From outside came the city noises of roving peddlers hawking tea, children playing, women chattering. Thunder punctuated the rhythm of the palanquin bearers’ feet. Hoofbeats signaled Police Commissioner Hoshina and his troops following the palanquin. Hirata thought of Midori and his children, whom he would never see again. Resisting the urge to struggle harder, he forced himself to lie still. He inhaled and exhaled the slow, deep breaths of the secret technique that Ozuno had taught him. He tried to tap his inner spiritual energy and the infinite wisdom in the cosmos that would enable him to save himself and Sano.
But if that had been hard enough to do at the mountain temple, it was impossible now. Hirata could barely catch his breath, let alone control it. The gag in his mouth was soaked with the saliva that almost drowned him. His bad leg ached viciously. Panic took over his mind, thwarted meditation. A curse on Ozuno, who’d misled him to believe that the mystic martial arts were any use! He would like to see Ozuno get himself out of this predicament!
But of course Ozuno would never have gotten into it in the first place. He’d have defeated Hoshina and his army at the start. Misery filled Hirata as he faced the fact that now he would never master the secret art of dim-mak. Shame added to his woes because he’d let Sano down, failed as a samurai. All his work, the trouble, the humiliation had been for nothing.
“It all began the day after you came to call on me the first time,” Lady Mori told Reiko. “That morning Ukon said to me, ”I must warn you about Lady Reiko. She’s no good.“ ”
“I said, ”You shouldn’t criticize someone who is your superior, especially when she’s my friend.“ But Ukon said, ”Please listen to what I have to say. Then decide for yourself whether you want to be friends with Lady Reiko.“ Well, I thought that was very presumptuous of her.” She cast a resentful glance at Ukon.
Ukon sat with her arms folded, her expression furious. “If you want to confess and die, suit yourself. But leave me out of it!”
“She had previously told me that her son, Goro, had been accused of killing a girl he’d gotten with child,” Lady Mori continued. “She said he didn’t do it. Now she said that you’d had him arrested, Lady Reiko. Your father the magistrate convicted him. He was executed. She said it was your fault.”
Reiko pictured Ukon spewing her obsession and hatred into Lady Mori’s ear on many occasions that included the morning Tsuzuki had overheard them. How fate linked people together and set events in unpredictable motion!
“I said maybe Goro was guilty, maybe she was just looking for somebody to blame for his death,” Lady Mori said. “But she believed in him even though he’d confessed. She said you should be punished for what you did to him.”
If Reiko hadn’t known Tsuzuki, she wouldn’t be here now. If Ukon and Lady Mori hadn’t met up, Lord Mori would still be alive, Reiko wouldn’t be in trouble, and perhaps neither would Sano.
“At first I didn’t believe her,” Lady Mori went on. “You seemed like a perfectly nice, harmless young woman. And you didn’t seem to remember Ukon. I told her that if you had really done what she’d said, you would have remembered her.”
“Should have.” Malicious humor curled Ukon’s mouth. “Forgetting me was your mistake.”
None of this would have happened if Reiko hadn’t had a taste for detective work, hadn’t started her private inquiry service. When had everything really begun? Perhaps when she’d married Sano. She wondered what he was doing now and felt such a strong prescience of danger that it dropped an invisible barrier between her and the other people in the room. Lady Mori went on talking, Ukon cursed at her, but Reiko couldn’t hear them; for a moment she could only see their lips move; she was imprisoned by her fear for Sano. She could barely stifle the urge to bolt from the room and run in frantic search of him.
“But Ukon didn’t give up trying to convince me that you were evil,” Lady Mori said. “She said, ”If someone hurt you and your family, how would you feel? Wouldn’t you want revenge? Wouldn’t you want them to suffer the way they made you suffer? How could you bear to live as long as your enemy was alive?“ ”
Her voice quavered and shrank. “Day after day she talked. I began to believe that her son was innocent, that he’d been wronged by you. And I began to understand how she felt.” A shadow of emotion dimmed her face. “Because I had felt that same way for so many years.”
Sudden comprehension startled Reiko. “Then it’s true. Lord Mori did entertain himself with boys. He did kill some of them. And you knew.”
“Yes. I knew.”
Reiko felt vindicated because Lady Mori had finally admitted she’d lied. “You hated being the wife of a monster. Is that why he had to die?” The murder had clearly not been intended for Ukon’s benefit alone, and the victim hadn’t been her choice alone, either. “You wanted to make him pay for disgracing you?”
“No.” Lady Mori gave Reiko a disdainful look. “You think you’re so clever. You think you have it all figured out, but you don’t. My own relations with my husband were of no importance. Ukon knew that very well. She knew everything else that he had done. Everyone in this house did.”
Reiko frowned, puzzled because she’d thought she’d begun to untangle the reason for the murder, yet now, for a second time, it seemed she had a ways to go. “What else did he do? What did Ukon know?”
“She said, ”You have a son. You love him the way I loved mine. How did you feel when he was hurt? Don’t you hate Lord Mori for what he did to Enju?“”
“Do you mean he used Enju the way he used those other boys?” Reiko was shocked. “His own son?”
Lady Mori’s disdain deepened. “Why are you so surprised? Lord Mori liked boys. When I remarried, Enju was a boy of just the right age for his taste.”
Reiko realized she should have known. Lord Mori, a powerful man accustomed to taking what he wanted, wouldn’t have confined himself to the peasant boys he rented, or hesitated to take advantage of his new stepson. It wasn’t exactly incest; Enju and Lord Mori weren’t related by blood. But Reiko doubted that even a blood tie would have protected Enju.
“Lord Mori wasn’t interested in me at all,” Lady Mori said. “At our first meeting, before we became engaged, he spent the whole time talking to Enju, playing with him. I thought that meant he would be a good stepfather.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I was too naive to understand what it really meant.”
Why, Reiko wondered, hadn’t she thought of Enju being one of Lord Mori’s boys? A mother herself, she didn’t want to believe that such things were done to children by men who were supposed to be their fathers. Maternity had blinded her.
“Then your story about your love for Lord Mori, and your perfect marriage, was a complete lie,” Reiko said.
Tears glittered in Lady Mori’s eyes. “It was the way I wished things were.”
“When did you realize they weren’t?”
“A few months after I married Lord Mori. Enju’s whole nature changed during that time. He had been such a happy, friendly little boy. He turned sullen, withdrawn. He would wake up screaming from nightmares. When I asked him what was wrong, he wouldn’t tell me. I had him treated by a doctor, but it didn’t help.”
Reiko remembered Sano telling her what Hirata had learned from the Mori clan physician. They should have suspected that Enju’s symptoms had resulted from sex forced on him.
“He began walking in his sleep, or so I thought at first. I would go to his room at night to check on him, and he would be gone. I searched for him all over the estate, but I couldn’t find him.”