The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 4 - Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Festering Resentment (Part Two)

Just like the last time she’d visited, the clinic was bustling with older palace women, but now interspersed among them were the young eunuchs, some of whom were in the nearby laundry area washing sheets by laying them on paving stones, treading on them with their bare feet, and dousing them with well water.

Maomao took it all in out of the corner of her eye as she came up to the clinic entrance. A woman who knew her happened to be there and popped out to see what she wanted.

“Not feeling well?” the woman asked.

“I’m all right, thanks,” Maomao replied.

She glanced at the woman, wondering how best to handle this. She wasn’t sure it was appropriate to ask here and now, but she couldn’t simply ignore the matter either. Above all, she was concerned about who here had come up with the idea in the first place.

She decided to make up a pretext. “I believe you use alcohol as a disinfectant here. I thought perhaps this might serve.” She produced a small bottle from a cloth pouch. Some alcohol—she’d made a little extra just for good measure and had brought it along with the moxa. She’d always intended to bring it to the clinic, but somehow she’d kept putting it off.

“What’s this?”

Maomao pulled the stopper and tilted the bottle toward the woman, who took a sniff.

“I think it may be more effective than what you’re currently using,” she said.

After a beat, the other woman said, “I’ll go ask,” and ushered Maomao into the building. She brought her to another room and offered her a chair—and there was the forceful older lady, Shenlü. Maomao, evidently regarded as a guest, was offered some sour fruit juice.

“We would be most grateful for this,” Shenlü said. “But are you sure it’s all right?” There wasn’t much alcohol in the rear palace to begin with—even less so distilled spirits.

“I have more.” In fact, she had another bottle in the pouch, plus more back at the medical office. And if all that ran out, she could simply make another batch. “I’ll bring you some more later.”

“That would help us very much.” Shenlü bowed her head. She sounded a touch stiff, perhaps all too aware of the fact that Maomao was one of Consort Gyokuyou’s ladies-in-waiting.

“Please, think nothing of it. I made plenty. By the way...” Maomao was trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, but acting had never been her strong suit; she wasn’t quite sure if she sounded natural. All she could do was try to appear calm. “It seems all the women around here are quite accomplished, are they not?”

“What brought that on?” Shenlü asked, somewhat abashed.

So she hadn’t quite pulled off the nonchalance. Forget it. Maomao forged ahead. “Oh, it’s simply that the usual term of employment here is two years. But it seems the women in the clinic have been here rather longer...”

“Yes, old ladies, all of us,” Shenlü said with a little twist of her lips that almost amounted to a smile. Maomao didn’t respond. “I see you’re not going to argue,” Shenlü added.

Women came into the rear palace in their teens, or at the oldest in their twenties, so Shenlü had certainly been here twenty years at the very least. Probably more. And therein lay the mystery. Maomao wasn’t sure whether to ask the question out loud or not, but Shenlü’s eyes grew distant. “We were young once too, you know. I was just ten when I came here.”

Maomao said nothing.

“All the palace women here were about that age when they entered service.”

Currently, virtually no one would be recruited for service in the rear palace at such a young age. Fourteen was about as young as one could hope to gain admittance. But Shenlü and the other women at the clinic would have entered their service during the reign of the previous emperor.

“And even now we cannot leave,” she said.

The clinic had originally been established by the woman who was now the Empress Dowager. Maomao had even seen her personally going to the building once. At first, Maomao had assumed she’d started the clinic out of compassion, the same way the system of slavery and the making of eunuchs had been outlawed—under the Emperor’s aegis, but at the Empress Dowager’s instigation. The clinic had simply come first.

However, such was not the case.

“No one would take us even if we did leave,” Shenlü concluded. By and large, once one had been the bedmate of an emperor, who lived “above the clouds,” one couldn’t leave the rear palace. True, women were sometimes married off to loyal servants or used as pawns in political matches, but even such fates as these were available only to ladies of a certain status. In another era, these women might have been put to death to accompany their master into the next life—but Maomao’s position was too far below theirs to even say definitively that they were at least lucky to have escaped that fate.

Ahh... Now I see.

Here was the resentment that festered within the rear palace. It was hard to blame them if they found the palace itself repugnant; if they despised those who sought His Majesty’s royal affections in pursuit of their own happiness. These women had been brought into the rear palace before their time and then had been bitten by the poisonous fangs of the former emperor. And these two facts conspired to ensure that they would never again see the world outside the walls of this complex. What must that do to a woman’s heart?

Not everyone would be able to endure that experience without it battering them beyond the hope of an ordinary life. Shenlü had asked Maomao to check on the young woman who’d fallen ill at the Crystal Pavilion. Maomao had been impressed by Shenlü’s perceptiveness, but there was another possible explanation, the flip side of the same facts: what if it had been Shenlü who’d taught Consort Lihua’s former chief lady-in-waiting, Shin, how to make the abortifacient? Not personally, but indirectly, using the maid who’d lain in that storage room. It would make a number of things that had nagged at Maomao fall neatly into place.

The maid had surely been one of the chatty types. From her, Shenlü would have learned all about the fault line between Shin and Lihua, and might have intuited the consort’s pregnancy.

“Here—leave this on the desk of the chief lady-in-waiting. It’s for the consort’s safety.”

The maid, the earnest maid, would have listened obediently to Shenlü. It would have been a list of things that might be bad for the consort. A list of things to be avoided—for the consort’s safety. But if someone with a grudge against Lihua were to see the list, it might serve precisely the opposite of the alleged purpose. The caravan had happened to be visiting right around then; it would have been possible to finagle the items on the list if one had really wanted to.

And why would the caravan happen to have those items? One possibility:

“I’d like perfume this time.”

A few words, whispered into the ear of one of the merchants who visited a few times each year. Keep up the habit over decades, and you would find that the merchandise naturally began to reflect what you wanted.

Malice, though not to the point of conscious fatal intent: that’s what Maomao saw at the root of this evil. That was what had allowed it to smolder for so long, eating away at the rear palace slowly, indirectly.

The toxic face powder was one of the forms it had taken. The women at the clinic must have known about it. They couldn’t all have been illiterate back when Maomao’s old man had written his first list of cautions. In fact, there was a bookshelf here in this room that implied the women of the clinic were at least sometimes given to study.

I wonder if I should press her about it, Maomao thought, but quickly dropped the idea. Partly because she had no witnesses and no proof, and she didn’t want to make vague accusations; but partly because of what might happen to the women here if she said anything. She was thinking of all the other ladies of the rear palace, who might be robbed of the clinic by what she said. She didn’t want to do that to them.

These women’s resentment would only continue to build—but that was out of Maomao’s hands. The most she could do was to try to make sure that it didn’t hurt those around them. That was it. Perhaps there was some better solution, but if so, Maomao wasn’t smart enough to think of it.

Guess there’s no point to my sticking around here. As Maomao grabbed her cloth bundle and stood up, she glanced at the bookcase. The fact that they could afford to keep books around suggested the women were receiving a pretty stipend. Maomao stood in front of the bookcase to conceal the questions she was beginning to have.

“If you’re interested in our books, feel free to borrow one,” Shenlü said. “Just be sure to bring it back, please.”

When she put it that way, Maomao started to feel it would be rude not to pick something out.

Then Shenlü added, “It seems as if some people must do more than bring back what they borrowed... For sometimes we find more books on the shelf than there were before. It’s the oddest thing.”

“Maybe they were in someone’s way. That’s being rich for you.” There were, indeed, many less than interesting books on the shelf. Quite a few had to do with being a dutiful wife—perhaps left here by women from affluent households when their personal chambers began to feel cramped.

They could stand to have something worth reading here, Maomao thought, when her eyes happened to light on a single, thick volume. She took it out and opened it to discover it had a unique quality among the books on the shelf: it was illustrated. A book this large, with this many pictures? It had to have been awfully expensive. Pictures of...bugs, no less, she thought with a wry grin. Shisui would be thrilled to get a look at this. In fact, she was probably the only person Maomao could think of who would look at such a thing.

Maomao noticed a piece of paper tucked in between the pages. She flipped to the page, looked—and paused. It depicted a butterfly from a foreign land. A gorgeous butterfly of the night, with a color that hovered somewhere between pale blue and pale green. A figure surrounded by them would look as divine as a moon goddess. Come to think of it, Shisui had said something about seeing the insects in a book. Was this what she’d meant?

“Is this encyclopedia also something somebody brought by?”

“Oh, that? Yes, it was left here... I suppose about a month ago.”

About a month ago. Long after the emissaries had left, their banquet over. If the book hadn’t been here before that, then it seemed most natural to assume Shisui had had it.

I’m not sure it’s the sort of thing your average serving woman would own, though, Maomao thought. In fact, she was sure of it. And a book this massive would never find its way into the hands of a peasant. So what was Shisui, then? The daughter of a particularly rich merchant family? Then Maomao remembered the notebook in which Shisui had drawn pictures of insects. She’d used the back of paper that had been used to wrap snacks, but even so, obtaining a large supply of it here in the rear palace couldn’t have been easy.

Not only did she have access to paper; she was literate too. Maomao couldn’t believe someone like that would rise no higher than laundry maid. (Well, maybe Shisui’s personality had held her back; that would make sense.) But then...

Maomao’s thoughts were interrupted when the door to the room clattered open. A eunuch stood there.

“Shenlü.” His voice was surprisingly high, for a man. “You’d best be careful.” And yet surprisingly low, for a woman.

Standing in the doorway was the beautiful newcomer with the almond-shaped eyes who made the man-starved ladies of the rear palace scream and squeal. He seemed a little short for a man, and yet a little tall for a woman. Likewise his cheeks, which were a bit soft to belong to a man, yet too sharp for a woman. His left arm hung limply at his side, though Maomao thought she noted his fingers trembling.

What’s his story? she wondered.

Say one were to use eyebrow black to draw shapely eyebrows on the eunuch’s face. Add some passé-looking lipstick, and as for his expression—well, leave the sour look exactly how it was. Dress him in an unremarkable serving woman’s outfit.

And the dead woman, Suirei, would be standing there.

Even Maomao, who had never been good at recalling faces, remembered Suirei. The woman had been too intense to forget.

“I figured it out, more or less, from what you said.”

Shenlü was looking at Maomao with eyes wide.

“I suppose I should thank you. It kept me from winding up as a corpse.” Her utterly emotionless tone made her seem even less feminine. Suirei closed the door, and then it was just the three of them in the room. There was a window, but it was latticework, and it wouldn’t be possible to escape through it.

Should I scream? Maomao wondered. Several needles, though, gleamed in Suirei’s hand, probably covered in some kind of poison. Much as I’m curious what she used...

Even Maomao knew this wasn’t the time. She couldn’t spare even a moment for a little prick to find out what symptoms the toxins might induce.

Maomao took a step back, then another, as Suirei came toward her. Then her heels bumped up against the wall.

Okay, what now? She had her cloth bundle with the bottles of alcohol and the mugwort in it. She could throw the alcohol in Suirei’s eyes and try to use the distraction to escape—but she had no idea if it would really work. Besides, she had so many questions—why Suirei was undercover here, what she was after.

Maomao might have appeared to be at a deadly disadvantage, but not so: “If you finish me off here and now, they’ll find me—and you—immediately.” She was Consort Gyokuyou’s food taster, after all. Unlike many palace women, she would be soon and sorely missed. And her old man knew her well enough that he would have a pretty good guess where she had gone and what she had done after leaving the medical office. He and anyone with him would arrive at the school quickly enough. The real question was whether anyone would realize she’d gone to the clinic after that.

“I’d like to do this quietly, if possible.” Maybe it was the male costume that gave Suirei’s voice its hard edge; no one else would have realized she was a woman. But then there was that left hand, trembling.

“Is that an aftereffect of the resurrection drug?” Maomao asked. The drug, after all, essentially killed the user. Even if her body then came back to life, it might not be revived in its original state. Suirei must have known that—but she’d used the drug anyway, intent on outwitting the Emperor himself.

“What about it?” Suirei said. She was still holding the needles. She hardly needed them; she and Shenlü together could easily have subdued the physically weak Maomao. “Anyway, we have more important things to talk about. Business.”

“How’s that, exactly?” Maomao’s heart was pounding in her ears and she was drenched in nervous sweat, but her voice still sounded dispassionate—it could be a curse or, at moments like this, a blessing. She watched the other women closely to see what they would do, trying to think one step ahead. Trying to envision a way out of there.

“You’re obviously hoping to plot some way to escape, but I’d suggest you not try anything.” With that, Suirei slowly opened the door again. The first thing Maomao saw was a pale hand. Suirei grabbed it and dragged its owner bodily into the room. It belonged to a tall palace woman—tall, but strikingly girlish.

“I’m sorry, Maomao...”

It was Shisui. Suirei wrapped her good arm around Shisui’s neck and held the needles up to her with her shivering left hand. Shisui was obviously in acute pain—and now she was a hostage. Maomao could only grit her teeth.

“Go ahead and try it, if you don’t care what happens to her,” Suirei said. She sounded like the villain in some popular stage drama. Maomao clenched her fists so hard she felt her fingernails bite into her palms. If only she could have solved this with those same fists—how simple that would be.

Instead she asked, “What do you want?”

“You to leave this place with me.”

“And you think we’re going to get out of here alive?”

She could try using Maomao as a shield, but it wasn’t likely to do much good. And it left Maomao wondering why Suirei had gone to all the trouble of disguising herself as a eunuch to sneak in here if her only intention was to march right out again.

Suirei, her face as impassive as a doll’s, nodded. “I do. And we will.” Then she added: “You will come with me.”

Maomao scowled at her. Did she think a hostage would do her any good? No one would escape punishment for leaving the rear palace. Certainly not Suirei, who’d already lied her way in with a disguise. Maomao was almost disappointed: she hadn’t taken Suirei for such a shallow thinker.

At that moment, though, Suirei’s lips twisted into a smirk. “Aren’t you curious about how to make the resurrection drug?”

Maomao’s heart pounded even harder.

Damn dirty trick. She was more than certain now—Suirei was not a woman to be taken lightly.