The bearers obeyed. Disembarking, Reiko hurried into her father’s house, to her childhood room. From the cabinet she took her two swords, long and short, with matching gold-inlaid hilts and scabbards. Then she returned to the palanquin and settled herself for the trip back to Edo Castle, hugging the precious weapons-symbols of honor and adventure, of everything she was and wanted to be.
Somehow she would make a purposeful, satisfying life for herself. And she would begin by investigating the strange death of the shogun’s concubine.
4
In the slums of Kodemmachō, near the river in the northeast sector of the Nihonbashi merchant district, Edo Jail’s complex of high stone walls, watchtowers, and gabled roofs hulked over its surrounding canals like a malignant growth. Sano rode his horse across the bridge toward the iron-banded gate. Sentries manned the guardhouse; doshin herded miserable, shackled criminals into the jail to await trial, or out of it toward the execution ground. As always when approaching the prison, Sano imagined that he felt the air grow colder, as if Edo Jail repelled sunlight and exuded a miasma of death and decay. Yet Sano willingly braved the danger of spiritual pollution that other high-ranking samurai avoided. In the city morgue, housed inside the peeling plaster walls, he hoped to learn the truth about the death of Lady Harume.
The sentries opened the gate for Sano. He dismounted and led his horse through the compound of guards’ barracks, courtyards, and administrative offices, past the jail proper, where the howls of prisoners drifted from barred windows.
In a courtyard near the rear of the jail, Sano secured his horse outside the morgue, a low building with scabrous plaster walls and a shaggy thatched roof. He took the bundled evidence from Lady Harume’s room out of his saddlebag. Crossing the threshold, he braced himself for the sight and smell of Dr. Ito’s gruesome work.
The room held stone troughs used to wash the dead; cabinets containing the doctor’s tools; a podium in the corner, piled with books and notes. At one of the three waist-high tables, Dr. Ito assembled a collection of human bones in their relative positions. His assistant, Mura, cleaned a pan of vertebrae. Both men looked up from their work and bowed when Sano entered.
“Ah, Sano-san. Welcome!” Dr. Ito’s narrow, ascetic face brightened with glad surprise. “I did not expect to see you. Is this not the day of your wedding?”
Dr. Ito Genboku, Edo Morgue custodian, whose scientific expertise had aided Sano in many investigations, was also a true friend-rare in the politically treacherous Tokugawa regime.
Shrewd of gaze and keen of mind at age seventy, Dr. Ito had short, abundant white hair that receded at the temples. His long, dark blue coat covered a tall, spare frame. Once esteemed physician to the imperial family, Dr. Ito had been caught practicing forbidden foreign science, which he’d learned through illicit channels from Dutch traders in Nagasaki. Unlike other rangakusha-scholars of Dutch learning-he’d been punished not by exile, but by being sentenced to permanent custodianship of Edo Morgue. Here, though the living conditions were squalid, he could experiment in peace, ignored by the authorities.
“I was married this morning, but the wedding banquet and my holiday were canceled,” Sano said, laying his bundle on an empty table. “And once again, I need your help.” He explained about Lady Harume’s mysterious death, the shogun’s orders for him to investigate, and his suspicion of murder.
“Most intriguing,” Dr. Ito said. “Of course I shall assist in any way I can. But first, my congratulations on your marriage. Allow me to present you with a small gift. Mura, will you please fetch it?”
Mura, a short man with gray hair and a square, intelligent face, set aside his pan of bones. He was an eta, one of society’s outcast class who staffed the jail, acting as corpse handlers, jailers, torturers, and executioners. Eta also performed such dirty work as emptying cesspools, collecting garbage, and clearing away dead bodies after floods, fires, and earthquakes. Their hereditary link with such death-related occupations as butchering and leather tanning rendered them spiritually contaminated, unfit for contact with other citizens. But shared adversity forged strange bonds; Mura was Dr. Ito’s servant and companion. Now the eta bowed to his master and Sano and left the room. He returned with a small package wrapped in a scrap of blue cotton, which Dr. Ito handed to Sano.
“My gift in honor of your marriage.”
“Arigatō, Ito-san.” Bowing, Sano accepted the package and unfolded the wrapping. Inside the cloth lay a flat, palm-size circle of black wrought iron: a guard meant to fit between the blade and hilt of a samurai’s sword. The filigree design was a variation on Sano’s family crest, with a crane’s elegant, long-beaked head in profile, a slit for the blade cut through its body, and elaborately feathered, upswept wings. Caressing the smooth metal, Sano admired the gift.
“It’s just a poor, humble thing,” Dr. Ito said. “Mura gathered scrap iron in the city. One of the janitors was a metalsmith before being convicted of thievery and sentenced to work here. He helped me make the sword guard at night. It’s not really good enough for-”
“It’s beautiful,” Sano said, “and I’ll treasure it always.” Carefully he rewrapped the sword guard and tucked the package in his drawstring pouch, more moved by Ito’s thoughtful gesture than by any of the lavish presents he’d received from strangers currying favor. Then, to fill the awkward silence that ensued, he opened his bundle and explained the circumstances of Lady Harume’s death. “Her corpse won’t arrive for examination until later. But there’s a strong possibility that she was poisoned.” Sano set out the lamps, incense burners, sake decanter, razor, knife, and ink jar. “I want to know whether one of these things is the source of the poison.”
At the doctor’s orders, Mura fetched six small, empty wooden cages, and a larger one containing six live mice. Dr. Ito lined the cages up on the table. In the first two small ones, he lit a lamp and incense burner from Lady Harume’s room, placed a wriggling gray mouse into each cage, and covered them with cloths.
“This method should expose the mice to any poison in the oil or incense,” Dr. Ito said, “while protecting us from dangerous fumes.”
In the third cage he set a dish of the sake that Harume had apparently imbibed shortly before her death, and a third mouse. To test the razor, Dr. Ito shaved a patch of hair off a fourth mouse’s back; with the pearl-handled knife he made a shallow cut on the fifth mouse’s belly, then dropped the animals into separate cages.
“And now the ink.” From a cabinet Dr. Ito took one of his own knives. “I’ll use a clean blade to avoid introducing extraneous contamination.” He made a scratch on the sixth mouse’s belly, unstoppered the lacquer jar, and brushed black ink onto the wound. Then he dropped the mouse into its cage and said, “Now we wait.”
Sano and Dr. Ito watched the cages. Faint scratchings came from within the two cloth-covered ones. The third mouse sniffed the liquor, then began to drink. The razor-shaved mouse roamed his cage while the others licked their wounds. Suddenly a high shriek rang out.
“Look!” Sano pointed.
The mouse with ink on its cut belly writhed, back arching, tiny claws grasping the air, tail whipping back and forth. Its chest heaved as if trying desperately to suck air into the lungs; its eyes rolled. The little pink mouth opened and closed, emitting cries of agony, then a gush of blood. Sano indicated the symptoms which matched the castle physician’s description of those suffered by Lady Harume: “Convulsions. Vomiting. Shortness of breath.”
A few more squeals and gasps, a final paroxysm, then the mouse lay dead. Sano and Dr. Ito bowed their heads in respect for the animal that had given its life to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Then they checked the other cages.