The Samurai's Daughter

by John J. Healey

  All I could do was squeeze her hand.

  “Sometimes I wish her dead, and hope it happened quickly,” she said.

  Both of us knew that was unlikely.

  “We could try to find her,” I said. “Perhaps Father could attempt it, with gold to offer.”

  “No,” she said. “If she’s not dead she will have adjusted by now, and she would die from the shame of it. Your father has done enough rescuing you and me and all the rest of it. He deserves some peace now.”

  “He needs to be with someone too,” I said. “It has been a long time for him without real female companionship. You are fortunate to be married.”

  She looked at me, incredulous. “Is it possible you do not know about your uncle Carlos?”

  “In what regard?” I asked.

  “He does not fancy women,” she said. “He fancies men. Our marriage is one of convenience. He desired respectability and a child. I wanted security for Patrick and me.”

  “I had no idea,” I said. “Father never spoke of it, and he is not prudish about such things. You should leave him if you are unhappy. I will take care of you, and my brother, and Carlota. It would give me great joy to do so.”

  “What might your future husband say about that?” she asked with a smile.

  “It shall be none of his business,” I replied. “I would never marry anyone who might try to dissuade me against it. I have not escaped being the consort of a monster in Japan and crossed the world to end up the wife of an intruder.”

  I told myself I meant it. I was trying on this new me, a woman who would have independent means, perhaps one of the few in the world.

  “Why should you do that for me?” she asked.

  “Because you took care of me, Caitríona. Because you are the mother of my brother. Because I would have been lost and annihilated without you.”

  “The truth is that you took care of me,” she said. “You would have been fine without me. The pirate beast would never have harmed you. You were too valuable to him. And his poor mistress adored you. I often wonder about Maria Elena. She was not a bad person. It was you who saved my life.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “from the moment they took Father off that ship until that horrible day when we were separated at sea, I was in your care, for thousands of hours and kilometers.”

  We finished our wine, opened the balcony doors, and stepped outside. It was cold and quiet, except for the noise of the fountain. The lemon trees were bare, the plane trees denuded, the quince trees mottled with swollen fruit. It smelled of boxwood and damp and smoke from fires that were lit in the hearths throughout the house.

  “I think I am going to like it here,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “You will.”

  “You must stay with us here always,” I said.

  She put her arm around me and drew me in.

  “We shall see,” she said.

  On the following morning I made a point of wearing a kimono. Caitríona took me through the formal gardens and up into the unkempt wood where the grave was. It was set back in a clearing by two columns, remnants of what had been a small Roman temple. The grass was long and moist and very green. I read my mother’s name on her tombstone where a Biwa tree grew. A few meters behind it, the clearing came to an end, up against a wall of shrubbery. Caitríona walked with me there. Through a gap, she pointed out the Guadalquivir River down below, snaking peacefully between the green rolling fields that spread out in the distance, south and west toward the town of Palma del Río. Where the fields blended into a morning haze in the distance, the dark northern side of the Sierra Morena Mountains rose up. She remained there while I returned to the grave. I stared at it for some time and tried to feel something. I was sad, of course, but more than sadness, I felt wonder. For the first time since our arrival, I felt like I was home.

  – XXXIII –

  We spent the rest of the morning strolling around the gardens with Carlota and her governess. The little girl insisted I tell her what everything we passed was called in Japanese. Caitríona introduced me to the rest of the staff and to the gardeners. After the midday meal when Patrick wished to go for a ride and his mother disapproved, I offered to accompany him. He did not expect this, but he was pleased to have his way. I put on a pair of umanori hakama, samurai trousers that were ideal for riding. Caitríona, the stable hands, and Patrick were shocked to see me reject one of Doña Soledad’s sidesaddles. I took my horse by the mane and swung up astride it. I told them that Japanese saddles were just as ornate and cumbersome as the Spanish variety—for I did not wish for them to think I came from a primitive culture—but that for many months during the previous year I had ridden virtually bareback. Caitríona was most amused.

  I allowed Patrick to lead the way, and after cantering and galloping and giving me what I assumed was his best impression of how his stepfather wished him to comport himself, he finally relaxed when we rested the horses at the river. I told him about our journey from Japan and of our adventures in Santa Fe on the new continent, our battles, our escapes, the soldiers we had to kill, our interactions with the various tribes of natives. I told him I had fallen in love with a Zuni brave who died in battle. He followed the tale, enraptured, and asked many questions. He wondered, as I often had, what had become of the horses we let free before paddling over to New Amsterdam. Sometimes when he spoke, I saw Father in him, and myself, in ways that gave me shivers. It occurred to me that part of my task in Spain was to learn and adapt to its ways, and that for Patrick the opposite was now true. By the time we returned to the house we’d become friends.

  “Now you’ve two half-sisters,” I said to him, as we walked the horses to the stables.

  He smiled, then asked if I could teach him how to use a Japanese sword.

  “You must ask Father for that,” I said. “He is far more patient than I.”

  That evening, I ached from the ride, though I confessed it to no one. After supper we sat in front of burning olive logs by one of the tall hearths that were framed in green Italian marble. Sometimes small jets of blue flame would escape from inside the logs. Carlota fell asleep in my arms and Patrick, his guard down, sat on the rug nearby, drawing pictures of bloody battles. Soon, he too fell asleep, for we had allowed him wine at supper. Caitríona and I spoke of men. I told her about Lonan and Kurt. She, for obvious reasons, was far more discreet, although her description of how Carlota was conceived made us both laugh so hard the little girl woke up. I felt comfortable and happy in her presence, with none of the instinctual jealousy that seized me when I met Rosario.

  I tried to remember how she and Father looked on Paxos when I was little, when I saw them naked on top of each other and swimming together. And then I reflected on how they looked standing side by side in Sevilla, and I liked it. I felt guilty and sorry for Rosario, who, all in all, had lived a lonelier life in Sanlúcar than Caitríona did at La Moratalla, Carmona, and Sevilla. Caitríona had borne Father a son and me a brother. She was younger and foreign like me, and had fire in her. That night, her story with Father seemed too romantic not to end with their being together again. We slept in the same bed, and fell asleep talking in the dark, as I’m told sisters often do.

  A messenger arrived the next day from the Casa de Pilatos. He brought a letter from my grandmother summoning us back to Sevilla forthwith.

  – XXXIV –

  Even when I was young, I often wondered when this day would arrive.”

  Doña Soledad said it in a whisper. Her skin was waxen and thin as gauze, her hair reduced to random strands of white that Doña Inmaculada had arranged in a dignified manner. I sat on the bed close to her, like I had that first day. My grandmother sat on the other side. The archbishop of Sevilla had just performed the Christian rite of Extreme Unction, and a spot of scented oil glistened on my great-aunt’s forehead. The towering, venerated cleric smelled of garlic, and stood murmuring prayers on the fringes of the room, beside Caitríona and my Uncle Carlos, who had just arrived.
My uncle was handsome and arrayed in a great luxury of fur and silk and velvet. He greeted me with gravity, with nary a smile. It was hard to judge whether the lack of sympathy in that first salutation was owing to the somber occasion at hand, or to his idea of me in general. I did not care. I was too occupied with giving thanks that Father and I had reached Sevilla after our journey, in time for Doña Soledad to see me alive and well.

  Almost an hour passed before she spoke again, two phrases that were impossible to interpret. One was, “Be careful in the pasture.” The other was, “Mind the stream, it’s deep there.” Her last words however, rang clear and shocked everyone, except for Caitríona and me. “Take off my clothes and ravish me,” she commanded, weakly, but with yearning. Then spittle emerged from her lips and she choked on it. The choking became a cough that rattled her emaciated body. I imagine the strain of it stopped her heart. Once she was still, my grandmother wiped her mouth clean and gently shut her eyes. The archbishop came forward again, somewhat to my irritation, bending over her, and making the sign of the cross with cloying theatricality.

  Father and Rosario and Francisco arrived in time for the funeral. She was laid to rest within a grand pantheon, joining her parents and her sons. Sevilla’s elite attended the holy mass and the procession. Rather than being a day of mourning for them, it had the air of a social event. Apart from a modicum of seriousness the nobility maintained within the church during the ceremony, friends and distant relatives, dressed in their finery, used the occasion to speak animatedly with each other. Women used their fans as accoutrements, even though the day was overcast and brisk. It was so very different from burial rites in Japan, and those of the Zuni. Ironically, tellingly, my Uncle Carlos and Doña Inmaculada were the center of everyone’s attention. Hermenegildo and his wife, who had accompanied my uncle from Granada, were there as well.

  Without asking my permission or consulting me in any way, everyone repaired to the Casa de Pilatos after the burial. My grandmother, in her restrained manner, treated me with affection and respect throughout, but made only minimal efforts to introduce me as her grandchild. Uncle Carlos did nothing to hide what I can only describe as his disdain and displeasure at my presence.

  Caitríona had warned me on the carriage ride from La Moratalla back to Sevilla. “He grew accustomed, as we all did, to the idea that you and your father were dead. It was easier for me to bear in my heart, and it was convenient for him. The only one that held out any hope at all was Doña Soledad. I know for a fact that once she died, he was going to try and use his newfound influence to claim your inheritance for himself.”

  “But he is well provided for, I assume,” I said.

  “Quite,” she replied. “We, or I should say he, has more property and wealth than he knows what to do with. But what he most cares about in this world are the properties you are inheriting. They are the finest and grandest there are.”

  Patrick followed our conversation and, obviously conflicted, said not a word.

  The tension that started to gather on the morning of the funeral erupted in full force once all the guests departed the house. Seeing little point in bidding farewell to people who had not paid me any attention, except to gawk, Father, Rosario, Caitríona, little Carlota, and I retired to a tranquil corner of the large enclosed garden. Patrick had gone off somewhere with Francisco.

  Uncle Carlos emerged from the house and approached us. As he did, I noticed Hermenegildo and his wife loitering, like buzzards, in the background. I watched Doña Inmaculada retreating back into the house, away from her son. Her gait, and the way she was leaning forward, seemed to express displeasure. She had probably been urging her firstborn to calm himself, to reconsider, to be realistic, or to at least wait for a more civilized moment, and she had failed. He addressed Father first.

  “I would like to speak with you alone,” he said.

  “If you are going to say something unpleasant,” Father replied, “my daughter should hear it as well.”

  They stared at each other. Having met for the first time that morning, each one’s existence still provoked the other. I think Father searched for traces of my mother in my uncle’s face. Uncle Carlos sized up the man who had become a family legend, the man his sister had loved and died for, the man his parents had vilified, the man his wife had lost her virginity to and borne a child for, a much too foreign man, a heathen who dressed oddly. Then he looked at Caitríona.

  “Would you and Rosario excuse us, please?”

  Caitríona took Carlota by the hand, but gave her over to Rosario. “Would you mind?” she said. “I’d like to stay here for this.”

  Rosario, who my uncle also disapproved of due to her humble birth, smiled and replied, “Not at all,” before walking off with the little girl.

  Carlos looked at his spouse with a scowl. Then he turned to me.

  “I recognize you are my niece,” he said, as if he were the king himself, “my beloved sister’s daughter. I recognize that our dearly departed aunt has favored you with the inheritance of her estate, a decision bordering on the insane. I will not contest it—with one exception. I cannot permit you to own and live in this house.”

  For the first time in a long while—out of the corner of my eye—I saw Father place both hands on the hilt of his long sword. I remained calm.

  “Why is that?” I asked my uncle.

  “I am a grandee of Spain,” he said. “My family—”

  “Our family,” I said, interrupting him.

  “My family,” he insisted, “has been an eminent one in Sevilla since the reconquest. They built this house. This house is regarded as a palace in this city, where, it has always been assumed, that only someone of the highest station would reside.”

  I should note here—for it is one of the things I was grateful to Father for—that in the normal course of events, someone of my age and gender would not have been permitted to carry on this sort of conversation with someone like my uncle. In the normal course of events, my father would have ignored me, and answered for me. He—mostly—did no such thing.

  “How much would you pay for it?” I asked my uncle.

  This caught him by surprise.

  “Pay for it,” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I said. “If you want it so badly and since legally the property is mine, I assume you would wish to purchase it. Or perhaps we could arrange an exchange, your parents’ house and the one given to you and Caitríona by Doña Soledad as a wedding gift. Together they must add up to approximately the ground covered by this one.”

  “Are you mad?” he said, quite aggressively.

  “That’s enough,” Father said, quietly, but in a manner no one would wish to question. My uncle looked at him and his face paled.

  “Uncle,” I said. “You have insulted me in myriad ways, with great economy I might add, and on this day of all days, a day of mourning. I am astonished.”

  I had thought, since Caitríona had seen fit to marry him, since he was the only brother of the woman Father had loved so dearly, that there would be a tender side to his nature. Clearly, he had suffered greatly at the hands of his own family, and it had filled him with bile.

  “Where does such greed and anger come from?” I asked him. “What wound, what grudge, has put you into such a frenzy of disrespect for your only niece?”

  “Your presence here is an embarrassment to me,” he replied, further fouling the air between us. “You are a glaring reminder of my sister’s sinful folly. Your father’s presence here threatens the reputation of my wife and stepson. I am sure tongues are already singing with scandal. For you to live in this house, in this city, is simply too much. I shall do all I must to wrest it from you.”

  Father was livid. I could feel it. My uncle turned to leave.

  “Come, Caitríona,” he said.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Come, I say.”

  “No,” she said again.

  He stared at her, dumbfounded. Having managed to adroitly sever ties with the
people who might have been of comfort to him, I almost felt sorry for him.

  “From this moment forward,” Caitríona said, “I shall be your wife in name only.”

  “You shall be my wife in whatever way I see fit,” he said. “Like it or not.”

  “No,” she said. “I shan’t. I fulfilled my end of our bargain, Carlos. I married you in front of your provincial world. I even gave you a child. But that is all I shall do. I will not make a fuss, but my son and I, and our daughter, will live with you no longer, and if you wish to have a male heir of your own so badly, take a mistress.”

  “It’s him, isn’t it?” my uncle said, pointing at Father, but continuing to stare at her.

  “No,” she said. “It’s you. Your behavior here today is unforgivable. It has confirmed my worst fears. It has knocked me, like St. Augustine, from my horse, and cured me of blindness. Clearly the inordinate amount of time you spend in Granada, or at court in Madrid, leaving us here alone—for which I have been grateful—has damaged your heart. When you freed yourself from the seminary, when you took care of your mother’s estate in Carmona, when you came to La Moratalla and met me, when, in your own fashion, and for your own well-known reasons, you courted and proposed to me, you were a better person. Or so it seemed.”

  – XXXV –

  I remained in Sevilla until Carlos departed once again for Madrid. I made a point of wearing dresses more often. I made it my business to familiarize myself with the Casa de Pilatos, and to ingratiate myself with the staff. Narciso the coachman was helpful in this regard. Plans were made for me to visit the Pazo de Oca in Galicia, and the numerous other properties in Soria and in Leon and Santander that had become mine as well. Caitríona later revealed to me that sometime during that ten-day period after Doña Soledad’s funeral, she and Father found time to arrange a series of liaisons that affected them deeply.

  With Carlos gone, Rosario and Francisco, and Father and I, left for Sanlúcar. Though Father resisted the idea, I pleaded with him that we stop in Coria del Río. I wished to meet the samurai who had chosen to stay in Spain instead of returning home with Hasekura Tsunenaga. Father and Francisco traveled on horseback. Rosario and I rode in a small open carriage driven by a nephew of Narciso. We followed the river road and arrived in Coria early in the evening. Word of our presence spread as soon as Father dismounted—with his swords and traditional clothing, he looked the way the samurai who lived there had when they first settled there.