Her spoon stopped its aimless circle. “You think it too extravagant?”
“Spend whatever you like.”
The spoon went back to its slow swirl. She took a small bite. He didn’t know why he was sitting here. He had work, Dojun’s and his own, but he just kept sitting, gazing at her hands, her neatly parted hair, her pink-and-white striped skirt: drinking in her presence.
“I thought, perhaps, an Oriental motif would be attractive,” she said. “Would you like that?”
“Anything you want. I don’t care.”
He was aware of the churlishness of his reply. For her to be present now, at a risk he couldn’t calculate, couldn’t believe in and couldn’t discount—he didn’t want it. He didn’t want her at the house in particular. His instincts shouted at him to lock her into a room and mount ten guards at the door; his reason and his training agreed with Dojun’s terse advice: that any guard at all, any indication that she was of interest or value, would be mistaken.
He didn’t want her here, and he sat losing himself in the sound of her voice, the sweet drift of inconsequential talk: what colors did he think might be attractive in the curtains, was it going to be possible to find an experienced cook at reasonable wages, did he know whether it was likely that wallpaper would not stick in the climate, as Mrs. Richards had warned her?
He felt the pull of it. The gentle seduction of her interest in his opinions. The delicate beguilement, the simple affinity. She was staying. All she spoke of was a future, in his house, as his wife.
The ice cream had melted in her dish. Outside the dining room, a sunset blazed and faded in the soft air that flowed through the open windows. Still she trifled with the spoon, her conversation gradually dwindling, until they sat silently amid the clink of glasses and murmur of other voices.
“Perhaps, if you have no business this evening—” She looked at him from under her lashes, “—you might like to take coffee in our suite?”
He thought it unlikely that she was in any jeopardy. And he thought: if he stayed, he would know she was safe. He nodded briefly and stood, pulling out her chair.
The suite was the largest in the hotel, with high ceilings and a sitting room suitable for a royal reception. Huge bouquets of flowers in Chinese vases adorned every table. The coffee had mysteriously arrived ahead of them on a silver tray—the boy poured and served, and vanished.
Samuel prowled along the floor-length windows that opened onto the lanai. Anyone could walk in here, with no effort whatsoever. It wouldn’t require the stealth of a baboon.
Leda sat with her coffee, illuminated only by the light from a red paper lantern filtering through the half-closed Venetian blinds. It gave a rose tint to the cream-colored gardenias in her lei, and left her skirt in shadow.
“Why did you come back?” he asked.
She stirred sugar around and around in her cup. “Because it would be wrong of me to leave.”
“I told you that you were free to go.”
Her mouth took on a small, stubborn curve. “That does not make it right and proper that I do so.”
“You should have gone.” The blinds rattled as he snapped them closed and open. “Damn it, I’m not—I can’t promise—” He tilted his head back. “God, you saw what it would be like! Get out of here, go away, you don’t have to stay with me.”
“Marriage is a solemn vow,” she said, with a trace of defiance. “I don’t see how I am to comfort, honor, and keep you in sickness and in health if I am not in the reasonably near vicinity.”
“It was a farce!” He swung to face her. “Would you have made any vows if you’d known?”
She stood up. “It was not a farce. I will not have you say so!”
“You’re too admirable! A regular saint.”
“I daresay that you mean to be sarcastic. I daresay you’ve forgotten common cordiality in your regret that I’m not the person whom you hoped to wed.”
“I don’t regret that,” he muttered.
“Do you not? I suppose I’m to believe that you’ve only been treating me to an ingenious imitation of the fact. And there,” she exclaimed, turning away, “you’ve made me lose my temper and lower myself to mockery also. I hope you may be satisfied!”
He gazed at the distorted reflection of himself in a convex pier mirror. He could see her warped image behind him. “I don’t regret it,” he repeated. He stared at the spiral of colors in the mirror until his vision seemed to go dim. “I don’t regret it. I love you.”
Blood suddenly began pumping hard through his body. He felt himself hanging in midair, ten feet off that bottomless cliff, no footing underneath him.
“I know that doesn’t change anything,” he uttered sharply, throwing himself back toward solid ground. “I don’t want you on this island. I don’t want you in my house. Do you understand? Is that clear?”
The mirror reflected immobility. Impossible to see her expression. The palm trees in the grounds outside made a clattering rustle in the breeze that stole through the transoms and the blinds.
She spoke gently. “Dear sir—I’ve never thought of you as muddleheaded, but it seems a very muddleheaded thing to say.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Just forget it.” He walked through to the bedroom, intending to check there for points of entry.
As he stood in the dusky rays of lantern light, scowling at the mosquito-netted bed and the same ludicrously vulnerable floor-length windows, she came up behind him. “I really don’t think I shall be able to promise that.”
“Forget it! Stay. Go. Do anything you like.”
“I never wished to leave at all. I love you very much also, you see.”
He shot her a glance. “My God, your manners are impeccable, aren’t they? ‘When a gentleman declares his affection,’” he mimicked her aphorisms ruthlessly, “‘a lady should instantly respond with a suitable lie—pardon me—a suitable “prevarication,” in order to save him looking a complete ass.’”
She gazed at him, and then lowered her head. “You think—that what I said—isn’t true?”
“I think that knowing what you know about me, it’s impossible.”
She remained looking at the carpet. “Everything I know of you is admirable.”
He laughed out loud, fiercely. “Right.”
“Everything,” she said.
“You know, don’t you? She told you.”
She lifted her eyes. He waited for her to say something, braced himself for it, but she only looked at him with a tender, patient gravity.
The shaking was there in his gut, just below the edge of feeling. He stood still, forcing it out of his muscles, fighting it. His throat held onto words.
“I love you, dear sir.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It is not impossible.”
Air seemed to come hard, as if he had to think, to remember to draw each breath into his chest. “You don’t have to say this. I’ve told you; I’ve told you that you don’t have to say it.”
Her chin tilted up. “Nevertheless, I do say it.”
He made a furious move away. “You’re wrong. You’re lying. You—cannot.”
“I do not wish to grow heated upon the subject with you.” She kept her chin lifted obstinately. “On our wedding night, Lady Tess mentioned to me several things which she felt were relevant to our—to our union. She said that you would not like it, and I see that you don’t. I’m very sorry if you feel that it is a character defect in me, but I found, and still find, that nothing of what she said—and nothing that I have learned in my acquaintance with you—nothing, dear sir!—could make me feel anything but—” Her voice began to lose its steadiness. “But a deep regard and respect for you. My very dear sir!”
The shudder inside him threatened violently; to shut it out he reached for her. He dragged her close to him. “Even this?” He brought his mouth down on hers, kissed her hard, gripping her arms with a force he knew would hurt.
The crushed gardenias in her fading l
ei filled the air with heavy fragrance as he held her tight to him. He slid his hand downward and molded her body. His fingers found the provocative valley at the base of her spine. He rubbed his thumb and fingers up and down in it, pressing deep through the pink-and-white skirt, pulling her lasciviously against his already turgid sex.
Deliberate crudity and instant passion, his tongue in deep penetration…he pushed her away as suddenly as he’d seized her.
In the rosy shadows, she was tousled and pretty, her eyes wide.
“Yes.” She turned away and smoothed at her cuffs. “Even that. Because—I am half-French, you see.” She bent her head over her hand. “And I know it would grieve you to hurt me on purpose.”
It grieved him. It revolted him. He wished to cradle her and smooth her hair, but he did not dare touch her. She wouldn’t want it; she couldn’t; what being half-French had to do with it he didn’t hope to understand. It was just Leda, she would say such things, nonsense and innocence—stubborn, gentle, resolute, oblivious innocence, to know what was inside him, what he had been and what he was, and call him admirable.
To say she loved him.
He felt afraid when he thought of it.
What if I’m afraid? he’d asked Dojun once, a long, long time ago. And Dojun had said: Afraid? as if he did not know the word. Fear comes of fighting against. Always go with, not against.
And long ago, he’d understood it. In a fight, become the situation; be with the adversary.
He didn’t understand now. He looked at Leda and felt everything inside him flame and fuse and flow away, flow out the cracks in himself, until there was going to be nothing left.
She looked over her shoulder at him. “I wish, dear sir, that you would stay here with me tonight.”
Too vulnerable, this hotel room was too vulnerable. He glared at the window blinds. “I’ll wait in the parlor while you change.”
A glad smile spread on her lips. She ducked her head. “Of course. I won’t—that is—you need not—I’ll only be a few moments!”
He walked into the parlor. At the door, he stepped outside into the lantern light. The paper lamps swung softly, alternately, shedding circles of illumination along the length of the wide lanai. At the far end, a couple stood looking over the fairy-like lights of the grounds. Samuel appraised them: haole and innocuous, residents from one of the other islands on holiday. New bars of light fell on the lanai floor as the electric lamp came on in Leda’s bedroom.
He watched the white drift of waiters over the lawn, looking for a certain essence of movement, a telltale balance, like the animal grace of Dojun’s natural stance. He saw nothing but a Chinese server scolded for bringing an ice water instead of a lemon ice.
Sometimes he thought that keeping zanshin was like dying calmly. It was like dying to give up desire, and doubt, and self. To become a shadow, and move freely in the dark.
Tonight, it was like drowning deliberately in a frozen ocean. The slow burn of ice, from his fingertips to his limbs to his brain, until sensation was gone. Until he felt nothing.
The bedroom lamp went out, leaving only the swaying rings of lantern light.
He moved back into the suite and closed the door, not bothering to lock it. He went silently to the bedroom. She’d drawn the mosquito netting all around the bed, a pale canopy falling from the ceiling.
He used that as camouflage for his white linen. He leaned against the wall where his clothes would blend with the netting from the angle of the door and windows.
“Sir?” Her voice came softly from the bed.
“Go to sleep. I’ll be here. I won’t leave.”
A dark shape sat up within the gauzy tent. “Are you not…you’re not going to come to bed?”
“Go to sleep, Leda. Just go to sleep.”
For a long time, she sat up. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, but he could never really see her face. Finally, she lay down amid the pillows. It was two hours later, and the soft laughter and talk from the lawn and the verandas had all died away, replaced by white moonlight that crept in laddered strips across the floor, before her even breathing told him that she’d fallen asleep.
Thirty-four
Leda woke to the sound of the surf, very clear in the early morning when no wind moved the trees. The endlessly sweet air of Hawaii kissed her skin; outside the open blinds, the blazing scarlet spikes of a poinciana tree waved gently against deep green shade. She felt happy and bewildered, a little dazed, gazing up at the gathered netting above her head.
The bedroom was empty, but she heard someone moving in the parlor, and the faint chink of china. Without stopping to put up her hair or even find her slippers, she pushed aside the netting and went to the door in her gown.
“Good morning!” she said warmly, before she saw that it was not Samuel.
“Aloha.” Manalo’s mellow voice greeted her. He rose, a self-composed giant next to the pig-tailed Chinese who was just setting out the breakfast tray. “Aloha! You eat, bumbye, I gonna take you up house. Haku-nui, he say come.”
“Oh. Oh, dear!” Leda realized she was standing in the doorway barefoot and undressed—not that the typical dress of the Hawaiian ladies was much different from her nightgown, except more colorful. She popped the door shut and padded to the bathroom. She began to wash her face, as if it were any normal day.
As if, when she looked in the mirror, she could keep herself from smiling, her cheeks pink from scrubbing and pleasure. As if it were not the day after the night when he’d said that he loved her.
He loved her. He had said so, quite audibly. She was certain that she was not mistaken.
And then, in the next breath, just as certainly, had said that he wanted her gone. Proud and bitter, wounded.
She gazed at her reflection.
Miss Lovatt had perhaps been right to warn her. Decidedly, matrimony was a risky thing. A most painful, joyful, perplexing institution.
To find his quarry, Samuel followed the trail backward, extending gentle feelers: nothing too anxious or ardent, simply expressing a mild interest in who was interested in him. It was only what he’d have done in any case. In the golden, twilight world of Chinatown, it would have been considered strange—and stupid—if he’d ignored the thing.
It had taken only a few days for the path to lead to this wide-beamed water barge anchored off a low, scrub island in the expansive harbor of Pearl River. That the trail hadn’t led into the plantations, where he might have lost it so easily among the streams of new laborers, was lucky, and indicated that these men lacked ties among the Japanese who came on contract, to make ends meet, to feed and clothe families at home. Their connection was with another echelon of society entirely, one that had no need or desire to leave Japan.
Silence was a tangible element on Pearl; silence, aquamarine and silver in the angle of light on the smooth water. Samuel’s companion, a half-Hawaiian, half-Portuguese fisherman who could be trusted to hire out his boat and keep his mouth shut, sat with his bare feet elevated and his hat pulled down over his eyes, emitting a gentle snore every few minutes.
Beyond that, the only noise was the occasional carillon of old tin cans strung in a manifold network across the rice paddies, jerked by some small boy stationed in a lookout shack in order to frighten plundering sparrows. Samuel kept his own face in the shadow of his hat, fishing diligently, looking less at the barge than at the situation; the angles and avenues of approach.
His adversaries hadn’t worked too hard to conceal themselves—but then, they didn’t need to. It was a good position, an easy lookout on all sides, hard to breach even with a nighttime attempt. There were four men on the barge; he knew of three more in the city; beyond that—it was questionable how many there were. The men onshore reported to one “Ikeno” on the boat. Pointless to speculate whether that was his true name or not. Japanese tended to change names anyway, with a frequency that baffled foreigners, bestowing on themselves a new identity for anything from the assumption of some new post to the attainment
of a life goal.
No doubt Ikeno had his new name all picked out for when he reunited the Gokuakuma. And he, or whoever he worked for, had tinder for the flame in Japan: proposed treaty revisions that gave more rights to the West and enraged the nationalistic sentiment, while the government teetered back and forth debating the unprecedented concept of a constitution.
High stakes, and a trump card in a demon sword.
The obvious routes of departure were covered by Ikeno’s men; for Dojun to move off the island with the blade as he planned would require a backcountry exit-through the mountains and off some secluded beach in a native canoe; then interception of a larger vessel. Luck and complexities.
Dojun’s problem, he thought. Samuel didn’t know where the blade was hidden; when or how Dojun intended to move it. He only provided cover and protection, and a concealed exit beneath his house to the mountains.
His house, where Leda was happily pottering in and out, furnishing things, while Dojun played houseboy.
Everything was quiet. At suspension. It could last a day. Or a year. Sometime, somehow, Dojun would make his move; transfer the blade from its hiding place to Rising Sea—and escape.
Samuel stared beneath his hat at the barge. The resentment still moved in him, cracking the ice of zanshin. He cared nothing for the safety of the sword; he cared only that the hunters had every reason to believe that he as well as Dojun knew where the blade was located: his London theft could only have appeared to them an aggressive maneuver to possess the mounting.
He shouldn’t have done it. Action and unseen consequence, like Dojun’s starfish. Two threats grew from one cut in half. Their adversaries would be looking for weakness, leverage. Dojun had none. Samuel had it all. Leda’s mere existence gave it to them. Everything he did to protect her would make her appear more important to him. The house was not absolutely safe; the hotel was impossibly worse. And if Dojun got away with the blade in secret—then where was the end of it? Would the hunters ever know for sure that the blade was gone? Would they ever be certain enough to leave here completely, to believe Samuel had no knowledge of it, to cease to be a threat to what he’d tangled his heart with?