The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 4 - Chapter 7

Chapter 7: Festering Resentment (Part One)

Life, it seemed, was fun and fancy free at the medical office at the moment.

“Now, this little kitten, she’s a smart cookie,” the quack was saying. “She loves fish, but she won’t eat the head, tail, or innards.” It had only been a few days, but he seemed to understand perfectly well that he would never be able to teach Luomen anything about medicine; instead he stuck entirely to nonmedical topics on which he perceived he had some measure of authority. And Maomao’s old man, ever personable, reacted with appropriate interest to the quack’s every observation. Maomao thought the loach mustache even looked a little perkier than usual.

Indeed, her father was being himself: “It’s her loss. I rather enjoy this bitter flavor myself.” He took a piece of the small fish the quack doctor had chopped up and popped it in his mouth. Granted he had always taught her not to let food go to waste, but even by that standard it was a little embarrassing. This wasn’t the pleasure district; in the rear palace, he could be assured of decent meals—but nonetheless Maomao didn’t stop him; she knew that this was simply her old man’s nature.

Luomen never forgot something once he had seen or heard it; from one simple fact he could deduce ten more. He was a genius, the greatest doctor in the land. The one thing he didn’t seem to know anything about was greed, ambition, or anything else besides personal simplicity. For him, the kitten’s leftovers were as good as a feast.

Maomao was preparing the mugwort she would use in the moxibustion. She’d already crushed it in a pestle and dried it out. It was an involved process, and it would have been easier to just buy some, but the ingredients happened to grow in the rear palace, and anyway, it provided her with an excuse to come to the medical office.

Maomao’s daily tasks hadn’t changed just because her father was here. “We should have Maomao continue to do everything she normally does,” Hongniang had suggested, the stubborn chief lady-in-waiting still unable to reconcile herself to the presence of a criminal. Maomao had assumed this would leave her old man twiddling his thumbs in the medical office, but not so; sometimes, he was called away by a eunuch who came to summon him. Maomao suspected Jinshi was behind it.

Her father never revealed where he was going or where he had been, but Maomao could take a guess. There was at least one more pregnant woman in the rear palace besides Gyokuyou, and as long as he was here, Luomen would be obliged to treat all the consorts equally. And although she was Consort Gyokuyou’s lady, Maomao was relieved to know her father was making the rounds. She wanted Consort Lihua’s child to grow up healthy this time, and that began with a safe delivery.

She’d heard that after the departure of her former chief lady-in-waiting, Shin, some older and more levelheaded ladies had come to serve Lihua. They knew how to comport themselves, and most likely had experience delivering children.

The rear palace was full of relatively young women; women who came and went every two years, at that. It was supposed to be a place to raise royal children, but it wasn’t currently serving that purpose. It was possible to argue that the Emperor should simply produce as many offspring as he could, and let the strongest survive—that such was the fitting fate of a ruler’s progeny. But considering the number of men in the current Emperor’s bloodline, that argument would have to be revised.

To put it quite bluntly, there weren’t enough stud horses.

If they could somehow remedy that problem...

Her father was writing something as he munched on the fish innards. He was no doubt well ahead of Maomao; whatever she might think of, he’d certainly thought of it already himself. At the moment, he was making a list of points of concern in the rear palace. The quack picked up the kitten to stop her from interrupting Luomen’s writing, then peered down at the list himself.

“You do have the loveliest handwriting,” he remarked.

That’s what gets his attention? Maomao thought. Well, the quack was who he was. Of course he wasn’t interested in what it said.

“The written style, though, is practically childlike. You don’t think it lacks something in gravitas?” the quack continued with a chuckle, running his free hand along his mustache.

“You’re quite right. There are those here who can still only understand simple sentences,” Luomen replied.

Maomao clapped her hands as it hit her, a vague intuition of what he planned to do. Her old man passed her the sheet of paper. “Anything I missed?” he asked.

“Offhand, I think it looks good.”

Good, good, she thought she heard him murmur as he turned to the quack. “My dear Guen. Would your family happen to have some paper, say, half this size?” He folded the paper in half and held it up to demonstrate.

Guen? Who’s that? Maomao thought, but there were only three of them in the room, so by process of elimination it had to be the quack doctor. That name hardly sounds like him, she thought, and resolved to continue thinking of him as “the quack doctor.”

“Sure. We can’t use scraps like that. We pulp them and reconstitute them into new paper,” the quack said.

“Perhaps you might be willing to sell me some at a reduced price, then?”

“I certainly could. It would be my pleasure, in fact.”

Luomen turned to Maomao. “I believe an institute of practical studies recently opened here, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Is everyone learning their characters well enough?”

Well, that varied from person to person. But if you wrote carefully and clearly, virtually everyone would be able to read what you had written.

“I wonder if they might be able to use this for writing practice at the institute. Maybe you could suggest it? I doubt they’d accept the idea from me, but they might listen to you.”

Maomao started back, caught between astonishment and exasperation. How willing was this man to use everyone and everything he could find? He was more cunning than a merchant. With a mental abacus so developed, she thought, it was a wonder how he gave charity until he himself was starving.

“I’ll try asking today,” she said, as she tucked the mugwort into a paper packet.

“Excellent, thank you.” Then her father stood and left the medical office. For the bathroom, she presumed. Call it a bit of meaningless trivia, but when one became a eunuch, one found oneself doing “number one” more often.

That reminded Maomao, though, that she needed something herself. She stood and opened a drawer of the medicine cabinet. “I’m gonna grab a few bottles of alcohol, ’kay?”

“Sure, sure.”

Maomao had made the alcohol in the first place, so she found it hard to have any compunctions about taking some for herself, but when she’d done it the day before, her old man had gotten angry at her. Evidently he felt she should show the quack more respect.

Let’s see... Was there anything else she needed? Come to think of it, she remembered Gyokuyou saying something about having trouble sleeping lately.

“I wouldn’t mind some sleeping medicine too. That all right?”

“Sure, take whatever you like.” The quack was absorbed in playing with the kitten. Maomao rifled through the medicine cabinet, though this time she felt a pang of conscience.

Something that won’t harm a pregnancy, she thought. It wasn’t unusual for a woman to find herself sleeping more lightly when she was pregnant. Maomao didn’t need some heavy-handed drug, just a little something to help the consort relax. Maybe this, she thought, opening a drawer that contained an herbal remedy.

Suddenly she found Maomao, the cat, curled around her ankles—when had she gotten there? She tried to nudge the kitten out of the way in annoyance, but the cat ran her claws along Maomao’s skirt.

“Stop, you’ll tear it!”

“Hey, now, what are you doing?” the quack said, grabbing the kitten.

Was this what she wanted? Maomao wondered, looking at the herbs in her hand. Maomao (the cat) was mewling in a most unusual way and swatting at Maomao (the woman) with her little paw.

“Well, you can’t have it.” The quack and Maomao’s old man might dote on the kitten, but Maomao herself would not be so easily swayed. She certainly wasn’t going to give precious herbs to the likes of a little furball. She quickly put them in a paper packet to get them out of the cat’s way.

“I’ll be going, then,” she said, and left the medical office.

Jinshi would most likely approve of what her old man was trying to do. Still, I suppose it would be polite to ask him in person. It would take days to go through Jinshi, though, so she was heading to the school first.

That reminds me... The hair stick Jinshi had given her was in the folds of her robe. She’d taken it out while she’d been working because Consort Gyokuyou, Yinghua, Guiyuan, and Ailan wouldn’t stop grinning and teasing her about it. I’ll have to remember to put it back in later. She reached the school in the northern quarter before she’d even finished ruminating about how much trouble the hair stick brought her.

The school was normally home to an elderly eunuch with a moderately insufferable personality, but he wasn’t standing at the lectern today. He was the man who oversaw the shrine designed to determine the lineage of would-be emperors. He could be a pain to deal with, but it would be quickest to talk to him. He knew Maomao’s father, and if she said Luomen was here, it would probably grease the wheels.

She walked through the hallways, heading for the eunuch’s office, which was a short distance from the classroom. The door was slightly ajar. “Are you here, sir?” she called. She peeked into the room to find the old man squinting down at a book. He arched an eyebrow, and when he noticed Maomao standing in the doorway, he gestured to her to come in, still holding the book.

“No Xiaolan today?” he asked. He was in the habit of instructing her in various and sundry subjects. The bubbly, affable serving girl seemed to have charmed more than one palace resident.

“No; I’m here on personal business today,” Maomao said. She decided the quickest way to explain would be to show him, so she put the paper Luomen had written on the table. The old eunuch’s eyebrow moved again, and this time he gestured toward a chair as if to say Sit. Maomao took a seat.

“This is Luomen’s handwriting, unless I’m much mistaken.”

“Very perceptive, sir.”

“We all endeavored to mimic his writing, back in the day. They said if you could write like he did, you’d pass the civil service examinations with flying colors.”

That day had to have been back quite a while indeed, then. Forty, maybe even fifty years ago. In this country, the civil service examinations were separate from the test to become a doctor, but Maomao’s old man had passed them both. He had the gifts to have been an excellent civil administrator, but he’d seen a vagrant child collapsed by the roadside with illness, and pity had moved him to choose the path of medicine. He’d always been that way—and his personality, she’d heard, had left him quite alienated from her biological father.

“He came all this way just to deliver this to us?” the old eunuch inquired.

“No, sir; he’s in the rear palace now.”

“Well, now. I hadn’t heard.” The old man’s eyes, hidden among his wrinkles, opened wide; his surprise was clearly genuine. The northern quarter was something of a wilderness in the rear palace, and word of new developments was evidently slow to reach him.

Now that she thought about it, Maomao realized Xiaolan hadn’t had much of a reaction when she saw Maomao’s old man. Much as the girls loved rumors and gossip, after the arrival of all those handsome young eunuchs, one gnarled old man barely warranted her attention.

“So Xiaolan knew. She could have told me...”

“I suspect all the much younger arrivals chased it right out of her mind.”

“Ah, young eunuchs.” The elderly teacher stroked his chin and gazed out the window. Beyond the carved, circular portal was the shrine for discerning the children of Wang Mu, the Mother Royal. But that wasn’t what the eunuch was looking at. He was staring somewhere beyond it. “I know how little excitement there is around here, but still I question all the commotion over the likes of them.”

“How’s that, sir?”

“Hm? Having all of the young eunuchs in the southern quarter would get in the way of getting work done, so some of them were sent here.”

That made sense. Far fewer palace women frequented the northern quarter.

“They’ve gone to assist at the clinic, where I gather they’ve been quite helpful.”

The clinic was another place without any young women. Instead, it was staffed entirely by levelheaded older ladies. Maomao could easily picture the palace woman she’d met there—Shenlü; wasn’t that her name?—making best use of the eunuchs with her force of personality.

“Anyhow, back to the business at hand. What was it you wished to ask of me?”

“I wondered if it might not be possible to use this as a sample for writing practice for the women at the school. We’ll provide paper for you to use.”

That got another eyebrow arch out of the old man, who proceeded to carefully peruse the long, thin strip of paper. “He wrote something like this once long ago as well. He was doing it all by himself back then, quite the task, and before I knew what I was doing, I found myself helping him. I see the years have at least taught him how to make use of people. Compared to the help I gave him then, this is child’s play.”

“He wrote some sort of text like this before?”

“Certainly, and posted it all over the rear palace. I never wanted to see the blamed thing again, though, and wouldn’t let him put one anywhere near me.” The old eunuch shook his head as if even today he would be loath to write that text out even one more time.

Maomao looked at the list of cautions on the paper. It included, among other things, a brief remark about the toxic face powder.

And he published something like this before? The thought felt strange to her. Seized by the desire to investigate, she put a paperweight down on the list and stood up, intent on following her feeling wherever it led. “All right, we’ll bring some paper by later,” she said.

“Oh, don’t you want a cup of tea before you go?”

“No, thank you, I’m afraid I’m in a hurry,” she replied and left the eunuch’s room.

And with that, she was off to...