought them to the gate on the east side. The walls were about four times as tall as Maomao. The great deep moat on the other side necessitated a bridge be lowered when provisions or supplies were brought in, or at the occasional changes of serving girls. In short, to flee the rear palace was to face the ultimate punishment.

The entry was a double gate with a guardhouse on both sides, and the gate was always guarded. Two eunuchs on the inside, two soldiers on the outside. The drawbridge was too heavy to raise or lower by manpower alone, so two head of oxen were on hand to do the job. Maomao was seized by the desire to go into the nearby pine forest to look for ingredients, but with Gaoshun there she had to restrain herself. Instead she sat down in the open-air pavilion in the garden.

And then, there in the light of the half-moon, she appeared.

“There she is,” Gaoshun said, pointing. Maomao looked and saw something unbelievable: the figure of a pale woman almost floating through the air. Her long dress trailed behind her, her feet moving gracefully atop the wall as if in a dance. She shivered, and her clothing rippled as if it were alive. Her long black hair shimmered in the dark, lending her a sort of faint halo. She was so beautiful she seemed almost unreal. It was like something out of a fantasy, as though they had wandered into the legendary peach village.

“Like a hibiscus under the stars,” Maomao said suddenly. Gaoshun looked surprised, but then murmured, “You’re a quick study.”

The woman’s name was Fuyou, “hibiscus,” and she was a middle-ranked consort. And the next month, she was to be given in marriage to a certain official, as a reward for his fine work.