Chapter 19: After the Festivities

“A very energetic food taster you are.” Maomao had just washed her mouth out and was staring vacantly into the middle distance when a most unexpected, and altogether underemployed eunuch appeared. She couldn’t believe he had found her so far away from the banquet.

Not long before, Maomao had detected poison in the dish that was served just after the raw fish. She’d spat it out and retreated from the celebration.

I guess most ladies-in-waiting would be chastised for doing something like that.

She wished she could have been more discreet, but it simply wasn’t possible. This poison was the first she’d had in so long, and it was inviting and delicious. She could practically have just swallowed it. But if a food taster eagerly swallowed whatever poison she came across, she wouldn’t be able to do her job. Maomao had needed to remove herself from the situation before things got out of hand.

“Good day to you, Master Jinshi.” She greeted him with her usual expressionless appearance, but she felt her cheeks weren’t quite as stiff as usual; maybe a bit of the poison was still in her system. She resented that this might make it look like she was smiling at him.

“I daresay it’s you who’s having a good day.” He grasped her by the arm.

He looked, in fact, rather upset.

“May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Taking you to see the doctor, obviously. It would be absurd for you to consume poison and simply walk away.” In actual fact, Maomao was the picture of health. As for the toxin in that dish—as long as she didn’t actually swallow it, it could hardly hurt her. But what would it have done had she swallowed it instead of spitting it out?

Curiosity coursed through her.

There was a good chance she would be starting to feel a tingle by now.

I shouldn’t have spit it out. Maybe it wasn’t too late to claim some of the leftover soup. She asked Jinshi if this might be feasible.

“What are you, stupid?” he said, scandalized.

“I would prefer to say I’m always eager to improve myself.” Although she recognized that not everyone would endorse that sort of self-improvement.

In any event, Jinshi now had little of his characteristic glitter, even though he had replaced the stick in his hair and he was wearing the same elegant clothes as earlier. Wait—was his collar ever so slightly askew? It was! So that was it—the scoundrel! He’d no doubt claimed he was cold as a pretext to do something smarmy.

At the moment, there was no honey in his voice, and no lilting smile on his face.

Is that sparkle something he can turn on and off? Or was he simply tired after all that had happened? Maybe the reason for his absence from the banquet was because he had spent the entire time accosting—or being accosted by—ladies-in-waiting and civil officials and military men and eunuchs. Yes, that’s what Maomao would go with. Talk about a man who kept busy.

I wouldn’t want to be in his position.

Beautiful he may have been, but from where she was standing he looked much more like the young age she suspected he was. Younger, perhaps. She would have to ask Gaoshun to make certain that from now on, when Jinshi visited her, it was only after he had been up to something indecent.

“Let me tell you something. You walked out of there looking so spry that one person actually ate the damn soup wondering if there was really poison in there!”

“Who would be that stupid?” There were many different kinds of poison.

Some didn’t manifest their effects for quite a while after they were consumed.

“A minister is feeling numbness. The place is in an uproar.” Ah, so the future of the nation was potentially at stake.

“I wish I’d known—we could have used this.” She produced a cloth pouch from around her neck, something she’d hidden just under her chest padding. It contained an emetic she’d quietly concocted the previous night.

“I made it so strong it’d make you cough up your stomach.”

“That sounds like a poison itself,” Jinshi said skeptically. “We have our own medical officer here. You can leave everything in his hands.”

Suddenly Maomao thought of something and stopped in her tracks.

“What is it?” Jinshi asked.

“I have a request. There’s someone I’d like to bring with us, if possible.” There was a matter Maomao was desperate to clarify. And there was only one person who could help her do it.

“Who? Give me a name,” Jinshi frowned.

“The Virtuous Consort, Lady Lishu. Would you call her?” Maomao replied, calm and confident.

When Lishu answered the summons, she gave Jinshi a smile as pleasant as springtime, while on Maomao she bestowed only a look of total contempt.

Who is this? she seemed to want to know. She restlessly rubbed her left hand with her right. She was quite young, but she was still that creature called a woman.

They tried going to the medical office, but because all the puff-brained important types felt they had to be there, there was an impossible crowd, and Jinshi, Maomao, and Lishu were forced to go to an unused administrative office instead. It gave Maomao a chance to appreciate how the architecture differed between the rear palace and the outside. The room was unadorned but vast.

Consort Lishu wore something of a pout. Maomao requested Gaoshun to usher away most of Lishu’s attendants, who had followed them in a gaggle, so that only one was left with the consort.

Maomao took an antitoxin to help cool her head. She would have been perfectly safe without it, but she felt like being sure, and anyway, she was intrigued to see how someone else had gone about making the drug. In this case, it caused her to vomit powerfully enough to bring up the entire contents of her stomach, a delightful emetic. Unlike the quack in the rear palace, the doctor of the main court was eminently competent. Jinshi watched Maomao grin the entire time she retched as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. She thought it was rather rude of him, though, to stare at a young lady while she was vomiting.

Now looking quite refreshed, Maomao bowed to Lishu. The consort regarded her with a squint.

“Pardon me,” Maomao said, approaching Lishu. The consort reacted with astonishment when Maomao took her left hand, rolling back the long sleeve to reveal a pale arm.

“I knew it,” Maomao said. She saw exactly what she had expected: a red rash stippling the normally smooth, unblemished skin.

“There was something in the fish course that you shouldn’t have been eating.”

Lishu refused to look at Maomao.

“What precisely do you mean by that?” Jinshi said, his arms crossed. The heavenly comportment had quietly returned, but he still wasn’t smiling.

“Some people simply can’t eat certain things. Not just fish. Some can’t stomach eggs, or wheat, or dairy products. I myself have to avoid buckwheat.” Jinshi and Gaoshun both looked amazed. This from the girl who casually ingested poison!

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.

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