Chapter 2

Chapter 2

After serving Han Zhaoyun her midday meal, I went to see Chicken Quill.

Lately she had suffered headaches, dizziness, and sleepless nights, and she had lost a great deal of weight. I knew the poisoning had reached a moderate stage.

Modern hospitals often treated mercury poisoning with sodium dimercaptopropane sulfonate. Here, without equipment, I could not synthesize it. I was helpless.

All I could do was bring her herbal tea that might help her body clear a little of the poison. Its effect was negligible, but it was better than nothing.

Chicken Quill ate a pastry, drank her tea, and beamed.

“Thank you, Sister Dongmei. You’re so good to me.”

She was only fifteen, with the tender, unformed features of a young girl. Malnutrition had left her hair yellow and brittle, her frame small.

I asked why she had agreed to become a bedmaid.

“My father died early,” she said. “Mother has to raise my three younger siblings alone. As one of the young master’s chamber girls, I earn an extra five hundred copper coins a month. I wanted to help my family.”

“Have you ever thought of leaving the household?”

She shook her head. “I’ve served the young master since I was little. I don’t know what life is like outside. If I were sold, the next place might not be as good as this one. Here I have enough to eat, and I have you looking after me. I’m already content.”

She grinned, showing a row of slightly crooked teeth. Two shallow dimples appeared in her thin, dark cheeks.

This was the wanton bedmaid whom Han Zhaoyun accused of choosing degradation.

My heart twisted with emotions I could not name.

I had often thought that contraceptives from the future might have spared many women in this era. Yet when I asked Nanny Wu whether there was any method besides medicinal draughts, she scoffed.

“The market sells sheep gut and fish bladders by the basket. How many men would agree to use them?”

Once again, I had no answer.

I sank into the suffocating struggle of powerlessness. Chicken Quill’s fate seemed to have been fixed from the start.

I knew many ways to prevent poisoning. I knew how to treat it.

And still I could do nothing.

Chicken Quill did not survive her fifteenth winter.

Firecrackers rang out to usher in the new year. Her body was found early on New Year’s morning.

Han Zhaoyun was dressing at her mirror when the news arrived.

“How unlucky,” she said, displeased.

Nanny Wu reminded her, “By household custom, her family should receive twenty taels of silver.”

Han Zhaoyun frowned at the expense. “She brings ill luck into the house on New Year’s Day, and we must pay so much for it? Give them ten.”

Nanny Wu knew her temper and did not argue.

Once my mistress had finished dressing, she ordered me to bring bird’s-nest soup from the private kitchen. It was made from Siamese golden swiftlet nests. A single serving cost thirty taels.