The Last Concubine

  ‘Shinzaemon took care of us on the road, Father,’ she said. ‘We travelled together. He is a great swordsman.’

  ‘He is like a brother to us,’ Taki added.

  ‘In that case I am in your debt,’ Daisuké said gravely to Shinzaemon. He looked at him hard. ‘We need to have a talk, young man. I need to know where you stand on things – whether you’re with us or against us.’

  Shinzaemon nodded.

  ‘There’s so much of my daughter’s life I’ve missed,’ said Daisuké. ‘I’m happy to meet you young men who have been protectors to her.’

  Sachi heaved a sigh of relief. For the time being at least there would be no confrontation. Taki lit long-stemmed pipes and handed them around. Haru ran to get tea. Shinzaemon and Edwards withdrew to the side of the room and smoked quietly.

  ‘There’s something important I have to tell you,’ Daisuké said. He was speaking to Sachi. ‘I believe it will make you happy. As soon as I got to Edo I went to the Mizuno mansion. It was your mother’s family home. I wanted to see the house where she lived and smell the air she breathed. It was a ruin. The Mizunos were close allies of the Tokugawas and had fled. They must have been some of the first to go.

  ‘Ever since I found you I’ve had a dream that we could live there together, all of us. Now it seems it may be possible. The estates and palaces of the lords who were enemies of the state have been taken into state control.’

  Sachi shifted uneasily. She knew very well that by ‘enemies of the state’ he meant loyal servants of the shogun. But she said nothing. It was not for her to argue.

  ‘They’re to be government offices or accommodation for government officials,’ Daisuké continued. ‘I’ve asked for the Mizuno estate.’

  Sachi felt a chill run through her. She had always known her father had huge ambitions – but to think of taking the estate of a family like the Mizuno . . . Even if they were her relatives, it didn’t mean she was entitled to their property. She understood very well that the northern lords had fled, that officials of the new government were to be given their land. But nevertheless . . . It seemed inauspicious. Surely such an action would draw down bad luck on them all.

  ‘The Mizuno family weren’t particularly powerful,’ Daisuké continued, ‘and the estate is not particularly desirable or spacious. It’s about right for someone of my rank.’

  Haru’s plump cheeks had turned pale at the mention of the Mizuno family.

  ‘There are too many ghosts there,’ she whispered. ‘Too many memories. But maybe . . . we could get to the root of what happened to my lady. Perhaps we could find her.’

  ‘It belongs to Lord Mizuno,’ said Sachi. ‘Surely we can’t just take his land.’

  Lord Mizuno. As she said the name she saw him as if he was kneeling right in front of her. She had been hiding in the shadows behind the princess. Lord Oguri, with his bland courtier’s face, was speaking and Lord Mizuno raised his head. She saw the leathery dome of his shaved pate, the fierce eyes burning like coals, the nose like a hawk’s beak, the pockmarked skin, the thin cruel mouth. It made her shiver. He had had a tic, she remembered. He had left his sword at the gate but his arm still kept jerking as if he was trying to wrench it out of its scabbard – as if he was expecting attack even in the women’s palace.

  Daisuké was frowning, looking at her with a curious questioning expression.

  ‘What do you know of Lord Mizuno?’ he asked. ‘He’s dead, isn’t that right, Haru? He died long ago.’

  ‘The last I heard of him he . . . he was on his deathbed,’ Haru whispered. Her voice trailed away uncertainly.

  ‘He isn’t dead,’ said Sachi. She and Taki had kept their secret for so long. But now the shogun and the women’s palace no longer existed, there was nothing to prevent them from speaking out. Sachi had to stop herself shouting the words. ‘We saw Lord Mizuno, didn’t we, Taki? He came to the palace with Lord Oguri to tell us His Majesty was ill.’

  A sound broke the silence, the clunk of a long-stemmed pipe striking the tobacco box. At the side of the room the two youths shifted slightly.

  Haru’s mouth fell open. She raised her hand, let it fall again. She made a strangled sound, halfway between a gasp and a groan, and the contours of her plump face seemed to sag and dissolve.

  ‘He . . . He can’t be. It’s impossible.’ She shook her head. ‘Not . . . Lord Mizuno. Lord Tadanaka Mizuno. Are you sure?’

  ‘Lord Tadanaka Mizuno,’ said Taki. ‘I remember very well.’

  ‘He was a bad man,’ muttered Haru. ‘An evil man. It would have been better if he had died.’

  There was a long silence. Daisuké’s face had creased and darkened. It was no longer as handsome as a kabuki actor’s but had become a demon mask. ‘So it was a lie!’ he shouted. He slammed his great fist on the tatami.

  ‘What was, Father?’ Sachi whispered. ‘What was a lie?’

  The sun had gone in. Candles and lamps glimmered in the dark corners as a chill fell over them. The smell of tobacco smoke drifted from the far side of the room and threads of smoke wavered upwards and coiled around the dark beams of the ceiling. Edwards and Shinzaemon were like statues, their pipes in their hands.

  ‘She said there was no one in the world she was afraid of except him.’ He turned to Haru. ‘Was it true what . . . what she told me? That it was all his doing? That he forced her to go into service?’

  ‘I thought he was dead.’ Haru was rocking herself backwards and forwards. ‘I remember them arguing. “You’re a woman,” Lord Mizuno said. He was shouting. “How dare you defy me! You think you can live without us, but you’re nothing without us. You have to do it. For your family’s sake.” ’

  ‘You didn’t want to enter the palace,’ said Daisuké softly. There was a presence in the room with them. Sachi’s mother. It was as if he could hear her voice, as if she was speaking to him. ‘Wasn’t that what you told me? It was like entering a convent, like being imprisoned. A place with three thousand women and only one man, and old ladies watching everything you did, waiting for you to make a mistake. Just sewing and fixing your hair all day – that was all you had to look forward to. “It’s no life for me,” that’s what you said. “I’m a wild creature. I’m a bird. I’ll fly away.” ’

  ‘What was the lie, Father? What was the lie?’ whispered Sachi.

  ‘They had everything, the Mizunos,’ said Haru. Her voice was strained as if the words were being wrenched out of her against her will. ‘A castle, a huge annual stipend – but they were chamberlains. My lady’s father was lord chamberlain of the Kisshu family and Lord Tadanaka, the young lord, couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand being number two. He used to stomp around shouting, lashing out at servants. Then my lady, his sister, grew up and he saw a way to get what he wanted.

  ‘He decided she was to go into service in Edo Castle, no matter what. A woman of her status was supposed to enter as a junior lady-in-waiting of middle rank. But there were very few openings at that level and the competition was stiff. It was the old ladies who made the selection and they didn’t take beauty into account. It was all to do with rank and status and how old your family was. It was much easier to get in at a lower level, so the young lord ordered my miserable family to adopt her. You can imagine what she thought about that! But what could she do? So she became my adopted sister and we were both taken on as lowerlevel maids.

  ‘Lord Mizuno knew he just had to get my lady into the palace where the shogun could see her. She was so alluring, so beautiful, so bright. He knew the shogun would fall for her straight away and make her the lady of the side chamber. And she’d take the whole family with her. Her father would be made a daimyo, then Lord Mizuno after him. Firefly daimyos. They’d flit along after the fire in her tail. Only it didn’t quite work out like that. The key thing was, she had to bear the shogun a son and heir. But her first son died, then her next child . . .’

  ‘And then everything started going wrong,’ said Daisuké. ‘She told me His Majesty stopped vis
iting her. She met me. And then her belly began to swell.’

  ‘People noticed,’ whispered Haru. ‘She had enemies. A lot of the women were jealous of her and if any of them had said anything it would have been a disaster for the entire Mizuno family. The young lord would have had to cut his belly and the family line would have been ended. He would have wanted to avoid that at all costs.’

  ‘He must have got wind of our affair somehow,’ said Daisuké. ‘Maybe he summoned her home to get her out of the way before the shogun and his officers found out.’

  ‘So that was the lie?’ whispered Sachi. ‘That he was on his deathbed?’

  ‘To get her home. To cover up the scandal.’

  ‘But what did he do then?’ Sachi could hear her voice, small and forlorn. ‘What did he do when my mother went home? Where is she?’

  Daisuké looked at Sachi.

  ‘If anyone knows what became of your mother, he does,’ he said. ‘We’ll find him. No matter what it takes.’

  The great hall was utterly still.

  If they could only find Lord Mizuno, Sachi thought. Then she remembered that she had seen him a second time. In her mind she could hear the rushing of a river, the murmur of refugees desperate to cross, the cries of wild geese, the crunch of porters’ feet, the clatter of a ferry pulling up on the bank.

  ‘Taki and I saw him again just a few months ago,’ she whispered. ‘At Takasaki. We were waiting to cross the river. They were leaving Edo, he and Lord Oguri. Shin was there too.’

  ‘The way he looked at you, my lady!’ It was Taki’s voice.

  Sachi saw Lord Mizuno’s dark face pressed up close to hers. She heard his rasping breath, felt it on her face. He had shouted, ‘Get away! Leave me alone!’ As if he was crazy. As if he had seen a ghost. Perhaps that was what he had seen when he looked at her – not her but her mother.

  From the other side of the room Shinzaemon spoke up. His face was alight, his eyes gleaming. ‘They had those strongboxes,’ he said, his voice full of excitement. ‘There was something odd about them. They looked very heavy. And the porters didn’t look like porters – they didn’t have tattoos. They were . . . samurai. Samurai whose hair had grown out. I remember wondering what they were up to.’

  ‘The southerners will be out to get them, powerful men like that,’ said Edwards, his blue eyes shining too. ‘I don’t know about Lord Mizuno but Lord Oguri was chief minister of the shogun’s government. Their chances of survival are small; we need to find them quickly. I’ll come with you. You’ll need all the help you can get. I can provide horses and porters. I have to conduct a survey anyway now the country is open to foreigners. We’ve never been able to travel freely before. It’ll be an adventure for me and I could be useful to you too.’

  Shinzaemon nodded.

  ‘I can only offer my arm,’ he said quietly, ‘but it’s a strong one. I came through Takasaki on my way back from Wakamatsu. I took the long way round to avoid the southern armies. I know the road well. And I have an idea about where they were going.’

  Daisuké was thinking hard.

  ‘We must move immediately. It’s going to be winter soon and it’ll be snowing already on the high passes. But if we wait for spring it’ll be too late. I owe it to your mother and to you, my dear daughter. I can’t rest till I know where she is.’

  15

  The Gold Digger of Akagi Mountain

  I

  After the men had gone, Sachi brought out the brocade – her mother’s overkimono. It had been stored away in a drawer in a kimono chest, and the fragile fabric rustled as she lifted it out and gently unfolded it. The colours were those of a time gone by. She pressed it to her face and breathed in its subtle ancient perfume – of musk, aloe, wormwood, frankincense. She wanted to fix the scent in her mind, to know it when she next encountered it, as if she might recognize her mother by her fragrance.

  ‘We’re coming to find you,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll be together at last.’

  That night Taki made a fire in the hearth in the main room of the family section of the mansion and pulled up cushions around it. Then she, Sachi and Haru wrapped up warmly in layers of thick robes. Smoke swirled around the room, making their throats sting and their eyes water. The fire crackled and spat fiery sparks on to the polished wooden floor. The lid of the iron kettle hanging above the fire clattered, jiggling and dancing as steam puffed out. It was a homely, comforting sound.

  Shinzaemon sat with them as if he was already part of the family. He lounged on his elbow, a little apart from the others, his eyes half shut, a long-stemmed pipe in his hand. Sachi glanced at him, shyly at first, then let her eyes roam more boldly across his face. The angles of it, his square chin and full mouth, were thrown into relief by the flickering light of the flames. He was so still, so contained – like a cat, she thought. He only appeared to be relaxed. In reality he was poised and alert, ready to spring at any moment.

  Taki was bent over her sewing, pretending to concentrate, although Sachi could tell she was yearning to ask a thousand questions. Taki had not asked about Toranosuké. After all, if Toranosuké had given Shinzaemon a message for her, Shinzaemon would have told her. She must have decided to keep a dignified silence. Nevertheless there was a hurt, sad look in her big eyes and her pointed face was even paler and more drawn than usual.

  At last Taki stretched out a thin hand and picked up the poker. She shook up the glowing embers then lifted the lid of the kettle and ladled hot water into a teapot. She filled a teacup, put it on a tray and held it out to Shinzaemon.

  ‘Shin,’ she squeaked in her most wheedling tones. ‘Didn’t you say you’d heard something about Lord Oguri and Lord Mizuno? Was that when you were up north?’

  ‘On the way back,’ said Shinzaemon and fell silent again.

  ‘So Tatsu found you,’ persisted Taki, her voice trailing away.

  He laughed.

  ‘It was easy,’ he said. ‘He knew where the fighting was.’

  ‘You met up . . . at Wakamatsu?’ asked Sachi. She too was eager to hear what he knew of Lord Mizuno’s whereabouts. But more than that she wanted to know about him – where he had been, what he had done, what had happened to him in the months they had been apart – and she guessed that that was what Taki and Haru wanted too.

  ‘You want to hear about Wakamatsu?’

  The women nodded. He thought for a while, staring into the fire.

  ‘We were at the castle there – White Crane Castle – a couple of months,’ he said slowly. He took a puff on his pipe. ‘We had to get there before the southern armies took the roads. Our job was to keep watch on a rise outside the main compound of the castle, me and Toranosuké. And Tatsu too, after he got there. We could see the town from there. When the enemy attacked we could see them swarming through the streets below us like a mass of black ants. Thirty thousand, we heard. Against three thousand of us. Some of the elderly and women and children from the town had taken refuge in the castle too, and had to be protected. Then the southerners set up their cannons and started bombarding us, morning to night.’

  As he talked in his brusque soldier’s way Sachi was no longer warming her hands at the fire, safe and cosy. She was there beside him, standing on the battlements. She looked out and saw clouds of smoke rolling across the city. The streets were dark as night. Here and there were tongues of flame and the raw red of smouldering fires. She heard the whoosh of flames, the crash of tiled roofs collapsing. There were no screams, no human voices, only a dreadful silence.

  ‘Then the enemy broke through. They came swarming across the wall of the moat. They looked like cockroaches – an invasion of cockroaches. We picked them off but they kept coming. No matter how many fell, more appeared. They broke into the third compound, then the second. We could see them clearly by then: men in black skinny-legged foreign uniforms and shiny pointed helmets, men in dog-skin capes and the Tosa men in their red bear wigs – like we’d think they were bears and run away.’

  He snorted with contem
pt.

  ‘It was all very well picking them off with rifles. I was just waiting for them to get close enough. I wanted to get down there, into the middle of them. I wanted to see their ugly faces, make their blood spurt and their heads fly. I’d had enough of waiting. I knew you’d want me to die a glorious death. That’s what you’d expect of me – a death fit for a samurai.’

  He was talking to all of them but his words were addressed to Sachi. He put his hand in his sleeve where her comb was hidden. His face was immobile, as if carved out of stone, but his jaw was clenched and a muscle in his neck twitched.

  ‘That’s how it would have been,’ he muttered. ‘In the old days. When men fought with swords, not rifles. When you could see the face of the man you killed or the man who killed you. When you fought man to man and the best man won.’

  He scowled. The women sat mesmerized, waiting for him to carry on.

  ‘It’s finished.’ He spat out the words. ‘It’s not just that the north lost and the south won. The old ways are over.’ He shook his head. ‘Honour, duty, the way of the sword, everything that means anything – finished. Over.’

  ‘But . . . what happened?’ Sachi whispered. He spoke with such passion she was afraid.

  ‘By the twenty-first day of the ninth month they had us by the throat. It was a month since the beginning of the siege and we were nearly out of food and ammunition. They bombarded us all day long. We fought back, picked them off – you could see them falling. A lot of our men fell too. The place reeked of corpses; there were too many to bury. The end was coming, staring us in the face.

  ‘We all knew what would happen next. There’d be brushwood piled inside the main citadel; we would hold the enemy off until his lordship cut his belly. Then whoever was still alive would set the castle alight and the gunpowder store would blow. Alive or dead, we’d have done our duty. We’d have lived or died with honour.’

  Taki had put down her sewing. Shinzaemon was still scowling, staring into the fire as if he saw Wakamatsu burning there.