The Peony Lantern (20 page)

‘Where have you been, Kasumi?' She looked anxious.

‘Isamu was going to Nihonbashi so I went with him to visit Daiki
sensei
. I'm sorry I left you alone. You were asleep and I didn't expect to be gone so long. Can I do something for you? Make some tea, perhaps?'

‘Poor Kasumi, you must miss your lessons. I'm sorry I've been so . . .' She waved her hand vaguely. ‘Are those paintings?' She gestured to the papers I was holding in my hand.

‘Yes, Daiki
sensei
has lent them to me.'

Her eye fell on the woodblock print peeking from beneath them, and before I could stop her she had taken the edge and pulled it loose from the others.

What did I say now? I wondered wretchedly. I would act innocent, I decided, as if I had no idea what was going on. ‘It's a woodblock print,' I said. ‘I got it in Nihon—'

‘I know where you got it,' she said.

She stared at it in silence, her teeth gnawing at her lower lip.

I looked over her shoulder and studied it for the first time. The print showed a festival procession crossing bare rice fields. In the foreground was a rooster, and beside it a bamboo rake. I wasn't sure what to make of it. ‘What is it?' I asked.

‘It's the Torinomachi festival, held at the Washi Daimyojin shrine during the days of the rooster in the eleventh month. The rake symbolises prosperity.' Her face was expressionless, her voice cold. Was she angry with me for having gone with Isamu? But I'd had no idea I would stumble across her secret. And I didn't even know what the secret was!

As I tried without success to guess at her feelings, I was reminded of those first terrible weeks in Edo when she had been so distant and treated me with such disdain. This had been followed by a period of warmth, affection and, I had thought, true friendship. But now, hearing
the coolness in her tone but with no understanding of its cause, it struck me that I didn't really know her at all.

I reached for the print, but with a quick movement she snatched it away and tore it in half.

‘Wait!' I said.

But with an almost savage look on her face she continued ripping, and ripping, and ripping, until all that was left were coloured pieces scattered on the floor like fallen blossoms.

The frost-covered shell

Draped in the snow woman's cloak

A first kiss of ice

It was midwinter, and the world was muffled by snow. A bitter wind rattled the wooden sliding screens, all drawn shut now, but still chill draughts slipped their icy fingers through cracks and chinks. Misaki and I spent our days huddled by the
kotatsu
, the quilt tucked around our lower bodies. I would paint, though Misaki refused to pick up a brush, and sometimes we played the shell-matching game, though with none of our former zeal. There was a distance between us, just as there had been when I first came to Edo, but this time it hurt even more for the contrast with our former closeness. And yet I couldn't bring myself to dislike her. If I were to describe Misaki's mood at this time, I would have said she was sad: a sadness so deep and heavy she was wilting under its weight.

Perhaps because of the weather, Shimizu's travels had dwindled. He spent most of his days at the domain mansion in Daimyo Alley, or holding meetings in the reception room at the front part of the house. Occasionally the hushed murmurs sounded urgent, vehement, but I never caught a word.

Isamu continued to visit regularly, though Misaki was hardly welcoming and often excused herself on the pretext of feeling unwell to avoid his company; I suspected she was angry with him for having taken me to Nihonbashi. He accepted her coolness as a rebuke, watching with unhappy eyes as she drifted from the room. As a result, we often found ourselves drinking our tea alone. We discussed painting, and he showed me some of the woodblock prints he had acquired recently. They were all landscapes, and all rendered in cool colours of white and black and blue and grey. Sometimes the only splash of colour was the blood-red of the censor's seal.

And then came the dreadful day in the eleventh month when our white world was splashed with blood.

Misaki and I were sitting at the
kotatsu
with our dinner — steaming bowls of oden: boiled eggs and daikon, fish balls and kelp in a dashi broth — when Lord Shimizu staggered into the house, his face ashen.

He looked so dreadful even Misaki was moved from her silence. ‘Who is it?' she asked, her voice tense with apprehension. ‘Who' I noted, not ‘what'; she seemed to know already the news he bore.

‘Taro.' His voice was ragged. ‘Taro is dead.' He dropped to his knees and put his face in his hands.

‘How?' The word tore from my throat.

When he lifted his head to answer me, I saw his eyes were red. ‘By a
rōnin
's sword.'

‘Assassinated?' Misaki whispered. She extended a hand as if to console her husband, then pulled it away uncertainly, seeming to shrink into herself.

Shimizu, his eyes closed, nodded. ‘In Yoshiwara.'

At his reply, his wife's mouth opened in a silent scream. Her body was racked with shudders then finally she caught her breath and gasped, ‘No!' She erupted into a storm of weeping, tearing at her hair so that it came loose and fell in disorder around her face.

I hung back, unsure how to help either of them, even as my own heart felt as if it were swelling with grief. Taro. Taro was dead.

‘Misaki, please, calm yourself.' Shimizu's own voice sounded barely controlled.

‘I can't! I can't!' The words were shrieked. She was clearly on the verge of hysteria.

Her husband's voice was rough as he ground out, ‘You can. You will.'

She crumpled to the floor and I sprang up and ran to her.

I knew how it must seem to Shimizu, who had lost his best friend: surely her grief couldn't be equal to his. But Misaki had so few people in her life, and Taro had been one of the kindest. Tears were overflowing my own eyes.

‘It is my fault,' Shimizu said, all anger evaporated.

Misaki raised her head to look at him. ‘Why do you say that?' she asked.

‘He wouldn't have been in that meeting if not for me. I persuaded him to join us.' The look he gave us was almost pleading. ‘But we needed him. He's so good at bringing people together.'

Misaki shuffled forwards on her knees to take his hands in hers. ‘No, Minoru,' she said fiercely. ‘You mustn't blame yourself. And at least he died honourably, serving the daimyo and the Shogun.' For the first time in a month or more she sounded like her old self, more concerned for her husband's suffering than her own.

‘You're right. I'll draw comfort from that and his family will too.'

Shimizu barely had time to mourn. Within days he was called on to return to Matsuyama to report directly to Lord Kinoyoshi, and to escort Taro's wife Miri home.

He was away six weeks, and Misaki deteriorated rapidly in his absence.

She had retreated deep inside herself, and wouldn't respond when anyone spoke to her, but closed her eyes or turned her head away.

Shimizu was alarmed to find her so low on his return. He sent for the doctor yet again, and yet again the doctor could find no physical cause for her decline.

‘He says it's a problem with her nerves,' Shimizu confided one morning as I served him breakfast. ‘I just wish I knew what was troubling her. Has she said anything to you, Kasumi? Anything that would explain this?'

Even before he had voiced it, I had been turning this question around in my head for weeks without reaching a conclusion. What could I say? That it had something to do with a letter — maybe to Isamu, or perhaps to a young man I had seen her talking to on a visit to the kabuki? That these three things — Isamu, the letter, Kenta — were connected, but I didn't know how?

‘Does it have something to do with your visit to the shrine in Asakusa perhaps?'

I almost dropped the tray I was holding. How could he know? Of course, the servants would have told him. I could only hope that he would read the astonishment on my face as innocent. I thought quickly. I was concealing something, yet I barely knew what. And I barely knew why. Lord Shimizu was my master; it was my duty to lay everything I knew at his feet and allow him to unravel it. Yet I didn't. To protect Misaki? Or . . . I felt my stomach knot . . . to protect Isamu? Besides, I argued with myself, what did I really know? Nothing.

I lifted my eyes to his, saw that he was watching me closely.

The answer I gave him was truthful: ‘No, sir. I don't know what is troubling her.'

Forgetting his breakfast, Shimizu stood. With his hands clasped behind his back, he paced the reception room for some minutes, then he crossed the corridor to the room where Misaki lay supine on her futon.

‘Please tell me what it is, Misaki,' he begged. ‘Tell me how I can help you.'

But she turned her head away.

Misaki was not the only one whose nerves were bristling, I soon discovered. After more years than anyone could remember, foreigners had set foot in Edo. Isamu brought the news to me one day when he came to see his uncle. On finding that Lord Shimizu was in a meeting in the formal reception room and couldn't be disturbed, he came to find me.

The Shogun had agreed to grant an audience to the American consul, Townsend Harris, and his interpreter. They had travelled from Shimoda, where they had established an embassy, and were even now in the city.

I could have sworn the very air felt different once I knew.

‘What do they look like, the foreigners?' I asked. The hair was prickling on my arms and the back of my neck. I felt both afraid and intensely curious.

‘I haven't seen them myself, but I've heard that they are huge and hairy, and that their complexions are flushed pink like the belly of a salmon.'

It could have been a description of evil spirits, and for a moment I felt a twinge of sympathy for those who were fighting to keep our country free of them.

The middle of the twelfth month brought a blizzard. The snow was not so much falling as gusting across the city in drifts, carried by an icy wind. Misaki, as usual, was indifferent to the weather outside when I took a bowl of soup to her room for breakfast. I coaxed her into taking a few sips before she lay back on her bed as if exhausted by the effort. Her cheekbones were more prominent than
ever and her wrists as she held the bowl looked as thin and brittle as twigs.

I spent the morning painting. A few weeks after my visit to Nihonbashi a messenger had arrived bringing some of Chika's paintings for me to copy. I was touched to think they hadn't forgotten me, and glad to have something to occupy my hands and mind.

When hunger began to overwhelm my concentration, I went into Misaki's room to see if I could persuade her to eat some lunch. To my surprise she wasn't there.

I went to the kitchen. ‘Ishi, have you seen Misaki?'

She hadn't.

I checked the other rooms, even slipped my feet into my wooden
geta
and trudged through the snow to peer into the reception room at the front of the house, but it was dark and empty. Finally I went into the garden.

There I saw a figure kneeling by the pond. She was wearing only a thin cotton under-kimono, not even a jacket.

I ran over, struggling to keep my balance on the high platforms of the
geta
. ‘Misaki?'

She turned to me, her face tinged blue with cold, snow coating her lashes, and I stumbled as an image of Yuki-onna flashed into my mind: the beautiful spirit who could kill with an icy kiss.

‘What are you doing?' I demanded. ‘You'll freeze to death out here!'

Misaki's voice was faint. ‘It doesn't matter.'

‘What do you mean it doesn't matter? Of course it matters! Imagine how your husband would feel if something happened to you.' I lowered my voice. ‘He has lost one wife already.'

I tugged at her arm to urge her up. I was starting to shiver myself now as the cold penetrated my jacket.

The bottom of her kimono was soaked I saw as we entered the house.

‘We need to warm you up then get you into a hot bath.'

She didn't resist as I sat her down by the
kotatsu
and wrapped a quilt around her.