The Stage
A week had passed since I set the machinery of public opinion in motion.
Interest in the Health Syrup was swelling by the day.
I hardly needed to put men in the street to see it. Even the lowliest clerks at Madoff Pharmaceuticals, and the palace staff who worked the Thames Palace, were bringing the syrup up in idle conversation often enough.
“I didn’t have time to stand in line, so I asked a friend to pick one up for me. And this bastard wants a hundred and fifty thalers, premium and all? Wasn’t it seventy-nine a bottle?”
“It’s up to eighty-nine. And if you ask me, a hundred and fifty is still cheap. The shortage’s so bad they’re saying bottles are changing hands around two hundred.”
“That kind of gouging…!”
“You don’t know the world. I hear there are people mobilizing the whole family to corner stock, then flipping it for pocket money.”
Servants’ talk, traded without a thought that I might be listening. They were chattering about the Health Syrup as if it were the weather.
Already that far gone.
It wasn’t strange.
The syrup’s name had climbed sharply, and the supply had not climbed with it. They were still shipping only a little over five thousand bottles a day.
Hours in line bought you no guarantee of a bottle, so people paid the premium. And where there was a premium, there were men making a tidy profit on the resale.
It wasn’t only the common folk who were feverish.
Even the rich—people who looked as though they had never so much as tasted the stuff—were scrambling to get a spoon into the syrup’s commercial promise.
“Allan. In the last few days, more than thirty million thalers have flowed into Chandler Syrup Co., Ltd.”
That was the first thing I heard the moment I stepped into Sienna’s office.
“Where did you get that?”
“Where do you think? The people who used to work under Anais. Handling money is their trade, so news like this reaches them fast.”
“A great deal of money.”
“I hear they issued shares at a face value of five thousand thalers and sold them to investors. The ones who bought in are probably expecting the price to multiply several times over once the company lists.”
“And how many investors are there, if you know?”
“More than thirty. As far as I know.”
To that, Sienna added, “A pity.”
Her face, however, did not look the least bit sorry.
If anything, she wore the faintly thrilled look of someone already picturing what awaited everyone tangled up in the Health Syrup. It was no exaggeration—color had actually risen in her cheeks. Other people’s misfortune is one’s own happiness, they say, but I hadn’t expected her to savor it quite so openly.
Not that I had any right to comment. The plan was unfolding exactly as I’d laid it, and I felt rather fine myself.
“They’ll be pushing for a listing soon.”
“Probably.”
In the Britannia Empire, offering shares to the public required the imperial family’s sanction.
A listing review? Of course there was one. But this was not a world that supervised equities with any rigor, and approval seemed to turn largely on a company’s reputation, the owner’s rank, and the size of the bribe. A company-regulation law would appear only after something blew up in everyone’s face.
I had no intention of waiting for that. I had already loosed a narcotic on the capital. I was not about to whip up a speculative frenzy on top of it.
“Allan. It’s ripening, isn’t it?”
“Yes. There’s no reason to let them list. I’m going to begin.”
“…It would still be fun, though.”
“Fun, certainly.”
But I could not enlarge the board merely for Sienna’s amusement.
If I sent Anais down now, a few hundred people would be hurt at most, and that would be the end of it. Wait any longer, and thousands—tens of thousands—would fall into the pit. Perhaps more.
This is the moment to cut.
By the feel of the city, everyone in the Imperial Capital had their eyes fixed on Mrs. Chandler’s Healthy Syrup, and on the Third Princess standing behind it—Anais, and Anais alone.
The timing could not have been better.
“Your Highness. Help me obtain an audience with Her Majesty the Empress.”
“You mean to see her yourself?”
“Yes. That’s the fastest way.”
The first step in bringing Anais down.
Securing the aid of the Empress—Anais’s own mother.
Using a birth mother as the instrument to ruin her daughter might sound like a fantasy. It was also the most efficient path.
That same afternoon, I was granted an audience with Empress Yeonhwa. Sienna’s influence had made it possible.
Had I been a mere knight, it would have been difficult to arrange.
But I was the man who had drawn the Empress up out of the mire of her melancholy. These days I was even preparing the artificial cultivation of psilocybin. Sending herb-gatherers out to hunt for roughly similar mushrooms, then sorting them one by one, had its limits.
Morphine, if I wished, I could teach to anyone. Cultivating psilocybin was another matter entirely. Even teaching it would have been hard.
If I’d cared only for profit, I never would have tried.
The Empress could hardly fail to know what I was worth.
“This is the first time I have looked upon your face with a clear mind.”
She received me seated on a throne of the sort only the imperial house of Jin would use.
The last time we met, she had been riding the trip the psilocybin gave her—a little lively, no, exceedingly so. Now she was composed. A glass of lemon tek sat beside her, so she clearly meant to enjoy herself before long.
Hair dressed up in the Eastern fashion. A sumptuous wide-sleeved robe wrapped about a slight frame. Skin so white it verged on pallor.
She looked like one of the beauties in a painting of the four gentlewomen, stepped down off the silk and set in motion. After a life spent among pale folk with their gaudy hair, she struck me as stranger still.
And yet she was not some outsider drifting at the edge of things merely because her looks were unusual.
Since her health had returned, she had been fulfilling the office of Empress to perfection.
According to Sienna, she even offered the Emperor counsel from time to time. I had to assume she knew what was happening in the Imperial Capital.
“I am told you take a very great interest in Anais’s venture.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“…In truth, even here it is not difficult to hear my daughters’ names in the galleries and the Grand Hall. The nobles who come and go through the Imperial Palace are forever taking Anais’s doings, and Sienna’s, upon their tongues. Even before me, without a trace of restraint.”
“In Jin, such a thing would be unthinkable. Subjects presuming to appraise the imperial family’s every movement, one by one.”
“Just so.”
Bold creatures, she seemed to say, inclining her head.
She did not appear to mind that I was putting on a show of knowing that culture, either. Perhaps she thought it beneath her to ask after every detail.
I have her measure, more or less.
What I had heard, and the impression I was taking in person.
If I went to the Empress and said, The medicine your daughter made is threatening people’s health, she would most likely nod and let it pass.
By Sienna’s account, a disregard for human life was simply part of her makeup. Unless the harm rose to the level of sparking a popular revolt, she would treat it as a trifle.
So I chose another way to persuade her.
“…As you have no doubt already surmised, the motive behind Her Highness Anais’s enterprise is not unrelated to her hostility toward Her Highness Sienna.”
I drove it inward—made it a matter of the imperial house itself.
“You are frank.”
“Whether from some compulsion to match morphine’s efficacy, Her Highness Anais has used a poisonous herb in the Health Syrup. Ma-huang. In the Empire they call the plant avesta. It is an ingredient that can harm the heart and the brain.”
“A poisonous herb? You overstate it. In my own childhood, the court physician prescribed me a decoction of ma-huang, and I drank it.”
“That physician will certainly have blanched the ma-huang to draw off its toxicity, then used licorice and other medicinals to blunt the side effects. He possessed a professional learning.”
“…….”
“Used properly, it is without question an efficacious medicine. But once it falls into the hands of ignorant commoners, it is poison. What would the unlearned know? They will be taken in by the syrup’s sweetness, gulp it down without a thought, and in the end bring ruin upon themselves.”
“Hm.”
Only then did the Empress nod, as if she were satisfied. Slandering blameless citizens as ignorant commoners had not been wasted effort.
“Her Highness Anais must be stopped before the Health Syrup spreads any further. Help me.”
“And why should I?”
“It is a presumptuous thing to say, but…”
“Speak freely.”
“If she is not stopped now, Her Highness Sienna may chew Her Highness Anais up alive. It is not a thing one ought to say of the lady one serves, but her temper is somewhat savage, is it not? Only if we stop this now can we avert a catastrophe.”
A warning, at this juncture, that if she did not cast her daughter off she would live to see flesh and blood at war… Even I thought it an insolent thing to say. The Empress nodded without hesitation.
Fond as she was of Sienna, she acknowledged the girl’s vicious streak all the same.
She seemed to know perfectly well that if the sisters fought, Anais would be the one ground underfoot—and that the two of them had already gone too far to live in amity.
She knows, and still she hesitates.
I had no mind to fault her for a slow decision.
However far Anais had strayed, she was still her own daughter.
In all the breadth of this empire, the only blood that resembled the Empress herself. In the years of her homesickness, her daughter must have been the one presence she could lean on. She would not want to cut her loose merely because the girl had sold a harmful medicine.
Hesitation aside, she seemed to have a clear eye.
“…You seem to believe that if we do not pull her down now, and let the days slip by, even preserving Anais’s life will grow difficult. If we delay, the common people will take that syrup without discernment and do harm to their own bodies.”
“Yes. That is so.”
“…….”
Hands clenching and unclenching in unease, eyes gently closed—I could feel the Empress’s heart wavering. This was no moment to press her.
The silence held for a while, but not for long.
“How would you have me conduct myself?”
Considering that the other party was her daughter, it was a comparatively swift decision.
I made her a single request, and not a difficult one.
That she hold a banquet at which the Emperor and Empress, and all three princesses, would be present.
It was nothing more than a family sitting down to a meal together, so no pretext was required. A word from the Empress, and it would be settled at once.
Needless to say, I was not arranging it so they could simply eat.
“There is something I would ask you to do there.”
“Speak.”
She nodded at once, and I gave her the particulars. The plan was a little cruel. I did not bother to soften the words.
I had raised her high enough. Now it was time to let her fall.
How badly the Third Princess would be hurt, even I could not say.