The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 1 - Chapter 23

Chapter 23: Wheat Stalks

Oh yeah...

The crowing of the rooster woke Maomao up, and she shuffled outside her dilapidated house. There was a small chicken coop in the back and a shed for farm implements, along with a wooden crate. From the fact that the hoe was missing, she gathered her father was in the field. He kept one in a grove just outside the red-light district.

He knows that’s not good for his legs. Her father was getting on in years, and she wished he would stop with the difficult physical labor, but he showed no sign of doing so. He liked to make his medicines from herbs he had grown himself. Hence, a motley collection of strange plants sprouted around their house.

Maomao plucked a leaf here and there, checking how the plants were doing. She glanced at the discreet wooden crate. It bore a sign with characters in brushwork reading: HANDS OFF. Maomao swallowed at that. She nudged the lid back and peeked in, although it did her heart rate no favors. If she remembered correctly, the crate contained various ingredients left to stew in wine. She seemed to recall the ingredients being very lively and difficult to catch.

After a moment, Maomao put the lid back just the way it had been. It seemed people were heeding the sign. Ever the careful thinker, her father had wisely put just one thing inside the box. That was a wise choice. Several together might eat each other and become toxic.

All right, anyway... Her thoughts were interrupted by a noisy pounding at the door. Scratching her head lazily, Maomao went around the front of the house. “You’re gonna break it,” she said to the panicked-looking girl who had been slamming her fist against the unsteady door. She wasn’t from the Verdigris House. She was a servant-apprentice at another of the nearby brothels who occasionally came to Maomao’s pharmacy.

“What’s up? If you’re looking for my dad, he’s out.” Maomao was in the middle of a yawn when the girl grabbed her hand and veritably dragged her away.

The apprentice brought Maomao to a middling brothel not far from the Verdigris House. It wasn’t a big place, but it boasted decent quality. Maomao recalled there were several courtesans here, with some excellent patrons. But what did the servant girl want, bringing her here?

Maomao tried to straighten her frazzled hair and brush the wrinkles out of her clothes. She hadn’t changed into her sleepwear the night before, which was starting to seem like it might be a good thing. But here she’d been planning to get hot water from the Verdigris House...

“Sis, I brought the apothecary!” the girl called as they went through the back door of the brothel and headed for one of the rooms. There, Maomao discovered a cluster of women, wearing no makeup and looking fatigued, gathered around something she couldn’t see. When she got closer, she found a man and a woman lying on a bed, sharing a pillow, spittle dribbling out of their mouths. There appeared to be traces of vomit on the bedding.

A pipe lay on the floor nearby, and tobacco leaves were scattered around. She saw some pieces of straw on the ground as well, and a shattered glass vessel nearby. The contents had spilled, staining the pillow. The air was filled with a very distinctive aroma. Two wine bottles were likewise part of the chaos, also tipped over and spilled. The two differently colored stains on the pillow looked almost like some strange kind of art.

Confronted with this scene, Maomao’s eyes snapped open and sleep left her. She pried open the man’s and woman’s eyes, looking into them; she checked their pulses and stuck a finger in their mouths. She wasn’t the first, it seemed, as the fingers of one of the courtesans were filthy with sick.

The man wasn’t breathing; Maomao pressed on his solar plexus in an effort to disgorge the contents of his stomach. There was a hrrk, and spit came pouring out of his mouth. She grabbed at the sheets to wipe the inside of his mouth. Finally she slid him around and breathed into his mouth.

Seeing this, one of the courtesans tried to imitate what Maomao had done for the woman. Unlike the man, she was still breathing, so she was easily induced to vomit. The courtesan made to offer her some water, but Maomao shouted: “Don’t let her drink that! Charcoal—we need charcoal!” The startled courtesan spilled the water in her surprise, but then rushed off down the hallway.

Maomao repeated the process with the man several more times, pressing on his chest to induce vomiting, then breathing for him. When only stomach acid began to come up, he finally started to breathe on his own.

Maomao, exhausted by this point, took the water that was offered to her and rinsed out her mouth before spitting it out the nearby window.

First damn thing in the morning. She hadn’t even eaten breakfast, and now she felt like she wanted to go back to bed. But she shook her head to stave off the sensation and called the servant girl. “Bring my father here. He’s probably in the field by the south wall. Give this to him; he’ll know what it means.” She had a wooden writing slip brought and scrawled a few characters on it, then gave it to the girl. The child looked conflicted, but she took it and left. Maomao took another mouthful of water, drinking it down this time, and then she began powdering the charcoal that had been brought.

Stupid, annoying, troublesome thing to do, she thought, scowling at the tobacco leaves and then heaving a sigh.

About half an hour later, an elderly man with bad legs arrived, led by the servant girl. Took her long enough, Maomao thought, but she showed her father the carefully pulverized charcoal. He added dried leaves from a few different varieties of herbs, then gave the concoction to the man and woman to drink.

“I guess you did a passable job dealing with this,” he said, then picked up one of the pieces of straw from the floor and studied one end of it intently.

“Just passable?” Maomao watched her father—old but by no means soft—work. He picked up a shard of the glass on the floor, and some of the tobacco leaves. Finally, he examined some of the vomit, the first stuff that had come out before Maomao had arrived.

She studied him as he went. If she had a habit of observing her surroundings closely, she had surely gotten it from him. This man—her adoptive father, a master apothecary—could discern two or three new things from just one new fact.

“What poison did you take this to be?” her father said. His tone implied he was giving her some sort of lesson. Maomao picked up one of the tobacco leaves herself and showed it to him. A wide smile crossed his wrinkled face as if to say, Yes, that’s right. “It appears you didn’t let them drink any water?”

“That’d be counterproductive, wouldn’t it?”

Her father responded with an ambiguous gesture that seemed to be both a nod and a shake of the head at the same time. “Depends. Stomach acid can help prevent the absorption of poison. In those cases, giving the patient water is counterproductive. But if the agent was dissolved in water to begin with, then diluting it is sometimes the best choice.” He explained everything slowly, carefully, as though instructing a child. Indeed, it might have been her father’s very presence that prevented Maomao from considering herself more of an apothecary in her own right. And perhaps he caused her to see the rear palace’s doctor as more of a quack than he deserved.

When Maomao observed that the vomit contained no traces of tobacco leaves, she realized the method her father was prescribing was probably the right one. It wasn’t that she might never have noticed the absence of the leaves, but it remained that she had overlooked it. Maybe she’d been sleepier than she realized.

While she tried to make herself remember this course of treatment, the apprentice girl tugged on her sleeve, saying, “This way.” Was it just Maomao’s imagination, or did the girl look sullen somehow? In any case, Maomao allowed herself to be shown to a room where tea had been prepared.

“You must pardon all the trouble,” said a woman portioning out a treat of sweet red beans. She looked like she was no longer practicing the profession; Maomao guessed she was the madam of this particular house. Clearly she didn’t share quite the same miserly streak as the madam of the Verdigris House; she would never have given tea and sweets to a mere apothecary (“Customers only!”).

“We only did our job, ma’am.” Maomao would be happy enough if they could just get paid. Her father, sitting beside her in a jovial mood, was apt to forget about that part, so Maomao had to make sure she got the money.

The woman squinted, looking into the next room. The courtesan who had been sick was asleep now, and the male customer was sleeping in another room. The woman’s face darkened noticeably.

An attempted lovers’ suicide, maybe? It wasn’t that unusual in the red-light district. When a man without means met a woman with too much time left on her contract, it was always the first damn thing they thought of. They would whisper sweet nothings about meeting each other in the next life, when there was no proof such a thing even existed.

Maomao took a bit of the red-bean treat and chewed thoughtfully. The tea was lukewarm, with a wheat stalk lounging on one side.

You know, I saw a couple of those back in that room, Maomao reflected. Stems of wheat were hollow on the inside; this one was intended to serve as a straw. Brothels here hated for lipstick to get on the drinkware, and it was customary to use wheat stalks for drinking.

God, but a little friendship between men and women could be complicated. The man in that room had looked awfully well-to-do. Like a playboy, certainly, but he’d been wearing a robe backed with fine silk. He had a charming face, too: the sort of person an inexperienced young woman might easily be drawn in by. Maomao knew her father would scold her for letting prejudice like this into her thinking, but this just didn’t look to her like a lady of the night who took poison in despair over her lack of a future. She didn’t look like someone who felt cornered enough to want to die.

Once Maomao got an idea into her head, she couldn’t let it go until she had followed it through. It was just how she was. Once she was sure her father had gotten the money from the madam, she said, “I’m going to go check on the patient,” and left the room.

The man was in worse shape than the courtesan. When Maomao headed for his room on the far side of the building, she noticed that the door was slightly ajar. And through the small crack, she saw something very strange.

It was the servant girl, the disconsolate child who had brought her here—and she was raising a knife over her head.

“Hey! What are you doing?!” Maomao said as she hurried into the room and took the knife from the child.

“Don’t you stop me! He deserves to die!” The girl launched herself at Maomao, trying to get the knife back. Maomao was small enough herself that even a child might have overpowered her if desperate enough. Left with no other option, Maomao clouted the girl on the head, and while she was reeling from the blow, slapped her hard across the cheek. The girl fell back from the impact. She began to cry, huge, wracking sobs, her nose leaking copious amounts of snot.

Maomao was just registering her own disbelief when another courtesan, alerted by the noise, came into the room. “Wh—What in the world is happening here?!” She quickly seemed to grasp the answer to her own question, however, and Maomao was hustled away to another room, much to the detriment of her investigation.

The man at the center of this attempted lovers’ suicide, it transpired, was already a notoriously problematic customer. He was the third son of a wealthy merchant family, and he had a history of using his handsome looks and silver tongue to get into a courtesan’s good graces, stringing her along with vague promises of buying out her contract, before casting her aside when he tired of her. At least one woman had subsequently despaired of her life and killed herself. This wasn’t his first encounter with near-fatal resentment, either; other women, enraged by his philandering, had attempted to stab him or even poison him. As the son of his father’s favorite concubine, though, Daddy always managed to buy the boy’s way out of trouble, and it left him a rotten, spoiled child. Recently he had even prevailed upon his father to have bodyguards see him safely to the brothels.

“This girl’s older sister worked at another shop,” explained a courtesan as she stroked the child, who continued to cry. The servant girl’s sister had been one of those the man had loved and left. The last word the girl had gotten from her sister was a letter joyfully communicating that she was to be bought out of her contract. And the next thing the child heard of her was that she had killed herself. How must she have felt?

“She became close to one of the girls here... The one you saved from poisoning today.” The woman looked at Maomao apologetically.

Look the other way—is that what she’s asking me to do? The woman’s hope, it seemed, was to share this sorry tale in order to earn Maomao’s sympathy and keep her mouth shut. Thankfully, the commotion hadn’t reached the room where her father and the madam were. If Maomao chose not to say anything, the child would most likely go unpunished. What a pain.

Personally, she felt that if a customer was known to be that much trouble, they should have just banned him, but apparently it was the unfortunate courtesan herself who had invited him in. If it got out that there had been an attempted double suicide, this establishment would have quite a headache to deal with. Part of why everyone seemed so grateful to Maomao and her father was that as repugnant as he might be, the man in question was still the son of an important family, and she had saved him from dying.

Which, to the little servant girl, must have felt like an unbearable injustice.

Can’t say I blame her, Maomao thought. She’d happened to be at home today, but for the past many months, Maomao hadn’t been in the red-light district. It was plausible to suspect that this little girl, who did the shopping and other errands for her house, would have been aware of when Maomao’s father was and wasn’t home. Besides, for an emergency like this, one would normally go to the doctor, not the apothecary.

Had the child deliberately chosen a moment when the pharmacist would be out? It implied an intimidating quickness of mind for one so young. That might also have explained why she had been so slow bringing Maomao’s father. It was a testament to how much she hated this man.

Finally Maomao said simply: “I understand,” and went back to her father.

“Quite a welcome home, this,” her father said lightly. He and Maomao were heading back to their little shack, having spent most of the morning on the incident. Maomao relieved her father of the coin purse, double-checked the contents, then gave it back to him. The amount suggested there was a bit of hush money included. The notorious customer was in stable condition, but this was probably the last time he would be allowed around here. Not just this brothel, but the entire red-light district. Word traveled fast in a place like this.

When they got home, Maomao settled in a creaking chair and kicked out her legs. She never had gotten that hot water. She was lucky it wasn’t the sweating season, but thanks to all that rushing around she was perspiring anyway, and it felt icky.

Almost as uncomfortable was this business about the double suicide. Something about it nagged at her. The man in question had been such a lowlife that even the apprentice girl hated him, and from what the others had said it sounded like the person he most looked out for was himself. Would a man like that get sucked into some overheated display of love like a double suicide?

Did the courtesan poison him, then?

Maybe he hadn’t chosen to commit suicide. But Maomao quickly gave up the idea. There’d already been at least one attempt to poison the man; he wouldn’t be too quick to eat anything a courtesan offered him. Maomao crossed her arms and grunted to herself. Her father watched her as he crushed some herbs in a mortar. After a beat he said, “Don’t say anything based on an assumption.”

For him to say that suggested he already had an inkling as to the truth of the incident. Maomao looked at him ruefully, then slumped against the table. She tried to bring to mind everything that had been at the scene of the incident. Had she missed something?

There was a man and woman, collapsed. The scattered tobacco leaves, the glass vessel with its...

Now Maomao registered that unless she was remembering wrongly, there had been only one glass vessel at the scene. And the wheat stalks. Two different colors of alcohol.

Without a word, Maomao got up and stood in front of the water jug. She ladled up some of the contents, then put them back. Her father watched her do this several times, before he sighed and put the powdered ingredients into a container. Then he rose and shuffled over to stand in front of her. “It’s over now,” he said. “It’s done.” He mussed her hair fondly.

“I’m aware of that,” Maomao said, putting the ladle back in the jug one more time and then leaving the house.

Not suicide. Murder, Maomao thought. And it was the courtesan, she believed, who had tried to kill the man. The playboy son, the smooth talker, the lover-and-leaver of so many women. The very courtesan whom the man had been courting, the most recent subject of his amorous advances, might be the one who had attempted to kill him.

Maomao felt she could safely suppose that the philanderer had, as usual, plied this woman with promises to buy her out of her contract. Unlike Maomao, many people seemed to believe that love could change a person. And when enough people repeated an idea enough times, somewhere along the line it became the truth.

Very well. How, then, had the courtesan managed to poison the vigilant man? It was simple: just show him that there was no poison present. The courtesan would have taken a drink of the wine first, just the sort of thing Maomao did in her job. When the man saw that the woman was perfectly fine, he would drink the same stuff. That was why there had been only one container.

That, however, raised the possibility that the woman would succumb to the poison first, and the man wouldn’t drink the tainted wine. Some poisons, like the one Maomao had discovered at the banquet, were slow-acting, and there was probably one of those present, too: in this case the agent was most likely the tobacco. It had a stimulant effect when chewed, and was spat out quickly.

If the courtesan was a talented actress and could consume the poison without being discovered, well and good, but Maomao suspected she’d had help. She’d drunk the wine through a straw made from a wheat stalk. It was a perfectly normal thing to do, and wouldn’t have aroused the man’s suspicion.

How had this enabled her to avoid the poison? Maomao thought it had something to do with the wine. There had been two different types. Two colors of wine in a single, transparent glass vessel. Though they might not be as immiscible as oil and water, two types of wine would have slightly different densities. If you poured a lighter wine on top of a heavier one carefully enough, two layers would form. And how pretty that would be, a dual-colored wine in a glass container. A lovely little trick to delight a favored guest. And meanwhile, the courtesan would use her straw to drink only from the lower layer, while the man, without a straw, drank from the top.

Once the woman was sure the man had collapsed, she would drink a bit of the poisoned wine herself. Not enough to die, just enough to present a convincing illusion. The tobacco leaves scattered around would help hide the smell, and make people think that was what they had used to do the deed. If the courtesan died herself, it would all have been for naught. She had worked very hard to make sure the man succumbed and she survived. Which presumably also explained why she had chosen to do this first thing in the morning.

There was even someone to conveniently discover the situation for her.

Maomao arrived at the brothel from that morning. She went around back, to the room where the poisoned courtesan had been put to get some rest. She found the exhausted-looking woman leaning against a railing and gazing up at the sky. Apparently she was up and about. She was humming a children’s song, and an ephemeral smile floated across her face. Ephemeral and yet, Maomao thought, somehow dauntless.

“Sis, what are you doing?” a servant girl—not the child from that morning—called when she saw the courtesan leaning on the railing. She dragged the woman back into her room and closed the window.

The behavior of the first servant girl, the one who had tried to stab the man, struck Maomao as odd for someone whose beloved “sister” was at risk of dying of poison. She’d deliberately gone to the apothecary and not the doctor, in hopes of being too late to save the man. And she’d taken her time summoning Maomao’s father, too. Wasn’t she worried about the courtesan at all? Or did she not believe a second person so close to her could die as well? Was Maomao overthinking things—or did it almost seem the girl had known all along that the courtesan would make it through?

Then there was the other courtesan, who had so emotionally described the woman’s plight to Maomao. And the uncommonly generous madam. The more she thought about it, the stranger everything seemed.

No assumptions, huh?

Maomao looked slowly from the newly closed window up to the sky. She was finally back in the red-light district for which she had pined all those months in the rear palace, but deep down they were the same place. Both were gardens, and cages. Everyone in them was trapped, being poisoned by the atmosphere. The courtesans absorbed the toxins around them, until they became a sweet poison themselves. With the playboy son alive, it was hard to say what would happen to his would-be killer. He might suspect an attempted poisoning. But then again, it might go the other way around: the brothel might accuse him of having ruined an important product of theirs, and squeeze something out of him that way.

I guess it doesn’t matter which, Maomao thought. It had nothing to do with her. If you felt personally involved in everything that happened in this place, you would never survive.

Maomao gave the back of her head a tired scratch and decided to go over to the Verdigris House. She was going to get that hot water. She set off at a slow trot.