The Apothecary Diaries

The Unsettling Matter of the Spirit (Part One)

Yinghua, lady-in-waiting to the Emperor's favorite consort, Gyokuyou, was faithfully at her work, as she was every day. All right, so she had fallen asleep on the job the other day, but her gracious mistress had forborne to punish her. The only way to repay her, then, was to work herself to the bone. She would make sure she polished every windowsill, every railing, until it gleamed. This was not normally something a lady-in-waiting would be expected to do, but Yinghua was not above doing a serving girl's work. Consort Gyokuyou had said how much she liked hard workers.

Consort Gyokuyou and Yinghua both came from a town in the west. The climate there was dry, and the area had no special resources to speak of and was periodically subject to drought. Yinghua and the other ladies-in-waiting were all officials' daughters, but she didn't recall her life in her hometown as especially luxurious. It had been the sort of impoverished place where even a child of the bureaucracy had to work if she didn't want to starve.

And then Gyokuyou was taken into the palace, and the world began to take note of her home. When the consort received the special attentions of the Emperor, the central bureaucracy could no longer hide where she had come from. But Gyokuyou was an intelligent woman. She wasn't content simply to be a pampered ornament. And Yinghua was bent on following her lady wherever she might go, including into the rear palace. Not all of Gyokuyou's ladies showed the same dedication, but those who remained simply resolved to work even harder to make up the difference.

When Yinghua went into the kitchen to organize the utensils, she discovered the new girl there, making something. Maomao was her name, Yinghua recalled, but she had proven so taciturn that nobody was sure what kind of person she really was. Consort Gyokuyou was an uncommonly strong judge of character, however, so it was unlikely Maomao was a bad egg.

Indeed, Yinghua felt sorry for her. The scars on her arm obviously bespoke a history of abuse, after which she had been sold into service, and now brought on to taste food for poison. It was enough to bring a tear to a lady-in-waiting's eye. They kept increasing her portions at dinner, hoping to plumpen the spindly girl, and they refused to let her do the cleaning so that she wouldn't have to reveal her injuries to the wider world. Yinghua and her two fellow ladies-in-waiting were of one mind in all this, and as a result Maomao frequently found herself with little to do.

Yinghua was happy enough with that. She and the other girls were more than capable of handling the work by themselves. Hongniang, the chief lady-in-waiting, didn't precisely agree, and at least gave Maomao the washing to take care of. It was just carrying the laundry around in a basket, so her scars wouldn't be obvious. She also engaged Maomao for miscellaneous chores when necessary.

Carting around laundry baskets also wasn't the work of a lady-in-waiting, but was properly done by the serving girls from the large communal rooms. But ever since a poison needle had been discovered in Consort Gyokuyou's clothing once, Yinghua and the others had taken to handling the wash themselves. It was incidents like this that inspired them to debase themselves as if they were simple serving women. Here in the rear palace, they were surrounded by enemies.

"What are you making?"

Maomao was boiling something that looked like grass in a stewpot. "It's a cold remedy." She always answered with the absolute minimum of words. It was understandable—poignant, in fact—to realize how hard she must find it to get close to people as a result of her abuse.

Maomao was profoundly knowledgeable about medicine, and occasionally made some like this. She always cleaned up after herself neatly, and the anti-chapping ointment she'd given Yinghua recently was precious stuff, so Yinghua didn't object. Sometimes Maomao even produced the concoctions at Hongniang's request.