The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 7 - Chapter 17

Chapter 17: The Suspect

The shrine maiden and the other women were quickly moved to their sickrooms. The shrine maiden and the second food taster were vomiting copiously. It was crucial to give them saltwater to make sure their stomachs were completely empty, and they were also given powdered charcoal and laxatives. Not the most pleasant-tasting stuff, but necessary to clear them out.

Maomao’s father still couldn’t examine the shrine maiden, so the responsibility fell to Maomao. Not only did she want everything out of their stomachs, she wanted to clear the guts as well. If the laxatives didn’t work, she was prepared to put medicine directly into their anuses in order to induce the purging she needed, but she doubted either of them was eager for that. Thankfully the laxatives did their job.

Both the shrine maiden and the second food taster were in a better way than Yao. Symptoms of poisoning they might have, but at least they were still conscious. Yao was in dire shape, and En’en, entirely forgetting whom she supposedly served now, was with her constantly. Jinshi wasn’t a monster. Maomao assumed he would let En’en be.

The day after the banquet, when the shrine maiden’s condition had stabilized somewhat, Jinshi paid Maomao a visit. He was dressed even more plainly than usual, but his sparkliness remained. The now-recovered Basen was with him. Maomao was still wearing her outfit from the day before; she hadn’t even had a chance to bathe. This, however, was not the time to worry about such things.

“How is the shrine maiden?” Jinshi asked.

“Calmer. Her case wasn’t as serious as Yao’s or the other woman who was tasting her food.” One of the apprentice physicians was reporting every detail of Yao’s progress to her, and she in turn told him how the shrine maiden was faring. If anything happened to the maiden, it could become an international incident. They couldn’t allow things to get any worse. No doubt the same concern was what had brought Jinshi here so promptly.

“Yao—yes, that was her name. The one En’en refers to as her mistress.”

“You seem to have grown quite fond of En’en, but perhaps you could give her back to us one of these days? I’m afraid she may die from lack of Yao.”

En’en must have been beside herself with Yao in such a state. As for Maomao, she was feeling composed enough by now to crack a joke. Gallows humor? Maybe. Impertinent? Some might say. But that was how you got by.

“You’re not worried about your colleague?”

“I’m worried. I’m not that cold-blooded. But my job at this moment is to care for the shrine maiden. Besides, my father is looking after Yao.” Maomao had faith he would find a way to help her. And En’en knew a thing or two about medicine, so if she kept herself together she could be a pretty effective nurse. No need for Maomao to bring more work on herself. In any case, Li’s international relations rode on the shrine maiden’s health. It was paramount that nothing happen to her.

“If I may ask, did they figure out who poisoned the shrine maiden?” No one but the maiden and those with her had gotten ill, which meant that even if the women survived, it remained a clear attempt on the shrine maiden’s life. The sooner they could find and punish the culprit, the better.

Jinshi looked pained, then he glanced at Basen. The other man made a rather odd expression himself, but took something wrapped in cloth from the folds of his robes. It turned out to be a small bottle. Maomao opened the lid to discover some kind of powder.

“What’s this?” she asked, taking a sniff. The odor was familiar. She’d smelled it very recently, in fact. She gasped when she realized what it was and reached for the bottle, but Basen wrapped it up again.

“I take it you know something,” Jinshi said.

“Is that incense powder?” she asked.

“Yes, it is.”

Incense powder was made from plant material, including shikimi. It was intensely poisonous, and caused vomiting, stomach pains, and diarrhea.

“Dr. Kan informed me that it’s poisonous,” Jinshi said.

“He’s right. Its effects are exactly the ones we saw yesterday.” Symptoms could occur at any time within several hours after ingesting the poison.

Jinshi studied Maomao’s face. “This particular bottle was found in the possession of Consort Aylin.”

I knew it. She’d smelled that odor when she’d been distributing the mosquito-repellent incense. It had been in Consort Aylin’s room.

Yao, the shrine maiden, and the shrine maiden’s other food taster had all been poisoned, but Yao was in by far the worst shape. Her symptoms would abate, only to come back. Now, three days after the incident, she was in much better condition, but they still couldn’t relax.

Maomao took over Yao’s place at the shrine maiden’s villa, staying there to minister to the maiden and her servant. Their symptoms were minor enough that Maomao’s presence was more precautionary than anything. The question of who had planted the poison was far more pressing.

And it looks like Aylin’s involved again.

Why would a woman from Shaoh poison the Shaohnese shrine maiden? Hadn’t she been trying to get the shrine maiden to help her? Or had this been her real goal from the moment she entered the rear palace? Didn’t she supposedly feel indebted to the woman she had just allegedly tried to murder?

For the moment, she’s a suspect, Maomao thought. There was evidence against her: the incense powder that had been found in her robes. One of her ladies-in-waiting had discovered it while helping her change and reported it.

Maomao knew some facts. For example, that Aylin had obtained a large quantity of the poisonous incense powder prior to the banquet. And that at the banquet, she’d been seated by her compatriot, the shrine maiden. What’s more, Maomao knew Aylin wasn’t watched at every moment. After all, she’d been alone when Maomao had come with the incense, not even a lady-in-waiting in attendance upon her. Perhaps she’d bided her time at the banquet, waiting for an opportune moment to poison the food.

The possibility couldn’t be ruled out. The witness testimony and the circumstantial evidence were considered enough to justify questioning Aylin personally.

We have to find the perpetrator as soon as we can. Before it became a diplomatic problem. But what if the culprit is someone from the same country?

That would be awfully convenient for Li. The attempted murder of the shrine maiden could be passed off as a civil dispute between Shaohnese visitors. Yes, if Aylin were responsible, that would make everything very simple.

I wonder what Lahan would do. The image of the numbers- (and looks-)obsessed little man floated through her mind. This had all begun when he and Aylin had discussed either sending food to Shaoh or giving her political asylum. Lahan was too clever to let himself be caught in the fallout of this incident, but it couldn’t be any fun for him regardless.

There must be more to this, Maomao thought. There were too many questions, too many things that didn’t fit. She didn’t like it at all.

On the morning of the fifth day, the shrine maiden’s attendant informed Maomao, “The honored shrine maiden is quite fine now. You may go.”

“I’m not sure she looks well yet, myself,” Maomao responded.

“The trouble is of the heart. How could she feel well, given who is involved?”

Fair enough. It would be a bitter pill to be nearly assassinated in a distant country, and to know that the would-be killer was from your own homeland. “I understand. An acquaintance of hers, yes?”

“Yes,” the other woman said after a second. “For she might have become the next shrine maiden, once.”

Sounds like my information is solid.

“She and her cousin Ayla both lived with the honored shrine maiden until the age of twelve.” The attendant sighed as if to say How could this have happened? Maomao wondered as well, but it wasn’t her place to ask too many questions.

Instead she simply said, “Thank you.”

A carriage was waiting for Maomao when she left the shrine maiden’s villa. She climbed aboard and found her father inside. “Is Yao all right?” she asked.

“For the moment. En’en’s watching her. She’ll let me know if the young lady takes a turn for the worse.”

Maomao had heard that Yao had briefly been stable, only to worsen and then stabilize again. Clearly, her condition still demanded caution, which meant that if her father was here, there must be a reason.

So it proved. Looking out the window, the old man said, “We won’t be going back to the medical office. We’ll go right past it.” Past the medical office—that meant into the part of the court where the important people dwelt. Maomao could think of one reason they might be going there.

“Is this about the dinner?” she asked. Maomao and her father had been taking care of those who had been poisoned at the event. With Aylin under suspicion, it was hardly surprising the authorities should want to speak to Maomao and Luomen. The carriage trundled past the medical office and toward its destination: Jinshi’s palace.

“Please, come in.” Suiren greeted them, polite as ever, although Maomao thought she caught a fleeting hint of a grin when the silver-haired woman looked at her. A cunning old thing, she was. Maomao bowed her head in return. Suiren took them to a room where Jinshi, Basen, and Lahan waited. The bespectacled little man wore a noticeable grimace; these events had weakened him.

“I assume you know why we’ve called you here,” Jinshi said. His color wasn’t very good—overworking himself again, Maomao suspected. Before she went home, she would have to get him to take a nap. By force if necessary.

“Does it have to do with Consort Aylin?” Maomao asked.

“Indeed. We’d like to begin by hearing from Sir Luomen.” He obviously wasn’t going to waste time on pleasantries.

“I’m afraid I can only speak to what happened with Yao, the medical assistant.”

That’s not true, Maomao thought. Well... It was and it wasn’t. Her father was a very careful person. What he meant was that he could only speak with confidence about what had happened to Yao. All else would be assumption, and Luomen didn’t like to speculate.

“Her symptoms were severe, including stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea. At one point they appeared to stabilize, only to worsen again. However, at the moment, they’ve improved.”

This all aligned with what Maomao had heard: the symptoms were precisely those of incense powder poisoning. The seriousness of their presentation, however, and the way they had gotten worse after subsiding once, puzzled her. Incense powder included shikimi, which was highly toxic—enough that it could potentially kill a person. The berries were especially poisonous, but incense powder was produced by grinding up only the skin of the fruit and the leaves.

I’m sure she would have noticed if she’d eaten enough of it to get that sick. Maomao had given Yao some pointers on how to look for poison in food, including sniffing it for any unusual odors. Then again, Yao’s color hadn’t been good before the meal. Maybe her nose had been stuffed up.

Her father’s next words turned Maomao’s suspicion into certainty. “I suspect we’re dealing with a mycotoxin—something from a mushroom or fungus. Not shikimi poison.”

Luomen’s audience was dumbfounded; what he was saying went against all their assumptions. No doubt they’d brought him here to seal the case against Aylin. They must have thought they had all the evidence they needed.

“I see!” Maomao said. It made sense to her now. Many fungal toxins were much more potent than shikimi, although they produced similar symptoms. And Yao wouldn’t have recognized the smell or flavor of most toxic mushrooms.

While everyone else was busy being shocked, Lahan leaned forward. “Are you suggesting Consort Aylin was framed? Tell me, Uncle!” There was an unmistakable note of giddiness in his voice, and with good reason. If someone he had brought to Li committed a crime like this, some of the responsibility would have to fall on him. This entire situation was outside even Lahan’s calculations.

“I’m saying only that we aren’t dealing with poisonous incense powder here,” Luomen replied. His roundabout way of talking was obviously frustrating his audience.

“May I interject?” Maomao said, hoping to move things along with her own observations. She laid out the facts, trying to be as objective as possible so she wouldn’t be carried away by what her father had said. “The shrine maiden and the other food taster displayed very similar symptoms—stomach pain and vomiting. Theirs were much less severe than Yao’s, however, and cleared up in about three days. I have some doubts about the hypothesis that a mycotoxin was involved here. Specifically, I think the shrine maiden and her attendant ingested too little of it to have the observed effects, and I believe the onset of symptoms was too rapid.”

The symptoms did make her think of the toxic Amanita virosa mushroom, which was extremely poisonous, but slow-acting. The terrible thing was that by the time the effects of the toxin began to show, it had already been absorbed by the body, which was why it could seem to be cured only for the symptoms to recur. Maomao didn’t question her father’s treatment of Yao, but if it was true that there was a poisonous fungus involved, then the case had to be considered more serious than an episode of shikimi poisoning.

It had occurred to Maomao that they might be dealing with a poisonous mushroom, but she had dismissed the possibility on the basis that, if that were the case, it should have taken about six hours for symptoms to appear. The three women had shown signs of poisoning far sooner than that.

I’m sure my old man must know that, she thought. So why would he say such a thing? He must have a reason. Could it be...

What if they consumed the mushrooms before the food tasting?

Before she knew what she was doing, Maomao slammed her hands down on the table. The conversation in the shrine maiden’s villa! How could she not have noticed?

“Master Jinshi!” she said.

“What is it?”

“Did you tell the shrine maiden that Consort Aylin was suspected of poisoning her?”

“I don’t want to tell her anything until we’re certain. It would only create unnecessary anxiety.”

Yes. Yes, of course. And yet the attendant at the villa had spoken of it:

“The trouble is of the heart. How could she feel well, given who is involved?”

“She might have become the next shrine maiden, once.”

Maomao had assumed from that exchange that the shrine maiden already knew who the suspect was. Maomao herself was aware, so she hadn’t thought twice about the shrine maiden knowing as well. But how did she know?

Now Maomao saw why Yao’s case had been so severe, but those of the shrine maiden and her attendant had been so much lighter. She could explain the delay in the onset of symptoms.

“Dad,” she began, giving him a serious look, “would it be all right if I engaged in some speculation?”

He seemed uncomfortable. “You’ll have to be prepared to be held accountable for whatever you say.” Once the words were out of her mouth, she wouldn’t be able to take them back.

“Sometimes one must speak all the same,” she said. Her father was silent at that; Maomao took it as tacit permission.

“Sounds like you have something for us,” Jinshi said.

“Yes, sir. Although it’s only one possibility.” Perhaps making that explicit would give her an escape route if she needed it. Or perhaps she simply wasn’t willing to speak with absolute confidence. “I believe it was not Consort Aylin who planted the poison.”

“Why so?” Jinshi was never going to simply take her word for it. He wanted reasons. Lahan and Basen were likewise watching her.

“If we accept what my old man—ahem, what Dr. Kan suggested, that the case involves a poisonous mushroom, it becomes difficult to sustain the belief that Consort Aylin tainted the food.”

Considering the time symptoms took to appear, the victims would have to have consumed A. virosa long before the banquet. Aylin had been under guard since the moment she left the rear palace; even when her lady-in-waiting had left her alone, she hadn’t been able to leave her room, and she’d had no confederates to help her. She couldn’t have poisoned the food before the banquet.

“So who did, then?”

“If the food was indeed poisoned, sir, it would have to have happened at the villa.”

Yao had been living with the shrine maiden for days prior to the banquet, eating the same food she did. It made the most sense to assume Yao had been exposed to the poison while still at the residence, and that narrowed down the list of possible perpetrators.

“I believe it was one of the shrine maiden’s attendants. In other words, she poisoned herself.”

This drew fresh consternation from the listeners—all except Luomen, who remained impassive. He’d probably come to the same conclusion, but he had stayed true to his unwillingness to speculate.

If the poisoning had been, in essence, a show, it would also explain why the shrine maiden and her attendant had suffered less severe symptoms than Yao. Yao would have been the only one to seriously consume the poison; the other two would have taken only enough to put on a convincing “performance,” or might have used a different, less serious toxin.

The same line of reasoning could explain why the attendant had known who the alleged perpetrator was without being told—if this had all been done with the intention of pinning the crime on Aylin. She and the shrine maiden had known each other long enough that the maiden would be aware of her old friend’s propensity for incense powder. Poisonous incense powder.

Maomao understood why her father insisted on not working on assumptions, but some things could push even Maomao over the edge. They had to drag Yao into this! They’d callously used her. The seriousness of Yao’s symptoms would lend credence to the idea of an attempted poisoning. Yao could be a little condescending, but at heart she was a decent young lady, dedicated to her studies. Maomao was no En’en, but this was enough to make the bile well up in her throat.

She belatedly noticed the numbness in her hands, and it made her stop and ask herself whether she was speaking rationally. Luomen was still silent, while Jinshi was practically slack-jawed.

“I have a question,” said Basen, speaking for the first time. He was quick to react in situations like this. “Why would the shrine maiden want to entrap Consort Aylin?”

“I believe I have an idea,” Lahan said, raising his hand. “Consort Aylin told me she thought the shrine maiden might have borne a child—and that it might have been the White Lady. I asked Maomao to see if she could tell whether the shrine maiden had given birth.”

If it transpired that the shrine maiden was no longer qualified for her office, then she could be stripped of that office. Indeed, she might very well be punished.

“The shrine maiden, the mother of the White Lady? That would be explosive,” Jinshi said. It would mean that Aylin had sought political asylum not only because of her enemies in the government, but because she knew something about the shrine maiden’s secret. It would also explain why the shrine maiden had followed her to Li.

“But if this was all to keep Consort Aylin quiet...” Maomao said. Lahan’s suggestion should have seemed perfectly reasonable, yet something about it nagged at her. She looked at her father. He only sat there, silent, neither affirming nor denying anything.