The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 1 - Chapter 11

Chapter 11: The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit (Part Two)

Somnambulism was a most mysterious condition. It caused one to move around as though awake, even when one was asleep. The cause could be some sort of disturbance in the heart, something no amount or type of medicine could cure. For there was no medicine to soothe a troubled spirit.

Maomao knew of a courtesan who had suffered from the condition. She had been of sunny disposition, a good singer, and one man had even been talking about buying her out of prostitution. But the negotiations fell through, for every night she would wander the brothel like a woman possessed. Ugly rumors began to dog her. When the madam tried to restrain her to stop her from walking around one night, the woman scratched her so badly she bled.

The next day, the other women confronted her about her behavior, but the courtesan said cheerfully, “My goodness, ladies, what are you talking about?”

The woman remembered nothing, but her bare feet were covered with mud and scratches.

⭘⬤⭘

“And what happened to her?” Jinshi asked. He, Maomao, and Gaoshun were in the sitting room together, along with Consort Gyokuyou. Hongniang was looking after the little princess.

“Nothing,” Maomao said curtly. “When the discussions of her emancipation ended, so did her wandering around.”

“Was it that the discussions upset her, then?” Gyokuyou asked with a puzzled look.

Maomao nodded. “It seems likely. The suitor was the head of a large business, but he was a man with not only a wife and children already, but even grandchildren. The woman’s contract was going to be up with another year’s work, anyway.” Perhaps she found the idea of working another year better than being married off to a man she had no interest in. In the end, the woman had worked out the remainder of her contract with no further offers to buy her out.

“Exceptional emotional agitation commonly results in wandering like this, so we tried to give her perfumes and medicines that might help calm her down. They relaxed her a little, but didn’t do much more.” Maomao had always been the one to mix the concoctions, not her father.

“Hmm,” Jinshi said with more than a touch of boredom. “And that’s really all there is to that story?”

“That’s all.” Maomao struggled not to sneer at Jinshi’s languid look. Gaoshun sat beside him, silently encouraging her in this effort. “If that’s all you need, I must get back to work,” Maomao said. Then she bowed and left the room.

Let’s turn back the clock a bit. The day after she had witnessed the spirit, Maomao had gone to see her favorite chatterbox, Xiaolan. Xiaolan was forever trying to pry information about Gyokuyou out of Maomao, so this time Maomao fed her some innocuous tidbits in exchange for what she knew about the ghost.

The trouble had begun about two weeks before. The spirit had first been spotted in the northern quarter. Shortly after that, it had begun to be seen in the eastern quarter, and started to appear every night. The guards, frightened by the entire situation, did nothing about it. But as the situation didn’t seem to be causing any harm, no one punished them for their inaction.

It seemed that the deep moat, the high walls, and the overall impenetrability of the rear palace had left the guards susceptible to such fears. Worthless for security.

Next, Maomao had headed to see the quack. His loose lips told her something new—about Princess Fuyou, how she had been unwell lately. She was the third princess of a vassal state so small it could have been flicked away with a finger; though she was given the title “Princess,” she was really little more than a highly ranked concubine. She had a building in the northern quarter. She liked to dance, but she was nervous and high-strung, and had once made a mistake while dancing for His Majesty. The other consorts in attendance had laughed at her, and since then she had refused to come out of her room. A sensitive soul, one might say.

Princess Fuyou had no conspicuous qualities other than her dancing, and it was said that in the two years since she had come to the rear palace, His Majesty had not spent the night with her once. Now she was to be given in marriage to a military official, an old friend of hers, and one hoped, might be happy.

Father always said not to say anything based on assumptions, Maomao thought.

And so she resolved not to.

The princess, pale and demure, was blushing as she passed through the central gate. She was not uncommonly beautiful, but her palpable happiness excited cries of admiration from the onlookers. A collective expectant gaze turned on the gate.

If one was going to be given in marriage, this was the ideal. This was how it should look.

“Surely you can at least tell me?” Consort Gyokuyou said with a lustrous smile. Though she was already the mother of a little girl, she was in fact not quite twenty years old, and the smile had a hoydenish quality about it.

What should I do? Maomao thought. Consort Gyokuyou had fixed her with her best stare and wasn’t letting up, and at length Maomao gave in. “If you understand that what I’m going to say is ultimately just speculation,” she said with a sigh. “And if you promise not to get angry.”

“Of course I won’t get angry. I was the one who asked.”

Hrrrm. It was looking like she had no choice but to talk. Maomao braced herself. “And you won’t tell anyone else.”

“My lips are sealed.” Gyokuyou sounded almost flippant, but Maomao decided to trust her. Then she told the consort the story of the sleepwalking courtesan. Not the one she had told Jinshi and the rest of them the day before. A different story.

Just like the other courtesan, the condition had first manifested when a suitor proposed to buy her out of her contract. The talks fell through—this much was the same as the other story. But this woman didn’t stop sleepwalking, and the perfumes and medicines that had given the first courtesan some relief didn’t help this one at all.

Then someone else offered to buy the woman out of her contract. The madam said she couldn’t foist a sick person off that way, but the suitor insisted they were still interested. And so the agreement was sealed, at half the price in silver of the first man’s offer.

“We learned later that it had been a con all along.”

“A con?”

The first man who had come with an offer was a friend of the second. Knowing that the woman would feign illness, he then broke off the negotiations. Then his friend swooped in and got her for half the price.

“This courtesan still had a substantial amount of time left on her contract, and the silver the man paid for her wasn’t enough to cover it.”

“And you’re suggesting these women and Princess Fuyou have something in common?”

The military official, the old friend, might have been from the same vassal state, but he was nonetheless not really of high enough social standing to seek to marry a princess. He had hoped to perform enough valorous deeds that he might one day be able to ask for her hand. Politics intervened, and Fuyou found herself in the rear palace. Still longing for her official, the princess deliberately botched her otherwise accomplished dancing to ensure she would not draw the Emperor’s attention. Then she shut herself up in her room until she seemed no more than a shadow in the palace.

Just as she had intended, she was still pure at the end of two years, the Emperor never having visited once. The military official had performed his valorous deeds, and now when he was to receive Princess Fuyou in marriage, she began to manifest these mysterious wanderings. She was trying to ensure that His Majesty would have no cause to have second thoughts about sending her away, no reason to suddenly make her his bedfellow.

There are, after all, some unscrupulous men of power who cannot stand to see a woman go to someone else, even a woman they never valued. If His Majesty were to take Princess Fuyou into his bedchamber, she could not be married off until later. And Fuyou herself, fastidious about her chastity, would be unable to face her childhood friend after she had spent the night with the Emperor.

Then, too, perhaps her dancing by the eastern gate was in part a prayer for her friend’s safety on his expeditions.

“Again, I have to stress that this is just speculation,” Maomao said calmly.

“Well... I can’t say you’re wrong as far as His Majesty is concerned.”

The lusty emperor could conceivably find his interest kindled in someone that one of his subordinates obviously valued so much. He visited Gyokuyou once every few days, and some of the nights on which he did not visit could be accounted for by the need to attend to official business. But not all of them. One of His Majesty’s duties was to produce as many children as possible.

“I suppose it would make me the most awful person to say I felt jealous of Princess Fuyou.”

Maomao shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She was more or less convinced that she had things figured out correctly, but she felt no special impulse to tell Jinshi. All the women involved would be happier that way. His ignorance was their bliss. She wanted her smile to stay as soft and innocent as it was.

It seemed everything had been resolved...

But in fact, one mystery still remained.

“How did she get all the way up there?” Maomao asked, gazing up at a wall four times as tall as she was. Perhaps she would have to look into it sometime.

As she danced that night, Princess Fuyou had looked truly beautiful, like the heroine of one of the illustrated story scrolls the women so enjoyed. It was almost hard to believe she was the same woman as the stoic, reticent princess.

Maomao went back to the Jade Pavilion, but her thoughts were less elevated than this: if only she could bottle love. What a medicine it would be, that could make a woman so beautiful!