The Shogun's Daughter (37 page)

He fitted the panel over the hole in the floor. He shoved the bank of drawers over it just as he heard soldiers tramping toward him along the corridor.

“Be a good boy, Masahiro. Don’t cry, Reiko,” he said, as if his family were with him.

The troops moved on. Sano tore off his surcoat, kimono, and trousers. He pulled his white funeral garments and a hidden dagger out of a cabinet. He donned the garments, put his other clothes on over them, and strapped the dagger to his calf under his trousers. Then he knelt and prayed for his family’s safety. He hadn’t told Reiko and Masahiro that he didn’t think he could escape. But he’d let them think so; otherwise, they wouldn’t have left him. And he would try his best.

Moments dragged with painful slowness, as if each one drove a needle into Sano’s nerves. At last temple bells tolled the hour of the dragon. Shouts and thumps came from the barracks as his men started a riot, the diversion he’d told Marume to create. Sano heard troops hurrying to quell it, leaving the house. He jumped to his feet. As he pulled out the bank of drawers, there came a knock at the door. He shoved the drawers back in place.

“Sano-
san,
that nurse is here,” said Captain Onoda’s voice.

Sano couldn’t say he didn’t want to talk to her, not after he’d made a big production about his final request. Onoda would get suspicious, look in the room, and see that his family was gone.

“All right.” Sano opened the door just enough to slip through. He called over his shoulder, to his absent family, “I’ll be back soon,” and shut the door.

Captain Onoda led him to the reception room. The noise from the barracks got louder. Sano hoped his men would keep it up long enough. In the reception room, he sat stoically on the dais, the condemned man ready to tie up the loose ends of his life.

Troops brought in Namiji. She was dressed in white cotton robes; she must have planned to attend the funeral with Lord Tsunanori’s household. Her gloved hand held her white head drape over her face. She knelt on the floor in front of Sano. The troops and Onoda stood along the walls. Sano wanted them away from the house, so that he could sneak out after he talked with Namiji, but if he asked them to leave, they might decide to check on his family.

He said to the nurse, “I brought you here for you to confess that you infected Lady Tsuruhime with smallpox.”

Her eyes gleamed with fear and insolence. “I’m innocent,” she said in her husky voice. “I already told your wife.”

“You’re guilty. Don’t bother denying it.” Sano had spent a lifetime having lies poured into his ears. He was sick of people who tried to avoid the consequences of their actions.

“I didn’t—”

“You scrubbed her bed with a contaminated sheet.” Fear for his family and his need to join them drained Sano’s well of patience dry. From outside came the sound of crashes as the men in the barracks hurled wine jars out the windows. He’d never conducted an interview while under such pressure. “You thought nobody saw you. You were wrong.”

Namiji gasped, sucking the fabric of her drape against her mouth. But she was too smart to ask who’d seen her, to admit that she’d done just what Sano said she had.

“Stop wasting my time.” Sano couldn’t leave until he was finished with her. “Confess.”

“I won’t. Because I didn’t do it.” She knew that denial was her only recourse.

“We’ll see about that.” Sano rose and stepped off the dais.

The hand that wasn’t holding her drape over her face went up in self-defense. “You can’t touch me.”

“Why not?”

“Lord Tsunanori won’t stand for your hurting me.”

“Lord Tsunanori isn’t here.” Sano ordered, “Confess that you killed Lady Tsuruhime by giving her smallpox.”

“He’ll send somebody to rescue me.”

“Why would he bother?” His impatience growing by the moment, Sano was curious in spite of himself.

“Because he takes care of me.” Namiji spoke with smug confidence.

Sano’s anger toward the shogun was like a fire that burned anyone else in its path. It incinerated whatever pity he might have felt toward this pariah of a woman. She’d coughed on and mocked his pregnant wife. Hiding her face, hiding the truth that she was a murderess, she was obstructing justice and delaying his flight from a death sentence.

“Why would Lord Tsunanori take care of this?” Sano grabbed her scarf and yanked.

Namiji shrieked as if he were peeling off her skin. She hung onto the scarf, but he tore it away. She covered her face with her gloved hands. Sano seized them by the wrists, pulling them down. Her face was a mass of puckered, pitted, circular scars. They disfigured her nose, lips, and ears. Her hair was wispy, her scalp bald where scars had proliferated.

The troops groaned in revulsion. Sano didn’t hide his own reaction or temper his cruelty. Thrusting Namiji away from him, he said, “Have you never looked at yourself in the mirror? How can you think that your master would protect a woman as ugly as you?”

“I wasn’t always ugly.” Tears of shame oozed from her eyes, the only features left unspoiled.

Sano saw that her body was slender but voluptuous, her neck long and graceful, her breasts full above the sash that circled her small waist. If not for the smallpox, Namiji would have been attractive.

“Lord Tsunanori knew me before.” Having lost her veil, she’d also lost her guardedness. Vulnerability replaced insolence. “He’s never forgotten what we were to each other.”

“What were you?”

“I was his mistress.”

“There’s nothing special about that,” Sano said. “Men sleeping with their servants—it happens all the time.”

Protest burst from Namiji. “We were in love!”

“Women fooling themselves. That happens all the time, too.” Sano said, “Let me guess: Lord Tsunanori ended the great love affair as soon as you got smallpox.”

“I didn’t want him to catch it,” she said, rushing to defend Lord Tsunanori. “But he still loved me.” Breathless with her need to convince Sano and herself, she said, “He could have thrown me out on the street to die. That’s what other masters do with servants who get sick. But he sent me to a convent. He paid the nuns to nurse me. When I recovered, he let me come back to his house, even though I looked like this.” She spread her arms in a gesture of triumph.

The vain, selfish Lord Tsunanori had more character than Sano had thought. But Sano kept goading Namiji. “So Lord Tsunanori let his former mistress empty his chamber pot. How generous.”

“He gave me a home when no one else would have!”

“What other dirty work did you do for him?” Sano turned the conversation back to the most important issue. “Kill his wife?”

“No! I would do anything for him but that!”

“Why not that?” Sano recalled what Reiko had said the nurse had told her. “You knew he hated Tsuruhime. She treated you like filth. You decided to give her the same disease that made you ugly. You accomplished two things at once—you got Lord Tsunanori out of his bad marriage, and you got your revenge on Tsuruhime.”

“I didn’t kill her.” Namiji regained some of her insolence. “It was Yoshisato.”

“Yoshisato wasn’t seen scrubbing Tsuruhime’s bed with a contaminated sheet,” Sano pointed out. “Or burning the sheet after Tsuruhime came down with smallpox.”

“Whoever says they saw me is lying.”

Sano reversed course. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you didn’t infect Tsuruhime. If not you, it had to be Lord Tsunanori.”

Namiji looked startled, as if she’d been following a road she’d thought was straight and it had taken a steep, downward turn. Her expression turned aghast as she realized that she had to choose between confessing to the murder or incriminating her beloved master.

“I did it,” she said with pride and resignation. “I confess.”

Captain Onoda signaled the troops to take her away. Sano said, “Wait. Did Lord Tsunanori ask you to infect Tsuruhime with smallpox?”

“No. I did it on my own.” Namiji sounded dismayed that her confession had damned her but hadn’t put Sano off Lord Tsunanori.

Sano heard his men rioting; he felt time slipping away. But he wanted the complete solution to his last case. “Why are you still protecting Lord Tsunanori? He won’t protect you. He’ll let you take the whole blame for Tsuruhime’s murder.”

“He’ll take care of me.” She sounded desperate to believe it. “He always does.”

“Not this time,” Sano said. “Tsuruhime was the shogun’s daughter. He can’t save you. He can only save himself by letting you take the whole blame. You’ll be put to death. And he’ll take as many new mistresses as he wants.”

Namiji whimpered as she absorbed the truth about her fate.

“Don’t let him get away with it.” Sano couldn’t care that he was breaking a vulnerable woman. He needed this business done with. “Make him take his part of the blame.”

She curled forward, put her scarred face against the floor, and dissolved into agonized weeping. “It was his idea. He asked me to do it. He knew I couldn’t say no.”

Sano nodded to Captain Onoda. Onoda told the troops, “Take her to Edo Jail. Tell army headquarters what happened. They’ll issue an order for Lord Tsunanori’s arrest.”

The troops carried Namiji from the room. Sano felt none of the satisfaction he usually did when he finished an investigation. Success in the past had improved his fortune, but it wouldn’t this time. This time he was still a man condemned to die, never mind that he’d solved the murder of his lord’s daughter. He had yet to make his escape, his only chance of living to see another day and reuniting with his family.

“That was impressive,” Onoda said with sincere, regretful admiration. “It’s too bad things went so wrong for you, Sano-
san.
I hate to lose a good man.”

“Thank you.” Knowing he’d better get lost soon, Sano edged toward the door.

A guard ran into the room. “Captain Onoda, have you seen Sano-
san
’s wife and children?”

Alarm struck Sano’s heart like a ramrod.

“No,” the captain said. “Why?”

“I can’t find them. They’re not in the house.”

Sano’s nerves zinged with tension; his thoughts raced. “My wife probably took the children outside to play.”

“Search the grounds,” Onoda said.

“It’s being done now.”

Sano slipped out the door; he eased down the corridor.

Captain Onoda came after him. “Weren’t they with you a little while ago? I thought I heard you talking to them.”

Sano forced himself to stay calm. “Yes, they were. I’ll go see if they’ve come back.”

Captain Onoda regarded him with growing distrust. “I’ll go with you.”

At that moment Sano knew what he would have to do. “All right.”

They walked to his room. The door he’d shut was open; someone had already searched it. Onoda looked inside, turned to Sano, and said in a grieved tone, “They weren’t there, were they? You were pretending.”

His eyes widened as he saw Sano holding the dagger he’d pulled from under his trouser leg. Before he could move, Sano stuck the blade in his throat. Blood gushed. As Onoda fell, Sano caught him. Sano dragged the corpse into the room and laid it on the floor. He heard troops shouting, “They’re not anywhere! The other woman and children are gone, too!”

Sano had no time to regret killing a man who’d been kind to him. He ran to the cabinet, pulled out the bank of drawers, and pried up the floor panel. He stole Onoda’s long sword, tucked it under his own sash, then squeezed through the hole. He dropped into the space under the house and crawled. Running footsteps shook the floor above him. Soon the troops would discover Onoda’s corpse and the secret exit. Sano had to get out of the estate fast.

He’d practiced using the secret exit before and familiarized himself with the escape route in case he ever had to use it. Bursting through the gap in the latticework, he found himself face to face with two soldiers in the back courtyard. Their faces registered surprise for an instant before Sano drew the stolen sword and slashed them across their throats. Sano heard the other troops running toward him, yelling. He tore off his outer garments. Then he was out the gate.

38

“
DIDN’T YOU SUSPECT
that Korika killed Yoshisato?” Reiko asked.

“I suspected,” Lady Nobuko said bleakly. “I didn’t know until you showed me that hood.”

They sat in Lady Nobuko’s chamber, waiting for Masahiro to bring Korika. Reiko thought that by now the troops at home must have noticed that seven of their prisoners were gone. There couldn’t be much time left before they went hunting for Reiko, Masahiro, and the others. Reiko forced herself to sit still and wait for Korika, her sole hope of exonerating Sano.

“Why didn’t you ask Korika if she set the fire?” Reiko asked.

Lady Nobuko sighed. “Because I didn’t want to believe it.” Reiko recalled that Lady Nobuko had been disconcerted to learn that the fire was arson and that evidence had been found. That information had fed her suspicions about Korika. “I didn’t want to know.”

Had Sano managed to escape yet? Were Midori and the children on their way out of town? Anger toward Lady Nobuko displaced some of Reiko’s anxiety. “You did it again. You withheld information.” This time the consequences were more serious than ever. “Why didn’t you tell somebody about Korika?”

“I wasn’t sure she did it. Weren’t you listening when I said so?”

“I think you were sure enough. Why didn’t you come forward and testify at my husband’s trial? How could you sit back and let him be convicted?”

“Do you think Yanagisawa would have let me testify?” Lady Nobuko chuckled through her grimace of pain. “Even if he had, what would I have said? ‘My lady-in-waiting killed Yoshisato for me’? Yanagisawa wouldn’t believe I had no part in it. He’d have made it look as if you and your husband and son and I were all in league with Korika. He’d have burned us all to death.”

Although Reiko knew Yanagisawa would have done just that, she was bitter. “So you kept your mouth shut. You’d have let my family die while you lived happily ever after.”

“Wouldn’t you have done the same?” Lady Nobuko asked.

“I would try to save everyone who was innocent and deliver the guilty person to justice.”