Chapter 16: The Garden Party (Part One)

With about an hour to go until the party started, Consort Gyokuyou and her ladies-in-waiting were passing the time in an open-air pavilion in the gardens. There was a lake hopping with all kinds of carp, and the trees were dropping the last of their fiery-red leaves.

“You really saved us.” The light of the sun was still plentiful, but the wind was cold and dry.

Normally the girls would have been standing there shaking, but with the warm stones under their clothes they found it wasn’t so bad after all. Even Princess Lingli, whom they’d worried about, was curled up, cozy in her cradle, which was equipped with a heating stone of its own.

“Be sure to take out the stone under the princess periodically and change the wrapping. Otherwise she might get burned. And take it easy on the candies; too many of them will make the inside of your mouth go numb.” Maomao had several replacement stones waiting in a basket, along with the princess’s diapers and a change of clothes. At a request to the eunuchs, the charcoal grill for heating the stones had already been moved to a discreet position behind the party venue.

“All right. But still...” Gyokuyou chuckled teasingly, and the other ladiesin-waiting also wore wry smiles.

“You are my lady-in-waiting, remember.” Gyokuyou pointed to the jade necklace.

“I am indeed, milady.” Maomao decided to take her words at face value.

Gaoshun watched his master solicitously inquiring after the health of the Virtuous Consort. With his sublime smile and ambrosial voice, Jinshi was practically more beautiful than the consort herself, who was widely regarded to be exceptionally gorgeous even though still very young. Jinshi’s current outfit was different from his usual plain official’s garments only by virtue of some embroidery and some silver pins in his hair, yet he threatened to outshine the consort in all her finery. This could well have made him an object of resentment, but the overshadowed consort herself was looking at him starstruck, so perhaps there was no real problem after all.

His master was downright criminal, Gaoshun concluded.

After having visited with the other three consorts, finally Jinshi came to Gyokuyou. He found her in the open-air pavilion on the far side of the lake. It was ostensibly his duty to divide his time equally among all four of the women, but of late it seemed he had been seeing quite a good deal of Gyokuyou. Perhaps it wasn’t right to look askance at him for that; she was the Emperor’s favorite, after all. But there were clearly other reasons for his visits as well.

It seemed his old habit of playing endlessly with his toys had never been cured. Troublesome, Gaoshun thought with a shake of his head.

Jinshi bowed to the consort. He praised the beauty of her scarlet outfit.

She certainly did look lovely in it, Gaoshun privately agreed. The foreign mystique and her natural allure combined to be practically palpable. Consort Gyokuyou was perhaps the only person in the rear palace who could truly compete with Jinshi for sheer elegant purity.

That was hardly to say the other women around were not beautiful, and indeed each tried to emphasize her own charms. One of Jinshi’s singular talents was his ability to speak directly to those charms. Everyone likes to hear their own best qualities praised. And Jinshi was very, very good at it.

He never lied, either. Although at times he refrained from telling the entire truth. He affected complete nonchalance, but the left corner of his mouth twitched ever so slightly upward. From long years of service to him, Gaoshun recognized this. It was the look of a child with his toys. Troublesome.

On the pretext of fawning over the young princess, Jinshi worked his way closer to a petite lady-in-waiting. The girl Gaoshun saw was a stranger. An unfamiliar lady-in-waiting, expressionless, but seemingly contemptuous of Jinshi.

“Good evening, Master Jinshi.” Maomao was mindful not to let her thoughts (Doesn’t he have anything better to do?) show on her face. Gaoshun was watching, so she wanted to remain calm if she could.

“Put on a touch of makeup, have we?” Jinshi asked indifferently.

“No sir, I’ve not.” She had put the slightest dab of red on her lips and at the corners of her eyes, hardly enough to consider makeup at all; otherwise she was entirely natural. A few speckles remained faintly beside her nose, but they were hardly worth noticing.

“But your freckles are gone.”

“Yes. I got rid of them.” The ones that remained were tattoos she had applied herself with a needle long ago. She hadn’t pricked too deep; the diluted pigments would fade within a year. Even knowing they wouldn’t last forever, her old man had been less than thrilled that she was doing essentially the same thing they did to criminals.

“You mean with makeup, yes?” Jinshi said probingly. He knitted his brow and squinted at Maomao.

“No. It was removing my makeup that got rid of them.” Hrm, maybe I should have just nodded along, she thought. But it was too late for Maomao to change answers now. And it would be annoying to have to explain.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Quite the contrary, sir. It makes perfect sense.” Nobody said makeup could only be used to make things more beautiful.

Sometimes married women were known to use the stuff to make themselves less attractive. Maomao had been caking dry clay and pigments around her nose every day. Artfully combined with her tattooed freckles, they came to look like discolorations, or perhaps birthmarks. And no one would have imagined she would do such a thing, so no one noticed. She was just another girl with freckles and splotches on her face. Homely, they called her. But that was another way of saying there was nothing special about her, that she didn’t stand out from the crowd; she looked average.

Just a touch of red pigment could change that impression completely, make Maomao seem a different person altogether. Jinshi had his hands on his head as if he couldn’t understand what he was hearing. “But why use makeup that way? To what purpose?”

“Sir, to prevent myself being dragged into some dark alley.” Even in the red-light district, there were some who were starved for women. They mostly lacked money, could be violent, and many of them had sexually transmitted diseases. The apothecary’s shop was set up fronting the street in a part of one of the brothels, so it was sometimes mistaken for a display window that happened to have an unusual theme. There were many out there who enjoyed indulging their lusts. And Maomao, naturally, wanted to avoid them. A waifish runt of a girl, and with freckles to boot, seemed less likely to be targeted.

Jinshi listened to this with astonishment and what seemed to be mounting horror. “And were you ever...?”

“A few tried.” Maomao, taking his meaning, scowled at him. “But ultimately it was the kidnappers who got me,” she added spitefully.

Such people saw good-looking women as the greatest prizes they could send to the rear palace. It just so happened that Maomao had forgotten her makeup that day when she went into the woods to gather herbs. As a matter of fact, she had been looking for dyes to refresh her fading tattoos. It would seem she had been just that close to not being sold.

Jinshi put his head in his hands. “I’m sorry. This is my failure as an overseer.” It didn’t appear to please him, as the one responsible for so much in the rear palace, to obtain women in this manner. Jinshi suddenly lacked his normal sparkle, a cloud seeming to hang over him.

“There’s scant difference between being sold by kidnappers and being sold off to give a family one less mouth to feed, so I don’t care.” The former was a crime and the latter was legal. Though if the person who bought her from the kidnappers claimed not to have known how she had been obtained, they would likely go unpunished. Many women came to the rear palace through precisely this loophole. Their captors knew that if they sent enough women, enough different kinds, one might catch His Majesty’s Imperial eye—and a portion of the resultant salary increase would go directly to the kidnappers’ purse.

As for why Maomao continued to use her makeup here in the rear palace, it was the same reason she had pretended to be unable to write. At this point it no longer mattered, but she wasn’t quite sure when would be the right time to suddenly appear with an unfreckled face, and the momentum had simply carried her along.

“You’re not angry?” Jinshi looked puzzled.

“Of course I am. But it isn’t your fault, Master Jinshi.” Maomao understood that it was foolish to expect perfection from a country’s administrators. One could try to protect against floods, so to speak, but some storm would always overwhelm the preparations.

“I see. You must pardon me.” His voice was flat, almost affectless.

How unusually direct of him. Maomao was just about to look up when something jabbed her in the head. “That hurts, sir.” This time she didn’t hide her displeasure when she looked at Jinshi. She wanted to know what he had done.

“Does it? I give this to you.” He wasn’t wearing his usual saccharine smile, but looked caught between melancholy and embarrassment. Maomao touched her hair, which was supposed to be unadorned, to feel something cold and metallic resting there.

“All right. I’ll see you at the banquet,” Jinshi said, departing the open-air pavilion with a wave over his shoulder.

It was a man’s silver hair stick that he had put in her hair. One of those he himself had been wearing, she presumed. It looked plain at first glance, but was closely worked with delicate designs. It would probably fetch a tidy sum if she were to sell it.

“Wow, lucky you,” Yinghua said, looking wistfully at the accessory.

Maomao considered giving it to her, but as the other two ladies wore the same expression, she wasn’t sure what to do. She was just holding it out to them when Hongniang grinned and pressed her hand away, shaking her head.

The message seemed to be, don’t be too quick to give away a gift received.

“So much for that promise. That didn’t take long,” Consort Gyokuyou said, almost pouting. The consort took the stick from Maomao and put it neatly in the young woman’s hair.

“I guess you’re not just my lady-in-waiting anymore.” For better or for worse, Maomao was not well-versed in the manners and customs of the palace, especially those of its more august residents. She had no idea what the hair stick signified.

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