She could not say it. Her throat would not open and let the words out. Without lifting her head, she turned quickly and found her way among the tables, walking out of the room.
Thirty-three
Dojun drifted through Samuel’s house, inspecting it. Samuel stood on the second-floor lanai, leaning against the rail, watching past the open doors as Dojun probed and scrutinized, evaluating the strength of the defenses.
Samuel felt a certain bitter satisfaction each time Dojun missed something, though it wasn’t often. The trapdoors, and the windows that would only open to a piece of paper slipped into the right place—those Dojun found. The natural lava tube that provided an underground entrance and exit into the mountain behind, he already knew. It was one reason Samuel had chosen this property. But Dojun finally had to ask how to spring the panel that led to it.
Samuel walked through the echoing house, locking and unlocking the precise combination of doors on the floor above that allowed the panel to move.
Then he went back out on the lanai. He stood there, watching, as the Kaiea steamed to sea.
How easily she’d agreed to go. No hesitation, no questions. She hadn’t even said good-bye.
He supposed that after a night to think about it, she’d found that she didn’t wish to keep up a conventional appearance after all. He supposed that if he could have kept himself in check—
He closed his eyes, his jaw tightening.
Better that she’d left. She would distract him. She would be vulnerable. The men who’d taken the Gokuakuma’s mounting, entering his office, finding and removing the kazaritachi without disturbing any of his seals—they would have been at this house, too. He had to assume they would have found everything Dojun could find. He had to assume they would strike at any weakness—and Leda was his.
She was his weakness even as he stood there, watching.
Below him, he could hear the soft voices of three of his “gardeners,” hand-picked from both his and Dojun’s networks. To turn a house into a stronghold, quickly, without appearing to do so, required choices. Samuel knew his own people, native kanakas, Chinese, and a scattering of haoles—Americans and Europeans of various stripes; he selected for loyalty and caliber, and lack of Japanese contacts, to lessen the chance of subversion.
Dojun had his own clansmen. Samuel still felt the interior shock of finding that the friendly connections Dojun had made among the new immigrants were actually family ties—older and stronger than anything between himself and his teacher. Shōji, with his broom and his respectfulness, turned out to be a nephew, sent especially to be instructed, to be raised and trained and dedicated to guardianship of the Gokuakuma.
In the years when Dojun had been alone, when Japan would allow no immigration, he’d made do with what he found. He’d trained Samuel. And Samuel felt like a fool to care, to be resentful of a boy with a broom.
He leaned his shoulder against the white pillar, scanning the city among its thick trees; Honolulu Harbor, and the broad sheen of Pearl Harbor far to the west, with fish ponds and taro patches between. Somewhere, they were there—an unknown number—outside of their native territory, and in his. Dojun would protect the blade; prepare the house to be safe, withdraw and adapt: the strength of in. Samuel would go out, turn the tables and seek the hunters: the energy of yo.
That was all he knew of Dojun’s intentions. All that Dojun had confided to him.
A “demon” blade. He wanted to roll his eyes. He had his directions, he would give whatever Dojun demanded of him as he always had. But this time, for the first time, there was a small, cold, sullen place; a reservation in his heart.
He didn’t say the obvious: that if he’d been told, if he’d been trusted to understand, that he would not have precipitated this crisis. He wouldn’t have stolen a kazaritachi in ignorance, for his own ends, and brought it here so close to the blade—and God knew, he would never have brought Leda near it.
But he remembered the empty cache beneath his stove, and the duplicate mounting that had been so conveniently “found” to replace the sword he’d stolen in London. Dojun’s adversaries had been going after the Gokuakuma’s mount before Samuel ever touched it; there was no other ready explanation for the existence of a duplicate. It must have been made to replace the real mounting before the presentation to the Queen. Samuel’s theft had forestalled the switch, and set the pursuit. And it had taken the pursuers months, but they’d managed to do what half the force of Scotland Yard hadn’t—identified and tracked him.
Whoever hunted the Gokuakuma had been trained as he’d been, only better. If they believed in it, then it was as Dojun said—the demon was as real as the hunters, and whatever they were capable of doing.
He studied the land. Three years ago it would have been easy—there had been so few Nihonjin in the islands. Samuel had known every one in Honolulu by name. But there were thousands of Dojun’s countrymen now, on the plantations and beginning to set up business in the city. Thousands of faces to hide behind.
It was, possibly, an advantage that he did not believe in the Gokuakuma the way Dojun and his opponents must believe.
To win, Dojun said, it is essential not to wish to win.
Samuel watched the Kaiea move in slow stateliness behind Diamond Head, her smokestacks trailing as she took the heading for Makapu’u Point—beyond sight, beyond reach of the signal that would call her back.
It had seemed such a sensible idea on the dock. It had seemed very clear and exact. Leda was certain that when the moment had arrived for her to put her foot upon the gangplank, and she had not done it, that she had been in possession of an entirely persuasive and reasonable train of thought in support of the decision.
That it had something to do with obedience and wifely duty, she was sure, but now that she was reinstalled at the Hawaiian Hotel, with the sound of the Kaiea’s departing horn long since faded from the air, she could not seem to perfectly reconstruct the logic which had required a direct defiance of her husband’s expressed wish in order to present herself in an obedient, respectful, and salutary light.
Manalo, the Hawaiian driver Samuel had sent to take her to the ship, helped her into the buggy. He was a strapping young man, formidable in his height and athleticism, but he seemed perfectly content to wear most of the flower leis that he’d brought to pile over Leda’s head, although he insisted on adorning her with at least one trailer of hibiscus and gardenias. “’As for you—come stay already. Haku-nui, number-one man, he like, yeah, you no go down California. Good thing stay Hawai’i.” Manalo grinned. “Got trunks all set, take you up d’ place, wiki-wiki.”
He gave the horse a lash, so that it careened at a wild trot out of the grounds of the hotel, neatly missing the mule-drawn trolley and turning on two wheels in the direction of the mountains.
Leda wasn’t quite so anxious to bucket up the hill as Manalo. Nor was she so perfectly sanguine about “Haku-nui” and his reception of the news that she hadn’t boarded the ship after all. She had hoped to be able to prepare a small speech in defense of her decision, but between the fluster of having her trunks retrieved at the last moment from the deck, and then the congenial surprise at her unexpected return to the hotel, and a certain amount of prolonging—possibly deliberate on her part—of rambling conversations and greeting of people she had only taken leave of an hour or two before, and now, having to cling for dear life to the buggy’s supports as they maintained a dashing pace through the mud streets of Honolulu—she really had no idea at all of what she was going to say to Samuel, and wasn’t precisely looking forward to the moment.
The poor horse was steaming by the time they reached the cooler heights. Samuel’s house—our house, she thought stubbornly—stood in white elegance against the rise of the mountain, with the red slash of bared soil around it. As Manalo reined the horse up the steep cinder-paved drive, two gardeners stepped out from where they appeared to have been clearing brush. They had something of a brooding air, standing with their hoes and sick
les in silence until Manalo shouted in Hawaiian and gestured at Leda. Then the dark faces broke into grins. They picked up their woven hats and swept wide bows to her as the buggy passed.
She inclined her head in a cordial manner. The horse swung around the final rising curve. The buggy clattered to a halt at the base of the steps, where other workmen were still laying cream-colored stones to complete the pavement.
Leda held on to the panel of the vehicle for a moment. There was no sign of Samuel. An Oriental man dressed in plain, sober clothes appeared at the open doorway and came down the steps.
“Aloha!” Manalo leaped from the buggy. “Dojun-san! Wahine-lady, she no wanna leave—she no went d’Kaiea. Where number-one Haku-nui?”
The other man bowed deeply, his palms on his thighs. “Ah, Mrs. Samua-san. Aloha!” His greeting had a courtly air. As Manalo helped her from the carriage, he bowed again and raised his hand upward. “Samua-san on top.”
Leda followed his gesture. On the veranda above, leaning against one of the tall fluted pillars, with his arms crossed, Samuel watched them. His soft aloha drifted down on a decidedly ironic note. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“With due consideration,” she began, “and upon most earnest reflection, the fact was borne in upon me as I was about to step upon the gangplank of the excellent Kaiea, that it is…ah…unfitting that I leave.” She was aware of the eyes of all the workers on her. “That is, so soon. Without justification. People will think it very odd. Perhaps, if you would—if we might discuss this with more privacy.”
“There’s not much to discuss. The boat’s gone.”
“Yes, I…I believe that may be so.”
“Seventeen miles past Makapu’u Point by now, I’d estimate.”
“I would have come sooner, and mentioned the—change of plan, you see, but Manalo and I felt that—it would be expedient to convey the trunks back to the hotel.”
“There’s nothing else for two weeks.”
“Is there not?” She looked down, with the fragrance of gardenia enfolding her. “How unfortunate!”
Even from her position below him, she could hear the slow sigh he exhaled. The sound of footsteps on wood reverberated into distance.
She peeked up at the front door, where the Oriental man observed her with an apologetic demeanor.
“Ey, number-one man make huhū.” Manalo put on a terrific scowl, then grinned in high good humor and shook his head sorrowfully. “Pilikia! Ho’opilikia you!”
Leda had heard pilikia, the native word that seemed to be applicable to trouble of all sorts and sizes. She gave Manalo’s golden, laughing face a subduing frown, but he only sank into the background—as much as his six-foot-plus frame could sink—when Samuel came down the open hall and onto the lower veranda.
He stopped at the top of the steps. Leda could see the trace of temper around his eyes, but he said nothing beyond: “What do you plan to do now?”
“Well, I…thought that I should begin work.”
“What work?”
She summoned up her courage. “It’s my place to make your house comfortable for you.”
He looked at her silently.
His lack of response goaded her into quicker speech. “I can see that we’ve not done nearly enough in London. We’ve hardly ordered sufficient to furnish one room, and it may not arrive for some time. Mrs. Richards told me that furniture could be got here in Honolulu, and fittings.”
“Furnita make,” the Oriental man said, bobbing eagerly. “I make, Mrs. Samua-san! Tomorrow you come back, look-see house, all room, need this, need this. I stop—make measure. Table. Chair. What you like.”
“No,” Samuel said. “I don’t want her up here.”
Leda flushed. She moistened her lips and took a step backward.
The little man looked mournfully at him. “Samua-san got wife. Furnita need. Chair, bed, all that.”
Samuel’s jaw flexed. “No.” He glanced at her. “You can go back to the hotel and stay put there.” He sent a cold stare beyond her toward Manalo. “I’ll take her. Since it looks like I can’t trust anyone else with a simple order.”
The Hawaiian, adorned with his red and yellow flowers and trailing leaves, managed to look hurt and lugubrious at once. “Ey, what I can do? She no wanna go ship. You no say me, ‘Eh, Manalo, t’row her on, any way!’”
“Certainly not,” Leda said. “It isn’t Manalo’s fault.”
“You like chair here, Mrs. Samua-san?” The Oriental man spread his hands, indicating a corner of the veranda. “Nice place. Pretty. Sit. Look-see ocean, mountain, everything. All kind wood got, koa, ohia, paulownia wood. What kind, eh?”
Samuel spoke to him curtly in his own language. The servant made a humble bow, and replied. As Samuel’s mouth grew tighter, the bows grew lower and lower and the murmured salutations longer.
Suddenly Samuel made a foreign-sounding exclamation and turned away. “Furnish the place, then! Enjoy yourself! Take all the time you like!” He stalked back into the interior of the house, as if the rest of them didn’t exist.
“OK! OK, Samua-san.” The Oriental man bowed after him, and then at Leda. He pointed to his nose. “Dojun name. Carpenta. Good table, good chair. You tell what want already.”
She had rather anticipated further discussion with Samuel, but Mr. Dojun looked at her expectantly, as if she were to present him with a list at once. “Well—I suppose—a table will be necessary. For the breakfast room. And chairs. Really, two would be sufficient, to start with. How long would that take?”
“Got table. Got dine chair. Got—” He held up his palm and folded down his thumb and forefinger, and then each of his fingers one at a time until only his little finger was left standing straight. “One-two-three-four. Four dine chair on hand been make. I bring. You like—no time.”
“It’s already made, do you mean?”
“Hai! Been make.”
“I see. Do you have other pieces on hand, Mr. Dojun?”
“Chest.” He outlined a large, squarish shape in the air, much taller than himself. “Bookcase, Chinese long chair. Rocky chair. Small-little table. Big table. All kind furnita on hand. Dojun furnita, tansu chest, no same buy somebody else. More better. Japan, say skibui—no ugly, no fancy too much. Beauty, yes. Fancy hybolic, no. Savvy? I bring all this house, you look-see, what you like.”
“Oh, you mustn’t go to so much trouble. I can come to your shop and see it.”
“No, no! I bring! You say me, put there, put there, look-see, you no like, take-go.”
“Well, that’s most kind of you. I should like to see how it would look in place, I imagine.”
Mr. Dojun bobbed. “Tomorrow, nē? You come this house. I bring.”
Leda hesitated. With this sudden cornucopia of furniture, was it not possible…
She would make everything look very handsome—and Samuel liked Japanese things; she remembered Lady Kai saying that he did his own woodwork in the Japanese style. But she didn’t know—she acknowledged herself sadly deficient in the comforts that might tempt a man to run tame about the house.
In the accustomed way of things, feminine delicacy would not have endured a discussion with strangers of something so personal as her husband’s tastes. However, experience taught that a familiar retainer, a maid or even a cook, often would be more conversant with her mistress’ private inclinations than the closest family relations. It seemed likely that the same would hold true of gentlemen. She looked shyly at Mr. Dojun and Manalo. “I wonder—if you don’t think me impertinent for asking—is it possible that you and Mr. Manalo have known Mr. Gerard for some time?”
“Time?” Mr. Dojun repeated.
“Some years? You, and Mr. Manalo, work for Mr. Gerard a long time?”
“Ah. Much year. Sixteen, eighteen year. Before, twenty year, work my lady—work my lady Ashlan’, she been take-care Samua-san.”
“Ah, Lady Ashland!” She lost her last reservations about Mr. Dojun. If Lady Tess had employed him, Leda f
elt that she could be assured of his excellent character.
“Manalo-kun, he more young. No full thirty year, eh?” Mr. Dojun bowed slightly toward the Hawaiian. “Maybe, six, seven year work Samua-san.”
Manalo grinned good-naturedly. “Too much time. No swim, no ride, no sing. Auwē! All work!” He passed his hand over his brow.
“Perhaps…if you know him well—” She lowered her voice. “I’m rather in a quandary, you see, as to how a gentleman would prefer the house to be done up. I wonder if you might have some suggestions for the primary choices.”
They both looked at her blankly.
“What particular furnishings a man would prefer—” She saw that she was making no progress. “What furniture a man likes,” she exclaimed at last. “What man like in house?”
“Bed,” Manalo said. And positively winked at her.
“Ah!” Mr. Dojun nodded. “Number-one thing, bedstead. Husband like!”
Leda felt herself blushing to her ears. While Manalo laughed himself silly at her confusion, Mr. Dojun began an intricate and indecipherable description of a bedstead that he happened to have “on hand.”
For all Manalo’s vulgarity—and she would have been surprised if he wouldn’t eat raw onions in a front parlor—he seemed quite sincere. It was his opinion that tables, chairs, what-nots, and chests of drawers were of no consequence. Mat of palm or feather tick, a bed was the first article of furniture that a husband required.
“I suppose,” she said to Mr. Dojun at last, “you should be certain to bring the bedstead.”
“Bring bed.” Mr. Dojun bowed. “Got bed, make home.”
“Well, yes,” Leda agreed. “That’s rather what one hopes.”
“And Mr. Dojun tells me that he has a particularly handsome bedstead of fiddlestick wood,” she said, making a swirl in her ice cream with a spoon. “I’m not precisely sure what that is.”
“Fiddleback wood. It’s a top-grain koa.” Samuel watched her. She wouldn’t look up at him; she hadn’t met his eyes once since he’d handed her into the buggy to return her to the hotel. “Expensive.”