The Last Concubine (39 page)

‘Don’t look, ma’am. Don’t look,’ said the old man, hurrying them on.

But how could Sachi not look? They passed the remains of the great hall where she had sheltered with Lady Tsuguko and Taki that terrible night before rushing out into the snow. The roof had collapsed and fallen beams lay across the entrance. She could still see the pall of smoke and the flames leaping from roof to roof and hear the horrific whoosh as they sucked up everything in their path.

‘We searched and searched,’ faltered the old man. ‘We buried the dead. But by then . . . By then . . .’

The dead . . . Sachi pressed her sleeves to her eyes as memories came flooding back.

Faces floated before her. Her Highness – at least she was still alive, or so the men had told her. Formidable Lady Tsuguko. Haru, dear Haru, her teacher. Sachi’s ladies-in-waiting and her maids and attendants. The fearsome Retired One and her retinue of grand ladies. Old Lady Honju-in and hers. The princess’s withered mother, the Old Crow. Lady Nakaoka and the other elders. The shaven-headed lady priests. What had become of all those women?

And what of all the others, all those three thousand who had filled the palace, from the highest-ranking ladies-in-waiting, entitled to look upon His Majesty, to the lowest? The administrators, negotiators, office workers, time keepers, seamstresses, fire wardens, errand women, cooks, singers, dancers, musicians, altar-room attendants, kitchen staff, ladies of the bath, scribes, maids in charge of tobacco and hand water, cleaners, guards, maids, maids of maids, maids of maids of maids – what had become of them all?

An icy breeze stirred the ashes and rippled her miserable cotton garments. Sachi shivered. The ruins seemed to be full of the wails of all the women who had died. They had given their lives to serve a man whom most of them would never even see. And then to suffer such terrible deaths – to burn to death in a fire!

She and Taki stumbled on through the never-ending grounds, across streams and bridges, around the boating lakes with lacquered pleasure barges pulled up forlornly on the banks, past gardens overgrown with weeds and pavilions with moss creeping across the roofs and holes in their walls. Much later, across another moat, they saw sweeping roofs and wooden shutters.

‘The Second Citadel,’ whispered Taki. Ninomaru, the Second Citadel, where the widows of past shoguns lived. Was Sachi’s mother still there? Sachi had come all this way in search of her, but now the thought of meeting her filled her with dread.

They skirted building after building until they came to the women’s palace of the Ninomaru. Women guards escorted them
inside and led them through a warren of chambers and corridors. In some, tapers and candles cast a wavering light, in others they fumbled their way through shadows with only the faint glow of the guards’ lanterns bobbing ahead of them to light their way.

Sachi kept expecting to open a door and find a room full of women with their skirts spread like water lilies, sewing or combing each other’s hair. But it was utterly silent. No chatter and laughter, no rustle of silk, no clatter of dishes, no singing and strumming of kotos. The only sound was the whisper of their own footsteps sliding across wooden floors and tatami mats.

There was a musty smell about the place. She noticed cobwebs glittering on the transepts and the corners of the ceilings and draped across the ornamental shelves. So even the honourable whelps – the children who took care of menial tasks, shadowy young girls who didn’t exist as far as noblewomen like her were concerned – had gone.

In the dim light she caught a glimpse of something humped and bristly, like a monstrous hedgehog, in the shadows in a far corner of one of the chambers. The guards hurried her past. Then she saw another behind a door. It was a great mound of brushwood. In chamber after chamber there were heaps of brushwood and bundles of dry grass hidden in dark corners. Instinctively she knew what it was for, and the thought made her cold with dread. So this was the destiny that the gods had brought her here to share.

Finally they came to a set of closed doors hung with giant red tassels. The guards knelt and intoned, ‘Her ladyship, the Retired Lady Shoko-in.’

A door slid open. A woman was on her knees with her head pressed to the tatami mats. Sachi gasped. She knew that plump back and thick hair tied into a simple knot. Every morning, throughout her life at the palace, that same head had been there, bowing at the door to her chamber. Seeing her, the palace no longer felt so strange. She was home after all.

The woman raised her head. She put her hand over her mouth and smiled until her eyes disappeared in the folds of her round pink cheeks. Tears ran down her plump face.

‘Well, I never!’ she said. ‘Well, I never! Your ladyship! I never thought I’d see you again.’

‘Haru! Big Sister!’

‘Welcome home. Welcome home!’

Haru – who had taken Sachi under her wing when she had just arrived, new and frightened, from the village and had made her into a lady; who had taught her how to talk like a lady of the shogun’s court, how to glide with slow, dignified steps instead of bounding like a peasant, how to write beautifully, to eat politely, to sing, to dance, gently explaining everything, correcting her kindly. The day Sachi had been ordered to go to His Majesty’s chamber, it was Haru who had told her what to do and not to be afraid. Haru with her stories and jokes – the tale of the body in the palanquin, the talk of roasted lizard powder and mushroom stems . . .

Sachi tried to speak but tears spilled down her cheeks. Taki was weeping too.

Brushing her sleeve across her eyes, Sachi knelt. She took Haru’s soft hands in hers and held them tight. She needed to be sure this was a real woman, not a ghost. She gazed at her face. There were lines on her forehead, streaks of grey in her hair. Her eyes still crinkled when she laughed, but there was a new sadness in them.

‘Big Sister. Thank the gods, thank the gods. You survived the fire.’

‘Yes, the gods were on my side,’ smiled Haru. ‘And yours too.’

‘Big Sister, where is everyone? Her Highness, how is she? Where are the ladies?’

But Haru didn’t answer. She was staring at her strangely, as if she in turn had seen a ghost.

‘Well, I never!’ she said again. ‘You look just like . . .’

Sachi could imagine what she must look like – like a savage or a madwoman, with her wild hair and gleaming white teeth and shapeless peasant’s clothes.

Haru shook her head. ‘I must be getting old,’ she said. ‘Come, both of you, you must bathe and change. I will notify Her Highness. But . . . how did you get here? How did you manage to cross the city unharmed? I heard it was swarming with southern hoodlums and the entire populace had fled. You should have stayed away. There’s nothing here except death, for all of us.’

Not everyone had left. There were enough serving women still to make sure the great baths were overflowing with steaming water. It really would have been the end if that had not been the case, thought Sachi. Sitting side by side on small wooden stools beside the baths, she and Taki took turns to scrub each other’s back; there were no bath maids any more, and anyway she was used to having Taki around.

‘Come and soak with me, Taki,’ she said.

Having washed off the dirt of the road as thoroughly as possible, they stepped into the scalding water, sank up to their necks and sat together for a while, feeling the tiredness of the journey ebb away. Sachi was grateful for the steam that swirled around, hiding her tears. This was not the home she remembered, this grim echoing palace. She had convinced herself that even though the rest of the world had changed, inside the castle walls she would still find a haven. How wrong she had been.

Shinzaemon . . . Shinzaemon . . . If only he were with her! It was as if a part of her was missing. Without him the world was a desolate place. She felt more forlorn than she could ever have imagined possible.

She tried to picture his face – his slanting eyes, his thick brows, his fine nose, his full mouth. In her mind she ran over every day, every moment of their time together, all the things he’d done and said – the time he had given her the wild orchid, the moment he had said he would go to the village with her. She tried to remember the touch of his palm and his salty smell. She had been foolish to let herself get so caught up but she didn’t regret it at all. It made her happy just to remember being with him.

Taki’s thin hollow-cheeked face had turned peony red from the heat. Sachi could see that she was weeping too.

‘I thought once we got back to the palace I’d be myself again,’ sniffed Taki. She shifted a little and Sachi felt the heat on her skin as the scalding water rippled. ‘I never imagined it was possible to have such feelings for someone. I didn’t know such feelings existed. If we’d stayed here, none of this would have happened. All that freedom went to our heads. That’s what I keep telling myself. We just got carried away, you and I.’

But she and Taki were not the same, thought Sachi. Taki had
never been further than her family home or the women’s palace before. She had never known any other life. It was perfectly possible that being out on the road, mixing with men, really had gone to her head. It had all been so new for her, it must have been utterly intoxicating, so it was hardly surprising that she had fallen for the handsome Toranosuké. But Sachi had grown up far away from the palace and had always known it was not the only world there was.

‘When we got back here I thought it would be like waking up from a dream,’ sighed Taki. ‘But I don’t seem to be able to wake up. I feel as if this is the dream.’

‘It’s like Urashima and the dragon king’s daughter,’ Sachi said softly. ‘Which was real and which was the dream – his village after he had been away for three hundred years or the palace under the sea?’

Taki murmured the first lines of a poem:

Sachi knew it well – a wonderful poem, written hundreds of years earlier by the great poet and lover Ariwara no Narihira. It seemed to chime perfectly with her feelings. Forgetting their gloom for a moment, Sachi and Taki recited the coda together, their voices ringing around the great bath chamber:

Taki sighed. ‘We’ll wake up soon enough,’ she said. ‘We’re not living in a fairy tale. We’re not peasants or children, to follow our emotions blindly. That’s only ever led to disaster. The quicker we disentangle ourselves, the better.’

She was right, Sachi thought. Yet she had not forgotten that the following night Shinzaemon might be waiting on the bridge. After tomorrow night, she told herself sternly. That would be the time to rein in these childish feelings.

After the bath she sat in silence while Taki fussed around her, blackening her teeth and shaving her eyebrows. Before, when she had looked at herself in the mirror, she had seen the glowing face that Shinzaemon saw. Now her reflection was pale and wan.

Carefully Taki painted her face porcelain white, rouged her cheeks and made her mouth small and red like a rosebud, then brushed in two moths’ wings on her forehead. Then she combed and oiled her hair until it swung at her shoulders, gleaming and black. She lifted it strand by strand and held an incense censer under it to perfume it and laid out layer upon layer of kimonos suitable for a widow who had taken holy orders.

Little by little Sachi the village headman’s daughter, the anonymous traveller on the Inner Mountain Road, disappeared. There in the mirror before her was the Retired Lady Shoko-in, the widowed concubine of His late Majesty, Lord Iemochi. Taki made the final adjustments to her robes, tweaking and smoothing the collars until they were perfectly parallel. As Taki helped her into her overkimono, Sachi grew grave and serious, feeling the cares and responsibilities pressing on her shoulders again along with the layers and layers of clothing.

But inside herself she knew she was not that person any more. Beneath the white powder there was colour in her cheeks and a new light in her eyes. She had seen too much, been to too many places. She knew what was expected of her and she would do her duty. Nevertheless she had tasted freedom and she could never be the same again.

Sachi hurried to the princess’s rooms and knelt outside the door, terrified of what she might find and of how she might be received. She took a breath, then softly slid it open.

Despite the heavy silence, she had been half expecting to find an antechamber lined with gold screens, full of gold-encrusted boxes set on lacquered shelves, with crowds of ladies-in-waiting chattering and laughing together, running in and out with lengths of kimono fabric, their magnificent silk robes rustling as they moved. But the room was nearly empty. There were just a few kimono stands with kimonos airing on them, a single kimono chest and a cosmetics box.

The princess was almost entirely alone. She was not even hidden behind screens. She was kneeling at a small table in the middle of the room, holding a brush upright in her thin fingers, writing. She finished the stroke and laid the brush down. Then she glanced around, inclined her head and touched her fingertips to the tatami.

‘I have put thee to much trouble,’ she murmured. She spoke the formal words of greeting in the archaic language of the imperial court. Her voice had not changed. It was that same piping birdlike whisper that Sachi knew so well. ‘Thou must be tired. Thou hast come a long way. What a journey thou hast had.’

She smiled her gentle sad smile and slipped into the language of the Edo aristocrats.

‘Welcome, child,’ she said. ‘Haru told me you were back. Come and sit by me.’

Tears pricked Sachi’s eyes. To see this woman who had always been surrounded by crowds of ladies-in-waiting, who throughout her whole life had never had to do anything for herself – to see her sitting alone like this was too poignant for words.