Wolfsbane

Gao Fu came back through the Gate of Returning Clouds on the twentieth day of the eighth month with the lacquered box against his chest and an answer in his sleeve, and for one evening the inner court believed the matter of the silk was finished.

The answer was written in the Minister's own hand, on Ministry paper, under the Ministry's stamp, and the Chief Steward read it aloud in the Hall of Still Water because the Keeper's voice no longer carried. Wei Zhengde, Minister of Rites, second grade, having received the Keeper's finding under the Empress's seal, had examined the receiving roll and found that the clerk Ma Deshun had opened it after stamping and altered the count of the second-grade silk. The clerk was dismissed from the Ministry and struck from the register of officials. Secretary Shen Guo of the seventh grade was cleared of all fault and would keep his grade and his post. The three hundred bolts had been traced to a warehouse by the southern lock and would be returned before the Autumn Rites. The Ministry considered the matter closed.

"The matter is closed," the Empress said, when Pei Rong had finished, and she looked at Yuelan as she said it. "Concubine Shen, your father is cleared. You may write to him and tell him so, and the letter may go out under the Chief Steward's hand, since it concerns no one's leaving."

Yuelan bowed. She had been Concubine Shen for five days and the word still sat strangely in her ear. "Your Majesty. The Keeper of Seals found what the Ministry could not. I am in his debt."

"The inner court is in his debt," said the Empress. "It has been for thirty-four years."

Gao Fu, on his stool, said nothing. He had looked grey since the gate, and his hands on the lacquered box were not steady. When the hall emptied he beckoned Yuelan over with two fingers, and she knelt beside the stool so that he need not raise his voice.

"The letter," he said. "The Consort Dowager's. I carried it to the house she named. I did not ask what was in it, and the man who took it from me did not tell me, and I think, Concubine, that you should not ask either." He paused for breath. "But the house was not a house I expected. It was in the street behind the Ministry of Rites. That is all I will say about it."

"Keeper..."

"The seal is in the box. The box is on the desk. I am too tired to count the ledgers tonight; I will do it in the morning." He almost smiled. "Go to your courtyard, Concubine Shen. You have earned it, and it has only been five days, and the court has not yet decided whether to forgive you for it."

She left him there with the lamp lit and the lacquered box at his elbow.

The morning of the twenty-first came up grey over the pond, and it was Shen Yuling who found him, because Attendants are the first awake, and she had gone along the walk with a basin to fill from the pond and seen the lamp still burning in the Hall of Still Water. She set the basin down and went in, and then she screamed, and the scream carried the way the old man's voice never had.

Gao Fu was at his desk with his head on the open ledger and a cup overturned beside his hand. His face was dark and his lips were drawn back from his teeth. The lamp had burned down to a thread. He had been dead some hours. The physician of the inner court, when he came, took one look at the cup and one at the lips and said "wolfsbane" in the voice of a man who did not expect to be asked twice.

The lacquered box was on the desk where he had left it. It was open. The lotus seal, the Empress's white jade seal that no consort could leave the inner court without, was not in it.

Yuelan arrived with her hair undone and her cousin's hand in hers, and the two of them stood at the door of Still Water and looked at the Keeper of Seals, and she heard herself think, quite clearly, that there would be no more jars of goose fat, and then she stopped thinking and began to look.

The cup had been his own. He had drunk from it every evening for thirty-four years. There was a kettle on the brazier and the brazier was cold. There was one lamp and it had been lit when she left. The ledgers were open to the page he had said he would count in the morning: the register of seals, the page where every time the lotus seal left the box was written down in his hand, with the hour and the name.

The last entry was in his hand. The fifteenth day. Carried to the outer court by the Keeper, by the Empress's order, for the Autumn Rites. Below it, nothing. He had not yet written the seal's return.

"Who was in this hall after I left him?" Yuelan said.

Pei Rong had arrived, and had the Chief Steward's face on, which was no face at all. "Concubine Shen, you are not the Empress, and you do not ask the Chief Steward questions in the Hall of Still Water."

"Then the Empress will ask them," said the Empress from the door.

She had come without her hair dressed and without her ladies, and she crossed the hall and stood over the old man's body for a long moment, and when she turned her face was as still as the water under the floor. "The Keeper of Seals served my husband's father for thirty years and my husband for four. He served me since the day I came through the Gate of Returning Clouds. Someone has put wolfsbane in his cup and taken my seal from his box, and they have done it in the one hall in the inner court where no man enters but a eunuch. Chief Steward, you will give me the name of every eunuch who walked this walk between dusk and dawn. You will give it to me by noon."

"Your Majesty, the Minister of Rites will..."

"My brother," said the Empress, "will be told what I choose to tell him. The outer court is his. The inner court is mine. Noon, Chief Steward."

Pei Rong bowed and went.

The Empress looked at Yuelan then, and at Yuling behind her still holding the empty basin, and something passed over her stillness that was almost weariness. "Concubine Shen. He thought well of you. Your cousin found him; she will be questioned, and she will not be harmed. The seal is gone, and until it is found, no one leaves the inner court, not even with my word, because my word is in that block of jade and I do not have it." She drew a breath. "Find out who was on the walk. You spend your taels on Attendants who listen. Spend them."

Yuelan knelt. "Your Majesty. There is one other thing. The Keeper carried a letter to the outer court for the Consort Dowager, sealed with blank wax, to a house in the street behind the Ministry of Rites. He would not say what was in it. He said I should not ask."

The Empress was quiet for a long time.

"Then we have two questions," she said at last, "and I do not yet know whether they are the same one. Who killed my Keeper. And what the Hall of Lasting Autumn sent to the street behind my brother's Ministry." She turned toward the door. "The silk is closed. This is not."

They carried Gao Fu out along the walk at midday, wrapped in third-grade silk from the stores because that was what the stores had, and the Moon Carp rose under the planks as he passed, white as the jade that was missing, and went down again.