puckered scar down his left cheek bespoke his fight for survival in the harsh world of the outcasts. He was handsome in a tough, savage way, and Sano could see the appeal he’d held for Lady Harume.
Mura performed the introductions. Sano said, “I’m investigating the murder of the shogun’s concubine Lady Harume, and I-”
At the mention of her name, instant awareness flashed in the eta chief’s eyes: He knew why Sano had come. His men sprang to attention, unhooking clubs from their sashes. They evidently thought Sano had come to kill Danzaemon for violating the shogun’s lady. Although the penalty for attacking a samurai was death, they were prepared to defend their leader.
Raising his hands in a gesture of entreaty, Sano said, “I’m not here to hurt anyone. I just need to ask Chief Danzaemon some questions.”
“Stand back,” Danzaemon ordered with the authority of a commanding general.
The men retreated, though Sano could still feel their hostility toward him, a member of the dreaded samurai class. He faced Danzaemon. “Can we talk in private?”
“Yes, master. I’ll do my best to assist you.”
Danzaemon spoke in the same soft, respectful voice with which he’d greeted Sano. His speech was more cultured than Sano had expected, probably because of his contact with samurai officials. Now Sano found himself subjected to the eta chief’s scrutiny. A kind of mutual scenting occurred, as if between two animals from different packs. A crowd of eta gathered to watch. Sano sensed in them a reverence for their leader that matched any his own people felt toward their lords. Looking at Danzaemon across the vast barrier created by class and experience, Sano knew in a flash of intuition that under different circumstances, the two of them could have been comrades. Danzaemon’s slight nod acknowledged that he realized it, too.
“You’re the friend of Dr. Ito,” he said. The statement sealed their understanding. “We can go to my house. It’s nicer there.” His manner conveyed a stoic acceptance of his squalid domain and Sano’s authority over him.
“Yes. Please.” Sano gave his relieved assent.
The house to which Danzaemon led Sano and Mura was larger and in better condition than the others. It had solid wooden walls, an intact roof, and untorn paper panes behind the window bars. Danzaemon’s lieutenants stood sentry outside, while Mura tended Sano’s horse. Inside the house, people of all ages, far too many for them all to be family members, filled the main room. A blind man and two cripples sat against the wall. Mothers cradled babies who looked too frail to live. Men awaited Danzaemon’s counsel. A young pregnant woman passed out bowls of soup. Upon Sano’s arrival, all activity and conversation ceased. The adults prostrated themselves, and the mothers pressed the infants’ small heads to the floor.
Danzaemon ushered Sano into a smaller, vacant room. Cheaply furnished but spotlessly clean, it held a desk, a chest, and open cupboards. One cupboard held folded bedding and clothes; the two others, full of ledgers and papers, suggested that the only literate member of his caste devoted more time to work than rest. The window overlooked a yard where men were butchering an ox. Evidently Danzaemon’s clan supported itself by practicing a trade; he didn’t abuse his position by extorting money from his people. Sano felt awed by the young chief’s responsibilities. Did many samurai lords have more, or attend to them with any greater apparent dedication?
Perhaps Lady Harume had admired this trait as well as Danzaemon’s looks and manner. Never before had Sano seen such strong proof that character transcended class.
Danzaemon knelt on the mat. Sano took the spot opposite him. “You’re here because you’ve found out about my relationship with Lady Harume,” Danzaemon said without straining their relations by inviting a samurai to eat and drink with an eta. “Thank you for sparing my life. I’ve committed an inexcusable crime. I deserve to die, and it’s your right to kill me.” The eta chief’s mouth thinned in a bitter smile. “But if you did, you wouldn’t get the answers you want, would you?”
In spite of the young man’s controlled tone and expression, Sano observed signs of grief: the bleakness in his eyes; lines of strain around his mouth. Danzaemon mourned Lady Harume as no one else did.
“Love may not be a good excuse for breaking the law,” Sano said, “but it’s a reason I can understand.” He would do anything for Reiko, risk any danger, betray any other loyalty. “I won’t punish you for loving unwisely. If you tell me about you and Lady Harume, I’ll try to be fair.”
The current of mutual empathy again flashed between them. Danzaemon inhaled a tremulous breath and released it in a shuddering sigh. Sano watched his need to speak of his lover warring with the reluctance to compromise himself and his people by saying something that might tax Sano’s tolerance. Need triumphed over prudence.
“We met by chance. At a temple in Asakusa.” Danzaemon spoke haltingly, looking down at his hands, clasped in his lap. “Even though a long time had passed, I recognized her at once. And she recognized me.”
“You knew each other before?”
“Yes. When we were children. My uncle used to take me to Fukagawa to gather shellfish on the beach every month. He met Harume’s mother and became her client. We would go to her houseboat. While I waited for them to finish, Harume and I played together.”
So he’d been correct in guessing that part of the solution to the mystery of Lady Harume’s life lay in her past, Sano thought. Blue Apple, the nighthawk prostitute desperate enough to accept eta clients, had unwittingly set the course of her daughter’s future.
A slight, tender smile curved Danzaemon’s lips. “Harume was so small and pretty, but tough, too. She was six years younger than I, but not afraid of anything. I taught her to throw stones, fight with sticks, and swim. It never mattered to her that I was eta. We were like sister and brother. While I was with her, I could forget… everything else.”
His hands turned palms up, as if accepting a burden-an eloquent gesture that conveyed the young boy’s unhappy knowledge of his destiny. “Then Harume’s mother died. She went to live with her father. I thought I would never see her again.”
This was because Danzaemon was one of the low-class companions from whom Jimba had separated Harume, Sano realized. Yet the horse dealer had not reckoned with the power of fate.
“When we met in the cemetery, at first it seemed as if no time had passed at all,” the eta chief continued. “We talked the way we did in Fukagawa. We were so glad to see each other.” Then he uttered a humorless chuckle. “But of course everything was different. She was no longer a little girl, but a beautiful woman-and the shogun’s concubine. I’m a grown man who should have known better than to go near her. But what we felt for each other was so sudden, and strong, and wonderful… When she said she had a room at an inn and asked me to go there with her, I couldn’t refuse.”
Sano marveled at the attraction so powerful that Harume and Danzaemon had courted death to consummate their desire. A centuries-old taboo, defeated by the even more ancient force of sex.
“It wasn’t only lust,” Danzaemon said, reading Sano’s thoughts. He leaned forward, his sharp face alight with the wish to make Sano understand. “What I found with Harume was the same thing she gave me all those years ago: the chance to forget that I’m dirty and inferior, less than human; an object of disgust. When I held her, I felt like a different person. Clean. Whole.” Looking away, he added sadly, “It was the only time I ever felt loved.”
“Your people love you,” Sano pointed out, wondering if Danzaemon’s passion had led to Harume’s death.
With a pained grimace, the eta chief said, “That’s not the same. My people are all contaminated with the same stigma as I. Underneath, we all despise one another the same way everyone else despises us.”
Raw pain hoarsened Danzaemon’s voice, as if he were tearing all the unspoken thoughts of a lifetime from his soul. Probably he’d never met anyone else willing to hear, or capable of appreciating his insight. “Even my wife, whom I betrayed for Harume, can never give me what she did-the kind of love that eased my own self-hatred.”
Sano hadn’t known that the outcasts themselves embraced society’s prejudice. This case had opened his eyes to the realities of worlds besides his own, and his own unwitting participation in human misery.
“What did Lady Harume get from the affair?” he asked.
Anger flared in the eta chief’s eyes, quickly extinguished by his formidable self-control. “I know it’s hard for you to imagine that I could give her anything besides trouble. But she was so alone. Her father sold her to the shogun and considered himself well rid of her. The women in the castle snubbed her because she was the daughter of a prostitute. She had no one to listen to her problems, to care how she felt, to love her. Except me. We were everything to each other.”
Here Sano spied a possible motive for murder. “Did you know that Harume was meeting another man at the inn?”
