“We’ve learned that you’ve found Egen the tutor,” Oigimi said, “and that he says your mother and a soldier from the estate kidnapped and killed my brother.”
Bad news traveled fast. Sano was dismayed to have one of his suspicions proved correct. “How did you learn that?”
“Lord Matsudaira was good enough to send an envoy to tell us,” Lady Ateki said.
Sano’s other suspicion had hit the mark. Lord Matsudaira had wasted no time capitalizing on Egen’s treachery. He’d quickly moved to influence these witnesses. They now believed Sano’s mother was guilty and so was Sano, by association.
“Egen lied,” Sano said, hiding his rage lest it offend the women and increase their antipathy toward him. “He and my mother were both accused of the crime. He told me they were both innocent, but when he testified in front of the shogun, he changed his story. He put the blame on my mother to protect himself. Did Lord Matsudaira’s envoy tell you that?”
Sano could tell from Lady Ateki’s and Oigimi’s blank expressions that they hadn’t been told. “Egen can’t be trusted. Don’t believe anything he said.”
“We don’t believe everything we hear.” Oigimi’s tart voice rebuked Sano for implying that she and her mother were so gullible or should take his word as the truth. “But the news about Egen made us think.”
“About Etsuko,” said Lady Ateki.
“We decided that maybe we didn’t know her so well after all,” Oigimi said.
“She seemed like a good, harmless girl,” Lady Ateki said, “but that could have been just the face she showed us.”
“She might have been hiding her true nature,” Oigimi said. “She was beautiful. She could have made that soldier fall in love with her. Maybe she talked him into kidnapping my brother to get the money they needed to run away together and elope.”
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!”
