The Last Concubine (41 page)

In the corner was the bulky, shapeless bundle Sachi had brought all the way back to the palace. The brocade inside seemed to glow, to draw her eyes towards it. Sachi remembered that Haru had seemed to recognize the crest on the comb. The same crest was embroidered on the brocade. She put the bundle on the floor in front of her and started fiddling with the knot. Haru reached out and took it.

Sachi watched curiously.

As Haru finished unpicking the knot, the thin silk wrapper fell open. There was the folded brocade, brilliant as the sky. It lit up the dark corners of the room.

Haru gasped and turned as white as if she had seen a ghost. She stared at the fabric, stretched out a trembling finger and touched it as if she could hardly believe it was real, as if she was afraid it would crumble away into dust. Then she picked it up and shook it out. A faint musty fragrance, as ancient as time – of musk and aloe, wormwood and frankincense – swirled into the air. She held it to her face, took a deep, convulsive breath and started to cry. She cried until Sachi thought she would never stop.

Sachi stared at her, aghast. Haru hadn’t even looked at the crest; it was the brocade itself that had had such a dramatic effect. Fear clutched at Sachi’s stomach, held it in an iron fist. Finally she forced herself to speak.

‘You . . . you know it, Big Sister.’

‘It’s been so long. So many years.’ Haru mopped her face with her sleeves and laid the brocade carefully on her lap. ‘You look just like her, Little Sister,’ she breathed. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘I thought as much but I couldn’t let myself believe it. I told myself it was a coincidence, that my memory was failing me. How could such a thing be possible?’

Sachi put her hands on the tatami to steady herself. The truth
about her mother – about who she was – was so close, yet suddenly she wasn’t sure she could bear to hear it. She was afraid.

‘Who do I look like?’ she whispered. ‘Big Sister, who do I look like?’

‘It’s so long since I saw her. And then you came. At first you were just a little thing. And then as you got older you looked more and more . . . And now, now you’ve been away and I see you afresh . . . It’s as if she’s come back. As if she’s here again.’

‘My mother . . .’ Sachi had to say it.

Haru was weeping. For a while she couldn’t speak. The scent of the brocade filled the room. A candle guttered and went out. Moonlight poured in through the fine white paper of the windows. Where once the castle would have been full of voices, footsteps and laughter there was utter silence, broken only by the sighing of the wind in the trees outside, the shriek of a night owl and the sound of Haru’s sobs.

‘She was so beautiful. So beautiful,’ said Haru brokenly. ‘No one could lay eyes on her and not love her. And you . . . You are the same.’

‘Is she here, Big Sister?’ Sachi’s voice was shrill in the silence. ‘If I could only see her, just once.’

Haru turned her face towards her. She was no longer the plump cheerful Haru that Sachi knew. In the sickly light of the flames she had shrivelled into an old woman. She shook her head.

‘I . . . don’t know where she is,’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t seen her since . . . that day. Since the day you were born.’

III

Sachi woke well before dawn and lay waiting impatiently for the first threads of light to come slanting between the wooden shutters. Taki had spent the night there in attendance. Sachi called to her to slide them back.

In the distance cocks were crowing. Another answered from the palace grounds. Birds sang, insects twittered, the sweet smells of spring came pouring in. Dogs barked madly as the city came to life. Temple bells tolled and drums sounded the hour but the sounds were thin and sparse, as if half the populace had disappeared.

As the late shogun’s concubine, Sachi had been given one of the finest rooms in the palace. She set a mirror on a mirror stand and, as pale light filtered into the room, gazed at the face that glimmered back from the polished metal surface. She studied the smooth pale oval, the straight, almost aquiline nose, the narrow slanted eyes, the small pursed mouth. There was something she was missing, something else there to be seen if only she could see it. For it was not only herself she saw there but a stranger: her mother, gazing back at her from some deep distant place.

Taki knelt behind her and started combing her hair.

‘Haru seems to know your mother,’ she said, ‘yet she never said anything all these years. Something must have happened, something terrible, to make her cry like that. It’s not like her at all.’

There was so little time, so little time, and so much Sachi needed to know.

Haru was waiting in the outer chamber. In the daylight the brocade had lost its glow. Sachi ran her fingers across it, as if afraid that if she put it away she would never see it again – that the spell it cast would be broken, that the woman who had come back would disappear. She looked up at Haru.

‘Tell me her name, Big Sister,’ she said. ‘What is her name?’

‘I shall, my lady.’ Sachi frowned. Haru had never called her ‘my lady’ before; she always called her ‘Little Sister’. ‘But first, I beg you, please tell me about this brocade. Where did you get it?’

Sachi smiled. ‘I had it all along but I didn’t know it,’ she said. ‘We went back to the village where I used to live. They told me there – my . . . parents. They told me my father brought me to them, wrapped in the brocade.’

‘Your father . . . !’ Haru went pale. Her eyes opened wide and her plump hands fluttered up to cover her mouth. ‘He went all that way . . . to the village?’

‘He’s a distant cousin of my parents. He visited again recently,’ said Sachi, trying to hide her amazement. Could it be possible that Haru knew her father too?

Haru gasped. ‘You mean . . . he’s alive?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Did you see him?’ She was staring at Sachi, half smiling, as if memories were reawakening.

‘No,’ said Sachi. ‘But my parents did.’

Haru drew back as if she had suddenly remembered who and where she was. ‘And he was . . . well?’ she asked rather formally.

‘He’s well. He was . . .’ How could she tell her that he was with the enemy?

But Haru had clasped her arms across her obi and was rocking backwards and forwards. ‘Daisuké-
sama
, Daisuké-
sama
,’ she murmured, her eyes filling with tears. ‘It would have been better if we’d never seen him, your mother and I. But then . . . you wouldn’t be here either.’

A maid was bringing in tray after tray of dishes the likes of which Sachi hadn’t seen since she left the palace.

‘Tell me . . . tell me about my mother, Big Sister. How did you know her?’

‘We grew up together, my lady,’ she said. ‘My father was a retainer of her father’s. I came with her to the palace. I was her maid. We were always together – like you two. I miss her still, I can’t tell you how much.’

Her maid . . . ! Taki gave a slow rumble of amazement, rising from somewhere deep in her throat. There was a long silence.

‘What was her name?’ whispered Sachi.

‘Okoto,’ Haru whispered, savouring each syllable. ‘
Okoto-nokata
. Lady Okoto.’

Lady Okoto. In the shadows a kimono hanging over a stand stirred as a draught eddied through the room.

‘She was of the House of Mizuno. Her father was Lord Tadahira, chamberlain to the lords of Kisshu.’

Lord Mizuno . . . Was that not the man who had come to the palace to announce that His Majesty was ill, that dreadful man she and Taki had seen getting off the ferry only a few days earlier? Sachi could see his swarthy hawk-like features as he shuffled past her behind Lord Oguri, disguised as a merchant with a travelling hat pulled well down over his face. The way he had stared at her and cried out, as if she was a ghost . . . It must have been because she looked like her mother!

Haru picked up the brocade, shook it out and ran it through her fingers till she found the crest embroidered on the shoulder. Sachi looked at it, mesmerized. It was the Mizuno crest: she should have recognized it.

She was opening her mouth to speak when she felt a thin hand grasp her arm. She had forgotten that she and Taki were sworn to secrecy. Besides the princess and Lady Tsuguko, only the two of them even knew he had been in the palace.

Sachi could still hear him shouting, ‘Go! Go! Leave me alone!’ If her mother was of the same family as that dreadful man then . . . so was she. They shared the same blood. The thought made her go quite cold.

‘My mother was . . . your mother’s wet nurse,’ said Haru. She was so caught up in her story she seemed not to have noticed Sachi’s reaction. Her face was alight. She was in another time, another place. She sat back on her heels as the words came tumbling out. ‘She was Lady Ohiro then, the little Lady Ohiro. She was lovely even then, when she was tiny. She had the sweetest face. She was not shy at all, as if she knew from early on what a great future she would have. We always played together. Tankaku Castle in Shingu, in the country of Kii – that was where we lived. When it was stormy you could hear the ocean outside. I used to lie in my futons and listen to the waves crashing up against the rocks below the castle walls. Sometimes I hear it still.

‘We studied together. Whatever she turned her hand to she did brilliantly – reading, calligraphy, poetry-writing, tea ceremony, incense-guessing, the koto, the halberd, all that. She was very clever, much cleverer than me. But wild, so wild. She went walking, climbed trees, climbed the cliffs. Imagine that! My father used to say she should have been a boy, that she had too many ideas of her own for a girl. She always got what she wanted. She could charm anyone.

‘But she was good to me. She treated me like a sister. We were still children when the Mizuno family were ordered to move to their Edo mansion. She said she would only go if I went too. But we didn’t stay there long, she and I. A couple of years later she went into service at the palace and she took me with her as her personal maid.

‘I was not much older than you were when you arrived, my lady. The palace was so huge! It was like a labyrinth, it went on and on. And the ladies with their gorgeous kimonos,
and painted faces. So grand, so haughty. I was terrified of them.’

Haru sighed and wiped a tear from her cheek.

Sachi was half kneeling, half lying on the tatami, her chin cupped in her hand, gazing up at Haru, gripped by her story, drinking in her words. Taki knelt beside her, listening too.

At least now she knew that noble blood flowed in her veins, Sachi thought. That was why she was so pale, like a ghost or an aristocrat, not nut-brown like the peasants of the Kiso valley. And perhaps it was why fate had brought her to the women’s palace, just as it had her mother. But more than that: she too was wilful. She shared the same blood as crazy Lord Mizuno.

‘Old Lady Honju-in was the number-one concubine back then,’ said Haru. ‘Her Majesty the
midaidokoro
, His Majesty’s wife, had long since passed away so Lady Honju-in was in charge. She ran this place with a rod of iron. You think the Retired One is tough. Lady Honju-in was worse, far worse. The beatings I got! I was black and blue. She was chief concubine because she was the mother of the heir. A hopeless, lolloping boy. He must have been twenty-one by then. I told you about him. Weak in the body and weak in the head. Everyone hoped and prayed for another son to be heir instead.

‘The moment His Majesty Lord Ieyoshi saw my lady he fell for her. I wasn’t surprised at all, not one bit. Who could resist her? She was so lovely and bright and full of sunshine – like you, Little Sister. Just like you. He was old and bald but a dear man, very kind. Of course he had plenty of concubines. But he was not like his father, he didn’t collect women like so many ceramics. He had a tender heart. He always had a favourite. His last had died in childbirth. He was so sad, we heard, he couldn’t sleep, he wept all the time. Then we arrived.’

‘What happened then?’

‘He took one look and asked, “What is her name?” I didn’t even know what the question meant. I didn’t realize he wanted my lady to be his concubine. She was scared too, like you were when His young Majesty asked for you. But she had to do it, she knew that. So she became Lady Okoto, the lady of the side chamber.

‘What a life we led! We lived in a magnificent suite of apartments. I was the head lady-in-waiting. Merchants would be lining up at the palace gates with trunks and boxes full of kimonos, obis, hair ornaments, cosmetics sets, all for her. The lords and officials and courtiers and merchants all wanted to be sure she was on their side when they petitioned His Majesty. They knew the only sure way to His Majesty’s ear was through her. It was my job to sort out all the presents they gave her.

‘There were many concubines, but His Majesty cared only for her. Night after night he summoned her. The year after we came she had a son, Prince Tadzuruwaka. There were huge celebrations and a ceremony to make him His Majesty’s heir. But His Highness didn’t live long. He passed away when he was still a baby. Then my lady had a daughter, Princess Shigé. She passed away too . . .’

Haru’s voice trailed away. Sachi glanced over her shoulder. She could almost feel the presence of her mother, the beautiful Lady Okoto, there in the room with them, kneeling by the window, her hair in gleaming oiled loops, wearing the glorious brocade overkimono, the colour of the sky. Maybe she had felt trapped in the palace, this vibrant, lovely woman. Maybe she had looked out at the gardens and wished she could escape, remembered Tankaku Castle and the waves breaking on the shore. Maybe she was lonely in the middle of all the gifts.

‘No one would have imagined it would come to this,’ Haru murmured. ‘I can’t say if we were happy or sad. We lived out our lives, here in the palace. And she was young still, your mother, she hadn’t even reached her twentieth year.’ She buried her face in her hands. ‘I tried so hard to forget!’ she wailed suddenly. ‘I thought I had succeeded. But then you appeared.’ She gazed at Sachi, tears running down her cheeks.

Sachi leaned forward, acutely aware of how little time they had, of the danger they were all in.