Autumn Bridge (6 page)

They were in the drawing room overlooking one of the inner courtyards of Quiet Crane Palace. It had been converted to the Western style, at first to accommodate Emily, and more recently to receive Western guests.

“Is that wise, sir? Would I not expose myself to further scandal?”

“I do not give an iota of credence to the rumors,” he said, “but you must admit the circumstances make such conjecture inevitable.”

“What circumstances?”

“Do you not see?” Robert’s handsome face squinched up in that boyish way he had of unconsciously showing anxiety.

She wanted to laugh, but of course she did not. While it was something of a struggle to maintain her serious expression, she managed to do so.

She said, “No, I do not see.”

Robert stood and went to the doorway overlooking the garden. He walked with the slightest of limps. He had dismissed it as the result of an accident during the war. The ambassador, however, had told her that Robert had received the wound during naval actions on the Mississippi River, actions for which he had been awarded numerous commendations for valor. She found Robert’s modesty endearing. Indeed, she found many things about him endearing, not the least of which was his ability to speak English. That was perhaps what Emily had missed most during these long years in Japan — the sound of an American voice.

Once at the doorway, Robert turned to face her. Apparently, he felt the need to stand at some remove in order to say what he had to say. His face still displayed a squinch. “You are a young unmarried woman, without the protection of father, husband, or brother, living in the palace of an Oriental despot.”

“I would hardly call Lord Genji a despot, Robert. He is a nobleman, rather like a duke in European countries.”

“Please. Let me continue while I have the courage to do so. As I was saying, you are a young woman, and, moreover, a very beautiful young woman. That alone would be enough to ignite gossip in any circumstance. To make matters worse, the ‘duke,’ as you style him, whose roof you share—”

Emily said, “I would not phrase it that way.”

“—is one notorious for debauchery even among his own debauched peers. For God’s sake, Emily—”

“I must ask you not to use the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Excuse me,” he said, “I forgot myself. But surely, you can see the problem now.”

“And is that how you see it?”

“I know you are a woman of impeccable virtue and utterly steadfast morality. My concern is not with your behavior. Rather, I fear for your safety in such a place. It borders on the miraculous that you have remained here unmolested for so long. Isolated this way, at the mercy of a man whose every whim is an ironclad command to his fanatic followers, anything could happen, anything, and no one could help you.”

Emily smiled kindly. “I appreciate your concern. But really, your fear is entirely without foundation. Your generous characterization of my appearance is not shared by the Japanese. I am considered quite hideous, not unlike the demons that periodically appear in their fairy tales, breathing fire. No person is less likely to excite ungovernable passions in the Japanese than I, I assure you.”

“It is not the generality of Japanese that concerns me,” Robert said, “just one person in particular.”

“Lord Genji is a true friend,” Emily said, “and a gentleman who conforms to the highest standards of decency. I am safer within these walls than I would be anywhere else in Edo.”

“The highest standards of decency? He consorts with prostitutes on a regular basis.”

“Geisha are not prostitutes. I’ve explained that to you many times. You willfully refuse to understand.”

“He worships golden idols.”

“He does not. He expresses reverence for his teachers and ancestors by bowing to the images of Buddhas. I’ve explained this also.”

Robert went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “He has murdered dozens of innocent men, women, and children, and caused many others to be killed. He has not only condoned suicide, which is sin enough, but he has actually ordered others to commit the act. He has decapitated, or caused to be decapitated, more than a few of his political enemies, and has compounded those atrocities by actually delivering the severed heads of those unfortunates to their families and loved ones. Such cruelty is beyond belief. My God, do you call this conforming to the highest standards of decency?”

“Calm yourself. Here. Have some tea.” Emily needed the pause. All of the issues he had raised were easily answerable, if not completely defensible, save one. The murder of the villagers. Perhaps if she left that aside and addressed the other issues, he would not notice.

Robert seated himself. He was breathing rather heavily, overexcited as he had been by his recitation of Genji’s sins.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but is coffee available by any chance?”

“I’m afraid not. Do you really prefer it to tea?” Coffee was apparently one of the more recent postwar fads in the United States. “I find it rather acidic, and it tends to upset my stomach.”

“It’s an acquired taste, I suppose. During the war, when Brazilian coffee was more readily available than English tea, I found coffee to have one great advantage. It supplies a tremendous burst of energy completely lacking in tea.”

“You seem, if anything, to have an excess of energy rather than a dearth,” Emily said. “Perhaps you should reduce your coffee consumption in any case.”

Robert took the offered tea and smiled. “Perhaps,” he said, and continued to smile at her in such a way that she knew she could lead the conversation in another direction with little effort. That direction, which Robert had attempted in several previous conversations, had dangers of its own, however, so Emily stayed with the subject at hand.

“Must I cover the subjects of geisha and Buddhism again, Robert?”

“I concede that your explanations, if true, would be valid.” He held up a hand to stop the protest he knew was coming. “And further, I concede, for the sake of argument at least, that they are valid.”

“Thank you. Now, as a military man yourself, you surely know that martial tradition is what sometimes compels samurai to take their own lives. By our Christian standards, this is a mortal sin. There is no question of that. But until they are converted to the true faith, we can hardly hold them to standards that are, at present, utterly repugnant to them.”

“That seems an excessively flexible viewpoint for a Christian missionary, Emily.”

“I do not consent. I simply understand, which is all I ask of you.”

“Very well. Go on.”

“As for the delivery of heads” — Emily took a deep breath and tried, without complete success, to avoid visualization. She had seen too many of them herself — “that is considered the honorable thing to do. If Lord Genji had not done so, it would have been a breach of the samurai’s equivalent of the code of chivalry.”

“Chivalry? How can you even think of using that word to describe wanton acts of butchery and mutilation?”

“Excuse me, Lady Emily.” Hanako knelt at the doorway and bowed, her right hand to the floor, the empty sleeve on her left draped elegantly beside it. “You have another visitor. I told him you had a guest with you, but he insisted—”

“Well, well, how gratifying to see you at leisure, Admiral. But can you really afford such a luxurious expenditure of time?” Charles Smith smiled and arched an eyebrow at Robert. His Georgia drawl, Emily noticed, was highly exaggerated, as it always was in Robert’s presence. “Don’t you have homes to loot, cities to burn, and defenseless civilians to bombard?”

Robert shot to his feet. “I have borne the last insult I will ever bear from a traitor such as yourself, sir.”

“Gentlemen, please,” Emily said, but neither gave any indication that they had heard her.

Charles gave the slightest of bows to his adversary. “I am at your service, sir, at any time of your choosing. And the choice of weapons, sir, is also yours.”

“Robert!” Emily said. “Charles! Stop it this instant.”

“Since I have offered the challenge,” Robert said, “the choice is necessarily yours, sir.”

“I am compelled to decline, sir, since it would confer upon me an entirely unfair advantage,” Charles said. “I would naturally choose either pistols or swords, and you and your kind, I believe, are much more comfortable with long-range mortars, flung torches, and starvation by siege.”

If Emily had not flung herself bodily between the two men at that moment, there was no doubt they would have come to blows on the spot. Thankfully, they both retained enough presence of mind to halt before colliding with her.

“I am ashamed of you,” she said, looking disapprovingly first at one and then at the other. “You are Christian gentlemen, and should be setting an example for our hosts. Instead, you are behaving in a barbarous manner hardly distinguishable from the worst of their own.”

“Surely I have a right to respond to insult intentionally given,” Robert said, still glaring at Charles, who, of course, also continued to glare at him.

“If the truth is an insult,” Charles said, “then perhaps you ought to examine the heinous acts giving rise to it.”

“What is more heinous than slavery?” Robert said. “We righteously put an end to it, along with your rebellion.”

Charles laughed derisively. “As if you care a whit about the fate of any Negroes. That was a mendacious excuse, not a reason.”

“Unless you cease this argument immediately,” Emily said, “I shall be compelled to ask you both to leave. Should I learn that you have engaged in any violence against each other, I will find it impossible to see either of you again. Ever.”

Robert Farrington and Charles Smith both looked as ready to kill each other as ever, and would no doubt remain ready for the foreseeable future. Emily was equally sure that they would not do so, the reason being that the quarrel between them was not really about politics generally, or even the late war specifically. For one thing, Charles’s family had originally been Georgian, but that was several generations in the past. Charles himself had been born in Honolulu, in the Hawaiian Kingdom, as had both his parents. He was heir to a sugar plantation and a cattle ranch there, and had never even seen Georgia. Furthermore, Emily knew from earlier conversations that Charles had been a fervent abolitionist, and had contributed significant sums to the cause. No, in point of fact, the men’s ire arose from their mutual wish to win Emily’s hand in marriage.

What made a man think he could win a woman’s heart with displays of murderous rage? It was as if in even the most civilized male breast, the residue of brutish prehistoric life was ever ready to resurrect itself to its former dominance. Truly, without the civilizing influence of women, even the best men of Christendom, such as Robert Farrington and Charles Smith certainly were, stood in constant danger of descending back into barbarism. For her part, she had made it eminently clear to them that any violence, even of the nonfatal kind, would immediately disqualify the perpetrator from her further consideration.

Which one to accept was not a decision easily reached, though Emily was determined to shortly accept one or the other. The reason for her newfound haste was the same as the reason for her previous disinclination to consider any proposal whatsoever. Love. Love of the deepest and most unshakable kind. But a love, unfortunately, that she did not feel for either of the two gentlemen seeking her hand.

After they departed, at an interval of fifteen minutes at her insistence, Emily went to her study to continue her translation of
Suzume-no-kumo
— “Cloud of Sparrows” in English — the secret scrolls of history and prophecy of Lord Genji’s clan, the Okumichi of Akaoka Domain.

There, on her desk, was a single red rose, just as there had been every morning now since the vernal equinox. It was of the variety known to Genji’s clan as American Beauty, an unexpected name for a flower which bloomed only in the inner garden of Cloud of Sparrows Castle. She brushed its soft petals gently against her lips. For love’s sake, she would marry Robert or Charles, neither of whom she loved. She placed the rose in the small vase she kept handy for the purpose and put the vase on a corner of her desk.

Today, she would begin a new scroll. Because they were not numbered or marked in any way, she was sometimes well into a scroll before she knew what part of the history it covered. That the first scroll she had translated six years ago had been the first scroll, written in 1291, was purely chance. The second had been from 1641 and the third from 1436. If any two scrolls were chronologically contiguous, it was not by design. It was this way, Genji said, because as every succeeding lord read the history, he tended to reread certain scrolls more than others, and thus any order, if there had ever been an order, was lost and lost again, repeatedly through the years. At first, this lack of sequential arrangement had bothered her. But soon, she found herself enchanted by the unpredictability. It was quite like opening a Christmas present, and being pleasantly surprised each time.

This was particularly so when, as today, it was not only time for a new scroll but also time to open a new trunk. The disorganization of the clan history was consistent with its manner of storage. Varying numbers of scrolls from different decades and centuries were contained in trunks of vastly different designs and sizes. Since there was no order about which to be concerned, whenever it came time to select a trunk to open, Emily let her eyes wander over the containers grouped in the corner of her study. As always, she would let her fancy make the choice.

Would it be a large one or a small? One that showed obvious age, or a newer one? That one of European vintage, closed with a rusty iron bolt? Or the elegant black lacquerware oval from China? Or the fragrant Korean sandalwood chest? But as soon as her eyes alighted on the odd leather-covered box, she knew her curiosity would not permit her to open any other. Upon its topmost surface was a painting, faded but with its original colors still apparent, of a red dragon curling around blue mountain spires. Her study of East Asian art enabled her now to recognize the country of origin of most artifacts she saw. But she could not identify this one.