As one who while still a girl had been loved by a man thirty years her senior, who had continued to coddle her ever since, Suga was too irrevocably the child-woman to feel motherly love for a man her junior by ten years. To eyes familiar with Yukitomo, Konno as a man was hopelessly lightweight, lacking completely in the more dignified masculine qualities. At first, indeed, she had thought so little of him that it would probably never have occurred to her even to make such a comparison, yet as he began to show his malice towards Tomo both his face and his body, shallow and insubstantial though they were, began to produce a strong though different impact on her.

Konno knew that Suga suffered from chronic hemorrhoids that caused her pain and fever, an affliction all the more distressing because she would not tell others of her trouble. So, being friendly with the pharmacologist in a drugstore, he would bring some Chinese herbal infusion that she had never heard of and give it to her when no one was about. Whenever she tried to pay for it, he would push the money away from him with the fingers of his pallid hand spread wide as he walked away.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ he would say. ‘What’s more important is that Her Highness will make a fuss if she hears, so don’t tell anyone you’re taking it.’

In anyone else such behavior, with its suggestion that she was not properly loved by her protector Yukitomo, would have aroused Suga’s indignation, but the medicine that Konno gave her was carefully transferred to a can and duly infused and drunk as though it were something very precious.

‘That’s an odd-smelling medicine – are you sure it’s not the stuff they put in the bathwater?’ Yukitomo would ask at times half-teasingly, but she would smile blankly and reply:

‘My sister-in-law sent it from home. It’s good for my usual trouble,’ she said. ‘I wonder what it’s called?’ The melancholy ghost of a smile that rose to one side of her face at such times had an almost uncanny air of coquetry; it was the closest she would ever get to avenging herself on Yukitomo.

In the other house, Miya was presenting her husband with another child almost every year, though there was no guarantee that among the five there was no offspring of Yukitomo’s. Michimasa in his near imbecility never dreamed of the true relationship between his father and his wife, but the mere necessity of guarding the secret had earned him during the past few years a kind of generosity from his father that he had never known before. By now the house at Tsunamachi was for Yukitomo not so much his son’s home as a secret love nest.