Bitterness edged her voice. Her head turned slightly toward Sano, who glimpsed the twisted, grotesque features on the left side of her face. He wondered if Oigimi wasn’t just angry at his mother because she believed his mother had killed Tadatoshi but because her beauty hadn’t been ruined by the fire. Probably no man had ever fallen in love with the scarred, mutilated Oigimi. Sano pitied her, but he was also infuriated by her baseless conjecture.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “You’ve swallowed hearsay from a man you never knew well and haven’t seen in forty-three years. You’ve let it change your mind about my mother.”
“With all due respect, Honorable Chamberlain, but it wasn’t just Egen’s story that changed our minds,” Oigimi said haughtily. “While Mother and I were talking, we remembered things about Etsuko that we’d forgotten until now.”
“Such as?” A bad feeling slithered, like a poisonous serpent, through Sano.
“Etsuko used to sneak off while she was supposed to be doing errands for me,” Lady Ateki said.
“I often saw her roaming around the estate, following my brother,” Oigimi said. “I watched her hide so he wouldn’t notice her. She was spying on him.”
“And why would she, unless she had evil designs on him?” Lady Ateki said.
“So now you must understand why we cannot speak on her behalf,” Oigimi concluded.
Things were even worse than Sano had thought. The women had offered more evidence against his mother, and instead of being certain that it was false, he felt his misgivings about her increase. She’d hidden something from him. Could it be the fact that she and an illicit lover had plotted to extort money from Tadatoshi’s father, spied on the boy, taken advantage of the chaos during the Great Fire to kidnap him, then murdered him because he’d resisted?
But Sano perceived another reason why the women had changed their tune. “Did Lord Matsudaira’s envoy tell you anything besides the tutor’s story?”
Another glance passed between mother and daughter. Oigimi said, “He warned us that you were looking for someone else to blame for the murder.”
“That I am.” And here were two new suspects, Sano thought. They’d taken the envoy’s hint; they weren’t stupid. They’d chosen to help Lord Matsudaira build up the case against Sano’s mother for fear that if she didn’t take the fall, they would.
Sano felt the atmosphere change as he shed the role of a son fending off an attack on his mother and reinhabited his position as chamberlain and investigator. Lady Ateki shrank with fear. Oigimi was still hostile, but on her guard.
“Where were you when Tadatoshi disappeared?” Sano asked.
“We were in the house, getting ready to travel across the river,” said Lady Ateki.
“My mother and I were together the whole time,” Oigimi said.
They were each other’s alibis for the kidnapping, if indeed there had been one. Sano said, “What did you do when your father gave orders to look for Tadatoshi?”
“We obeyed,” Oigimi said. “When nobody could find him in the estate, we went outside to the city.”
“Our attendants went with us,” Lady Ateki said.
Which meant they couldn’t have done any evil without witnesses. Sano asked, “What happened there?”
“We called Tadatoshi’s name up and down the streets. We could see smoke coming toward us.” Lady Ateki’s eyes searched the distance for her lost son. “The buildings up ahead were in flames. A mob of people came running away from them. We got caught in them, caught in the fire.”
Caught up in the memory, she shuddered. “We couldn’t get away. We were trapped in a narrow road. The houses around us went up in flames. The wind blew them at us. I heard my daughter scream. Her hair and clothes were burning.”
Oigimi sat as motionless as a corpse propped on a funeral pyre. Sano imagined fire engulfing her, blackening her clothes. She stiffened her posture against the recollection.
“The guards beat their capes on her and rolled her on the ground until the flames were out,” Lady Ateki said. “She was unconscious. I thought she was dead. The guards picked her up. They carried her as we ran.”
Sano pictured the burned, limp girl in the soldiers’ arms, the hysterical mother, the crying ladies, their frantic flight through the inferno.
“My ladies-in-waiting fell behind. They were lost in the crowds. I never saw them again. All the guards except the two carrying Oigimi were killed when a balcony collapsed on them. It was only by the grace of the gods that we reached the hills. I held my daughter while we watched the city burn.”
Rarely had Sano ever felt such distaste for interrogating suspects. If it was for anyone else besides his mother, he would leave them alone. “You never saw Tadatoshi?”
“No.” Oigimi’s voice was sharp with impatience. “We thought he’d died in the fire-until you told us otherwise. He never came back.”
But Sano speculated that perhaps Tadatoshi had come back after the fire, to what was left of his family. “Suppose he had. Would you have been glad to see him?”
“Of course!” Lady Ateki exclaimed. “All I wanted was to have my son again.”
“Even though he was the reason you were caught in the fire?” Sano said. “At the time nobody thought he’d been kidnapped; you must have thought he’d wandered off, as he was in the habit of doing.”
“He was just a child! He didn’t know any better!”
“Fourteen is almost a man,” Sano pointed out. “Tadatoshi was old enough to know that when there’s a fire and one’s family is about to run for safety, one shouldn’t go wandering. Because you had to look for him, you never got across the river. Didn’t you think to blame Tadatoshi?”
“No!” Lady Ateki cried.
“I blamed him,” Oigimi said. A strange note pealed in her voice, a chord of anger and hatred muted by time. “But if you’re suggesting that he came back and I killed him… Well, I couldn’t have. I was an invalid for years after the fire. I hadn’t the strength.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Sano said, and turned to Lady Ateki.
She gaped, shook her head, and said, “I never would have hurt my own boy.”
“Your husband was killed, and so were most of the people from your estate,” Sano reminded her. “Your daughter was burned. Didn’t he deserve to be punished?”
“No!” Lady Ateki raised herself up like a wounded bird trying to fly. “I loved him. No matter what!”
Oigimi said, “My mother is innocent. Leave her alone.”
“Daughter, mind your manners. You’ll offend the honorable chamberlain,” Lady Ateki pleaded.
“I don’t care. I’m not afraid of him,” Oigimi said. “There’s nothing he can do to me that’s worse than what’s already happened.”
She flung off her drape. Her neck was corrugated with scars, her scalp crusty and bald on the burned side. Her dead eye stared blankly. She pushed up her left sleeve to reveal the mottled red stump of her arm. Sano’s repugnance vied with pity. Oigimi had nothing to lose except her life, which must be a terrible burden.
“You’ll never be able to prove we’re guilty,” she said. Her good eye sparked with fury and triumph. “If you bring us before the shogun and accuse us, we’ll testify against your mother. The shogun and Lord Matsudaira can decide who’s telling the truth. We’re willing to take a chance. Are you?”
At Sano’s estate, Reiko and Akiko played ball with Midori, her children, and Lieutenant Asukai in the garden outside the private chambers. Reiko threw the soft cloth ball to little Tatsuo. She noticed that Lieutenant Asukai was good with the children; he gently tossed them the ball, and when they threw it with all their might only to have it land near their feet, he gallantly dashed forward, retrieved it, and backed up for another throw. Although Reiko smiled and cheered with everyone else, her mind dwelled in dark realms.
She was glad she hadn’t told Sano about her conversation with his mother. He had enough to worry about already. For him to know that Reiko believed his mother to be guilty would do him no good. And Reiko had no basis for her judgment except her intuition, no proof that Sano would accept. Although Reiko was upset that her mother-in-law was in jail, she couldn’t help feeling relieved to have Etsuko out of the house. She thought jail was exactly where Etsuko belonged. Yet Reiko felt no true satisfaction. Etsuko’s imprisonment was another step toward disaster for the whole family and a sign that Sano couldn’t save them. The fearful tension that had plagued Reiko during the past few days mounted higher.