The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Western Capital—Day Four

The sunlight that got past the curtains pried open Maomao’s heavy eyelids. The bed (complete with fancy canopy), the bright, clear air, and the elaborate furnishings reminded her once again that she was not in her house at the capital.

Want...more...sleep...

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Nights were so cold that she slept under several heavy blankets and some sort of pelt, but once the sun rose, it got awfully hot. Already, one of the layers was on the ground, and Maomao’s feet were kicked out from under the covers.

She thought she’d heard shouting in the middle of the night; it had woken her up, and she’d slept only lightly after that. Who would do that sort of thing? What obnoxious neighbors.

Breakfast should be arriving soon. Maomao was happy they didn’t all have to get together to eat—probably a bit of courtesy toward hungover guests. Deciding to get changed before the serving girl arrived, Maomao slipped out of her sleepwear, putting on an outfit she picked at random from a clothing rack.

Today she was wearing an ordinary skirt and short-sleeved top over a cool-looking drape. The best thing about it was the way it breathed. Touches of embroidery on the collar and hem gave it a western look. The silver hair stick sat on the table.

Hm...

Maomao didn’t put it on her head, but used a simple tie to hold back her hair. She did, though, place the hair stick in the folds of her clothes to make sure she wouldn’t lose it. She always carried a small package containing medicine, bandages, and the like, so she simply added it to that.

The knock on the door came just as she finished changing. “Come in,” she said, and a maid entered with a cart bearing breakfast. The menu was a little sparser than usual, perhaps taking into account the extensive banquet the night before.

Maomao had a couple mouthfuls of the plain congee, and was just thinking some black vinegar might improve the flavor when a very loud knock came on the door. Maomao poured some black vinegar into her congee, took a bite, and then, not hiding her annoyance, said, “Come in.”

“I would swear it took you an extra moment to answer,” Basen said as he entered. There was a man with him, but it wasn’t Jinshi. Unsure how to feel about that, Maomao swallowed her food and pretended she didn’t know what Basen was talking about.

“It was your imagination, I’m sure,” she said.

“You’re having breakfast?” Basen asked. Not that it seemed to motivate him to leave. Something, Maomao figured, must have happened.

She set down her chopsticks and looked at him. “What’s going on?” His right hand was wrapped in a bandage, the one Maomao had put there the night before. He had been so full of adrenaline that even the swelling and the fact that the bone was broken hadn’t seemed to bother him. There was dense, and then there was dense.

Basen took a breath, then produced a cloth package from the folds of his robe. He set it on the table and opened it to reveal another package, this one of oil paper. No sooner had he unwrapped it than Maomao’s nose prickled and she started back.

The offensive odor came from a ceramic jar in the packet. “Is that perfume, by any chance?” she asked. She’d smelled it before—it was the stuff that had been spilled all over Consort Lishu at the banquet. “Where did you get this?”

“Funny you should ask,” Basen said. His expression was conflicted; he was obviously suppressing a flash of anger. “Lady Ah-Duo brought it to us.”

“And where did she get it?”

“She said one of her bodyguards found it. Late last night—a serving woman of Consort Lishu’s half-sister had it. She was out walking when for some reason a stray dog attacked her, and the guard happened to help her.”

Just happened to, eh?

What were the chances the guard’s being there had really been coincidence? Even so far from the capital, why would a serving woman be out and about by herself? The logical inference would be that in fact the guard had been sent to tail her because Ah-Duo was suspicious of her. But there was no reason to specifically say that out loud.

“The mongrel seemed inordinately excited, and despite the presence of other people, it completely ignored them. It made a beeline for this serving woman.”

“You’re saying this perfume was the reason for that?” Maomao pressed a cloth over her nose and picked up the jar. Ceramic ware wasn’t that unusual. No one made ceramic perfume jars purely for stylistic purposes, so it would be hard to trace the origin of the piece. “That would imply that the perfume Consort Lishu was doused with last night belonged to her half-sister, yes? And this smell evidently has the side effect of agitating wild animals.”

“I think that’s almost certainly correct,” Basen said.

Had the half-sister purchased the perfume purely as a prank? Maomao wouldn’t have put it past her. But did she hate Lishu enough to want to get rid of her? And even if she had the motive, Maomao doubted she and the serving woman between them had the skills to rig the bars of the lion’s cage.

She considered the possibility that Lishu’s father Uryuu had helped them, but that theory left questions too. For one thing, if they had been trying to get rid of Lishu, it was an awfully roundabout way of doing it. There would have been so many simpler solutions. Above all, the risk was simply too great. Nonetheless, there was one thing Maomao wanted to be sure about.

“So you’re taking the consort’s half-sister to be the culprit?”

Basen paused. “We can’t say for certain. But if nothing changes, I think that’s where we would find ourselves.” An artfully vague way of putting it. That was unusual for Basen. He was normally much more direct. Maomao might have expected him to exclaim, “Yes! She must be punished!”

Instead he went on, “The half-sister claims it was just supposed to be a prank. She says someone she met in town a few days ago gave her the perfume. They told her it would attract nasty insects, and wouldn’t that be funny? The half-sister swears she didn’t expect a lion to be involved...”

So she admitted her malice toward Lishu. She just hadn’t planned on the lion. If that was all true, how did it change things?

“If she was also involved in booby-trapping the lion’s cage, that would go beyond a prank,” Maomao said. There had been many dignitaries at the banquet besides Lishu, and she would have been putting them in danger as well. If she really had only been going after the consort, she might still get away with it. Lishu was a relative, for one thing, and importantly, she would have some discretion in how hard to push for punishment. The half-sister might not get off scot-free, but maybe with just a slap on the wrist.

“You’re right. And not only the half-sister, but Sir Uryuu as well as Consort Lishu herself might feel the heat from it,” Basen said.

“You think a little heat is all they’re going to feel?” Maomao asked. She expected them to be scorched. Many powerful people from another country had been at that banquet—this could be an international incident. She thought it was naive to imagine that only the culprit would be punished.

Basen gave her a sour look. “Why do these things always happen to Consort Lishu?” he said. It was hard to tell whether he was asking himself or Maomao, and she wasn’t sure what to say, so she stayed silent. But she thought, Maybe she was just born into it.

Maomao hated to wave everything away with words like “destiny,” but it did seem to her that some people had better luck than others. This especially struck her when she considered her adoptive father Luomen. He was smarter and more capable than anybody, but he seemed to utterly lack good fortune. He was now back working at the palace, but it seemed this had only prompted the fox strategist to drop in on him with some regularity, interrupting his work. The situation must have been dire if it was bad enough for him to remark upon in his letters. He’d written that recently, one of his medicine cabinets had found itself turned inside out. Maomao couldn’t imagine why.

“Isn’t it all just too pitiful to bear?” Basen said.

He’s really worried about her, Maomao thought, but she decided not to say anything out loud. Commenting on that which would better go unnoticed was a sure route to more headaches.

Still, it was true that the consort, in her consort-ish way, had her problems. Fundamentally, she always simply allowed herself to be swept along. Maomao knew that was somewhat inevitable—it was how Lishu had been raised and it was how she had always lived. Yet Maomao couldn’t help thinking of the young woman who had come to the pleasure district to sell herself as a courtesan. She’d done it in order to cut ties with her father, to help her sister eat, and to pull herself out of the muck. Maomao couldn’t bring herself to hate a personality like that.

If the consort had half that much drive... Well, maybe she would have suffered a lot less bullying from her half-sister, and maybe she wouldn’t be mocked so much at the rear palace.

Anyway, that was enough preliminaries. It was time for Maomao to find out exactly why Basen had come to her. “Is there something you’d like me to do, sir?” she asked.

“Yes... There is,” Basen said, and took out a piece of paper. It looked like a wanted poster, but something puzzled Maomao.

“What’s this mean?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. This is the woman she said gave her the perfume.”

The sketch on the paper did indeed appear to depict a woman, but her face was veiled so that only her eyes were visible. To compensate, the sketch included her entire body, but although the details of her clothes were carefully drawn, she could obviously just change outfits.

“Is she a merchant?”

“No, apparently she just started talking to the half-sister while she was doing some shopping in town.”

In town, huh? Maomao listened to Basen’s story doubtfully.

“The woman claimed to deal in perfumes, and she recommended several different scents to the half-sister. This one was among them.” Supposedly, the “merchant” had told her that the perfume could attract men, but to be careful how she used it. The smell would be too strong unless it were properly diluted, the half-sister was told—in fact, some people had even been known to use it in pranks. This, it seemed, was where the half-sister had gotten the idea for her little joke.

“That story’s a little vague,” Maomao said.

“Very true. It’s not much to go on. And tracking down this perfume seller would be difficult at best.”

Maomao squinted, studying the picture. The outfit, characteristic of the western capital, was designed to protect against sand and dust, so it left very little exposed—which is to say, it concealed any distinguishing bodily features. But Maomao’s sharp eyes noticed one thing in particular. “For as simple as this drawing is, the accessories on the shoes have an awful lot of detail.”

Basen took another look at the image. “Now that you mention it, that’s true. In fact, the size of the feet seems off compared to the rest of the body.” The person’s body had been drawn to a more or less normal scale, but her feet appeared twisted, almost stylized.

“Do you think there’s any chance she had bound feet?” Maomao asked.

“Bound feet?”

Foot-binding was a way of forcibly making the feet smaller than they would naturally be. A few of the women in the rear palace had had it done to them—it was a fairly common custom in the north, but what about here in the west? If the half-sister hadn’t given it much thought, it suggested foot-binding wasn’t unusual.

“Could you double-check this drawing for me?”

“I will,” Basen said, collecting the picture. He was about to leave when he turned back as if he had just remembered something. “By the way...”

“Yes, sir?”

“Master Jinshi has looked...odd since last night. Do you happen to know anything about it? I think he would normally have come on an errand like this himself, but instead he chose to send me.”

Maomao didn’t say anything.

“Have you heard anything about him...I don’t know, being under pressure from anybody? Anything?”

Maomao averted her gaze. Basen was right—she knew he would never normally come to her unless Jinshi had specifically asked him to.

She decided to play dumb. “Who knows?” she said. “Perhaps he’s tired. It has been a very long trip.”

Basen’s report came back in less than thirty minutes. The half-sister had evidently been insisting to her lady-in-waiting that she had “nothing to do with this” and “never meant for this to happen,” but Maomao, frankly, didn’t care. Basen came back in a huff, quite angry about all of it.

“It’s just as you said,” he told her. The woman had indeed had bound feet, and had been wearing special shoes because of it—a distinctive detail that stuck in the mind, and which the half-sister had subconsciously emphasized as she described the woman for the artist, even if she never specifically said that the woman had bound feet. “That narrows it down.”

“To just a few people, I would say, sir,” Maomao replied.

“You think?”

In Li, the custom of foot-binding was found primarily in the north; here in the west, in fact, it hardly existed. Thus, if someone with bound feet were encountered in the western capital, it seemed safe to assume they had come from points north. Or at the very least, that their family had settled here sometime in the last couple of generations.

“The point is, their household must already have had the custom.”

Basen looked dubious. “You don’t think she might have been a traveler?”

Maomao shook her head at that idea. “If she was, she would have to be the daughter of a household that could afford to send her in style, like Consort Lishu.”

It was a long way to the western capital, and binding twisted the feet into shapes that were, let it be said, not conducive to walking on sandy ground. The process of foot-binding involved forcibly preventing the growth of the feet from a young age, and leaving them bound throughout life so they wouldn’t get any bigger. The feet had to be disinfected every few days, such that Maomao sold alcohol to the courtesans with bound feet.

All of which meant that if someone born in the western capital had bound feet, she must have belonged to a family large or wealthy enough to continue the tradition.

“And you’re sure about that?”

“I take no responsibility for anything. I’ve only offered what I think is the most likely possibility in light of the information I’ve been given.”

She couldn’t have them expecting perfection of her. If they were only going to permit correct answers, then Maomao would have no choice but to shut her mouth and swear she didn’t know anything.

“All right,” Basen said after a moment, resigned to her conditions. He finally left the room.

Maomao yawned and sat on her bed, thinking about getting settled again.

Perfection... Yeah, not likely. Maomao herself still had several questions. Would Lishu’s high-handed half-sister deign to speak to someone she had only just met—let alone buy something from them? And how had this mysterious seller known about the half-sister? It was a little too neat for mere coincidence.

Hmm...

Whatever. Maomao decided to go ahead and get some sleep. She was so tired she could barely make her brain work. She lay down, but the hair stick at her chest nudged against her. She thought about pulling it out, but she didn’t want it somewhere she could see it.

Without a word, Maomao flipped over and lay on her other side, and promptly closed her eyes.