The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 14 - Chapter 9

Chapter 9: A Courtesan’s Time to Quit

While Zulin’s Sister was dragged away, Joka slowly got to her feet.

“Are you all right?” Maomao asked.

“Yeah... Maomao, you have a moment?” Joka rubbed her stomach gingerly. She might be the victim, but she watched the perpetrator go with emotionless eyes.

“Is there something else you need?”

“Not really. Just a little favor I’d like to ask. Could you come to my room?”

“Sure,” Maomao said, and they headed for Joka’s chambers.

The rooms were still a mess from the burglar’s incursion, but Joka had at least tidied around the table and chairs.

“Have a seat,” she said, and Maomao sat.

Joka rolled back the mattress on her bed, revealing the frame underneath. She worked one of the boards loose, and out came a cloth bundle, which she placed on the table.

“Of all things, the thief was after this,” she said.

From the bundle emerged the broken jade tablet, the one Joka had shown Maomao just the other day.

“What is it doing there?” Maomao asked. “I thought it was stolen.”

“When you told me about that soldier who was murdered, I started to get a bad feeling. I decided to take the jade out of its box and hide it under my mattress. The box, I put in my clothing chest. When you make your living on an edgy name, you start to develop a certain intuition. And just as I expected, the box was stolen.”

Maomao stared intently at the broken jade. The surface had been scraped away; the stone itself was of excellent quality, but it had no value, and as a tablet it would be hard to work. Even if the thief had taken it, it would not have been easy to turn into money—but there were other ways to use it.

Maomao’s sister Joka had come into the world in a brothel. A prostitute had given birth to her, and some customer had provided the seed—and also left behind this fragment of jade.

The name “Joka” was not strictly appropriate. By tradition, only the Imperial family was permitted to use the character ka, meaning “flower.” Joka’s father, however, had been of noble blood, and had left the jade as proof, so she was entitled to use the character—or anyway, that was Joka’s story.

Joka herself was decidedly not of the belief that she was descended from the Imperial line; she believed that a foolish woman had been duped by one of her customers, who had foisted the tablet on her—which must have been stolen or worse.

Still, an air of mystery was a boon for attracting men. Joka touted the story that she might, just might, be of Imperial descent in order to cultivate sales.

“You know how I drum up my business, don’t you, Maomao? The whole thing about being cast-off nobility is a lot of smoke and mirrors. I don’t actually believe it—and for the most part, I don’t think my customers do either, which is why there haven’t been any problems before.”

“Until someone decided that they were going to find out if that jade was the real thing, huh?” Maomao crossed her arms. A lot of things involving the Imperial family seemed to happen around her, going far beyond Joka.

I wonder if they’ve looked into Tianyu’s background too.

She’d heard that Tianyu was supposed to be descended from a former Imperial family member named Kada.

“In which case, that guy... What was his name again? The soldier? Your customer who ended up dead in the freak strategist’s office.”

If he’d been looking into the Imperial bloodline, Tianyu might be somehow connected.

“You really are bad with names, aren’t you? It was Fang.”

“Yeah, that’s him!”

Joka had no special investment in her customers and always affected an air of disinterest toward them, but she was professional enough to remember their names. She rarely revealed that fact in public, however, frequently giving her clients dismissive nicknames instead.

He doesn’t call people by their names either, Maomao thought, suddenly noticing a point of similarity with Tianyu, to her chagrin.

“He was after this tablet, then he got killed. Now someone tries to steal the tablet. I may be just a courtesan who’s never left my brothel, but even I know what that means.” Joka sighed deeply.

Now that she mentions it...

Maomao remembered Lahan saying something about how the three women involved in the soldier’s death had all had a connection to the Shin clan. Had anything ever come of that? She hadn’t heard anything further about it.

“I assume the thief will break open the puzzle box, and when he realizes there’s nothing inside, what do you think he’ll do?” Joka said.

Presumably, he would come after the jade again—ready to use more forceful methods than before.

“I think it may be about time. I’ve been able to earn a lot, but no amount of money is worth more than my life.” Joka threw up her hands. “I’m going to stop selling myself by claiming Imperial ancestry. I probably should have stopped sooner. I know I can’t expect my little ruse to just go away after I’ve used it to excite so many customers. But I think a quick withdrawal is the wisest move.”

Joka sounded tired. She picked up a book that had fallen to the floor and leafed through the pages. Maybe the paper wasn’t very good, because the cover was rough and worn. It must have hailed from Joka’s days as an apprentice, when she’d used crude copies of books because she couldn’t afford better.

“Courtesans have short lives. It would be easy enough if it were just bam, over, but sometimes you get worn away bit by bit, frayed around the edges. You look sad and used, but you think, maybe if I do some repairs I could last for a while longer.”

The pages Joka flipped crumbled under her fingers.

“Are you going to quit being a courtesan?” Maomao asked.

Joka gave an ambiguous tilt of her head. “That might be what it works out to. It’s hard for a lady of almost thirty to attract new customers. And those kids taking the civil service exam may show up, sort of as a superstition, but they won’t become regulars.”

A courtesan was bound to retire eventually. Yet it somehow left Maomao feeling sad.

“I’m going to throw this jade tablet away. I know that won’t make the whole thing disappear—Oh, I’m sorry, I got rid of it, it’s nothing to do with me anymore—but it’s important that people can feel that I did it. You know—I promise to stop claiming to be descended from the Imperial family, so please, just spare my life.”

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“Maomao, I know you have connections with the bigwigs at the palace. Not least your freak father with his monocle. I know this is a huge favor to ask, but you’re the only person I know anywhere outside the world of the brothels. There’s no one else I can count on.”

Joka’s voice, normally so strong, had taken on a meek tone.

“You know I can’t say no,” replied Maomao.

What a headache—was what she might normally have been thinking. Instead she said, “I’ll make sure the tablet gets taken care of. I’ll tell a ‘bigwig’ I know I can trust.”

She wrapped the jade in its cloth again and placed it among the folds of her robes. It was a small piece; it must originally have been no more than nine centimeters or so, but it felt strangely heavy.

Who do I ask to take care of this?

The freak strategist was right out. She would no more give it to him than she would walk into a powder store with a lit match.

She thought of a few members of the nobility that she knew, but none of them seemed quite appropriate for this task.

Then Jinshi’s face floated into her mind. He would be well acquainted with the details of the Imperial family and the other great houses; above all, for better or worse, he was a decent person. He’d looked the other way with the children of the Shi clan, had hidden Suirei—who was herself a part of the Imperial family, if an unlikely one—and had even given safe haven to the former shrine maiden from Shaoh.

I’d rather not give him something else to worry about, but...

As reluctant as Maomao felt, for Joka’s sake, she wanted to act as soon as possible. Otherwise, they might not be able to guarantee her sister’s safety. Still, this really was going to be a very difficult request to make.

And I just saw him the other day...

On which occasion he’d declined to sleep with her. She felt as awkward about it as anyone would.