“You go on ahead,” she whispered to Midori. “Take Akiko with you and Taeko and Tatsuo.”
“Aren’t you and Masahiro coming?” Midori said, startled.
“We’ll come later.”
“But Sano-san said we’re supposed to sneak out of town with the funeral procession and go to his mother’s house in Yamato.” That village was a few days’ journey from Edo. Heaven knew how they would manage the journey without money or help, but they must try; it was better than staying home and waiting to die. “Sano-san will meet us there. That was the plan.”
“We’re going to exonerate him,” Reiko whispered.
Midori frowned, uncomprehending. “Does he know?”
“No,” Masahiro said. “If we’d told him, he never would have agreed to it.”
Reiko hated to deceive Sano, but she had to make one last attempt to prove his innocence. Even if they all managed to escape, the murder and treason conviction would stick to them. They would always be hunted. And Sano wouldn’t be able to endure the disgrace.
“But what if you’re caught before you can get out of the castle?” Midori demanded. “That’s not what Sano-san would want!”
Reiko knew that Sano wanted most of all to save her and the children. But she and Masahiro would gladly risk themselves for a chance to save him. “This is what we’re doing.”
Panic shone in Midori’s eyes. “I can’t go by myself!”
“There’s no time to argue! Pretty soon the guards at home will notice we’re missing. Just go!” Reiko pushed her daughter at Midori.
“Mama,” Akiko protested.
“Go with Midori,” Reiko said.
“I want you to come!” Akiko sucked in her breath, opened her mouth wide.
She was about to have a tantrum. Reiko quickly put her hand over Akiko’s mouth and squeezed hard. Akiko yipped in pain.
“Be a good girl and go,” Reiko said in a firm voice. “Or you’ll get us all killed!” She dropped her hand.
Akiko stared at her, furious yet shocked silent because Reiko had never treated her so harshly. Her cheeks had red marks from Reiko’s fingers.
The stream of white-robed people going to the palace had thinned. Soon there wouldn’t be crowds to hide among. Masahiro whispered, “Mother, hurry!”
As she and Masahiro joined the march uphill, Reiko couldn’t look backward. She’d left Akiko again. Akiko wouldn’t forget this time. If Akiko escaped safely and Reiko didn’t, Akiko’s last memory of her mother would be Reiko walking away from her. Reiko blinked away tears as she trudged behind Masahiro.
They didn’t see Taeko run after them or hear Midori frantically calling her daughter.
* * *
HIRATA AND DEGUCHI stood in the hillside clearing, by a bonfire they’d built. They lifted their chins, their bodies still, all their senses alert. Hirata exerted all his mental discipline to keep calm. Tahara and Kitano would arrive soon. He mustn’t let emotions impair his judgment or his reflexes. He mustn’t lose the slightest advantage.
He looked sideways at Deguchi, whose expression was inscrutable. But Hirata knew Deguchi was feeling the same doubts about the wisdom of their plan. They stood without speaking or touching, united by their terror, chained to a course from which they couldn’t deviate.
The familiar aura pulsed distantly, ominously, in the cool morning air. “Here they come,” Hirata said.
37
AT THE PALACE, Masahiro gaped at the hundreds of white-robed mourners, the priests with their musical instruments, the troops with their lanterns and banners. “How are we going to find Lady Nobuko in all this?”
“Maybe she’s still in her quarters,” Reiko said.
She and Masahiro hurried around the palace to the separate wing of the Large Interior, where Lady Nobuko lived. They dodged patrolling troops. They didn’t knock on the door of the little house attached to the main building. They had no time for formalities, and Reiko wasn’t giving Lady Nobuko the chance to refuse to speak to her. She and Masahiro needed a confession fast. They walked right in.
The entryway and the parlor were deserted. Reiko heard a soft rustling sound. She and Masahiro followed it to an inner chamber. There Lady Nobuko lay in bed. Her gray silk night robe rustled as she tried to make herself comfortable. Reiko stalked into the room, Masahiro behind her. Lady Nobuko rolled over to face them. Her complexion was gray, without makeup, her hair straggly from tossing in bed. She was apparently too ill to attend the funeral. The spasm on the right side of her face pulled the muscles so tight that the eye was screwed shut in pain. Her left eye stared indignantly at Reiko.
“I thought you were under house arrest,” she said.
“Not at the moment,” Reiko said.
Lady Nobuko drew a breath to call for help. Reiko snatched a bamboo hair spike off the dressing table and held the sharp tip to Lady Nobuko’s withered throat. “Don’t.” Never mind that Lady Nobuko was the shogun’s wife; Reiko hadn’t the patience to be respectful.
“What do you want with me?” Lady Nobuko lay on her back, palms pressed against the bed, her good eye rolling as she tried to see Reiko and the spike at the same time.
“I want you to admit that you know my husband is innocent and my son and I didn’t conspire with him to murder Yoshisato,” Reiko said.
“I don’t know anything of the sort!”
“Yes, you do,” Masahiro said. “You’re the arsonist. You let my father be blamed.” He was shaking with fury, his fists clenched. Reiko was afraid he would hit Lady Nobuko, even though Reiko and Sano had taught him never to hit a woman. “You were going to let our family be killed for what you did!”
“I didn’t—” The spasm around Lady Nobuko’s eye tightened.
“Show her,” Reiko said.
Masahiro reached inside his kimono, whipped out the fire hood, and shook it in Lady Nobuko’s face. “This is yours. Yanagisawa’s men found it by the burned building.”
“It’s not mine.” Lady Nobuko spoke vehemently, but recognition opened her eye wider.
“Don’t lie to us!” Masahiro shouted. “You wore it while you set the fire, so you wouldn’t get burned. It got caught on a bush when you ran away.”
“No.” Shrinking from the hairpin, Lady Nobuko said to Reiko, “I didn’t set the fire. That’s the truth. If you’ll take that thing away, I’ll tell you what happened that night.”
Against her will, Reiko began to think she and Masahiro had been wrong about Lady Nobuko. Her intuition said so.
“Mother, don’t let her fool you,” Masahiro said.
Reiko shushed him. She retracted the hairpin slightly. “Tell me.”
Gasping, Lady Nobuko said, “The fire bells woke me up. My headache was terrible. I called Korika. She brought my medicine and put a wet cloth over my eyes. She was out of breath, as if she’d been running.” Lady Nobuko finished in a low, sorrowful voice, “She smelled like smoke. That hood isn’t mine. It’s Korika’s.”
“Korika set the fire, then.” Reiko wasn’t entirely surprised. The devoted lady-in-waiting had fulfilled her mistress’s wish for revenge on Yanagisawa.
“She’s just trying to shift the blame,” Masahiro scoffed.
“I don’t think so,” Reiko said, although reluctant to absolve Lady Nobuko. “Korika vouched that Lady Nobuko was at home when the fire started, but if Lady Nobuko was asleep, Korika hasn’t anyone to vouch for her. Korika could be guilty. Where is she?”
“She went to the privy,” Lady Nobuko said.
“Let’s hear what she has to say.” Reiko knew time was speeding by; every moment they remained in the castle increased the chances that she and Masahiro would be caught. But they needed the truth about Yoshisato’s murder and a valid confession that would leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that Sano was innocent. Reiko told Masahiro, “Get Korika.”
* * *
WHILE THE TROOPS were busy taking Marume to the barracks and settling him down, Sano ran to his private chambers. He saw the bank of drawers pulle
d away from the wall. The floor panel lay by the hole that led to the space under the house. Reiko, Masahiro, Akiko, and Midori and her children were gone.
Sano let out his breath in relief that immediately gave way to apprehension. Would someone recognize them and stop them before they got out of the castle? Would the troops discover they were missing before they could leave town? Was anywhere safe from Yanagisawa’s long reach? Sano closed his mind to those questions. It was too late to stop the plan he’d set in action or feel ashamed because running away seemed cowardly. Sano told himself that this was like a warlord retreating from the battlefield to live and fight for his honor another day. For now he must conceal his family’s absence for as long as possible.
He fitted the panel over the hole in the floor. He shoved the bank of drawers over it just as he heard soldiers tramping toward him along the corridor.
“Be a good boy, Masahiro. Don’t cry, Reiko,” he said, as if his family were with him.
The troops moved on. Sano tore off his surcoat, kimono, and trousers. He pulled his white funeral garments and a hidden dagger out of a cabinet. He donned the garments, put his other clothes on over them, and strapped the dagger to his calf under his trousers. Then he knelt and prayed for his family’s safety. He hadn’t told Reiko and Masahiro that he didn’t think he could escape. But he’d let them think so; otherwise, they wouldn’t have left him. And he would try his best.
Moments dragged with painful slowness, as if each one drove a needle into Sano’s nerves. At last temple bells tolled the hour of the dragon. Shouts and thumps came from the barracks as his men started a riot, the diversion he’d told Marume to create. Sano heard troops hurrying to quell it, leaving the house. He jumped to his feet. As he pulled out the bank of drawers, there came a knock at the door. He shoved the drawers back in place.
“Sano-san, that nurse is here,” said Captain Onoda’s voice.
Sano couldn’t say he didn’t want to talk to her, not after he’d made a big production about his final request. Onoda would get suspicious, look in the room, and see that his family was gone.
“All right.” Sano opened the door just enough to slip through. He called over his shoulder, to his absent family, “I’ll be back soon,” and shut the door.
Captain Onoda led him to the reception room. The noise from the barracks got louder. Sano hoped his men would keep it up long enough. In the reception room, he sat stoically on the dais, the condemned man ready to tie up the loose ends of his life.
Troops brought in Namiji. She was dressed in white cotton robes; she must have planned to attend the funeral with Lord Tsunanori’s household. Her gloved hand held her white head drape over her face. She knelt on the floor in front of Sano. The troops and Onoda stood along the walls. Sano wanted them away from the house, so that he could sneak out after he talked with Namiji, but if he asked them to leave, they might decide to check on his family.
He said to the nurse, “I brought you here for you to confess that you infected Lady Tsuruhime with smallpox.”
Her eyes gleamed with fear and insolence. “I’m innocent,” she said in her husky voice. “I already told your wife.”
“You’re guilty. Don’t bother denying it.” Sano had spent a lifetime having lies poured into his ears. He was sick of people who tried to avoid the consequences of their actions.
“I didn’t—”
“You scrubbed her bed with a contaminated sheet.” Fear for his family and his need to join them drained Sano’s well of patience dry. From outside came the sound of crashes as the men in the barracks hurled wine jars out the windows. He’d never conducted an interview while under such pressure. “You thought nobody saw you. You were wrong.”
Namiji gasped, sucking the fabric of her drape against her mouth. But she was too smart to ask who’d seen her, to admit that she’d done just what Sano said she had.
“Stop wasting my time.” Sano couldn’t leave until he was finished with her. “Confess.”
“I won’t. Because I didn’t do it.” She knew that denial was her only recourse.
“We’ll see about that.” Sano rose and stepped off the dais.
The hand that wasn’t holding her drape over her face went up in self-defense. “You can’t touch me.”
“Why not?”
“Lord Tsunanori won’t stand for your hurting me.”
“Lord Tsunanori isn’t here.” Sano ordered, “Confess that you killed Lady Tsuruhime by giving her smallpox.”
“He’ll send somebody to rescue me.”
“Why would he bother?” His impatience growing by the moment, Sano was curious in spite of himself.
“Because he takes care of me.” Namiji spoke with smug confidence.
Sano’s anger toward the shogun was like a fire that burned anyone else in its path. It incinerated whatever pity he might have felt toward this pariah of a woman. She’d coughed on and mocked his pregnant wife. Hiding her face, hiding the truth that she was a murderess, she was obstructing justice and delaying his flight from a death sentence.
“Why would Lord Tsunanori take care of this?” Sano grabbed her scarf and yanked.
Namiji shrieked as if he were peeling off her skin. She hung onto the scarf, but he tore it away. She covered her face with her gloved hands. Sano seized them by the wrists, pulling them down. Her face was a mass of puckered, pitted, circular scars. They disfigured her nose, lips, and ears. Her hair was wispy, her scalp bald where scars had proliferated.
The troops groaned in revulsion. Sano didn’t hide his own reaction or temper his cruelty. Thrusting Namiji away from him, he said, “Have you never looked at yourself in the mirror? How can you think that your master would protect a woman as ugly as you?”
“I wasn’t always ugly.” Tears of shame oozed from her eyes, the only features left unspoiled.
Sano saw that her body was slender but voluptuous, her neck long and graceful, her breasts full above the sash that circled her small waist. If not for the smallpox, Namiji would have been attractive.
“Lord Tsunanori knew me before.” Having lost her veil, she’d also lost her guardedness. Vulnerability replaced insolence. “He’s never forgotten what we were to each other.”
“What were you?”
“I was his mistress.”
“There’s nothing special about that,” Sano said. “Men sleeping with their servants—it happens all the time.”
Protest burst from Namiji. “We were in love!”
“Women fooling themselves. That happens all the time, too.” Sano said, “Let me guess: Lord Tsunanori ended the great love affair as soon as you got smallpox.”
“I didn’t want him to catch it,” she said, rushing to defend Lord Tsunanori. “But he still loved me.” Breathless with her need to convince Sano and herself, she said, “He could have thrown me out on the street to die. That’s what other masters do with servants who get sick. But he sent me to a convent. He paid the nuns to nurse me. When I recovered, he let me come back to his house, even though I looked like this.” She spread her arms in a gesture of triumph.
The vain, selfish Lord Tsunanori had more character than Sano had thought. But Sano kept goading Namiji. “So Lord Tsunanori let his former mistress empty his chamber pot. How generous.”
“He gave me a home when no one else would have!”
“What other dirty work did you do for him?” Sano turned the conversation back to the most important issue. “Kill his wife?”
“No! I would do anything for him but that!”
“Why not that?” Sano recalled what Reiko had said the nurse had told her. “You knew he hated Tsuruhime. She treated you like filth. You decided to give her the same disease that made you ugly. You accomplished two things at once—you got Lord Tsunanori out of his bad marriage, and you got your revenge on Tsuruhime.”
“I didn’t kill her.” Namiji regained some of her insolence. “It was Yoshisato.”
“Yoshisato wasn’t seen scrubbing Tsuruhime’s bed with a contamin
ated sheet,” Sano pointed out. “Or burning the sheet after Tsuruhime came down with smallpox.”
“Whoever says they saw me is lying.”
Sano reversed course. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you didn’t infect Tsuruhime. If not you, it had to be Lord Tsunanori.”
Namiji looked startled, as if she’d been following a road she’d thought was straight and it had taken a steep, downward turn. Her expression turned aghast as she realized that she had to choose between confessing to the murder or incriminating her beloved master.
“I did it,” she said with pride and resignation. “I confess.”
Captain Onoda signaled the troops to take her away. Sano said, “Wait. Did Lord Tsunanori ask you to infect Tsuruhime with smallpox?”
“No. I did it on my own.” Namiji sounded dismayed that her confession had damned her but hadn’t put Sano off Lord Tsunanori.
Sano heard his men rioting; he felt time slipping away. But he wanted the complete solution to his last case. “Why are you still protecting Lord Tsunanori? He won’t protect you. He’ll let you take the whole blame for Tsuruhime’s murder.”
“He’ll take care of me.” She sounded desperate to believe it. “He always does.”
“Not this time,” Sano said. “Tsuruhime was the shogun’s daughter. He can’t save you. He can only save himself by letting you take the whole blame. You’ll be put to death. And he’ll take as many new mistresses as he wants.”
Namiji whimpered as she absorbed the truth about her fate.
“Don’t let him get away with it.” Sano couldn’t care that he was breaking a vulnerable woman. He needed this business done with. “Make him take his part of the blame.”
She curled forward, put her scarred face against the floor, and dissolved into agonized weeping. “It was his idea. He asked me to do it. He knew I couldn’t say no.”
Sano nodded to Captain Onoda. Onoda told the troops, “Take her to Edo Jail. Tell army headquarters what happened. They’ll issue an order for Lord Tsunanori’s arrest.”
The Shogun's Daughter: A Novel of Feudal Japan (Sano Ichiro Mysteries) Page 29