The Incense Game si-16 Page 25

  “Here he comes,” Sano whispered to Detective Marume.

  From behind a grove of bamboo outside the guesthouse, they watched Priest Ryuko hurry down the steps. He wore a heavy, hooded cloak over his saffron robe. He climbed into a waiting palanquin. The bearers carried him out the gate.

  Sano and Marume, dressed in garments without identifying crests and wide-brimmed wicker hats that shaded their faces, followed on horseback at a safe distance. “If Priest Ryuko is going on a journey, where’s his baggage?” Marume asked.

  “I don’t see the porters he was trying to hire, either. Maybe he’s not leaving town after all.” Sano hated to think he was wasting time on this surveillance while he could be looking for other leads. “Let’s see what happens.”

  As they rode through the passages inside the castle, his horse’s every footfall aggravated his headache. He resisted the temptation to take the opium pills he’d brought, which would dull his mind along with the pain. Priest Ryuko’s bearers walked briskly. Sano and Marume mingled with the soldiers and the workers who thronged the passages. Outside the castle, the crowd of beggars on the streets and the roving squadrons of troops in the daimyo district shielded Sano and Marume from Ryuko’s view. Sano warily eyed the troops. Either Lord Hosokawa hadn’t yet warned the daimyo not to flaunt their armies or they’d chosen to disregard the warning.

  Beyond the daimyo district, the crowds thinned. Townspeople crawled over the wreckage of Nihonbashi, picking out wood and paper scraps to burn in their bonfires. The heaps were shrinking. Eventually, all the combustible materials would go up in smoke. Sano and Marume dropped farther behind the palanquin. Past a tent camp, the bearers carried Ryuko to an oasis of houses amid the ruins. Sano and Marume watched from a distance as the priest climbed out of the palanquin. They dismounted and hid their horses behind one of the tall debris piles that dotted the area, which had been an affluent merchant district. Sano’s legs felt weak and wobbly. Taking cover behind other piles, he and Marume stole up to the houses.

  There were three, flanked by the burned remains of neighboring residences. Peasants armed with spears were stationed at the gates. In many improvised forts like this, the lucky few citizens who still had their homes tried to bar trespassers seeking loot or shelter. Sano and Marume positioned themselves behind a pile some thirty paces from the houses.

  Priest Ryuko walked up to the guards, who let him in the gate. Sano waited. His head throbbed. He blinked to focus his eyes on the house. After a long while, a muscular peasant man backed out the gate, carrying one end of a large wooden trunk. A second man followed, holding the other end. The porters dropped the trunk by the palanquin. Priest Ryuko emerged, shepherding a woman and a little boy. The boy was about three years old and so padded with clothing that he looked like a ball, his fat arms sticking out from his sides, a red cap with earflaps on his head. The woman was slender and young. She wore a blue coat whose hood framed a pretty, anxious face. Priest Ryuko led her and the boy to the palanquin and opened its door. He spoke to the woman. Sano couldn’t hear his words, but he seemed to be reassuring her. She climbed into the palanquin. Priest Ryuko crouched before the boy. He smiled and said something that made the boy laugh. Then he lifted the boy into the palanquin and settled him beside the woman.

  “Priest Ryuko isn’t going on the journey,” Sano said. “They are.”

  Sano and Marume strode toward the priest. Ryuko shut the door of the palanquin and turned. His eyes hollowed and his mouth sagged with shock. “What are you doing here?” He moved in front of the palanquin, as if to hide it from Sano’s view. “Did you follow me?”

  “Yes.” Sano peered around Ryuko. The open window of the palanquin framed the woman’s and boy’s frightened faces. “Who are those people?”

  Ryuko’s expression darkened. “That’s none of your business.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Sano said. “I can guess. The woman is your mistress. The boy is your son. They’re your secret, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, damn you, and keep your voice down. I don’t want the whole world to hear.”

  “You mean, you don’t want Lady Keisho-in to hear.” Sano realized the magnitude and dangerousness of the priest’s secret. “Imagine what she would do if she found out that you’d not only been unfaithful to her, but that you have a child with your mistress.”

  “Lady Keisho-in is insanely jealous.” Fear of her wrath made Ryuko’s voice quiver. “She would kill me.” He gestured toward his woman and son. “She would kill them, too.”

  “Madam Usugumo knew about them, didn’t she?” Sano asked. Ryuko nodded weakly. “You confessed to her during her incense ritual. You couldn’t stop yourself.”

  “A curse on her! She threatened to go to Lady Keisho-in unless I paid for her silence.”

  “Would Lady Keisho-in have believed her?” Marume said skeptically. “Would she have even been able to get an audience with Lady Keisho-in? Couldn’t you have kept them apart?”

  “Madam Usugumo wouldn’t have had to speak with Lady Keisho-in. She could have started a rumor. Lady Keisho-in hears all the rumors, and she listens. She’s always accusing me of something or other-stealing from her or making friends with people she doesn’t like. I’ve always managed to get around her. But this-” The breath gushed out of Ryuko. “This, she would never forgive.”

  “So you paid Madam Usugumo,” Sano said.

  “Yes.”

  “She was bleeding you dry. You were afraid you would run out of money and she would let out your secret. So you slipped her the poisoned incense.”

  “No!” Ryuko swelled with the wind of his denial. “I said I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t.”

  “You said you didn’t have any secrets, but you do,” Sano reminded him.

  “I’m telling you the truth this time. The truth is that I would have killed Usugumo if I thought I could get away with it. But it turned out that I didn’t need to.” Ryuko smiled, triumphant yet shamefaced. “Because somebody else did.”

  Sano didn’t know whether to believe him. “Either you were fortunate or you’re still lying.”

  “You can’t prove I poisoned her.”

  “But you’re still my best suspect,” Sano said. Unless Reiko discovered evidence just as incriminating about Minister Ogyu. “Because now I know that you have a secret that’s worth killing to hide.” He pointed to the woman and child in the palanquin. “There’s proof.”

  Priest Ryuko wiped his hand down his face, which was shiny with sweat. His ghastly expression said he’d been struck anew by the seriousness of his predicament. “I should have sent her away before our son was born, but I couldn’t bear to let them go.”

  He gazed at his family, and Sano saw love in the eyes of this vain man who’d never appeared to care about anyone except himself. Mother and child gazed solemnly back at him with utter trust and dependence. Sano pitied them.

  “I have to get them out of town to someplace where they’ll be safe. Before anyone else can find out about them.” Ryuko raised his clasped hands to Sano. “Please don’t keep them from leaving. Please don’t tell Lady Keisho-in.”

  Sano saw a dilemma. The mistress and son were evidence in his investigation. If he let them go, Ryuko could deny their existence. Ryuko would have no verifiable motive for the murders even if he were guilty. Without one, could Sano convince Lord Hosokawa that Ryuko was the culprit? Lord Hosokawa had already warned him against framing a scapegoat. If Ryuko were guilty and Lord Hosokawa didn’t believe it, Sano would either have to frame someone else or let Lord Hosokawa join the rebel daimyo clans and the civil war would begin. Ryuko would surely escape justice because Lady Keisho-in and the shogun would never believe he was guilty in the absence of any reason for him to have committed the crime. They would protect him. And Sano would have let a killer go free.

  “I’m begging you!” Priest Ryuko fell to his knees, heedless of the mud that soiled his cloak. He lay forward, arms extended, fingers at Sano’s toes. “Have mercy!” />
  But Sano couldn’t subject that innocent woman and child to the jealous wrath of Lady Keisho-in, even if Priest Ryuko was a murderer.

  “They can go,” Sano said. “I’ll keep your secret for now. But if I find out that you killed Madam Usugumo and Lord Hosokawa’s daughters, it will have to come out.”

  33

  The trip to Mitake was more difficult than Reiko had anticipated. Escorted by four mounted guards, she traveled all morning. They detoured through fields, avoiding huge cracks in the road. She frequently had to get out of her palanquin so that the bearers could maneuver it through the woods. About two-thirds along the way they met a massive landslide of rocks and earth, a cliff that had fallen across the highway. Reiko had to abandon her palanquin and tell her bearers to wait for her. As she climbed over the landslide, her sandals slipped on loose dirt. She clung to Lieutenant Tanuma’s hand for support. Her other escorts walked the horses up. Reiko was afraid she’d fall, afraid for the child inside her, but she’d come too far to turn back. The downward slope was gentler, and Sano needed the information she’d promised him. She wouldn’t let the truth go undiscovered and have a civil war start because she was a coward.

  On the other side of the landslide, Tanuma lifted Reiko onto his horse and climbed up in front of her. She clung to him and hoped the swaying and jolting wouldn’t shake the baby loose.

  Fewer obstacles arose the farther they traveled. By the time they turned onto the branch of the highway that led to Mitake, it seemed as if the earthquake had never happened. Dikes and canals bordered wide rice fields frosted with snow. Crows flew, black and sharp-edged as ink marks against the blue sky. Mitake consisted of a dirt road that ran past some fifty huts with mud walls and thatched roofs, surrounded by bamboo fences and small yards cluttered with farm equipment. A torii gate marked the entrance to a Shinto shrine. As Reiko and her party rode into the village, peasants lined up along the road to watch. It was probably rare for any samurai except local tax collectors to visit them, and they’d probably never seen a lady on horseback.

  “We want to talk to an old woman named Kasane,” Lieutenant Tanuma announced. “Who can tell us where she lives?”

  The crowd shifted and murmured. A man lurched forward, pushed by his neighbors. He was short, solid, in his fifties, with a tanned, wind-burned face. Bowing hastily, he said, “She’s my aunt.”

  Reiko and her guards followed him to a house at the edge of the village. Larger than the others, it had a stone wall with a roofed gate. The thatch was neatly trimmed, the walls coated with fresh white plaster. The nephew ushered Reiko into the house while her guards waited outside. After she removed her shoes in the entryway, he took her to a room that served as kitchen and parlor, with the hearth, cookware, hanging utensils, and cutting board at one end and a raised tatami floor at the other. He gestured for Reiko to sit on the tatami near a brazier.

  “Auntie!” he called. “You have company!”

  A tiny woman shuffled in through a doorway at the back of the room. Skeletally thin, bent at the waist and shoulders, her elbows sticking out at angles, she leaned on a wooden cane. She reminded Reiko of a grasshopper. Loose skin hung on her pointed face, which had caved in around her toothless mouth. Her hair was like cobwebs. She was probably closer to eighty than a hundred. She halted in front of Reiko and peered into her face. “Who are you, little girl?” Her voice was high, tremulous. Droopy lids shaded her eyes.

  Reiko spoke in a loud, clear voice. “My name is Reiko. I’m the wife of Chamberlain Sano, the shogun’s second-in-command.”

  Kasane winced. “You needn’t shout. I may be almost blind, but I’m not deaf.”

  “I’m sorry,” Reiko said, ashamed of her mistake.

  Carefully lowering herself to the floor, Kasane folded her bony limbs and knelt opposite Reiko. She laid her cane at her side and called to her nephew, “Make my guest some tea.”

  She overrode Reiko’s polite refusals. The nephew brewed and poured tea, set rice cakes on a dish, then decamped. Kasane’s toothless smile brimmed with pleasure. “I never had a samurai lady come to visit me. Not even when I lived in Edo. I used to be a nursemaid in the house of a very important family there, the Ogyu clan. My young master grew up to be head of the shogun’s big school.”

  “Yes, I know,” Reiko said.

  Kasane beamed proudly, then looked confused. “What was it you wanted?”

  Reiko had spent much of the journey thinking about how best to approach Kasane. “I need to talk to you about Minister Ogyu.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him in-oh, it must be twenty years. Since I came to live here.”

  Ogyu had tried to cut his ties to his old nurse. Reiko was more certain than ever that Kasane had dangerous knowledge about him. Maybe he believed that if she didn’t see him, she would forget it, or that any tales she told wouldn’t reach the ears of anyone who mattered.

  “But he still sends me letters and money,” Kasane said. “Because I took care of him when he was young. He’s taking care of me now that I’m old. He was always such a good, kind boy. I never married or had children, but I raised him and loved him as if he were my own.”

  But Reiko heard a dubious note in Kasane’s wavering voice. That wasn’t the real reason, and Kasane knew it. The pension Minister Ogyu had given his nurse, that must have paid for this house, was akin to the blackmail Reiko was now sure he’d paid Madam Usugumo.

  “I came to see you because Minister Ogyu is a suspect in a murder that my husband is investigating,” Reiko said.

  “Murder?” Kasane’s toothless mouth gaped. “Who was murdered?”

  “A woman named Usugumo, his incense teacher. And two young ladies, her other pupils.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Madam Usugumo found out something about Minister Ogyu. It must be the same secret you’ve been keeping for him.”

  “Secret? I don’t know any secret.” Kasane’s gaze wandered, belying her words.

  Reiko described the bodies in the sunken house, the fatal incense game. “She blackmailed him. He poisoned her so that he wouldn’t have to pay her anymore and she could never talk. I must warn you that he may kill you next.”

  “But I’ve kept quiet for twenty years!” Alarmed into forgetting to deny knowing the secret, Kasane said, “Why would he think I would tell now?”

  “He’s tired of paying you and waiting for you to die.” Reiko was intentionally brutal. “He’d rather murder you than let nature take its course.”

  The nurse sat in the shambles of her illusions about the man she’d thought of as her son. She reminded Reiko of the earthquake victims sitting by their ruined homes. “I don’t want to die.” She clutched at Reiko. “What should I do?”

  “The only way to protect yourself is to tell me the secret,” Reiko said. “I’ll let the whole world know. Then it won’t serve any purpose for Minister Ogyu to kill you. You’ll be safe.”

  Kasane trembled. Reiko thought of the earth quaking and splitting open the ground. The secret buried inside Kasane was erupting, shattering her as she wrestled with her conscience, her instinct for self-preservation, and her loyalty to her master. She said, “I always knew I would have to tell someday.” The words shook out of her like rice on the sieves used to separate grains from husks. Resignation eased her trembling, saddened her face. “It’s time.” She sighed.

  “My mother was a midwife in Nihonbashi. My father was a doctor. He died when I was very little.” Kasane’s voice took on a remote, nostalgic tone. “But my mother made a good living. She was one of the best midwives in Edo.”

  Reiko glanced at the window. It was past noon, and if she wanted to get home before darkness made the journey even more difficult, she must leave soon. She resisted the urge to hurry Kasane, which might change her mind about confessing.

  “Very few of the babies she delivered ever died,” Kasane said proudly. “Very few of the mothers, either.” That was a great accomplishment, Reiko knew, considering that childbirth wa
s fraught with hazards and many mothers and infants didn’t survive. “All the rich ladies in town would call her in as soon as they knew they were expecting. She gave them potions she made from secret recipes she learned from her mother, who was also a midwife. It kept them and the babies healthy. And she learned acupuncture from my father. When the women went into labor, she used the needles to relieve the pains. The parents paid my mother very well. And they told other people about her. Samurai ladies started asking her to deliver their babies. When I was ten years old, she started taking me to the births. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a child born.” Awe illuminated her old face. “Out of all the blood and suffering, a miracle.”

  Reiko smiled. Truer words she’d never heard.

  “At first I helped my mother with simple things, like boiling water and laying out her tools and cleaning up afterward. As I got older, she taught me her trade. How to make the potions. How to turn a baby that was coming out feet first. How to sew up tears. How to stop bleeding and cure fevers. She died when I was twenty.” Sadness tinged Kasane’s voice. “By then I was almost as good a midwife as she’d been. It was me that everybody called to deliver babies. I never got around to marrying, but I didn’t mind. It was as if I was put on earth to be a midwife. And one day I was called to the Ogyu house.”

  At last she was getting to the meat of her story. Reiko’s impatience eased.

  “Lady Ogyu-my master’s mother-was pregnant,” Kasane said. “She’d already had four miscarriages and two stillborns. She begged me to help her bear a live child. She was desperate. I promised to do my best. But some women aren’t meant to have children. When she went into labor, I prayed as hard as she did. I’d never lost a baby yet, and it was my worst fear.”

  Reiko imagined the scene-the pregnant woman convulsing on the bed, the midwife holding her hands and urging her to push, both hoping for the miracle that neither expected.

  “The gods must have heard us,” Kasane said. “The baby was born alive. It was the last one I ever delivered. It was a healthy, perfect little girl.” Her expression signaled a deep, incongruous guilt. “So now you know.”