The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 7 - Chapter 13

Chapter 13: Lady-in-Waiting to His Majesty’s Younger Brother

For days after their shopping expedition, Maomao found herself doing the same thing day in and day out: washing and disinfecting bandages. The medical assistants were all getting pretty tired of it when a message happened to arrive. Specifically, a message for En’en.

“Just for me?” she asked.

“I wonder what it could possibly be,” said a most intrigued Yao, taking a peek. Out of the three of them she was the most fully developed, but her behavior, including her bouts of unabashed curiosity, reflected her age more than her looks did.

“It would appear to be notice of a new assignment,” En’en said. When they saw what it said, all three of them scowled.

They looked at the physician who had brought the notice. “Well, you all saw it. En’en’s going to have other work to do for a while.”

En’en scowled hardest of all. “I’m sorry, sir, but I must say I’m loath to be separated from Lady Yao.”

“This assignment comes from someone you don’t say no to,” the physician replied. His tone was still friendly, but there was clearly no room for argument.

What was written in this disturbing notice?

“So...she’s ordered to serve the Emperor’s esteemed younger brother? At least, for a while?” Yao said, taking the paper and reading it over again. So she was going to be babysitting Jinshi.

“May I ask something, sir? Why me? If this is about our exams, Lady Yao achieved better marks than I did.”

Yeah, because you deliberately flubbed it, Maomao thought, but she was decent enough to resist the impulse to say it out loud.

“And I hardly think my family background makes me suited to this service,” En’en continued. Yao came from good stock, but En’en was a commoner. Normally, one would have expected the royal family’s ladies-in-waiting to come from halfway respectable households. Maomao, though, thought she had an inkling as to why En’en had been chosen.

“If anything, I think he’s avoiding ladies whose status is too high,” the doctor said, looking somehow pleased to know this. “Pick someone of high status, and there’s every chance she’ll just be angling to make him her husband.”

Jinshi was twenty, a year older than Maomao, and he looked older still. Certainly a reasonable age to find himself a wife or consort. Indeed, it was starting to seem odd that he hadn’t.

“With that face of his, the wrong person could make his life a living nightmare,” the doctor said.

As Maomao had suspected, then. En’en could be warped in her own particular ways, but she was unstintingly devoted to her mistress. She wouldn’t pull anything outrageous with Jinshi. She was so dedicated to Yao, in fact, that it was written plainly on her face that she had no interest in taking up this position. How rude of her.

“Word is that Maomao was in the running...” The physician glanced outside, where a freak with a monocle was pressed up against the window. Evidently he was back from his hiatus. Everyone seemed to be used to him by now. “...but some highly ranked individual insisted she wasn’t fit for the position, so she was dropped from consideration.”

Just as the freak was staring his hardest, two of his subordinates came up from behind and peeled him away from the window, dragging him off. Maomao wished he wouldn’t come back, but she knew better than to hope for more than a few minutes’ respite.

“They want you there tomorrow. I know it’s sudden,” the physician said.

En’en didn’t respond. Even her face remained impassive, but she somehow still managed to give off an aura of absolute disgust with the idea. She glanced at Yao, looking for help, but Yao simply said, “If it’s a matter of family background, there’s not much we can say.” Maomao had thought she might be jealous, but she was surprisingly willing to come around when confronted with that logic. Maybe it was because she knew just how good En’en was at her job. “They could send you just about anywhere, En’en. I hope it goes really well,” she said and flashed the other woman a brilliant smile. Maomao briefly thought that it might be her little way of getting En’en back for leading her around by the nose all the time, but it didn’t seem so. Yao was truly giving her blessing to this personnel transfer, completely oblivious to how En’en felt or what she was hoping for. Classically naive, Yao was.

En’en scowled again. If her mistress had interceded at this moment, it might have saved her, but Yao had simply given her the old so-long-good-luck. What else could En’en do?

“Best of luck out there, then,” the physician said, clapping her on the shoulder. En’en gave him a dejected nod.

“It’s a lot busier around here with one less pair of hands,” Yao said as she organized medicine in some drawers. She’d already been talking to Maomao more, and the pace had really picked up now that En’en was gone.

“Definitely,” Maomao said. “En’en worked hard.” She was going through medicines and sorting them into piles. Once in a while they got something unusual, but today it was all just topping off supplies of ordinary drugs.

“I hope she’s okay... I’d like to think she wouldn’t be rude to His Majesty’s younger brother.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Yeah... You’re right. This is En’en we’re talking about. I’m sure it’s okay.”

What I meant was, he won’t have her executed for being a little rude to him... Maomao had been thinking less about En’en and more about Jinshi’s personality. He was never too eager to punish people. There were times when his hands were tied and he had to do it, but Maomao seriously doubted En’en would do anything awful enough to put herself in that position. Long as she doesn’t actively try to murder him.

Maomao, meanwhile, would keep doing her work as normal.

○●○

Jinshi’s office was more populated than usual. He held his paperwork in one hand as he looked at the civil officials, soldiers, and court ladies being introduced to him. Normally, someone of Jinshi’s rank wouldn’t have bothered to meet every single new person who was given a job. It had been his own idea to make sure he saw each of them.

“We’ll be getting quite busy, but I’m confident you’ll work hard,” he said to them and smiled. He wasn’t out to sow goodwill, or even to make his subordinates feel at ease.

Not a single other person there was smiling. To smile at someone could leave the other person with a good impression—but for Jinshi, it could also be a harbinger of disaster. On his very first day as a “eunuch” in the rear palace, one of the other eunuchs had greeted him with a smile. Gaoshun had looked away for an instant, and Jinshi had found himself dragged into the underbrush. The men around there might have been without their most important possession, but that wasn’t enough to completely rob them of their sex drive. The man had wanted to make Jinshi his toy. Jinshi wasn’t sure how it had started, but it had been clear he was in danger.

“Funny. I never got to where I could look back on that and laugh,” he muttered to himself. He’d punched the eunuch and run, but he’d learned that such relationships weren’t uncommon among the men of the rear palace, who referred to their lovers as “brothers-in-law.” He didn’t want to think about it. Sadly for all involved, Jinshi had no interest in such things.

“Is something the matter, Master Jinshi?” asked Basen, who had at last recovered from his injuries. From what Jinshi heard, he’d continued his daily military training unabated despite his body being in tatters. Gaoshun seemed in disbelief at his own son’s durability.

“It’s nothing,” Jinshi said. The new personnel all appeared to be safe. He’d been somewhat unnerved when he’d heard that they simply had to hire a young lady-in-waiting, but so far all seemed well. And now Suiren would stop chiding him every time he was in his room.

He couldn’t be too cautious, especially in light of the recent attempted poisoning. He had to keep a sharp eye on things. Jinshi himself had hoped to bring a certain long-standing acquaintance of his on board, but instead he’d ended up with one of that acquaintance’s colleagues. That is to say, one of the court ladies from the medical office.

Since the position was new, the test had been made particularly difficult, and one by one the women with no aptitude for medicine had been weeded out. That assured him that at least this young woman knew what she was doing.

Everyone would have plenty to do soon enough, what with the prince’s presentation coming up. Jinshi needed to get back to work himself, so he told them to be on their way.

Once the crowd was gone, Jinshi heaved a sigh. Only Basen was in the room with him, and he would let the gesture go.

“Would you like me to prepare a drink for you, Master Jinshi?”

“No, I don’t need anything. What about you? Are you feeling better?”

“I sincerely apologize, sir, but my morning runs are still only two li. I’ll have them back to normal in no time.” That sounded like more than enough to Jinshi. He marveled at Basen’s physical capacities.

Basen’s work had piled up during his absence, and now he was playing catch-up. He had no gift for paperwork, but he was doing his damnedest, which pleased Jinshi.

“Master Jinshi,” Basen said, holding up a piece of paper. “What do you wish to do about the Shaoh shrine maiden living in the villa?”

Politics could be a very special kind of pain in the neck. Things that could have been easily communicated orally had to be announced in painstakingly detailed memos. The shrine maiden had arrived at the villa days ago, and now the papers about the matter were arriving? As for the shrine maiden, Jinshi had gone to give his formal greetings, but that was all. He’d been under the impression someone else was dealing with the matter, so imagine his surprise when it landed in his lap.

“It’s my problem now, is it?” He looked at the mountain of paperwork and sighed again. What else was there to do? Rear palace-related matters were still coming to him, and it seemed to be falling to him (so he felt) to fill the hole left by the absence of the Shi Clan. “Do you suppose they all hate me?” he asked.

“No, sir. If anything, I should think they adore you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that with such a straight face.”

“No? I think they all came here out of a genuine desire to meet you, sir.”

The worst part was, there wasn’t a hint of malice in Basen’s voice.

The reason court ladies weren’t allowed in his office was that so many of them would “drop” their papers just to have an excuse to drag out their time there. In fact, the occasional male bureaucrat tried the same thing, such that these days, anyone who dropped their papers in Jinshi’s office was thereafter barred from entering. Jinshi didn’t actually consider it a black mark on the perpetrators, but to outsiders it was impossible not to think that there was something strange going on in there. Some people got the idea that Jinshi’s office was a place where the slightest slip would be severely punished.

Despite all of this, the quantity of paperwork never seemed to lessen.

“In any case, the Shaoh shrine maiden. Yes. The physicians haven’t yet been to see her, have they?” Jinshi asked.

“No, sir. The plan is for Medical Officer Kan and the new medical assistants to be the ones to examine her.”

This woman was a foreign dignitary, a shrine maiden. They couldn’t blithely subject her to examination by men, even if she was here for medical treatment. They would send the eunuch Kan Luomen—Maomao’s father, Lakan’s uncle. The court ladies would be the ones doing the actual examination, with Luomen making the diagnosis based on what they told him. A roundabout method at best.

Roundabout, but necessary. It was what the Shaohnese delegation had asked for. Jinshi had just appropriated one of the medical assistants for himself, leaving only two of them, but at least Maomao would be there. He expected her and Luomen to work well together.

“All right. Find out everyone’s schedules and tell the medical office to set up an examination. Ideally, one that accommodates the shrine maiden’s needs and availability as much as possible.”

“Yes, sir.” Basen quickly wrote down the orders and passed them to a messenger who waited outside the office.

“Is there anything else?” Jinshi asked. He wanted to get the weightiest matters out of the way first. The nettlesome annoyances that seemed to keep coming back to haunt him could wait.

“Nothing to speak of, sir. Oh! Except...”

“Yes?”

Basen looked uncomfortable. “We’ve already received a request for transfer.” He held out the written request, which Jinshi took and studied. It was written in a very accomplished hand. It must have come from one of the people he’d met earlier. “A court lady named En’en requests to be transferred back to the medical office.”

“She was one of the medical assistants?”

Birds of a feather, as they said. A somewhat unusual job could attract somewhat unusual people. Jinshi wasn’t eager to have too many young ladies-in-waiting around him, so once the other women had learned the ropes, he thought it distinctly possible that they would be able to get along with one less person. If this En’en could simply hold out until then, she might very well get her wish.

“On what basis did we hire En’en?” he asked.

“She’s diligent about every aspect of her work and excellent at supporting those around her. She’s also been a lady-in-waiting since she was ten years old, so she already knows what she’s doing in that regard. She’s a quick learner, but shows no desire to advance herself in the world—which I suppose is both a strength and a weakness.”

“Yes, that does sound promising.”

“She also... Well, this isn’t precisely about her capabilities...” Basen sounded awkward; he couldn’t quite bring himself to look at the paper directly.

“Yes? Out with it.”

“Sir. There’s an additional note here. It’s not that she’s uncomfortable around men or even specifically dislikes them...” He hesitated ever so briefly before saying, “But she’s shown a certain preference for women.”

A preference for women! Meaning she was romantically interested in other women despite being a woman herself.

“She stays!” Jinshi exclaimed, flinging the transfer request aside.

“M-Master Jinshi!”

“She’s the perfect fit. I’m not letting this one get away!”

He was grinning broadly as they went back to work.