Laura Rowland - The Iris Fan

“Have you thought about what will happen to her if you’re executed for treason?” Reiko asked. “She’ll be executed, too. It’s the law.” She pictured a little girl who looked like Akiko kneeling on the dirt while the executioner raised his sword over her. The awfulness of the image touched on Reiko’s grief for her baby. She blinked away the tears that were always ready to fall. “If your confession is a lie, it’s not too late to take it back.” Aware that every word she said went against her own family’s interests, Reiko said, “Why don’t you try to save yourself, for your granddaughter’s sake?”

“I’m doing it for her!” Madam Chizuru burst out. Her self-control shattered with an abruptness that stunned Reiko. She rocked back and forth. “Chamberlain Yanagisawa kidnapped her! He said that if I confessed that I stabbed the shogun because Lord Ienobu told me to, he would let her go. I would be put to death, but she would be safe. If I didn’t, or if I told anybody what he told me, then he would kill her!” She leaned over, beat her forehead on the plank floor, and sobbed violently. “I should have kept my mouth shut! Now we’ll both die!”

Reiko experienced an overwhelming astonishment and distress. She’d broken Madam Chizuru’s confession so easily, so exactly against her wishes. For a moment she considered not telling Sano. What if she convinced Madam Chizuru that the best way to protect her granddaughter was to keep Yanagisawa’s threat a secret and let herself and Lord Ienobu be executed for a crime they hadn’t committed? That would be the end of the danger Ienobu posed to Reiko’s family. But Reiko felt responsible for this poor woman desperate to save her granddaughter who was only a little older than Akiko. She couldn’t not tell.

* * *

Marume and the soldiers dragged the shouting, cursing Lieutenant Arai out of the palace. Sano led the way down the hill to a watchtower. He ordered the guards inside to leave. Marume and the soldiers dumped Arai on the floor of the cold, square bottom level.

“I’ll give you another chance to tell me the truth before I take you out of the castle and kill you.” Sano drew his sword. “Are you working for Chamberlain Yanagisawa? Did he tell you to make Madam Chizuru confess?”

Arai leapt to his feet. “No.” Insolence shone through the fear in his glare. “You can’t make me say I did.”

Sano wondered what he would do if Arai wasn’t Yanagisawa’s messenger or wouldn’t admit it. He wasn’t really going to kill anybody … or was he? To kill under circumstances like these was a line he’d always refused to cross. Sano felt a terrifying, disorienting uncertainty. How far would he go to learn the truth about a confession that he would do better to let stand?

How far to uphold honor?

Last night’s doubts, temporarily quelled by a restorative sleep, reawakened in Sano.

There was a scuffle outside. A guard said, “You can’t go in there.” A woman shouted, “I have to speak with Sano- san ! I have something important to tell him!” It was Reiko.

“Are you sure this is where she’s being kept?” Marume asked Sano as they rode across the bridge that spanned the Nihonbashi River. Below them, boats converged on the fish market on the north bank. The sounds of merchants haggling over the catch, seagulls screeching, and the stench of rotten fish drifted up.

“No. He owns several properties that I know of,” Sano said.

They spoke in low voices that wouldn’t carry to the army troops riding behind them through the district known as the Large Post-House Quarter. Stables and lodging houses clustered near the starting point of the four major highways that led out of Edo. The streets were crowded with travelers who had come to rent or return horses and government officials come to hire the fleet-footed messengers who ran messages all over Japan. Sano hadn’t told the troops they were here to rescue Madam Chizuru’s granddaughter. He hadn’t let them hear Reiko whisper to him that Madam Chizuru had admitted that Lieutenant Arai had told her that Yanagisawa had kidnapped her granddaughter and forced Madam Chizuru to incriminate herself and Lord Ienobu.

He was amazed that Reiko had managed to break the confession she wanted to be true. He wished she hadn’t. He, too, had hoped the confession was good.

He’d sent her home with instructions not to tell anyone outside their family. He didn’t want Yanagisawa to find out what she’d discovered. He hoped he could count on help from these troops when the time came.

“I think this is the likeliest place.” Sano confessed, “I used to wait outside the castle for Yanagisawa. Then I would follow him.” He’d been trying to find out what Yanagisawa was up to and why he’d allied with Lord Ienobu. He hadn’t told anyone then; it seemed shameful, his futile dogging of his old enemy.

They stopped in a street, between the neighborhood gates at each end that closed at night to keep the residents contained and troublemakers out. Sano pointed to a low house flanked by two stables and enclosed by a fence that concealed it up to the bottom of its tiled roof. Across the street, trees rose from within the earthen walls surrounding large inns. Sano had seen Yanagisawa use the house for meetings with men who appeared to be spies newly arrived in town, but he’d been unable to get close enough to eavesdrop. Now, as he and Marume and the troops dismounted, servants carried bales of hay into the stables. Sano led the way to the house. It was run-down, with cracked and missing roof tiles. He and Marume peered between the moss-stained planks of the fence. In the side yard, two horses were visible through the barred windows of a small stable. Sano’s heart sank even as it beat faster. Two horses there meant two samurai in the house. This had to be the place where Yanagisawa was keeping his hostage. Otherwise, it would have been vacant.

Marume heaved his shoulder against the locked gate. It broke off its hinges. He and Sano stepped over it and ran up the path, drawing their swords. The half-timbered house with peeling plaster walls squatted in a garden of snow and dead weeds. Sano beckoned the troops to follow. As they neared the door, it opened. They burst in on two samurai in the entryway. Sano recognized them as Yanagisawa’s enforcers-hard-muscled, strong-jawed. When they recognized Sano, Marume, and the Tokugawa crests on the troops’ helmets, they faltered for an instant before they drew their swords and lunged.

“Don’t kill them!” Sano shouted as he parried their strikes. “Capture them!”

Three of the soldiers had already ganged up on one of Yanagisawa’s men. He fell, blood pouring from a fatal gash across his belly. The other turned and ran into the house. Sano and Marume pounded after him, through an entryway that contained empty racks for shoes, down a corridor with rooms on either side. Marume tackled Yanagisawa’s man, then sat on him while Sano wrested his long sword from his fist and his short sword from the scabbard at his waist.

“Chamberlain Yanagisawa will kill you for trespassing on his property!” the man said as he kicked and bucked.

The soldiers, who’d followed Sano and Marume inside, watched with astonishment. One said, “This place is Yanagisawa’s? What the hell are we doing?”

“I’ll explain in a moment,” Sano said. “Tie him up.”

“You should have told us. Now we’re in trouble!”

“Not as much trouble as Yanagisawa,” Marume said.

The troops bound the captive’s wrists and ankles with his sash. Sano asked him, “Where’s Madam Chizuru’s granddaughter?”

“Who?”

Marume kicked the man. “The girl you kidnapped for Yanagisawa.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”