Chapter 2: Nine Names and a Foxglove Garden
The first lady's foxglove turned out to be an ornamental border, planted by a gardener who had not known what it was and pulled up in a panic the moment Maomao named it. The late mother's weak heart turned out to be a weak heart. Maomao spent a whole afternoon with the family physician, a nervous old man with ink on his cuffs, going through twenty years of prescriptions, and found nothing more sinister than too much licorice root, which was mostly harmful to his reputation.
She wrote it up in three neat lines. No poison. Household safe. Lady is allergic to cats.
The second lady had no foxglove, no dead relatives, and no allergies. She did have a tendency to faint at banquets, which turned out to be her sash, tied so tightly by an ambitious maid that the poor woman could barely breathe. Maomao loosened it with her own hands, ordered the maid to stop, and wrote: No poison. Lady should be allowed to exhale.
The third, fourth and fifth were unremarkable. The sixth kept a pet snake, which was not technically a poison case, but Maomao spent an extra hour there anyway because it was a very good snake.
By the seventh she had developed a routine. She would arrive in a plain carriage from the Moon Prince's household with a letter bearing his seal, and the family would treat her with the brittle courtesy of people who did not know what she was and were afraid to guess. She would ask to see the kitchens first, then the storerooms, then the lady's personal chests. She would smell everything. She would ask the cook what the lady ate when she was unhappy, and the maids what she ate when she was happy, and the gardener what grew in the corners nobody visited.
And at the end of each visit, without fail, the lady herself would find a reason to catch Maomao alone in a corridor, take her hand with a small damp grip, and ask, in some form or another: "What is he like?"
Maomao had been asked this question seven times. She had given seven different answers. She had told the first lady that he was diligent, the second that he was punctual, the third that he was very tall. She had told the fifth, a sharp young woman with ink-stained fingers who reminded her a little of herself, that he was "persistent in a way you will find exhausting," and the woman had laughed out loud and said, "Oh, good."
She had not told any of them that he ate pickled radish standing up in the corridor when he thought nobody was watching. Or that he hummed when he read reports he liked. Or that, the one time she had been seriously ill, with a fever that had laid her out on her own bench for three days, he had sat in the medical office with a stack of memorials on his knees and refused to leave, and Doctor Liu had complained about it for a month.
That was not relevant information for a poison inquiry.
The eighth lady was Lady Shui Lan, daughter of a minister of the Board of Revenue, and the moment Maomao stepped into her house she knew something was wrong.
It was not anything she could point to. The house was rich, quiet and well kept. The servants were courteous. The garden was pruned within an inch of its life. But there was a smell in the inner rooms, faint and mineral, like a struck flint or a temple after the incense has burned out, and it stayed with her as she walked the corridors.
Lady Shui Lan received her in a sitting room hung with blue silk. She was twenty, slender, very pale. Her face was made up beautifully, and underneath the powder her skin had a faint grey cast. When she lifted her teacup her hand trembled, and she set it down quickly to hide it.
"I'm told you're very thorough," she said, with a brave smile.
"I'm told I'm a nuisance," said Maomao. "May I see your hands?"
The lady blinked, but gave them. Maomao turned them over. The nails had faint pale bands across them, like rings in a tree. The gums, when Maomao politely asked to see them, carried a thin blue-black line along the edge of the teeth.
Maomao's heart did the thing it always did at moments like this: a cold, delighted lurch, as if she had found a rare mushroom growing in the gutter. She was not proud of it. She had stopped expecting to be.
"My lady," she said, very gently, "do you take any medicine? Anything daily? A tonic?"
"Only my father's elixir," Lady Shui Lan said. "For beauty and long life. He has taken it for years. He had a Taoist master compound it especially."
"May I see it?"
It was kept in a red lacquered cabinet in the lady's bedchamber, in a small jar of celadon glaze. Maomao uncapped it and tipped a few granules into her palm. They were a deep, glossy red, the exact color of a bride's veil.
Cinnabar. Ground fine and mixed with honey and something that smelled like ginseng, to make it palatable.
Elixirs of immortality. There were whole mountains of men who had died chasing immortality, and every one of them had a jar like this somewhere in his house. The emperors of old had eaten cinnabar by the spoonful and died raving, and their courtiers had called it ascending to heaven.
"How much do you take?" Maomao asked.
"A spoonful in the morning," said Lady Shui Lan. "My father increased it this winter. He says I'm to be my most beautiful for the Moon Festival."
Maomao put the cap back on the jar very carefully and set it on the cabinet. She would have liked to throw it through the window. She settled for writing in her book, in characters so hard the brush nearly tore the paper.
"Stop taking it," she said. "Today. Drink milk and mung bean broth. I'll send a physician from the palace with a proper course." She looked at the young woman's grey skin, the shaking hands. "It's not too late. You'll feel worse before you feel better. But you'll feel better."
"Is it poison?" whispered Lady Shui Lan.
Maomao thought of the minister upstairs who had increased his daughter's dose so that she would shine for a prince.
"Yes," she said.
She was halfway down the minister's front steps, already composing the report in her head, when she heard a voice she would have known at the bottom of a well.
"Maomaaaao!"
Every muscle in her body locked.
A carriage had drawn up at the gate. Its door was open, and from it was clambering a middle-aged man in a rumpled military robe, a monocle on a chain swinging wildly from his collar, his face split in a wide, beaming, deeply unhinged smile. Behind him a long-suffering aide was trying to catch his sleeve.
Lakan. The Grand Strategist. The single most brilliant tactician in the empire, who could not tell one face from another except hers and a handful of others, who saw every other human being as a Go piece, who had once moved an entire army purely to win a bet, and who was, by the cruel accident of nature and a night in the pleasure district twenty-two years ago, her biological father.
"I heard you were in the district!" he cried. "I rode straight over! Maomao, come and have dinner with Papa! I've had them make—"
Maomao did not stop to hear what he'd had them make. She turned on her heel, walked very fast along the garden wall, and saw, parked at the corner of the minister's compound under a willow, a second carriage. Black, unmarked, with a familiar driver dozing on the box.
She did not ask herself why it was there. She yanked the door open and threw herself in.
And landed nearly in Jinshi's lap.
He was sitting with a stack of documents, a writing board on his knees, a brush in one hand. He looked at her, sprawled half across the bench beside him, and then out of the window at the distant figure of the Grand Strategist spinning in a confused circle in the road.
"Drive," Jinshi said calmly, and rapped on the roof.
The carriage lurched forward. Maomao righted herself, smoothed her robe, and sat as far from him as the bench allowed, which was not far.
"You were here," she said.
"I was in the area."
"The Board of Revenue is on the other side of the city from your office."
"I was in a large area." He set the writing board aside. His eyes went over her face, then dropped to the book clutched in her hands, its pages bristling with slips. "What did you find?"
She told him. She told it the way her old man had taught her: the signs, in order, with nothing left out and no guessing. The grey skin. The bands in the nails. The blue line at the gums. The red jar. The father who had increased the dose. When she finished, the carriage was quiet except for the creak of wheels on stone.
Jinshi had gone very still. It was a stillness she recognized. It was the one he wore in council chambers just before somebody's career ended.
"Her father did this," he said.
"He thinks he's helping. Most of them do. That's what makes it so hard to stop." She looked out of the window. "She'll recover if she stops now. I want Doctor Liu to see her. And I want the jar confiscated, and whoever sold it to him."
"Done," said Jinshi. "All of it." A pause. "And her name comes off the list."
"Her name isn't the problem. She's a sweet girl." Maomao frowned. "Well. She's a sweet woman. She'd probably make a perfectly good wife."
"Would she."
"She embroiders. She has excellent posture. Her family is rich. She asked what you were like." Maomao was not sure why she was still talking. "Once she's off the cinnabar her complexion will be very good."
Jinshi turned to look at her fully. In the close dim of the carriage, the light from the window caught the edge of his jaw, the pale thread of the scar, the dark lashes. She had grown used to his face over four years the way a person grows used to living next to a waterfall. She mostly didn't hear it anymore. Mostly.
"And what did you tell her?" he asked. "When she asked what I was like."
"I didn't get the chance. I was busy diagnosing her mercury poisoning."
"The others, then. You've seen seven. You must have told them something."
Maomao considered lying. He would know. He always knew, which was intensely irritating, because she could read anyone in the palace except him.
"I told them you were tall," she said.
Jinshi made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Tall."
"And diligent. And punctual. And that you'd be exhausting."
"I see." He leaned back against the carriage wall, arms folding into his sleeves, and studied her with that same unbearable steadiness Gaoshun had. "Maomao. I'm going to ask you something, and I'd like you to answer as an apothecary, since you insist on being nothing else."
"I am nothing else."
"If I married one of them," he said quietly, "would you mind?"
The carriage hit a rut. She grabbed the edge of the bench. Outside, the city went by in a smear of roof tiles and hanging lanterns being lit one by one for evening, and inside the carriage Maomao found that her mouth had gone dry, which was a symptom of fright, or thirst, or eating too much salt, and she had not eaten anything salty all day.
"It isn't an apothecary's business," she said, "who the Moon Prince marries."
"That isn't an answer."
"It's a true one."
He looked at her for a long time. Then, very softly, as if he were making a note in a ledger: "Then I'll have to make it your business."
The carriage stopped. They were at the gate of the inner court. Jinshi gathered his documents, stepped out, and turned back to offer her his hand down, which he had done perhaps a hundred times and which she had ignored perhaps a hundred times.
She ignored it again, and climbed down on her own, and went straight to the medical office without looking back, and did not sleep well.
Two days later she was summoned to the Jade Pavilion. Lady Gyokuyou, Empress now, red-haired and green-eyed and delighted with herself, received her in a room full of spring flowers, waved away every attendant but Hongniang, leaned forward conspiratorially, and said:
"Maomao. Darling. Do you know whose name Jinshi wrote at the bottom of his list?"