Butterfly's Shadow by Lee Langley

lieutenant proved obstinate and set off to catch up with Suzuki, who could point out to him the best way back to the harbour.
    On board the liner Sharpless greeted his niece affectionately.
    ‘My dear Nancy, welcome to Japan!’
    Mary was his favourite sister, and the girl had her mother’s looks, the same way of wrinkling her nose when she laughed, a mannerism he found endearing. He smiled, taking pleasure in the look of her, the shiny hair, the quick smile, the sense she brought him of an outside world where people were open and direct and said what they thought. He had grown to love this complicated, unfathomable, coiled society; there was a poetry to social intercourse here that turned humdrum exchange into an art form, but just occasionally he yearned for simplicity, the calling of a spade a spade. The American world.
    As they rode through town he made plans for her brief visit.
    ‘You’ll stay at the Methodist mission house, with Mrs Sinclair.’
    Disappointed, Nancy murmured, ‘Not with you?’
    He shook his head, smiling.
    ‘My quarters are hardly suitable. I think I should warn you: Nagasaki has made some progress – look at the paved streets – but conditions are unlikely to match American expectations.’
    He did not add that it had been his own decision to choose a traditional Japanese house rather than westernised accommodation.
    He asked for news from home, but as they rattled along the road he kept breaking in to point out an unusual building, or a view worth noting. She saw with some surprise the affection, even pride, with which he regarded this malodorous, primitive place.
    Only when she was seated across the desk from him did he enquire why she had so suddenly decided to join the ship which brought her to Nagasaki. She gave a small, gleeful jiggle of the shoulders.
    ‘I thought you’d never ask! The trip’s horribly expensive, but Daddy said he never gave me a proper twenty-first birthday present, so this is it.’
    An excited laugh and a wrinkling of her nose. ‘My fiancé is here and it seemed a cute thing to do, to give him a surprise!’
    ‘You’re engaged! I didn’t know—’
    ‘It happened quite quickly.’ She laughed again. ‘He swept me off my feet!’
    ‘And he’s here in Nagasaki?’
    A tray with tea and refreshments edged its way round the half-open door, followed by a young servant. He bowed and placed a small salver with a scribbled note on the desk. Sharpless read it and glanced up at the youth: ‘Lieutenant Pinkerton was here?’
    He heard Nancy cry out in surprise and at once he understood everything. He felt a deadening sense of inevitability: he was about to watch a disaster take place, unable to influence or avert it.
    ‘You are engaged to Lieutenant Pinkerton.’
    She blushed. Sharpless was astonished that in this modern day American girls could still blush, but then he remembered that, despite the flapper dress and cloche hat he was familiar with from the American newspapers, Nancy was not a modern girl. She was the granddaughter of missionaries, the daughter of churchgoing folk, herself trained to be a teacher. She would, of course, have a sense of duty, he thought, and was not comforted.
    Sharpless wondered later whether, had he been at his desk when Pinkerton called, he could have altered the course of events. But what would he – could he – have done? Momentum, once established, has its own imperative; thesituation had moved beyond his power to affect it. There was no runaway horse to be mastered here, no vehicle out of control; just three people moving towards a calamitous impact. Sharpless was a quiet man, not given to emotional extravagance, but he found himself groaning as he contemplated the picture before him.
    In the house above the harbour, Pinkerton felt time stretching like elastic, past and present shifting disconcertingly: now, as on that first time, he felt the ridged tatami mat beneath his feet; saw the way light fell on paper walls; inhaled