Lady Samurai

Chapter 52

They talked until late in the afternoon; after the initial shock and exclamations of surprise they settled down and each in turn told their story.

He shared his last memory of her. "After I pushed you on some floating debris, I went briefly underwater. When I resurfaced, you had disappeared..." He was saying in a faltering voice. "I despaired. I thought you had tried to dive after me and had drowned. After that I lost my will to fight. I let the water pound on me, but, surprisingly, I was still floating. Eventually, I was bashed on the rocks and left broken on a beach. That's where I was found by a young boy..."

"Hikaru." She breathed, already guessing.

"Yes. He pulled me out of the water. I was delirious and by this point didn't care what would happen to me... He came here and begged the monks for help. I was nursed to health in secret, but I had lost my sight and my leg never healed properly. There was no hope I could ever go back home, not with these injuries and Sakoku in force. So I stayed... Hikaru hid my presence from his father, but he visited often. He was probably curious about Gai-Jin." He smiled. "Eventually, I started teaching him English, predicting perhaps that it might come useful one day." He fell silent for a long while, lost in the past. "My child, but how is it possible that you are here?"

Now it was her turn to recount the story, as she had told it to Hikaru all those months ago.

"I was happy here, living a simple, but peaceful life. Yet, as the years passed, I couldn't suppress the deep yearning for my real mother and I decided to go back home. However, on my arrival in England I found no one..." Her voice broke a little and she had to pause. "To my horror, I discovered that hearing about our assumed fate mother had miscarried her baby and died soon after from a broken heart." She paused, knowing that this news would be as painful to him as they had been to her. Indeed, he wept for his wife and unborn child, while she held his hand between hers.

Only after a long while Lottie was able to continue. "I was seventeen and had neither family nor the means to survive. I would have been forced to seek help from your relatives in Norway; it would have been difficult and humiliating, considering that they never wanted to have anything to do with us, but I found out about my uncle Gilbert in America. I lived with him for nearly ten years, until this spring, when he was killed and I was framed for his murder..." She paused, once again struck by the magnitude of the loss. "I had to run away. Then luck, or fate, or... the gods sent me an American ship going to Japan... Pappi, Sakoku is crumbling away as the Shōgun is losing power and the Emperor moves to regain it. We might yet be able to go home!"

"How do you know all this? And how you are here? With Lord Takeda?" He asked again, with incomprehension.

"I returned to Japan as an interpreter for the official negotiations between the Shōgun's representative and the American government. The Americans got the rights to trade in Japan and I believe it is only the beginning. Sakoku will not survive with the pressure from all the western nations."

"And Hikaru?" He pressed further, guessing perhaps that Lottie was reluctant to talk about it.

"This is a very complicated story. Maybe we should leave it for another time?"

"No, I need to know everything." He could hear reluctance in her tone. He touched her face, tracing the contours of her cheekbones, then feeling her clothing and the two samurai swords.

"Yes, Pappi." She sighed, accepting his authority as her father. "I met him in Kanagawa, south of Edo, where the negotiations were going to take place..." She started quietly; suddenly shy to talk to him about her intimate relationship with a man." I saved his life in an assassination attempt. At least this is what we believed at the time. As it turned out they had actually tried to kill me, to delay the talks. But Lord Takeda must have suspected I was still in danger and insisted on offering me his protection. We..." She hesitated briefly. "We became very close for a time." She was as succinct as possible. She paused to see his reaction, but he just sat there, with a benevolent expression, waiting for the rest of the story.