The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 1 - Chapter 26

Chapter 26: Two ’Cides to Every Story

Gaoshun placed a lacquered box on the desk and took out a scroll from inside. “The report you requested has finally arrived.” Nearly two months had passed since Jinshi’s instruction to find any serving woman who had sustained a burn.

“That took too long,” Jinshi said, looking up sharply.

“My apologies.” Gaoshun made no effort to add any excuse. It was a matter of principle with him not to do so.

“So, who is she?”

“Sir. Surprisingly highly placed.” He unrolled the scroll on Jinshi’s desk. “Fengming, of the Garnet Pavilion. Chief lady-in-waiting to the Pure Consort.”

Jinshi let his chin rest on his hands, his eyes cold as he scanned the paper.

⭘⬤⭘

“Oh, young miss! Come with me, won’t you, please?” When Maomao arrived to help with medical matters, this was the first thing out of the mouth of the layabout—ahem, the doctor. A eunuch was nearby, apparently with a message; he had evidently come to summon the physician.

“What on earth has you so upset?” Maomao asked, smelling trouble. The quack was practically quaking as he begged for her help, though, so she obliged and went with him. They soon found themselves at the guard post by the north gate. Several eunuchs were standing and looking at something, surrounded by a gaggle of serving women.

“We’re lucky it’s winter,” Maomao said, utterly calm in the face of what she found.

A rush mat concealed a woman, her face bluish and pale. Her hair was stuck to her cheeks and face, her lips blue-black. Her spirit no longer resided in this world.

The body was uncommonly neat for a drowning victim, but it still wasn’t exactly pleasant to look at. It really was a good thing it was a cold time of year. Typically, it would fall to the physician to inspect the corpse, but at present he was cowering behind Maomao like a little girl. A quack, indeed.

The dead woman had apparently been found that morning, floating in the outer moat. From her appearance, it was clear she was a servant of the rear palace. Hence why the quack doctor had been summoned; the business of the rear palace was to be taken care of by the inhabitants of the rear palace.

“Young lady, perhaps you could... look at her for me?” the doctor implored, his loach mustache quivering, but Maomao was unmoved. Who did he think she was?

“No, I couldn’t. I’ve been instructed never to touch a dead body.”

“What a strangely specific instruction.” The needling comment came from an all-too-familiar, heavenly voice. The girls gave the by-now customary squeals. It was almost as if they were watching a stage show.

“Good day to you, Master Jinshi.” As if it could be good with a dead body lying right there... Maomao, as ever, regarded the handsome youth, totally unimpressed. There was Gaoshun behind him as usual. Conducting his standard business of beseeching Maomao with his eyes to be courteous.

“Well, Doctor? Might we trouble you to take a proper look?”

“Very well...” The quack flushed and moved to examine the corpse without much conviction. First, visibly trembling, he pulled away the rush mat, provoking some screams from the assembled women.

The deceased was a tall woman, wearing hard wooden clogs. One of them had come off, exposing a bandaged foot. Her fingers were red, the nails cruelly damaged. Her uniform was that of the Food Service.

“You don’t seem too bothered by this,” Jinshi remarked to Maomao.

“I’m used to it.”

Beautiful as the pleasure district might appear, one step into its back alleys and hidden corners could reveal a world of lawlessness. It wasn’t so uncommon to discover the body of a young woman, raped, beaten, and left for dead. It was easy to see the women of the pleasure district as being trapped in a cage, but by the same token one could say they were protected from its dangers. Brothels treated their courtesans as merchandise, yes. And one wanted merchandise to last a long time and not be damaged.

“I’ll be very interested in your perspective—later.”

“Certainly, sir.”

She doubted she could be of much help, but she didn’t deny him. It would have been impolite.

It must have been so cold. When the doctor had finished his examination, Maomao delicately covered the body with the mat once again. As if it made any difference now.

Maomao found herself escorted into the guard post by the central gate. The matron’s office must have been busy again. She presumed Jinshi didn’t want to have this conversation in the Jade Pavilion. It wasn’t appropriate for the ears of a child.

I think it’s about time he got his own damn place. Maomao nodded politely at the eunuchs standing before the door.

“The guards are of the opinion that it was suicide,” Jinshi informed her. The woman had ostensibly climbed up on the wall, then flung herself into the moat. She was, as her outfit had suggested, one of the lower-ranking women of the Food Service; she had been accounted for at work until yesterday. In other words, she had died sometime the previous night.

“I don’t know whether it was suicide,” Maomao said. “I do know that she didn’t do it alone.”

“And how is that?” Jinshi asked, looking regal as he sat in his chair. He was like a different person from the childish youth he sometimes showed her.

“Because there was no ladder by the wall.”

“That’s true enough.”

“Do you think it would be possible to scale that wall with a grappling hook?”

“I very much doubt it. No?” he asked probingly. It was truly frustrating, dealing with him. She wanted to tell him off for asking questions he already knew the answers to, but Gaoshun was watching, so she refrained.

“There is a way to reach the top without any tools, but I don’t believe that woman could have managed it.”

“Is there? What way would that be?”

After the commotion surrounding the “ghost” of Princess Fuyou, Maomao had wracked her brains trying to understand how the woman had gotten up on the outer wall. It wasn’t a place one simply clambered up to.

When Maomao got a question into her head, she gnawed at it until she had the answer, so she had spent a great deal of time contemplating the walls. What she had discovered was a series of projections at one corner where the walls met. A brick jutting out slightly here and there. They could conceivably serve as footholds—if one were, say, a talented dancer like Princess Fuyou. Maomao speculated that the protruding bricks had been used by the builders when they were constructing the wall.

“It would be difficult for most women. Especially one who’d had her feet bound.”

Sometimes a girl’s feet were wrapped in bandages and shoved into tiny wooden shoes. The bones were crushed, her feet then bound with strips of cloth and constrained in wooden clogs. All this was done on account of a standard by which the smaller a foot was, the more beautiful. Not every woman was subject to the practice, but one sometimes saw it in the rear palace.

“You’re suggesting it was homicide?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. But I do believe she was alive when she fell into the moat.” The red fingertips implied the woman had scratched desperately at the walls around the moat. Down there in the cold water. Maomao didn’t want to think about it.

“Couldn’t you have a closer look?” There was the honeyed smile, impossible to refuse. Yet, unfortunately, refuse she must: she couldn’t do what she couldn’t do.

“A master apothecary instructed me never to touch a dead body.”

“For what reason? Some simple-minded fear of impurity?” Jinshi seemed to be implying that apothecaries interacted with the sick and injured all the time, and contact with corpses could hardly be unusual for them.

Maomao’s riposte was to state the reason plainly: “Because human beings can likewise become medicinal ingredients.”

No telling how far your curiosity goes, her father had said. If you must do it, well... leave it till last. He’d claimed that if she ever handled a dead body, she might well turn into a grave robber. It wasn’t the nicest thing he’d ever said. Maomao privately felt that she had more sense than that, but she had nonetheless somehow managed to respect his stricture thus far.

Jinshi and Gaoshun, jaws slightly agape, looked at each other and nodded in understanding. Gaoshun turned a pitying gaze on Maomao. She thought that was terribly rude, but forced her fist not to tremble.

In any event.

Did she kill herself, or did someone else do it? Maomao had never once thought of ending her own life, and she had no interest in being murdered, either. If she were to die, it would mean she could no longer test medicines or experiment with poisons. So if she had to go, she wanted it to be while she was trying out some heretofore unexplored toxin.

I wonder which one would be best...

Jinshi was looking at her. “What are you thinking?”

“Sir. I was meditating on which poison would be best to die by.”

She was just being honest, but Jinshi frowned. “Are you of a mind to die?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Jinshi shook his head as if to say she wasn’t making any sense. Well, she didn’t have to make sense to him. “No one knows the day or the hour of their death,” she said.

“True enough.” A hint of sorrow passed over Jinshi’s face. Perhaps he was thinking of Kounen.

“Master Jinshi.”

“Yes, what?” He looked at her skeptically.

“If, perchance, I must be put to death someday, may I humbly request that it be done by poison?”

Jinshi put his hand to his forehead and sighed. “And why would you ask me that?”

“If I should ever commit an offense that warrants such punishment, it would be you who handed down judgment, would it not?”

Jinshi studied her for a moment. He seemed in an ill temper, though she wasn’t sure why. Indeed, he almost seemed to be glaring at her. Gaoshun was looking increasingly anxious behind him.

Hmm, perhaps I just committed the offense.

“Pardon me, sir, I’ve overstepped myself. Strangulation or beheading would be equally acceptable.”

“I don’t follow,” Jinshi said, visibly passing from anger to exasperation.

“Because I’m a commoner, sir,” Maomao said. Commoners couldn’t contradict nobles. It wasn’t a matter of right or wrong; that was simply how the world worked. True, the way the world worked was sometimes turned on its head, but she didn’t think there would be many who would be pleased with a revolution at this particular moment. The rulership in this day and age simply wasn’t that bad. “My head might be chopped off for the slightest mistake.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Jinshi watched her, unsettled.

Maomao shook her head. “It’s not a question of whether you would. But whether you could.” Jinshi had the right and authority to dispose of Maomao’s life, but Maomao didn’t have the same right. That was all there was to it.

Jinshi’s face was impassive. Was he upset? It was hard to tell. He might have been mulling something over. Maomao had no special need to know. It simply looked to her as if many different thoughts were running through his head.

I guess what I said bothered him.

Neither Jinshi nor Gaoshun said anything further, and Maomao, with nothing more to do, bowed and left.

A rumor reached her sometime later that the dead woman had been present at the scene of the attempted poisoning not long before. She said as much in a note that had been discovered. The case was closed, ruled a suicide.