The Vice-Regent and I were discussing not just the production of animal fat soaps, but of industrial quantities of lye and acids when there was a tremendous ruckus from a few doors down in the harem. In the fine tradition of my people, I began rubbernecking.
The doors pop open by a maid, and several important looking men stumble backwards bowing to a woman screaming, "YOU did it! YOU killed him! My BOY, only 24 years of age, you POISONED him with potions and HARLOTS! You brought him out hunting once and told him, your ROYAL BLOOD allows you to shoot anything here and now he's shot his own head off!"
She fell sobbing in the hall as maids poured in, and she screamed, "I can't even go to the funeral, because that corpse is not my son, you butchers put on a new head of wax!" The Vice-Regent turned to me and said, "Nothing of this gets out, not a word of what you heard, now wait in your room."
The gossip got to me even within isolation. It was well known that the Emperor had only had daughters, but there was one son from a courtesan that I had been compared to, I had heard of him, they called him "Azure, the only male bastard", but the term was nothing rude here.
One guard told me that the reason we never met, is that we ran in 2 different circles and in ours, we had to work for a living. It was a scandal, the only male heir had apparently gone mad, after an orgy, he had sworn love to a ballerina he had been seeing, and 2 hours later they were both dead.
The gossip changed with each servant that I spoke to, the Celestial City were going to say it was a stroke, heart attack, poisoning, hunting accident. Then I heard the police had tried to sneak the ballerina's body out from a hunting lodge they had the party at. But the mother of the ballerina, threw herself against the carriage and in the scuffle, the seated up corpse tumbled out in front of a dozen reporters. There were not enough police to catch them all to force them to swear to silence. I laughed.
Eventually a notice came from the Vice-Regent, he had decided that my continued habitation in the harem and working in the Garden of Government Office was no longer appropriate. A yearly stipend would be provided, and I was to find an apartment within the city. If anything, it was irritating to work when any papers and guests had to go through a wall of censors and guards to even enter the Outer Palace. Finally the news truly got out, the Celestial City was announcing the death of the royal bastard, who was mentally unwell, and he and the ballerina died in an accident.
Half the truth, half a lie, that summed up my final days in the palace well enough. Luckily a townhouse was found for me in the south end of the city near the river. A second story office and a third story to live in, along with a thin canal in the back, where at least the smell of horse manure was attenuated by servants who swept it into the canal.
