“He didn’t kill that girl.” Ukon was adamant.
“And you’re not just loyal to him, you’re deluded enough to blame me for your troubles,” Reiko said.
“You are to blame. You dragged him in front of the magistrate. He was so frightened that he confessed.” Two years hadn’t shaken Ukon’s certainty.
Reiko saw that she’d been right about Ukon; even though the woman had admitted nothing yet, she was the person behind Reiko’s troubles. “You’re also bold enough to take the revenge on me that you promised. But how did you happen to be here? Was it just a coincidence?”
Ukon smiled with a glimpse of decayed teeth. “Not just. I’ve been trying to get near you since the day my son was executed. I applied for work here because I thought it could lead to a job at Edo Castle, in your house. When you showed up here, I thanked the gods for my good luck.”
“Then you figured out how to make me find out what it’s like to be punished for something I didn’t do,” Reiko said, citing the threat Ukon had hurled at her in the Court of Justice. “You framed me for the murder of Lord Mori. But why him? How did you have the nerve?”
Lady Mori watched Reiko with an expression of nascent fear. She said to Ukon, “She knows! You promised me nobody would find out!”
“She doesn’t know anything she can prove.” Ukon aimed her scorn at Reiko as well as Lady Mori. “Just keep quiet, and we’re safe.”
Reiko saw that although Ukon wasn’t to be so easily pressured into confessing as her son, Lady Mori was a different matter. Reiko said to her, “Ukon couldn’t have done it by herself. At the very least, she needed you to invite me to dinner that night. What else did you do to help her?”
In any conspiracy there is a weaker partner. Lady Mori hunched her shoulders, like a bird trying to hide under its wings. She began to stammer.
“Be quiet!” Ukon said sharply.
Forgetting her fear, Lady Mori regarded Ukon with indignation. “How dare you speak to me like that? Show some respect!”
“My apologies, Honorable Mistress,” Ukon said, her impatience not hidden by her false courtesy, “but I’m trying to keep you out of trouble.”
“You promised there wouldn’t be any trouble,” Lady Mori said angrily. “And now this.” She pointed at Reiko as if she were dog dung on the floor. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”
No love lost between them, Reiko thought. All the better for her. “Why did you help her murder your husband?” she asked Lady Mori.
“I wasn’t just helping her.
Reiko realized that there was more to the situation than she’d thought. The crime wasn’t as simple, nor the motive as straightforward.
“Shut your mouth, you idiot!” Ukon yelled.
Lady Mori drew herself up in a snit. “I have had enough of your uppity ways, of your ordering me around as though I were the servant, not you. I shall talk to Lady Reiko if I wish.”
“Talk, and it’s all over for both of us, you fool,” Ukon said. “She’ll have us put to death!”
They apparently didn’t know that Sano was on the verge of being deposed, the Mori troops were slaughtering his, and Reiko and Lieutenant Asukai would have a hard time getting out of the estate alive. Reiko said, “Tell me about the night Lord Mori died.”
“No!” Ukon grabbed Lady Mori and tried to put a hand over her mouth.
“Let go! How dare you touch me?” Struggling, Lady Mori said to her attendants, “Get her off me!”
They pulled Ukon away. Lady Mori wiped her face, smoothed her garments, and wrinkled her nose as if Ukon’s touch had contaminated her. When she turned to Reiko, the temptation to confess had overcome her fear. Reckless daring sparkled in her eyes. “Ukon and I discovered that we had interests in common. I’ll tell you exactly what happened.”
28
During the ride that seemed endless, Hirata lay beside Sano in the palanquin. Facing in opposite directions, confined in a space so small they couldn’t even turn over, they squirmed in a futile attempt to loosen their bindings. They couldn’t talk around their gags, let alone call out loud enough to be heard by anyone who might help them.
From outside came the city noises of roving peddlers hawking tea, children playing, women chattering. Thunder punctuated the rhythm of the palanquin bearers’ feet. Hoofbeats signaled Police Commissioner Hoshina and his troops following the palanquin. Hirata thought of Midori and his children, whom he would never see again. Resisting the urge to struggle harder, he forced himself to lie still. He inhaled and exhaled the slow, deep breaths of the secret technique that Ozuno had taught him. He tried to tap his inner spiritual energy and the infinite wisdom in the cosmos that would enable him to save himself and Sano.
But if that had been hard enough to do at the mountain temple, it was impossible now. Hirata could barely catch his breath, let alone control it. The gag in his mouth was soaked with the saliva that almost drowned him. His bad leg ached viciously. Panic took over his mind, thwarted meditation. A curse on Ozuno, who’d misled him to believe that the mystic martial arts were any use! He would like to see Ozuno get himself out of this predicament!
But of course Ozuno would never have gotten into it in the first place. He’d have defeated Hoshina and his army at the start. Misery filled Hirata as he faced the fact that now he would never master the secret art of
“It all began the day after you came to call on me the first time,” Lady Mori told Reiko. “That morning Ukon said to me, ”I must warn you about Lady Reiko. She’s no good.“ ”
“I said, ”You shouldn’t criticize someone who is your superior, especially when she’s my friend.“ But Ukon said, ”Please listen to what I have to say. Then decide for yourself whether you want to be friends with Lady Reiko.“ Well, I thought that was very presumptuous of her.” She cast a resentful glance at Ukon.
Ukon sat with her arms folded, her expression furious. “If you want to confess and die, suit yourself. But leave me out of it!”
“She had previously told me that her son, Goro, had been accused of killing a girl he’d gotten with child,” Lady Mori continued. “She said he didn’t do it. Now she said that you’d had him arrested, Lady Reiko. Your father the magistrate convicted him. He was executed. She said it was your fault.”
Reiko pictured Ukon spewing her obsession and hatred into Lady Mori’s ear on many occasions that included the morning Tsuzuki had overheard them. How fate linked people together and set events in unpredictable motion!
“I said maybe Goro was guilty, maybe she was just looking for somebody to blame for his death,” Lady Mori said. “But she believed in him even though he’d confessed. She said you should be punished for what you did to him.”
If Reiko hadn’t known Tsuzuki, she wouldn’t be here now. If Ukon and Lady Mori hadn’t met up, Lord Mori would still be alive, Reiko wouldn’t be in trouble, and perhaps neither would Sano.
“At first I didn’t believe her,” Lady Mori went on. “You seemed like a perfectly nice, harmless young woman. And you didn’t seem to remember Ukon. I told her that if you had really done what she’d said, you would have remembered her.”
“Should have.” Malicious humor curled Ukon’s mouth. “Forgetting me was your mistake.”
None of this would have happened if Reiko hadn’t had a taste for detective work, hadn’t started her private inquiry service. When had everything really begun? Perhaps when she’d married Sano. She wondered what he was doing now and felt such a strong prescience of danger that it dropped an invisible barrier between her and the other people in the room. Lady Mori went on talking, Ukon cursed at her, but Reiko couldn’t hear them; for a moment she could only see their lips move; she was imprisoned by her fear for Sano. She could barely stifle the urge to bolt from the room and run in frantic search of him.
