“A letter from Consort Gyokuyou?”
“Yes. I was told to deliver it personally.”
“I’m afraid Lady Ah-Duo is attending tea right now…” Fengming, Ah-Duo’s pudgy chief lady-in-waiting, regarded Maomao apologetically.
Maomao opened the small wooden box she was carrying.
Normally it might have contained a slip of paper, but this one held a small jar with a single red trumpet of a flower within. A familiar, sweet aroma drifted from it. Maomao saw Fengming wince; she must have recognized the blossom.
So I was right? Maomao slid the jar aside, revealing a scrap of paper on which was written a list of specific words she suspected Fengming knew perfectly well.
“I would like to speak with you if I may, Lady Fengming,” Maomao said.
“Very well,” Fengming replied.
I like the sharp ones, Maomao thought. Makes things so much quicker.
Fengming, her face taut, ushered Maomao into the Garnet Pavilion.
Fengming’s personal chambers were laid out on much the same plan as Hongniang’s, but everything she owned was crammed into one corner. It seemed she was all packed.
Yep. That tallies. Maomao and Fengming sat facing each other across a round table. Fengming served warming ginger tea, and a caddy on the table contained hard buns of bread. Fruit honeys were slathered all over them.
“Now, whatever is the matter?” Fengming asked. “We’re quite finished cleaning, if that’s what you’re here for.” Her voice was
gentle, but it had a searching quality. She knew why Maomao had come, but she wasn’t going to be the one to start the
conversation.
“When will you be moving, if I may ask?” Maomao said, indicating the belongings in the corner.
“You’re very perceptive.” Fengming’s voice immediately turned cold.
The “spring cleaning” had been only a pretext. In order that a new consort might be in place by the time people made their
formal new year’s greetings, Ah-Duo was going to have to leave the Garnet Pavilion. Consorts who would not or could not bear children had no place in the rear palace. Not even if they had
been the Emperor’s companion for many years. All the more so if they lacked any powerful backer at court to secure their status, as Ah-Duo did.
To this point, the fact that Ah-Duo was the monarch’s milk-
sibling, a bond closer than that with one’s own biological parents, had protected her. Perhaps if at least the prince she’d borne had lived, she might have been able to hold her head up.
I have a guess about her. Consort Ah-Duo had the handsome beauty of a young man; there was hardly a hint of womanliness about her. If a woman could become a eunuch, she might look
something like Ah-Duo. Maomao hated to say anything based on an assumption—but when it was an obvious fact, sometimes that was all you could do.
“Consort Ah-Duo is no longer able to bear children, is she?”
Fengming said nothing, but her silence was as good as confirmation. Her face grew harder and harder.
“Something happened during the delivery, didn’t it?” Maomao prodded.
“That has nothing to do with you.” The middle-aged lady-in- waiting narrowed her eyes. They held no hint of the tender, considerate woman Maomao had met before, but burned with a deep hostility.
“In fact, it does. For the attending physician at the birth was my adoptive father.” Maomao delivered this fact dispassionately. Fengming got to her feet.
The medical staff at the rear palace was continually
shorthanded, so much so that even the quack who filled the
position at the moment could hold onto his job. The reason was
simple: a man who possessed that unique skill—well-developed medical knowledge—had no need to become a eunuch. It had probably been easy enough to foist the job on her socially inept old man.
“Consort Ah-Duo’s misfortune was that the birth of her child coincided with that of the Imperial younger brother. Weigh the
two in the scales of this court, and your lady’s delivery was clearly deemed the less important.”
The baby survived the difficult delivery, but Ah-Duo lost her
womb. Then the child died young. Some speculated that Ah-Duo’s infant had been lost to the same toxic makeup that had killed
Consort Lihua’s prince, but Maomao thought differently. The mother of a young prince, like Ah-Duo, would never have been allowed the deadly face powder on her father’s watch.
“Do you feel at all responsible for what happened, Lady Fengming? When Consort Ah-Duo was indisposed after the birth, I believe it was you who cared for the infant in her place…”
“Well,” Fengming said slowly. “You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you? Even though you’re the daughter of the worthless quack who couldn’t help Lady Ah-Duo.”
“Yes. Even so.” Blame in medicine couldn’t be dismissed with a helpless shrug: something else her father had said. He would have readily accepted abuse like “quack.” “You know that quack prevented your mistress from using face powder with white lead
in it. And you were too smart to have given the child something so deadly.” Maomao opened the small jar in the letter case. Honey glistened inside. Maomao put the red flower from the jar into her mouth.
It carried the sweetness of the honey. She plucked off the
blossom, playing with it in her fingers. “There are many varieties of poisonous plants. Wolfsbane and azalea, for example. And the toxins carry over to honey made from them, as well.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“I should think so.” A family of beekeepers could certainly be expected to understand such things. And if a toxin would cause serious poisoning in an adult, think what it would do to a child. “But you didn’t realize that honey could contain poison that only affected children.”
It wasn’t an assumption. It was fact. It was rare, but some
such toxins existed—agents that were only poisonous to children, with their lower levels of resistance.
“You tasted it and were fine, so you assumed he would be, too.
Yet the stuff you gave to the boy to help him grow was doing exactly the opposite, and you never knew it.”
And then, Ah-Duo’s child had perished. Cause of death unknown.
Luomen—Maomao’s father and the chief physician at the time
—was blamed for this tremendous failure, in addition to the
trouble during the birth. For these he was banished, and he was further punished with mutilation: they removed the bones of one knee.
“The last thing you wanted was for your mistress to find out— for Consort Ah-Duo to know.” To discover that Fengming was the reason the one child her mistress would ever have was dead. “So you tried to get Consort Lishu out of the picture.”
During the reign of the prior Emperor, Lishu had apparently been quite close to Ah-Duo, and Ah-Duo, it was said, had
seemingly taken a great liking to her. Was it possible Ah-Duo had been staying close to the young bride in hopes that the Emperor would not consummate their relationship?
A child separated from her parents, and a grown woman who could never give birth: a sort of symbiosis emerged between
them. But one day, abruptly, Consort Ah-Duo ceased admitting Lishu. The young consort came repeatedly to visit her, but each
time, Fengming chased her away. Then the former Emperor died, and Consort Lishu took vows.
“Consort Lishu told you, didn’t she? That the honey could be poisonous.” And if Lishu had continued her frequent visits, she might have eventually let the fact slip to Ah-Duo. Ah-Duo was
clever enough that it might be all she needed to put the pieces together. That, Fengming was desperate to avoid.
After the Emperor’s death, however, with Lishu safely in a nunnery, Fengming had thought she would never see the girl again—until she reappeared at the rear palace, still a high
consort. And now a threat to Ah-Duo. Yet the girl almost seemed to make a show of coming to visit Ah-Duo, like a child eager for
her mother. So sheltered, Lishu was. So blind to the world around her. So Fengming decided to get rid of her.
Across from Maomao there was no trace of the calm, caring chief lady-in-waiting. Fengming’s gaze was as cold as ice. “What do you want?”
“Nothing,” Maomao said, although she felt a tingling on the
back of her neck. The knife they had used to cut the buns earlier was on the shelf behind her. It was only a simple cleaver, but it was more than enough to threaten the petite Maomao. It was
easily within Fengming’s reach.
“Anything at all,” Fengming ventured, almost sweetly. “You know perfectly well, milady, that such an offer is
meaningless.”
Fengming’s lips curved vacantly at that. It didn’t even rise to the level of a polite smile, but there was something deep within the expression—what?
“Say… Do you know what matters most to the person who
matters most to you?” Fengming said to Maomao, the whisper of a smile still on her face. Maomao shook her head. She was ignorant of what was most important. Be it things or people.
“Well, I took it away,” Fengming said. “Stole the child she
cherished more than a jewel.” From the moment Fengming had entered Ah-Duo’s service, she had known she would serve no one else in her life. The consort had a firmness of will uncommon in a woman and could bring to bear the same look as the heir himself when she spoke, and Fengming respected her to no end. The
consort struck Fengming, who had spent her whole life doing just as her parents told her, like a thunderbolt. She smiled as she told the story.
“Lady Ah-Duo said something to me, back then. She said her
son had only followed the will of heaven. That it wasn’t something for us to be disturbed over.” It was impossible to know if a child
would survive to the age of seven. The slightest illness could kill them seemingly on the spot. “And yet I could hear Lady Ah-Duo crying every night.” Fengming looked slowly at the ground. A sort of moan escaped her. The immovable chief lady-in-waiting was
gone. In her place there was only a woman wracked with regret. How must she have felt as she served Consort Ah-Duo these
sixteen years? Devoting herself entirely to her lady, with no
thought of a spouse or partner? Maomao could not imagine. Not Fengming’s emotions, not what it would feel like to cherish another person to that degree. Thus she truly didn’t know what it was she wanted.
Would Fengming accept what Maomao was about to propose? No doubt Jinshi had been informed of Maomao’s recent interest in the archives. She didn’t think she could hide anything from the
eunuch who all but ran the rear palace. She had managed to keep the truth to herself in the matter of Princess Fuyou, but she didn’t think she could throw him off the trail this time.
Nor did she want to.
When he heard what Maomao had to say, Jinshi would have Fengming arrested. She would certainly not escape the ultimate punishment, no matter what else happened or who appealed on her behalf. The truth would come to light after sixteen years.
Things had been set in motion, and even if Maomao were to
vanish here and now, sooner or later, Fengming would be found out. The chief lady-in-waiting was too smart not to realize that.
There was only one thing Maomao could do for her. Fengming couldn’t hope for a reduction in her punishment, nor for the intercession of Consort Ah-Duo. But her two motives could be
reduced to one. She could continue to hide her motivation from Consort Ah-Duo.
Maomao knew what a terrible thing she was saying. That it amounted to asking another woman to die. But it was the only thing she could think of. The only thing a young woman with no particular influence or authority could offer.
“The outcome will be the same. But if you can accept that…”
If Fengming could accept that, she would do as Maomao urged her.
So tired…
Maomao returned to her chamber at the Jade Pavilion and
collapsed onto her hard bed. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, sweat that had poured off of her at the moment of highest
tension, reeking of fear. She wanted a bath.
Thinking she could at least change, she pulled off her outer
garments, revealing a large cloth wrapped from her chest all the way down to her stomach. It held several layers of oil paper in place.
“Glad I didn’t need it,” she said to herself. Getting stabbed still would have hurt.
Maomao stripped off the oil paper and found herself a fresh outfit.
⭘⬤⭘
Jinshi could only contemplate the fact in amazement. Who would have imagined that the attempted poisoning of Consort Lishu would end with the culprit’s suicide?
Jinshi was in the sitting area of the Jade Pavilion, describing this outcome to a reticent lady-in-waiting. He had already
informed Consort Gyokuyou.
“And so Fengming is dead, by her own hand,” he said. “How lucky for all of us,” the lady-in-waiting replied with no
special show of emotion.
Jinshi rested his elbows on the table. Gaoshun looked like he wanted to object, but Jinshi ignored him. Manners be damned. “Are you sure you don’t know anything about this?” he said. He sometimes had an inescapable feeling that this young lady was up to something.
“I can tell you what I don’t know—what you’re talking about.” “I’m given to understand you kept Gaoshun quite busy
gathering books.”
“Yes. All for nothing, I’m afraid.”
She sounded so nonchalant he almost thought she was making fun of him. Then again, what else was new? It was possible she was carrying a bit of a grudge from his joke the other day—he
had gone a bit overboard. But for the most part, this seemed
normal. She was giving him her standard looking-at-filth glare. It went beyond rudeness to achieve a purity all its own.
“The motive, as you guessed, was to help Consort Ah-Duo retain her seat among the four ladies.”
“Is that so?” Maomao looked at him with total disinterest. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Consort Ah-Duo will indeed
be demoted from her place as a high consort. She’s to leave the
rear palace and live at the South Palace.”
“Retribution for the attempted poisoning?” Maomao asked. Ah, the cat had finally started to take an interest in the ball of string.
“No, the move was already settled. His Majesty’s decision.” The Emperor’s long affection for Ah-Duo must have been what allowed her to remain in an Imperial residence, rather than being sent
back to her home and family.
Maomao’s uncharacteristic show of interest promptly led Jinshi to get carried away. He stood and took a step forward,
whereupon she tensed and took a half step back. So he was right; she hadn’t quite gotten over his little japes. Naturally, Gaoshun watched them both with exasperation.
It would do Jinshi no good if Maomao got too tense. He sat
back down. The petite serving woman bowed her head and made to leave the room, but then she stopped. A branch of red,
trumpet-shaped flowers decorated the room.
“Hongniang put them there earlier,” Jinshi informed her.
“Indeed,” Maomao said. “What a great burst of blooms.” She took one of the blossoms, broke off the stem, and put it in her mouth. Jinshi, perplexed, approached slowly and did the same. “It’s sweet.”
“Yes. And poisonous.”
Jinshi spat out the stem and covered his mouth as Gaoshun rushed to get water.
“Don’t worry,” Maomao said. “It won’t kill you.”
Then the strange girl licked her lips, which carried the hint of a sweet smile of her own.
