“Yes, Señora.”
“Do they seem genuinely foreign?”
“Yes, Señora. In fact, their Spanish is poor.”
“How tiresome.”
“They have an infant with them.”
“An infant, you say?”
For a brief moment, flagrantly ignoring the time that had passed since my father’s departure, she hoped against hope.
“Yes, Señora. A baby boy.”
“Ah … Ask them to stay, and tell them I shall see them at supper. Show them to the Roman Suite and see they have all they require. And have Manolo prepare something tasty this evening.”
It had been a long time since Soledad Medina had kept a houseguest, or entertained, and the prospect stimulated her, almost as much as the possibility of having some news of Father and me. In fact, she found herself incapable of waiting until the evening meal. After fifteen minutes of deliberation, she had herself carried to the Roman Suite. The men transporting the chair were ordered to leave the guest rooms immediately, for as they carried the elderly woman in, they encountered Caitríona feeding her baby. Caitríona apologized for not standing so that she might curtsy properly, but otherwise showed no embarrassment at having her breasts exposed.
The first thought entering my great-aunt’s mind was that she had not seen a creature as young, charming, or beautiful since—in much happier times—my mother. Paolo Sarpi emerged from an adjacent room and introduced himself. Doña Soledad was surprised to see such an older man with the girl, but as a woman of the world she took it in stride, and recalled how her own Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, the late Duke of Medina-Sidonia, had fallen in love with a girl in his service easily forty years his junior. She addressed them in perfect Italian.
“I understand you bring news of my great-niece and of her father, the gentleman from Japan.”
“We do, my lady,” answered Caitríona.
“If you will permit me,” Paolo Sarpi interjected, “I will happily offer our gracious hostess a full account of how it is that young Caitríona here has come to this noble house.”
“By all means,” said Caitríona, deferring to him.
He prefaced the tale with shameful assurances that Father and I were last seen in good health. These assurances caused Caitríona to blush and stare at the floor. Both gestures were duly noted by Soledad Medina. Then he related how our ship had been taken by pirates, only a few days after embarking from Spain. He told what he knew about Father’s time in Algiers, and went into great detail describing the house and situation of Maria Elena in Venice. He placed emphasis on how much time and care Caitríona had devoted to my welfare. He omitted all mention of Father and Caitríona’s subsequent journeys to Greece, to Egypt, and their failed attempt to reach India. He elected instead to tell another lie, one that mirrored the advice he had given Father in Brindisi, saying that Caitríona had come with him directly to Sicily.
“It was the samurai’s most fervent wish,” he concluded, “that Caitríona find some way of being of service to your ladyship, so that she might find a way for herself and her child to survive in this world.”
Soledad Medina studied the scholar’s face as he delivered his disquisition, looking for lapses in the story, or any signs of equivocation. She told me that though she felt stirrings of suspicion, they were still too vague in nature. It was then that the baby boy ceased suckling and turned his head in her direction. That the little fellow was part Japanese and directly related to me was immediately evident. Doña Soledad reached out and took the boy’s tiny hand and kissed it.
“What have you named him?” she asked.
“Patrick, after a beloved uncle,” she said. “Patrick Date O’Shea.”
It made the older woman laugh.
“I see there are some details you’ve yet to mention,” my great-aunt said to Paolo Sarpi, while looking into Caitríona’s eyes. “You must rest. We can continue to get to know each other at supper.”
Once their hostess had been carried from the room, Caitríona turned to Paolo.
“What possessed you to lie like that?”
“Instinct,” he said. “The same instinct that told me to speak for you. I’m not at all certain this woman could survive knowledge of the events that still weigh on us. The samurai impressed upon me the degree of devotion she felt for her niece, and that she continues to feel for the little girl. Her main reason for living is to be here when the girl is returned to her. The truth would break her heart—and cloud any chance for your success. She might expire on the spot, or wash her hands of the whole business.”
Though she understood his logic, Caitríona had her doubts. It pained her conscience to keep a horrible truth from a woman who had the look of someone well accustomed to surviving disappointment.
***
The evening meal began shortly after eleven, and took place in the salon dominated by a Giuseppe Recco still life. The marble dining table displayed a mosaic portrait of Mary Magdalene. Two young men dressed in daffodil-yellow livery came through the arabesque doorways and served grilled fish, along with a rice dish cooked with olives and honey. They served a chilled Manzanilla wine in crystal goblets.
“Might I presume you are not a married couple?” Doña Soledad asked the Venetian.
“You may.”
“And might I be correct in assuming that Shiro the samurai is the father of your little Patrick?” she asked Caitríona.
“Yes, madam,” Caitríona answered with a blush. Then she bit her lip and went on. “But I feel compelled to tell you the truth of how the relationship came about. It was I who approached him, I who sought his comfort, I who took the first steps. He saw my father murdered. He was taken away on the same ship as my mother. He escaped after unimaginable trials to come for his daughter and me. He saved my life, twice. I was alone in the world and never had I encountered such a gentleman. I was besotted. But all the time that I was fortunate enough to be with him, he never once lost sight of, or broke free from, the profound connection he had to your niece. Try as I did to distract him from it, he maintained an abiding love for Doña Guada.”
Soledad Medina looked down at her plate.
“I promised the samurai I would escort the signorina here and see she was taken in and properly cared for,” Paolo Sarpi said, hastening to put off any adverse conclusions on the part of their hostess.
But the hostess had been thinking of little else since that afternoon’s first interview, and after careful consideration she had already arrived at a firm determination.
“Before they departed, I tried to convince Shiro to remain here,” she said. “I offered him many advantages, offers that will still apply upon their return. One of the things I said to him was that for however difficult it might be for him to then imagine, it would only be natural that he find another companion someday to trust his heart to, and that when such an attachment occurred, I would welcome the both of them. Though half of Sevilla thinks me mad, I have willed the entirety of my estates and holdings to Shiro and Guada’s little girl. That he has sent you to me, Caitríona, entrusted your welfare to me through the offices of this distinguished gentleman from Venice, assures me his affections toward you were not superficial, but solid—and you have borne him a son. You and your baby boy shall be safe with me. You will be my companion now, and we shall both wait and pray together for his safe return.”
Caitríona was awash in tears at this point, tears of gratitude and tears of shame. It was then they heard the baby cry. Caitríona felt her milk gathering and excused herself.
“Let him sulk a while, child,” Soledad said, bidding with her hand that the young woman remain seated. “Or you shall spoil him.”
But Caitríona did not return to her seat. Drying her eyes with her napkin, she said, “Oh, but I mustn’t, my lady. Please forgive me.”
And with that she was gone.
“She is young still,” Paolo Sarpi said.
“She is a mother,” Doña Soledad replied. “I very much approve of her
decision to ignore my attempt to maintain an absurd social decorum. My admonishment was but a test, in fact, and she has passed it glowingly. I, once upon a time, and my Guada, had she lived, would have done the same.”
Tears came into Doña Soledad’s eyes, which the Venetian misinterpreted.
“I would like to say, my lady, that your behavior in this entire matter is exemplary. It has far exceeded my expectations. Your generosity is an inspiration and—might I suppose—as unusual here in Sevilla as it would be among the nobility of Venice.”
She waved his flattery away and took a long drink of wine.
“I have lived a long time, Signor Sarpi. Though I have been fortunate in that I have not had to witness such horrors as Signorina O’Shea has at such a young age, there is little, bad or good, I have not seen by now. I consider myself a keen judge of character, of people in general. It is a quality I had to learn from numerous mistakes made along the way. And so, though I am honored by the dignity and the strength of character you have demonstrated, fulfilling your promise to the samurai in such a selfless fashion, and though I have been truly moved by the degree of forthrightness Caitríona has shown in explaining herself to me—my instincts, my heart, my graying soul are certain you are hiding something.”
Paolo Sarpi blanched with alarm.
“What, pray my lady, might you be referring to?”
“Come, Signor Sarpi, before the girl returns. Tell me the truth of how it came to be that she and her baby were separated from the samurai and my relation. I could not help but notice how she spoke of him in the past. Even if my heart shall be unable to bear it, tell me the truth.”
– VIII –
Soledad Medina was devoted to my mother. It was a source of significant irritation for my mother’s parents. In their opinion, it gave society the impression that the wealthy dowager cared more for their daughter than they had. They would often claim that, after all, it was they who conceived and raised my mother. It was they who procured an advantageous marriage for her. That the groom proved to be a cad was not their fault. That my mother got pregnant because her husband raped her was less important to them than the fact it produced a male heir—Rodriguito—a future nobleman and grandee of Spain, a child blessed with impeccable lineage who, since Mother’s tragic demise, it had been their great pleasure to care for and educate within the walls of their palace and estates.
They were appalled by what my mother did afterward, that she fell in love with my father—a “heathen” from halfway around the world. Though they never met Father, they denied his so-called charm, his claims to royalty, and the favor he had gained in the eyes of the king. And then Mother made it worse by being happy with him, getting pregnant again, and then dying as she gave birth to me, a bastard baby girl. I believe that for quite some time they harbored the belief that Mother’s death had been a just punishment for her sins.
And so it bothered them enormously when Doña Soledad Medina’s surge of affection toward their daughter coincided precisely with her disgrace, the collapse of her marriage, and the consummation of her feelings for my father. Though she was too well mannered to say so, it was clear to them that Soledad Medina considered their feelings to be provincial, and that she had come to hold them in low esteem.
From the day my mother died, Doña Soledad dressed in black. A mass was celebrated every morning, to pray for my mother’s soul and for my safe return. Before we left Spain, Doña Soledad signed over the entirety of her properties and her enormous fortune to me. It stung my mother’s parents to the quick to know that their daughter’s first child—a son, a Spaniard, the legitimate heir as far as they were concerned—had been ignored by their esteemed relative in favor of the illegitimate, half-breed baby girl that was me.
Soledad Medina’s world had diminished with time, the fate of a woman blessed with longevity. Her men were dead: her unfaithful but not unamusing husband; her gallant lover, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia; and her two sons, once upon a time sweet little boys who in adolescence became crass, bulky, and insolent. Since the muted reaction of my mother’s parents to their daughter’s rape, Doña Soledad had pulled back from them. From the moment they took Mother’s little boy, who they would make their heir, into their house, Soledad Medina made a point of seeing them as infrequently as possible. By taking my mother into her care, she relived her youth. Through Mother’s romance with my father, she saw life once again as something vibrant and meaningful. Then, suddenly, Mother departed this earth, and the samurai took me away. It was my return that she lived for.
***
She told me about the day she fell and broke her hip. It was after mass at the chapel at her estate, La Moratalla. She was taking her customary walk through the formal gardens up to the Roman ruin where Mother’s grave is. She slipped and fell backward. The pain surprised her as she lay in the grass looking at the sky through her veil. She said she thought at first that she might die, for she had the lucidity to recognize that under her luxurious skirts was an aging animal, and that this was how aging animals met their end—when their bones could no longer carry them. While her handmaiden ran off in search of the priest and the doctor, she recalled a day when she and my very pregnant mother, along with Father and Mother’s first little boy, took a picnic to the river below. She recalled how happy they had been, how content she felt having us safe with her. She sat with my mother in the shade of a tree on the shore of the Guadalquivir, in a place where it narrowed and flowed cold and clean, and they watched my father teaching the little boy to swim. They’d been a family, she said, a family that was original and simpática, the sort of unexpected group her own liberal father would have loved, and that her dour mother would have been horrified by.
When the maid returned with the doctor and the obsequious priest who fell to his knees in prayer like a bad actor, and as the doctor prodded, as the other men with them lifted her onto a cot to carry her back to the mansion, she told me how she remembered other good times to keep the pain at bay. Most of all, she went back to an evening when she had walked through those same gardens many years earlier—while her husband was away with one of his lady friends. She had walked there with the Duke of Medina-Sidonia at her side. Her sons were still little and they ran on in front of them, conquering imaginary Moors with swords the duke had fashioned from sticks. She said, whispering it to me, that what she most remembered from that day was the moment the duke bade her pause, when he pressed her against the trunk of a tree and kissed her, moving his hands over her, the breathtaking thrill of it.
– PART TWO –
– IX –
Some years later, Father told me what happened aboard the ship on which the mutiny took place—the blood and the savagery—for I had blocked it from memory. The rage and then the horror that gripped the mob of men hell-bent on killing us. Rage flowed between them like a drug, but then the horror as they began to see their number diminish, as hands and arms littered the deck, as they slipped on their mates’ blood and innards. I cowered behind Father, screaming as he went about his task like a dancer of death. When it was down to just one miserable man, the fellow dropped his sword and jumped overboard to drown.
Father suffered many bruises, but no gashes, punctures, or broken bones. He carried me to the other extreme of the ship, up the stairs onto the aft deck, and set me down by the helm. He spoke to me gently and sang softly to me until I stopped crying and fell into a deep slumber. He said it was only then that he allowed himself to rest, to lie back and stare at the sky. What he most remembered was how beautiful the clouds were, for it was early evening by then, and they had taken on brilliant tints of pink and orange as the sun began to dip below the horizon.
This was how the Dutchmen found us when their ship came alongside. They boarded armed with muskets. As they surveyed the foredeck’s macabre tableau, Father stood and placed a hand on the helm and watched as all of their guns swerved in his direction.
Afterward, cleaned and manacled, he faced the Dutch commander: a tall, han
dsome, broad-shouldered man named Kurt Vanderhooven. He had full lips and a large broken nose and wore a uniform that was clean and sober. I was seated in a chair next to Father. My feet did not reach the floor.
“I find your tale hard to believe,” Kurt said in English.
“Every word is true,” Father replied.
“If you swear to it, I will remove the chains.”
“I swear it,” Father replied.
“Free his hands,” said the commander in Dutch to a mate standing by.
I watched the mate’s small, delicate hands open the lock that held the iron cuffs in place as the commander went on in English.
“I have some good news for you,” he said, trying to repress a smile. “We are sailing to Hirado.”
“Hirado,” Father repeated.
“We are on our way to Japan.”
Tears surged into my father’s eyes. Now that his hands were free, he raised one and made as if to clear an irritant from his eyes.
“You are my guest,” the commander continued. “I shall see that you and your daughter are well treated. And in exchange I hope you might speak well of me to the shogun.”
“If the shogun permits me to see him, you have my word,” Father said.
“Of course he shall see you, sir, a samurai from Sendai Castle with a tale like yours.”
Before getting underway, Father watched the Dutch sailors throw the remains of the English crew overboard. He forbade me to look, but I found a way. The blood brought sharks. He later said the splashing sound the bodies made reminded him of when the pirates had done something similar two years earlier, when one of the bodies had been Caitríona’s father. He was in pain that evening and tired of being captured, bound, and then released in exchange for something. He said he never wanted to sit in another sea captain’s cabin. He wondered what had become of Caitríona and the rest. He hoped beyond hope they had survived, that they had been somehow rescued as well. He could not bear the irony that it might be he and I who kept our lives, after facing that gruesome mob, while those he had fought to save perished. He said he thought of little else for the rest of our journey to Japan.
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