The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 3 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Mirrors

One hot afternoon, Maomao was told that a strange object from a foreign land had arrived in the Jade Pavilion and that she should come and see it. When she arrived in the main room, she found a large, full-length mirror. Consort Gyokuyou was standing in front of it, gleefully holding the clothes she’d bought from the caravan up to herself. Hongniang was carefully folding away the cloth in which the mirror had been wrapped.

One might wonder about such fuss over a mirror, even a full-length one, but when Maomao saw it, she was surprised, and not just by the size.

Now, that is something you don’t see every day, she thought. Typically, mirrors were made of bronze, like the polished sheet of metal Maomao used. This mirror, though, wasn’t metal at all, and it reflected Gyokuyou’s image far more clearly than any bronze surface.

“Ho ho. I wonder if you know what it’s made of,” Gyokuyou said.

“Perhaps glass, milady?”

Gyokuyou pouted. Evidently, she’d guessed right.

Yinghua and Guiyuan were ecstatic:

“Oh my goodness! It really is like there’s two of you standing there, Lady Gyokuyou!”

“Yes, it’s amazing!”

“We had a mirror once before, but Yinghua broke it.”

“Aw, don’t bring that up!”

Glass mirrors were unusual but not unheard of. Making them was a difficult endeavor, though, and the only examples were those brought over from the west, so they were enormously expensive. A lady-in-waiting who broke one could well expect to lose her head. It was Yinghua’s great good fortune that Consort Gyokuyou was as kindhearted as she was.

Looking at the new treasure, Maomao began to understand the excitement. A bronze mirror inevitably muddied colors, but this mirror was different. The glass had been stretched long and thin, yet there were no imperfections in the surface; the reflection was perfect.

Yinghua smirked when she saw Maomao staring intently into the mirror. “So it’s got even your interest, Maomao.”

“Yes. How do you think they produce material like this? If we could figure it out, I bet we could sell them for a small fortune.”

“Er... Yeah, sure,” Yinghua said, patting Maomao encouragingly on the shoulder. Maybe she’d been hoping for an appraisal from some other perspective.

“Was it a gift from His Majesty?” Maomao asked.

“No, from the visiting embassy,” Gyokuyou said, passing the clothes to Guiyuan and sitting down on her couch.

“Embassy, ma’am?” Come to think of it, the doctor had mentioned something of the sort in passing. He’d said the recent caravan had been especially large in part because it was laying the groundwork to welcome these visitors.

“That’s right. They gave mirrors to the other consorts too.” Yinghua sounded distinctly put out. Hongniang scolded her to speak more politely, but in her heart she must have felt the same way.

In principle, Gyokuyou ranked exactly as highly as the other three upper consorts, so the diplomatic mission would be obliged to treat them all equally. Still, to bring such rich gifts must have taken quite the effort, Maomao thought. Whether it traveled across the sands or across the sea, glass was easy to break. It would have to be treated very carefully to avoid any impacts that might shatter it.

Maomao looked at the mirror and thought: if the visitors were giving such exquisite gifts even to the consorts, they must be looking to land a major trade deal or something. What could it be that they wanted?

It was the very next day that Gaoshun came to her seeking her advice.

“What’s going on?” Maomao asked as she set out tea. Hongniang, the chief lady-in-waiting, was also in the room with them; she presumably felt that no man, not even a eunuch, should be alone with a palace woman.

At the moment, she was eyeing Gaoshun with an expression of fatigue. Now in her thirties, Hongniang had probably hoped to land this diligent, decent man for herself, but when she had learned recently that he already had a wife and children, she promptly lost all interest in him. (Far be it from her to seek to be anyone’s mistress.) Hongniang was such a competent chief lady-in-waiting that she probably wasn’t expecting to get married anytime soon, anyway.

Gaoshun, for his part, seemed unbothered by the fact that Hongniang was there, leading Maomao to suppose that the matter wasn’t one of any great import.

“I was hoping to get your opinion on something, Xiaomao,” he said. According to Gaoshun, it had to do with a request he’d received from an acquaintance; today’s visit had nothing to do with Jinshi. This wasn’t the first time a friend of Gaoshun’s had sought his help—there had been that case of food poisoning. Maybe this was related.

“If you think I can be of help,” Maomao said, and seated herself in a chair.

Hongniang politely made tea for Maomao. Her long service had given her a knack for making delicious tea, but she’d snapped at Maomao once for saying so. It seemed she disliked any comments that reminded her of her age—a fact Maomao had made a careful mental note of.

“Very well,” Gaoshun said, and began.

○●○

A certain distinguished household had two daughters. They were close in age and similar in appearance, and their parents doted on both of them, to the point of being overprotective. When the young women reached marriageable age, their parents categorically refused to let them leave the house alone. Instead they were kept inside all day long, and even then there were always ladies-in-waiting to watch them.

The ladies-in-waiting took pity on the young women—perhaps the treatment seemed cruel to them—and frequently helped the girls sneak out of the house when their parents weren’t looking. That couldn’t last long, though, and when they were found out, guards were placed outside the girls’ room as well. Perhaps that was what prompted the daughters, who had always been somewhat withdrawn, to spend all day, every day at their preferred pastime of embroidery. They spoke with no man other than their father, and the male guards assigned to watch the room were never supposed to be closer than fifty meters from the girls’ residence. At night, their father would lock the building to ensure they couldn’t leave.

After quite some time of this, something incredible happened—one of the girls, the younger sister, was found to be pregnant. Her father was incandescent: how could this be, he wanted to know, when she had never so much as touched a man? Her mother bewailed that this should have happened to her unmarried daughter. Only the other sister, the elder, took the girl’s side. She said something almost as incredible as the event itself:

“One of the hermit-immortals impregnated her.”

Her parents were again incensed; her story was patently absurd. Yet they couldn’t deny that the guards had performed their job impeccably; meanwhile, the mother and father had dismissed all the former ladies-in-waiting who had helped the young women get out of the house and replaced them with new ones who were prevented from contact with the young ladies as much as possible so as not to develop sympathy for them.

Her parents were at a loss, for it did indeed seem that only magic could have allowed anyone inside that building.

○●○

“That is indeed a strange story,” Maomao said, sipping her tea. At Gaoshun’s invitation, Hongniang, too, had taken a seat and was dividing the snacks. She cut into a large mooncake that was filled with walnut paste. She was obviously invested in the story as well, for example exclaiming “How terrible!” when the girl was revealed to be pregnant.

“My acquaintance was at his wits’ end and asked me what I thought he should do.”

“I can see where it would be a troubling situation, but I can’t help thinking that it’s not exactly my field,” Maomao said, and she meant it. “Unless perhaps you’re asking me whether there are any cases of a woman becoming pregnant without the intervention of a man.”

“Are there any such cases?”

“No, none in which the woman was actually with child. However, sometimes the body can behave as if it were pregnant, even when it isn’t.”

The human body is a mysterious thing, and a persistent belief can occasionally cause symptoms to appear in the absence of a physical cause. Suppose someone hates going to work and wishes they could stay home: as the hour to go to work approaches, they may find their stomach begins to hurt. Maomao knew of a young courtesan who said she was pregnant with the child of the man she loved and showed the signs of early pregnancy, but it was an illusion born of her own conviction. Maomao’s old man told her that it wasn’t just people; sometimes it even happened to animals.

Gaoshun’s expression grew more and more ambivalent as Maomao explained all this.

Finally Maomao asked, “Was the young woman in fact pregnant?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he replied. She wondered at his somewhat evasive tone, but decided to ignore it for the moment.

“In that case, in what way were the women watched?” If it was remotely possible the young woman could have escaped the guards’ notice, the discussion could end there.

Gaoshun took a piece of paper from the folds of his robes. It was a simple plan of the house that looked like he’d had it prepared specifically to show Maomao. The girls’ annex was represented by a basic square connected to the main house by a covered gallery on the west side. To the north and east a wall surrounded the mansion, while to the south there was a garden.

“What did they do when they had to use the bathroom?”

“There were facilities in their building.”

Toilets were usually located well away from where anyone lived. Maomao could only smile bitterly to realize how desperate the parents must have been to prevent their daughters from leaving.

“If they were being guarded from outside, there must have been a window. Where was it?”

“The building had only a single entrance, on the west side. But it had two windows, one on the east wall and one on the south. There were no other ways in or out.” Gaoshun took out a portable writing set and drew a couple of circles to mark where the windows were.

“Were the guards stationed around here, then?” Maomao pointed to the main building. There were only so many places from which the windows of the sisters’ building would have been visible. Most likely the guards had been stationed at high vantage points so as to be able to see down into the separate structure.

Gaoshun appeared to confirm her suspicions by adding two more marks, Xs this time. He added, however, that the guard to the south was on the third floor of the main building, while the one to the east was on the first floor. The wall on the east side left too many blind spots, making the first floor the only place from which the room was visible.

Maomao traced paths between the Xs and Os with her fingers. “The view from this window is quite limited,” she remarked.

“Yes. But the women often spent entire afternoons sitting by it doing embroidery.”

With no real opportunities for entertainment, they threw themselves into their hobby, and it was better to do it by the window rather than to have a light burning in the middle of the day. Easier for the guards too.

Hmm. Maomao thought it over. She stole a glance at Gaoshun—he looked impassive, but she couldn’t shake the sense that he was avoiding her eyes. This, she suspected, was related to a feature of the story that bothered her. The chief lady-in-waiting sitting with them seemed to have noticed it as well.

“It’s an odd choice of pastime, embroidery,” Hongniang said. She, unlike Maomao, had been raised in high society.

“Yes; the family comes from a line of shepherds.”

Was it Maomao’s imagination, or did Gaoshun not sound quite natural as he said this? It was like he was reciting from a prepared script.

“I see,” Hongniang said. Among some minority groups, specific embroidery patterns could have special significance. In that case, it would be a less perplexing hobby.

Even so, something still nagged at Maomao. She took another, closer look at the plan of the complex. It included the rooms of the house, and it appeared that the two windows of the annex, south and east, were in a single large room, in addition to which there were two bedrooms.

“Was the separate building originally built to accommodate guests?” she asked.

“Well deduced,” Gaoshun replied.

“And how many guards were there?”

“Two,” he answered patiently. He seemed to know an awful lot about the situation, Maomao thought—he would have to, to prepare a plan like this. Yet she felt like he was leaving out a vital piece of the puzzle. Without it, Maomao could only offer the vaguest of answers.

Hmm... She scratched her chin, torn between pressing the point and not saying anything.

As if to give her a little extra push, Gaoshun produced something else. “Master Jinshi sends this, with his apologies. It seems your ox bezoar will take longer than expected to arrive.”

It was true; Jinshi hadn’t yet given her the precious calculus bovis. She’d refrained from asking about it, concerned it might earn her another headbutt, but it certainly was taking a while.

“I must apologize,” Gaoshun said. “It seems demand has risen sharply just recently.”

“Why in the world would that be?” Maomao said. Gaoshun refused to look at her.

It was Hongniang who let it slip as she took a sip of tea: “I heard that a great many people have come to Master Jinshi with extraordinary and precious medicines of late. Somehow, a rumor got started that he’s become a passionate collector of them.” She could be just as firm-handed with a man (now that she knew he was married) as she was with any of the ladies-in-waiting. Or perhaps she was trying to send a message: Don’t string along one of our ladies with rewards that never materialize. Whatever the case, Gaoshun looked pained.

“Perhaps he should accept at least one of those invitations to dinner,” Hongniang said. He must get them, from men and women both—and they were unlikely to end at dinner. Being gorgeous had its own challenges.

“All right, fine,” Maomao said, taking the paper packet but distinctly annoyed.

The packet contained something that looked like a dried persimmon. Hongniang’s face twisted when she saw it, but as for Maomao, her all-too-rarely-used tear ducts began to open. She blinked rapidly, then slowly looked at Gaoshun.

“You seem pleased; that’s what really matters,” he said. “It’s bear gall. Master Jinshi wished he could give it to you in person, but it wasn’t possible.” Jinshi, it seemed, was simply too busy. When it came to precious medical ingredients like this, though, Maomao didn’t care who they came from.

Bear gall was, as its name implied, the dried gallbladder of a bear. It had a bitter flavor but was highly valued for medication relating to the digestive tract. Seeing the way Maomao’s face lit up, Gaoshun couldn’t restrain a smile. The stiff, formal eunuch was starting to understand the way to Maomao’s heart.

“Did you notice anything unusual?” Gaoshun asked.

When he asked her so directly, Maomao felt she had to say something. She tucked the paper packet carefully into the folds of her robe, then settled in her chair. “Please wait just a moment, sir,” she said, then went to her room. When she came back, she placed a small brass plate on the table along with two nuts. Two dolls would have been better, but Maomao had never been interested in girlish things like that.

She placed the nuts in front of the window on the plan. “A question,” she said. “Were the young women always watched by the same people?”

“Basically, yes.”

“And those people were always in the same places?”

“That’s right.”

“Then would you happen to remember exactly what kind of embroidery the young women were doing?”

“I’m told both of them stitched animals. Lions and rabbits, mostly.”

Still a bit surprised by Gaoshun’s detailed knowledge of the situation, Maomao placed the brass plate—which she usually used as a mirror—by the eastern window. She moved one of the nuts and crouched so she could look directly at the metal. When she had the mirror in the right spot, she said to Gaoshun, “Try looking into the mirror from right here.”

He did as she said, kneeling to see into the mirror. What he should be seeing was the other nut.

“I suspect that from this position, you couldn’t see much more than the wall in a mirror. From up close it might be another matter, but from a distance, you wouldn’t know the difference. That of course assumes there was a large enough mirror in the annex, and that the window hid any frame around such a mirror.”

Such a large mirror would be extremely valuable; and in order for anyone to take the things reflected in it as real, simple brass wouldn’t cut it. As luck would have it, Maomao had recently seen just the kind of exquisite mirror that would be necessary.

“You’re saying that there was only one young woman in the room, and what the guard was seeing was her reflection in the mirror?”

Maomao nodded. If the two sisters looked enough alike, telling them apart from a distance would be difficult. Even if they’d been given differently colored accessories to help distinguish them, the remaining woman would simply tie one to each of her arms in different colors, and it would be hard to know who she was.

Hongniang, however, was perplexed by this. She seemed uncommonly involved today—the tale apparently interested her. “What about the embroidery, then?” she asked. “They must have been working on different patterns, mustn’t they?”

“Suppose it was a pattern like this,” Maomao said. She borrowed the brush from Gaoshun and sketched the face of a laughing person. Then she turned it upside down: it immediately transformed from a laughing person to an angry one. A picture that changed depending on the perspective from which it was viewed; a simple trick.

Hongniang was obviously startled. Maomao said, “I suspect the pattern simply appeared reversed in the mirror.”

“I see...” Gaoshun said. If there appeared to be two women near the window, the guards would focus on them, making it just possible to slip out the west side.

Gaoshun and Hongniang seemed convinced, but Maomao was still thinking. It wasn’t actually that unusual for highborn girls to pass the time with stitching. It wasn’t the custom of this land, though; it was more common among women from the west. Her father had told her it was quite typical of the country where he’d studied, for example.

Then she considered how the envoys from a far land had brought large mirrors, with workmanship fine enough to cause the kind of confusion involved in this situation. Gaoshun had said that a daughter of a respectable household had slipped out and gotten herself pregnant, but Maomao doubted the complete truth of his story. Had the woman been carrying a child—or some deeper secret? It wasn’t unusual for those suspected of spying to be treated as honored guests.

Maomao, though, wasn’t so uncouth as to pry further; instead, she gently squeezed the folds of her robe where she’d stashed the bear gall.

Now, how shall I use this little pretty? she thought to herself. She entertained the possibility that it might be, in effect, “hush bear gall.” But that didn’t stop her from savoring the thought of what she might do with it.