The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Homecoming

The horse whinnied as it came to a stop in front of the Verdigris House.

That was a long trip, Maomao thought, climbing out of the carriage and nodding politely to the driver. He unloaded her luggage with a thump. It included the outfits that had been thought necessary for the journey, which were now hers to keep, along with some unique products and unusual medicines from the western capital—and a gigantic load of potatoes.

“Maomao, my goodness... Are you planning to open a new business?” The old madam walked up, a pipe clutched in her withered hand. “I’m happy enough that you got them to send us rice, but I wish you would think about the quantity. The storehouse won’t hold any more!”

She grabbed one of the dried potatoes out of a basket. It was raw still, but growing eyes, so it would have to serve for a seed potato.

After the showdown at the quack doctor’s village, Maomao had at least wound up with as much rice as they would sell her. She’d let the madam know by letter—the first batch must have arrived already.

“And what’s this?” the madam asked, looking at the potato dusted in white powder.

Maomao took it, tore a piece off, and put it in her mouth. For a potato, it was awfully sweet—almost as sweet as a dried chestnut.

The madam took a piece too and chewed. Her eyes narrowed. “It would be better to grill it a little first. It’s a bit tough for me.” She shouted for one of the menservants, instructing him to haul the basket away.

“Nobody said you could have all of them,” Maomao said.

“Nobody had to. I know for a fact you and Chou-u can’t eat all those by yourselves. I’m helping you out here, and listen to you. Not even a word of thanks.”

The past month and a half clearly hadn’t dulled the madam’s stinginess one bit.

Maomao, though, wasn’t going to take this lying down. “Even a year’s free rent for the apothecary shop was cheap for all that rice, don’t you think?” she said. Practically pocket change. She’d written in her letter that instead of paying for the rice directly, the madam could give her free rent. The fact that the old woman hadn’t said anything about it, Maomao took for agreement.

“Yeah, yeah. This is separate. You got these for free, right? Well, share with your neighbors,” the madam said. “Heeeey, everyone, Maomao’s home! And she brought souvenirs!”

The old woman never let up! Her shout brought a crowd of courtesans. Work was over and they should have been resting, but the mercenary impulse was strong.

“Freckles!” Chou-u came bursting out of the crowd, Zulin obediently following her “boss.” But there was something else with them... “Yeesh, you sure took your time! You just up and leave, and then you don’t come home for nearly two months?! That wasn’t part of the deal!”

Yeah, well, Maomao hadn’t bargained for it either. What bothered her more, though, was the creature behind them.

“Hey, what’s that behind you?” she demanded of Chou-u.

“Don’t tell me you forgot about Zulin! What a jerk!”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Behind her.” Maomao pointed at a calico cat sitting and grooming herself.

“What, you don’t remember Maomao? Man, that’s cold,” Chou-u said.

“Oh, believe me, I remember her,” Maomao said. But the furball was supposed to be at the quack’s village. What was she doing here in the pleasure district? “What I want to know is, why is she here?”

It was the madam who answered. “She was in with the rice! They couldn’t exactly send the cat back by herself, could they? Anyway,” she added, “I’d just spotted some mice in the storehouse, so I think she can stay for a while. And she’s friendly—makes her popular with the customers. We have to do something about her habit of stealing side dishes at dinner, though.”

The madam was a practical woman. She would never keep a pet—but an animal who could make itself useful, that was all right.

Maomao (the girl) gave Maomao (the cat) a dark look. The furball narrowed her eyes, yawned a little, and said, “Meeeow!”

At that moment, someone stumbled out of the apothecary’s shop.

“Y-You’re home?” asked the man, Sazen. Maomao had tasked him with running the shop while she was away. He’d never been the most robust-looking person, but now he appeared haggard, and he had an unkempt beard on his face. He stumbled over to Maomao and promptly collapsed on the ground. “The shop... It’s all yours...” he managed, and then he was out cold.

Chou-u poked at him with a stick he’d gotten somewhere. “Stop that,” the madam said, ordering a manservant to get Sazen out of the way.

“People were coming down with colds left, right, and center while you were away, Freckles. We used up the medicine you made before you left, but people kept begging us for more,” Chou-u told Maomao.

She nodded: it made sense. People often got sick as the seasons changed, so there hadn’t been enough medicine even though she’d made more than she had expected to need. Very few people in the pleasure district could afford to go to the doctor for proper treatment—taking some medicine was the most they could do. And a lot of them wouldn’t even do that.

“Some of them were really pushy,” Chou-u added. “One even stole some medicine, because he said he’d gotten it for free last year!”

Maomao’s old man had probably given it to the guy—a bad habit of his. He would hand out treatments gratis to anyone who came weeping and crying, and once you’d given away medicine one time, everybody wanted it for free. No doubt he’d given the store’s stocks away generously until the madam had noticed.

Maomao went into the apothecary’s shop. She saw a mortar and pestle containing some half-made medicine, along with a medical book on the ground. She picked up the book and flipped the pages, which had smudges on them, as if Sazen had handled them with dirty fingers. Normally she might have given him a piece of her mind for failing to treat the book with proper respect, but when she saw him lolling there, she found she couldn’t say anything.

I might just have gotten a lucky break with him, she thought. He wasn’t very skilled, but he didn’t just give up either. That was what really mattered.

Maomao went through the drawers of the medicine chest, tallying up which drugs needed to be replenished. Then she set about cleaning up the messy floor.

It was humid in the shop. Time had passed while she was busy cleaning up from her time away, and it was now early summer. Rain fell continuously with no sign of letting up. A young man—the scion of an important merchant house—walked by with a prostitute Maomao knew, trotting along under an umbrella as if to illustrate that this season had its own charms. The woman probably hated getting her clothes all wet, but she wasn’t going to miss this chance to go out. The courtesans’ activities could be quite limited: the brothel was like a cage, and the courtesans were the little birds within it.

“You can almost hear the crickets in here,” Meimei said with a resentful look at the woman outside. She was chewing on a dried potato with her luscious lips. The potatoes were quite tasty if you put them over some heat for a few minutes to soften them. They were sweet in their own way, not like one of those snacks that used sugar or honey.

“It was so hard on poor Sazen too,” she added. Epidemics aside, Sazen might not have collapsed if Maomao’s trip had been at a slightly different time of year. Sazen, who had a propensity to feel responsible at the strangest moments, had evidently begrudged himself even time to sleep in order to mix up enough medicinal herbs.

“You don’t need to get some sleep, Sister?” Maomao asked. She was sure Meimei had been on the job the night before. The older woman had just gotten out of the bath, and her hair was still dripping. To sleep when it was time to sleep: that was part of a courtesan’s job as well. Meanwhile, a high-class courtesan like Meimei had practice in the afternoons to keep her skills sharp.

Meimei, however, only munched lazily on the potato and looked at Maomao closely. “Listen—yesterday, my patron...”

“Yes?”

Meimei had three men who were her patrons, as Maomao recalled. One was a civil official, and the other two were merchants; all of them loved board games.

“He said I should come to his place,” Meimei said. Come to his place: in other words, he wanted to take Meimei home with him. If he was talking like that, he wasn’t just asking her to go for a little walk with him.

“He wants to buy you out?”

“That’s what it comes down to.”

For a courtesan, being bought out was akin to getting married. It was an opportunity to be freed from the cage of the brothel. Meimei, though, didn’t look happy about it. Maomao could understand: her taste in men was extraordinarily poor.

“He’s bad news, this customer?” Maomao asked.

“No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Is the madam opposed?”

“Oh, she loves the idea.”

That might seem to make everything simple, but this decision would influence the rest of Meimei’s life. Maomao could well imagine she wouldn’t want to make it too lightly. It was not a choice that could be easily undone once it had been made.

Meimei was still a popular courtesan, but who knew how long that would last? Age was the unavoidable barrier for some in her line of work, and most women would have retired from the profession long ago.

“This guy, his wife has passed away, but he’s got kids,” Meimei explained.

“Hmm.” Maomao didn’t sound particularly interested. She hadn’t meant to respond so apathetically, but she’d suddenly found herself picturing the freak strategist. In the end, she’d given him an alcoholic drink to knock him out and then made her escape before he woke up. Lahan had come with her, keen to get back to the capital so he could coordinate about the potatoes. Rikuson had effectively drawn the short straw and had to stay behind. The strategist had been muttering in his sleep again about making a book, and at the moment he was probably ignoring all his work to focus on that task.

Maomao wondered if Meimei still had feelings for the likes of him. Did she know there was no longer a bought courtesan at his house? Maomao briefly wondered if she should tell her older sister about it—but the information seemed as likely to make Meimei’s life more difficult as easier, so she stayed quiet.

“Kids don’t tend to like me very much,” Meimei said.

“Can’t you just ignore them?” Maomao replied.

“Interesting idea...” For some reason, she seemed to be studying Maomao. She’d finished the potato and was wiping the grease from her fingers with a handkerchief. “Speaking of kids, where’s that naughty tyke of yours?” she asked, attempting a change of subject.

“Chou-u? No idea. Probably with Ukyou or Sazen.”

“Hm. There’s something I’d like him to draw for me.”

“Porno?”

Meimei grinned and gave Maomao an affectionate pinch of the cheek. Maomao regretted the question; she realized that sort of joke was more Pairin’s thing.

“I thought for sure everyone would be sick of him by now, but his popularity seems surprisingly enduring,” Maomao said, rubbing her reddened cheek. Chou-u had been doing booming business drawing portraits of the courtesans and menservants, but Maomao had assumed the interest was mainly driven by novelty.

“Sure. That boy, he’s talented.” Meimei ducked out of the apothecary’s shop and went for the clerk’s desk, where she picked up a folding fan. The bamboo frame was covered with quality paper and decorated with a picture of a cat playing with a ball. The animal was a calico—maybe Chou-u had taken Maomao for his model—and despite the paucity of lines used to depict it, the creature seemed startlingly alive.

Just at that moment—almost as if she knew what they were talking about—Maomao the cat came by; her tail stood up and she let out a “Meow!”

“When his portrait business started running out of steam, the boy began coming up with things like this,” Meimei said. “He knew lots of courtesans like cats. I wondered why he was spending all his time following Maomao around—and then he came up with this!”

Maomao (the girl this time) didn’t say anything. Chou-u certainly was thorough. And although the fan’s frame was old, the paper was new. He’d refreshed it with stuff presumably sent from the quack’s village. So the paper had been given to him, and he’d refurbished the frame—in other words, the materials had been free.

Maomao had to admit that Chou-u’s drawing ability appeared to have improved substantially—maybe it just had to do with how quickly children grew and matured. She was sure that before, his drawings had been more superficial.

“Oh, that’s right—the boy’s learning from a painter, I think,” Meimei said.

“That’s news to me.” Maomao frowned.

“You were away in the west for so long. A customer from a big merchant house brought this guy along—a cutting-edge painter, or so he said.”

“Ah,” Maomao replied. It was a familiar story: rich people bought paintings or ceramics all the time; it was sort of a sport for them. When that wasn’t enough, they would surround themselves with the artists who created works they particularly liked. It was an expensive hobby, one only the rich could indulge in.

“Believe it or not, he said he’d introduce the guy to Joka,” Meimei added.

“Yikes!”

Joka was one of the “three princesses” of the Verdigris House, but she despised men. Civil officials or students might at least be able to talk to her about poetry or the civil examinations, but painting wasn’t exactly her wheelhouse.

“That’s not all,” Meimei said. “This painter? It turns out he specializes in portraits of beautiful women.” Her gloom of moments before was gone, replaced by a grin and excited, gossipy waves of the hand.

“I’m guessing our dear sister didn’t take it well,” Maomao said.

“Oh, no she didn’t! She was so angry. And you know what she does when she gets angry—she writes poetry. Then some ignorant rookie courtesan copied one of Joka’s poems exactly and sent it to a customer! There was a ruckus!”

Joka was a specialist at poems and lyrics—but one had to take care with anything she wrote in anger. The verses might look beautiful at first glance, but they were soaked with venom. She couldn’t be allowed to write to customers when she was in a bad mood—the madam would make sure to check Joka’s outgoing mail at moments like that.

While Pairin’s appetite for men could make her hard to handle, Joka was at the other end of the scale, and was equally troublesome.

Maomao the cat wove around Meimei’s legs and mewed for a treat. Meimei picked her up and put her on her knees, scratching her under the chin.

“So this is the painter Chou-u has been learning from?” Maomao (not the cat) asked.

“Uh-huh. Joka was hell-bent on sending that nasty letter, and she used Chou-u as her messenger.”

Mr. Merchant, it seemed, desperately wanted Mr. Painter to create a picture of Joka. The intention had been for the man to do a rough sketch when he met the courtesan, and then complete his final draft later. Nice and easy. But Joka wasn’t about to sit there and let him study her. Instead, she conducted the entire meeting from behind a folding screen—rude, but effective.

Undeterred, Mr. Merchant and Mr. Painter had left their address and pleaded with Joka to get in touch with them. Normally, a letter would be delivered by an apprentice courtesan accompanied by a manservant, but a young girl couldn’t be asked to deliver a missive of such vitriol, so Joka called for Chou-u instead. A neat way to skirt the madam’s vetting process.

Chou-u delivered the letter—all well and good—but he also took a liking to Mr. Painter’s pictures and started spending time with him.

“He might even be over there today,” Meimei said.

“And after I warned him not to go out,” Maomao grumbled. She wished everyone else would think about what watching out for Chou-u meant. He still dragged one leg—if anything happened to him, he would be hard-pressed to react.

“Heeey! Maomao!” she heard Ukyou call.

Maomao stood up, ignoring the cat, who had rolled over on her back and was begging for food. “What’s wrong?” she called back. Ukyou looked distressed.

“It’s Chou-u!”

“What’s he done this time?” Maomao scowled, looking as if she was not at all surprised by this development.

“Please—just come with me,” Ukyou said, taking her hand. “Some friend of his is dying!”