She opened the letter and scanned its contents. He couldn’t help but notice that in certain lighting, at certain angles, she was looking more and more like her mother. A full minute ticked by before he asked, “Will you go?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Bretagne will be thrilled.”
“You are correct, butthrilledmight not be a full enough word to describe Lucy’s enthusiasm. I’m not sure therearefull enough words in the entire world of languages.”
Her lips curved into a secret smile. A girlish smile that daughters didn’t share with fathers, only with other girls. His heart lifted on a fragile note of hope.
She collected the letter and her telescope and stood. “Good night, Father. You outlasted me tonight.” She bent her willowy form over him and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “An early morning? I should like to begin classes tomorrow.”
Left alone, he continued thinking how like her mother Mina had become.
His first memory was his strongest memory ofher. He closed his eyes beneath the indigo London sky, so like the sky above the Bay of Nagasaki, and allowed it to lead him to that place for the first time in years.
~ ~ ~
The market on the trading island of Dejima was pure bedlam on a slow day.
But the Saturday morning market after a trading ship had docked and unloaded its cargo was a mayhem beyond mere insanity: chickens squawking; goats bleating; horses stamping; fish stinking; traders barking orders; sellers crying wares; customers hustling, bustling, jostling, haggling, dismissing, imploring, leaving, returning, buying, all before moving on to the next stall for another round.
These noises, these crowds, these smells conspired to produce an atmosphere of pure pandemonium that could render the uninitiated claustrophobic within seconds. Add to this intoxicating mixture, pungent spices and miscellaneous goods delivered by the sometimes generous, sometimes miserly, always capricious salty sea, and one had the exact scent of young beginnings.
The twenty-one-year-old Jakob Radclyffe striding through narrow market aisles had long settled into these uneven rhythms of Dejima. Nothing about this world surprised him anymore.
That wasn’t to say the life of a roving sea trader had lost an ounce of its charm. On the contrary. There was nothing life didn’t have on offer for him. It was just that he was confident, as only a youth could be, that he’d seen it all.
That was, until the day he slipped through a narrow gap in the crowd, turned his head as if by instinct, and sawheracross the glassy expanse of a still, shallow pond.
She’d been a vision, poised gracefully over the railing of a footbridge arched above languid, undulating koi, while the crowd around her pushed past, each person eager to complete this or that errand. She had a way of remaining completely motionless that was unique to her.
It wasn’t this, however, that drew his notice. It was that she stood nearly a head above everyone around her. He was a tall man by anyone’s standards, but even from this fair distance, he could see that the top of her head would reach above his chin. Unusual in these environs. There wouldn’t be another girl like her for a thousand miles around.
He decided on the spot that he must have her. Brash, young men based such momentous decisions on less.
When he focused on the pleasant side of memory, he recalled that she’d seemed genuinely amused by his pursuit, granting him a coy smile now and again. She wasn’t only beautiful and unusual, but reserved and gentle, too.
Put plainly, she hadn’t discouraged his pursuit. And his twenty-one-year-old self hadn’t the wisdom to separatenot discouragefromencourage.
A year later, she was dead, and he’d known himself to be a man different from the one he’d thought himself to be. A man selfish, unbearably naïve, and capable of cruelty to his beloved in the face of public humiliation.
A long submerged wave of shame washed over him, pricking his skin with tiny beads of sweat. He’d pushed for too much, too fast. If he hadn’t been such a blind young man, she might have had a different future. She might have lived.
Likely not. It wasn’t the way of thecivilizedworld to forgive such afoolish girl.
At the end, he’d done one thing right: he’d taken Mina.
Protect her, Jakob . . . she’ll have only you . . . only you can do it . . . for Minako, my little Mina.
He had a promise to keep: to protect Mina. Now that he’d secured her school, he would secure her reputation. Tomorrow, he would deal with Jiro, which left only one loose end to tie up tonight: Olivia.
And that must be the end of it, ofthem. He would be able to focus on finding a proper stepmother for Mina, a proper wife for him. Words true in his mind, but ones that were feeling more and more false in his heart. Perhaps if he repeated them to himself, over and over, they would seem less empty.
Perhaps his belief in them would return.
Chapter 19
Olivia tapped the mother-of-pearl face of her newly fashionable wrist watch. Five minutes until ten o’clock. She’d been awaiting his arrival in the quasi darkness of a dimmed lamp since nine-thirty.
