by Natsu Hyuuga
Leave me alone, Maomao implored them silently. She had tried to accustom herself to buckwheat, but it caused her bronchial tubes to contract and threatened her breathing. It also made her break out in a rash, but only once it was absorbed by her stomach, so it was hard to judge an appropriate portion, and the effects took a long time to subside. Eventually, she had given up trying to inure herself to the stuff. She still harbored hopes of making another attempt at it someday, but she wasn’t going to do it here in the rear palace, where her only hope if something went wrong would lie with the quack doctor.
“How did you know?” Lishu asked tremblingly.
“First, let me ask you a question. How is your stomach? You don’t appear to have any nausea or cramps.” Maomao then offered to prepare a purgative, but Consort Lishu shook her head vigorously. It was too humiliating to contemplate, right here in front of the one aristocrat with whom everyone seemed obsessed. It was Maomao’s little way of getting back at Lishu for her contempt.
“In that case, please be seated.” Gaoshun, more solicitous than he first appeared, pulled out a chair. Lishu sat down.
“The problem is that your meal was switched with Lady Gyokuyou’s. The lady isn’t picky about her food, so she largely eats the same things as His Majesty,” Maomao said. But in this case, one or two of the ingredients had differed between their meals. “Mackerel and abalone—that’s what you can’t eat, isn’t it?”
The consort nodded. The look of astonishment on the face of the lady attending Lishu wasn’t lost on Maomao.
“Those who don’t labor under such dietary restrictions don’t always understand that this goes beyond preference,” Maomao said. “In this case, the consequences seem to have been no worse than a rash, but sometimes such foods can cause difficulty breathing or even heart problems. I would go so far as to say that if someone were to knowingly give you food you can’t eat, it would be tantamount to serving you poison.” That word got an immediate reaction from the rest of the room. “I understand that under the circumstances you may have found it difficult to object, Consort, but you put yourself in tremendous danger.” Maomao’s gaze drifted between the lady and her attendant. “I urge you not to forget this lesson in the future.” She was talking to both of them. After a beat, she added to Jinshi, “Please be sure her usual chef is aware as well.”
Lishu and her attendant, however, still seemed uncomprehending. Maomao explained the danger at length to the lady-in-waiting, and wrote down what to do in the event Lishu should have another reaction. The woman was pale, giving little, convulsive nods of her head.
So this is what it’s like to threaten somebody.
The lady who had stayed with Lishu was her food taster. The one who had been laughing.
After Consort Lishu had withdrawn, Maomao sensed an almost viscous atmosphere behind her, and finally felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned a cold look on the hand’s owner; it would have been better had she looked at him the way she might look at an earthworm.
“I am but base, and wish you would not touch me.” In less elegant words: Screw off.
“You’re the only one who says such things to me.”
“I suppose everyone else is too considerate.” Maomao edged away from Jinshi. She sighed as if she had heartburn and looked for Gaoshun in hopes that he might serve as her tonic, but ever loyal to his master, he looked back with an expression that said: Please, just put up with him.
“Well, I must return and report to Lady Gyokuyou,” Maomao said.
“Tell me why you asked that the consort’s food taster come here with us,” Jinshi said, suddenly springing on the heart of the matter. This was why it was so hard to deal with him.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Maomao said expressionlessly.
“You think the one who set out the meals made the mistake, then?”
“I wouldn’t know.” She was going to play dumb to the bitter end.
“Then answer me this, at least. Was the Virtuous Consort being deliberately targeted?”
“If there’s no poison in any of the other bowls...”
Then it would have to be deliberate.
Maomao left the room as Jinshi lapsed into thought. Once she was safely outside, she slumped against the wall and let out a long breath.
Chapter 20: Fingers
Upon returning to the Jade Pavilion, Maomao found herself subjected to scrupulous nursing. She was changed into fresh clothes and thrown into bed, not in the cramped room she usually occupied, but in a much larger spare room made up with a proper bed. After a bit of rest on this new silk bedding, Maomao thought of the straw mat on which she usually slept and felt like she had ascended from a bog into the clouds.
“I’ve taken medicine, and there’s nothing wrong with me physically,” she protested. By medicine she meant the emetic, but there was no need to say that.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You should have seen the minister who ate that food. I don’t care if you did get the stuff out of your system, there’s no way you’re fine and dandy,” Yinghua said, pressing a damp cloth to Maomao’s forehead with concern.
Stupid, stupid minister, Maomao thought. She wondered if he had really managed to get it all out with the first medication he was given, but her curiosity wasn’t going to win her freedom here. She resigned herself to this fact and closed her eyes.
It was an agonizingly long day.
Maomao must have been more tired than she thought, because it was almost noon when she woke up. That wasn’t good for a lady-in-waiting. She hopped out of bed and changed, then went looking for Hongniang.
No, wait. First...
Maomao went back to her own room to find the face powder she always used. Not the whitening powder everyone else was so concerned with, but the stuff that created the freckles on her face. Using a polished sheet of bronze as a mirror, she tapped the spots around her tattoos with her fingertip, paying special attention to the ones above her nose.
I’m absolutely not going out without my makeup again. It was just too much trouble to explain. It crossed Maomao’s mind that she could just pretend she had used makeup to hide her “freckles,” but the idea only embarrassed her. She would probably be expected to react like a blushing virgin every time somebody mentioned it.
Maomao’s stomach was rumbling, so she had one of the leftover mooncakes for a snack. She would have liked to wipe down her body, but she didn’t have the time. She made a beeline for where the others were working.
Hongniang was with Consort Gyokuyou, watching over Princess Lingli. She hardly looked away from the rather mobile young lady, moving her so that she stayed on the carpet, or supporting chairs so they wouldn’t fall as the princess used them to try to stand up. She seemed quite precocious.
“My sincere apologies for oversleeping,” Maomao said with a bow.
“Oversleeping? You should have taken the day off.” Gyokuyou put a hand to Maomao’s cheek, looking worried.
“Hardly, milady. If you have need of me, please call,” Maomao said—but she knew full well that she was rarely given any serious work to do and would probably be left alone.
“Your freckles...” Gyokuyou said, fixing immediately on the one thing Maomao least wanted her to notice.
“I feel much better with them. If milady doesn’t mind.”
“Yes, of course,” Gyokuyou said, letting the matter go much more readily than Maomao had expected. Maomao gave her a probing look, but Gyokuyou said: “Absolutely everyone wanted to know who that lady-in-waiting of mine was. I thought the questions would never end!”
“My apologies.”
Maomao suspected people didn’t look favorably on a serving girl who declared the presence of poison and then simply left a banquet of her own volition. Privately, she had even fretted over whether she would be punished for it, and she was relieved to discover no reprimand was forthcoming.
“At least with those freckles, people won’t recognize you right away. That might be for the best.”
Maomao had thought she’d been more subtle than that, but maybe she was wrong. Where had her mistake been?
“Oh, and something else. Gaoshun came by this morning looking for you. Will you see him? He looked like he had time on his hands, so I set him to weeding outside.”
Weeding?
True, it was the Emperor’s favorite consort dispensing the task, but then, Gaoshun was no serving girl. Or perhaps he had taken on the job voluntarily. Maomao had the impression Gaoshun ranked reasonably high in the hierarchy, but he also seemed something of a soft touch. She could see any number of ladies-in-waiting falling hard for him. She especially had the sense that Hongniang’s eyes lit up when Gaoshun was around. The chief lady-in-waiting was thirty or so, and despite her good looks, her considerable competence had the side effect of scaring off potential suitors.
“Might we borrow the sitting room?” Maomao asked.
“You may. I’ll have him summoned immediately,” Gyokuyou said, taking the princess from Hongniang, who left to go call Gaoshun. Maomao had been just about to follow her, but Gyokuyou stopped her with a hand, and directed her to the sitting room instead.
“Master Jinshi sends this, with his regards,” Gaoshun said promptly when he entered the room. He placed a cloth-wrapped package on the table. Maomao opened it to discover a silver bowl full of soup. Not the stuff Maomao had sampled, but the dish from which Consort Gyokuyou had been about to eat. He had refused her yesterday, but in the end, had been kind enough to provide it. He was being polite, but this was also, Maomao surmised, an order to investigate.
“Please don’t eat it,” Gaoshun said with a distinct look of concern.
“Perish the thought,” Maomao replied. But only because silver promotes rotting. Oxidized food was never tasty.
Gaoshun didn’t seem to realize she had her own reason for not drinking the soup. He watched her doubtfully. Maomao stared at the bowl, careful not to touch it directly. And she was staring at the bowl, not at the contents.
“Learning anything?” Gaoshun asked her.
“Did you touch this with your bare hands?”
“No. I only took out some of the contents with a spoon to ascertain whether they were in fact poisonous.”
Then he had wrapped it in a cloth to bring to Maomao, apparently leery of touching a bowl full of poison.
That caused Maomao to lick her lips in anticipation. “All right. Wait here a moment.” She left the sitting room and went to the kitchen, rifling through the shelves looking for something. Then she went back to the room in which she’d been sleeping earlier. She ducked her head toward the fancy bed, splitting the cloth at the seams and pulling out some of what was inside before going back to where Gaoshun was waiting. To his eyes, she was simply carrying some white powder in one hand and soft-looking padding in the other.
Maomao balled up the padding and dusted the powder—flour—on it. Then she tapped it gently against the silver bowl. Gaoshun peered at her curiously. “What’s this?” he asked, observing the marks that appeared on the bowl.
“Traces of human touch.”
Human fingers easily left prints on metal. Particularly silver. When she was young, Maomao’s father had daubed dyes on vessels she wasn’t supposed to touch, to stop her from getting into mischief. Her little trick with the flour just now was a stroke of inspiration born of that old memory, and even she was surprised how well it had worked. If the flour had been a little finer, the prints might even have been easier to make out.
“Silver vessels are always wiped down before use. They would be worthless if they were cloudy, after all.”
Several different sets of prints were evident on the bowl. From their position and size, it was possible to guess how the bowl had been held.
Even if the exact patterns of the prints aren’t quite visible.
“This bowl has been touched...” Maomao said, but then she stopped.
Gaoshun was too perceptive to miss the way she came up short. “Yes? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” There was no point clumsily trying to keep secrets from Gaoshun. Even if it would render her little charade of the day before meaningless. Maomao let out a small sigh. “This bowl has been touched by four people in all, I would guess.” She pointed to the differing patterns in the white dust, careful not to touch the surface herself. “One doesn’t touch the bowl while polishing it, so we can presume the prints belong to the person who doled out the soup, the one who served it, the Virtuous Consort’s food taster, and one more unidentified person.”
Gaoshun turned an intense look upon her. “Why the food taster?”
Maomao wanted this to end quietly, but it would all depend on how this taciturn man reacted. “It’s simple. Because I suspect the food taster deliberately switched the bowls.” She knew perfectly well what her mistress could and could not eat, and had changed the bowls on purpose. With malice aforethought. Maomao set the bowl down, an unpleasant look flashing across her face. “It’s a form of bullying.”
“Bullying,” Gaoshun repeated as if he couldn’t quite believe it. And who could blame him? For a lady-in-waiting to do such a thing to a high-ranking consort was unthinkable. Impossible.
“I see you aren’t certain,” Maomao said. If Gaoshun didn’t appear to wish to know, Maomao had no inclination to tell him. She didn’t like to speak from assumptions, after all. But she might have to, if she was to explain why the fingerprints of the lady-in-waiting were on this bowl. Maomao decided it would be better to give her honest opinion than to make any half-baked attempts to throw Gaoshun off the scent.
“Would you let me in on what you’re thinking?” Gaoshun asked, his arms crossed as he studied her.
“Very well, sir. Please understand that this is ultimately just speculation on my part.”
“That’s fine.”
To begin with, consider the unusual situation of Consort Lishu. She had become the concubine of the previous Emperor while still very young, and soon found herself becoming a nun when he died. Many women, especially the rich ones, were taught that it was their wifely duty to commit themselves totally, body and spirit, to their husbands. Though she may have understood the political reasoning, Lishu must have found it appallingly unvirtuous to be married to the son of her former spouse.
“Did you see what Consort Lishu was wearing at the garden party?” Maomao asked. The Virtuous Consort had been attired in a gaudy pink dress that seemed well above her station.
Gaoshun said nothing, suggesting her reputation was poor in the circles he ran in.
“It was... somewhat gauche, shall we say?” Maomao offered. But Consort Lishu’s attendants, for their part, had all been wearing clothes that were mostly white. “In any normal situation, the ladies-in-waiting would have collectively convinced their mistress to wear something more prudent, or else they would have coordinated their outfits with hers. Instead, what they did made Consort Lishu look like a clown.”
A lady-in-waiting was there to support her mistress. This was something Hongniang had drilled into Consort Gyokuyou’s other women. Yinghua had said something similar during the banquet. Something about wearing subdued clothing to make their mistress stand out all the more. With that in mind, the argument with Consort Lishu’s ladies-in-waiting about clothing took on a new aspect.
The Pure Consort’s ladies-in-waiting were reprimanding them for their unconscionable behavior.
The callow Lishu was at the mercy of her serving women, who must have flattered her and insisted the pink dress would look good on her. There was no doubt in Maomao’s mind. In the rear palace, all around were enemies; the only people one could trust were one’s ladies-in-waiting. And these had betrayed that trust to humiliate their mistress.
“And you believe they further switched the food purely in order to make Consort Lishu’s life more difficult?” Gaoshun said tentatively.
“Yes. Though funnily enough, it saved her.”
Poison came in many varieties. Some were quite strong, but showe
d no immediate effects. In other words, had the bowls not been switched, Lishu’s food taster would still have shown no ill effects, and the consort would probably have drunk the soup, presuming all was well.
I think that’s enough speculation for today. Maomao picked up the bowl again and pointed to the rim. “I suspect these are the fingerprints of whoever put the poison in here. Perhaps they pinched the rim of the bowl while they did so.”
One must never touch the rim of a food vessel—something else Hongniang had taught them. One’s fingers must not dirty anything that might be touched by the lips of some noble person.
“That’s my view of what happened,” Maomao said.
Gaoshun rubbed his chin and gazed at the bowl. “May I ask you one thing?”
“Yes, sir?” Maomao passed the vessel, still cradled in its cloth, back to Gaoshun.
“Why did you attempt to cover for that woman?” In contrast to Maomao’s strained expression, Gaoshun appeared downright curious.
“Compared to a consort,” Maomao said, “the life of a lady-in-waiting is all too cheap.” Particularly that of a food taster.
Gaoshun nodded easily as if he understood what she was saying. “I’ll make sure Master Jinshi understands the situation.”
“My thanks.” Maomao politely watched Gaoshun leave—and then she slumped into a chair. “Right. Right. I’ll have to thank her.”
Since she was kind enough to change them, after all.
Maomao really ought to have drunk it, she thought.
⭘⬤⭘
“...Such is how matters stand, sir,” Gaoshun said, concluding his report on what he had learned at the Jade Pavilion. Jinshi, who had been too busy to go himself, ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. Papers were piled on his desk, and his chop was in his hand. In the whole administrative office, large but barren, only he and Gaoshun were present.
