Free The Fire Kimono by Laura Joh Rowland Page B

some questions about what’s happened. Do you feel up to that?”
    “I suppose so.” But she looked ill and exhausted.
    Sano wouldn’t have forced her, except that they had no time to lose. Lord Matsudaira was probably working to ruin them already. “Hana-san, will you leave us for a few moments?”
    Reluctance compressed Hana’s mouth, but she started to rise. Sano’s mother said, “Please, I want Hana to stay.”
    For moral support or protection against him? Sano had never thought to find himself interrogating his own mother who was accused of the crime he was investigating. He could see in her face that her feelings toward him had changed: He was no longer the same son she’d borne. He was the authority, a danger.
    “Please don’t be upset,” Sano said, “but I have to ask you: Did you kill Tadatoshi?”
    “No!” Hurt encroached on the fear in her eyes. “I’m innocent. You don’t believe him, do you?”
    Sano supposed that any woman arrested, dragged out of her house, accused before the shogun, and threatened with death would be afraid, even if not guilty. “Believe Colonel Doi? Of course not. But why would he make up that story?”
    “… I don’t know.”
    Sano noticed the hesitation before she answered, the glance she and Hana exchanged. “Do you know Colonel Doi?”
    Although she wouldn’t meet his eyes, she nodded.
    “How well?”
    Hana said, “Tell him.”
    “Tell me what?” Sano said, mystified.
    His mother sighed. “Colonel Doi and I were once engaged to be married.”
    Sano’s body didn’t register the shock. His breath didn’t catch; no blow landed in the pit of his stomach. It was as if her words had fallen on a cushion whose stuffing had already been punched out by earlier revelations about her. But he felt a sensation like a knife piercing the core of his spirit. That his mother had been engaged to Colonel Doi, and he hadn’t known, put to question everything he’d believed about their family.
    “When was this?” he asked.
    Sadness and shame clouded her face. “Before I met your father.”
    He’d thought his father had been the only man in her life. He knew it was stupid to be jealous on his father’s behalf, or his own. His father had been dead eleven years; nothing could hurt him. And Sano had no claim on his mother before his birth. But emotions were often neither rational nor controllable.
    “Did my father know?” Sano asked.
    “Yes.”
    “And neither of you ever told me.” Anger gathered heat in Sano. The engagement didn’t mean his mother and Doi had been involved in any unseemly way, because most marriages were arranged, and betrothed couples were barely acquainted until their wedding day. But Sano felt as if her prior engagement was a violation of her marriage to his father and their family.
    “We didn’t think it mattered,” she said weakly.
    “What happened with the engagement?”
    “It was broken.”
    “Obviously.” Had it not been broken, she couldn’t have married Sano’s father. “Who broke it? Your parents or Doi’s?”
    Her gaze turned vague. “It was a long time ago. I don’t remember.”
    “Do you remember why it was broken?”
    “… No.”
    Sano beheld her with disbelief. The breaking of an engagement was a serious matter. In this instance it had resulted in his mother marrying a poor ronin and losing her place in high society. Sano doubted that even after more than forty years she’d forgotten.
    “What did Colonel Doi think about the broken engagement?” Sano asked.
    “Must we talk about this?” Her voice was querulous, her face wan.
    “If you expect me to save you, I have to figure out what’s going on,” Sano said. “You have to work with me.”
    She closed her eyes briefly, as if wanting to hide from him. “I’m sorry.”
    “All right, let’s forget Colonel Doi for now,” Sano said. She’d already given him a possible clue in that direction. If Doi had been upset about the broken engagement and nursed a grudge all