Efficacy
Mrs. Chandler's Healthy Syrup.
A syrup devised by a housekeeper of forty years' service, out of nothing more than a wish to ease her fellow workers. It might easily have passed from hand to hand among the palace staff and then vanished—but an investment from the Third Princess, who had an eye for such things, had brought it into the world as a medicine. That, at least, was the story told beyond the palace walls.
The syrup began to seep into the lives of the Imperial Capital. Quietly, but quickly, and with no regard for sex, age, or trade.
"I'm telling you, the Healthy Syrup saved our marriage. My wife's a frail little thing—let a cold draft so much as touch her and she coughs the whole day through. I come home after thirteen hours of work, and if she's laid up sick, how do you think that sits with me?"
"Snap at her in a temper, tell her to quit playing ill, and she starts whining, and watching that, my own life stops feeling like a life. ...But thanks to the Healthy Syrup, she's got her strength back. The cough's gone, and the color's come back into her face."
"They say your hands and feet tingle and your heart pounds, but that's a good sign, apparently. A very good sign! Means the blood's running properly, so you feel yourself getting healthier."
There was a man clutching Mrs. Chandler's hands and singing the syrup's praises. He even sniffled through the tale, insisting that life had only just begun to taste sweet again, and she received every word of it with nothing but a kindly smile.
"When a husband and wife are at peace, the children smile too. You have to get along, you know."
She fed him cozy little sentiments of that sort, and he gazed up at her, profoundly moved, as if she were the savior of his life.
"Thank you, Mrs. Chandler...!"
Nor did he forget, while he was at it, to buy a second bottle, declaring that a household ought to keep a generous stock of so essential a medicine.
He was hardly the only one praising it. There was an old man who tore into the physicians—rude, and none too skilled besides—while talking the syrup up in their place.
"It isn't once or twice a hospital's wounded my pride, I'll have you know. I'm sick, I want to explain every last thing that's wrong with me, and the bastard of a doctor half-listens and finishes by mixing a few herbs into a tea and calling that a prescription. And do they even see you quickly? Not a chance!"
"But one bottle of Healthy Syrup settles the whole business!"
"Better than a doctor!"
And there were those who said, simply:
"I just drink it because it tastes good."
Some used it as nothing more than a sweetener. Ordinary syrup was so cloyingly sweet it tasted cheap, they reasoned, whereas the Healthy Syrup carried a subtle refinement. The reasons differed from mouth to mouth, but the devotion was the same. Anyone who had tasted it even once tended to speak of it with favor.
Little by little, Mrs. Chandler's Healthy Syrup was winning the hearts of the capital.
And there was someone watching that success unfold behind a quiet smile. A woman of ample build, well into her later years. Mrs. Chandler herself.
It had been only five days since she took charge of selling the syrup. When she first began, most of the people loitering around the stall had no particular intention of buying anything, and she had set about turning them with a pitch seasoned by a measured dose of bluster. It hadn't been difficult. Forty years of knocking about a palace, and a lie learns to live on the tongue—well-meant lies, of course, the sort one tells to spare another's feelings.
This is a well-meant lie too.
Whether that was why, customers were lining up now. Some even turned away in quiet disappointment, unable to buy because the stock had run short.
Today that popularity had produced a small quarrel.
"You little shit! Where do you think you're sneaking in?"
"Was this even a line...? I mean, even so, cursing at me out of nowhere—"
"I cursed because you earned it. Shut your mouth and move."
"Who the hell do you think has no temper, you son of a bitch? Get out here!"
Two men scuffling over a place in line, a breath away from blows, while the crowd around them began to murmur as one. Even for Mrs. Chandler, it was a first.
They want it that badly, then.
She regarded the pair with something like satisfaction, hardly flustered at all. Of course, she had no intention of letting them fight. These were customers who had endured a line for the sake of a little syrup, whether for themselves or for their families—the Healthy Syrup known to the world as her own making. They ought to have been getting along. A brawl was simply not the thing.
"Everyone. I won't be selling syrup to people who fight."
At that the customers broke off at once, cleared their throats, and fell back into line. The commotion settled in an instant. So their feeling for the syrup was sincere after all. Mrs. Chandler looked fondly over the customers waiting their turns in good order.
In the beginning she had taken the work up because the Third Princess ordered it, and because of the reward. But it was a fulfilling thing, hearing praise from customers, and watching people light up as they received a bottle of syrup that bore her name.
Perhaps trade suits me after all.
She felt a fresh surge of appetite for the work.
"One more bottle!"
The Healthy Syrup sold even faster than the day before. She couldn't be certain, but a time seemed near when she wouldn't need to sell it at all.
At this rate, it really might succeed on the scale of that other syrup.
Watching the Healthy Syrup fly off the shelves, another product came to mind. Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, of course. A syrup built on opium and morphine, sold like madness across America and Europe for a full sixty years from the middle of the nineteenth century. They said nearly every household kept it on hand as a staple medicine. The number of people who died of it was beyond counting.
Judged by effect alone, of course, it was not the same as the Healthy Syrup. Soothing syrup had been a medicine aimed at pain and sedation, fed to squalling infants until they lay as quiet as angels. They hadn't been sleeping. They had slipped into comas and wandered the edge of death.
The Healthy Syrup, by contrast, thanks to its third ingredient, ephedra, raised the pulse and drove the blood. Ephedra itself hit viciously hard—cute, perhaps, beside the methamphetamine one could cook from it, but hard all the same. The number of people who sank, from too deep a sedation, into a sleep from which there was no waking might even fall.
Anais did not seem to have added the ephedra because she understood any of this, but for most people it would likely produce the sensation of getting healthier. The blood runs, the fatigue lifts, the pain vanishes? It would have to feel like magic.
It would be stranger not to buy the stuff.
But quite apart from the kick, the load on a body could only accumulate. A human frame was not strong enough to weather a cocktail of opium, jimsonweed, and ephedra. The old and the frail might drop where they stood even without long use or excess. A healthy adult might not lose their life to it... but no one here was going to manage dose and hour the way a military hospital would, so the danger came to the same thing.
The one small mercy was that it had not yet reached the stage of true mass adoption.
"Sir Allan. The supply appears to be falling short."
The report came from Viscount Draghead, lately absorbed into Siena's faction. He had followed Anais once. Now he was watching his former mistress.
"I imagine so. There's a limit to what a single factory can turn out."
"Yes. I had men on the place all day, and we estimate a little over four thousand bottles shipped daily. And that's with laborers thrown at it around the clock. ...It has to be considered insufficient to meet the demand."
So a shortage had struck in the same breath as its debut. Four thousand bottles a day—not nearly enough to soak the empire, nor even the Imperial Capital. There was still a little time before the Healthy Syrup spread past any hope of recall. It did not look like much time.
"But... Sir Allan. People sent by Her Highness Anais are making contact with sizable sugar works and syrup works on the capital's outskirts, even in other provinces. I don't believe it's come to acquisitions, but they may be looking to commission production."
Because the Third Princess was already preparing to increase output. Openly, at that. The formula was simple enough that a sugar factory or a caramel factory could manufacture the Healthy Syrup whenever it pleased, and once the owners grasped its potential they would gladly become Anais's comrades. For a single extra thaler.
Let it reach that state, and the whole country is contaminated in a heartbeat.
And once a thing caught on, there was no telling when it would end. The soothing syrup of my previous life was proof enough. In the early twentieth century the federal government of the United States banned its sale, and the medical associations begged people not to take the stuff, and still, in the shadows, it went on selling, doggedly, for another twenty years and more. An age when every literate grown man subscribed to a newspaper and commercial radio had already spread—and still that happened.
I could guess why. They bought it and swallowed it because it was easy. A few spoonfuls, and most pain simply went away.
And this place...
I couldn't even begin to guess. Leave it alone, and it might truly sell for a hundred years. Knockoffs would follow soon enough. Sugar was expensive, so someone would stir opium into molasses and sell that, and someone else might build the whole trade on ephedra.
I have to stop it. No matter what.
I could see the future plain as day, and I couldn't leave it sitting there. If the country rotted into that shape, I would not be clear of the wreckage either. A few methods had already come to mind. Stopping it by peaceful means, though, was flatly impossible. More than one or two people were already enthralled by the Healthy Syrup. The harm might come out smaller than if I simply let it run—but I couldn't even be sure of that. Thinking on how this mess had come about only made me less sure.
Even so, I had to stop it. For my own sake, if no one else's. There was, however, something I needed to do before I stepped into the mire.
"I'll have to see Anais. Once."
I had to give the Third Princess a chance to withdraw of her own accord. She had fallen as far as a drug peddler, yes—but she was a woman who, had it not been for me, would have been passing happy days at the academy. Trying a negotiation at least once was the decent thing. Once the fight began, it could not be closed out with some modest settlement like a renunciation of her right to the succession. If I meant to reach for a dirtier hand without flinching, I would need preparations of my own.
I asked Siena to arrange a meeting with the Third Princess.
"You think she'll listen? Wouldn't it be better to sit with me and work out how we're going to kill her?"
Cynical, as expected. I was of much the same mind, but meeting her was still the more profitable course. Talk to Anais face to face, and it would be easier to price the operation.
"It's necessary."
Only when I stated it a second time did the answer come back that she would help.
This was to be the first chance Anais, the Third Princess, would receive. And the last.