The Apothecary Diaries

Chapter 31: Dismissal

"What am I going to do?" Jinshi gazed mournfully at the paper.

"What do you wish to do?" his taciturn aide asked, likewise looking at the document. The situation was enough to make any man despair. "This is a list of names," Gaoshun observed. "Fengming's family, and their known associates."

Fengming was already dead, and her clan and family relations would be spared total annihilation, but her relatives were to be subject to the confiscation of all their assets and would each be punished with mutilation, though to varying degrees of severity.

Jinshi could be grateful, at least, that there had been no sign of any instructions from Consort Ah-Duo. Fengming was to be held to have acted alone.

Among the associates were a number of clients who engaged her family's services. Jinshi had always taken the clan to be simple apiarists, but they seemed to have their hands in quite a few cookie jars.

"Eighty of their girls serve at the rear palace," Gaoshun remarked.

"Eighty out of two thousand. A respectable ratio."

"I should say so," Gaoshun said, watching his master furrow his brow.

"Shall they be discharged?"

"Can that be done?"

"If you wish it."

If he wished it. Whatever Jinshi told him, Gaoshun would see done. Whether it was right or not. Just or not.

Jinshi sighed, a long, slow exhalation of breath. He recognized at least one of the names on the list of associates. The purchasers of a kidnapped apothecary's daughter.

"What to do about this..." he mused. All he had to do was choose. But he sat in fear of how she would look at him, depending on what he decided to do. It was so simple to give an order. But how would she take it, if it was contrary to what she wanted?

Maomao saw the divide between herself and Jinshi as that between a commoner and a noble. No matter how distasteful the command, he suspected she would ultimately accept it. But he saw it making the gulf between them that much wider.

But—send her away? He waffled. She wasn't here voluntarily, that much was true. Yet could he end her service at his own whim? And what if the ever-perceptive girl caught a whiff of it?

"Master Jinshi," Gaoshun said, as Jinshi turned the questions over and over in his mind. "Was she not a very fortuitous pawn?"

His aide's words were coldly rational. Jinshi ran a hand across his brow.

⭘⬤⭘

"A mass dismissal?"

"Yep," Xiaolan said, munching on a dried persimmon. Maomao had helped herself to a few persimmons from the fruit orchard, then discreetly hung them under the eaves of the Jade Pavilion to dry. If anyone had noticed, she would have been in a spot of trouble. In fact, she actually was: there was no way Hongniang would fail to notice the fruit. Gaoshun had arrived at just the right moment to save her skin. When Hongniang discovered that he was quite fond of persimmons, she said she would let it go "this one time," with a conspiratorial wink.

"I guess it's like, you know how sometimes they slaughter everyone related to a case like this? All the girls from all the merchant houses they had dealings with are going to have to quit. That's what I heard."

Xiaolan's explanation left something to be desired, but Maomao nodded. Not sure I like where this is going. Got a bad feeling about it, she thought. And her bad feelings had an unfortunate tendency to be accurate.