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arrived from Cloud of Sparrows Castle.
    Okumichi no kami Kiyori, warrior and prophet, the revered Great Lord of Akaoka for sixty-four years, was dead.
     
     
     

2
American Beauty Rose
     
     
A favorite samurai saying proclaims, “First thought on waking — death. Last thought before sleep — death.” This is the wisdom of fools who have never given birth.

Instead of accepting a weakling who sees only death in blood, find someone who sees life therein.

First thought on waking — life!

Last thought before sleep — life!

Only such a one knows that death comes soon enough.

Only such a one is truly capable of understanding a woman’s heart.

AKI-NO-HASHI
(1311)
     
1867, QUIET CRANE PALACE, EDO
     
    Emily Gibson’s yearning was so great, she awoke every morning to the scent of apple blossoms borne on the wind. It was no longer the memory of the Apple Valley of her childhood that caused the painful emptiness in her breast, nor did the imaginary wind bear that lost fragrance from an orchard on the banks of the Hudson River. She missed the other Apple Valley, the dell that sheltered barely a hundred trees a little more than an arrow’s flight from Cloud of Sparrows Castle.
    That she was able to feel nostalgic about a place in Japan was indicative of how long she had been away from America. It had been more than six years since she had left, and almost as long since she had last thought of it as home. She had been sixteen then. She was twenty-three now, and felt much older. In the years between, she had lost her fiancé, her best friend, and, perhaps most significantly, her sense of propriety. Knowing what was right and doing what was right were two very different things. Emotions were not as easily controlled as logic would dictate. She was in love, and she should not have been.
    Emily rose from her bed, a canopied four-poster in what Robert Farrington, the American embassy’s naval attaché, assured her was the latest style in the United States. It was on his advice that she had ordered it. Her discomfiture with discussing such an intimate article of furniture with a man not related to her was overcome by necessity. There was no one else to advise her on such matters. The wives and daughters of the few Americans in Edo avoided her company. This time, it was not because of her beauty, or, more accurately, not primarily because of it, but because of her excessively close association with an Oriental, which, Lieutenant Farrington told her, was something of a scandal in Western ambassadorial circles.
    “What is there to be scandalized about?” Emily had asked. “I am a Christian missionary doing Christ’s work under the protection of Lord Genji. There is nothing improper in the slightest about our relationship.”
    “That is one way to look at it.”
    “I beg your pardon, Lieutenant Farrington,” Emily said, her shoulders stiffening. “I fail to see any other way.”
    “Please. We have agreed, have we not, that you will be Emily and I will be Robert. Lieutenant Farrington sounds so distant and, well, military.”
    They were in the drawing room overlooking one of the inner courtyards of Quiet Crane Palace. It had been converted to the Western style, at first to accommodate Emily, and more recently to receive Western guests.
    “Is that wise, sir? Would I not expose myself to further scandal?”
    “I do not give an iota of credence to the rumors,” he said, “but you must admit the circumstances make such conjecture inevitable.”
    “What circumstances?”
    “Do you not see?” Robert’s handsome face squinched up in that boyish way he had of unconsciously showing anxiety.
    She wanted to laugh, but of course she did not. While it was something of a struggle to maintain her serious expression, she managed to do so.
    She said, “No, I do not see.”
    Robert stood and went to the doorway overlooking the garden. He walked with the slightest of limps. He had dismissed it as the result of an accident during the