The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: The Floating Bride (Part Two)

“If it’s not one problem it’s another, isn’t it?” Ah-Duo said darkly. Originally, she and Maomao had planned to go shopping today, but after the events of the previous night, this would be another day with no sightseeing. Maomao had been looking forward to discovering what unusual things were on offer in the western capital, but it was not to be; instead she was dressed in somber clothing. Of all the things she’d thought might happen on this trip, she had never imagined she would be attending a funeral.

“I have to admit, I’m not sorry that it means no banquet tonight, but I wish it were under other circumstances,” Ah-Duo said, sipping her tea. So it wasn’t just Maomao who’d been feeling the strain of the nightly parties. Only she, Ah-Duo, and Suirei were in the room at the moment, which was why Ah-Duo could make a somewhat indiscreet comment like that. Suirei was permitted to go without her minder while in Ah-Duo’s company, but Maomao doubted the reserved young woman found it exactly relaxing. Ah-Duo for one loved amusements, entertainments, and interesting things, so she was probably forever teasing the eternally serious Suirei.

“Cornered until she felt the only way out was to kill herself... It’s a tragedy,” Ah-Duo said.

Suicide: that had been the official conclusion. A note had been found in the young woman’s personal chamber, stating that the reason for her death was distress at the idea of moving to a faraway foreign land. The boisterous mood at the banquet had chilled immediately, and the groom was beside himself when he saw the note. He began to tear into the bride’s father; most of what he said was in a foreign language and incomprehensible to Maomao, although it was clear enough that it wouldn’t have borne repeating if she could have understood it. The residents of the western capital seemed to know what the man was saying, but they only stared sadly at the ground.

Jinshi had shown her the note, and Maomao was convinced that it had indeed been written by the bride.

She didn’t say anything about being cornered, though...

Ah-Duo came across as very much like Empress Gyokuyou; Maomao saw that this former consort was not to be underestimated—it was one of her subordinates who had found the perfume as well. But Maomao didn’t know exactly how much Ah-Duo knew, so she had to be careful about what she said.

Here was how it looked: distraught by her marriage, the bride had killed herself, making certain everyone saw her hanging from the pagoda before the rope snapped and she fell to the ground. Not only that, but she happened to upset a lantern when she landed, causing her clothes to catch fire.

But was that the truth of the matter? Jinshi seemed to think it was something he had done that had caused the young woman’s suicide, but there was no way for Maomao to know. There was a distinct possibility this was the woman who had given Consort Lishu’s half-sister the perfume—but that was something else about which there was no certainty. Thus Maomao would attend the funeral with things still shrouded in ambiguity. True, she might have been able to refuse if she’d insisted, but there was something that nagged at her.

Jinshi was going too. He wouldn’t normally have had any reason to attend the funeral of the daughter of a local official, but the bride’s father had pleaded with him to come. It was Jinshi and Gyokuen whose presence had quelled the raging bridegroom. They learned later that what the groom had shouted was: “This is twice now! Can you get me a third bride?!”

Twice, huh? Maomao thought. It was fairly simple to deduce that behind this seemingly ordinary marriage, something was afoot.

“It’s almost time, ma’am,” Maomao said, rising from her chair.

“Ah, of course.” Ah-Duo set down her tea and glanced at Maomao. “Incidentally, if you’ll forgive me...”

“Yes, ma’am?” Maomao looked back at her with curiosity. It was an unusually reserved way for Ah-Duo to speak.

“If the Night Prince is going, I suppose that attendant of his will be with him, yes?”

“I should think so.”

They were referring to Jinshi’s aide and bodyguard, Basen. He’d broken the fingers of his right hand when he struck the lion, but at the time he had been so totally worked up that even the fact that his fingers were pointing in unnatural directions couldn’t overcome his frenzy.

“Are we sure about him? I’ve heard he’s Gaoshun’s son. What’s your read on him?”

After a second Maomao said, “I believe that’s for Master Jinshi to decide, and not my place to comment on.”

Basen’s physical prowess certainly left nothing to be desired, but personally he still had some growing to do. Though admittedly, Maomao’s opinion of him in that respect might have been colored by having seen Gaoshun at work. Anyway, she tried to be optimistic: it wasn’t like Basen was Jinshi’s only bodyguard or personal aide. So it would be fine, right?

“You really don’t feel you’re in a position to say anything?” Ah-Duo looked grim. Suirei poured fresh hot water into Ah-Duo’s empty cup.

“No, ma’am. It’s not something I have any influence over.”

“Understood.”

Maomao left the room, casting a mystified glance at Ah-Duo as she went.

This was the sort of thing a family might usually have wished to handle quietly, but with the young lady’s death having been such a public affair, the funeral could hardly be a private one.

As the family’s estate came into view, they could see a river of white-clad women streaming into it. Wailing women, to judge by their veils. Quite a few of them, Maomao observed. There were wreaths of flowers all over, as well as servants coming out with heads bowed to meet the guests.

Maomao wasn’t certain that the custom of wailing women existed here in the western reaches, but the family had bound the young woman’s feet, so they might well observe funerary customs in the manner of the capital as well.

At the reception desk, the number of wailing women was confirmed, and they were given wooden tags that served as identification.

“Come on, this way. Let’s go,” a servant said, and the women followed him.

This time Lahan had joined Maomao and the others. Their baggage included money and household goods made of paper.

“Don’t they use the real thing?” Maomao asked.

“Maybe if you’re new money,” Lahan sniffed. Well then. He hadn’t prepared paper items simply because he was a skinflint. It was customary for attendees at a funeral to give money and daily sundries made of paper, which would be burned to ensure the deceased could lead a comfortable existence even in the next life. Even one’s stay in hell, it was often said, could be shortened by an infusion of cash.

Lahan had grumbled about being left out of the banquet and only dragged to the funeral, but it was what it was. With him here, Maomao didn’t have to stay in Jinshi’s orbit. Rikuson wasn’t present; he had stayed behind. He probably had his own job to do.

“Anyway, it’s very good paper. No low-quality scrap.”

True, the material for the paper money was excellent. It could have stood proudly alongside anything from the quack doctor’s village, although Maomao didn’t know if it came from them or not. When she’d seen the young woman’s suicide note, though, she’d had the thought that the western capital seemed to have a lot of awfully good paper.

“That’s because this place is a crossroads of trade,” Lahan told her. “Nobody sends their worst goods out into the world.”

Li had in fact once exported paper, at a time when its products were said to fetch a good price even in the west. When low-quality products began to proliferate, the export business all but died off, but apparently there was still good stuff to be had.

The day before, they had been at the mansion amidst the evening dim, and now, in the daylight, Maomao could see a few places where the estate was falling into disrepair. This had once been a lavish mansion, but its new owners lacked the ability to maintain it.

A marriage with someone from Shaoh, she reflected. That seemed odd too. Important for diplomacy, perhaps, but the balance of power struck her as skewed. For example, the banquet had been held here, but everything else about the marriage was to be handled in the groom’s land. And the way the man had behaved after the death of his bride could only be called contemptuous.

Lahan, it seemed, was already privy to the story, which he shared with Maomao on the way.

“This family was brought here to replace the Yi clan, but also, so I gather, to get them out of the way.”

The mother of the former emperor—that is to say, the empress regnant—had been a pragmatist. She regarded officials who couldn’t do their job as a nuisance, even if they boasted good bloodlines from the central region of the nation. She’d lured several families to the western reaches with promises of a family name if they went to oversee the area. The bride’s family had been one of them.

But incompetent people don’t suddenly become competent thanks to a simple change of scenery. Some of the families were decimated by disease in the unfamiliar climate; others were reduced to ruin and disappeared.

Why would the empress regnant have done something that seemed so rash when the western lands were widely acknowledged to be crucial to national defense? Perhaps because at that time, she had been at the height of her powers, and if a few families fell, well, others were rising to take their place. Empress Gyokuyou’s family, for example.

The young woman at yesterday’s marriage feast was supposed to strengthen her family by going to another country as a bride. This family preferred to do business where they had blood relations; creating those relations by marrying their daughters off was how the household had chosen to survive down the years.

“The groom was actually supposed to be married to the cousin of the girl who died. The daughter of the younger brother of the head of the household, I believe,” Lahan said. Was the younger brother in question, then, the overwatered man from the carp pond? Maybe he’d been celebrating as if it were his own daughter’s wedding. “She killed herself ten days before the ceremony.”

“He didn’t look like a man who had suffered that sort of tragedy...”

“There are many things in this world that demand us to put on our best face, whether we wish to or not,” Lahan said.

So that was what had been behind the groom’s remark about “twice now.” And to think, he had lost both would-be wives in the exact same way. They must have thought that foreign land was truly terrible.

Lahan’s and Maomao’s footsteps sounded as they walked along the flagstones, their feet dampened by the spray from the carp splishing in the canal. The fish (who had a terrible diet, for fish) came and gathered when they heard visitors approach; the refreshing sound of splashing water increased.

There was already a crowd in front of the mansion, the troupe of wailing women keening loudly. Maomao recognized many of the attendees from the day before.

Look at them all, she thought. Partly she meant the attendees, but what really stood out were the women in white. There must have been more than fifty of them setting up a racket of grief and mourning. Maybe some of the guests had brought wailers along as a courtesy, but it still seemed like a lot. It was these women’s job to lament for the dead, but Maomao had the sense they were holding back a little this time, perhaps because if all of them had wailed at the tops of their lungs, you wouldn’t have been able to hear yourself think. It was an unwelcome reminder that they were, in fact, mourning as a job.

With so many women present, some of them were bound to be better at the job than others. A few of them sounded a little embarrassed—they must still be new at this. Another stumbled on the long hem of her outfit.

It had to be a challenge, keeping up with the crying all the way through the long, long funeral ceremony, and from time to time the front and back rows of women would switch places. They seemed to be switching off crying duties, conserving their stamina. It was hard to say whether such efficiency-minded wailers would really bring peace to the dead, but personally Maomao didn’t believe there was anything after the point of death, anyway. And these women did have to eat.

Maomao looked up. Out beyond the garden, she could see the four-storied pagoda. She wondered if it might be possible to get a different perspective on it in the day than at night. She started walking forward and almost fell into a canal she’d failed to notice. She grabbed onto Lahan, who was standing next to her.

“What are you doing?” he snapped.

“Sorry.” Even if she had fallen in, the canal wasn’t that deep, but the carp had already arrived, drawn by the noise. The night before, the floating lanterns had saved anyone from falling in, but it was a moderately dangerous terrain feature, she reflected.

It was quite a distance to the pagoda, and yesterday they’d not only run over there but run all the way up the steps as well. It had been rough.

Steps? The distance to the pagoda? Maomao remembered that something had felt off the night before. What was it? She almost had it...

“Hey, you! She’s not food!” Lahan joked. The carp, paying him no mind, continued to bloop at her, hoping for crumbs. Just then there was a gust of wind, and some of the money for the dead fell into the canal. The carp were on it in an instant, and it was swiftly gone without a trace.

Maomao didn’t say anything, just stared at the fish.

“What are you doing? They’re not food either. You can’t fish here.”

He sounded like he was joking again, but she stuck out her hand toward him. “Paper.”

“Paper?”

“I know you keep some scratch paper with you. Give me a sheet.”

“What brings this on?” Lahan grumbled, but nonetheless he produced the paper from the folds of his robe. Maomao tore it up and dropped it into the canal, where the carpet greedily consumed it again.

Maomao’s mouth hung open for a second, and then she said, “That’s it!” She set out at a brisk trot toward the pagoda.

“H-Hey!” Lahan exclaimed.

The place where the bride had been hanging from the pagoda could be seen from the pavilion where the wedding feast had been held, but as you got closer, it dropped out of view.

Maomao picked up her pace, running until she could see the pond directly underneath the tower.

“Wh-What are you after? What’s going on?” Lahan panted as he caught up to her. Maomao lifted up the hem of her dress and waded into the pond. There was a short distance between the pagoda and the water; that was where the bride’s body had been found.

“When a person falls out of a window, Lahan, where do they drop?” she asked.

“Down, usually,” he said.

Yes, and that was where they’d found the charred corpse. However...

“What if it was something lighter than a person? Say the wind speed and direction were roughly like they are now.”

“It would depend on the weight.”

“Less than two kin, but about the size of a human.”

“In that case...” Lahan adjusted his glasses, eyeballing the distance. He licked his finger and held it up to the wind. “Slightly farther out from the building than where you are, I would guess. And if we take the position of the roof into account...”

Right, the roof. If you bring that into it, there’s something that doesn’t make sense. Now that she could see it in the light, she was sure of it.

Lahan looked at the scorched patch of ground where the body had been discovered, then at the roof. Then he cocked his head. Of course—if Maomao could figure it out, this human abacus couldn’t fail to notice it. If he’d been there the night before, he would have detected the inconsistency long before she had.

Maomao moved to the place Lahan had indicated, then rolled up her sleeves and plunged her hands into the water, digging around on the pond bottom. Lahan, meanwhile, had sat down, evidently intent on observing the situation. He had a little twig in hand to keep himself busy, with which he was writing on the ground. Calculating something, perhaps.

“What are you doing, ma’am?!” cried a servant who had noticed the guest playing around in the pond. Reprehensible behavior at a home that was observing a funeral, surely. “Please, get out of there right now!”

“Don’t mind me,” Maomao said, ignoring the man and reaching into the pond again. The bottom was muddy; excellent fertilizer. Lots of fish poop that had infused it with nutrients.

“You heard the lady,” Lahan said diffidently, but the servant continued to try to stop Maomao. Maomao continued to ignore him, carrying on with her digging. If and when she found what she expected to find, all would be resolved.

Lahan wasn’t getting in her way, but he wasn’t exactly helping either, just glancing around now and then. Maomao could hear the servant splashing into the pond behind her. She felt him pull on her hand. She tried to run, but her feet caught in the mud and she went headfirst into the water. She ended up covered in filth, with the servant trying to get a hold of her.

At just that moment, however, a gorgeous, carrying voice said, “Have you found anything?”

You’d think he was waiting for the perfect moment to make his entrance, Maomao thought. Jinshi had appeared. Basen stood behind him, looking aghast.

Maomao wiped the mud off her face and held up a piece of rope, the end of which had snapped. Which would mean the bride...

In her head, Maomao went over what she knew. There was another mysterious thing about this mansion—and if she could reveal the truth of it, the mystery would be solved.

“The bride is still alive,” she announced, and grinned.

Maomao asked for a room in which to clean herself off and change clothes. She would have loved a proper bath, but they didn’t have the time. She hated the feeling of mud clinging to her scalp, but she was just going to have to grin and bear it.

Once she was changed, she was shown into the mansion’s main room. The master of the estate and his family shot her dirty looks as she came in, clearly unhappy about a guest behaving so outrageously at a funeral. Jinshi and Basen were there, along with Lahan and the bodyguards, but she didn’t see the bridegroom from yesterday. In fact, she didn’t think she had seen him participating in the funeral at all.

Lying on the table was the piece of rope Maomao had discovered. She looked out the window and saw the women in white, still busy crying. The funeral rites would continue until tomorrow, so perhaps the ladies would stay here for the night. The other guests had gone home; only those women, the people who lived in this house, and Maomao’s party remained.

“May I ask what in the world you think you’re doing?” said the despondent master of the house. He seemed less angry than simply overwhelmed with grief.

“This young woman will explain everything,” Jinshi said, ushering Maomao to the center of the room. The rope on the table was filthy, yet nonetheless obviously still new.

“I know she’s supposed to be a lady of the La family, but we’re grieving the death of our child,” the master said. “Could you not leave us in peace? Surely even the Night Prince...” He was being circumspect, but he was unmistakably criticizing Jinshi. The way he trembled as he did so indicated how much courage it must have taken.

“Yes, and I must apologize for intruding on your sorrow. However, if we could ask for but a moment of your time,” Jinshi said; he was gentle, but firm.

“The guests have gone home and we must clean up. Might I at least dismiss the wailing women?”

Jinshi glanced at Maomao, but she shook her head. Jinshi took a step back as if to say he was trusting her to handle things from here on.

Maomao said, “I would feel the same way you do—if the bride had really died.” Then she picked up the rope and went outside. “Come with me.”

“What’s this all about?” the host fumed, but Maomao ignored him and went and stood in front of the women in white. The others watched her, perplexed, as she crouched down.

With a “Hiyah!” she grabbed two of the wailing women’s robes, flipping them up.

The spectators’ jaws practically fell on the ground.

The sun was strong in these parts, and people kept their legs hidden, safe from its light, so the limbs Maomao revealed were suitably pale. Growing ever hungrier for daikon, she went along flipping up the ladies’ skirts, the women shouting and shrieking.

This brings back memories, Maomao thought. There had once been a merchant with questionable tastes who had assembled ten or so courtesans and spent an entire night flipping their skirts up. The madam had clucked and complained that it was particularly lowbrow behavior—but the man paid three times the going rate, so she wasn’t about to stop him.

In short, Maomao was essentially behaving just like a sex-crazed old man.

The women whose skirts had been flipped quickly crouched down, trying to hide themselves, while those Maomao hadn’t gotten to yet panicked and tried to run.

Well, damn. This is more fun than I expected!

She hadn’t understood what was so great about it until she’d done it for herself, chasing the crying women around pulling at the hems of their dresses. She finally started to understand what that lustful old man had been feeling. Well, that wasn’t good.

One of the wailing women stood out as not very athletic. She tried to escape but couldn’t run, instead tripping and stumbling. Maomao showed no mercy, standing in front of her and flexing her fingers. The woman’s shouts echoed around the yard, but Maomao grabbed her skirt.

“You! Learn some blasted manners!” Jinshi exclaimed; he accompanied his injunction with a smack to the back of her head. She turned and saw that he looked thoroughly exasperated.

“I’m very sorry,” Maomao said, releasing the handful of skirt she’d gotten. “But I’ve found what I was looking for.”

Peeking out from under the hem of the girl’s skirt was a pair of shoes. She’d almost fallen out of them trying to run away, because the size was all wrong. Her feet were wrapped in bandages, and in fact they hardly looked like feet at all.

This wailing woman had bound feet.

Next Maomao took the mourner’s veil and slowly pulled it off, revealing a pretty young woman with a tearstained face.

“I’m sorry!” the young woman said, crying. Whoever she was apologizing to, it certainly wasn’t Maomao.

“H—” Maomao began, but before she could come out with Here’s your missing bride, another woman with bound feet threw herself between them. One of the bride’s ladies-in-waiting, perhaps?

“What is the meaning of this?! Can’t you manage even the most basic decency?!” the second woman shouted at Maomao. Her eyes were open wide in an effort to forestall the tears that threatened to come pouring out of them. She was biting her lip and her shoulders were trembling. Then she straightened the other woman’s skirt and put the veil back on her head. “Get going, quickly. We have work again tomorrow.”

With the bound feet revealed, though, the woman wasn’t going to get away—Maomao, and now Jinshi, wouldn’t let her. They couldn’t have her fleeing on them. It was that thought that inspired the cruel words Maomao spoke next.

“The body you burned. Was it your older sister’s? After she killed herself?”

The wailing woman shuddered.

“The body already had marks on its neck. That’s why you made such a show of ‘hanging’ yourself. And then you burned the body so no one could be sure what had happened to it.”

The young woman could be heard to sniffle—not in a poor imitation of grief; it was an excellent job of crying, one that would certainly have passed muster during her work.

The bride’s father, who’d watched silently until that moment, finally burst out: “Once again, I have no idea what in the world you’re talking about! I must ask you not to desecrate my child’s funeral any further. There’s no way this wailing woman could be my daughter!” He joined the lady-in-waiting in standing in front of Maomao. “It’s true, I spoke to you about my little girl, but quite frankly, I wasn’t asking you to go poking your nose in every last place!” The man’s anger was plain to see.

Then the bride’s uncle intervened with much gesticulating, “If the girl is alive, then how do you explain what happened last night? We all saw the bride hang herself. And we found the body on the ground. Those are facts!”

Maomao, though, shook her head. “True enough, the bride hanged herself from the highest level of the pagoda and then fell down. But there’s something interesting about that tower. It’s four stories, yes? And at first, all of them appear to be the same size—but the lowest level flares out farther than the others. What would happen if something were to fall there?”

Lahan was better at explaining these kinds of things than Maomao was, so she handed him a branch off the ground. He began to sketch a diagram of the tower in the dust. It was the same picture he’d been drawing while Maomao was busy playing in the mud.

“The roof is on an angle, so something that fell on it would roll outward. The force would continue to carry it as it came off the roof,” Lahan said, adding an arrow to his diagram by way of explanation. “In other words, if this object came down with undiminished momentum, it would land some distance from the pagoda.”

However, the burned body had been directly under the eaves, in a place that was concealed if you were standing at the entrance to the tower. For if it had fallen into the pond, it would no longer have been possible to burn it to throw people off the trail.

“Based on basic principles of movement and the speed of the body, the corpse should not have fallen where we found it,” Lahan said. At least he could be counted on at times like this. And the diagram made his explanation easier to understand.

“The burned body was there all along,” Maomao concluded. “We were distracted by the ‘floating’ bride and missed it.”

The path to the pagoda had been lit with small lanterns. Guests unfamiliar with the estate, trying to find their way on a dark night, would naturally follow it. And the smoke from the fireworks combined with the smell of the lantern oil was perfect for concealing the already burned body.

Finally Maomao added: “I suspect this was the true identity of the dangling bride.” She took out some scrap paper and walked toward the pond, deliberately stomping her feet as she went. She tore up the paper and tossed it into the water, which promptly roiled with carp coming to eat it. “There’s plenty of excellent paper around here. Stuff that could be made into something that might well pass for a bride’s gown when seen from a distance.”

What would the signal have been? The fireworks, they would be perfect. Perhaps a special color of smoke or a particular sound. When somebody spotted the hanging bride, the signal would be given. Working backward from the distance to the tower and how long it would take to reach the top floor, the rope would be cut to make it look as if it had snapped. Everyone would be so busy rushing to the pagoda that they wouldn’t notice the fall.

“You went in and grabbed one of the carp yesterday,” Maomao said to the uncle. “Was that in order to scare the fish away?” Perhaps he had been attempting to drive the paper-eating fish to the desired location. They’d probably been frightened by the fireworks, but why take any chances?

The paper doll would fall into the pond and be eaten by the carp, leaving only the rope Maomao had found in the water. As for the person who had cut the rope, she merely needed to wait for everyone else to arrive at the pagoda. No need to try to rush out and risk bumping into anyone who had come to investigate. Instead, she could simply hide somewhere inside, and once there was a suitable crowd, she could join the others, slipping in amongst them and looking as if she was as confused as everyone else. They now no longer needed to ask who had played that role.

“If there are any objections to my interpretation of events, perhaps we should check the rope that I found against the piece left over from the tower. Anyone?”

At that word, “anyone,” the bride’s father fell to his knees, while the others looked at each other with resignation. The lady-in-waiting who had put herself between Maomao and the wild wailing woman wore a pained expression. Yes, of course: the bride couldn’t have pulled this off by herself. She must have had accomplices—perhaps her entire household.

The faces of the family members before them were written not with treachery, but with grief.

“You hoped to hide the bride among the ranks of the wailing women, and help her escape that way,” Maomao said. It seemed she’d been under an enduring misimpression. Namely, she’d been wrong that the incident with the lion had been targeting Consort Lishu.

Sometimes, what another person was thinking didn’t always line up with what you imagined.

“All this to help her get away from that foreign groom.”

She’d heard it was the would-be groom who had brought the lion—and if the cage were to break and the lion were to get loose, the blame would fall on him. The family simply had to tamper with the bars of the cage and get the lion-agitating perfume among the attendees of the banquet. It must have been simple chance that one of the people they had chosen happened to be Lishu’s half-sister.

Normally, blame for the incident with the lion would have been quickly assigned, and it would have fallen most heavily on the groom. But Jinshi and Gyokuen were more thoroughgoing than the family had expected; rather than immediately escalate things, they had focused on gathering evidence.

The groom, understandably concerned, had decided to leave the country posthaste, planning to depart after the banquet that had been planned for the next day. That was why he wasn’t here now: he was already on his way home. If things had been allowed to go on unhampered, the young woman would now be on her way to live as the man’s wife in a foreign country. The family, frantic, decided to stage the young woman’s death. They were so set on protecting the young lady that they were even willing to use the corpse of her older sister, who had already died.

“Why did you feel it was necessary to go so far?” Jinshi asked.

“Hah! You have no idea how abominably my daughter was treated,” replied the bride’s uncle—the father of the dead woman. “Those people see our family’s women as nothing but slaves. Do you know what they do on their first night together? They brand the bride. Like an animal!”

Marriages weren’t always equal; in fact, more often than not the balance of power leaned in one direction or the other. If you didn’t have the power, then the only thing you could do was bow and scrape. This family had already offered up one daughter as such a sacrifice.

“It was the same with these feet of mine,” the bride dressed as a wailing woman said, brushing her hand along her own small feet. “This is what that man wanted. He said he wanted me to look like a girl from the east. I doubt he saw me as anything more than a commodity.” The lady-in-waiting watched her with agony on her face. Perhaps the bride and even her lady-in-waiting had had their feet bound as potential backups in case the older sister didn’t pan out.

The expression disappeared from Jinshi’s face, but he seemed privately disturbed.

“I am incompetent. This was the only path open to me. Do you think perhaps, if I’d had more talent or skill, I might have been able to see my daughter become one of the roses in the garden?” the girl’s father asked. Perhaps he was thinking of another family, also from the western capital, who had seen their own daughter rise to become Empress.

“If the empress regnant had been pleased with us,” the father continued, “do you think we might have escaped being sent to these backwaters?”

Jinshi turned away from the tragic family. They had committed a serious crime. Their attempt to protect their own daughter could have sacrificed many more lives.

“Do you think we might have been able to save our household?”

It wouldn’t be possible to let them off with a slap on the wrist.

The one thing Maomao didn’t know was whether Jinshi had grown up enough to accept that.

That being said, she couldn’t help thinking she saw things differently than they did. “Is a household something that must be saved?” she said quietly, approaching the two bound-footed women as they clung to each other. Despite all the claims of incompetence, something bothered her. “May I ask you something?” she said to the women.

They didn’t say anything, and she took their silence as assent.

“I believe that among those to whom you gave the perfume, there was one woman with an arrogant attitude and a mouthful of bad teeth. How did you get to know her?”

The lady-in-waiting looked at the ground. She must have been the one who had made contact with Lishu’s half-sister. It was strange: she hadn’t seemed like the type to be that friendly with someone she’d just met.

“I don’t remember exactly, but she was eighteen or nineteen years old with a somewhat plump behind.”

“Her butt measures three shaku and one sun around,” Lahan interjected. (Why?!) Maomao assumed the number was an educated guess, that he was just eyeballing it—but she silently crushed his toes nonetheless.

“I urge you to tell us,” Maomao said. “It would be better for everyone.”

After a moment, the lady-in-waiting said, “The fortune-teller told me.”

“Fortune-teller?”

The other woman nodded, still looking at the ground. “She’s been all the talk in the western capital. Everyone’s been going to see her.”

At first, the lady-in-waiting said, she’d thought it was all just talk. But the fortune-teller’s words had shown an uncanny insight into the young woman and her friends, and she’d been drawn deeper and deeper in.

“The dearly departed young mistress used to go to her for advice.”

“I’m impressed she was able,” Maomao said. She wasn’t trying to attack the young woman—it was just a simple doubt that emerged in her mind. The subject of the “advice” wasn’t something you could talk about with just anyone.

The lady-in-waiting pointed toward town. “They would talk in the chapel.”

It was a place much like the building on Gyokuen’s premises dedicated to a foreign religion. There were places within where one could have a private conversation, and the fortune-teller used them to ply her trade. These nooks and crannies were originally, it seemed, for monks of the foreign faith to listen to people, but with the appropriate donation they might be available for private personal conversations as well.

The lady-in-waiting had tried not to be overly specific about her name and identity, but an industrious snoop could find out whom they were talking to. This fortune-teller appeared to have taken advantage of that.

“I was the one who accepted the perfume! And I accepted the advice to tamper with the cage! It was all me!” The lady-in-waiting let her head droop. She’d felt she couldn’t let there be any more dead young women simply because they wouldn’t listen to the fortune-teller. She looked up at Maomao pleadingly, but Maomao wasn’t the one who would hand down judgment.

The fortune-teller had also told her whom to target. She was vague when it came to the names or characteristics of some of the marks, but there were others, like Lishu’s half-sister, whom the lady-in-waiting was told about in detail. Ultimately, she sold perfume to around three people.

“The guilt doesn’t fall on this young woman alone. It was I who tampered with the cage,” said the bride’s uncle, stepping forward. He had found the lady-in-waiting in a somber mood and questioned her. Indeed, it seemed like more than one young woman could have done on her own.

“It wasn’t just them. The staged suicide was my idea. Even if it meant disturbing my niece’s grave,” the bride’s father said.

“No! Brother, I begged you to do what you did!”

Witnessing this exchange, the women of the family began to set up a terrible cry.

“So all this came not from the fortune-teller, but was your own idea?” Jinshi asked.

“That’s right. After what happened yesterday, we didn’t have time to meet with the fortune-teller.”

“And would this fortune-teller have been able to meet with you?” Jinshi was watching the pitiful family closely. He didn’t seem to be thinking of how to punish them, but rather how to connect this to whatever came next.

As he watched the family, Maomao silently watched him.

They never did find the fortune-teller or whoever it was. A monk at the chapel, however, testified to where the diviner had been living. The proverb has it that money talks even in hell—a good donation made the man quite forthcoming.

The residence he pointed them to was totally empty. The only thing they could conclude from what they found there was that the fortune-teller didn’t appear to live like someone from the west.