“No, master.”
Sano grimaced in annoyance. He would rather begin his investigation by examining the murder scene, where vital evidence might be lost if he didn’t get there soon enough. He could ill afford to wait for some elderly woman to hobble over from the shrine, and he felt a strong resistance toward the shogun’s plan. He didn’t share Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s superstitious belief that communication with the spirit realm would reveal the killer’s identity. Practical means would more likely provide the answers. But the shogun had as good as ordered him to consult the mystic. For the first time, Sano suspected that his new position, for all its prestige and authority, might have constraints that would make solving a murder case harder instead of easier.
The servant was waiting for his orders. Sano, realizing he was hungry, said, “I’d like a meal now.” With much work ahead of him, he didn’t know when he might get another chance to eat. He could do so while he waited for the mystic.
“Yes, master.” Bowing, the servant left the room.
Sano knelt on the dais and surveyed his new domain with customary awe and discomfort. Fine tatami covered the floor. A brilliant landscape mural decorated the wall behind him. Sliding doors stood open on both sides of the room. Through them to his left, he could see past the veranda to a garden of flowering cherry trees, mossy boulders, and a pond. Sunlight shone upon the teak-wood shelves, cabinets, and desk in the study niche, and lit the scroll and the vase of lilies in the alcove. On the right, he looked across the corridor to his bedchamber, where a maid was dusting the lacquer cabinets and chests. Faint sounds told him that other servants were at work in the kitchen, the bathchamber, the privies, the six other bedchambers, or the long corridors. But to Sano the house seemed empty, unlived-in. With his books and clothes stowed away in cabinets, nothing of him showed, except for the Buddhist altar in a corner of this room, where incense burners, a cup of sake, and a bowl of fruit stood before his father’s portrait. Accustomed to close quarters, he couldn’t expand to fill the house’s space. Neither could he relax in its grandeur.
He’d lived for most of his life in a crowded Nihonbashi neighborhood, in the small house behind his father’s martial arts academy, with his parents and their maid Hana. The four tiny rooms had walls so thin that they could never escape one another’s sounds, or those of the city outside. His rooms in the police barracks had been larger but just as noisy. The relative silence of his new mansion unnerved him. But even worse than the silence was the loneliness.
After his father’s death, he’d brought his mother and Hana to live with him, but his mother hadn’t taken to life at the castle. Afraid to go outside, afraid of the sophisticated neighbors and servants, she’d refused to leave her bedchamber. When Sano tried to comfort her, she just stared at him in mute misery. She couldn’t eat or sleep.
After ten days, Hana said to Sano, “Young master, your mother will die if she stays here. Send her home.”
Reluctantly Sano had complied, regretting that he couldn’t share his new affluence with his mother. His loneliness worsened after she and Hana left. He spent as much time as possible at the training grounds, in the archives. He went to parties given by the shogun’s other retainers, who didn’t understand why their lord had promoted him, because circumstances prohibited them from knowing. Consequently they resented him, even as they courted his favor. But after martial arts practice, work, and recreation ended, there always came that dreaded moment when he must return home, alone.
Perhaps a marriage with Ueda Reiko would fill the emptiness in his life. Sano hoped the miai, that first, most important formal meeting between their families, would go well.
A maid entered and placed a tray laden with covered dishes before him. He ate vegetable soup, rice, grilled prawns, sashimi, pickled radish, quail eggs, tofu, steamed sweet cakes-all tasty, prettily arranged, and in abundant quantity. Whatever he disliked about life at the castle, he couldn’t complain about the food or service. He was just finishing when he heard footsteps in the corridor. Looking up, he saw a woman, escorted by his manservant, enter the room.
“His Excellency’s shrine attendant,” the servant announced.
Sano had never visited the Momijiyama, the Tokugawa ancestral worship site in the castle’s innermost precinct. He’d therefore based his notion of its attendant on the old crones who tended the peasants’ Shinto shrines in the city. Now he felt a jolt of surprise when he looked at her.
She was tall, perhaps his own height, and probably near his age. Her face was bare of white makeup, yet very pale. A spray of rare freckles dotted her cheeks and the bridge of her long, thin nose. Thick glossy black hair, which glowed rust-brown in the sunlight, was piled neatly on her head, except for one long strand that had escaped the combs to lie against her neck. She had a square jaw, its uncompromising shape repeated in the set of her shoulders and in the strong, blunt-fingered hands she placed on the floor as she knelt before the dais and bowed.
“I am Aoi,” she said.
Her voice had the rich, vibrant tone of a temple bell; it resonated pleasurably through Sano’s body. When she sat back on her heels to face him, her movements had a natural grace that softened her body’s angularity. Somehow she made her simple cotton kimono-pale blue printed with white clouds and green willow boughs-look more elegant than a fine silk robe on a slimmer, daintier figure. Sano thought that many men might consider her plain, a far cry from conventional standards of feminine beauty. To him, she was one of the loveliest women he’d ever seen.
Unflinchingly, she held his gaze for several heartbeats. Her eyes were a strange, luminous light brown, Sano noticed. Then she flashed him a brief smile. His breath caught as dimples wreathed her face, transforming its somber beauty into something mercurial and mysterious.
“His Excellency has explained that you’re to help me investigate the murder of Kaibara Tōju?” Discomfort stiffened Sano’s manner. In his world, convention kept men’s and women’s work separate. All the bakufu officials, secretaries, and clerks were male. Gone were the days when samurai women rode into battle beside their men. The novelty of the situation hadn’t troubled or even interested him when he’d imagined the shogun’s mystic as old and matronly. But to consult and collaborate with such a young, attractive woman…
“Yes. The shogun has explained.”
Sano had never seen anyone so serene, so self-possessed as Aoi. And she exuded a subtle but unmistakable aura of power. On some primitive level, he, like the shogun and even the most modern and sophisticated of other men, believed in the ancient myths and legends, in powers beyond human comprehension, in the existence of ghosts and demons. As he looked at Aoi, his skepticism wavered. Perhaps she really could command the spirit world. A tinge of atavistic fear added to Sano’s uncertainty. Such power set her outside society’s rigid class system, where a peasant must automatically defer to a samurai. Not knowing exactly how to address Aoi, Sano took refuge in brusqueness.
“So. Do you think you can identify the killer?”
“Perhaps.” She lowered her eyes, inclining her head in a slow nod. Evidently a woman of few words, she showed no intention of helping the conversation along.
“How?” Sano asked, resisting the nervous urge to fidget.
Aoi’s gaze met his, its candor somehow more alluring than coy flirtatiousness. “I’ll perform a ritual. To contact the spirit of the dead man. Perhaps we may see the killer through his eyes. What he knew, we can know. From him. If the spirits are willing.” Her strong hand turned palm up in an eloquent gesture that conveyed the uncertainty associated with such a venture, as well as the miracles possible.