Maomao awoke to the twittering of sparrows. She sat up in her meager
bed, the characteristic odor of brewing medicine prickling her nose. “Good morning,” said a calm, grandmotherly voice. It belonged to her
father.
That’s right… I’m back home, she thought. This was her first trip back since she had begun working in the outer court. Typically, maids in her position had no vacations to speak of. Of course not: even if their master were to take a day off work, it wasn’t as if he stopped living his life. Most such people had more than just one or two servants, leaving a little leeway for one of them to take time off. But matters were different with Jinshi; he had so few attendants.
I can’t believe she made it this long by herself… Maomao could only tip her proverbial hat to Jinshi’s attendant Suiren, whose indulgence was the only reason she had been able to take this break. Although Maomao paid for it: the rest of the time, Suiren worked her relentlessly.
Maomao got out of bed and sat in a crude chair. Her father brought her some warm congee in a chipped bowl. She sipped at it: it needed salt, but her father had at least given it a good, hearty flavor by mixing in some fragrant herbs. Maomao added a few drops of vinegar and stirred.
“Make sure you wash your face,” her father said. “Yeah, once I eat.”
Maomao continued stirring the porridge with her spoon while her father prepared the ingredients for the medicine he was mixing up. “What do you plan to do today?” he asked.
Maomao looked at him, almost a bit confused. “Nothing special,” she said.
“In that case, perhaps you could go to the Verdigris House for me.”
There was a beat before Maomao said, “Sure. All right.” She added another liberal dash of vinegar to her congee.
Her father’s apothecary was situated inside the Verdigris House, but when he asked her to “go” there, he had something else in mind. When Maomao arrived, she greeted the manservant outside with a familiar hello and went in. Through the elegant atrium of the entry hall she passed, then proceeded down a covered walkway to one side. The central courtyard was as fine as that in any aristocrat’s mansion, and at night it was lit with burning lanterns. It was kept in good enough order to impress those who occasionally came by for tea during the day.
Maomao didn’t stop in the courtyard, though, but continued to a lonely little outbuilding. This was no place for customers. Once within, the reek of illness filled her nostrils.
“Morning.”
A woman slept inside, her hair disheveled. She looked like a particularly unpleasant skeleton.
“I brought your medicine,” Maomao continued. The woman, though, didn’t speak. One might almost suspect she had long ago forgotten how.
She used to chase Maomao out, seemingly from sheer hatred, but in the past few years she’d lost the energy to do even that.
Maomao went to where the woman lay indolently on her back and helped her swallow the powder she’d brought. It was what her father used in place of quicksilver or arsenic. Less poisonous, he said, and more effective, but at the moment it wasn’t even serving to help sedate the woman. Yet they had no other way to treat her except to give her this powder.
The noseless woman was nearly forty now, but once she had been celebrated as a butterfly, feted as a flower. The Verdigris House was a prestigious enough establishment to pick and choose its customers now, but it hadn’t always been so. In the years after Maomao’s birth, there had been a time when the place had little more than a mud-spattered sign to its name. It was during that time that this woman had been a courtesan taking customers, and to her misfortune, she’d contracted syphilis, known in Maomao’s language as “the Plum Poison.”
If this medicine had been available to her in the early stages of her
illness, perhaps she might have been cured, but by now the state of her body barely bore looking at. The illness had ravaged not only her appearance, but her mind as well, leaving her memory in tatters.
Time—time was a cruel thing.
When Luomen had first seen the woman, her illness had been in a dormant phase. If she’d only told him about it then, instead of holding back, things might not have taken such a brutal turn. But then, not everyone was willing to immediately trust a eunuch who showed up seemingly out of nowhere, a pariah from the rear palace. The simple reality of a courtesan’s life was that she took customers, or she didn’t eat.
When the lesions began again several years later, the tumors spread with startling speed. So the woman was confined to this room where customers wouldn’t see her. Yes, she was being swept under the rug, but this was still, by one standard, remarkably compassionate treatment. A courtesan who could no longer work was typically chased out of the establishment. The woman was lucky not to be simply daubed with some whitening cream and eyebrow ink and left in a ditch.
Maomao took a rag from a washbasin and began wiping the woman’s body as she lay there. Maybe I’ll burn some incense too, she thought; the perpetually closed door penned the stench in the room.
There was some incense on hand that the woman had received from a certain noble. Fancy stuff, and an aroma the man himself was said to enjoy
—but it was rarely used. It could be a problem when mixing medicines, many of which suffered from absorbing unusual odors. The only times the stuff was regularly burned was when the man himself appeared, at which point a token amount would be lit. Maomao helped herself to a bit of the stuff now.
The incense had an ever so slightly sweet scent, and when it wafted over
to her, the barest of smiles passed over the woman’s face. She began to hum a children’s song in a broken voice. It seemed she had regressed to her childhood. Hopefully she was at least reliving a pleasant memory.
Maomao set the incense burner in a corner of the room so the courtesan wouldn’t accidentally knock it over. Just then, she heard pounding footsteps from outside.
“Good lord. What is it?”
One of the apprentices appeared. Maomao seemed to remember she served Meimei. The girl was reluctant to come into the sickroom, but hovered in the doorway. She was probably scared of the woman with no nose.
“Um, Sis said to bring you a message,” the girl told Maomao. “She said if I found you here, to tell you you’d better stay here for a while. She said there’s a weird guy with a monocle out there.”
“Ah,” Maomao said. She understood who the girl meant. The weird man with glasses was a long-standing customer of the Verdigris House, but he was not someone with whom Maomao wished to cross paths. As long as she stayed in this room, however, she would be safe. The madam would never do something so stupid as to show a customer something she had worked so hard to hide.
“Okay,” Maomao said now. “I’ve got it. You can go back.”
Then she let out a breath. The woman with no nose stopped her song and pulled out a set of marbles made with colored pebbles. She began lining them up one next to the other, as if trying to organize the tattered bits of her memories.
Fool woman, Maomao thought. She went over to a corner of the room and crouched down.
It was Meimei who came shortly thereafter to let Maomao know that the coast was clear. Unlike her apprentice, the courtesan entered the room without hesitation, as though she knew it well. “Thanks for taking care of her today.”
Maomao set out a round pillow. Meimei sat and smiled down at the sick woman. The patient didn’t react; she had fallen asleep at some point.
“Maomao,” Meimei said. “They talked about you-know-what again.”
Maomao did indeed “know what.” The very thought was enough to give her goosebumps. “Persistent old bastard, isn’t he? I’m amazed you can stand him, Sis.”
“He’s a good customer, if you can accept him as he is. And given what he pays, the old lady’s not about to object.”
“Yeah. And I’m sure that’s why she’s so keen for me to become a courtesan.” The customer in question was the reason the madam had been so intent on bringing Maomao into her employ these past years. If Maomao hadn’t been hired by Jinshi, there was a distinct chance she would have been sold off to this customer by now. “I don’t even want to think about it,” she said, her face contorting.
Meimei exhaled pointedly when she saw this expression. “From an
outside perspective, it might look like an excellent opportunity.” “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Don’t make that face at me.” (Courtesans had a somewhat different idea from most people of what constituted a good match.) “Do you know how few of us get to end up with someone we truly desire?”
“I know. Because for the madam, personal attraction weighs nothing, but silver is very, very heavy.”
“That’s the cost of a ticket on the boat to heaven,” Meimei said with a jovial laugh. She ran her fingers through the sick woman’s hair, then whispered to Maomao: “I think the old lady’s of a mind to sell one of us off one of these days. We’re getting to be about that age.”
Meimei wasn’t quite thirty yet, but for a courtesan, it was entirely natural to start thinking about retirement at that age. Sell high, as it were; or rather, sell before your looks started to go.
Maomao silently studied Meimei’s profile. Her face, still beautiful, appeared awash in a bevy of emotions, but Maomao didn’t want to think about them too hard. Those were feelings she still didn’t understand. If there was such a thing as love, Maomao thought she had left it in the womb of the woman who bore her when she came out into the world.
“What if you started up a place of your own?”
“Hah! The last thing I want is to be a competitor to that old hag.”
Meimei must have enough money to free herself, Maomao thought. If she chose not to leave the courtesan’s life, it must have been because she wasn’t ready.
“Just a little longer,” Meimei said with a smile. “I won’t be in this line of work forever.”
○●○
Jinshi pressed his chop to some paperwork, his face long. The outing the day before must have tired him.
He sighed: never had he imagined that the establishment at which the meeting took place would be a virtual extension of the pleasure district. He hadn’t gone there for that! What’s more, the whole point of his disguise had been that it was difficult for him to go out in public quietly. Yet he had ended up accompanied by Maomao practically to the very doorstep of his
meeting. Something else he hadn’t envisioned. The idea had come instead from the aide quietly organizing the papers beside him.
This man had served him for many years, but perhaps it made him too willing to take matters into his own hands. No doubt he thought that what he had done was for Jinshi’s benefit, but Jinshi could have raised a number of objections.
“Gaoshun… What are you plotting?” Jinshi asked.
Gaoshun shook his head as if to say the idea of plotting anything had
never occurred to him. “Allow me to answer a question with a question, sir: how was your little jaunt into town?”
“Ah, yes…” Jinshi wasn’t quite sure what to say about it; he took a sip of tea in hopes of stalling. He was sure now: Gaoshun thought he was helping, howsoever that was. Jinshi searched his mind for some way to change the subject. “Ahem. I discovered something interesting. The girl—her adoptive father is a eunuch, and was a doctor here once.”
“‘The girl’—you mean Xiaomao? If she was taught by a palace doctor, that would explain a great deal about her medical knowledge. A eunuch, though…”
“You heard me.”
The simple fact was, no doctor of the rear palace was likely to be a man of renown. Someone who had the wherewithal to become a qualified medical practitioner had no need to become a eunuch in order to find work. The only physicians who found their way to the rear palace were the ones with problems.
“Could such a talented practitioner really have been among the eunuchs?” Gaoshun asked.
“That is the question, isn’t it?” Jinshi said.
Gaoshun hmmed and stroked his chin. Jinshi felt he had said enough; his aide was a sharp enough man to take the investigation from here.
They heard the clear ringing of a bell, a little device set up so Jinshi would be immediately aware of any visitors to his office. Gaoshun put down his work and stood by the entrance, waiting for the new arrival.
Another day, another visit from the weirdo with the monocle. He didn’t have any particular business; he simply lounged around on a couch, sipping juice. “Thanks for taking care of that little thing the other day. Whew, it did
turn out to be quite a story, didn’t it?” Lakan stroked his chin and squinted at Jinshi, making his already narrow eyes even narrower.
“It seems the youngest of those brothers was the most capable after all,” Jinshi said as he flipped through some papers. He suspected the commander had known all along. After the incident with their father’s inheritance, the three men had appeared to reconcile with each other, but it was no more than that—an appearance. The youngest brother had suddenly revealed a heretofore undisclosed ability, and there was even talk that he could soon be doing work for the palace. Jinshi had seen some of his products, and the delicacy of the workmanship impressed even him. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he strongly suspected the apothecary’s daughter did
—and wasn’t saying anything about it.
“I think if we got that young man to handle the furnishings for the ritual, it would redound to the glory of our ruler.”
“Yes, of course.” Jinshi hated the way Lakan could make virtually anything sound important. A man of Jinshi’s stature would normally hardly even hear of ritual preparations.
“Then there’s the last work the father left behind. Just simple metal fittings, but so fine they could be fit for ritual use themselves.”
“I find I keep wondering, Master Strategist, why it is you feel you must speak with me about these craftsmen.”
“Why not? It’s a waste to leave buried talent buried.”
Lakan could be obnoxious, but when he was right, he was right. Even if there was an ulterior motive for whatever he happened to be saying. If nothing else, Lakan was an excellent judge of talent. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it was that ability that had seen him rise to the position he now occupied. He might look as if he was slacking off at the moment, but in fact his work was being done, and industriously at that, by the various people he had discovered and employed. Jinshi could almost be jealous of him.
“What does it matter whether he’s the elder brother or the younger? The cream should rise to the top!”
He made it sound so simple. That penchant for simplicity made him useful in his way, but he took careful handling.
Jinshi straightened his papers and passed them to an official who took them away.
“Incidentally, I wanted to ask you about something. The thing we talked about before,” Jinshi said.
He meant the courtesan he had heard about previously. Did Lakan intend to play dumb again?
The commander put his hands on his cheeks and grinned. “If you want to know about that world, better to ask someone who comes from it.” Then he got to his feet. The official attending him let out a sigh, relieved to
finally be going home. “Hah, I see it’s that time. My lackeys won’t let me hear the end of it if I keep them too long.”
He finished the last of his juice, then set the other bottle he’d brought
with him on Jinshi’s desk. “Let your little serving girls have it or something. It’s easy on the throat—not too sweet.” The middle-aged soldier waved a hand in Jinshi’s general direction. “See you tomorrow.”
Then he was gone.
