The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 6 - Chapter 13

Chapter 13: Scandal (Part One)

Some days later, Sazen came to her with an unsettling story. He appeared at the shop, his face drawn, saying he wanted to talk. Maomao wondered what he could want to talk about, but it turned out to be none other than Consort Lishu.

“If a rear palace consort had been meeting secretly with a man, would she be put to death?”

The question came completely out of the blue, and Maomao could only muster a befuddled “Huh?”

Sazen seemed to take her response as vaguely insulting; he stomped on the floor and said, “Would she or wouldn’t she? I’m an ignorant bumpkin; just tell me!” His gaze was piercing. Maomao realized her reaction hadn’t been ideal. Sazen, she knew, had once served the Shi clan, and while he had no loyalty to his former masters, she suspected he had some attachment to Loulan.

“I guess that would be sort of unavoidable in cases of infidelity, wouldn’t it? An ordinary palace lady might be one thing, but this is a consort you’re talking about. Why are you talking about it, though? What brought this on?”

Sazen pursed his lips and wouldn’t quite look at her. “I heard about it at the market—they say the Emperor is preparing to subdue another clan.”

“Is it the U clan, by any chance?”

“No idea. But I heard it was because of a high consort who’s only sixteen years old.”

Maomao didn’t say anything to that, but she wished she could put her head in her hands. If even Sazen had heard about this situation, probably everyone in the capital had. She’d been sure to be explicit in her report that Consort Lishu was innocent. Whatever the consort’s former chief lady-in-waiting might be pulling, Maomao had tried to tell herself that it wouldn’t amount to much. But it sounded like she’d been wrong.

Normally, she might send a letter to Jinshi and simply wait for him to do something about it, but there wasn’t time for that now.

“H-Hey!” Sazen cried when she jumped up.

“I’m going to need you to watch the shop for a bit.”

“What, again?!”

Maomao hurried out and toward the northern side of the capital. That was where the palace was—along with a whole district of high-class homes. One of them was one of His Majesty’s villas, home to Ah-Duo, herself a former high consort.

“Is Lady Ah-Duo in?” Maomao asked the guard, even though she knew he wouldn’t simply grant her admittance.

“Do you have an official appointment, miss?” the guard asked. The fact that he was willing to speak so politely to a mere apothecary—and not a particularly well-dressed one at that—was probably because he remembered Maomao from her other visits here. But that wouldn’t be enough to gain her admission.

“I’m afraid I don’t, sir, but I simply must see Lady Ah-Duo.”

“Sorry, rules are rules. I can’t just let you in,” the guard said, looking genuinely apologetic. It briefly occurred to Maomao to try to force her way past him while he was busy feeling sorry for her, but she knew all too well that it would only end with her under arrest.

“Might I at least ask you to take her a message for me?”

“I’m afraid she’s not here right now...”

Maomao made a face like she had bitten down on something particularly bitter. If she was just going to let herself be sent home, she might as well not have come at all.

I wonder if Suirei’s here, she thought, but then dismissed the idea. Suirei wasn’t officially supposed to exist. She wouldn’t meet Maomao alone, and even if she did, she probably lacked any authority to summon Ah-Duo.

“Might I be allowed to wait?” Maomao asked, determined to stay there until Ah-Duo returned.

It was something like an hour later that a carriage arrived at the villa. The guard was kind enough to alert Maomao, who was sitting in the shade of a tree as she waited. She jumped to her feet and ran over to the vehicle; Ah-Duo’s face appeared in the window.

“Well, this is a surprise. I always took you to be a bit cooler-headed than this,” Ah-Duo said—and it was true that a few years ago, Maomao probably wouldn’t have come personally to Ah-Duo like this. She would have borne in mind that the palace had its own ways of maintaining its equilibrium, and that the Emperor seemed especially considerate toward Lishu such that nothing too terrible could happen to her.

At that moment, though, in her mind’s eye, Lishu seemed to overlap with the lady of the annihilated Shi clan. Maybe that was what had made her uncommonly emotional about this.

“Let’s talk inside,” Ah-Duo said. “I’m sure you must be thirsty after such a long wait out in this heat.”

“Thank you, milady,” Maomao said, bowing deeply, and then they entered the villa.

“So there are already rumors in the marketplace. News traveled faster than I expected.” Ah-Duo sat with her legs and arms both crossed. On anyone else, the posture might have looked imperious, but for her it seemed oddly fitting and not at all offensive. A lady-in-waiting had served them tea, yet she had disappeared almost without Maomao noticing. Maomao had thought Suirei, at least, might be present, but there was no sign of her.

Hesitantly, she said, “May I take it from your tone, milady, that the rumors are true?”

“What’s true is that at the moment she’s confined to a separate pavilion,” Ah-Duo said. The consort was not, strictly speaking, being treated as a criminal, but she was still effectively under arrest.

“Have you had an opportunity to speak with Consort Lishu?”

“I have,” Ah-Duo replied. She told Maomao that Lishu insisted she hadn’t written any love letter—but also, Ah-Duo added, the letter in question clearly was written by Lishu.

That gave Maomao pause. “Don’t those things contradict each other?”

“They don’t. It seems the text in question was copied out of a novel.”

So that’s it. The novels the palace women loved so much were full of tales of romance—parts of which might happen to look just like a love letter if one found them in isolation.

“The consort was quite shocked. She says she was copying the story for a palace woman she’d recently become friends with.”

Maomao cast her eyes to the ground. Lishu had believed that, slowly but surely, she was gaining some allies.

A woman who couldn’t write was likely a woman of low rank. By writing out the story, Lishu had been trying, in her own somewhat awkward way, to make friends. Copying out a text might seem a mundane enough thing, but it would have taken considerable time and effort—and because Lishu was doing it and asking nothing in return, she might well have imagined it would deepen the friendship between her and this other woman. She must have been very happy with the idea.

Only to find herself betrayed, Maomao thought. Or had the other woman approached the consort with that in mind all along? Whichever, it was all very underhanded.

“Couldn’t you provide a copy of the book she was working from?”

“The thing about that is...every book that enters the rear palace goes through the censors, who keep a copy on hand for reference. But nothing they have matches this text.”

“You mean it didn’t go through their office?”

“Mmhm. Someone smuggled it in.”

Well, now. That was a problem. Still something nagged at Maomao. “What happened to the woman who asked the consort to copy the book? Where is she? For that matter, how did a woman who can’t read get her hands on a book that had bypassed the censors, anyway?”

“Supposing the woman is already gone?” Ah-Duo said. While Consort Lishu had been on her trip, about a hundred women had reached the end of their terms of service and left the rear palace. This mystery woman had been one of them.

“And after she left?”

“We looked, naturally. But we never found her. It’s not like she was officially attending upon the consort, anyway. They seem to have gotten to know each other when the woman did odd jobs at the consort’s request. Even if we found her, she could just play dumb. She may have been doing everything with one eye on the end of her contract.”

If this was, in fact, a premeditated crime, it would have been difficult for the woman to pull off on her own. Maomao tried to think over what she knew. One thing was certain: if a high consort like Lishu had started getting friendly with a menial maid, her critics wouldn’t have stayed silent about it—least of all her former chief lady-in-waiting.

So a palace lady nearing the end of her term of service had approached Consort Lishu to copy out a romantic text from a book. That book happened to be one the censors hadn’t seen or approved. Something a lowly, illiterate maid would never normally possess.

“I’m thinking that some other person used the maid to convince the consort to write out the passage, but what’s your opinion, Lady Ah-Duo?” Maomao asked. She didn’t like to work based entirely on her own assumptions; she hoped Ah-Duo could back up her intuition.

“I agree,” Ah-Duo said—but then she added, “Consort Lishu’s lady claimed she found the ‘letter’ in the consort’s room, but it was actually found somewhere else—somewhere outside the rear palace.”

“Had it actually been sent to some lordling somewhere?”

If it had still been in Lishu’s chambers, then it would be easy enough to claim she was going to send it to the Emperor: problem solved. But if it was already in the possession of some other man, then it was hard to blame them for treating her as unfaithful.

“Yes, unfortunately. That’s why it’s such a big issue and why she’s under lock and key now. The man in question is the son of a servant, someone who’s met the consort several times throughout her life. He denies any involvement, but the letter was found at his house.”

The man could protest his innocence all he wanted; finding evidence like that at his own estate was pretty damning. Apparently the former chief lady-in-waiting had claimed that there had been something between this man and the consort when she had returned from the nunnery to the rear palace, and she had been most insistent the man be investigated. She had Consort Lishu all tied up with a pretty bow.

But that doesn’t make any sense!

“How did she even send the letter? I thought the censors checked everything, even letters home,” Maomao said. That was why on one occasion, someone had tried to use chemicals infused in the wooden writing strips as a code, and why Empress Gyokuyou’s letters to her family were so roundabout in communicating the information they contained.

“The letter was folded very small. It must have been tucked among some items she was sending home, for the boy to get it first.”

It wasn’t impossible. But something felt off.

Maybe Maomao felt so muddled and confused because it was Ah-Duo telling her all this. What she really wanted was to hear the story firsthand.

“Do you think anyone could possibly get me an interview with Consort Lishu, or even with this young man?” she asked.

At that exact moment, someone knocked on the door, and a servant hesitantly showed his face.

“What is it?” Ah-Duo asked, and the servant looked at Maomao as if he was unsure what to do.

“A Master Basen is here asking after Lady Maomao.”

It was as if he’d been waiting for his cue.

Basen offered only the most perfunctory of greetings to Ah-Duo before he dragged Maomao off.

“If I may ask, sir, what in the world do you think you’re doing?” Maomao inquired. Basen had come on horseback, begrudging even a carriage, and the two of them stood out like a sore thumb as they worked their way through the city, Maomao clinging on behind him. She did at least have a cloth to cover her face.

“You heard about Consort Lishu?” he said.

“Yes...”

“Then you must have figured it out. You must have some way to show her innocence.” Maomao thought she understood what Basen was saying, but something still bothered her. “I can’t meet her myself. I was told to find a proxy,” he said.

A woman under suspicion of infidelity would certainly find it difficult to meet with a man, true enough. Much as Basen couldn’t have been more of a lifesaver for her, Maomao decided to tweak the headstrong man. “You were told. By Jinshi?” she asked.

“I’m...using my own judgment.”

“Oh, I see.”

Yes, something did bother Maomao—but as she didn’t wish to upset the person in control of the horse, she kept it to herself for the time being.

Consort Lishu had been relocated from the pavilion she’d occupied a few days before. That building had been not unlike the one she had in the rear palace, showing that she was still being treated as her station merited—but now she had been moved to the western part of the city, and her residence was less a palace than a tower. It looked something like a pagoda one might see at a temple, but on a larger scale, six stories tall with several overlapping roofs, and although it was somewhat lacking in color, that only made it look all the more imposing. The impression was reinforced by the ring of gigantic trees surrounding the place. Truly impressive, as buildings went—yet rather poor quarters for a royal consort. The burly men standing guard at the entrance didn’t make it any more inviting.

“During the time of the empress regnant, a powerful courtier who turned against her was brought here, on the pretext of having an incurable illness,” Basen informed Maomao. “They claimed they’d brought him here to attempt a new medical procedure. It’s the same place the former emperor’s brothers were brought when they contracted the illness that killed them. All of them met their ends in this tower.”

So this place has a history. Maomao was about to say it out loud, but she refrained. The sad tale somehow robbed the place of its gravity, turning it instead into nothing more than a gloomy prison. Did His Majesty order this? she wondered. She’d always believed he was partial to Lishu, in his own way.

“If we can just find a way to undermine their evidence, she could get out of here,” Basen said. What he meant was, he wanted Maomao to talk to the consort and find the truth.

Luckily for him, Maomao wanted the same thing.

There was, however, one thing she had to be sure of first. She pulled aside the cloth over her head so that she could look him square in the eye and said, “I’m going to do what you ask, Master Basen, because I share your objection to Consort Lishu’s treatment.”

Maomao did feel compassion, once in a while. She’d originally taken Lishu for nothing more than an unpleasant little princess, but as she saw misfortune befall the young woman again and again, she had come to sympathize with her. Surely no one could blame Maomao for trying to do a little something to help the consort. At the rear palace, Maomao had been then-Consort Gyokyou’s woman, and so she couldn’t be too vociferous in support of Lishu—but now she didn’t have that concern.

What about Basen, though?

“Do I understand correctly that we’re doing this not on Master Jinshi’s orders, but at your own discretion?” she asked.

“You do.”

“And what motivates this behavior, sir?” It was the obvious thing to ask. So obvious, in fact, that she hadn’t been able to ask it even though it was on her mind.

“Who wouldn’t want to help an innocent consort in trouble?” Basen said.

“How do you know she’s innocent?” Maomao said flatly. Lishu and Basen had only just met on their recent trip. They’d seen each other at the banquet, true enough, but they hadn’t had a chance to talk. And otherwise there had been few opportunities for them to even see each other’s faces during the journey—the only time they were face-to-face was when the lion attacked. Again, they had hardly spoken to each other even then; for the most part, Basen simply peppered Maomao with questions about Lishu. Now he was acting to help this young woman with no official orders, entirely on his own. Why?

I wish he wouldn’t.

There were people in the world who did something extraordinarily tiresome: fall in love at first sight. They would completely ignore personality and social status, feeling love well up, as it were, at nothing more than a person’s appearance. Maomao was quite certain: at that moment, Basen was operating under the influence of exactly such irksome feelings. True, she’d known him to get a little emotional from time to time, but for the most part Basen was quite aware of his place as Jinshi’s attendant. A place of which acting on his own volition to prove Lishu’s innocence was emphatically not a part.

All this being the case, Maomao wished to be very clear about one thing: “Even if we establish the consort’s innocence, the best you can hope for is that she returns to the rear palace.”

“Yes... I know that.”

She was a flower blooming on a peak so high he would never reach it as long as he lived. Would recognizing that be enough to put the matter to rest for him?

“If you mean that, sir, then very well.” There were still many things Maomao wished she could say, but she decided to stop there. She was no more eager than anyone to stick her nose into such subjects.

It happened with customers sometimes: they’d go head over heels for a courtesan the first time they saw her, and come to the brothel constantly, spending every coin they had on the woman. But when the money dried up, so did the love, and men who didn’t understand that would vilify the suddenly distant and uninterested courtesan, ridicule her, sometimes even become enraged and try to kill her. There’s little more unsettling than a man laughing uproariously over a blood-soaked bedroom.

If they were going to fall in love with a woman hiding the bags under her eyes with makeup, bags inflicted by a lack of sleep from entertaining customers all night long, you would hope they could at least be true to that love. If they didn’t realize what they were getting, then it was their own fault for being so ready to give their hearts.

Maomao looked at Basen, silently begging him not to be one of those men.

“I know,” Basen said, as much to himself as to her. The words sounded heavy in his mouth, and Maomao continued to fix him with a severe look as they entered the prison.

“Are you well, milady?” Maomao asked Consort Lishu, though she knew she couldn’t possibly be very well. When they had been admitted to the tower, they’d been given a wooden strip with the time written on it and told they were free to speak with Lishu until the next bell tolled.

The tower was of rather unusual construction, with a staircase and hallways winding around the outside while the interior was entirely devoted to individual rooms. Lishu’s quarters occupied two simple, adjoining rooms on the third floor; Maomao wondered if there might be people on the floors above, but it seemed not.

Lishu nodded, her face pale. Her chief lady-in-waiting was beside her, but as far as Maomao could see, she had no other attendants. The room itself was well appointed for a criminal’s cell, but for a member of the nobility, it must have been an acute embarrassment.

I wonder how many people have gone mad and died in this room, Maomao thought, but she knew better than to say it out loud—she would only cause even more blood to drain from Lishu’s face. Instead she asked, “May I inquire whether your monthly visitor has come?”

“Yes...finally,” Lishu said, glancing at the ground in embarrassment. That didn’t necessarily mean she would be feeling physically better, but it did offer the consolation that she wouldn’t have to be subject to further examinations by anyone else on the grounds that Maomao’s work was suspect. It at least demonstrated conclusively that she wasn’t pregnant.

“Would you tell me what kind of relationship you have with the man who had the letter?”

“It’s not a letter. It’s just something I copied,” the consort said. Maomao chose to take this as a denial of any involvement with the man, however weak the terms might have been. “He’s the son of a servant. All he did was babysit me a few times when I was little. The last time I saw him was at the mansion when I came back from the nunnery. My nursemaid told me he was a very serious, grown-up person.”

None of this sounded like Lishu was lying; Maomao was inclined to believe the consort.

“I never sent him any letters, and the only reason I sent anything home at all was because they sent His Majesty a gift, and he thought they should be sent something in return. I wouldn’t send them anything myself. The closest thing I get to a letter from them is when word comes from my father via my nursemaid.”

The irony of the situation was that it had made Lishu far more talkative than usual. Each time her eyes met Maomao’s, however, she would look away again. That was normal enough for her, and Maomao paid it no mind. “I’ve heard the letter was tucked among a delivery to your family. Do you think such a thing is possible?” she asked.

“It’s impossible to say,” answered, not Lishu, but her chief lady-in-waiting. “Most of what Lady Lishu sends home to her family are gifts from His Majesty. Someone from her household is supposed to come pick them up immediately after the rear palace has finished processing the goods.”

There was no stipulation about who would come to pick them up—but it seemed to have been this servant’s son. In other words, nothing could be proven, but nothing could be disproven either. If Lishu’s former chief lady were intent on discrediting her, it would be natural to look into the matter.

“And there’s no sign that the former chief lady-in-waiting herself sent anything to anyone?” Maomao asked, but Lishu and her current chief lady both shook their heads.

“I know at least that she didn’t send anything after I wrote out that copy,” Lishu said. If the imperious former chief lady hadn’t sent anything, her lackeys wouldn’t have been able to either. Records were kept of such things in the rear palace, anyway, and so would have been easy enough to check. How, then, had Lishu’s handwritten copy gotten into the young man’s house?

“She claims this ‘letter’ was packed with the shipment, but I’m having trouble imagining how it actually got in there,” Maomao said. It wouldn’t have been possible to physically wrap anything with that paper. Maybe it had been put in among the packing material used to prevent breakage?

“Apparently it was rolled up tightly, almost like a string. The paper we saw was very dirty and awfully tattered,” the chief lady replied.

“Is that right...”

That would make the whole job easier for the culprit. Even if the wrong person got the letter, they wouldn’t know what was inside it; they would think it was a piece of string and treat it accordingly. So what if they threw it away? It would be simple enough to retrieve. In fact, anyone in Consort Lishu’s household could reasonably be expected to do so.

“Did anything change after you wrote that text out?”

The consort and her chief lady looked at each other. Both cocked their heads quizzically, as if to say—well, yes and no. They couldn’t quite remember.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the former chief lady-in-waiting really was the criminal here (the evidence certainly seemed to be mounting). Even if so, it would be a difficult ploy to pull off solo. She must have had an accomplice outside the rear palace. How had they communicated with each other?

We can worry about that later, Maomao told herself. They were running out of time, and there was something else she wanted to ask. “One more thing, then,” she said, and pulled out some paper and a portable writing set. “This novel the maid asked you to copy. Would you write down as much about it as you remember?” She immediately began grinding the ink.

○●○

“Wouldn’t you like some tea, Lady Lishu?” the consort’s chief lady-in-waiting, Kanan, asked. As she had been asking. As she kept asking. But Lishu shook her head. She had nothing to do but drink tea, but she felt like if she drank any more, her belly would turn to mush.

Kanan was the only lady-in-waiting there with Lishu. One lady was enough, under the circumstances; but the humiliating thing was that Lishu had never specifically been told not to bring her other women. Only Kanan had been willing to follow her here.

Lishu had been starting to think she was finally getting a little closer to some of her other ladies-in-waiting, but apparently that had been a delusion. Particularly so when it came to the maid for whom Lishu had copied out a novel because the girl couldn’t read herself—and on whose account Lishu was now considered a criminal. It was enough to make her want to cry, but crying would do nothing but make life harder for Kanan, the one person who had actually stayed with her.

Here in her tower Lishu had no particular amusements, not even any windows; no way to pass the time. Her two choices were eating or sleeping. Virtually no light made it into her room, such that even in the middle of the day it was necessary to light candles to see by, and the constant clinging gloom only made her depression worse.

The only people who had come to visit her were the apothecary (the one who had once served in the rear palace herself), and Lishu’s father Uryuu, one solitary time. Lishu had been sent to this tower immediately after Ah-Duo had come, so she didn’t expect to see the former consort for a while. As for her father, his only question had been, “So you really didn’t pull that ridiculous stunt?”

“No, sir,” Lishu had answered weakly. It had been all she was able to muster. The apothecary had proven that Uryuu was in fact her real father, but such long-standing grudges didn’t instantly dissipate in real life the way they did in plays. Her father might finally believe she was his daughter, but he had other children. He’d rejected her mother; why should he suddenly feel any warmth for the daughter he’d had with her? Lishu had known perfectly well that things had been unlikely to change, yet it grieved her to be confronted with the reality.

“I’m going to clean these up, then, milady,” Kanan said, collecting the tea implements and taking them out of the room. There was nowhere to get water in Lishu’s chambers, so any washing had to be done on a lower floor. Kanan was allowed some mobility, but Lishu was required to stay on the third floor. If she ever went downstairs, it was only with the permission of her guard.

Lishu sighed and stretched out across her table. The old building creaked and cracked every time she moved. The upper levels seemed to be in an even worse state, and Lishu sometimes worried that one day the ceiling might come clean off.

It seemed to her that there was someone else locked up here besides her. Because the staircase wound around the outside of the building, getting to the upper levels required passing the rooms on the lower floors, and several times each day, someone—someone who wasn’t Lishu or Kanan—took the stairs going up. Kanan reported that this person would be carrying food or changes of clothes, so there must have been someone up there in the same situation as Lishu.

She had no way of finding out who it was, though—and even if she did, it was possible she would discover she had been better off not knowing.

With nothing else really to do, Lishu thought she might try to sleep a little, but then she heard a noise from above her. She looked at the ceiling in surprise. It was an old building; there must be some mice around. But one does grow anxious when one is in a dimly lit room by oneself. Lishu was so frightened, in fact, that she thought she might try to step outside.

Tump, tump, tump. Mice didn’t have footsteps like that. Lishu was still frightened, but now she was also strangely intrigued. The sounds seemed to be coming from above the next room, so Lishu took the cover from her bed and, draping it over her head, peeked cautiously through the door.

“Y-You’re just a little mouse, right? Say ‘squeak’!”

It was a silly request. Before, back when Lishu had been ignorant of the mockery of her ladies-in-waiting, she had taken an imperious attitude with maids who came to her pavilion, frequently issuing just such childish demands. She’d been told that you had to assert yourself with these lowly types so that they knew their place, and she had believed it uncritically. No wonder the maids hadn’t liked her—she couldn’t do anything for herself, yet she went around giving orders.

The muffled thumping stopped, but just as Lishu was letting out a sigh of relief, there was a tremendous crash, accompanied by a tinkling sound of something breaking. Lishu was so startled she fell flat on her behind.

And then she heard much more than a squeak.

“Hello?” a voice said. “Is someone there?”