Dreaming Spies

by Laurie R. King

  His dark eyes rose to watch us approach. We stopped a distance away, and gave him formal bows.

  “Please,” he said. “Sit.”

  We knelt at the far side of the carpet. Haruki-san took up a position halfway between us. He said nothing for a time, his gaze wandering to one side, where a sturdy lichen-covered rock nestled comfortably between the trunks of a pair of cherry trees. One side of its weathered surface had a slight starburst pattern beneath the lichen, as if someone, a thousand years before, had tried to carve a flower there.

  After a time, he gave a small sigh, then turned to speak to Haruki-san in his soft voice. When he had finished, she bowed and turned to us.

  “His Highness wonders if you have participated in our tradition of hanami?”

  “Blossom-viewing?” I shook my head. “No, although I’ve seen a lot of people doing so in the parks.”

  “It marks spring. It is also a recognition of the transience of beauty, and of life. The blossoms quickly pass, and summer comes. You would not like a Japanese summer,” she added. “Very hot, very humid, very hard.”

  The Prince spoke up again, and after a bow, she moved obediently to open the wicker box—which was, to my surprise, the picnic basket it resembled. But a far cry from English sandwiches and thermoses of tea.

  Sake, cold or hot, and tiny lacquered boxes containing a myriad of delicacies savoury and sweet. It was too lovely to eat, but our host gestured at the trays Haruki-san had laid out, so we put a few of the little gems on our plates and accepted cups of sake.

  When his cup was empty, he raised his eyes. “Thank you,” he said in English. “For what you did Friday night.”

  “We did nothing,” Holmes told him. “We failed. A good man died because of it.”

  The young man shook his head gently, and spoke, Haruki-san translating. “A good man died achieving his highest desire, to serve his Emperor.”

  “We—” Holmes started, then stopped at a tiny motion from Haruki-san’s fingers. One did not argue with an Emperor. Well, most of us did not.

  But as if he had heard my thought, the Prince Regent’s features suddenly twisted into an expression that looked remarkably like regret. He said, in English this time, “In Mojiro-joku, Sato-san make me angry. It is hard for a man, to make his Prince angry. It is good for a prince, to have a … friend, who make him angry. Life will be … more empty, without Sato-san.”

  The three of us sat stunned by this regal admission, until he went on in Japanese, Haruki-san automatically resuming her translation.

  “The night before that man’s party,” the Prince Regent continued, “my old friend came to meet me here, in the garden. Sato-san always admired this rock, and told me many times that it was in the wrong place, here. ‘The Chrysanthemum needs other flowers,’ he would say. I think he wanted me to give it to him, for his own garden in the hills. I would tell him that he was a peasant who did not deserve an Emperor’s Chrysanthemum.” The smile on his face was sad, the insult fond.

  He withdrew his gaze from the mottled stone, to ask in English, “Have you been to Kyoto?”

  “Mostly the train station,” I replied.

  “Take them to Kyoto,” he said to Haruki-san. “Come back and tell me how beautiful it is.”

  So she did.

  Many months later, the Chrysanthemum followed us, brought halfway around the world by a ninja’s cousin, from an Emperor’s garden to an Englishman’s flowerbed.

  Oxford in the spring:

  Tints of pale pink and yellow

  But rarely scarlet.

  I laid the revolver on the kitchen table as I hurried over to where the daughter of the Emperor’s Fool stood bleeding onto my pantry floor.

  “How bad is it?” I demanded.

  “It looks worse than it is,” she said. I had my doubts—even in her dark blue clothing, I could tell that she was spattered with blood from shoulder to shoe—but her face was no paler than usual and her pain looked more like embarrassment than physical distress.

  “Come and sit down,” I told her.

  “Close your curtains first,” she said.

  I started to ask questions, then shut my mouth and went to switch off the belching kettle and secure my windows—picking up the gun as I crossed the room.

  When we were invisible to anyone standing on the back step, I pulled out a chair for her, stuck the gun in the back of my belt, and placed my largest pan under the hot-water tap. As the pan filled, I dug through cabinets, wondering how long it took for Japanese tea to go stale.

  Not that someone in Haruki’s—Haruki-san’s—no, Haruki. This was England, and as the automatic bowing had fallen from my shoulders, so had the “san” left my lips: not that someone in Haruki’s condition was likely to complain at stale tea.

  I placed the tea in front of my guest, shut off the tap, and went to fetch my well-stocked first-aid kit. When I came back, she had tried to get out of her shirt, but in the end, it proved not worth saving. She let me slice it open with the kit’s scissors, and we looked at what lay beneath.

  I’d thought it would be a knife-slice, because of all the blood, but if so, it had been a terrible blade. The injury was, as she’d said, not deep, but the skin seemed to have been savaged.

  “What did this?”

  “One of your British iron fences.”

  Ah. For a woman of her training to fall into a fence-rail … No wonder she was embarrassed.

  However, the physical effects of the injury had to be considerable. The metal point had jammed into her arm at a shallow angle, lifting a flap of skin the size of a child’s palm. It had bled like crazy, but nothing seemed to be missing. If she could avoid infection, the edges would heal together.

  “We need to—”

  “No hospitals. No friendly nurses. This is a simple wound. I am sure you have a needle and thread.”

  I made a face. “Haruki, there’ll be a generation of filth in there.”

  “You do it. You can stitch it. I would have done it myself if I could reach it.”

  She would, too. I shook my head at the source of all that blood, then lifted the kit’s hidden drawer.

  She watched me pinch off a small pellet of the opium paste. I thought she was going to refuse it, so I just stood, holding it out. After a minute, she took it between two bloody fingers and placed it on her tongue, washing it down with tea.

  I brought the steaming pan over to let her rinse her good hand, drying it with the pristine kitchen towel Miss Pidgeon had set out on the counter. I then wrapped the towel around her lower arm to catch the ongoing dribble.

  “When did you last eat?” I asked.

  “This afternoon.” But the drug was already beginning to work—that testified to an empty stomach. I raised one eyebrow. “Breakfast,” she admitted. “Tea and rice.”

  Wordlessly, I refilled her tea-cup, then ladled Miss Pidgeon’s soup into two bowls, and sawed off some of the fresh bread in the bin. I ate mine; she ate half of hers. I took my time, eating a second slice of the bread. When I walked back from putting my bowl into the sink, her gaze had lost its focus.

  To a large extent, it is easier to bear pain than to cause it. Washing the wound created as much distress—to both of us—as I had anticipated, and I was no more skilled a seamstress when it came to flesh than I was at fabric. By the time I had snipped the last length of thread and wrapped her arm in gauze, we were both drenched in sweat. My hands, I thought, were shaking more.

  I constructed two fresh cups of tea, then said, “Stay there.” I trotted upstairs for one of Holmes’ old bath-robes—a man’s robe being shorter than my own—then stripped her down, sponged her off, and wrapped her in the worn plaid. I led her to the ground-floor guest room, pulling the bed-clothes to her chin.

  “I will be here. I have a gun. You sleep.”

  Back in the sitting room, I ran a hand through my hair, surveying the chairs, the low-burning fire, the calm books. It felt like days since I had brought my things through the front door: a
ccording to the clock, it was little more than an hour.

  I dumped several ounces of brandy down my throat, cleaned up the carnage in the kitchen, and went through the house, checking the windows and doors. I then stirred up the fire and settled onto my favourite chair, a blanket around my shoulders. The gun was in my lap.

  I dozed, on and off. No sound came from the next room; no platoon of ninjas crashed through my windows. Only the ordinary noises of an Oxford night.

  At dawn, I rose. Haruki-san had pushed the covers from her shoulders, but I left them, for fear of waking her. In the dim room, I could see no signs of fever.

  I put on the kettle, pulled back the curtains, made some telephone calls. Then I took my mug of tea out into the garden—only when I stepped down to the paving stones, I went open-mouthed with astonishment.

  Over the past fifteen months, I had spent a mere handful of days in this house. During one of those rare days, last summer, I had sat with Miss Pidgeon here on my diminutive terrace and talked about the drawbacks of travel. I told her about the intense beauty of Japan, almost shyly confiding my intention to plant a Japanese cherry tree—perhaps in that corner, there. And, O blessed among women, she had heard my longing, and responded.

  Japan was now blossoming in Oxford: a sapling no higher than my chin, showing a handful of rich near-white blossoms along its bare branches. Transient loveliness, they would be gone in days.

  I walked across the stones and the small patch of lawn to the low rise that was now home to a Prunus serrulata. In twenty years, I could host a hanami picnic beneath my very own blossoming tree.

  I was still looking at the tiny splashes of white against the weathered red bricks of the wall when I heard a sound behind me. Haruki’s face was a lot rosier than my tree; I hoped it was merely from the warm bed.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep so long.”

  “Why not? It’s the best medicine.”

  “It is more difficult to leave a place by daylight.”

  “All for the better, since you don’t need to be anywhere. No one knows you are here, no one comes in. And no one overlooks the garden.”

  She glanced out, her eyes lingering on the skinny blossoming twig. “You have no servants?”

  “What would I want servants for? Unless you stand in the front window, no one will see you. Now, what do you like for breakfast?”

  I ignored her protestations and assembled the only meal I could cook without having to chip the remains from the skillet and air out the kitchen. I beat eggs, sliced tomatoes, carved bread—and all the while, she talked. I would never have thought her so garrulous, and could not decide if it was a remnant of the opium or the beginnings of fever.

  In either case, she talked. I heard about her older brother, who had taken over the running of the inn, and her younger brother, now studying business at Princeton. Then she told me of the much-anticipated birth of the Prince Regent’s first child, due in the winter, and Tokyo’s progress after the great Kanto quake, and the arrival of the first telephone at the Mojiro-joku onsen. All manner of things—except those that mattered.

  Plates were emptied, then moved over to the sink, while she talked. I retrieved the first-aid box, changed the bandages (the skin was red and oozing, but not dangerously so), and fashioned a sling for her. She rambled on, and on.

  Finally, I sat down in front of her, forcing her to meet my eyes.

  “I was so very sorry about your father,” I told her.

  At this, she fell silent.

  “I’m sorry also that I didn’t have a chance to know him better. He was a good man.”

  She nodded.

  “Now, before I put you back to bed, tell me why you’re here.”

  Proctor’s bulldogs stroll

  Beneath the faded blue sky,

  Quick as a spring breeze.

  The year before, soon after the events at the Imperial Hotel, Holmes and I had slipped quietly away from Japan. Any news we had received of the country since then was both second-hand and in general terms. Of course, if we had chosen to bring Mycroft into matters, we could have had every iota of detail imaginable, but our return to England had been first delayed, then somewhat chaotic—and when that chaos subsided, a degree of mistrust had crept into my attitude towards my brother-in-law.*

  We simply assumed that the Prince Regent’s book had gone safely back into its former hiding place, and all was well.

  But, no.

  Haruki did not enjoy voicing any faint criticism of her future Emperor, but in truth, the blame was his. Not the original problem—in 1921, the young Prince could hardly be blamed for not knowing that the gift he carried to King George was anything but an innocent piece of Japanese history. What followed, however, was … less excusable.

  “As you saw, His Highness received the book that very night. He took it into his own hands. He had bodyguards with him lest anyone think to steal it again. He knew its value, knew that the very future of the Son of Heaven touched upon its safety.”

  “Oh, God. Who has stolen it now?”

  “No one stole it. The book is where His Highness put it.”

  “Then what?”

  She sighed. “It is not the correct book.”

  I sank my head into my hands at the table and repressed a groan. “I don’t suppose the Emperor had a second one he didn’t tell Prince Hirohito about,” I said after a time.

  “Only the one. This is not it. This is a very fine forgery, but when His Highness … the Prince Regent … when—” She stopped. She cleared her throat. “His Majesty the Emperor has been unwell—more unwell, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “His—that is, His Highness the Prince Regent hesitated to bring anything before His Majesty the Emperor that could cause distress. Perhaps if he had brought the matter before His Majesty earlier—if he had not been so very occupied with his new marriage and—well. At any rate, he did not show it to the one Person in all of Japan who might have seen that it was … lacking.”

  My heart dropped. “Lacking what?”

  “The hidden … key.”

  “The document? Oh, Lord.”

  “Yes. His Highness the Prince Regent took the book that night, carried it back to the Residence, and placed it in his personal vault. He left it there. I suppose …” She drew a breath; let it out again. “He was fond of my father.”

  Prince Hirohito was Japan’s Regent, but he was also a young man whose only friend had died at his feet. A young man schooled from birth to hide away his emotions—or to hide away those things that provoked emotions. The book reminded him of Sato-san, and of how his own self-perceived carelessness had killed his loyal retainer.

  Haruki cradled her arm in the sling, trying to find a comfortable rest for it. “In November, His Majesty the Emperor took ill—a cold, merely, but every minor illness is a threat. His Highness the Prince Regent has assumed more and more of His Majesty’s business over recent years, and at this illness, all of His Majesty’s correspondence came to him.

  “One of the letters, which His Highness did not see until the third week of November, was from England. It was on stationery he had seen before. The letter was the request for a donation. An enormous donation. His secretaries saw no particular importance in it, merely passing it on for approval before they sent back their polite reply turning down the request. It was fortunate His Highness even saw it. And extremely fortunate that it reached him rather than his Honourable Father.

  “Because it contained this.”

  Her good hand dipped into the pocket of her robe, and held out a photograph. It showed a narrow book on top of a slip-case, with an object protruding from its pages—but no, not from its pages: the rectangle of paper was sticking out from the book’s front cover.

  “When His Highness opened the safe to truly look at the book we had retrieved, he saw that its pages were not as worn as he remembered them, and the colours of Hokusai’s blue did not seem
as vibrant. To be certain, he took a knife to the covers.

  “There was no document. No letter. In fact, some of the filler matter used to add bulk to the covers was modern newsprint. The Times of London. From March and April, 1923.”

  Well, at least that gave us a date for the forgery. “So the Prince came to you.”

  “He sent for us. For my older brother. However, because our father had made me the family’s expert in the West, my brother brought me as well. His Highness gave us the letter, the photograph, and the remains of the book, and commanded us to set things right.”

  “How big is ‘enormous’?”

  “One hundred thousand pounds sterling.”

  “Whoa!”

  “Yes.”

  “Does His Highness have £100,000?”

  “His Highness has all the wealth of Japan. But only if he is willing to turn the matter over to his advisors.”

  Which, I reflected, was precisely where we had come into this whole mess.

  “So what did you do?”

  “We began by replacing the response that the secretaries had composed to the ‘request’ with a reply that was—is the word ‘noncommittal’? Saying that His Majesty was unwell, but that His Highness would take the donation request under advisement, and would reply in some weeks. We posted the letter the first part of December.

  “Immediately, we set about learning as much as we could, as well as restoring the covers of the forged copy of the book. When it was presentable, I sailed for England.”

  I thought over the sequence of events, so far as we knew. “What was the date of Darley’s original letter? The one demanding £20,000?”

  “October 14, 1923.”

  “So: in 1921, Prince Hirohito gives the book to King George. At some point between then and the spring of 1923, some very good forger gets his hands on it long enough to make a remarkably good copy. In October, Lord Darley writes to the Emperor demanding £20,000 for the book’s return. In … November I think it was, Darley and his new wife and son leave on their world tour, planning to visit Tokyo on the way to pick up their money. The following April, they get to Japan. Darley dies. His wife and her stepson sail home. And six months later, in October, someone writes a second letter demanding five times the initial amount. Did it come from the House of Lords?”