Two weeks pass. A night comes when all seems quiet and peaceful. Ailan is recovering, and she sleeps soundly, with breath flowing gently in and out through her slightly open mouth. Miss Chen dozes next to Manzi. Their inhales are low and jagged, caused by exhaustion for her and frailty for him. As Miss Chen and I did earlier in the epidemic, I now sit and sip tea with Grandmother and Miss Zhao. My father’s concubine looks tired. Grandmother is another matter entirely. Her vitality has always impressed me. Now she appears drained. This ordeal is hard on all of us, but she’s seventy-seven years old.
“Tell me about Meiling’s miscarriage and what happened in the capital,” Grandmother says seemingly out of nowhere.
These past weeks I’ve put that out of my mind to focus on the ill and dying. Now it’s a reminder of all I still need to understand.
“I’m waiting,” Grandmother says, and sends me an encouraging smile.
Haltingly, I tell her about the herbs meant for me that Meiling took, the loss of her baby, and the beating she survived. Grandmother’s face grows darker with each word I speak. I end by saying, “I’m still inexperienced compared to Doctor Wong, so maybe his prescription was something I don’t understand—”
“Ha!” Grandmother snorts. “That man is like a fly following a horse’s tail, while you have benefited from learning passed down from generation to generation in my natal family.” She pauses, fuming. “What can we say about Doctor Wong? He has a greater desire for fame than he does for producing a good remedy. Many doctors like that exist, you know. They use exotic ingredients—the fuzz from deer antlers in spring or the shavings of rhinoceros horn—to make their benefactors feel special. At least Doctor Wong doesn’t pretend that an immortal revealed to him the secret for a unique tonic that only he possesses.”
“Are you saying you think he made a mistake—”
“A mistake? No doctor should make a mistake when it comes to abortifacients. I know I don’t.” When I look at her questioningly, she asks, “Do you remember Red Jade?”
“Of course. She was one of Grandfather’s three Jade concubines.”
“When you were a girl, I diagnosed her as having a ghost pregnancy.”
As she speaks, it starts to come back to me. Ghost pregnancies occur in widows long after their husbands have passed away, in unmarried servant girls, and in wives and concubines whose husbands and masters work far from home. When Grandmother treated Red Jade, Grandfather had been in Nanjing for several months attending to duties at the Board of Punishments.
“Grandfather wasn’t the father,” I say in understanding.
“An old horse knows the way,” Grandmother recites. “It was better to guarantee Red Jade’s loyalty to me by helping her than it would have been to replace her. I gave her those items that would purge the embryo from her body, save our family from embarrassment, and provide me with a set of eyes and ears that I’d be able to trust going forward.”
“That doesn’t explain what Doctor Wong did,” I point out. “I’m not a concubine or a servant, and Doctor Wong knew my husband had planted a baby in me before I left for the capital. Is it possible that he could have created this particular remedy in an effort to help me with my pregnancy?”
Grandmother doesn’t have an answer apart from “I don’t see how.” She holds out her cup for me to refill. “We’ll rest awhile longer,” she says, “and then we’ll make a final visit to our patients before we try to sleep.”
As I always have, I obey Grandmother Ru’s orders, knowing I am not done with trying to figure out Doctor Wong’s actions. I visit each patient. Everyone is recovering except for Miss Chen’s son. I’ve done everything I can think of and so has Grandmother, but the boy continues to drift away from us. In Miss Chen’s concern for her son, she’s let go of all vanity. She’s lost more weight, her complexion is gray, her hair hangs in strings, and her eyes have a vacant look. I put a hand on her shoulder, then quietly move on.
When I get back to Grandmother, she’s slipped into nightclothes and lies beneath a light quilt next to Miss Zhao. I’m too tired to change, but I rinse my mouth with tea, spit it into the pond below the terrace, and stretch out on my mat. I stare up at the sky as I’ve done every night since I came home from the capital, trying to let the anxieties of the day float to the heavens. But my earlier conversation with Grandmother and Manzi’s worsening condition gnaw at me.
“Grandmother.” I glance her way. “Smallpox is the great sadness of the world, but why does this scourge continue when it’s preventable?” I pause before blurting the question that has tortured me these past weeks. “Why didn’t Respectful Lady hire a smallpox-planting master for my brothers and me?”
“Those are two very different questions.” Grandmother sits up, and Miss Zhao rises next to her. They stare at me with concern in their eyes. “I can only guess at the answer to your first question. Maybe those mothers were afraid of variolation. Maybe they were ignorant—”
“But what about my mother? Why didn’t she—”
“When the smallpox-planting master returned to Laizhou after your brothers died and I had been brought in,” Miss Zhao interrupts in her quiet voice, “I made sure your brother, Yifeng, received the treatment. The old man used the method of wrapping a scab in cotton and sealing it in his nose.”
“And he’s alive and without a single scar!”
Miss Zhao looks at me in sympathy, while Grandmother regards me with equanimity.
“Your mother came from an elite family,” Grandmother says. “She should have known better. Your father too.”
“Then why didn’t she—”
“There are people in the world who believe nothing bad can happen to them. Your mother was like that. She had not suffered a day in her life, but…”
“But?”
“How much do you remember about her?” Grandmother asks.
“Respectful Lady was beautiful.” My mind fills with images: her pleasing countenance, the grace with which she moved, and the expression on her face when she was teaching me the rules to become a proper wife and mother.
“Yunxian,” Grandmother says, cutting into my memories, “try to think of her not as her daughter but as a doctor. Use the diagnostic tools I taught you.”
I cast myself back in time, but as a physician and not a little girl. I summon a vision of Respectful Lady in her room, sitting on the edge of her marriage bed. “She was always pale,” I remember. “Even before my brothers died, melancholy hung on her. She bound my feet. She taught me how to read and write. She listened to me recite rules for girls. But now that I’m a mother myself, I see how removed she was from her actions. Her heart wasn’t in the room with me.”
“The first time this happened was when your oldest brother was born,” Grandmother says.
“It happened again after your second brother entered the world and again when you arrived,” Miss Zhao adds.
“After your brothers died, your father wrote to your grandfather and me because he was worried,” Grandmother goes on in a gentle voice. “You were all far away in Laizhou, so your grandfather and I could only send recommendations by courier.” She tightens her jaw as she recollects that time. “When I look for patterns in the human body—the relationship between the Five Depot Organs, the Five Influences, and the copiousness with which women feel the Seven Emotions—I focus on that most common of feelings, which is—”
“Anger,” I finish for her. “Often when I get to the root of a woman’s ailments, anger is the spark, the fuel, and the creator of ash.”
“All true,” Grandmother agrees. “But I consider sadness to be the most powerful and destructive of the Seven Emotions. Even when your mother first married into our family and lived in the Mansion of Golden Light with your grandfather and me, she was pensive and inward looking. Now think about how she must have felt after your brothers died. How could she have not blamed herself?”
Miss Zhao reaches out and touches my hand. “Many times after your father fell asleep in my bed, I’d go to the courtyard and find your mother weeping. As you might imagine, she did not want my comfort, especially after I became pregnant. When I gave birth to Yifeng, she now had a new son.”
“But he was a ritual son and a daily reminder of everything she had lost,” I say in sudden understanding. It’s all I can do not to cry, because didn’t she see that she still had me? But as I know all too well, a daughter is not a son.
“Respectful Lady knew what would happen if she didn’t take care of her feet,” Miss Zhao resumes. “To this day I wonder if she neglected them so she might be reunited with your brothers or if she did it to punish herself for believing she was above tragedy.”
A dismal silence encircles us. Finally, Grandmother speaks. “I see so much of your mother in you.”
With a pang, I perceive all the worry I’ve given her over the years, but then Miss Zhao says something that changes how I interpret what Grandmother said. “You are even more beautiful than she was.”
“You are both being kind,” I say. “But I’m not a typical Snake with flawless skin.”
I touch a finger to one of my smallpox scars. Grandmother and Miss Zhao exchange glances, then return their faces to me, both of them smiling.
“Don’t you know that those heavenly flowers marks are what make you so beautiful?” asks Miss Zhao, who I’ve always considered to be even more exquisite than Respectful Lady. “Total perfection is not so desirable.”
* * *