Asagao appears at Yayoi’s door. ‘Naster Suzaku is arriving, Avhess.’

Orito looks at Yayoi who is determined not to cry.

‘Thank you, Asagao.’ Abbess Izu rises with the suppleness of a girl.

Sadaie reties her headscarf around her misshapen skull.

With the Abbess’s departure, air and talk flow a little more freely.

‘Calm down,’ Yayoi tells the yowling Binyô, ‘I have two. Here, greedy one…’

Binyô finds his mother’s nipple at last, and feeds.

Housekeeper Satsuki gazes into Shinobu’s face. ‘A full, happy tummy.’

‘A full, smelly swaddling band,’ says Orito. ‘May I, before she’s too sleepy?’

‘Oh, let me.’ The housekeeper lays Shinobu on her back. ‘It’s no trouble.’

Orito allows the older woman the sad honour. ‘I’ll fetch some warm water.’

‘To think,’ says Sadaie, ‘how spidery the Gifts were just a week ago!’

‘We must thank Sister Aibagawa,’ says Yayoi, reattaching the guzzling Binyô, ‘that they’re sturdy enough for Bestowal so soon.’

‘We must thank her,’ adds Housekeeper Satsuki, ‘that they were born at all.’

The ten-day-old boy’s petal-soft hand clenches and unclenches.

‘It is thanks to your endurance,’ Orito tells Yayoi, mixing hot water from the kettle with a pan of cold water, ‘your milk, and your mother’s love.’ Don’t talk about love, she warns herself, not today. ‘Children want to be born: all the midwife does is help.’

‘Do you think,’ asks Sadaie, ‘the twins’ Engifter might be Master Chimei?’

‘This one,’ Yayoi strokes Binyô’s head, ‘is a chubby goblin: Chimei’s sallow.’

‘Master Seiryû, then,’ whispers Housekeeper Satsuki. ‘He turns into a Goblin King when he loses his temper…’

On an ordinary day, the women would smile at this.

‘Shinobu-chan’s eyes,’ says Sadaie, ‘remind me of poor Acolyte Jiritsu’s.’

‘I believe they are his,’ responds Yayoi. ‘I dreamt of him again.’

‘Strange to think of Acolyte Jiritsu buried,’ Satsuki removes the soiled cloth from the baby girl’s loins, ‘but his Gifts’ lives just beginning.’ The Housekeeper wipes away the pungent paste with a murky cotton rag. ‘Strange and sad.’ She washes the infant’s buttocks in the warm water. ‘Could Shinobu have one Engifter and Binyô another?’

‘No.’ Orito recalls her Dutch texts. ‘Twins have just one father.’

Master Suzaku is ushered into the room. ‘A mild morning, Sisters.’

The Sisters chorus, ‘Good morning,’ to Suzaku; Orito gives a slight bow.

‘Good weather for our first Bestowal of the year! How are our Gifts?’

‘Two feeds during the night, Master,’ replies Yayoi, ‘and one more now.’

‘Excellent. I’ll give them a drop of Sleep each; they won’t wake until Kurozane, where two wet-nurses are waiting at the inn. One is the same woman who took Sister Minori’s Gift to Niigata two years ago. The little ones will be in the best hands.’

‘The master,’ says Abbess Izu, ‘has wonderful news, Sister Yayoi.’

Suzaku shows his pointed teeth. ‘Your Gifts are to be raised together in a Buddhist temple near Hôfu by a childless priest and his wife.’

‘Think of that!’ exclaims Sadaie. ‘Little Binyô, growing up to be a priest!’

‘They’ll have a fine education,’ says the Abbess, ‘as children of a temple.’

‘And they’ll have each other,’ adds Satsuki. ‘A sibling is the best gift.’

‘My sincerest thanks,’ Yayoi’s voice is bloodless, ‘to the Lord Abbot.’

‘You may thank him yourself, Sister,’ says Abbess Izu, and Orito, washing Shinobu’s soiled swaddling, looks up. ‘The Lord Abbot is due to arrive tomorrow or the day after.’

Fear touches Orito. ‘I, too,’ she lies, ‘look forward to the honour of speaking with him.’

Abbess Izu glances at her with triumphant eyes.

Binyô, sated, is slowing down: Yayoi strokes his lips to remind him to slurp.

Satsuki and Sadaie finish wrapping the baby girl for her journey.

Master Suzaku opens his medicine box and unstops a conical bottle.

The first boom of the Bell of Amanohashira ebbs into Yayoi’s cell.

Nobody speaks: outside the House gate, a palanquin will be waiting.

Sadaie asks, ‘Where is Hôfu, Sister Aibagawa? As far as Edo?’

The second boom of the Bell of Amanohashira ebbs into Yayoi’s cell.

‘Much nearer.’ Abbess Izu receives the clean, sleepy Shinobu and holds her close to Suzaku. ‘Hôfu is the castle town of Suô Domain, one domain along from Nagato, and just five or six days away, if the Straits are calm…’

Yayoi stares at Binyô, and far away. Orito guesses at her thoughts: of her first daughter Kaho, perhaps, sent last year to candlemakers in Harima Domain, or of the future Gifts she must give away before her Descent, in eighteen or nineteen years’ time; or perhaps she is simply hoping that the wet-nurses in Kurozane have good, pure milk.

Bestowals are akin to bereavements, Orito thinks, but the mothers cannot even mourn.

The third boom of the Bell of Amanohashira brings the scene nearly to a close.

Suzaku empties a few drops from the conical bottle between Shinobu’s lips. ‘Sweet dreams,’ he whispers, ‘little Gift.’

Her brother Binyô, still in Yayoi’s arms, groans, burps and farts. His recital does not delight, as it should. The picture is flat and melancholy.

‘It is time, Sister Yayoi,’ states the Abbess. ‘I know you’ll be brave.’

Yayoi smells his milky neck one last time. ‘May I feed Binyô his Sleep?’

Suzaku nods and passes her the conical bottle.

Yayoi presses the pointed mouth against Binyô’s; his tiny tongue slurps.

‘What ingredients,’ Orito asks, ‘does Master Suzaku’s Sleep contain?’

‘One midwife.’ Suzaku smiles at Orito’s mouth. ‘One druggist.’

Shinobu is already asleep: Binyô’s eyelids are sinking, rising, sinking…

Orito cannot help guessing: Opiates? Arisaema? Aconite?

‘Here is something for brave Sister Yayoi.’ Suzaku decants a muddy liquid into a thimble-sized stone cup. ‘I call it “Fortitude”: it helped at your last Bestowal.’ He holds it to Yayoi’s lips, and Orito resists the urge to slap the glass away. As the liquid drains down Yayoi’s throat, Suzaku lifts her son off.

The dispossessed mother mutters, ‘But…’ and stares, cloudily, at the druggist.

Orito catches her friend’s drooping head. She lays the numbed mother down.

Abbess Izu and Master Suzaku each carry out a stolen child.

XXIV Ogawa Mimasaku’s Room at the Ogawa Residence in Nagasaki

Dawn on the Twenty-first Day of the First Month

Uzaemon kneels by his father’s bed. ‘You look a little… brighter today, Father.’

‘Leave those flowery fibs to the women: to lie is their nature.’

‘Truly, Father, when I came in, the colour in your face-’

‘My face has less colour than Marinus’s skeleton in the Dutch hospital.’

Saiji, his father’s stick-limbed servant, tries to coax the fire back to life.

‘So, you’re making a pilgrimage to Kashima, to pray for your ailing father, in the depths of winter, alone, without a servant – if “serve” is what the oafs sponging off the Ogawa storehouse do. How impressed Nagasaki shall be with your piety.’

How scandalised Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known.

A hard brush is scrubbing the stones of the entrance hall.

‘I don’t make this pilgrimage to earn acclaim, Father.’

‘True scholars, you once informed me, disdain “magic and superstitions”.’

‘These days, Father, I prefer to keep an open mind.’

‘Oh? So I am now-’ He is interrupted by a scraping cough, and Uzaemon thinks of a fish drowning on a plank, and wonders if he should sit his father upright. That would require touching him, which a father and son of their rank cannot do. The servant Saiji steps over to help, but the coughing fit passes and Ogawa the Elder bats him away. ‘So I am now one of your “empirical tests”? Do you intend to lecture the Academy on the efficacy of the Kashima Cure?’