by Natsu Hyuuga
Maomao was well aware that she couldn’t beg off the party on the pretext of inexperience. Consort Gyokuyou had far too few ladies-in-waiting already for her to do that. Besides, the services of a food taster would be seen as particularly important at such a public gathering.
Maomao’s intuition nagged at her. It could be a bloodbath if we aren’t careful. And her intuition had an annoying habit of being right.
“Hmm, I think you’d better stuff that chest. I’ll help you add a bit around the butt, too. Sound okay?”
“I leave the matter in your capable hands.”
A certain voluptuousness was the standard of beauty here, which unfortunately meant Maomao’s natural shape was somewhat wanting—a point Yinghua made inescapably clear. She was busy cinching belts and checking fits. “You’ll have to make yourself up, too. You could at least bother to hide your freckles every once in a while.” Yinghua gave Maomao a naughty little grin, and we need hardly say that Maomao replied with a scowl.
Maomao was somewhat disheartened when Hongniang filled her in on how things would go at the party. The head lady-in-waiting, who had been at the previous year’s spring event, heaved a sigh and said, “I was so looking forward to not having to deal with it this year.” When Maomao inquired whether there was anything particularly bad about it, Hongniang explained that there was simply nothing to do. The ladies-in-waiting just stood around the entire time.
There would be dance performance after dance performance, then singing accompanied by a two-stringed erhu, then food would be presented and eaten, and then the girls would exchange forced smiles and pleasantries with the various officials in attendance. And all of it outdoors, where they would be exposed to the blowing, dry wind.
The gardens were expansive, a testament to His Majesty’s power. Even a “quick” visit to the toilet could take upwards of thirty minutes. And if His Majesty, the true guest of honor, remained resolutely seated, his consorts would have no choice but to stay sitting as well.
Sounds like I’m going to need an iron bladder, Maomao thought. If the spring party had been as much trouble as all that, how much worse would it be in winter?
To combat one source of potential discomfort, however, Maomao had sewn several pockets onto her undergarment, into which warmers could be placed. She also minced ginger and tangerine rinds, boiling them with sugar and fruit juice to produce candy. When she showed these products to Hongniang, the head lady-in-waiting veritably begged her to make some for everyone else.
While she was busy working on them, a certain eunuch with too much time on his hands showed up and demanded she make some for him as well. His assistant seemed to feel bad about it and at least helped her with the work.
What was more, it seemed Consort Gyokuyou let word of Maomao’s ideas slip during one of the Emperor’s nocturnal visits, and the next day she was approached by His Majesty’s personal seamstress and chef. She obligingly taught them her methods.
I guess we aren’t the only ones who have it tough at these events, she thought. Still, the hubbub over such simple ideas suggested how rotely everyone else was approaching the party. When one let oneself become too attached to custom, one ceased to be capable of discovering even the most minor innovations.
So Maomao passed the time until the garden party in domestic endeavors. Hongniang, meanwhile, busied herself with attempting to correct Maomao’s occasional lapses into less than deferential speech. Much as Maomao appreciated the gesture, she found the lessons trying. Unlike the other three serving girls, their leader, Hongniang, was just a bit too attuned to how Maomao really was.
When she was finally free, the night before the garden party, Maomao set about making some medicine with herbs she had to hand. A little something, just in case.
“You look absolutely beautiful, Lady Gyokuyou.” Yinghua spoke for all of them, and her words were more than mere flattery.
I guess that’s the Emperor’s favorite consort for you.
Gyokuyou exuded an exotic beauty, dressed in a crimson skirt and a robe of a lighter red color. The wide-sleeved jacket she wore over this was the same red as her skirt, and worked with embroidery in gold thread. Her hair was gathered into two large rings held back with ornate hair sticks decorated with flowers, and perched between the rings of hair she wore a tiara. Straight silver hair sticks surrounded the elaborate decoration, themselves adorned with red tassels and jade stones.
It was a mark of Gyokuyou’s force of personality that despite the elaborate designs, she was in no way outshone by her own clothes. The consort with the flame-red hair was said to look better in scarlet than anyone in the country. The way her eyes, green as jade themselves, shone from within all that red only added to her mystique. Perhaps this was the product of the abundant foreign blood that flowed through Gyokuyou’s veins.
The skirts that Maomao and the others would wear likewise used light red to indicate that they served Consort Gyokuyou. In addition, wearing the same color as their mistress, but in a lighter hue, would make her stand out that much more.
The ladies-in-waiting all changed into their skirts and did their hair. Consort Gyokuyou, remarking that this was after all a special occasion, produced a jeweled box from her own dressing table. Inside were necklaces, earrings, and hair sticks decorated with jade.
“You are my own ladies-in-waiting. I have to mark you out, to make sure no little birds try to go flying off with you.” And then she bestowed an accessory on each of them, in their hair or on their ears or around their necks. Maomao was given a necklace to wear.
“Thank you, milad—”
Hrk!
Before she could properly finish her expression of gratitude, she found herself choked. Yinghua had wrapped her arms around Maomao. “All right! Time for some makeup!”
Hongniang was standing there with eyebrow tweezers and a grin on her face. Was it just Maomao’s imagination, or did she look a bit more jovial than usual? The other two ladies-in-waiting had items of their own: a pot of lip color and a brush.
Maomao had forgotten that the other women had of late been deeply interested in getting her to wear some makeup.
“Hee hee. I’m sure you’ll look lovely.”
It seemed they had a co-conspirator! Consort Gyokuyou’s laugh was like the ringing of a bell. Maomao couldn’t hide her distress, but the four waiting-women were merciless.
“First, we need to wipe your face and get some scented oil on there.”
A damp cloth was assiduously applied to Maomao’s face.
But then Yinghua and the others exclaimed in unison: “Huh?”
Ugh... Maomao stared at the ceiling, beaten. The girls were looking from the cloth to her face and back, their mouths hanging open. Guess the jig is up. Maomao closed her eyes, not best pleased.
We should say something here. The reason Maomao hated to be made up was not because she fundamentally disliked makeup. It didn’t disagree with her in any particular way. In fact, so far from having trouble with it, one could say she was quite skilled at its use. Why her aversion, then? It was because her face was already made up.
Several light stains could be seen on the damp cloth. The face everyone had taken to be heavily freckled was in fact the product of cosmetics.
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 ch
ange 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 ladies-in-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.
“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.
Chapter 17: The Garden Party (Part Two)
The party took place at a banquet area set up in the central gardens. Red carpets were rolled out through large open-air pavilions, and two long tables were placed end to end with the seats of honor at either end. The Emperor himself occupied the central seat of honor, with the Empress Dowager and the Imperial younger brother seated to either side of him. On the east side of the table were seated the Precious Consort and the Virtuous Consort, while on the west side were the Wise Consort and the Pure Consort. To Maomao, the seating arrangement looked deliberately designed to provoke dispute. It could only possibly fan the flames of hostility among His Majesty’s “four ladies.”