The Fire Kimono(37)

“What are you doing?” Sano asked.

“Making duck stew,” Hana said, “for your mother. To restore her strength.”

The Buddhist religion outlawed killing animals and eating meat, but made an exception for medical reasons. Hana must have sent for the duck from Edo’s wild-game market.

“How is my mother?” Sano asked.

“She’s asleep,” Hana said. “I hope you aren’t going to bother her with more questions. She needs rest.”

“I won’t bother her,” Sano said. At least not yet. “It’s you I want to talk to.”

“All right.” Hana spoke in the same irritated but indulgent manner as when Sano had pestered her during his childhood. The last drips of blood fell from the duck. She untied it. Holding it by the legs, she plunged it into a pot of water that boiled on a hearth.

“How long have you been my mother’s maid?” Sano asked.

“I was with her when you were little.” Hana swirled the duck in the boiling water. “Don’t you remember?”

“Of course.” Sano waved away the steam, which smelled of wet feathers. But he knew as little about Hana’s past as his mother’s. Hana had always been there, taken for granted; he’d never imagined her as a person with a life apart from his. “Were you with her before she married my father?”

“Yes.” Hana’s resigned, glum air said she’d expected an interrogation along these lines. She pulled the duck out of the pot. It was naked, the feathers scalded off, bits of down clinging to its dimpled pink skin. “Since she was a child.”

Sano asked the questions that had been foremost in his mind all day: “Why did she marry my father? Why didn’t she marry Colonel Doi?”

Hana rinsed the duck in cold water. She shook her head.

“Do you mean you don’t know? Or you just won’t tell me?”

“It’s not my place,” Hana said, thumping the duck onto a chopping board.

Sano was hurt and frustrated by her and his mother’s insistence on keeping him in the dark. “Not even to save her life? Any information about that time could help me prove that she didn’t kill Tadatoshi and find out who did.”

“Her broken engagement had nothing to do with the murder,” Hana said stubbornly as she took up a sharp knife. “Neither did her marriage to your father.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

Hana clamped her mouth so tightly shut that it looked like a walnut, wrinkled around the slit, tough to crack.

“Maybe you don’t understand how much trouble my mother is in,” Sano said. “If I can’t prove she’s innocent, she’ll be executed.”

“I do understand.” The fear in Hana’s eyes said she did.

“She needs your help.”

Hana expertly slit the duck’s belly. “Has she ever told you how we met?” Sano shook his head. “My parents were servants to a family in town. They died when I was ten. I became a beggar. One day I was outside a food-stall in town, eating scraps that people had dropped on the dirt. Along came some rich samurai girls in palanquins. They laughed at me.” Hana plunged her hands into the duck and tore out glistening, pungent red entrails.

“One of the girls got out of her palanquin. It was your mother. She ordered her attendants to buy me a bowl of noodles. She kept me company while I ate, and she asked me about myself. When she found out I was an orphan, she took me home with her. Her parents said I was dirty and disgusting, but she insisted on keeping me. They finally gave in. She saved my life.”

Sano was surprised as well as moved by this tale, more astonished by his mother’s backbone than by her compassion. He’d never known her to stand up for anything. He began to realize where he’d gotten his own tendency to champion the underdog. But what had changed her? Was it only her marriage to his father, who’d been a strict, traditional, authoritative husband?

“Now I’ll do anything to save her life,” Hana said with passionate conviction.

“Anything but tell the whole truth,” Sano observed.

“Anything that will help her. Not telling old tales that won’t do her any good.”

“Let’s try another question,” Sano said. “Were you with my mother when she was a lady-in-waiting at Tadatoshi’s house?”

“Yes.” Hana flung intestines into a bucket, saved the deep red liver and heart.

“Then you knew the people there.”

“I was just a maid.”

Servants knew their superiors better than most other folks did, and Hana was a shrewd observer. As a child Sano had been amazed at how she’d always known everything that went on in their neighborhood. “Who could have kidnapped Tadatoshi and killed him?”