Chapter 1: Maomao
What I wouldn't give for some good street-stall meat skewers. Maomao looked up at the overcast sky and sighed. She lived in a world that was at once a place of unparalleled, sparkling beauty and a noxious, foul, suffocating cage. Three months already. Hope
my old man's eating properly.
It seemed just the other day she had gone into the woods to gather herbs, and there had met three kidnappers; let us call them Villagers One, Two, and Three. They were after women for the royal palace, and in a word, they offered the world's most forceful and unpleasant marriage proposal.
Now, it wasn't that she wouldn't be paid, and with a couple years' work, there was that glimmer of hope that she might even be able to come back to her hometown. There were worse ways to earn a living—if one went to the royal city of one's own accord. But Maomao, who had been making her way just fine as an apothecary, thank you very much, saw it solely as so much trouble.
What did the kidnappers do with the nubile young women they captured? Sometimes they sold the girls to the eunuchs, putting the proceeds toward a night of drinking for themselves. Sometimes the young ladies were offered in lieu of someone's own daughter. To Maomao, it was a moot question, for now she found herself caught up in their schemes, regardless of the reason. Else, she would never in her life have wished to have anything to do with the hougong, the "rear palace": the residence of the Imperial women.
The place was so thick with the odors of makeup and perfume as to turn the stomach, and even more full of the thin, forced smiles of the court ladies in their beautiful dresses. In her time as an apothecary, Maomao had come to believe there was no toxin so terrifying as a woman's smile. That one rule held true whether in the halls of the most ornate palace or the squalid chambers of the cheapest pleasure house.
Maomao hefted the laundry basket at her feet and headed into a nearby building. Unlike the dazzling front façade, the dreary central courtyard housed flagstone-paved washing areas, where the court's servants—people who were neither quite man nor quite woman—did laundry by the armload.
Men, in principle, were not allowed in the rear palace. The only men who could enter were either members and blood relations of that most noble family in the country, or former men who had lost a very important part of themselves. Naturally, all the men Maomao was looking at right now were the latter. It was twisted, she thought, but admittedly a logical thing to do.
She set down her basket and spotted another one sitting in the next building over. Not dirty clothes, but clean laundry that had dried in the sun. She glanced at the wooden tag dangling from the handle; it bore an illustration of a leaf along with a number.
Not all of the palace women were literate. It wasn't that surprising: some of them had been brought here by force, after all. And though the rudiments of etiquette were beaten into them before they arrived, letters were not. It would probably be lucky, Maomao reflected, if half the girls that got snatched from the countryside turned out to know how to read. It was, one might say, a hazard of the rear palace growing too populous. Quality was being sacrificed for quantity. Although it in no way equaled the "flower garden" of the former emperor, the consorts and ladies-in-waiting together numbered two thousand people, while with the eunuchs that number came to three thousand. A vast place indeed.
Maomao was a serving girl, a post so lowly she didn't even have an official rank. What more could she expect, as a girl who had no one to back her at court, who had arrived by way of kidnappers to fill out the palace staff? If she had perhaps possessed a body as shapely as a peony, or skin as pale as the full moon, she might at least have aspired to the status of one of the lower concubines, but Maomao possessed only ruddy, freckled skin and limbs with all the elegance of withered branches.
I need to just get this job done.
Maomao picked up the basket with its tag depicting a plum
flower and the number 17, and trundled off as quickly as she could manage. She wanted to get back to her room before the frowning sky began to weep.
The owner of the laundry in the basket was one of the lowranked consorts. Her room was rather more lavish than those accorded to the other low consorts—in fact, it was downright ostentatious. The occupant, Maomao surmised, must be the daughter of some affluent noble family.
When a woman was assigned a palace rank, she was also permitted her own ladies-in-waiting. A minor consort, however, could have two ladies at most, which was why Maomao, a serving girl with no mistress of her own on which to attend, was carting around the woman's laundry like this.
A low consort was permitted personal rooms in the rear palace precincts, but they were inevitably on the fringes of the grounds, where the Imperial eye was unlikely ever to fall upon her. If she should, nonetheless, be graced with a night with His Majesty, she would be granted new rooms, while a second such night meant she had truly found a place in the world.
As for those who ultimately never excited the Emperor's interest, after a certain age a consort (assuming her family didn't wield particular influence) could expect to see herself demoted, or even granted as a wife to some member of the bureaucracy. Whether that was a blessing or a curse depended on whom she was granted to, but the fate the women feared most was being bestowed upon one of the eunuchs.
Maomao knocked discreetly on the door. A lady-in-waiting opened it and snapped, "Just leave it there." Within, a consort redolent of the sweetest perfume was sipping some alcohol from a cup. She must have been much admired for her beauty in those halcyon days before she had arrived at the palace, but when she got here, she discovered she had known as much about the outside world as a frog who had spent its life in a well. Crowded out by the array of dazzling flowers in this garden, she had lost her will to continue fighting for a place here, and of late had ceased to come out of her room at all.
You know no one is going to come visit you in your own room, right?
Maomao traded the basket in her arms for the one sitting outside the door and went back to the laundry area. There was so much work to do still. She may not have come to the palace of her own volition, but they were at least paying her, and she intended to earn her keep. Maomao the apothecary was diligentminded, if nothing else. If she kept her head down and did her job, she could hope to leave this place someday, if never, she assumed, to gain royal notice.
Sadly, Maomao's thinking was—let us say naïve. She didn't know what was going to happen. No one does; that's the nature of life. Maomao was a relatively objective thinker for a girl of seventeen, but she had a few qualities that continually dogged her. For one, curiosity; and for another, a hunger for knowledge.
And then there was her budding sense of justice.
A few days hence, Maomao would uncover a mysterious and terrible truth concerning the deaths of several infants in the rear palace. Some said it was a curse laid upon any concubine who dared to produce an heir, but Maomao refused to regard the matter as anything supernatural.
Chapter 2: The Two Consorts"Huh! So it's true?"
"It is! She said she saw the doctor go into their rooms with her own eyes!"
Maomao sipped her soup and listened. Hundreds of serving girls were having their breakfast in the vast dining room. The meal consisted of soup and a porridge of mixed grains. She was listening to two women diagonally across from her as they traded gossip. The women took pains to look chagrined about the story, but it was an unseemly curiosity that lit their eyes.
"He visited both Lady Gyokuyou and Lady Lihua."
"Gracious, both of them? But they're only six months and three months, aren't they?"
"That's right! Maybe it really is a curse."
The names were those of the Emperor's two favorite consorts. Six months and three months were the ages of the ladies' children.
Rumors were rife in the palace. Some of them sprang from contempt for His Majesty's companions and the heirs they bore him, but others had more the savor of simple ghost stories, the sorts of tales told during the summer doldrums to beat the heat by chilling the blood.
"It must be. Otherwise, why would three separate children have died?"
All of the offspring in question had been born to consorts; that is to say, they could in principle have been heirs to the throne. One of the poor victims had been born to His Majesty before his accession, while he still lived in the Eastern Palace, and two more since he had assumed the throne, but all three had passed away in infancy. Mortality was common among infants, of course, but that three of the Emperor's own progeny should die so young was strange. Only two children, those of the consorts Gyokuyou and Lihua, still survived.
Poisonings, perhaps? Maomao mused, sipping her porridge, but she concluded it couldn't be. After all, two of the three dead children had been girls. And in a land where only men could inherit the throne, what reason was there to murder princesses?
The women across from Maomao were so busy talking about curses and hexes that they had stopped eating entirely. But
there's no such thing as curses! Maomao thought. It was stupid, that was the only word for it. How could you destroy an entire clan with one curse? Such questions bordered on the heretical, but Maomao's expertise, she felt, constituted proof of this pronouncement.
Could it have been some kind of sickness? Something bloodborne, maybe? How exactly did they die?
And that was when the detached, quiet maid began talking to her chatty dining companions. It would not be long before Maomao regretted succumbing to her curiosity.
"I don't know the whole story, but I heard they all wasted away!" Apparently inspired by Maomao's show of interest, Xiaolan, the talkative maid, thereafter regularly brought her the latest rumors. "The doctor's been to see Lady Lihua more often than Lady Gyokuyou, so I guess Lady Lihua must be worse." She wiped at a window frame with a rag as she spoke.
"Lady Lihua herself?"
"Yes, it's mother and child both."
Maomao supposed the doctor paid closer attention to Lady Lihua not necessarily because she was more sick, but because her child was a little prince. Consort Gyokuyou had borne a princess. The Imperial affection fell more upon Gyokuyou, but when one child was a boy and the other a girl, which one should receive preferential treatment was clear.
"Like I said, I don't know everything, but I've heard she has headaches and stomachaches, and even some nausea." Satisfied that she had divulged all her newest gleanings, Xiaolan busied herself with another task. By way of thanks, Maomao gave her some tea flavored with licorice. She'd made it with some herbs that grew in a corner of the central garden. It smelled strongly medicinal, but was in fact quite sweet. Xiaolan was thrilled— serving girls had all too few opportunities to enjoy sweet things.
Headache, stomachache, and nausea. Maomao had some ideas as to what illnesses these might portend, but she couldn't be sure. And her father had never tired of admonishing her not to do her thinking based on assumptions.
Maybe I'll just pay her a little visit.
Maomao was determined to finish her work as quickly as possible. The rear palace was in fact a vast place, housing more than two thousand women and five hundred eunuchs on the premises. Lowly workers like Maomao slept ten to a room, but the lower-ranked consorts had their own chambers, mid-ranking ones had whole buildings to themselves, and the highest-ranking consorts virtually had their own palaces, sprawling complexes including dining halls and gardens, large enough to dwarf a small town. Thus, Maomao rarely left the eastern quarter where she lived; there was no need. She had neither the time nor the means to leave unless she was sent on some errand.
Well, if I don't have an errand, I'll just have to make one.
Maomao spoke to a woman holding a basket. This basket contained fine silk that would have to be washed over in the laundry area in the western quarter. No one seemed to know whether there was something different about the water there, or perhaps about the people who did the washing, but apparently the silk would soon be ruined if handled here in the eastern quarter. Maomao understood that silk degraded more or less depending on whether it was dried out in the sun or kept in the shade, but she felt no particular need to tell anybody that.
"I'm just dying to get a look at that gorgeous eunuch they say lives in the central area," Maomao said, invoking one of the other rumors Xiaolan had mentioned in passing, and the woman gladly gave her the basket. Chances for anything resembling romance were few and far between in this place, so that even the eunuchs, men who were not really men, soon became something to swoon over. Stories were even told, from time to time, of women who became the wives of eunuchs after they left palace service. Presumably this was all healthier than the women lusting after each other instead, but still it puzzled Maomao.
Wonder if I'll end up like everyone else one day, she thought to herself. She crossed her arms and grunted. Romantic matters held scant interest for her.
She delivered the basket of laundry as quickly as she could, and then a red-lacquered building of the central area came into view. Carvings were everywhere, every pillar like a work of art unto itself. Each detail had been attended to, so that the whole was far more refined than anything on the fringes of the eastern quarter. At present, the largest quarters in the rear palace were occupied by Consort Lihua, the mother of the prince. The Emperor was without an Empress proper, which made Lihua, the only one of his women with a son, the most powerful person here.
The scene Maomao discovered looked almost as if it could have come from the city itself. One woman fulminated, one hung her head in gloom, while others fussed and fretted, and a man tried to make peace among them all.
It's hardly different from a brothel, Maomao thought, a cold observation made possible by her status as a third party, if not a gawker.
The upset woman was the most powerful person in the rear palace, the one hanging her head the next most powerful, and the fussy women were attendants. The man (no doubt a man no longer at this point) interceding was the doctor. So much, Maomao gathered from the whispering she heard and the general state of things around her. That first woman would have to be Consort Lihua, mother of the Imperial prince, and the second woman would be Consort Gyokuyou, blessed—though not quite so blessed as Lihua—with a daughter. As for the eunuch doctor, Maomao knew nothing about him, but she had heard that in this whole great palace there was only one person who could truly be called a practitioner of medicine.
"This is your doing. Just because you had a girl, you got it into your head to curse my prince to death!" A beautiful face distorted by anger is a frightful thing. Eyes as furious as a demon's, set in a face as pale as a ghost's, were turned upon the beautiful Gyokuyou, who held a hand to her cheek. There was a red mark under her fingers; she had, Maomao surmised, been slapped with an open hand.
"That isn't true, and you know it. My Xiaoling is suffering just as much as your son." The second woman had red hair and eyes the color of emeralds, and she answered the charges calmly, referring to the young Princess Lingli by an affectionate nickname. Consort Gyokuyou's looks suggested no small amount of western blood in her veins. Now she raised her head and glared at the doctor. "And that is why I request that you not neglect to attend to my daughter as well."
It seemed the doctor himself was the reason intercession had been needed between the two women. He had been spending all his time looking in here at the young prince, and Gyokuyou was appealing in her daughter's behalf. One sympathized with her, but this was the rear palace, and male children were more prized than female ones. The doctor, for his part, looked caught between trying to make an excuse, and total speechlessness.
What a knave, that sawbones, Maomao thought. To fail to notice with the two consorts right in front of him. How could he not have figured it out already, anyway? The dead infants, the headaches, the stomach pains, the nausea. To say nothing of Consort Lihua's ghostly pallor and frail appearance.
Muttering to herself, Maomao put the raucous scene behind her. I need something to write on, she thought. She was so busy thinking it, in fact, that she didn't even notice the person passing by.
Chapter 3: Jinshi"They're at it again," Jinshi muttered glumly to himself. It was unseemly, the way the blossoms of the palace carried on sometimes. It fell to Jinshi—one among his many responsibilities —to quiet things down.
As he waded into the crowd, Jinshi saw one person walking along as if the uproar didn't concern her. She was a petite girl with freckles peppering her nose and cheeks. There was nothing else distinctive about her, except that she paid no heed at all to Jinshi as she walked along muttering to herself. And that could well have been the end of it.
It was not quite a month later that word spread the young prince had died. Consort Lihua was consumed with weeping, and was thinner now than ever; she no longer looked anything like the woman who had once been considered the blooming rose of the court. Perhaps she suffered from the same illness as her son, or perhaps it was an affliction of the spirit that blighted her. Regardless, she could hardly hope for another child in such condition.
Princess Lingli, the half sister of the deceased prince, soon recovered from her indisposition, and she and her mother became a great comfort to the bereaved emperor. Indeed, it seemed likely Consort Gyokuyou might soon bear another child, given how often His Majesty visited.
The prince and princess had both suffered from the same mysterious illness, yet one had recovered while the other had succumbed. Could it be the age gap between them? It had been just three months, but such a span could make a significant difference in an infant's resilience. And what of Lihua? If the princess had made a recovery, then there was every reason the consort should be able to as well. Unless she was suffering chiefly from the psychological shock of losing her son.
Jinshi turned these thoughts over in his head as he reviewed some paperwork and pressed his chop to it. If there was any difference between the two children, perhaps it lay with Consort Gyokuyou.
"I'm going out for a while," Jinshi said as he stamped the final page with his chop, and promptly left the room.
The princess, cheeks as full and rosy as steamed buns, smiled at him with all the innocence a child could muster. Her tiny hand clasped into a fist around Jinshi's finger.
"No, child, let him go," her mother, a red-haired beauty, scolded gently. She wrapped the infant in swaddling clothes and put her down to sleep in her crib. The princess, apparently too warm, kicked the coverings off and lay watching the visitor, gurgling happily.
"I presume you wish to ask me something," said the consort, always a perceptive woman.
Jinshi got right to the point. "Why did the princess recover her health?"
Consort Gyokuyou allowed herself the smallest of smiles before pulling a piece of cloth from a pouch. The cloth had been torn off of something and was adorned with ungainly characters. Not only was the handwriting uneven, but the message appeared to have been written using grass stains, so in places it was faded and difficult to read.
Your face powder is poison. Don't let it touch the baby.
Perhaps the faltering quality of the handwriting was deliberate.
Jinshi cocked his head. "Your face powder?"
"Yes," Gyokuyou said, entrusting the child in the crib to a wet nurse and opening a drawer. She took out something wrapped in cloth: a ceramic vessel. She opened the lid to a puff of white powder.
"This?"
"The very same."
Perhaps, Jinshi conjectured, there was something in the powder. He remembered that Gyokuyou, already possessing the pale skin that was so prized at court, didn't need to use the powder to try to make herself more beautiful. Consort Lihua, in contrast, looked so sallow that she used more of it every day to conceal her condition.
"My little princess is quite a hungry girl," Gyokuyou said. "I don't make enough milk for her, so I hired a nurse to help." Sometimes mothers whose children had died shortly after birth found work as wet nurses. "This face powder belonged to that woman. She favored it because she felt it was whiter than other powders."
"And where is this nurse now?"
"She took ill, so I dismissed her. With ample funds for her livelihood, of course." Spoken like a woman who was both intellectual and perhaps too kind for her own good.
So say there was some kind of poison in the face powder. If the mother were to use it, it would impact the child; if whatever was in the powder got into the mother's milk, it might even end up in the child's body. Neither Jinshi nor Gyokuyou knew what such a poison might be. But if the mysterious message was to be believed, it was how the young prince had met his end. By simple face powder, makeup used by any number of people in the rear palace.
"Ignorance is a sin," Gyokuyou said. "I should have taken more care with what was going into my child's mouth."
"I'm guilty of the same crime," Jinshi said. It was ultimately he who had allowed the Emperor's son to be lost. And there may have been others who had died in the womb.
"I told Consort Lihua about the face powder, but anything I say only makes her dig in her heels," said Gyokuyou. Lihua had dark bags under her eyes even now, and used ample helpings of the white makeup to conceal the poor color of her face, never believing it was poisonous.
Jinshi gazed at the simple cotton cloth. He thought it looked strangely familiar. The hesitant quality of the characters appeared to be a ruse, but the hand had an unmistakably feminine quality.
"Who gave this to you, and when?"
"It came the day I demanded the doctor examine my daughter. I'm afraid I only succeeded in causing you trouble, but this was by the window afterward. It was tied to a rhododendron branch."
Jinshi remembered the commotion that day. Had someone in
the crowd noticed something, realized something, left a word of warning? But who? "No doctor in the palace would resort to such circuitous methods," he said.
"I agree. And ours never did seem to know how to treat the prince."
All that commotion. On reflection, Jinshi did remember a serving girl who had seemed distanced from the other rubbernecks. She had been talking to herself. What was it she had been saying?
"I need something to write on."
Jinshi felt the pieces fall into place. He started to chuckle. "Consort Gyokuyou, if I were to find the author of this message, what would you do with her?"
"I would thank her profusely. I owe her my daughter's life," the consort said, her eyes sparkling. Ah, so she was keen to discover her benefactor.
"Very well. Perhaps you would allow me to keep these for a short while."
"I eagerly await whatever you may discover." Gyokuyou looked happily at Jinshi. He returned her smile, then collected the jar of face powder and the cloth with the message on it. He searched his memory for any cloth that felt quite like this.
"Far be it from me to disappoint His Majesty's favorite lady."
Jinshi's smile had all the innocence of a child on a treasure hunt.
Chapter 4: The Nymph's SmileMaomao first learned of the prince's passing when black mourning sashes were distributed at the evening meal. The women would wear them for seven days to demonstrate their sorrow. But what caused more frowns than anything was the announcement that their serving of meat, already miserly, would be eliminated entirely for the duration. The women servants ate two meals a day, chiefly millet and soup, with the occasional vegetable. It was enough for the petite Maomao, but many of the women found the meals something less than filling.
There were many kinds of women among this lowest class of servants. Some came from farming families; others were city girls; and although uncommon, a few were the daughters of officials. Children of the bureaucracy could expect a modicum more respect, but even so, the work a woman was given to do depended on her own accomplishments. A girl who couldn't read or write could certainly not expect to become a consort with her own chambers. Being a consort was a job. You even got a salary.
I guess maybe it didn't matter, in the end.
Maomao was aware of what had killed the young prince. It was Consort Lihua's and her serving women's liberal use of white powder to cover her face. That powder was so expensive, the average citizen couldn't expect to use it a day in her life. Some of the more established ladies in the brothel had had it, though. Some of them made more money in a single night than a farmer would earn in his entire lifetime, and they could afford their own makeup. Others received it as an expensive present.
The women would cover themselves in it from their faces down to their necks, and it would eat away at their bodies. Some of them died from it. Maomao's father had warned them to stop using it, but they ignored him. Maomao, attending at her father's side, had witnessed several courtesans waste away and die with her own eyes. They had weighed their lives against their beauty, and in the end had lost them both.
That was why Maomao had broken off a couple of convenient branches, scrawled a brief message to each of the consorts, and left it for them. Not that she had expected them to heed a warning from a servant girl who couldn't get her hands on so much as paper or a brush.
After the mourning period was over and the black sashes disappeared, she began to hear rumors about Consort Gyokuyou. People said that after the loss of the prince, the Emperor, sick at heart, had begun to take comfort with Gyokuyou and his surviving daughter. But to Consort Lihua, who had lost her child just as he had, he did not go.
How convenient for him. Maomao drained her bowl of soup— today furnished with the smallest sliver of a piece of fish—then cleaned up her utensils and headed to work.
"A summons, sir?" Maomao was carrying a laundry basket when she was stopped by a eunuch, who told her to report to the office of the Matron of the Serving Women.
The Office of Serving Women was one of the three major divisions of service in the rear palace, and encompassed responsibility for the lowest-ranking of the women servants. The other two divisions were the Office of the Interior, which dealt with the consorts, and the Domestic Service Department, to which the eunuchs were attached.
What could she want with me? Maomao wondered. The eunuch was talking to other serving girls nearby, as well. Whatever was going on, it involved more than just Maomao. They must need more hands for some chore or other, she reasoned. She set the basket outside its proper room, then went following after the eunuch.
The Matron of the Serving Women's building was situated just to one side of the main gate, one of the four gates that separated the rear palace from the world outside. When the Emperor visited his ladies, this was the entrance through which he passed.
Despite being there on an official summons, Maomao didn't feel comfortable in the place. Although it was somewhat lackluster compared to the headquarters of the Office of the Interior, located next door, it was still noticeably more ornate than the residences of the mid-level consorts. The railing was worked with elaborate carvings, and brightly colored dragons climbed the vermilion pillars.
Urged inside, Maomao was somewhat less impressed than she had expected to be: the only furnishing in the room was a single large desk. Ten or so other serving girls besides her were present, and they seemed animated by anxiety, anticipation, and a strange sort of excitement.
"All right, thank you. The rest of you may go home," the eunuch said.
Huh? Maomao felt unnatural, being singled out this way. She went alone into the next room as the remaining women left with suspicious glances in her direction.
Even for the chamber of an appointed official, it was a large space. Maomao looked around, intrigued, whereupon she noticed that all the serving women in the room were looking in one particular direction. Sitting unobtrusively in the corner was a woman, attended by a eunuch, and not far away was another, somewhat older woman. Maomao remembered the middle-aged woman to be the Matron of the Serving Women, but the haughtylooking lady she didn't recognize.
Hrm? Now she registered that the person's shoulders were rather broad for a woman's, and their dress was so plain. Their hair was mostly held back by a sort of scarf, the rest of it cascading down behind them. He's a man?
He was surveying the female servants with a smile as soft and gentle as that of a heavenly nymph. Even the Matron was blushing like a girl. Suddenly Maomao understood the flush in everyone's cheeks. This had to be the immensely beautiful eunuch of whom she had heard so much. He had hair as fine as silk, an almost liquid presence, almond-shaped eyes, and eyebrows that evoked willow branches. A heavenly nymph on a picture scroll could not have competed with him for loveliness.
What a waste, Maomao thought, not remotely blushing herself. The men in the rear palace were all eunuchs, deprived of their ability to reproduce. They now lacked the equipment they needed to bear children. Precisely how gorgeous the offspring of this man would have been would remain a matter for the imagination.
Just as Maomao was thinking (with no small amount of impertinence) that such almost inhuman beauty might ensnare even the attentions of His Majesty, the eunuch stood up with a flowing motion. He went over to a desk, took up a brush, and began to write with elegant movements of his hand and arm. Then, with a smile as sweet as ambrosia, he displayed his work to the women.
Maomao froze.
You there, with the freckles, it said. You stay here.
That, at least, was the gist of it. The beautiful man must have noticed Maomao's reaction, because he turned his fullest smile on her. He rolled up the paper again and clapped his hands twice. "We're done here for today. You may all go back to your rooms."
The women, with plentiful disappointed glances back over their shoulders, exited the room. They would never know what had been written on the nymph's paper.
Maomao watched them leave, and after a moment it occurred to her that they were all petite women with prominent freckles. But they hadn't heeded the sign, which must mean that they couldn't read.
The message hadn't been for Maomao alone. She made to leave the room with the others, only to feel a hand placed firmly on her shoulder. With much fear and trembling, she turned around to find herself confronted with the almost blinding smile of the nymph-man.
"Now, now, mustn't do that," he said. "I want you to stay behind."
That smile—so bold, so bright—wouldn't take no for an answer.
Chapter 5: Attendant"Most interesting. I was given to understand that you couldn't read," the beautiful eunuch said slowly, deliberately. Maomao followed uncomfortably behind him as he walked along.
"No, sir. I am of lowly birth. There must be some mistake."
Who the hell would teach me? she thought, but she would hardly have said the words if she'd been under torture. Maomao was set on acting as ignorant as she could. Maybe her language was a little off, but what could she do about it? Someone of such mean origins could be expected to do no better.
The lower-ranked serving girls were handled differently depending on whether or not they could read. Those who were literate and those who were not each had their uses, but if one could read yet pretend ignorance—ah, now that was the way to walk the fine line in the middle.
The beautiful eunuch introduced himself as Jinshi. His gorgeous smile suggested he wouldn't hurt a flea, but Maomao felt something shifty behind it. How else could he needle her so remorselessly? Jinshi had told Maomao to be silent and follow him. And that brought them to this moment. Maomao was aware that, as a servant of no import, shaking her head at Jinshi might be the last thing she ever did with it, so she had obediently done as he said. She was busy calculating what might happen next, and how she would deal with it.
It wasn't as if she couldn't guess what might have inspired Jinshi to summon her; what remained mysterious was how he had figured it out. The message she had delivered to the consort.
A piece of cloth dangled with affected nonchalance in Jinshi's hand. It was festooned with unkempt characters. Maomao had told no one she could write, and had likewise kept silent about her background as an apothecary and her knowledge of poisons. He could never have tracked her by her handwriting. She thought she had been careful to ensure there had been no one around when she delivered the message, but perhaps she had missed something, been seen by someone. The witness must have reported a petite servant girl with freckles.
No doubt Jinshi had begun by canvassing all the girls who could write, collecting samples of their calligraphy. One could attempt to appear a less competent wielder of the brush than one was, but telltale signs and identifying characteristics would remain. When that search had proved in vain, he would have turned to the girls who could not write.
Suspicious fart. Too much time on his hands...
As Maomao was having these uncharitable thoughts, they arrived at their destination. It was, as she might have expected, Consort Gyokuyou's pavilion. Jinshi knocked on the door and a placid voice responded, "Come in."
So they did. Inside they discovered a gorgeous woman with red hair, lovingly cradling an infant with curly locks. The child's cheeks were rosy, her skin the same pale tone as her mother's. She was the picture of health as she lay dozing sweetly in the consort's arms.
"I have brought the one you wished to see, milady." Jinshi no longer spoke in the jocular manner of earlier, but comported himself with perfect gravity.
"Thank you for your trouble." Gyokuyou smiled, a smile that was warmer than Jinshi's, and bowed her head to Maomao.
Maomao looked at her in surprise. "I possess no station to warrant such acknowledgment, milady." She chose her words carefully, trying not to offend. Although, not having been born to a life where such care was necessary, she wasn't sure she was doing it right.
"Oh, but you do. And I will do much more than this to show my gratitude to you—my daughter's savior."
"I'm certain there's been some misunderstanding. Perhaps you have the wrong person," Maomao said. She felt herself break into a cold sweat: she was being polite, but she was still contradicting an Imperial consort. She wished for her head to remain attached to her shoulders, but she did not wish to be a part of anything involving people such as this—to be pressed into any kind of service for any kind of noble or royal.
Jinshi, alert to the concern on Gyokuyou's face, displayed the cloth to Maomao with a flourish. "Are you aware that this is the material used in the maids' work clothes?"
"Now that you mention it, sir, I see the resemblance." She would play stupid to the bitter end. Even though she knew it was useless.
"It's more than a resemblance. This came from the uniform of a girl connected to the shang of sartorial affairs."
The palace serving staff were grouped into six shang, or main offices of employment. The shang fu, or Wardrobe Service, dealt with the dispensation of clothing, and it was this group to which Maomao, who was largely charged with doing laundry, belonged.
The unbleached skirt she wore matched the color of the fabric in Jinshi's hands. If anyone were to inspect her skirt, they would find an unusual seam, hidden carefully on the inside.
In other words, the proof was there before them. Maomao doubted Jinshi would do anything so uncouth as to check for himself right in front of Consort Gyokuyou, but she couldn't be sure. She decided she had best own up before she was publicly humiliated.
"What exactly is it that you both want from me?" she asked.
The two of them looked at each other, apparently taking this for confirmation. Both had the sweetest of smiles on their faces. The only sound in the room was the whispering breath of the sleeping child and, almost as soft, Maomao sighing.
The very next day, Maomao was obliged to pack up her meager belongings. Xiaolan and all the other women who shared a room with her were properly jealous, and pestered her endlessly about how this turn of events had come about. Maomao could only give her most strained smile and try to pretend it was no great matter.
Maomao was to be a lady-in-waiting to the Emperor's favored consort.
She had, in a word, made it.
Chapter 6: Poison TesterJinshi found this a most congenial turn of events. The unusual girl he had discovered by sheer chance would now help him solve one of his many problems.
Lady Gyokuyou, the Emperor's favored consort, was presently served by four ladies-in-waiting. That might be enough for some concubine of mean account, but for a high-ranking consort like Gyokuyou, it seemed rather too few. The ladies-in-waiting, however, insisted that the four of them were perfectly sufficient to take care of everything that needed doing, and Gyokuyou herself didn't seem inclined to press for more servants.
Jinshi understood well why this was the case. Consort Gyokuyou was a cheerful and generally tranquil person, but she was also intelligent and careful. In the garden of women that was the rear palace, a woman who received the Imperial favor and was not suspicious of others was in mortal danger. There had, in fact, been several prior attempts on Gyokuyou's life. Notably, when she had become pregnant with the child who would go on to be Princess Lingli.
And so, although she had had ten ladies-in-waiting at first, she now had less than half that number. Typically, a lady only brought her own servants with her when she first arrived at the rear palace, but Gyokuyou had called on special privilege to bring in that nursemaid. She would never accept an anonymous servant girl from some far-flung corner of the rear palace as one of her ladies-in-waiting. But she had her station as a high consort to think of. Surely she could take on at least one more woman.
And this was where the freckled girl came in. She had saved Gyokuyou's daughter; surely the consort wouldn't be averse to her. What was more, the girl knew something about poisons. That could only be useful. There was always the possibility that this freckled girl would put her knowledge to evil ends, but if she tried anything, they would simply have to corner her somewhere she couldn't do anything harmful. It was all so simple.
If all else failed, Jinshi thought with a grin, he could always use his charms. Yes, he found it just as repugnant as everyone else that he was so ready to take advantage of his ethereal beauty. But he had no intention of changing his ways. Indeed, his looks were what gave Jinshi his value in life.
When one became a servant assigned to a specific mistress, and a lady-in-waiting to the Emperor's favorite consort at that, one found that one's treatment improved. Maomao, who had heretofore been squarely at the bottom of the palace hierarchy, suddenly found herself in the middle ranks. She was told her salary would see a significant increase, although twenty percent of what she earned went to her "family," which was to say, the merchants who had sold her into this life. A distasteful arrangement, in her opinion. A system created so greedy officials could line their pockets.
She was also given her own room—cramped, but a far cry from the overcrowded accommodations she had shared in the past. From a meager reed mat and a single sheet for bedding, she now found herself with an actual bed. Granted, it took up half her room, but Maomao was frankly happy to be able to get up in the morning without treading all over her coworkers.
She had one more cause for celebration as well, although she wouldn't know it until later.
The Jade Pavilion, in which Gyokuyou lived, was home to four other ladies-in-waiting besides Maomao. A nursemaid had lately been dismissed, allegedly because the princess was beginning to be weaned, but Maomao thought she had an inkling of the real reason. It was an awfully small number of women, in view of the fact that Consort Lihua had more than ten ladies-in-waiting attending upon her. Gyokuyou's ladies were more than a little taken aback to discover that one of the least important people in the palace had suddenly been elevated to their colleague, but they never harassed Maomao in the way she had half expected. If anything, they seemed sympathetic toward her.
But why? she thought.
She would find out soon enough.
A palace meal, packed with ingredients traditionally believed to be of medicinal benefit, sat before her. One by one, Hongniang, the head of Gyokuyou's ladies-in-waiting, took samples and put them on little saucers, placing them in front of Maomao. Gyokuyou observed the scene apologetically but gave no indication that she was going to stop what was happening. The other three ladies-in-waiting likewise watched with pitying gazes.
The location was Gyokuyou's room. It was appointed in the highest style, and it was where the consort ate all her meals. Before the food reached her, it would pass through the hands of many others, and being the Emperor's favorite, it behooved her to consider the possibility that one or more of those hands might try to poison the product.
Thus a food taster was necessary. Everyone was on edge because of what had happened to the young prince. Rumors were rampant that the princess might have been sickened by the same poison the infant boy died from. The ladies-in-waiting hadn't been informed of what the toxic substance had ultimately been discovered to be, and so they were understandably paranoid that it might be in anything or everything.
It would not have been strange if they'd viewed the lowly servant girl sent to them at that moment, specifically to be a food taster, as nothing but a disposable pawn. Maomao was charged not only with tasting Consort Gyokuyou's meals, but also the baby food served to the princess. On those occasions when His Majesty was present, she was also responsible for sampling the luxurious edibles offered to him.
After it was discovered that Gyokuyou was pregnant, Maomao was given to understand, there had been two separate instances of attempted poisoning. In one, the taster had gotten off without real injury, but another had found themselves subject to a nerve toxin that had left their arms and legs paralyzed. The remaining ladies-in-waiting had had, with much fear and trembling, to check the food themselves, so they frankly must have been grateful for Maomao's arrival.
Maomao furrowed her brow as she looked at the plate in front
of her. It was ceramic.
If they're so scared of poison, they should be using silver. She picked up the little bit of pickled vegetable in her chopsticks and regarded it critically. She took a sniff. Then she placed it on her tongue, checking to see whether it caused a tingling sensation before she swallowed it.
I don't think I'm actually qualified to be tasting for poisons, she reflected. Fast-acting agents were one thing, but with regard to slower toxins she expected to be somewhat useless. In the name of science, Maomao had accustomed her body to a variety of poisons by gradual exposure, and suspected there were few left that would have a serious effect on her. This was not, let it be said, a part of her work as an apothecary, but purely a way of satisfying her intellectual curiosity. In the west, she heard, they had a name for researchers who did things that made no sense to people: mad scientists. Even her father, who had taught her the apothecary's trade, grew exasperated with her little experiments.
When she was satisfied that there were no untoward physical effects and that she detected no poisons she knew of, the meal could finally make its way to Consort Gyokuyou. Next would come the flavorless baby food.
"I think it might be best to change the plates to ones made of silver," she said to Hongniang, as flatly as possible. She had been called to Hongniang's room to provide a report on her first day of work. The chief lady's chambers were generous in size, but unadorned with any frivolous objects, bespeaking Hongniang's practical bent.
Hongniang, an attractive, black-haired woman not quite thirty years of age, let out a sigh. "Jinshi really had it all figured out." She confessed with some chagrin that they had deliberately not used silver tableware at the eunuch's instruction.
Maomao had a distinct suspicion that it was also Jinshi who had ordered her appointed food taster. She struggled not to let her already cold expression turn into one of outright disgust as she listened to Hongniang talk. "I don't know why you decided to hide your knowledge, but it's amazing that you know so much about poisons and medicine both. If you'd told them from the start that you knew how to write, you could have gotten a lot more money."
"My knowledge comes from my vocation—I was an apothecary. Until I was abducted and sold into this place. My kidnappers receive a portion of my salary even now. The thought turns my stomach." Maomao's hackles were up now and her words came in a sharp rush, but the chief lady-in-waiting didn't rebuke her.
"You mean you were willing to put up with receiving less than you were worth to make sure they had one less cup of wine when they were carousing." Hongniang, it seemed, was more than perceptive enough to grasp Maomao's motives. Maomao found herself simply relieved that Hongniang hadn't scolded her for what she said. "Not to mention that women of no special distinction serve a couple of years and then go on their merry
ways. Plenty of replacements out there."
She didn't have to understand quite that well.
Hongniang took a carafe from the table and gave it to Maomao. "What's this?" Maomao asked, but almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth, a pain shot through her wrist. She dropped the carafe on the floor in her shock. A large crack spidered through the ceramic vessel.
"Oh, my goodness, that's quite an expensive piece of pottery. Certainly not something a simple lady-in-waiting could afford. You won't be able to make remittances to your family anymore with that hanging over your head—in fact, we should probably bill
them."
Maomao understood immediately what Hongniang was saying, and the slightest ironic smile crept over her otherwise expressionless face. "My profound apologies," she said. "Please, deduct it from the amount of my salary that's sent home each month. And if that isn't enough, by all means, take from my own share as well."
"Thank you, I'll make sure the Matron of the Serving Women knows to do that. And one more thing." Hongniang put the broken carafe back on the table before taking a wood-strip roll out of a drawer and writing on it in quick, short strokes. "This details your
additional salary as a food taster. Hazard pay, you might call it."
The amount was almost as much again as Maomao was
currently receiving. And insofar as nothing would be taken from it to pay her captors, Maomao came out ahead.
This woman does know how to use the carrot, she thought as she bowed deeply and left the room.
Chapter 7: BranchThe four ladies-in-waiting who had always attended Consort Gyokuyou were exceptionally hard workers. Granted, the Jade Pavilion was not the largest place, but they kept it humming along neatly, just the four of them. Serving girls from the shangqin—the Housekeeping Service, those charged with keeping rooms clean— did come sometimes, but by and large the four ladies-in-waiting handled all the cleaning and tidying themselves. That was not, for the record, something ladies-in-waiting typically did.
All of this meant that the new girl, Maomao, had little to possess her other than tasting the food. Besides Hongniang, none of the other ladies-in-waiting ever asked Maomao to do anything. Maybe they felt bad that she was stuck with the most unpleasant job, or maybe they simply didn't want her intruding on their turf. Whatever the reason, even when Maomao offered to help, they would gently rebuff her with an, "Oh, don't worry about it," and urge her to go back to her room.
How am I supposed to settle in here?
Cooped up in her room, she was summoned twice daily to meals, once to afternoon tea, and every few days to try one of the sumptuous banquets offered when the Emperor came calling. That was all. Hongniang was kind enough to try to find little tasks for Maomao to do, but they were never anything difficult, and didn't occupy her for long.
In addition to her tasting duties, she found her own meals became more elaborate. Sweet treats were offered at tea, and when there were extras, they would be sent to Maomao. And because she was no longer working like an ant as she once had been, all those extra nutrients went to flesh.
I feel like some kind of livestock.
Her new appointment as food taster had brought with it another thing Maomao didn't like. She had always been rather slim, but this meant that if a poison caused her to waste away, it would be hard to detect. What was more, the dosage of any given toxin that might be deadly was in proportion to one's body size. A little extra weight could improve her chances of survival.
In Maomao's mind, there was no way she could miss a poison so powerful as to make her waste away, and meanwhile she was confident she could survive an ordinarily fatal dose of many toxins. But no one around her seemed to share her optimism. They only saw a small, delicate girl being treated like a disposable pawn, and they pitied her for it. And so they plied her with congee even after she was full, and always gave her an extra serving of vegetables.
They remind me of the girls from the brothels. Maomao could be cold, reticent, and unsentimental, but for some reason the women had always doted on her. They always had an extra treat or a bit of something for her to eat.
Although Maomao didn't realize it, there was a reason people were so inclined to look kindly on her. Running along her left arm was a collection of scars. Cuts, stabs, burns, and what seemed to be repeated piercing with a needle. That is to say, to others, Maomao looked like a petite, overthin girl with wounds on her arm. Her arms were frequently bandaged, her face sometimes pale, and once in a while she was given to fainting. People simply assumed, with a tear in their eye, that her coldness and reticence were the natural result of the treatment she had suffered to this point in her life. She had been abused, they were sure—but they were wrong.
Maomao had done all of it to herself.
She was most interested in discovering the effects of various medicines, analgesics, and other concoctions firsthand. She would take small doses of poison to inure herself to them, and had been known to let herself be bitten by venomous snakes. And as for the fainting, well, she didn't always get the dosage quite right. This was also why the wounds were concentrated on her left arm: it was preferable to her dominant limb, her right.
None of this sprang from any masochistic proclivity for pain, but was fueled entirely by the interests of a girl whose intellectual curiosity inclined rather too much in the direction of medicines and poisons. It had been her father's burden to cope with her for her entire life. Yes, it was he who had taught Maomao her letters and first instructed her in the ways of medicine, in the hopes that she would see a way forward in life other than prostitution, even though he had been obliged to raise her in and around the redlight district. By the time he realized he had far too apt a student on his hands, it was too late, and the calumnies about him had already begun to spread. There were a few who understood, just a few; but most turned cold, hard gazes on Maomao's father. They never for a moment imagined that a girl of her age might commit self-harm in the name of experimentation.
And so the story seemed to be complete: after suffering long abuse at the hands of her father, this poor child had been sold off to the rear palace, where she was now to be sacrificed to discover poison in the consort's food. A sorrowful tale indeed.
And one of which the protagonist was entirely unaware.
I'm going to be a pig at this rate! About the time Maomao began to fret about this particular possibility, her woes were compounded by a most unwelcome visitor.
"It's rather late for you," Consort Gyokuyou said as a newcomer entered the room.
The caller in question was the nymph-like eunuch, this time with one of his compatriots in tow. The gorgeous youth evidently made routine rounds of the chambers of the upper consorts. Maomao tasted the sweets the compatriot had brought for poison, then withdrew discreetly behind Consort Gyokuyou where she reclined on a chaise longue. Maomao was standing in for Hongniang, who had gone to change the princess's diaper. Eunuchs these men may have been, but they were still not allowed an audience with the consort without the presence of a lady-in-waiting.
"Yes, there's been word that the barbarian tribe has been successfully subdued."
"Has it? And what's to come of it?" Gyokuyou's eyes glowed with curiosity; this subject was more than enough to excite the interest of a bird trapped in the cage that was the rear palace. Though she was the Emperor's favorite, Gyokuyou was also still young, not more than a couple or three years older than Maomao herself, as Maomao understood it.
"I'm not certain it's appropriate to discuss in front of a lady such as yourself..."
"I wouldn't be here if I couldn't endure both the beautiful and the terrible in this world," Gyokuyou said boldly.
Jinshi glanced at Maomao, an appraising look that swiftly vanished. He insisted there was nothing interesting about the subject, but proceeded to speak of the world outside the birdcage.
Some days before, a band of warriors had been sent out, on information that a tribe was once again plotting ill. This country was largely a peaceful one, but issues such as this did sometimes mar its tranquility.
The warriors successfully drove back the barbarian scouts who had ventured into the territory, with hardly a casualty to speak of. The trouble started on the way home. The food in the encampment was compromised, and almost a dozen men came down with food poisoning. Many more were deeply demoralized. They had obtained the provisions at a nearby village just prior to coming into contact with the barbarians. The villages in this area were technically part of Maomao's nation, but historically they were not without their ties to the barbarian tribes.
One of the soldiers, armed, arrested the village chieftain. Several villagers who attempted to resist were killed on the spot for conspiring with the barbarians. The rest of the villagers would learn their fate after it was determined what would happen to their chief.
When Jinshi had delivered this précis of events, he took a sip of tea.
That's outrageous. Maomao wanted to grab her head in her hands. She wished she had never heard the story. There were so many things in the world one would be happier not knowing. The eunuch saw the furrow in her brow and turned his fine countenance on her.
Don't look at me.
Ah, if only wishes made things so.
Jinshi's lips formed a gentle arch as he took in Maomao's expression. He almost seemed to be testing her with his smile.
"Something on your mind?"
It was as good as an order to say something, so she had to find something to say.
Will it even matter? she asked herself. But one thing was for certain: if she said nothing, then at least one village would disappear off the map of the frontier.
"I offer you only my personal opinion," Maomao said, and picked a branch out of a nearby vase in which some flowers had been arranged. This branch, which had no blossoms itself, was from a rhododendron. The same kind of branch upon which Maomao had left her message. She plucked off a leaf and put it in her mouth.
"Is it flavorful?" Consort Gyokuyou asked, but Maomao shook her head.
"No, ma'am. Touching it can induce nausea and difficulty breathing."
"And yet you've just had it in your mouth," Jinshi said with a probing look.
"You needn't fret," Maomao said to the eunuch, setting the branch on the table. "But you see, even here on the grounds of the rear palace, there are poisonous plants. The rhododendron's poison is in the leaves, but others contain their toxins in the branches or roots. Some release poison if you so much as burn them up." These hints, Maomao suspected, would be enough to lead the eunuchs and the clever Gyokuyou where she wanted them to go. Despite doubting it was necessary to continue, she did so: "When encamped, soldiers make their chopsticks and campfires from local materials, do they not?" "Ah," Jinshi said.
"But that—" Gyokuyou added.
It would mean the villagers had been punished unjustly.
Maomao watched as Jinshi rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
I don't know how important this Jinshi is...
But she hoped that he might be able to help in some way, however minor. Hongniang came back with Princess Lingli, and Maomao left the room.
Chapter 8: Love PotionThere was the young man with his inhuman beauty and his perpetual, divine smile. Even the way he sat on the cloth-draped sofa in the sitting room was elegant.
What's he want today? Maomao thought. Her cold detachment was not shared by the three ladies-in-waiting who blushed and bustled off to make tea for the guest. Maomao could hear them arguing in the next room over who would have the honor of preparing it. Finally, an exasperated Hongniang made the drink herself, sending the other three ladies back to their rooms. They went with their shoulders slumped, the very picture of dejection.
Maomao, the food taster, picked up the silver teacup and gave it a delicate sniff before taking a mouthful of tea. Jinshi had been watching her this entire time, and it made her fidgety. She squinted so she wouldn't have to meet his eyes. Most young women would have been quite satisfied to have the attention of such a fine man, even if he was a eunuch. But not Maomao. She didn't much share the interests of the common run of people, so even if she acknowledged intellectually that Jinshi was intensely beautiful, she still watched him at a remove.
"Someone gave me some treats. Would you be so kind as to taste them, too?"
Jinshi indicated a basket filled with baozi. Maomao took one of the buns and pulled it open, discovering a filling of minced meat and vegetables. She took a sniff; it had a faintly medicinal odor she recognized. It was the same as the stamina booster from the other day.
"An aphrodisiac," she said.
"You can tell without tasting it?"
"It's not harmful to speak of. Go ahead and take them home with you. Enjoy them."
"I don't think I could, knowing who they came from."
"Indeed. I think you might have a visitor this evening."
Maomao made sure to sound downright nonchalant. Jinshi, who had clearly not expected this reaction, looked at a loss. He was just lucky she didn't give him her staring-at-a-worm look. Giving her a bun to taste when he knew there was an aphrodisiac in it!
There remained the question of who had given him the baozi. Consort Gyokuyou laughed to overhear their conversation, her voice like the tinkling of a bell. Princess Lingli slept peacefully at her feet.
Maomao bowed and made to leave the room.
"Just a moment, if you please."
"Do you need something further, sir?"
Jinshi and Gyokuyou shared a look, then nodded at each other. It seemed they had already discussed whatever was going on— and it involved Maomao.
"Perhaps you could make a love potion."
For just an instant, Maomao's eyes lit up with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. What's that supposed to mean?
She couldn't imagine what they wanted with such a thing, but the subject was one she would be more than happy to entertain.
Forcing herself not to smile, she replied, "I need three things:
tools, materials, and time."
Could she make a love potion? Oh, yes. Yes, she could.
Jinshi wondered what was the matter. His eyebrows furrowed like drooping willow branches, and he crossed his arms. Jinshi was a person of such beauty that some said if he had only been born a woman, he could have had the country under his thumb; indeed, it was held that had he wished to, he could have convinced the very Emperor to affirm that gender meant nothing.
But such "praise" brought him no pleasure.
Today as he went about the rear palace, he had once again found himself the object of something like catcalls, by one of the middle-ranked consorts and two of the lower-ranked ones, and even by two separate male officials in the palace, one military and one bureaucratic. The military official had even given him dim sum laced with a stamina tonic, so Jinshi decided to forgo his rounds tonight and retire to his rooms in the palace instead. He wasn't slacking off; it was for his own protection.
He quickly noted some names on the scroll lying open on his desk—the names of the consorts who had called out to him today. Even if she had scant visits from the Emperor, it was awfully audacious of a woman to try to invite another man into her bedchamber. Jinshi's list was not an official report, but he suspected they would be even less likely to receive an Imperial visit after this.
He wondered how many of the little birds trapped in this cage understood that his own beauty was a testing stone for the women of the rear palace. Women were chosen to be consorts based first and foremost on family background, but beauty and intelligence played their part, too. Compared to the first two qualities, intelligence was trickier to measure. They also needed an upbringing befitting a mother to the nation, and of course they must be of chaste outlook.
The Emperor, in a nasty little tweak, had made Jinshi the standard for selecting his consorts. It was in fact Jinshi who had recommended both Gyokuyou and Lihua. Gyokuyou was thoughtful and perceptive. Lihua was more emotional, but possessed unimpeachable manners. And both had unquestioned loyalty to His Majesty, without a shadow of untoward feelings.
Consort Lihua, though, now seemed to have no place in His Majesty's adoration.
The Emperor might have been Jinshi's master, but he was also, in Jinshi's estimation, terrible. He set up concubines purely based on their usefulness to him and the country, got them pregnant, and then when the children showed no aptitudes, he would cut them loose.
In the future, Jinshi surmised, the Imperial affection would continue to incline ever more toward Gyokuyou. The death of the young prince had marked the Emperor's final visit to Lihua, who now seemed as insubstantial as a ghost. Lihua was not the only consort for whom it seemed His Majesty no longer had any need. Those women would be quietly returned to their homes at an opportune moment, or else gifted as wives to various officials.
Jinshi pulled a particular paper out of his pile. It referred to a middle consort of the Upper Fourth rank, Fuyou by name. She had just been promised in marriage to the leader of the assault on the barbarian tribe in recognition of his military valor. Truth be told, they were less appreciative of the man's energetic destruction of the enemy than of his restraining certain short-tempered elements among his own troops. That a certain small village had been blamed and punished for something it hadn't done was not a fact that had been made public. Such was politics.
"Now then, I wonder if it will all go well."
If everything went just as he had calculated in his head, there would be no problems. He might have to lean on the chilly apothecary to help him out with a few things, though. She had turned out to be even more useful than he'd expected.
She wasn't the only one who showed no special desire for him, but she was the first to regard him as though she were looking at a worm. She seemed to think she hid the feeling well, but the disdain was clear on her face.
Jinshi smiled in spite of himself. That smile, like nectar from heaven, some said, contained just a hint of something mean in it. He wasn't a masochist as such, but he found the girl's reaction intriguing. He felt like a child with a brand-new toy.
"Yes, where will this all lead?"
Jinshi placed the papers under a weight and decided to go to sleep. He made sure to lock his door in case he should have any uninvited visitors during the night.
People spoke of "cure-alls," but in fact there was no medicine that would cure all. Her father had always insisted as much, but Maomao had admittedly gone through a phase in which she had rejected his claim. She had wanted to create a medicine that could work on anyone, for any condition. That was what had led her to inflict those ugly wounds on herself, and had indeed resulted in the creation of some new medicines, but a true panacea remained nothing more than a dream.
As much as she hated to admit it, the story Jinshi brought her was enough to pique Maomao's interest. Since arriving in the rear palace, she'd been unable to make much more than sweet amacha tea. To her surprise, a variety of medicinal herbs did grow on the grounds of the rear palace, but she lacked the implements necessary to make proper use of them, and trying to do anything with them would have attracted undesirable attention in her crowded quarters anyway, so she forced herself to leave the plants alone.
This was what she liked best about having her own room. Now she just needed excuses to go gather ingredients—laundry was a convenient one. She suspected Hongniang would soon see to it that Maomao was entrusted with all the washing.
Now she arrived at the room she had been told was the doctor's, ostensibly to deliver clean laundry. She entered the room to discover the lamentable quack himself along with the eunuch who so frequently accompanied Jinshi. The doctor had a mustache that made him look like a loach fish, which he stroked as he gave Maomao an appraising glance. He seemed to be wondering what this petite young woman was doing on his turf.
I'll thank you not to stare so hard at a young lady, Maomao thought.
The eunuch, by comparison, was as polite as if Maomao were his own master, ushering her gracefully into the room. When Maomao saw the space, surrounded by medicine cabinets on three sides, she was overcome by the biggest smile she'd smiled since coming to the rear palace. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes brimmed, and her lips went from a thin, implacable line to a gentle arch.
The eunuch looked at her in surprise, but what did she care? She gazed at the labels on the drawers, doing a sort of little dance when she spotted an especially unusual pharmaceutical.
The joy was simply too much to keep inside.
"Is she under some sort of spell?" Maomao had been indulging this rapture for a good half an hour, unaware that Jinshi had appeared in the room. He watched her with a mixture of curiosity and sheer bewilderment.
Maomao went row by row, collecting any ingredients she might be able to use. Each one went into a separate baggie, the name written carefully on the package. In an era when most writing was still done on rolls of wood strips, such extensive use of paper was a luxury. The loach-mustached doctor came peeking into the room, wondering who or what was in there, but the eunuch closed the door on him. The eunuch's name, Maomao learned, was Gaoshun. He had a steady countenance and a well-built body, and if he hadn't been here in the rear palace, she would certainly have taken him for some sort of military official. He appeared to be Jinshi's aide, and was often seen in his company.
Gaoshun politely fetched any medicines that were in drawers too high for Maomao to reach. His superior, meanwhile, did nothing. Maomao maintained a neutral expression but privately wished that if he wasn't going to make himself useful, he would go away.
Maomao spotted a familiar name on one of the topmost drawers and craned her neck for a better look. Gaoshun passed the stuff to her, and she looked at it in wonder. Several small seeds rested in the palm of her hand. They were exactly what she needed, but there weren't enough of them.
"I need more of these."
"Then we shall simply get them," the indolent eunuch said with an indulgent smile. As if it were so easy.
"They're from all the way in the west, then farther west, then south."
"Trade's the thing. We'll check the goods that come in, and I suspect we'll find some." Jinshi took one of the seeds between his fingers. It resembled the seed of an apricot, but had a unique aroma. "What is it called?"
"Cacao," Maomao replied.
Chapter 9: Cacao"At least I grasp its effectiveness now," Jinshi said with an annoyed glance at Maomao.
"As do I," Maomao said.
Jinshi looked almost overcome by the catastrophic scene in front of him. "Ugh," he said, and there was no hint of his usual detached smile. There was only fatigue on his face. "How did this happen?"
To answer that question, we'll have to go back in time a few hours.
The cacao they were sent was no longer in seed form, but had been powdered. All the other ingredients Maomao had requested had already arrived at the kitchen of the Jade Pavilion. Three of the ladies-in-waiting were busy trying to look on, but a word from Hongniang sent them scurrying back to their work.
Milk, butter, sugar, honey, distilled spirits and dried fruits, and some oils derived from aromatic herbs to give everything a pleasant odor. All nutritious—and expensive—ingredients, and all useful in a stamina concoction.
Maomao had tasted cacao only once. It had been in a hardened, sweetened form called chocolate, and she had received it from one of the prostitutes. It had been a piece hardly the size of the tip of her finger, but on eating it, she felt she had drunk an entire cup of some especially sharp liquor. It made her oddly giddy.
The chocolate was, the woman had explained, a gift from an especially nasty customer who had hoped to buy the affections of a girl who had been sold into prostitution, by offering her a rare treat. When the girl noticed Maomao's altered state, however, she was deeply angry, and the madam of the brothel forbade the customer from coming back. It came to light later that a trading concern had started to sell the stuff as an aphrodisiac. Maomao had managed to obtain a handful of seeds since then, but she had never used them as medicine. No one in the red-light district came to the apothecary seeking something so extravagant for a simple medicament.
Even now, Maomao remembered the chocolate for the way it had been hardened with oil and fat. Her wide experience with an eclectic collection of medicines and poisons in all their various flavors and aromas naturally also gave her an excellent memory for ingredients.
It was still the hot season, and she suspected butter wouldn't set well, so she decided to cover some fruit instead. A bit of ice would be perfect, but that was of course impossible and didn't make the ingredients list. Instead she asked for a large, unglazed water jug to be prepared. It was filled half full with water. As the water evaporated, the inside of the jug would become cooler than the outside air, cool enough to help harden the fats.
Maomao dipped a spoon into the mixture and tasted a bit of it. It was bitter and sweet at the same time, and her knowledgeable tongue likewise detected elements that would improve the mood. She was far more resistant to things like alcohol and toxins now than she had been when she'd had that first taste of chocolate, and it didn't affect her nearly as much. But she could still tell it was powerful stuff.
Maybe I should make the portions a bit smaller.
She chopped the fruit in half with a simple cleaver, then dipped them in the brownish liquid. She put them on a plate, then placed them in the jug. She put a lid on the jug, then covered it with a straw mat to hide it. The only thing left was to wait for the chocolate to harden. Jinshi would come by to collect it that evening; that should be plenty of time.
Guess I've got a little extra...
She hadn't used all of the brownish liquid. The ingredients were extremely expensive, and it was quite nutritious. Aphrodisiac or not, it had a minimal effect on Maomao, so she decided to eat it herself later. She chopped some bread into cubes and soaked them in the stuff; this way she wouldn't have to worry about any cooling process, either.
She put a lid on the jar of cacao liquid and set it on the shelf.
The rest of the ingredients she put in her own room, then headed for the washing area to clean the utensils. She should have put the dipped bread in her room, too, but she was already thinking about other things. Maybe her taste-testing had left her a little inebriated.
Well, it was too late now.
It happened after that, while Maomao was out running errands for Hongniang, stopping off along the way to pick some medicinal herbs for herself. The bread, and the fact that it should have gone on the shelf, were chased clear out of Maomao's mind. She returned with a laundry basket full of herbs, thoroughly pleased with herself, only to be greeted by Hongniang and Consort Gyokuyou, looking deathly pale and rather disturbed, respectively. Gaoshun was there too, which implied Jinshi was somewhere about.
Hongniang could only put a hand to her forehead and point to the kitchen, so Maomao pressed her laundry basket into Gaoshun's arms and headed over.
She discovered Jinshi, looking annoyed. The delicate way to put it would be to say that a great medley of peach and light-red colors spread before her. Which is to say, more plainly, that three ladies-in-waiting were all leaning against each other, sound asleep. Their clothes were in disarray, their disheveled skirts revealing lascivious glimpses of thigh.
"What happened here?" Hongniang demanded of Maomao.
"I'm afraid I'm not best placed to answer that question," she replied. She went over to the three young women and crouched down, flipping down their skirts and examining them. "It's all right, this attempt failed to—"
Hongniang, blushing furiously, smacked Maomao on the back of the head.
Sitting on the table was the brown-colored bread. Three pieces were missing.
The girls had mistaken it for an afternoon snack.
The fatigue caught up with her after they had put each of the girls to bed in her own room. In the sitting room, Gyokuyou and Jinshi were looking at the chocolate bread with some wonder.
"Is this your aphrodisiac?" Gyokuyou inquired.
"No, ma'am, this is." Maomao gave her the chocolate-covered fruit. Approximately thirty pieces, each the size of a thumbnail.
"What is this, then?" Jinshi asked.
"It was supposed to be my bedtime snack." Everyone seemed to recoil a little at that. Had she said something wrong? Gaoshun and Hongniang both looked like they could hardly believe their eyes. "I'm very accustomed to spirits and stimulants, so I don't feel them much."
Maomao had once, in the name of science, pickled a venomous snake in alcohol and drunk it, so she could safely be called an experienced drinker. She considered alcohol to be a kind of medicine. The more susceptible one was to new forms of stimulation, the better medicine worked on one. Take this bread, for instance: here in the Jade Pavilion, it passed for an aphrodisiac, but she had to think that in the land where the ingredients had come from, it would be substantially less effective.
Jinshi picked up one of the pieces of bread and looked at it doubtfully. "I wonder if I might safely try a piece, then," he said.
"No, sir, don't!" Hongniang and Gaoshun cried almost in unison. Maomao thought this was the first time she had heard Gaoshun speak.
Jinshi put the bread back, remarking that he had only been joking. It would, of course, have been improper for him to consume a known aphrodisiac in the presence of the Emperor's own favorite consort, but perhaps even more to the point, hardly anyone could have resisted him had he come to her with that nymph-like smile and a flush in his cheeks. His face, if nothing else, Maomao reflected, did him credit.
"Perhaps I should have some made for His Majesty," Gyokuyou said with amusement. "It might keep him from his usual ways."
"It would most likely work about three times better than a typical stamina medication," Maomao informed her.
At this, Gyokuyou's face took on a cast that was hard to read. "Three times..." She mumbled something about whether she could endure so long, but those present affected not to have heard her.
It seemed it wasn't easy being a concubine.
Maomao put the aphrodisiacs in a covered jar and handed it to Jinshi. "They're quite potent, so I recommend taking just one at a time. Taking too many could overstimulate the blood flow and produce a nosebleed. Also, consumption should be limited to when the patient is alone with their partner."
With these instructions duly conveyed, Jinshi stood up. Gaoshun and Hongniang left the room to prepare for his departure. Consort Gyokuyou likewise nodded to him, then left with the sleeping princess in a carrier.
As Maomao went to clean up the plate of bread, she smelled a sweet aroma from behind her.
"Thank you. I put you to quite a bit of trouble." The voice was sweet, too, like honey. Maomao felt her hair being lifted up, and something cold was pressed against her neck. She turned in time to see Jinshi waving at her as he left the room.
"I get it." When she looked at the plate, she discovered one of the pieces of bread was missing. She had an idea where it was. "I just hope no one gets hurt," Maomao muttered, but she didn't seem to think it had much to do with her.
The night was still young.
Chapter 10: The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit (Part One)Yinghua, lady-in-waiting to the Emperor's favorite consort, Gyokuyou, was faithfully at her work, as she was every day. All right, so she had fallen asleep on the job the other day, but her gracious mistress had forborne to punish her. The only way to repay her, then, was to work herself to the bone. She would make sure she polished every windowsill, every railing, until it gleamed. This was not normally something a lady-in-waiting would be expected to do, but Yinghua was not above doing a serving girl's work. Consort Gyokuyou had said how much she liked hard workers.
Consort Gyokuyou and Yinghua both came from a town in the west. The climate there was dry, and the area had no special resources to speak of and was periodically subject to drought. Yinghua and the other ladies-in-waiting were all officials' daughters, but she didn't recall her life in her hometown as especially luxurious. It had been the sort of impoverished place where even a child of the bureaucracy had to work if she didn't want to starve.
And then Gyokuyou was taken into the palace, and the world began to take note of her home. When the consort received the special attentions of the Emperor, the central bureaucracy could no longer hide where she had come from. But Gyokuyou was an intelligent woman. She wasn't content simply to be a pampered ornament. And Yinghua was bent on following her lady wherever she might go, including into the rear palace. Not all of Gyokuyou's ladies showed the same dedication, but those who remained simply resolved to work even harder to make up the difference.
When Yinghua went into the kitchen to organize the utensils, she discovered the new girl there, making something. Maomao was her name, Yinghua recalled, but she had proven so taciturn that nobody was sure what kind of person she really was. Consort Gyokuyou was an uncommonly strong judge of character, however, so it was unlikely Maomao was a bad egg.
Indeed, Yinghua felt sorry for her. The scars on her arm obviously bespoke a history of abuse, after which she had been sold into service, and now brought on to taste food for poison. It was enough to bring a tear to a lady-in-waiting's eye. They kept increasing her portions at dinner, hoping to plumpen the spindly girl, and they refused to let her do the cleaning so that she wouldn't have to reveal her injuries to the wider world. Yinghua and her two fellow ladies-in-waiting were of one mind in all this, and as a result Maomao frequently found herself with little to do.
Yinghua was happy enough with that. She and the other girls were more than capable of handling the work by themselves. Hongniang, the chief lady-in-waiting, didn't precisely agree, and at least gave Maomao the washing to take care of. It was just carrying the laundry around in a basket, so her scars wouldn't be obvious. She also engaged Maomao for miscellaneous chores when necessary.
Carting around laundry baskets also wasn't the work of a ladyin-waiting, but was properly done by the serving girls from the large communal rooms. But ever since a poison needle had been discovered in Consort Gyokuyou's clothing once, Yinghua and the others had taken to handling the wash themselves. It was incidents like this that inspired them to debase themselves as if they were simple serving women. Here in the rear palace, they were surrounded by enemies.
"What are you making?"
Maomao was boiling something that looked like grass in a stewpot. "It's a cold remedy." She always answered with the absolute minimum of words. It was understandable—poignant, in fact—to realize how hard she must find it to get close to people as a result of her abuse.
Maomao was profoundly knowledgeable about medicine, and occasionally made some like this. She always cleaned up after herself neatly, and the anti-chapping ointment she'd given Yinghua recently was precious stuff, so Yinghua didn't object. Sometimes Maomao even produced the concoctions at Hongniang's request.
Yinghua took down some silver dishes and began diligently polishing them with a dry cloth. Maomao rarely said much, but she knew how to be a polite listener in a conversation, so it never hurt to talk to her. And that's what Yinghua did, telling her about some rumors she'd heard recently. Stories of a pale woman who danced through the air.
Maomao headed for the medical office with her completed cold remedy and a basket of laundry. It was the doctor's right to give his imprimatur to any medicine, even if it was only for form's sake.
Did this spirit suddenly pop up in the last month? Maomao shook her head at the garden-variety ghost story. She hadn't heard anything of the sort prior to arriving at the Jade Pavilion, and because she trusted Xiaolan to tell her anything worth hearing, she had to think the rumor was a recent one.
The rear palace was surrounded by what amounted to castle walls. The gates in each wall were the only ways in or out; a deep moat on the far side of the barrier prevented both intrusion and escape. Some said there were former concubines, would-be escapees from the rear palace, sunk at the bottom of that moat even now.
So the ghost is supposed to show up near the gate, huh?
There were no buildings in the immediate area, just a spreading pine forest.
Started around the end of summer.
It was the time for harvesting a certain something.
No sooner had she had this naughty little thought than Maomao heard a voice, one she was not pleased by but which always seemed to be after her specifically.
"Hard at work again, I see."
Maomao met the man's smile, lovely as a peony blossom, with studious indifference. "Hardly working, sir, I assure you."
The medical office was beside the central gate to the south, near the headquarters of the three major offices that oversaw the running of the rear palace. Jinshi could be seen there often. As a eunuch, his proper place was in the Domestic Service Department, but this man seemed to have no specific place of employment; indeed, he almost seemed to oversee the entire palace.
It's almost like he's over the head of the Matron of the Serving
Women.
It was always possible he was the current emperor's guardian, but considering Jinshi looked to be about twenty years old, it was hard to imagine. Maybe he was the son of the Emperor or something, but then why become a eunuch? He seemed close with Consort Gyokuyou; maybe he was her guardian instead, or perhaps...
The Emperor's lover...?
Relations between the Emperor and Gyokuyou always seemed perfectly normal when His Majesty came for his visits, but things weren't always what they seemed. Maomao got tired of trying to play out the possibilities, though, and so settled on this last one.
That was easiest.
"Your face says you're having the world's most impertinent thought," Jinshi said, squinting at her.
"Are you sure you're not imagining it?" She bowed to him and ducked into the medical office, where the loach-mustached quack of a doctor was industriously pulverizing something in a mortar. Maomao grasped that in his case, this wasn't a step in making some medical concoction, but simply a way of passing the time. Otherwise, why would he need her to give him any medicine she made? The doctor didn't seem to know but the most rudimentary medicinal recipes or techniques.
The medical staff was perpetually shorthanded, as one might surmise of the rear palace. Women were not allowed to become doctors, and while many men might wish to be, few wished also to become eunuchs. The old quack here had at first treated Maomao like a distracting little girl, but his attitude softened when he saw the medicines she made. Now he would put out tea and snacks and gladly share with her any ingredients she needed, but while she was grateful for this, she did question what it said about him as a physician. Confidentiality seemed of little concern to him.
I wonder if this is remotely all right. Maomao would entertain the thought, but she wouldn't say anything. The current arrangement was far too convenient for her.
"Would you be so kind as to check this medicine I've made?"
"Ah, hullo, young lady. Of course, hold on just a moment." He brought out snacks and some kind of tea. No more sweet buns; there were rice crackers today. That was fine by Maomao, who preferred a hotter flavor. It seemed the doctor had been so gracious as to remember her preferences. She'd had the continual feeling that he was trying to ingratiate himself with her, but it didn't bother her. He might have been a quack, but he was a decent person.
"Surely there's enough for me, too?" a honeyed voice said from behind her. She didn't have to turn around; she could practically feel his effulgence in the air. You must know by now who it was:
Jinshi, in the flesh.
The doctor, with a mixture of surprise and excitement, promptly changed the crackers and zacha—old tea with flavorings —for more-desirable white tea and mooncakes.
My rice crackers...
The beaming smile seated itself beside Maomao. By dint of social difference, they should never have found themselves sitting side-by-side, and yet here they were. It might have looked like a gesture of utmost magnanimity, but Maomao felt something very different in it, something pointed and forceful.
"I'm sorry for the trouble, Doctor, but could you go in the back and fetch these for me?" Jinshi handed the quack a slip of paper. Even without getting a clear look at it, Maomao could see an abundant list of medicines. It would keep the doctor occupied for a while. The quack squinted at the list, then retreated ruefully into the back room.
So that was the plan all along.
"What exactly do you want?" Maomao asked bluntly, sipping her tea.
"Have you heard about the commotion concerning the ghost?"
"No more than rumors."
"Then have you heard of somnambulism?"
The sparkle that lit in Maomao's eyes at that word wasn't lost on Jinshi. A naughty bit of satisfaction entered his lovely smile. He brushed Maomao's cheek with his broad palm. "And would you know how to cure it?" His voice was as sweet as a fruit liqueur.
"I haven't the foggiest idea." Maomao refused to be selfdeprecating, but she didn't want to overstate her abilities, either. She'd encountered virtually every kind of illness, though, and seen many of them in patients. Thus, she could say with confidence what she said next: "It can't be helped with medicine."
It was a disease of the spirit. When a prostitute had been afflicted with this illness, Maomao's father had done nothing to treat it, because there was no treatment to give.
"But with something other than medicine...?" Jinshi wanted to know any potential cure at all.
"My specialty is pharmaceuticals." She thought that was about as emphatic as she could be, but then she realized she could still see the lovely face, now wreathed in distress, floating in her peripheral vision.
Don't look him in the eye...
Maomao avoided his gaze, as if he were a wild animal. Or at least, she tried to, but it just wasn't possible. He slid around so he was facing her. Talk about persistent. Talk about annoying.
Maomao had no choice but to admit defeat.
"Fine. I'll help you," she said, but she was careful to look very unhappy about it.
Gaoshun arrived to fetch her around midnight. They were going out to witness the illness in question. Gaoshun's taciturn nature and often expressionless face could have made him seem unapproachable, but Maomao actually rather liked it. Sweet treats went best with pickled foods. Gaoshun made the perfect complement to Jinshi's saccharine attitude.
He doesn't come across like a eunuch.
Many eunuchs became effeminate, because their biological yang had been forcibly removed. They grew minimal body hair, had gentle personalities, and a disposition to obesity as their sexual appetites were replaced by culinary ones.
The quack doctor was the most obvious example. He looked like any other middle-aged man, but his speech made him sound like the mistress of some well-to-do merchant household. Gaoshun, for his part, didn't have much body hair, but what was there was thick and black, and if he hadn't lived in the rear palace it would have been easy to take him for a military official.
I wonder what brought him to choose this path. Wonder she might, but even Maomao understood that actually asking would be beyond the pale. She simply nodded in silence and went with him.
Gaoshun led the way, holding a lantern in one hand. The moon was only half full, but it was a cloudless night, and all its light reached them.
Maomao had never been out in the rear palace so late at night: it was like a different world. Once in a while she thought she heard rustling, and maybe some moaning, from the bushes here or there, but she determined to ignore it. The Emperor was the only proper man allowed in the rear palace, so it wasn't the ladies' fault if romantic encounters here started to take on less typical forms.
"Mistress Maomao," Gaoshun began, but Maomao felt some compunction at the polite mode of address.
"Please, you needn't call me that," she said. "Your station is so far above mine, Master Gaoshun."
Gaoshun ran his hand along his chin as he considered this. Finally he said, "Xiao Mao, then," a diminutive form of her name that was very much the polar opposite of "Miss Maomao."
That's maybe a little too familiar, Maomao thought, realizing that perhaps Gaoshun had a lighter heart than first appeared, but nonetheless she nodded.
"Perhaps," Gaoshun ventured now, "I might ask you to stop regarding Master Jinshi in the same manner in which you might look at a worm."
Damn. They noticed.
Her reactions had been growing too automatic recently; her poker face could no longer hide them. She didn't expect to be beheaded for it on the spot or anything, but she would have to control herself. From the perspective of these notables, it was Maomao who was the worm.
"Why, today he reported to me that you gazed at him as though he were a slug."
Well, he certainly seemed especially slimy.
The fact that he informed Gaoshun of Maomao's every disparaging glance, she thought, spoke to both his tenacity and his sliminess. It didn't say much for him as a man... or former man, perhaps.
"He smiled so broadly as he told me, his eyes brimming and his whole body trembling. Truly, I have never seen joy so singularly expressed."
Maomao greeted Gaoshun's description (surely he knew it could only possibly cause misunderstanding?) with total seriousness. As a matter of fact, she was privately demoting Jinshi from worm to filth as she replied: "I'll be more mindful in the future."
"Thank you. Those with no immunity do tend to swoon at a glance. It's quite an effort to keep on top of it." The sigh with which Gaoshun accompanied this remark carried an unmistakable note of frustration. Maomao surmised that this was not the first time he'd had to clean up after Jinshi. Having a superior who was too pure was its own kind of difficulty.
The course of this tiring conversation brought them to the gate on the east side. The walls were about four times as tall as Maomao. The great deep moat on the other side necessitated a bridge be lowered when provisions or supplies were brought in, or at the occasional changes of serving girls. In short, to flee the rear palace was to face the ultimate punishment.
The entry was a double gate with a guardhouse on both sides, and the gate was always guarded. Two eunuchs on the inside, two soldiers on the outside. The drawbridge was too heavy to raise or lower by manpower alone, so two head of oxen were on hand to do the job. Maomao was seized by the desire to go into the nearby pine forest to look for ingredients, but with Gaoshun there she had to restrain herself. Instead she sat down in the open-air pavilion in the garden.
And then, there in the light of the half-moon, she appeared.
"There she is," Gaoshun said, pointing. Maomao looked and saw something unbelievable: the figure of a pale woman almost floating through the air. Her long dress trailed behind her, her feet moving gracefully atop the wall as if in a dance. She shivered, and her clothing rippled as if it were alive. Her long black hair shimmered in the dark, lending her a sort of faint halo. She was so beautiful she seemed almost unreal. It was like something out of a fantasy, as though they had wandered into the legendary peach village.
"Like a hibiscus under the stars," Maomao said suddenly. Gaoshun looked surprised, but then murmured, "You're a quick study."
The woman's name was Fuyou, "hibiscus," and she was a middle-ranked consort. And the next month, she was to be given in marriage to a certain official, as a reward for his fine work.
Chapter 11: The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit (Part Two)Somnambulism was a most mysterious condition. It caused one to move around as though awake, even when one was asleep. The cause could be some sort of disturbance in the heart, something no amount or type of medicine could cure. For there was no medicine to soothe a troubled spirit.
Maomao knew of a courtesan who had suffered from the condition. She had been of sunny disposition, a good singer, and one man had even been talking about buying her out of prostitution. But the negotiations fell through, for every night she would wander the brothel like a woman possessed. Ugly rumors began to dog her. When the madam tried to restrain her to stop her from walking around one night, the woman scratched her so badly she bled.
The next day, the other women confronted her about her behavior, but the courtesan said cheerfully, "My goodness, ladies, what are you talking about?"
The woman remembered nothing, but her bare feet were covered with mud and scratches.
"And what happened to her?" Jinshi asked. He, Maomao, and Gaoshun were in the sitting room together, along with Consort Gyokuyou. Hongniang was looking after the little princess.
"Nothing," Maomao said curtly. "When the discussions of her emancipation ended, so did her wandering around."
"Was it that the discussions upset her, then?" Gyokuyou asked with a puzzled look.
Maomao nodded. "It seems likely. The suitor was the head of a large business, but he was a man with not only a wife and children already, but even grandchildren. The woman's contract was going to be up with another year's work, anyway." Perhaps she found the idea of working another year better than being married off to a man she had no interest in. In the end, the woman had worked out the remainder of her contract with no further offers to buy her out.
"Exceptional emotional agitation commonly results in wandering like this, so we tried to give her perfumes and medicines that might help calm her down. They relaxed her a little, but didn't do much more." Maomao had always been the one to mix the concoctions, not her father.
"Hmm," Jinshi said with more than a touch of boredom. "And that's really all there is to that story?"
"That's all." Maomao struggled not to sneer at Jinshi's languid look. Gaoshun sat beside him, silently encouraging her in this effort. "If that's all you need, I must get back to work," Maomao said. Then she bowed and left the room.
Let's turn back the clock a bit. The day after she had witnessed the spirit, Maomao had gone to see her favorite chatterbox, Xiaolan. Xiaolan was forever trying to pry information about Gyokuyou out of Maomao, so this time Maomao fed her some innocuous tidbits in exchange for what she knew about the ghost.
The trouble had begun about two weeks before. The spirit had first been spotted in the northern quarter. Shortly after that, it had begun to be seen in the eastern quarter, and started to appear every night. The guards, frightened by the entire situation, did nothing about it. But as the situation didn't seem to be causing any harm, no one punished them for their inaction.
It seemed that the deep moat, the high walls, and the overall impenetrability of the rear palace had left the guards susceptible to such fears. Worthless for security.
Next, Maomao had headed to see the quack. His loose lips told her something new—about Princess Fuyou, how she had been unwell lately. She was the third princess of a vassal state so small it could have been flicked away with a finger; though she was given the title "Princess," she was really little more than a highly ranked concubine. She had a building in the northern quarter. She liked to dance, but she was nervous and high-strung, and had once made a mistake while dancing for His Majesty. The other consorts in attendance had laughed at her, and since then she had refused to come out of her room. A sensitive soul, one might say.
Princess Fuyou had no conspicuous qualities other than her dancing, and it was said that in the two years since she had come to the rear palace, His Majesty had not spent the night with her once. Now she was to be given in marriage to a military official, an old friend of hers, and one hoped, might be happy.
Father always said not to say anything based on assumptions, Maomao thought.
And so she resolved not to.
The princess, pale and demure, was blushing as she passed through the central gate. She was not uncommonly beautiful, but her palpable happiness excited cries of admiration from the onlookers. A collective expectant gaze turned on the gate.
If one was going to be given in marriage, this was the ideal. This was how it should look.
"Surely you can at least tell me?" Consort Gyokuyou said with a lustrous smile. Though she was already the mother of a little girl, she was in fact not quite twenty years old, and the smile had a hoydenish quality about it.
What should I do? Maomao thought. Consort Gyokuyou had fixed her with her best stare and wasn't letting up, and at length Maomao gave in. "If you understand that what I'm going to say is ultimately just speculation," she said with a sigh. "And if you promise not to get angry."
"Of course I won't get angry. I was the one who asked." Hrrrm. It was looking like she had no choice but to talk.
Maomao braced herself. "And you won't tell anyone else."
"My lips are sealed." Gyokuyou sounded almost flippant, but Maomao decided to trust her. Then she told the consort the story of the sleepwalking courtesan. Not the one she had told Jinshi and the rest of them the day before. A different story.
Just like the other courtesan, the condition had first manifested when a suitor proposed to buy her out of her contract. The talks fell through—this much was the same as the other story. But this woman didn't stop sleepwalking, and the perfumes and medicines that had given the first courtesan some relief didn't help this one at all.
Then someone else offered to buy the woman out of her contract. The madam said she couldn't foist a sick person off that way, but the suitor insisted they were still interested. And so the agreement was sealed, at half the price in silver of the first man's offer.
"We learned later that it had been a con all along."
"A con?"
The first man who had come with an offer was a friend of the second. Knowing that the woman would feign illness, he then broke off the negotiations. Then his friend swooped in and got her for half the price.
"This courtesan still had a substantial amount of time left on her contract, and the silver the man paid for her wasn't enough to cover it."
"And you're suggesting these women and Princess Fuyou have something in common?"
The military official, the old friend, might have been from the same vassal state, but he was nonetheless not really of high enough social standing to seek to marry a princess. He had hoped to perform enough valorous deeds that he might one day be able to ask for her hand. Politics intervened, and Fuyou found herself in the rear palace. Still longing for her official, the princess deliberately botched her otherwise accomplished dancing to ensure she would not draw the Emperor's attention. Then she shut herself up in her room until she seemed no more than a shadow in the palace.
Just as she had intended, she was still pure at the end of two years, the Emperor never having visited once. The military official had performed his valorous deeds, and now when he was to receive Princess Fuyou in marriage, she began to manifest these mysterious wanderings. She was trying to ensure that His Majesty would have no cause to have second thoughts about sending her away, no reason to suddenly make her his bedfellow.
There are, after all, some unscrupulous men of power who
cannot stand to see a woman go to someone else, even a woman they never valued. If His Majesty were to take Princess Fuyou into his bedchamber, she could not be married off until later. And Fuyou herself, fastidious about her chastity, would be unable to face her childhood friend after she had spent the night with the Emperor.
Then, too, perhaps her dancing by the eastern gate was in part a prayer for her friend's safety on his expeditions.
"Again, I have to stress that this is just speculation," Maomao said calmly.
"Well... I can't say you're wrong as far as His Majesty is concerned."
The lusty emperor could conceivably find his interest kindled in someone that one of his subordinates obviously valued so much. He visited Gyokuyou once every few days, and some of the nights on which he did not visit could be accounted for by the need to attend to official business. But not all of them. One of His Majesty's duties was to produce as many children as possible.
"I suppose it would make me the most awful person to say I felt jealous of Princess Fuyou."
Maomao shook her head. "I don't think so." She was more or less convinced that she had things figured out correctly, but she felt no special impulse to tell Jinshi. All the women involved would be happier that way. His ignorance was their bliss. She wanted her smile to stay as soft and innocent as it was. It seemed everything had been resolved...
But in fact, one mystery still remained.
"How did she get all the way up there?" Maomao asked, gazing up at a wall four times as tall as she was. Perhaps she would have to look into it sometime.
As she danced that night, Princess Fuyou had looked truly beautiful, like the heroine of one of the illustrated story scrolls the women so enjoyed. It was almost hard to believe she was the same woman as the stoic, reticent princess.
Maomao went back to the Jade Pavilion, but her thoughts were less elevated than this: if only she could bottle love. What a medicine it would be, that could make a woman so beautiful!