The Last Concubine Read online

  She looked at them hard as if to make sure they understood. Sachi remembered the fear she had seen crossing her face the first time they had met. She had thought she must have imagined it but now she knew she hadn’t.

  She tried on a plain grey kimono. It was in the style prescribed for samurai, but not very different from what she had worn in the village except that it was new and crisp instead of old and ragged. She twirled around, enjoying the new-found freedom. She rather liked this modest new self. With her simple unadorned hairstyle, skin free of make-up and unblackened teeth, she was as freshfaced as a child. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror – even in this drab kimono, no one would ever mistake her for an ordinary samurai wife.

  Aunt Sato looked her up and down.

  ‘I don’t know what you used to do in Edo,’ she said, ‘but round here you can’t go about with unblackened teeth at your age. Unmarried or not, it looks strange. I’ll send the maid straight away.’

  Later that evening, feeling rather self-conscious in their dowdy kimonos, Sachi and Taki emerged from their room. A fire burned in the hearth in the middle of the great hall. Smoke wafted like a low-lying mist, making their eyes water.

  Men in haori jackets and pleated hakama trousers milled around the open hearth, blowing on their hands and rubbing them. They all had the shiny shaven pates and oiled topknots of samurai. There were no wild-haired ronin to be seen. The women were in drab browns, greys and indigos, so Sachi and Taki fitted in perfectly. Everyone seemed strangely subdued. They chatted quietly as if everything was normal, but every now and then eyes met and a sudden silence would fall. Only the children, in crisp holiday kimonos, dashed about yelling with excitement. Their shouts echoed from the blackened rafters.

  In the palace such a crowd would have exuded perfume with every movement of their sleeves, each person wearing their own distinctive blend. But here there was only the smell of freshly washed cotton, the camellia scent of the pomade that held the men’s hair in place and the all-pervasive bitter smell of smoke.

  The previous New Year had been so different. Taki had laid out an exquisite new kimono for Sachi of white silk with plum blossom, bamboo and pine embroidered in silver thread and cranes and tortoises of long life across the back. They had spent the morning visiting the grand dowager ladies and in the afternoon had sat with the princess, writing poems and playing round after round of the poem card game. And now here they were in this grim city with this unknown threat hanging over everyone. Where was the princess? What was she doing? Sachi took a deep breath. It was better not to think of such things, better not to think at all.

  At the hour of the rat, when the night was at its darkest, the first bell sounded, booming out from a nearby temple. The hall fell silent. The children began to count: ‘One. Two. Three.’ They had reached a hundred and eight when the bells finally stopped. Again the adults glanced at each other. There was a long pause. One by one people began to file towards the side entrance of the house. Sachi and Taki followed Aunt Sato. They put on quilted jackets and wrapped their heads and faces in scarves so that only their eyes were visible.

  Outside, the narrow lane wound between sturdy earthen walls topped with clay tiles. People clattered on wooden clogs, all heading in the same direction. The smoke from their lanterns rose with their breath in the frosty air.

  Here and there a pool of yellow light glowed, breaking the line of the wall, and a massive gate loomed out of the darkness, marking the entrance to a samurai mansion. Lanterns glowed outside. A sacred rope with a wreath of ferns and an orange hung across the eaves, and tubs of bamboo and pine stood on each side of the gateposts.

  Then they came to a gate that was shut and bolted. There were no lanterns burning and no festive decorations. Dry leaves lay in rotting piles in the corners as if no one had passed through for months. The place was as still as the grave. Everyone hurried by with their eyes lowered, as if to look on such a sight might bring down the same dreadful fate on them too.

  A little girl with a plump round face, like the moon, and huge innocent eyes was trotting beside Sachi. She wore her hair tied into two loops which flopped on top of her head like butterfly wings. A slight, nervous woman shuffled behind her, her head bowed and her shoulders stooped. Sachi had seen her moving around the house like a ghost, as if she didn’t belong there and didn’t want anyone to notice her. She had thought she was the children’s teacher.

  Suddenly the child spoke, breaking the silence.

  ‘Haha-nu! Mama!’ she piped. ‘Are we going home soon? I’d like to go home!’

  She tugged at the sleeve of Sachi’s jacket and said in matter-offact tones, ‘That’s our house. See, it says Miyabe on the gate. That’s our name. We’ll be home soon.’

  ‘Yu-chan,’ said the woman gently. It was years since Sachi had been around children or heard the affectionate term of address chan, used for little girls. ‘Little Yu. Hush. Stop bothering the honourable guest.’

  She straightened her back and raised her head, revealing a refined, rather beautiful face with thin cheeks and large sad eyes. ‘It’s true,’ she added softly but clearly, her voice proud and defiant. ‘Everyone knows it. It’s our house. That is . . .’ She paused. ‘It was our house.’

  ‘Nonsense, Cousin,’ said Aunt Sato hastily, glancing around and taking her arm. ‘Don’t say such things.’

  Further on they passed another sealed, unlit gate. Some of the roof tiles lay on the road outside and there were holes in the clay and straw of the walls. Where the side buildings should have been were gaping spaces. Beyond them was the dark silhouette of a mansion, silent and still, like a house of the dead. They came to another, then another and another. Half the houses on the street were dark and bolted. They were like blind eyes, like missing teeth in a healthy mouth. Sachi stared around in dread, wondering what terrible cataclysm had happened here.

  The grounds of the shrine to Hachiman, the god of war, were jostling with people. Smoke and succulent smells coiled from tiny stalls where burly men with tattooed shoulders and scarves knotted around their heads were cooking up year-end noodles and grilling rice balls, octopus and squid, yelling out their wares at the tops of their voices. Merrymakers laughed, shouted, pushed and shoved, welcoming in the new year in innumerable cups of steaming sake. Skeletal dogs slunk around, sniffing for food.

  ‘They make me nervous, all these people,’ said Taki, wrinkling her nose and drawing back with distaste as a crowd of townsmen staggered drunkenly by. ‘I know they’re countryfolk, but still, for samurai to be mixing with commoners like these – even samurai women! I’ve never come across such a thing. Have they no sense of propriety?’

  Sachi too was looking among the merrymakers, wondering if she might see a wild-haired ronin. She needed news of Edo, she told herself. But the three men were not there. She was not surprised. It would have been madness for outlaws like them to be seen in public.

  The children had gathered around Aunt Sato. They tugged at her hand, her skirts, whatever part of her they could reach.

  ‘Granny, granny. Give us money,’ they clamoured. ‘We want to go and pray for victory.’

  They scampered up the steep stone steps that led to the shrine and disappeared through the huge wooden gateway into the darkness at the top. In a while they returned, each holding an arrow tipped with white feathers.

  ‘For good luck,’ said a plump-faced boy solemnly, waving his arrow above his head.

  ‘And victory,’ piped Yuki, her two loops of hair flapping.

  ‘It’s not victory we need, it’s peace,’ muttered Aunt Sato, shaking her head. She glanced around the crowds, her face tense and strained. Yuki’s mother gave the ghost of a nod.

  III

  The next morning, the first of the new year, Sachi and Taki joined the others in the great hall. Men, women, adults and children mingled there. For these few days all the usual boundaries were set aside.

  The men lounged around as if they were in their own homes, their hairy legs poki
ng from thick indigo gowns, smoking pipe after pipe of tobacco. They had left their long swords at the door, but they kept their short swords thrust into their waistbands. They were relaxed but watchful.

  Someone brought out a pack of poem cards. Aunt Sato put them aside, frowning.

  ‘Cousin,’ she said, ‘didn’t you tell me you had a fine pack of cards?’

  Yuki’s mother was kneeling in a corner. She jumped up like a startled rabbit and scurried off, then returned with two sets of cards. Aunt Sato dealt out one set face up on the tatami while the maid stood tall candles in the middle. Everyone clustered around to look. The cards were of beautifully grained, thick, stiff paper. On each were two lines of verse in a strikingly assured, graceful hand.

  ‘A master calligrapher!’ murmured Sachi.

  ‘It’s Papa’s writing,’ piped little Yuki proudly, looking up at Sachi with her big innocent eyes. In her brightly coloured kimono with long flapping sleeves, she looked more like a butterfly than ever.

  ‘Yu-chan’s father is a very famous calligrapher,’ said Aunt Sato. There was a long silence. Looking at the bowed heads and grim faces, Sachi dared not ask why he was missing from the gathering. Yuki snuggled up against her.

  ‘Do you know “One hundred poems by one hundred poets”?’ she whispered. ‘It’s my favourite game.’

  Uncle Sato, Aunt Sato’s husband, sat cross-legged, his great belly hanging so far over his waistband it all but obscured it. He had a round head and shiny pate and half-closed eyes that peered out watchfully from heavy folds of flesh.

  Smiling down at little Yuki, he took the second pack of cards and shuffled them then picked one out. The card was small in his big hand. In a deep rumble he chanted the first lines of a poem:

  ‘If but for the dream

  Of a night of spring

  I make your arm my pillow . . .’

  Everyone leaned forward, making a great play of studying the cards that lay in neat rows on the tatami. Yuki stretched out her small arm and snatched one up.

  ‘Lady Suo!’ she squealed. ‘It’s Lady Suo!’

  She read out the last two lines in her fluting voice:

  ‘How I would regret my name

  Coming blamelessly to shame.’

  As the last syllables rang out, the room fell silent again. The words hung in the air. The adults all looked uncomfortably at the tatami. Sachi glanced around, wondering if there was some connection here with what had happened to Yuki’s family.

  Then everyone started chattering again, a little too urgently. As if to conceal the awkwardness, Uncle Sato pushed the card he was holding into Yuki’s small hand. She held it out to Sachi.

  Beneath the poem was a tiny portrait of the poet, Lady Suo. It showed a doll-like lady of the Heian period reclining languidly, her small head peeking from her brilliantly coloured twelvelayered robe. Her face was a white blob with dots for eyes and mouth. But the eyebrows painted high on her forehead gave her a distinctly disdainful look. The lavish robes, the air of melancholy resignation, reminded Sachi forcibly of the princess. The princess and her ladies – and Sachi too – had dressed just that way. Sachi remembered the arguments they had had with the Retired One and her ladies, who dressed in the florid Edo style. At the time the whole matter of whether one dressed this way or that had seemed so important. But now it was all over. The palace had burned down. Sachi yearned to know where the princess was and what she was doing this New Year’s Day.

  Yuki was gazing up at her.

  ‘Is this how you used to dress in Edo?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Sachi lied, swallowing hard. Her voice was wobbling. She tried to smile at the little girl. ‘Much the same as here.’

  No one must ever know about the palace or the life they had led there. It was their secret, to be treasured for ever.

  Uncle Sato picked another card and sang the first half of a poem in his deep voice. Before he had even finished Yuki had shrieked and snatched up the card which contained the second half. She read it out triumphantly. Taki too was poised over the cards, hand stretched out. She took the game every bit as seriously as Yuki did. Soon there was a heap of cards beside each of them.

  Only a few matches were left to find when there was a commotion at the side entrance. The heavy wooden door juddered open and a cold wind swirled in, setting the candles guttering. The servants rushed around taking the new arrivals’ mantles and swords.

  Then the great hall was full of people. Everyone was on their hands and knees, bowing.

  ‘My brother and his family,’ said Aunt Sato. She was smiling, playing the gracious hostess, but Sachi couldn’t help noticing the tension in her voice. ‘You know Shinzaemon, of course.’

  Sachi raised her fan to cover her face and peeked curiously from behind it. She remembered that smile he had given her. Shinzaemon looked tidier now. His bushy hair was knotted into a ponytail and his sun-darkened cheeks clean-shaven. Without his horse and long sword, he looked uncomfortable and out of place. He stood around awkwardly, scowling, as if he wished he were somewhere else.

  Aunt Sato introduced Sachi and Taki to Shinzaemon’s stern, heavy-set father and small, soft-spoken mother and his bespectacled elder brother and his wife. Sachi had never imagined that a rebellious character like him would have a respectable, well-spoken family. But of course he did.

  Shinzaemon was next in line. Sachi knelt beside Taki, keeping her eyes to the ground. She wanted to look up, to see those eyes which had stared at her so insolently, to see whether there was a spark in them, whether he was looking at her now. She wanted to say, ‘You said you were going to protect us. But we never even see you.’

  But of course she didn’t. She kept her eyes lowered and murmured politely, ‘Thank you for taking care of us.’ Taki pressed her face to her hands in silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I wish I could do more.’

  It was not like him to be so formal. There was uproar as Aunt Sato’s sons clustered around him.

  ‘Cousin Shin,’ yelled a boisterous voice. It sounded like Gennosuké, the oldest. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ demanded another. ‘What happened to your hair? Is that the way they wear it in Edo?’

  ‘Time you got it cut,’ cried the first voice. ‘We need you here. We’re fighting here too, you know. What about that duel you promised me?’

  ‘Any time.’ It was Shinzaemon’s gruff tones. ‘You haven’t got a chance.’

  There was a roar of laughter.

  ‘Haven’t changed, have you?’ said the second voice.

  ‘This way,’ said Uncle Sato, heaving himself to his feet and leading the menfolk off to his section of the house. While the maids prepared sake and food for the guests, the women gathered up the cards to play another round. The children were soon absorbed in the game.

  Shinzaemon’s small, plump mother asked polite questions of the newcomers. It was hard to see anything of Shinzaemon in her faded, pretty face. Like everyone in that strange city she had a haunted look in her eyes.

  Aunt Sato knelt beside her.

  ‘He’s grown-up, that boy of yours,’ she croaked in her raspy voice. Sachi bent over the cards, pretending to be interested in the game, but she couldn’t help listening. She was prickling with curiosity.

  ‘He’s not a boy any longer,’ said Shinzaemon’s mother, who spoke with a strong Kano lilt. She sounded sad and resigned. ‘He’s bloodied his sword.’

  ‘How long has it been now? Three years? Four?’

  ‘It was before the time of the troubles. We didn’t think he’d ever come back. At least he didn’t disgrace the family. His father gave him a scolding but there’s no talking to him. He won’t listen to anyone.’

  ‘In this world there’s no place for people who won’t fit in,’ said Aunt Sato, shaking her head. ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.’

  Sachi had heard the proverb a thousand times before but that day the words gave her a feeling of foreboding. A ronin
was undoubtedly a nail that stuck up.

  ‘He was always a fighter, always practising with his sword instead of reading books,’ said his mother with a sigh.

  ‘He’s a good swordsman,’ said Aunt Sato firmly. ‘One of the best.’

  ‘We need that,’ said his mother. ‘If we survive, then’s the time for scholarship. I dread to think what will happen now, now that his lordship’s . . .’

  Aunt Sato laid a warning hand on her knee. They both glanced at Yuki’s mother who was kneeling in a corner, twisting her thin hands, gazing pensively at the poem cards, and fell silent.

  Sachi was not the only one who had overheard the conversation. Taki had been listening too. Sachi leaned towards her and whispered, ‘I have to talk to Shinzaemon before he goes. I have to find out what’s happening in Edo. They brought us here, those three, they have to help us get away. We can’t stay here for ever.’

  Taki raised her eyebrows and looked at her quizzically. There was disapproval in her big eyes. Sachi knew perfectly well that a lady like her was not supposed to speak to a man. If anyone addressed him, it should be Taki. But Sachi didn’t care.

  The maids were closing the shutters and lighting the lamps and the women had tired of playing the poem card game when they heard angry shouts.

  ‘Insolent boy! Have you no sense of duty?’ It was Uncle Sato. ‘If you weren’t my brother’s son I’d take my sword to you.’

  ‘I’ll ride north when I see fit and not before,’ came Shinzaemon’s voice. ‘I have a job to do here. I wish we could have got back sooner.’

  Sachi leaped to her feet and ran to the entrance hall. Shinzaemon was thrusting his long sword angrily into his belt and throwing on an overmantle.

  ‘Master Shinzaemon,’ she said softly. He swung round, startled.