Fifty Words for Rain(25)

“Yes, little madam.”

On her way out of the room, Akiko leaned down and whispered something in Akira’s ear. The boy looked up from his book, and their eyes met from across the darkened room. And that’s when Nori knew that she wasn’t going to die.





CHAPTER FIVE


    DELPHINIUM




Kyoto, Japan

Summer 1951

Summer began to draw to a close, and the mid-August days were both warm and breezy. Sometimes Akira would cancel a lesson or two to run some errands or go visit some friends in Tokyo. Nori sat by the door until he returned. There was always the fear that he wouldn’t come back to her.

He placated her with trinkets from the city to keep her complaints to a minimum. He presented her with a stuffed rabbit when he returned from a weeklong venture into Tokyo for a violin competition. He refused to tell her whether or not he had won, but Nori did spy a shiny new trophy being carried up to his room.

“I saw it in a toy store window,” he remarked dryly when he handed the toy to a squealing Nori. “It was the last one, so don’t lose it because I don’t think I’ll be able to get you another one.”

The stuffed bunny rabbit was exquisite, with snow-white fur and shiny, happy-looking black eyes made of half-moon-shaped buttons. Around its neck was a bright yellow ribbon tied in a bow. When Nori looked closely, she could see that there were tiny suns stitched into the silk.

She named the toy Agnes, after one of the characters in Oliver Twist. Thanks to Akira, who had grown up speaking English as a second language, she was about three-quarters of the way through. When she was still recovering from her illness, he would sit beside the bed and read it to her.

From that day forward, Agnes went everywhere with her. When Nori ate, Agnes went below the seat. When she was in her lessons, Agnes sat atop the piano. Her smile was stitched on—so even when Nori faltered and Akira winced in distaste, Agnes kept smiling.

During one such lesson, Nori joked that if Akira wanted her playing to improve, he should try beating her. She was expecting a laugh, but it did not come. The look he gave her was grave.

“Has she been hitting you?”

Nori was instantly uncomfortable. Stoic Akira she could deal with. Serious Akira was an entirely different beast.

“I mean . . . a little bit.” This was a lie. The beatings had only gotten worse since she’d recovered.

Akira frowned and placed his tea on the end table. “Often?”

“Every . . . week or so. It’s fine, really.”

Akira would not relent. He pressed for details, and she was forced to tell him about the visits from her grandmother and the beatings that inevitably followed. She told him everything—the beatings, the special baths designed to chemically lighten her skin. He listened to her with a hard face.

“That’s not going to be happening anymore,” he said, shoving her weekly assignment—four pieces of music to be memorized and performed—into her hands. “There’s some Brahms in here. He’s new to you. His style will prove challenging, but I expect you to learn it anyway. Understood?”

“I’ll try, Oniichan.”

“I didn’t tell you to try, I told you to do it. Start practicing one of the pieces from last week. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Which one should I practice?”

Akira shrugged as he walked past her. It was clear that his attention had already moved on. “Any of them, all of them. They were all terrible, so you have a lot to work with.”

And on that note, she was alone. She didn’t waste energy thinking about what Akira was going to do. He did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, and the rest of the world seemed to fall in line.

Truthfully, it had become painfully obvious that Akira could have whatever he wanted. If he asked for the moon, her grandmother would probably find a way to bring it to him.

She needed him. Akira was the only legitimate heir. And her dearest grandmother would saw off her own foot before she let it be said that Yuko Kamiza was responsible for the demise of the legacy—though, since Akira had explained to her that the monarchy was dead in all but name, Nori didn’t know what good the legacy would do them now. The kuge nobility that the Kamiza family had come from, the kazoku aristocracy of the imperial court that her grandmother and mother and Akira had been born into—both were gone. Everyone was to be equal now. Cousins to the emperor or rice farmers, it made no difference in the new Japan.

Akira told her that wasn’t going over very well.

Why Akira explained things to her, why he cared what happened to her, was still a mystery to Nori.

She knew that her best hope was to be an amusement for him. Many years from now when they were both grown, he would be a very important person. Though the peerage and all hereditary titles had been officially dissolved after the war, many people still believed in the power of blood. Besides, the wealth and reputation of their family still carried a great deal of weight. Akira might no longer be called a prince or a duke, but he was still going to be treated like one.

And she would probably still be here, in the attic, watching the flowers bloom and die.

Nori shook her head to clear it. Such thoughts served no purpose other than to depress her.

She did not dwell too much on her mother, or her future, or the gaping, bottomless pit of emptiness that resided inside her chest where her heart should be. She had learned, in the years that she had spent here in utter isolation, not to think too much. Because if she did, she likely would have dashed her head against the ground until her brains spilled out to form a watercolor on the hardwood floor. And so Nori counted what she had and kept the rest at a distance, in a place where it could not destroy her.