Autumn Bridge (66 page)

Remembrance brought her to a bold decision.

“I hope I am not disturbing you,” Genji said.

“You are not,” Emily said.

“I will leave you alone if you prefer. It is a fine day for solitude.”

“I’m glad you have come to me,” she said. “I was just about to go to you.”

“Oh?” He dismounted and stood next to her. “For a specific purpose, or only because you’ve missed me?”

She felt herself blushing, but did not let her embarrassment deflect her from her purpose.

“I want to talk to you about the scrolls I have been reading,” Emily said. She continued before she lost her courage. “They are not the
Cloud of Sparrows
chronicles.”

“No?”

“They are, or they claim to be, Lady Shizuka’s
Autumn Bridge
.”

“Ah,” Genji said, and waited for her to continue.

Emily was taken aback by the mildness of his reaction.

“You don’t seem surprised,” she said, “or even very curious.”

“I am neither,” Genji said. “Hanako told me about it as soon as she found out.”

Emily stared at him in disbelief. “Hanako was my friend. She promised she would tell no one.”

“You were her friend. But I was her lord. She could not be loyal to me and keep such a secret. In return—”

Genji stopped in mid-sentence and moved quickly to catch Emily as she put a hand to her face and lost her balance. She put her hand against the tree trunk and, leaning away from him, waved him off.

“No, please, I am quite capable of standing on my own.”

“Are you sure?”

“I have not much choice in the matter. Nor have I ever, it seems. Even when I thought others were standing with me, they were not.”

“Hanako did not betray you,” Genji said. “How can you even think it? At Mushindo Abbey, she gave her life for you.”

“She did,” Emily said, beginning to weep. “But she said she would keep my secret, and she did not.”

“She did not think it was your secret to keep,” Genji said. “Since you thought it was, she made me swear not to interfere, or to speak of it until you spoke first. I have kept my word.”

“It’s purely chance that you did,” Emily said. “You could not have been sure I would ever speak of it to you. If I did not, you would have asked me about it eventually. Your word to her was meaningless, as was hers to me.”

“No, Emily, you are mistaken. I knew you would speak of it.”

“Oh? Did you have a vision of me telling you of
Autumn Bridge
?” Only the hurt she felt caused her to use that word in a taunt.

“No,” Genji said. He met the challenge in her look and voice with unaffected calm. “It was a different vision.”

Genji, again a passenger in his own body, finds himself striding through the corridor. The man he is to be is impatient. Genji can tell by the hastiness of the stride. He is in the castle, walking toward his own quarters. From the far end of the corridor, he hears the cries of a newborn infant coming to him from the room to which he is hurrying. Servants kneel and bow as he passes.

When he enters the room, he sees a baby in a maid’s arms.

“Lord Genji,” she says, and holds the child for him to see. But he hardly gives it a glance. His concern is for someone else, the person in the innermost room. Before he can enter it, Dr. Ozawa steps out and closes the door behind him.

“How is she?” Genji’s voice is anxious.

Dr. Ozawa says, “The birth was a difficult one.”

“Is she out of danger?”

The doctor bows. He says, “I am sorry, my lord.”

Genji drops to his knees. He feels grief fill his body.

“You are a father, Lord Genji,” the doctor says, and places the infant in Genji’s unresisting arms. Genji tries to look at the infant’s face, hoping to see in it some indication of the mother’s identity. But the Genji to be doesn’t look at the baby. His entire attention is elsewhere, on a small piece of jewelry hanging from a silver chain around the infant’s neck.

It is a small silver locket marked with a cross upon which is emblazoned a single stylized flower, a fleur-de-lis.

“It is the very locket you wear,” Genji said.

“That proves nothing,” Emily said. “Even if you saw what you thought you saw, it proves nothing.” Genji’s revelation had shaken her, but she could not admit it. To do so would be to admit the possibility that he had indeed seen a vision. “The strangest hallucinations occur regularly in dreams. It is the very nature of dreams. You have seen my locket. Hanako told you of Lady Shizuka’s predictions. Your sleeping self assembled them in this bizarre manner. It is no more than that.”

Genji said, “I had this dream, as you call it, six years ago, in the rose garden of the castle. I do not want it to be true any more than you do.”

Emily turned away from him. She reached into the neck of her blouse and undid the latch of the silver chain. She turned back to Genji, took his hand in hers, and put the chain and the locket with the fleur-de-lis in his palm. It was her most precious possession. She had thought she would not part with it until death. That had been yet another false hope.

“Here, it is yours. You may give it to your wife, or mistress, or concubine, whichever first gives birth, and she can give it to the child. Your dream will come true, and it will prove itself not to be a vision of any weight at all.”

Genji looked at the locket and shook his head.

“My grandfather told me it was futile to try to avoid the fulfillment of visions, that they would occur no matter what, and perhaps with more dangerous consequences if avoidance was attempted. But I have tried nonetheless. I have distanced myself from you as much as I could. I have spent time I did not wish to spend with geisha. I have brought concubines into my household. I have promoted your own relationships with Charles Smith and Robert Farrington. If a child is born to a geisha or concubine, I could perhaps convince myself that what I saw was no vision, but only a dream, as you say. Or if you marry Smith or Farrington and return to America, perhaps then I will believe it is as you say.”

Genji took Emily’s hand and placed the locket in it.

“Your marriage is our best hope, Emily. If we are not together, the vision cannot be fulfilled. It will be utterly impossible.”

Emily held on to Genji’s hand when he tried to withdraw it. She looked at him without expression for a long time. Then a smile slowly brightened her face, and as it did, she began to weep anew. She wept in silence, smiling, and never took her eyes from Genji’s face.

“What is it?”

“I have loved you for a very long time.” She stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “I didn’t know until this moment that you loved me.”

“If I have somehow given you that impression, I regret it,” he said. Christians considered lying a sin. That was because they believed, quite erroneously, that the truth was always best. “It is not so,” Genji lied. “I’m sorry.”

“You have been a skillful deceiver for six years. But I see through you now.”

He laughed to make light of it. “How have I given myself away?” He said it as if it were all a joke.

“You believe in your visions,” Emily said, “and in the visions your ancestors have seen for six centuries. You believe that any attempt to evade them will fail, and will result in greater disaster as well. All this you believe, yet you would send me away in the hope of preventing its fulfillment.”

“Just because I am not as good a Christian as you would like me to be, it doesn’t mean I am totally lacking in Christian virtue. I am your friend. I do not wish to see you suffer. I certainly do not wish to see you die before your time.”

“Liar,” Emily said, and smiled.

The way she said the word reminded him of how Heiko had said it, the last time he had seen her. But Heiko had not smiled.

Emily said, “You are risking yourself, the future of your clan, and the safety, perhaps even the very existence, of your heir. Why? To protect me.”

She released his hand, which she had been holding fast all the while.

“You care more about me than about yourself,” she said. “Was that not your definition of love?”

Genji looked down at his hand. Emily had left her locket there.

If he wanted her to go, all he had to do was keep it, and deny her words. Then she would go. She would marry Smith, or Farrington, or another American, and leave Japan and Genji behind. Not because she believed he did not love her, but because she would never force herself on him, even to save him. By the tenets of her faith, so entangled as they were with her ideas of romantic love, free will played a crucial part.

Free will.

Genji didn’t know what those words really meant. In his world, they made no sense. The will was the means by which one properly fulfilled one’s fate. Free? No one was free. That was a delusion fostered by demons, and believed in only by fools and lunatics.

And which was he? Lunatic? Fool? Demon? Perhaps all three.

Genji held the locket by its chain. It glittered as brightly as it had in his vision. He reached around Emily. His hands lightly brushed her neck as he closed the clasp.

Free will, or fate?

“Genji,” Emily said, and softened slowly into his embrace.

Emily had little time to marvel at the unexpected denouement. Once Genji made his decision, he planned and executed subsequent events with the speed and precision of a samurai general on campaign. In less than three weeks, the chapel on the hill above Apple Valley, the one they had talked about for so long, became a reality. The construction foreman, Tsuda — the very one who had discovered
Autumn Bridge
and then had it delivered to Emily — worked seemingly without sleep, as if his life depended on the timely completion. The castle maids sewed a wedding dress from a French pattern that was so elaborate, it might have originated before the Revolution. Yards and yards of the finest Chinese silk, Irish linen, and French lace went into it. She overheard a maid say that the cost of the intricately embroidered bodice alone approached the annual income of some of the smaller domains. Emily was terribly embarrassed by the extravagance. She doubted Queen Victoria had been as finely attired at her own wedding. But she said nothing to Genji. She knew he was putting on a grand show for very good reasons. A lord of one of the realm’s most ancient lineages was to marry an outsider of no name, no political connections, and no fortune. He was combating the inevitable slanderous gossip with a grand display of pride. Perhaps it was strategically similar to a military campaign after all.

She could not quite believe it. Emily Gibson, a farm girl from the upper Hudson River Valley, was to be the bride of a pagan Japanese warlord.