The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 2 - Chapter 11

Chapter 11: Chance or Something More

Maomao was cleaning a hallway somewhere in the outer court, as she so often did, when she heard a very strange tale.

A large figure came up to her in a mild panic. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the big dog, Lihaku.

“What’s going on?” Maomao asked, setting down her cloth. The burly military officer wouldn’t have a reason to come to Jinshi’s office—unless he needed something from Maomao.

“No time for chitchat! There’s trouble!”

“And what might that be?” If he’d come all this way, it must be serious. Despite the way he sometimes acted, Lihaku hardly had time to kill.

“You remember the fire at that storehouse? Later we found out that on the exact same day, there was a burglary at another one.” He scratched his head as he spoke. “The only thing I can think is that someone was using the fire as a diversion.”

Maomao crossed her arms: so that was the story. “What was stolen, if I may ask?”

At that, Lihaku fell into an uncomfortable silence. He tapped her on the shoulder and gestured, apparently wanting to go somewhere they wouldn’t be overheard. Maomao let him lead her out of the gallery and toward the garden. Lihaku squatted in the shade of some trees, tapped his finger against the side of his nose conspiratorially, and said, “Some ritual implements disappeared.”

“Ritual implements?” A very strange thing to steal, Maomao thought.

“Yeah. Several seem to have vanished, but I’m afraid we don’t know exactly what.” Lihaku gave a helpless shake of his head.

“You don’t know what was in there? Was the keeper of the storehouse that careless?”

“No, it’s not like that... There’s no one in charge of the place right now. An important official who’d been closely involved with it died last year, and that turned everything on its head.”

A matter of new superiors shuffling things around, perhaps.

“Perhaps you could ask whoever oversaw it before him, then?”

“There’s a wrinkle in that too. See, he’s in no shape to come back to work. He came down with food poisoning not long ago, and...well, he’s still unconscious.” Lihaku heaved a sigh as if to emphasize what dire straits he was in.

But the words food poisoning set Maomao’s memory working. Hadn’t there been a case of that just after the fire? In fact, almost simultaneously with it...

“That wouldn’t happen to be the clerk-gourmand, would it?” she asked.

Lihaku’s eyes went wide. “How do you know about that?”

“It’s a long story.”

The fire, the theft, and the indisposition of the clerk: could they all be one giant coincidence? On some level, it was always possible—but it seemed deeply unlikely. Something else Lihaku had said got her attention too.

“You mentioned an important official who passed away last year. What kind of person was he?”

Lihaku put a finger to his forehead and grunted. “I remember he was some old fart who always had a stick up his—er, I mean, always stood on principle. What was his name? Blast, it’s on the tip of my tongue! I know he was real big into sweets...”

“Perhaps you’re thinking of Master Kounen,” Maomao said, remembering the person Jinshi had told her about the year before. A straitlaced, sweet-toothed official who had died from an overdose of salt.

“Yes! That was it! Wait...you know about him too?”

“It’s a long story.”

Lihaku’s surprise was understandable. Maomao was by no means enough of an optimist to assume all these coincidences could be, well, mere coincidence. Each looked like an accident in isolation. But there were no guarantees that what appeared to be an accident was in fact accidental, as the case of the blowfish had proven. Was it possible that all of these incidents were deliberate, aimed at some larger goal?

Maomao looked at Lihaku. “I’m sorry, Master Lihaku, but what does this have to do with me?”

“Right! That’s what I came here to talk to you about!” He rifled through a bag and pulled out something that turned out to be the ivory pipe Maomao had discovered in the burned storehouse. She’d delivered it to him not long ago, after cleaning it up and rebuilding it. He’d said he would see that it made its way back to the storehouse watchman, but he still had it.

“It’s not my fault,” Lihaku said now. “The watchman told me to keep it. Said he didn’t want it anymore.”

The guard had been dismissed after blame for the storehouse fire had fallen on him. Maomao had taken the pipe to be a potentially expensive purchase, but evidently it had been a gift. Someone was very generous, she thought.

“He said one of the ladies of the outer court gave it to him. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? Why would one of them give something like this to a random watchman?”

“It might make sense, depending on the person.” When courtesans received a gift from a particularly despised customer, they would promptly sell it for cash, or otherwise give it to someone else. But Maomao could think of another possibility too. “Maybe she knew that he would want to put such a rich gift to use right away.”

Not everyone would have that impulse, but many would. And if that was the mystery woman’s objective... She must have guessed the course of events: The fire would break out. People would come running. Security would be lighter elsewhere—the perfect time for sneaking.

Lihaku, anticipating what Maomao was about to ask, said, “Unfortunately, he said he couldn’t see the face of the woman who gave him the pipe. It was too dark.”

A woman walking around in the dark? That was strange too. Even the palace wasn’t a place where a woman should be walking alone at night. The storehouse watchman had found the woman doing just that, and had been so kind as to accompany her out, for her safety. She’d thanked him by giving him the pipe. It had been cold, and the woman’s face was hidden by a tall collar.

“He did say that she seemed unusually tall for a lady, though, and that she smelled faintly of medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“Don’t worry, I know it wasn’t you. He said tall. But I just wondered. Sound like anyone you know?”

Although he might look like a lummox, Lihaku could be pretty sharp. Can’t exactly claim I’ve got no idea, Maomao thought. Maybe she should simply tell him exactly what she suspected. But then her father’s mantra ran through her mind: don’t draw conclusions based on assumptions. Maomao thought the matter over and decided on a compromise.

“Has anything else unusual happened besides the accidents and incidents you mentioned?”

“That sounds like a portentous question and all, but I wouldn’t even have connected this many dots without your hints,” Lihaku said, crossing his arms. “Are you saying there’s something else I should be investigating?”

“Possibly. Or possibly not.”

“Which is it?” Lihaku said, exasperated.

Maomao crouched down and grabbed a stick off the ground, with which she proceeded to draw a circle in the dirt. “Two things often happen coincidentally.” She drew another circle, partially overlapping the first. “Three things may happen and still be chance.” She added another circle. “But don’t you agree that at some point, it stops being coincidence and becomes deliberate?”

She filled in the segment at the center of her three overlapping circles. “Suppose this lady of the outer court—if that’s what she is—stands at the nexus of these deliberate coincidences.”

“I get it!” Lihaku clapped his hands. As for Maomao, an image of Suirei flashed through her mind, but she felt that was neither here nor there. “You’re smarter than you look,” Lihaku said, clapping her on the shoulder with a huge grin.

“But you’re just as stupidly strong as you look, Master Lihaku, so please do be careful.”

Lihaku felt a bit of a chill as Maomao glared at him. He turned around to discover she wasn’t the only one giving him the stink eye.

“I’m glad to see you’re having fun.” The voice was gorgeous, but thick with sarcasm. Lihaku took an intimidated step back when he saw who it belonged to.

“I’m not particularly having fun at all,” Maomao said.

Jinshi stood watching them closely, half-hidden by the shade of the tree. Gaoshun stood behind him, his brow wrinkled in his customary, perpetual expression of chagrin.

The big mutt promptly went home, leaving Maomao to deal with Jinshi, who was acting put out for some reason.

“You seem quite friendly with that man.”

“Do I?” She poured tea from a small teapot she had put on to boil. A ceramic cup might have made for a better-tasting drink, but most of the dishware Jinshi used was silver. Maomao still wasn’t entirely clear on Jinshi’s place in the political hierarchy. He was more than a eunuch who flitted around the inner palace; he had real business here in the outer court as well.

“What is he, some kind of military officer?”

“Indeed, sir, as you could see. He came to talk to me about something that was bothering him.”

Maomao placed snacks to go with the tea on the desk. She couldn’t be completely sure whether Jinshi might have a stake in what Lihaku had told her. After all, Kounen was somehow connected. So Maomao offered: “Shall I tell you exactly what he was asking about?”

Jinshi only sipped his tea in silence.

When Maomao had finished a detailed explanation, Jinshi closed his eyes and frowned, looking faintly distressed. “A tangled web indeed.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jinshi hadn’t touched the snacks. Gaoshun was standing by the entrance of the office, looking as disturbed as his master.

“And how do you think it’s all related?” Jinshi asked.

“That I don’t know,” she said honestly. She had no idea what any of this had been intended to accomplish. Any of the cases might have been accidental. The one thing that was certain was that as long as they looked like they could be accidents, it was unlikely that anyone would put the pieces together. “Personally, I think they look less like a single grand scheme and more like a series of traps, the success of any one of which would serve the purposes of the one who set them.”

Jinshi took another sip of tea in response. The mouthful emptied his cup, so Maomao went to boil more.

“I must agree,” Jinshi said. “And that means there’s a possibility that there are other traps.”

“We can’t be certain.” Even Maomao had only her speculation to go on. If somebody told her definitively that it had all been a series of coincidences, she could only have nodded and accepted it.

“Hmph. Not feeling too eager about this one?”

“Eager, sir?” she said. And? It’s not like I stick my nose into these things out of personal interest. She just took note of what was going on around her. There were too many people all too prepared to involve her in their own risky business, that was the problem. Maomao would have been perfectly happy to live a quiet life as an apothecary: sitting on her veranda sipping tea and doing her medicinal experiments. “I’m only a maid,” she said. “I simply do the work I’m given.”

“Hmph,” Jinshi said again, apparently finding this answer lackluster. He played half-consciously with a brush in his hand. He had pushed the snacks to one side of his desk. Maybe he wasn’t interested in them. Maomao thought he looked uncommonly youthful. “How about this, then?” he said. He called Gaoshun over with a grin and whispered in his ear. Whatever he said, Gaoshun was clearly not enthusiastic about it.

“Master Jinshi...” he said.

“You heard me. Get everything ready, please.”

Gaoshun nodded without conviction, and meanwhile Jinshi dunked the brush he was playing with in some ink, then began writing on a piece of paper in fluid, flowing motions. “When I was making the rounds of the trading merchants the other day, I heard tell of a very interesting item. I believe this was the name.”

He pulled up the paper with a flourish and displayed it to Maomao. Her eyes immediately began to sparkle.

Written on the paper were two characters, niu huang: calculus bovis. Ox bezoar.

“Would you like it?”

“I would!”

Almost before she knew what she was doing, Maomao rushed up to—and then onto—Jinshi’s desk.

Calculus bovis was a medicine, a gallstone from a cow or ox. Supposedly, only one in a thousand cattle produced one; it was considered among the rarest and most valuable medicinal supplements. A poor apothecary from the pleasure district would be lucky ever to see one in her lifetime. It was a mouthwatering prospect.

And this eunuch was saying—what? Would he actually give her one? Really and truly?

Jinshi drew back slightly from Maomao, who had begun to lean closer and closer to him. She didn’t realize what she was doing until Gaoshun tugged on her sleeve, bringing her back to reality. She slowly climbed down off the desk and straightened her skirt.

“There’s that motivation.”

“Can I really have it?” Maomao gave Jinshi a cautious look, but he now appeared somewhat more adult than before. Maomao recognized this as the alluring gaze he frequently turned on maidservants in the rear palace.

“That depends on how hard you work. Let me start by giving you all the details.” Jinshi began wadding up the paper and threw it into the trash basket, the familiar honeyed smile on his face. Maomao couldn’t have cared less about the smile, but he was offering to reward her with something she desperately wanted if she did good work, and that was all she needed to know.

“Understood. You need only tell me what you wish, Master Jinshi.” And then Maomao cleared away the teacup and the untouched snacks.