The Apothecary Diaries Vol. 3: The Apothecary Diaries (Manga), Volume 3

The request is comic because it is necessary. Gao Shun has carried the poisoned soup to Maomao wrapped in cloth, on Jinshi's instructions, and when she stares at it a moment too long his worry comes out as an order. She was not planning to drink it, she says, then explains that the silver bowl has oxidized, so the broth will no longer taste good. He catches the phrase at once: "taste good"? They are talking of the poisoned soup. His alarm is well founded. The volume opens with Gyokuyo's ladies ordering Maomao back to bed after she spat out poison (p. 6), and near the preview's end she thinks she wishes she had drunk it all down (p. 37). The joke works because the careful official is the only person in the room treating poison as a danger.

He asks after Maomao has laid out her whole reading of the banquet. Consort Lishu's own food taster switched the bowls to bully her mistress; whoever touched the rim, Maomao believes, added the poison; and she has no way of telling whether the bullying and the poisoner are related. His question moves from the case to her. It is also the question a suspicious official ought to ask, since a food taster who covered for someone at a poisoning has something to explain. He insists he is only curious, and she answers that a lady-in-waiting's life is worth far less than a consort's. Gao Shun takes that without comment and says he will fully explain the situation to Sir Jinshi, and only then does Maomao bow and thank him. Curiosity, in his hands, ends in a report she is grateful for.

Gyokuyo reports it brightly, and Maomao's reaction does the analysis: asking this of someone with Gao Shun's status is curious enough, she thinks, and his accepting it is more curious still, since at the banquet he sat where a high-ranking official would. The easy reading is a consort's whim. The better one is a household keeping its own order. Gao Shun has been waiting all morning for a lady-in-waiting who overslept after spitting out poison, and Gyokuyo's ladies had ordered that patient back to bed. Gyokuyo even tells Maomao she could have taken the day off. In this palace the sick girl rests and the visiting official makes himself useful. The weeding joke is where Gyokuyo's authority shows: she overrides rank inside her own walls, cheerfully, and the only protest on the page is Maomao's stunned "You made him weed......?"

This is her answer to why she covered for a lady-in-waiting at the banquet, and it is a statement about price, not about character. Maomao has just separated two acts: Consort Lishu's food taster switched the bowls, and whoever touched the rim, she believes, added the poison. Naming anyone in that room could cost a life the palace values cheaply. The second sentence covers them both: the woman she shielded is a food taster (p. 21), and so is Maomao, who found the poison by tasting Gyokuyo's dishes (p. 32). Then the chapter adds a motive she does not say aloud. Alone on a bench, she thinks that the switch did her a favor, and that she really wishes she had drunk it all down (pp. 36–37). Mercy and an appetite for poison sit side by side. The line lets her sound principled; the pages after it do not let that stand alone.