"Don't go putting poison in your mouth on your own."
The moment they returned to the room, Jinshi gave Maomao that order.
(How awful.)
Her plate of poisonous seaweed was taken away too, and Maomao was left agape.
The whole reason she had prepared two plates was so she could properly prove with her own body that the seaweed was poisonous. This was an important verification. However, the timing could not have been worse — the source of the seaweed had been exposed, and they had figured out who purchased it.
It was the younger brother of the official who had collapsed.
Even after they tracked down the supplier, he readily admitted to being the one who bought it.
The way he had stared when trying to enter the kitchen — she had sensed something was off, and it turned out she was right.
That was how people behaved when they had something they didn't want seen.
It was a textbook story: when the eldest son was in good health, the second son was overlooked. The reason was so simple that Maomao and the others actually felt somewhat deflated.
Setting that aside, he had told her not to eat poison, but Maomao realized anew that he was quite lenient about everything else.
When she thought about it carefully, setting aside Jinshi's perverted behavior, her treatment was remarkably good.
(And yet, here I was, doing whatever I pleased.)
She had given Jinshi curt replies, shown him no respect, called him a pervert, and looked at him the way one would look at a squirming earthworm.
If she were the master, she would have fired a lady-in-waiting like that on the spot. No — she would have had her hanged. Hanging was no good, though; she should request a poisoning instead.
(And if that came to pass, the medicinal herbs...)
Her wages didn't matter — there were other ways to make money.
But imported medicinal herbs were the kind of thing a pharmacy in the pleasure quarter could never get its hands on.
Even if she endured years of poison experiments, there were still plenty of things she wanted.
She decided she should serve with utmost sincerity from now on — with the professional smile trained into her facial muscles by courtesan education.
She plastered on a smile and tried to greet Jinshi.
When Jinshi made a dumbfounded face, she thought she had put on the wrong expression — but then Jinshi suddenly started banging his head against the pillar. Bang, bang, like a woodpecker.
At that sound, Gaoshun and a senior lady-in-waiting named Suiren came rushing out, wondering what had happened.
She didn't quite understand why, but she found herself being stared down by Gaoshun.
(That wasn't my fault.)
The one being strange is your master, Maomao thought as she sulked.
Maomao's work for the day ended once she welcomed her master Jinshi back. Therefore, it was easier for her if Jinshi came home sooner rather than later.
Jinshi entered the room with a tired look on his face.
"Welcome home."
Suiren told her, "Say 'Welcome home, Master,'" but Maomao ignored that. At any rate, if she tried saying those words, her tongue would tie itself in a knot and she'd end up biting it off.
Recently, Jinshi had been coming home late from work. The reason, apparently, was that he had been clearing up accumulated tasks.
Rather than letting work pile up like this, he should have just wrapped things up quickly during the incident the other day without indulging his gawker curiosity — or so Maomao thought, but apparently it was a matter that simply proved too difficult to handle.
"It's not that we don't get along or anything — we just can't seem to agree on anything."
Jinshi sighed as he received a cup of fruit wine from Suiren. Everyone present had built up a tolerance to Jinshi's charms, so it was fine, but if some lady-in-waiting from elsewhere happened to see him like that, she would simply swoon on the spot. What an inconsiderate eunuch he was.
If there was actually someone who could voice objections to a person like that, it was rather impressive — but at the same time, she couldn't help but think she wouldn't want to deal with that person either.
"Even I have people I don't get along with."
Being a high-ranking military official, he was apparently sharp-minded but famously an oddball.
He would pick quarrels over anything and everything, drag guests into his room or barge in on theirs, play shogi, make small talk — all to put off the stamping of official documents.
This time, the target happened to be Jinshi himself.
Thanks to that, every day, for an hour, the man would park himself in the office, and Jinshi had to work overtime to make up for it, apparently.
A look of distaste crept onto Maomao's face.
"Which backwater did that one retire from?"
"He's barely past forty. The fact that he doesn't even finish his own work is what's really rotten about him."
*(Past forty, high-ranking military official, oddball?)* It was a phrase that sounded familiar from somewhere, but remembering it probably wouldn't lead anywhere good, so Maomao decided to let it go.
Well, forgetting it didn't do much to dispel the usual uneasy feeling that had already settled in.
○●○ "The matter should have already been approved, surely?"
To the uninvited guest, Jinshi deployed his celestial maiden's smile. It took effort to keep it from looking strained.
"Now, now, flower-viewing in winter is a tall order. So I was thinking we could hold it here instead."
Unkempt beard and a monocle— there sat a nonchalant middle-aged man sporting both.
He wore a military officer's uniform, but his appearance was far more befitting of a civil official. His narrow, fox-like eyes brimmed with both keen intellect and a touch of madness.
The man's name was Rakkan— a military strategist. In a different era, he might have been hailed as a legendary grand strategist, but in this day and age he was nothing more than an eccentric.
He came from a respectable family, yet even past forty he had never married, having adopted his nephew to manage the household.
Rakkan's interests were go, shogi, and gossip. He would drag anyone into his topics whether they cared to listen or not.
The reason he had been accosting Jinshi lately was over the girl with ties to Verdigris House whom he had taken in as a maid.
It wasn't a lie, but taking a girl from a brothel—even as a maid—looked rather bad. More importantly, the girl herself had made a face as though she were hearing the buzzing of midsummer bugs, so he had tried to settle the matter as discreetly as possible.
It was technically a maid position, but the question was how people would read it.
And yet, this man—who fancied himself a young lady in his love of gossip—had spun every tale both true and fabricated until, in military circles, it had become accepted that Jinshi had formally vouched for her. Well, it wasn't exactly wrong, strictly speaking.
Maomao let the old man's inexplicable tales of who-knows-what wash over her from one ear to the other, and stamped the documents Gaoshun had brought.
"Come to think of it, I once had a regular at the Blue Copper House."
That was an unexpected topic, Jinshi thought.
He had assumed the man had absolutely no interest in matters of romance.
"What sort of courtesan was she?"
Jinshi found himself answering out of sheer curiosity.
Raohan smiled broadly and poured fruit water from his own supply into a crystal goblet.
Long chair— the way he sprawled across it was no different from relaxing in his own room.
"She was a fine courtesan.
She excelled at Go and shogi, and while I could hold my own at shogi, I could never win a game of Go against her."
To defeat the military strategist—that must have been quite something, Jinshi thought.
"I even considered paying her contract, thinking I'd never meet another woman that entertaining. But things never work out the way you want. As it happened, two eccentric rich men were bidding against each other, driving the price up."
"My, my."
The buyout price for a courtesan could at times be enough to build an entire villa. That must be what it meant that even Raohan couldn't afford it.
What exactly was this man trying to get at with all this talk?
"She was an eccentric one—her art drew crowds, but she herself was never on the market. She didn't even think of her customers as customers. When she poured tea, she looked at you not as a hostess serving a guest, but with the haughty gaze of a noblewoman dispensing charity to the unwashed masses. Of course, I was one of those customers myself, and I must say—that spine-tingling feeling was simply irresistible."
"..."
Jinshi averted his gaze, profoundly uncomfortable. Gaoshun, standing at attention beside him, was biting his lip into a thin line.
In this world, there were quite a few people who shared the same peculiar tastes.
Whether Raohan knew what they were thinking or not, he continued.
"I'd always wanted to pin her down sometime."
In the man's grinning eyes, Jinshi glimpsed a flame of madness.
"In the end, I couldn't give up on that courtesan either, so I had no choice but to play a rather dirty hand. If the price is too high to reach, well—there's nothing wrong with making it drop."
Rarity value.
"I dropped it for you," he said.
"Would you like to know what method I used?"
His single eye gleamed with a fox-like grin behind the monocle.
Before I knew it, he'd drawn me in. That was exactly what made him so terrifying.
"You're really going to play coy at this point?"
"Oh no, no — time's already up, you see. If I linger any longer, my subordinates will give me an earful."
With a flick of the wrist, Rakhan cleared away the fruit water. He placed another sake flask he'd had ready onto Jinshi's desk.
"Do give it to the ladies-in-waiting assigned to your rooms. It's a smooth, easy drink — not overly sweet."
The middle-aged military officer waved his hand as he stood.
"Well then, see you tomorrow."
And with that, he took his leave.