The Last Concubine

by Lesley Downer

  The rest were ordinary soldiers – burly leather-skinned veterans of battle, hard-eyed professionals. Some held red banners marked with a white cross in a circle – the crest of the Satsuma, the most intractable of the southern clans. Just as she had thought, they were all wearing their swords.

  Some were yawning, looking bored. Some were gloating, stifling grins as if they couldn’t believe their luck. They seemed a little shamefaced too, like children who had been caught fighting or stealing or running away. Here they were right inside the forbidden palace, in the innermost sanctum, the most secret part, walking where no man had ever walked before, seeing women no man had ever been allowed to cast eyes on. And without even removing their swords! It was unbearable.

  Haru was kneeling bolt upright, her fists clenched. Her eyes were wide and her plump cheeks were as pale as the straw of the tatami mats. Tears ran unheeded down her cheeks. She was staring transfixed at someone in the crowd.

  At the far end of the hall was a middle-aged man, standing a little apart from the rest. He looked like an official of some sort. He was dressed formally in stiff black hakama trousers and a haori jacket. He had two swords but he didn’t seem to be a samurai. His head was not shaved and he didn’t have a topknot. His thick hair, greying at the temples, was cut short like a foreigner’s. He was peering around with unabashed curiosity, studying the ranks of bowed heads as if he was trying to make out the faces beneath the gleaming coiffures sparkling with hairpins and combs.

  Sachi couldn’t help noticing what a fine-looking man he was, despite his age. Maybe it was the way he held himself, with a kind of quiet confidence. Maybe it was his broad high-cheekboned face, or the way he gazed so steadily from under his thick brows, or the laughter lines around his eyes, or the half-smile lurking on his full, rather sensual lips. For a southerner he looked almost human.

  For a moment their eyes met, and he started. She could see his throat move as he swallowed. He clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles went white and he clutched at his sword for support.

  Sachi looked away quickly. In her mind something was falling into place. It was as if she had been trying to open one of the puzzle boxes some of the women in the palace had. Only the owner of the box knew the secret sequence of moves, which small slat of wood to slide first and which after. Some of those beautiful boxes took a hundred different moves to open. Sachi felt as if she had worked out which piece to move but she didn’t know yet which way it went.

  As soon as the formalities had finished, the man strode across to her. He knelt, slid his fan from his obi, laid it on the tatami in front of him, and made a formal bow.

  There was a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach. Suddenly Sachi knew exactly what he was going to say.

  He spoke the words softly but clearly: ‘I am your father.’

  10

  Falling Blossoms

  I

  The great hall seemed to have grown quiet. Somewhere in the distance men’s voices and laughter echoed dully. Not a sound came from the ranks of women, only a soft rustling from the movements of their voluminous skirts.

  Sachi looked at the hands resting politely on the tatami in front of her. They were big and muscular with broad nails and black hairs sprouting between the knuckles. Carpenters’ hands, she thought with a sort of dazed wonderment. But surely a carpenter’s would be ingrained with dirt and have chipped, broken nails? These were scrubbed, trimmed and faintly perfumed. They had not seen manual labour for years.

  So this was her father. She knew he had asked for her at the village when he had been on his way to Edo with the southern forces. But a father! He was an outsider, a townsman, a southerner with an outlandish haircut, utterly wrong and foreign.

  She stared down at her own hands, so small and thin and pale. She was not going to look at him. But she could feel his eyes probing her downturned face, hear the rasp of his breath, smell the pungent scents of sweat and tobacco and southern spices.

  Then Taki spoke up. She seemed to sense what Sachi was feeling.

  ‘You are mistaken, sir,’ she said in her most fiercely protective tones.

  ‘There’s no mistaking,’ he said. His voice was a low rumble. ‘My daughter. My child. I knew straight away. You are exactly . . .’

  He spoke in rough townsman’s Edo overlaid with what sounded like broad Osaka. Sachi knew what he wanted to say: exactly like her mother.

  ‘I waited so long,’ he said, softly but clearly. ‘So many years. I thought I would never set eyes on you again. And now . . . To find you in this place of all places, at this time of all times . . .’

  Sachi was staring at his hands. She looked back at her own. There was something about the way the fingers lay. The tip of his middle finger inclined ever so slightly towards the finger next to it. The same as hers. She looked away, focused her mind, took a deep breath. She had to remember she was a samurai.

  ‘Who is addressing me?’ she asked. For all her efforts her voice was shaking and her breath came in short gasps.

  ‘So rude of me,’ he grunted. She glimpsed the stubbly grey hair on the top of his head as he bowed. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Daisuké, humble servant to His Grace the emperor, the Son of Heaven. I am charged with ensuring the smooth transfer of Edo Castle to the imperial command. At your service, madam. I will do all I can to help you and all the ladies.’

  Sachi couldn’t resist any longer. She was too curious. She raised her head a fraction and peeked at him through her lashes.

  Close up his face was lined and weathered, a little jowly around the cheeks and baggy around the eyes. She could see the pores on his nose, the thick black hairs of his eyebrows. Hairs prickled above his upper lip. His eyes roamed across her nun’s garments, her cowl. He was looking at her as if nothing else existed in the world, studying her face as if he wanted to fix her image in his mind for ever. It was a rather kind face, she thought, not villainous at all. He was not scowling like an enemy or gloating with triumph but gazing at her with a look that was excited and hopeful, sad and despairing all at the same time.

  For a moment their eyes met. His were narrow, slightly puffy, a little bloodshot. She started as she realized they were glittering with tears.

  Behind him the pompous court envoys and generals in their gleaming red and gold surcoats had disappeared. The lower ranks were milling around in a clot of sweaty black uniforms, pomaded ponytails and oiled rifle butts. They were trying to keep their expressions cool and indifferent, like professional soldiers who strutted through conquered castles every day; but she could see the corners of their mouths twitching and the gleam of triumph in their eyes.

  The women pressed their faces to the floor, refusing to let the men see them, but Sachi knew exactly what they were thinking. For ladies such as they, the greatest ladies in the land, to be evicted by this mob of ignorant bumpkins – the ignominy was more than they could endure. Some would go back to their families but many more were vowing to be dead by their own hands long before the seven days had passed.

  There was a rustle. Haru slipped forward on her knees. Her plump cheeks were redder than ever and her lips were trembling.

  ‘My lady,’ she said. ‘I know this man. I can vouch for him.’

  The man spun round. ‘Haru,’ he said. ‘Is it really you?’

  She nodded.

  He turned back to Sachi.

  ‘My child,’ he said. His voice was a groan. ‘My Sachi.’

  She stared at him wildly. He knew her name, her childhood name! She had always thought it was her parents in the village who had given her that name. He could only know it if . . . She looked at his face again, at his eyes, like bitter almonds, barely slanting at all . . . It couldn’t be denied. There was a connection between them stronger even than the bond that united the northerners against the southerners. A bond of blood.

  The last soldiers were straggling out of the great hall, scuffing their feet across the exquisite tatami with its woven gold edging. Their voices an
d raucous laughter, the noxious odours of sweat and clove oil disappeared into the distance.

  ‘I have to go,’ the man said, still gazing at Sachi. ‘But I beg you, let me return. I know you see me as your enemy. Give me a chance, a chance to get to know you.’

  Sachi tried to speak but couldn’t. She was trembling too much.

  ‘Daisuké-sama.’ It was Haru. ‘Please visit us. Her ladyship would like it too, I promise.’

  Sachi bowed stiffly. Haru understood everything, yet it was still a struggle to force out the words.

  ‘You are welcome . . . to come.’

  His eyes lit up.

  ‘Nothing will stop me,’ he said. He bowed and hurried out.

  The women made their way slowly through the labyrinth of rooms. For a while there was no sound except the swish of their quilted kimono hems trailing across the tatami and the trilling of birds in the gardens. Then Haru turned to Sachi. She was dabbing her eyes with her sleeve.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ she said, smiling ruefully through her tears. ‘Is he not the handsomest man you ever saw?’

  ‘Be careful, my lady,’ said Taki in thin clipped tones. ‘He’s not a good person for people like you to consort with. He’s a townsman. He has no idea of proper behaviour among our class of people. He persuaded your mother – a concubine of the shogun – to neglect her duty. Don’t forget that. Don’t be taken in by him.’

  Sachi had never heard Taki speak so disapprovingly before. She was not sure about this man either but Taki’s attitude made her leap to his defence.

  ‘Taki!’ she said fiercely. ‘You forget. He’s my father.’

  Taki bit her lip. With a jolt Sachi realized what she had said – that she had acknowledged their blood relationship, voiced her acceptance of it.

  ‘He isn’t a good man,’ said Taki, setting her jaw stubbornly. ‘He’s a traitor. He’s an Edo man who’s with the southerners. I don’t know what you can be thinking, Haru-sama. If he comes, you can see him, but my lady needn’t ever see him again.’

  ‘My lady’s destiny is intertwined with his,’ said Haru. ‘Now they’ve found each other it’s only the beginning.’

  II

  Seven days to pack up and leave. In seven days it would all be over.

  Sachi was kneeling on a dais, plucking out a melody on a koto. The notes echoed hollowly in the empty room. She was hardly aware of the tune she was playing. Her fingers moved by themselves across the strings. In her thoughts she was far away, outside the castle, up on the hill where the militia was billeted.

  Shinzaemon . . . They were nothing but autumn leaves whirling in a typhoon, the two of them, tossed by events far bigger than themselves. Without him the world was an empty place, a howling wilderness. In front of the others she hid her pain, but she had to force herself to smile and laugh.

  She carried his toggle tucked into her obi. When she was alone she brought it out, raised it to her nose, inhaled his smell. Now she felt it there, pressing against her stomach.

  If only there was some way to get a message to him, to tell him that the castle had been occupied, that she was not going to die. But she couldn’t even tell him where she was going because she didn’t know herself.

  Taki’s voice broke into her thoughts.

  ‘Please, my lady,’ she squeaked. ‘Something different, I beg you. Play something different.’

  Sachi was playing one of the songs they used to sing when they went to view the cherry blossom. She came back to the present with a start and pushed the koto away. The memory of those happy times was too much to bear.

  Already the palace was starting to feel deserted. Haru and Taki were rushing around in a panic, packing as quickly as they could. Carefully they lifted a last kimono off its rack. It was white with a pattern of phoenixes woven into the cloth. With every movement of the fabric fragrance wafted through the room, a complex scent of eight or nine different ingredients – sandalwood, myrrh, a heady hint of fragrant spikenard oil on a base of aloe, with a grace note of some secret ingredient that only the princess knew. The scent took Sachi back to the day when His Majesty had made his last visit to the women’s palace. It was the gown the princess had worn that day. Sighing and brushing away tears from their cheeks, the women smoothed the beautiful robe, then folded it, wrapped it in paper, put it in a drawer and laid it gently in a trunk.

  Footsteps sounded in the distance. Men, stomping unceremoniously through the palace. The women bowed their heads in resignation. They must show a strong face to these intruders.

  The doors slid open. Daisuké. This man who claimed to be . . . who was . . . Sachi’s father. He strode in, tall and burly and commanding, followed by a party of uniformed soldiers.

  Sachi stared at the floor as a terrible idea occurred to her. Maybe everything that had happened was her fault? Maybe it was she, the offspring of an unnatural union of high and low, the shogun’s concubine and a low-class townsman, who had brought this ill fortune on the palace. Maybe it was because of her that these southern barbarians – low-class samurai and townsfolk so base they barely counted as humans – swarmed like a plague of rats into every corner of the magnificent halls.

  ‘We are under orders to inspect the chambers,’ said Daisuké. Sachi detected a note of apology in his voice. Even the princess’s chambers? Surely not. Even these loutish southerners could not be so ignorant of the proper order of things.

  Daisuké clapped his hands and men of the merchant class appeared, bobbing and bowing timidly outside the door. In the old days undermaids of undermaids would have gone to the gates to deal with such creatures. Never in a million years would these men have dreamed of setting foot within the sacrosanct precincts of the palace. They would have been dead, their heads severed from their shoulders, if they had even thought of it.

  Now here they were in their merchants’ garb, dull and drab as the rules required but with a flash of gold at the cuffs, a reminder that for all their grovelling humility they were hugely rich. They crept in, trembling, on their hands and knees, rubbing their noses along the matting, bowing again and again. Every now and then they twisted their heads to steal a glance at the forbidden interior and even more forbidden women. The women shrank back and turned their heads away, trying to conceal their faces from these vulgar eyes.

  Servants scurried behind the merchants carrying lengths of silk.

  ‘To make your days of seclusion more endurable,’ said Daisuké as he presented the gifts to Haru and Taki.

  One servant held a cage of finest paulownia wood, exquisitely carved and embossed, fitted with opaque paper screens in rose-wood frames. A tiny brown bird crouched in the shadows. It cocked its head, blinked a black eye and trilled out a plangent melody, slow and sweet, rising to a passionate warble. In the gardens a wild nightingale took up the song.

  ‘A good omen,’ said Daisuké, smiling. ‘Nightingales never sing when people are watching. But he sings for you.’

  Sachi bowed. The little bird’s plight reminded her all too fiercely that she too was about to lose her freedom. She murmured a poem:

  ‘Taguinaki

  Were it not for

  Ne nite nakazuba

  The peerless sweetness of its song

  Uguisu no

  The nightingale in its cage

  Ko ni sumu ukime

  Would never suffer

  Mizu ya aramashi

  So harsh a fate.’

  For a moment she looked up at this face – her father’s. The sags and bags were kindly but there was something disturbing about him too. It was the way he looked at her, she thought, the fiery intensity of his eyes.

  There were other gifts – an urn of the finest Uji tea, boxes of rice cakes stuffed with bean jam, last season’s Edo oranges. Sachi had been dreading this visit, fearful he was going to make demands, try to persuade her to do this or do that. But he didn’t. They sat in silence, puffing on long-stemmed pipes, listening to the nightingale’s song. Little by little she was getting used to his presence
.

  Haru was leaning forward, gazing at Daisuké bright-eyed as if she was afraid that if she once took her eyes off him he would disappear back into the shadows from which he had so unexpectedly emerged. Every now and then Taki glanced at her with a frown of irritation on her thin face but Haru seemed not to care.

  ‘It must be . . . eighteen years!’ she said suddenly, then clapped her hands over her mouth and turned a deep shade of red, glancing around as if the words had burst out of their own accord.

  ‘You weren’t much more than a child when I saw you last,’ said Daisuké, smiling. ‘You haven’t changed, not one bit.’

  Haru flushed even redder. Sachi smiled to herself at the thought of plump-cheeked Haru, with her heavy face and forehead covered in fine lines, being like a child.

  Daisuké was staring into the distance.

  ‘This palace,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I used to come here even when I was just a boy. Climbing around the roofs – roof after roof after roof. Checking the lead tiles – hundreds of thousands of them. Then there were the beams, the support pillars, the joists, the floors, the transepts . . . There was so much that needed seeing to. My father was so proud we had the contract. We had the sign outside our shop: “By appointment to the shogun”.’

  ‘We weren’t supposed to see you,’ said Haru. Her round face was wreathed in smiles. ‘As far as we were concerned you didn’t exist. That was the theory, anyway.’

  The faintest of scents spiked the air, a mysterious silky odour like the perfume of some great lady. Musk, aloe, wormwood, frankincense . . . The candle flames flickered and a whorl of dust spiralled in a corner. Was someone else there with them? A beautiful woman dressed in the gorgeous overkimono of a concubine?