Mrs. Chandler
Three days had passed since an imperial edict halted the sale of the Healthy Syrup, and the Third Princess, Anais, was still idling in a modest room in the eastern wing of the Imperial Palace. No one had yet announced where she would be sent.
Was the Emperor hesitating because he could not bear to part with his precious youngest? Or had the Empress, who had personally engineered her own daughter's fall, discovered a belated flicker of maternal feeling?
Word from Sienna said it was nothing of the kind.
"The sentence is already decided, Allan."
The Third Princess was to be exiled to a modest enclosed convent in Wirral, a province bordering the Imperial Capital. Some thirty nuns lived there in quiet harmony, Sienna said, weaving lace, tilling the fields, and reading scripture. The Emperor's mind, it seemed, was to lodge her there with only a small escort. Her right of succession, and every privilege she had enjoyed as imperial blood, would be stripped away entirely.
"If it's all decided, why delay the announcement?"
"Mrs. Chandler is being stubborn."
"Stubborn... Ah. Yes."
"You can tell what that means from that alone, can't you?"
There was hardly anything to guess. The answer had been obvious from the start. What the imperial house needed now was a scapegoat to shoulder a share of Anais's guilt. If it came out that Anais had orchestrated the whole affair from beginning to end, the dignity of the throne might suffer a grievous wound. A mild measure like confinement in a convent might not be enough to close the matter. They might have to go so far as striking her from the imperial register and banishing her beyond the borders.
"So Mrs. Chandler has to confess of her own accord and die before the Third Princess's sentence can be settled. ...In any case, there's no one better suited. She's the one known as the maker of the Healthy Syrup."
"And that old woman won't listen to a word, from what I hear."
"I understand. She's denying responsibility, late as it is. In a sense she only did as the Third Princess told her. Why would she want to die in her place?"
When an operation collapsed, it was only natural for the accomplices to start stabbing one another in the back. Mrs. Chandler had spent forty years grinding away in the lower ranks; she could hardly fail to know that a confession meant death. At the very least, I thought, she was holding out under the military police's beatings in hopes of securing her family's safety.
Sienna smiled with her eyes and shook her head.
"How strange. So even you can be wrong."
"Wrong?"
"That old woman still admits she made the Healthy Syrup. She's only denying that it's dangerous. They say she keeps repeating that it's medicine that's good for the body."
"......"
That was genuinely unexpected. I had assumed she would change her story somehow, if only to save her own neck. It hardly seemed likely she was doing it out of loyalty to the Third Princess. Mrs. Chandler was a fixture who had served several members of the imperial family across forty years; when a master died, she had always found the next in silence and served them just the same.
"The lie must have stuck to her tongue while she played mother to the Healthy Syrup. Stuck so well that even she believes it's the truth."
"Or she simply wants to believe it."
"...Yes. That could be."
There was no looking into her heart. What mattered was that Mrs. Chandler was obstructing the imperial house's design. Had she merely been denying responsibility, a threat against her family's lives would have been enough. But she was claiming there was no crime at all, and that left even those above with a headache.
"A few more days of interrogation and she'll break, won't she...? I've never been tortured, so I wouldn't know."
"She might. But given her age, she could die before then. And that would invite all sorts of misunderstandings."
If it ended that way, it would send the wrong signal to everyone who had already tasted the syrup. Someone might decide Mrs. Chandler had been caught up in a quarrel among royals and died an unjust death. The Healthy Syrup was a medicine that genuinely made a person feel healthy, so it was entirely possible.
Cleaner if the old woman just went quietly.
And if she insisted the syrup was harmless right up until she died? There was no telling how large the aftermath would grow. Even on the day sales were halted—and even after the ban—hoarding had been carried out in the open.
How to change Mrs. Chandler's mind?
I turned it over for a moment, and a method did present itself.
In the end, she believes in the syrup's virtue.
Or else she had hypnotized herself, unable to admit she had spread a harmful drug among the citizens. Either way, she was cut from different cloth than Anais.
"Then we should have her prove that belief. It's simple. ...Provided they haven't already destroyed every bottle of the banned syrup."
"That works too."
I passed the plan I had just devised straight to the military police. I had no wish to drag things out.
The interrogation room of the Capital Military Police.
Mrs. Chandler, three days into a harsh examination, stared blankly at the object set before her. It was Mrs. Chandler's Healthy Syrup—once a product that had brought her boundless joy, and also the reason she had been thrown into this dim room.
She could not quite bring herself to call it the culprit. There had to be some misunderstanding. The syrup itself could not possibly have a single flaw.
"Dorothy Chandler. You still maintain that the Healthy Syrup is harmless?"
The question came from an investigator wearing an officer's insignia. She answered with nothing but a nod.
"On the day you were arrested, a person collapsed on the scene clutching their chest. They died. The family stated that the deceased took five spoonfuls of Healthy Syrup every morning and evening, to recover from fatigue."
"That wasn't the syrup—there was some other reason...!"
"So you still won't admit it."
Of course she wouldn't. Mrs. Chandler bit down hard on her lip.
What mattered now was defending her honor, and the syrup's. She had no intention of yielding to people who ran the Healthy Syrup down in difficult words—tachycardia, and the rest of it. She did not want to compromise.
If it were that dangerous a medicine, people wouldn't have welcomed it, would they?
Customers who had raised a thumb and sworn that with the syrup alone they could work fourteen hours a day without faltering. Customers who boasted they had bought it for their elderly parents because it worked so well. If it were truly a bad medicine, they would never have raved like that.
I fed something harmful to all those people?
Impossible. Absolutely not. In truth, she had no way of knowing what was in it. Mrs. Chandler believed only in the reactions of the customers she had seen with her own eyes. If it had really been harmful, even one person among so many would have said that something was wrong. But all she had ever heard was praise.
"It isn't a strange medicine. Never."
Mrs. Chandler shook her head and repeated it to herself. As if he had expected as much, the investigator slid the syrup toward her, and she closed her hand around it as naturally as breathing.
"If you truly believe that, you'll be willing to prove it by your own hand."
"Prove it...?"
"You will demonstrate your innocence before the public. It was proposed by President Allan Madoff of Madoff Pharmaceuticals. He also said that if you succeed, he will help you clear your name. Will you accept?"
"You want me to drink it?"
"For the record, this is an early batch, one that contains jimsonweed. It was found in Her Highness the Third Princess's office. Decide carefully."
It was an exceedingly plausible offer. A little light returned to Mrs. Chandler's deadened eyes. If this was how she could wipe away the syrup's disgrace, she had no reason to refuse. She had been humiliated before a crowd; it was only right that she prove her innocence before a crowd as well. It would take enormous courage, but she was willing.
"There's no reason not to."
"You'll do it?"
The investigator looked at her with something like pity and asked again, but Mrs. Chandler cradled the syrup as if it were precious and nodded.
A series of upheavals she guessed had sprung from the covert struggles within the imperial house. Proving the syrup harmless was no guarantee she could return to the good days. Those wicked people would malign the Healthy Syrup, and the Third Princess, however they could. But wasn't it enough, in the worst of circumstances, simply to have seen a hope?
A faint smile rose on Mrs. Chandler's wrinkled face.
The next morning, Mrs. Chandler was escorted to Covant Square, at the heart of the Imperial Capital. Whether the affair had been announced in advance or not, the crowd was thick. She showed not a trace of nerves as she waved to the people, and she spoke with her head high.
With that she opened the bottle and drank the contents straight down.
The taste was good, of course. Good enough that she could understand why some customers had called it a refined sweetness fit for nobles, and less cloying besides.
Nothing but the taste. What of it!
When she had finished the bottle, Mrs. Chandler wiped the syrup from the corner of her mouth and smiled. Then she swept a gentle gaze over the crowd in the square. She saw quite a few familiar faces—customers of the Healthy Syrup, most likely. One of them even held up a bottle, timidly, and offered her encouragement.
"Thank you, all of you. I came out to clear up a misunderstanding. Everything will end well."
At a glance it was a public execution, but the mood was comparatively warm. Some people even spoke to Mrs. Chandler while keeping an eye on the soldiers. She answered that she was fine, that there had been a misunderstanding, that they would meet again at the shop.
"M-Mrs. Chandler! Your face has gone terribly red—are you all right? It usually flushes you a little, but this is too much...!"
"Of course I am. If anything, I feel healthier."
She went on like that for about thirty minutes, and as her confidence grew she even let slip a rather arrogant declaration.
"The Healthy Syrup is safe."
A proclamation flung straight in the face of an imperial command.
The medicine chose that moment, of all moments, to take hold.
"Eh...?"
Her vision began, little by little, to blur. Something felt wrong, and when she tried to look around, her breathing quickened with it—or rather, she wanted to breathe quickly, but something caught hard in her throat and the air would not come. Her stomach began to hurt as well. No. How to put it. Less pain than the feeling of everything turning inside out.
"I'mfineI'mreallyfine."
Mrs. Chandler insisted, the words gone thick on her tongue, but from that moment sweat began to pour madly from her brow and the nape of her neck. Her heart thudded as if it might burst.
I can't do this with everyone watching.
Determined to show them something, she flailed both arms from where she sat, as if she were swimming. In truth she had meant to spring to her feet, but she could not understand why it was her arms moving and not her legs. She could not understand why her head was growing so heavy, either.
She flailed like that for about ten minutes, and flailed some more—
Thud!
In the end she toppled onto her side. Mrs. Chandler lay sprawled on the ground, gagging and shedding tears, but there was no one to hold her up.