“Listen and you’ll understand.” The sudden sharpness of Kasane’s voice silenced Reiko. “When Lady Ogyu saw that she had a daughter instead of a son, she was very upset. She cried so loud that her husband came to see what was the matter. When he saw the baby girl, he was disappointed. He told me to take her into the next room. I washed her while I listened to him trying to comfort Lady Ogyu. She said, ‘I’ll never be able to have another baby! This was my only chance, and I’ve let you down!’
“After a while, she got quiet. I wrapped up the baby and went to listen at the door.” Kasane craned her neck. Her arms curved around the shape of the infant. “Lady Ogyu said, ‘The baby doesn’t have to be a girl. We can raise it as a boy. To be your son. Your heir.’”
Now Reiko understood. Now shock hit her so hard that she fell forward. She caught herself with her hands. Palms splayed on the floor, mouth open, she stared.
The baby wasn’t Minister Ogyu’s sister; it was him.
That was his secret: He’d been born female.
Never would Reiko have guessed. She’d thought his secret would turn out to be embezzlement, treason, or even murder, the usual vices. Instead, it was a simple fact of nature, a circumstance beyond his control.
“How could he and his parents get away with it?” Reiko exclaimed, even though they obviously had. In retrospect, she saw the signs she’d missed: Minster Ogyu’s soft, pudgy figure; his voice that sounded falsely deep; his face that was unnaturally smooth except for those few whiskers-all had hinted at his true sex. But such a deception was unheard of. Minister Ogyu had not only fooled everyone into believing he was male; he’d attained a coveted position in the government.
“That’s what Master Ogyu asked his wife. She said, ‘We’ll say I gave birth to a boy. Nobody knows differently except us.’ He said, ‘Very well.’ Then the baby started to cry. They looked up and saw me.”
The scene was vivid in Reiko’s mind: The woman on the bloodstained bed, plotting with her husband; the shocked midwife standing in the doorway holding the baby. “You were the only witness to the baby’s birth.”
“They asked me to stay and be the baby’s nursemaid. They offered me a lot of money, and something I didn’t know I wanted until then.” Kasane smiled, reliving the surprise she’d felt. “The chance to bring up a child instead of walking away after I’d delivered it. So I stayed.”
Reiko could still hardly believe what she’d heard. “But why would they go to such lengths? Couldn’t Minister Ogyu’s father have just adopted a boy?” That was the custom for men who lacked male offspring. The shogun himself would follow it unless he fathered a son, or as soon as he gave up his hope that it was possible. An adopted heir had all the rights and status of a sired one. “Or had one by a concubine?”
“Lady Ogyu didn’t want him to,” Kasane said. “She wanted to be the mother of his heir. She couldn’t stand the thought of having to treat another woman’s child as the son of the family. And her will was stronger than her husband’s. He did what she wanted.”
“But how could they have turned a girl into a boy?” It seemed impossible. Since birth, Masahiro had been so masculine, and Akiko so feminine, that Reiko couldn’t have imagined trying to switch their sexes.
“It was hard,” Kasane admitted. “Especially for my poor young master. His parents gave him medicine made from goat weed and dong quai to make him masculine and grow whiskers. They were always after him to eat more and get bigger. To talk and act like a boy. To learn everything he would need to know as a man. He had terrible headaches.” She sighed regretfully. “I nursed him as best I could, but not even my potions could take away the pain.”
Reiko couldn’t entirely pity Minister Ogyu. He’d reaped benefits that most women would never have-an education, financial independence, an outlet for his talents, freedom. “Didn’t anyone notice he was different from other boys?”
“My young master was a good, dutiful child. He worked hard at it,” Kasane said. Reiko belatedly noticed that she always referred to Ogyu with male pronouns. She had completely accepted him as a boy. Reiko herself couldn’t help thinking of him as male, even now that she knew better. “He was smart, too. Good at his lessons. And his parents kept him away from people who might find him out. Like other children. No martial arts practice. And they hired tutors who had their heads up in the clouds, who didn’t notice they were teaching a girl.”
Minister Ogyu would have made a good actor, Reiko thought. Although fooling the shogun was no great feat, Ogyu had tricked countless smarter, more observant men, including Sano. But there was one person he had taken into his confidence.
“His wife knows,” Reiko said, remembering the conversation she’d overheard between Minister and Lady Ogyu.
“I wondered what would happen when it was time for him to marry. Then I heard he picked a plain, timid girl. I suppose she didn’t have the nerve to complain to somebody.”
“They have two children. He couldn’t have fathered them. Where did they come from?”
Kasane shook her head, as perplexed as Reiko. “Having children helped him pretend he was a man. Nobody ever guessed he wasn’t.”
How fortunate for him, Reiko thought. “If his secret became public, there would be serious consequences.” The daughter of a magistrate, Reiko knew there weren’t any laws against women posing as men; the problem had never arisen. But the government wouldn’t let Minister Ogyu’s deception go unpunished. “At best, he would be stripped of his position and all his rights as a man, including marriage with a woman.” Lady Ogyu would lose her husband and her status as a wife, her children their legitimacy. “At worst, he would be put to death for fraud against the shogun. So would his wife, as an accomplice in the crime. And no matter what, he would be the center of a scandal, the butt of jokes.”
For the proud samurai into which Minister Ogyu had fashioned himself, the humiliation would be worse than death.
Reiko knew that his was a secret imminently worth killing for. Every intuition told her that Minister Ogyu had murdered Madam Usugumo. She didn’t need physical proof. She didn’t need to wait for news that Priest Ryuko was innocent. She would stake her life on the fact that Minister Ogyu hadn’t been willing to risk the chance that Madam Usugumo would talk after he spent his entire fortune on paying her blackmail. He had poisoned the incense that Madam Usugumo used in her last game.
“He was so desperate that he didn’t care whether he killed her pupils, too.” Reiko was appalled by his indifference to the side effects of his crime. “Lord Hosokawa’s daughters were just accidental casualties.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Kasane asked anxiously. It was clear that she still cared about him in spite of how he and his family had used her. Her face was woeful with her shame that she’d betrayed his trust. “And his family?”
“That’s for my husband to decide,” Reiko said.
There came the sound of a door opening at the back of the house. A cold draft swept into the room. “Who’s there?” Kasane called.
34
After Sano finished with Priest Ryuko, he was so shaky that he feared he would faint in the saddle as he and his troops rode through town. His head pounded like a drum, the stitches on his scalp burned, his back hurt, and dizzy spells raised cold sweat on his body. He dug in his waist pouch and removed a small black opium pill, which he swallowed dry.
“Let’s go back to Madam Usugumo’s house,” Sano told his troops.
“Why?” asked Marume.
“Just a hunch.” In truth, Sano wanted to look for clues that Hirata had missed.
By the time they arrived in Usugumo’s neighborhood, the opium had taken effect. The pain had ebbed; drowsiness softened the edges of the world around Sano. He saw a big, new pile of debris by the crack that had swallowed up the house. A man was pawing through the pile.
“Where did this come from?” Marume asked.
Sano peered into the crack. A sinister chill raised bumps on his skin. The crack was empty, as clean as if it had been swept out. “From in there, apparently.”
Marume shook his head, nonplussed. “How did all that get up here?”
