attack.”
More annoyed than enlightened, the shogun said, “Why should I care that she’s, ahh, conscious? Why do you, ahh, bother me about her?”
“There is a possibility that Suiren heard or saw something that could help us determine where the kidnappers took your honorable mother,” Uemori interjected.
“Ahh. And now that she’s conscious, she can, ahh, tell us what she knows.” Comprehension quickly gave way to anxiety. “Sosakan Sano must go to her at once!” Then recollection struck the shogun. “But Sano-san is out tracking down Dannoshin Minoru. So is Chamberlain Yanagisawa.” The shogun pointed at one of his secretaries.
“Go fetch them.”
As the secretary started to obey, Uemori said, “With all due respect, Your Excellency, perhaps the chamberlain and sosakan-sama should be allowed to finish what they’re doing.”
The shogun chewed his lip, humbled by Uemori’s better judgment. “Never mind,” he told the secretary.
“Someone else could question the maid,” Uemori said.
“Ahh. Yes. You are right,” the shogun said, then asked in bewilderment, “But who shall I send? I can’t entrust such an important task to just anyone.”
Out of nowhere came a sudden, novel idea: Why don’t I go myself? So disconcerted was the shogun that his jaw dropped. Yet the idea seemed the perfect solution, because interrogating the maid would satisfy his desire for action. While his audience watched him as if wondering what had gotten into him, he stepped toward the edge of the dais… only to hesitate. Talking to a servant was beneath him. He must uphold the dignity of his rank and let his underlings do his dirty work. Wishing Sano and Yanagisawa were here to spare him this dilemma, he started to step back, but the thought of them arrested him.
They had taken charge of the kidnapping investigation, but why should they? It was his mother who was in danger, not theirs. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi experienced a rare pang of resentment toward Yanagisawa and Sano. From time to time he had a sneaking suspicion that they thought they were smarter than he, and more fit to make important decisions. He recalled that when the ransom demand came, he’d at first wanted to execute Police Commissioner Hoshina, then changed his mind… or had he? Could Sano have changed it for him, with Yanagisawa’s collusion? The shogun wondered how many of his other decisions they’d influenced. Resentment and suspicion turned to anger at his trusted chamberlain and sosakan-sama. Well, he wouldn’t leave matters to them anymore. It was time to stand on his own two feet.
“This meeting is, ahh, adjourned,” he said. Hopping off the dais, he pointed at his chief attendants and Dr. Kitano. “Come with me.”
“Where are you going, Your Excellency?” Uemori said, obviously startled.
“To the, ahh, sickroom to question Suiren.” As everyone stared in amazement, the shogun strode regally from the chamber.
Righteous indignation carried him out of the palace, through the castle grounds and passageways, to the threshold of the sickroom. There, sudden apprehension halted him and his retinue at the shrine outside the low, thatched building. The sickroom was haunted by spirits of disease and polluted by the deaths that had occurred there. The shogun, whose health was delicate, felt dizzy and sick to his stomach at the thought of entering. But enter he must, for his mother’s sake.
He took a clean white cloth from under his sash and tied it over the lower half of his face to prevent the bad spirits and contamination from getting in his nose or mouth. “Let us, ahh, proceed,” he said.
His chief attendant opened the door of the sickroom, walked in, and announced, “His Excellency the Shogun has arrived.”
Faltering into the room, the shogun saw physicians and apprentices staring in shock to see him in this place where he’d never come. They fell to their knees and bowed. The shogun approached the woman who lay in the bed.
“You must be, ahh, Suiren,” the shogun said. He crouched some distance from her, because he could read death in her wasted body and unwholesome pallor.
She gazed up at him in awe. “Your presence does me an honor, Your Excellency,” she whispered in a low, cracked voice.
With his retinue and the doctors all watching him, the shogun felt self-conscious and uncertain because he’d never before questioned a witness about a crime. “Do you remember how you, ahh, got hurt?” he ventured.
Suiren nodded weakly. “Some men attacked us on the highway. They killed the troops and attendants. They took Lady Keisho-in.” Tears welled in her eyes.
At least she hadn’t lost her memory, the shogun thought. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so difficult. “I want you to tell me everything that happened during the, ahh, attack,” he said.
The maid poured out a tale of carnage and terror, her words frequently halted by weeping and pauses to muster her strength. “I was pulled out of my palanquin. A man stabbed me. I fell and must have hit my head and fainted. When I woke up, I was lying in a pool of blood. There were dead bodies all around. I saw the men emptying the trunks. Lady Keisho-in, Lady Yanagisawa, Lady Reiko, and Lady Midori were lying by the road. They seemed to be asleep. The men put them inside the trunks.”
Envisioning his mother treated like cargo, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi gasped with outrage.
“I tried to crawl toward the men and stop them, but I was too weak.” Sobs wracked Suiren. “How I wish I could have saved Lady Keisho-in!”
“Here is your, ahh, chance to help me save her,” the shogun said. “Did the men say anything to, ahh, indicate where they were taking my mother?”
Weariness overlaid Suiren’s features like a veil. Her voice dropped to an almost incomprehensible murmur: “There was an argument. Some of them complained… the trunks were too heavy to carry all the way to… ” She breathed the last word.
“Izu!” the shogun interpreted. “They were going to Izu!” Behind his facecloth he grinned with glee because he’d found out something that Yanagisawa and Sano hadn’t.
“The leader… told some others to hire porters to help carry the trunks,” Suiren said. “They asked how… how to find the place where they would all meet again.” Suiren paused, as if listening to echoes from the past. “… main highway south through Izu… west on the crossroad at the Jizo shrine… a lake with a castle on an island… ”
Such joy overwhelmed the shogun that he chortled and clapped his hands. Now he knew precisely where to find his mother! He couldn’t wait to see Sano’s and Yanagisawa’s faces when he told them.
“You’ve done me a, ahh, great service,” he said, impulsively leaning over to pat Suiren’s head. “I will, ahh, reward you with anything you ask.”
Suiren closed her eyes and sighed, weakened by the effort she’d expended on speech. “All I ask is for Lady Keisho-in to come home,” she murmured. “Then I can die happy.”
The shogun belatedly remembered the danger of disease and pollution. He bolted from the sickroom, his retinue in tow. Outside, he removed his facecloth, wiped his hands on it, and prayed that his health wouldn’t suffer. Yet he was proud that he’d talked to Suiren, and taking this initiative had whetted his appetite for more. He was tired of waiting for others to act on his behalf, and fed up with complicated strategies for hunting the Dragon King. The reasons for delay fled his mind, as did his usual indecisiveness. For once Tokugawa Tsunayoshi knew exactly what to do next.
Two guards eased Midori down the tower stairs and carried her on a litter through the forest. More guards herded Reiko, Lady Yanagisawa, and Keisho-in behind her in the rain and locked them inside a wing of the main palace. The room was dingy and smelled of the dampness and mold that discolored its bare walls, but it was furnished with tattered cushions, frayed tatami, enough bedding for all the women, a basin of hot water, and a pile of rags. An undamaged roof kept out the rain.
As Reiko helped the other women settle Midori on a futon, she breathed a prayer of thanks that the Dragon King had decided to relocate them. She glanced out the barred windows at the gray, stormy lake, visible through the trees. Here, on ground level and nearer to the boats, freedom beckoned. But devising an escape would have to wait.
Midori shrieked, convulsed, and wept harder with each strengthening pain. She sat up, huffed, bore down, and grunted again and again, then fell back on the bed.
