The Last Concubine (21 page)

‘Is that really you, Shin, under all that hair?’ the broad-faced woman asked. She prodded him in the ribs, laughing and weeping at the same time. Shinzaemon grinned and blushed furiously like a little boy before fixing his samurai scowl firmly back on his face.

Dazed with tiredness, Sachi had an uneasy feeling that all was not as it should be. In spite of the warm greetings, everyone seemed watchful and tense. Every now and then someone glanced around nervously. Was she imagining it, or did a look of fear cross the woman’s face? Almost immediately it was gone and everyone was talking and chattering as before.

‘Off you go, everyone,’ said the woman. ‘Inside, quickly.’ Sachi thought she heard a note of urgency, almost panic, in her voice. She was just tired, she told herself. She was imagining things.

A maid hurried Sachi and Taki into the house. Lighting the way with a taper, she led them through a labyrinth of shadowy rooms to a high-ceilinged chamber somewhere at the back. She bowed and slid the door shut. Her footsteps faded away into silence.

Sachi and Taki huddled together beside the dying embers in the hearth, small and lost in the huge room. The tatami mats were faded and worn, the paper doors patched and repatched. A single lantern cast a lonely light. They were alone, without even a servant or a maid to attend to them.

Sachi was thinking about the look she had seen on the woman’s face.

‘Taki,’ she said, ‘did you notice anything strange?’

‘They seemed a little nervous,’ said Taki. ‘After all, those men are
ronin
. It’s a crime to leave one’s clan. It’s treason. They’ll be in trouble if they draw too much attention to themselves.’

Sachi nodded. They must have had good reason to come back, she thought.

‘On our own again,’ she murmured. ‘I was getting used to them. They were beginning to seem like family – almost brothers. It feels lonely without them. Isn’t that odd?’

She could still feel Shinzaemon’s eyes burning into her. Was she imagining that too or had he turned to glance at her one last time as he was led away by his family?

‘What could he have been thinking of, staring at you like that?’ snorted Taki, as if she could read her mind. ‘Did he imagine you were for sale, like a play-woman or a geisha?
Ronin
or not, you can’t go behaving like that towards a lady of the court. The insolence of it! Has he no manners? It’s a good thing he’s gone. I know he’s loyal but that’s all he has to recommend him.’

Sachi smiled at Taki’s indignation. Taki was right. With that hair of his Shinzaemon was like a wild animal, a bear or a wolf. No one could be more different from the only man she had ever known or cared about – gentle, noble Kiku-
sama
.

Now that had been a man – so cultured, so delicate, so sensitive. If only he had lived! She would have passed her days as his concubine, the honoured number-two wife. What had he said? ‘Be like bamboo. Bend in the wind but never break.’ She would have to be strong. But the thought of him and of that whole beautiful, fragile world that was lost made her eyes fill with tears.

‘We’re exiles,’ she sighed. ‘Stranded.’

She thought of Prince Genji, the Shining One, in the old story, playing his flute forlornly while the waves beat on the shore in
distant Suma, hundreds of
ri
from the court. ‘ “His sleeves like the grey sea waves”,’ she murmured. She had almost forgotten how it had felt to be a pampered concubine with nothing to do all day but read poetry and practise singing and dancing, surrounded by a retinue of maids and retainers eager to serve her. It was as if that life had never been.

And here she was in Kano. It seemed a dreadful, desolate, windswept place. Even the room had a musty smell to it. The damp and cold gnawed into Sachi’s bones. No matter how many layers of robes she piled on or how close she huddled to the fire, she could not get warm. Her teeth were chattering. Her feet in their thin cotton
tabi
socks were frozen.

‘At least Her Highness is safe,’ said Taki, holding her thin hands close to the fire, ‘and you’ve completed your mission. You no longer have to pretend to be the princess. I suppose we should go back to Edo and report. They’ll be expecting us.’

It was true. Sachi was free. She didn’t have to stay in this dreadful city a moment longer. But Edo was swarming with southern hoodlums, as Lady Tsuguko had told them. And the roads were dangerous; they couldn’t go on their own. Besides, she was tired. She could sense that Taki too was reluctant to turn around and go straight back again. Now she was outside the palace everything looked different.

‘Her Highness doesn’t even know I’m alive,’ whispered Sachi. ‘She sent me away. There’s no one else I owe allegiance to, only her. Those bonds are broken now. My destiny is in my own hands.’

She paused for breath, shocked at her own rebellious words. At the palace she had learned always to say the proper thing. She knew what she was expected to say and even to feel at every moment of the day. But things were different now.

Taki looked at her with her big eyes.

‘Don’t say that,’ she said sternly. Sachi could hear her samurai training in her squeaky voice. ‘You’re forgetting your duty. There’s nothing for us in this terrible place. It’s the end of the world here. We can’t be beholden to people like these. We must get back to Edo, to our own people.’

‘But when the princess sent me away she cut the cord,’ Sachi
protested. ‘You too, you disobeyed orders when you came after me. Those men promised to protect us and now they’ve disappeared. I hope we’re not separated from them for too long.’

Sachi had never before seen Taki look worried but now she did. Her face was pinched and drawn.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Taki muttered, staring at the worn tatami. ‘We’re too conspicuous – the way we look, the way we talk, everything. But we can’t just set off by ourselves. We’re women and it’s nearly New Year. The weather will be closing in. All the inns will be shut. And even if we make it back to Edo, what do we do then? We saw what it was like on the streets.’

‘We need to wait and find out what’s going on there,’ said Sachi firmly.

Someone had brought in their bundles and stacked them neatly in the corridor along one side of the room. Even the lowest-ranking court lady would have had a trunk at least, and most probably a retinue of soldiers, maids, retainers, cooks, shoe-bearers, bathcarriers and endless amounts of luggage. But all they had was a forlorn pile of things tied up in rough silk squares.

‘We’ll need to sell a gown to pay for our keep,’ said Taki gloomily. ‘I can’t even remember what I packed.’

Rummaging through the heap, Sachi came across the tattered bundle she had brought from the village. It was cold and clammy. She held it to her nose and shut her eyes, breathing in the faint earthy odours of woodsmoke and miso and dung – smells of the village, of home. It took her back to the day when the princess arrived there. She remembered her mother turning away and the tears running down her face as she dashed them angrily away with her hand. But there was another scent mingled with the familiar village smells, a mysterious silky odour like the elegant perfume of some great lady or nobleman.

She picked at the knot. The fabric was half rotten and the bundle fell open as she tugged at it.

Inside was a thick roll of brocade. Sachi looked at it, dumbfounded. It was not hers at all. She had never seen it before. She gave it a shake. Perhaps there was something wrapped up inside
it. Slowly, like a great log rolling down the River Kiso, the brocade unrolled across the tatami.

It was the colour of the sky on a bright winter’s day, embroidered with tiny leaves and flowers – delicate purple plum blossoms, clusters of spiky bamboo leaves, bristly sprigs of pine. It lit up the dreary room like sunshine.

‘Pine, bamboo, plum,’ exclaimed Taki. ‘A New Year’s gown!’

A rag doll came tumbling out of the folds.

‘Little Bean!’ cried Sachi. She snatched it up. It was a faded, shabby thing made of two red crepe bags stuffed with beans and stitched together, the smaller one making the head, the bigger one the fat round body. It was worn where she had cuddled it. It had been her dearest plaything. She cradled it, feeling the soft weight in her hands. There were also a few strings of copper coins, tied with strands of hemp. To someone who had lived in the palace they were practically worthless; yet she knew how much her mother must have sacrificed to give them to her.

Taki was examining the brocade.

‘Glossed silk,’ she said, running her thin fingers over the fabric. ‘Looks like palace style. It’s a noblewoman’s robe! Must be brittle after all these years.’

She spread it on the threadbare tatami. The clusters of leaves and flowers formed a landscape. On one shoulder the verandas of an embroidered pavilion peeked from behind the leaves. At the hip was a brushwood fence with a rustic gate and below that a rope curtain rippled in an imaginary breeze. A silver stream tumbled across the back of the gown. Near the hem was a wheeled carriage such as a Heian-period nobleman would have used. The reins coiled picturesquely as if the oxen had wandered off while the owner was away, perhaps visiting the imaginary lady who lived in the garden.

‘It’s an overkimono,’ murmured Sachi in hushed tones. ‘A wraparound. It’s a treasure! It’s been in that bundle all along and we never opened it!’

She picked it up with care, afraid it might fall apart at her touch. She stood up, draped it over her shoulders and tied it in place at the waist with her worn cotton obi. Then she let the
fabric fall. It cascaded around her hips in a double layer and formed a train that swirled at her feet.

She was transformed: no longer a wanderer in a shabby townswoman’s kimono but a lady of the finest court in the land. Spreading the skirts to show the lining, she glided around the room. Then she stretched out her arms and took a few measured steps. The heavy fabric swung and sparkled as it swished across the faded tatami mats.

‘ “It is an angel’s cloak of feathers”,’ Taki sang softly.

It was true. It was just like the angel’s cloak that the fisherman had found in the Noh play.

‘ “A cloak no mortal man may wear”,’ Sachi chanted, remembering the next line. How had the story gone? Wasn’t it that without her robe of feathers the angel could not return to heaven? She had begged and pleaded and eventually the fisherman had conceded. But first he had insisted that she dance for him.

For a moment Sachi was back at the palace on a steamy summer evening. The air was heavy with incense and the fragrance of flowers. Cicadas kept up their ear-piercing shrill. Blazing torches crackled and spat, lighting up the gardens with their huge yellow flames. While the other ladies watched Sachi danced on and on into the night with movements so slow they were almost imperceptible, forgetting everything in the passion of the story and the feeling of her body moving with perfect control. The singers chanted and wailed and the drummers thwacked their drums. The memory was so sharp it brought tears to her eyes. It was a shock to come back to the dismal present.

What was this gown? Where did it come from? There was something sinister about it. It was too beautiful, too seductive – as if it belonged to one of those women in the fairy tales who turned out not to be women at all but foxes, or to have been dead for hundreds of years.

‘You try it,’ said Sachi, hastily throwing it off.

‘I can’t,’ said Taki. ‘It’s a concubine’s robe. It’s for you to wear.’

‘But I don’t understand. It’s not mine. I don’t know how it got into my bundle.’

She lifted the collar. Embroidered at the back of the neck was a
crest with a pattern of three narrow leaves. There was another on each shoulder.

‘That crest,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you seen it somewhere before?’

Taki tilted her head to one side.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I can’t think where.’

‘It’s not mine,’ said Sachi fiercely. ‘We have to get rid of it. We must find out where it comes from and return it.’

But how could they? They were adrift, lost in a strange city about which they knew nothing. They looked at each other helplessly.

They had tidied the gowns away when footsteps came pattering towards the room. The door slid open. A smiling face appeared. It was the woman who had come out to meet them.

‘How rude, leaving you all alone so long!’ she cried, scrambling in on her knees. ‘You must be frozen. Please, have some tea and try these pickles. I made them myself.’

She had a raspy voice like a crow’s caw and spoke with the same Kano lilt as the three men.

She introduced herself as Shinzaemon’s aunt, of the Sato family. Her high-cheekboned face and direct gaze were very much like his. Sachi warmed to her immediately. She was brisk and down to earth, full of common sense. Although obviously a samurai and a woman of rank, she wore her hair in a simple knot and it was a little ruffled, as if she did it herself. It was a long time since Sachi had been in the presence of someone so reassuring and motherly. She radiated calm and competence as if nothing could surprise her, as if mysterious ladies travelling in disguise turned up every day to billet themselves in her guest chambers.

‘Welcome, ladies. Please stay as long as you like,’ Aunt Sato said, bowing and smiling. ‘My nephew, Shinzaemon, has asked me to take care of you. I will do my best to keep you safe and comfortable.’ She added quietly, ‘Things are uncertain here at the moment. It would be best if you stay within the house and grounds. I’m sure you understand.’

Sachi glanced at Taki. She had been right. They would have to be careful.

II

All day long the house had been in upheaval. The women swept, polished and scoured feverishly as if they believed they could wash away all the bad luck of the previous year if they scrubbed hard enough. The air sparkled with dust as they heaved out the tatami mats and leaned them against the walls to air, then fitted them back into their frames again with a thump. The old year was ending – the third year of Keio – and a new year beginning. But no one dared guess what it would bring.

Sachi and Taki retreated to their chamber and listened to the distant sounds. Sachi pushed back the wooden shutters so the gloomy room was flooded with sunlight. She stepped out on to the veranda.