The False Persimmon Tree

“Land good for farming, I still haven’t the first idea about. Making the fertilizer, that’s done. Ah! If I mix the fertilizer into the soil, does that turn it into land good for farming? Then what’s the orange fruit about?”

Dong-hui chewed the information over and over.

“The fruit of the false persimmon tree has to be blanched in boiling water to draw off the astringency and then roasted before you eat it?”

But she had never once seen an orange fruit anywhere near Grace Castle. Tomorrow she would just have to ask around and track the thing down.

The Komo trees had turned up quickly enough once she started asking, so there was bound to be somebody among the household staff who knew where the false persimmon trees grew.

The next day broke, and Farmer arrived to report on how the reclamation of the wasteland was coming along.

Handsome mentioned that the man had reached Grace Castle before sunrise and been waiting ever since, and Dong-hui shook her head. Farmer was, exactly as his name promised, a thoroughly diligent farmer.

The moment the lord stepped into the study, Farmer sprang up from his seat and bowed respectfully from the waist.

He looked far more at ease, far surer of himself, than on the day he first set foot in Grace Castle. Her eyes kept straying to the hair that mounded up over his crown like a head of broccoli, but Dong-hui made every effort to keep her attention on what he was saying.

“You haven’t gone without breakfast again and been sitting here starving all this while, have you?”

Dong-hui raised an eyebrow at him, and Farmer waved both hands like windshield wipers on a rainy day as he answered.

“No, my lady. The butler gave me warm soup and good bread the moment I arrived, so I have eaten my fill.”
“Have you? Well done, that.”

Dong-hui looked over at Handsome and gave him a thumbs-up, and Handsome ducked his head, embarrassed, and scratched at his hair.

Farmer insisted he was perfectly willing to give his report standing, but Dong-hui made a point of sitting him down on the sofa opposite and pushed the cup of warm tea Anna had brought across to his side. Farmer, a lowly creature by his own reckoning, could hardly believe her ladyship would be so considerate as to sit face to face with him and talk with him, and the thought brought the tears stinging to his eyes. In that one moment the resolve rose in him, all on its own, to give his utmost to the work her ladyship had entrusted to him.

“The reclamation of the wasteland has come along about a quarter of the way now. We mixed the fertilizer Helsa brought into the dry ground, and, astonishing as it is, the land turned fertile at a great speed.”

Farmer’s voice shook even as he reported to the lord, as though he still could not believe it however often he turned it over. The more he spoke, the redder his face grew. In all the years he had lived as a farming man, it would be no exaggeration to call this the most moving moment of them all.

“Is that so?”

Scrooge and Handsome, hearing him out, made no attempt to hide their own pleasure; they looked at each other and broke into broad smiles.

Dong-hui was every bit as pleased. She had expected the fertilizer to need time set aside before it was ready, and hearing that it had come out straight off was as strange as it was delightful.

“All the same, keep watching it a few days more. There’s no telling how it may change again as time goes on.”
“Yes, my lady!”

The status window was obnoxious and it needled, but it had never once told her a lie. So Dong-hui had no doubt that the wasteland, where dry dust puffed up at no more than a breath, would turn into rich, oily soil.

She had not turned so much as a handful of that ground herself, and yet somehow she felt as though she had become the greatest farmer who had ever lived.

“And what family have you?”
“I have a wife, and two sons and two daughters, my lady.”
“They will still be young, then.”

She said it remembering that Scrooge had put his age at thirty-one.

“Yes, my lady. The eldest has just turned ten. The youngest is a little over a hundred days old.”

“With so many children, it must have been hard for you all this while. I am sorry to have been such a poor lord.”

“N-no, my lady, not at all! Please do not say such a thing. When I think of the kindness my lady has shown us of late…”

All at once Farmer stopped short, and his lower lip began to push out in a pout.

“What’s the matter?”

“When I think of the kindness… Kh-hup!”

Lower lip jutting, mouth clamped shut, Farmer let out one short whining sob, and then the tears came down in fat drops.

“D-don’t cry. What are you crying for.”

A full-grown man sat in front of her spilling tears like a child and sniffling, and Dong-hui, at a complete loss, shifted about in her seat.

“This kindness… hh-uuk. Until the day I die, hu-hu-huuuk, never—!”

Farmer’s shoulders heaved as he wiped the tears away with his sleeve. Watching him cry, she could feel how hard the years must have been for him, and it made her heart ache.

She remembered the month she had no money for the rent and rang the landlady to beg for a little more time.

Everything in front of me went blank back then, and I really did want to die.

To think that Farmer’s past had been one long chain of days like those made her heart heavier still.

“Forgive me, my lady. Making a fool of myself so. Hu-huuuk.”

Farmer struggled to get the crying under control, could not manage it, and kept burying his face in his forearm.

She was waiting in silence for him to settle himself when another sniffle came from beside her. She turned her head toward the sound and found Handsome snuffling. He had his eyes stretched wide, holding it in so as not to cry, but he could not hide the red tip of his nose.

Chloe, you sinful woman.

Once again Dong-hui swore to herself that she would feed these people white rice and meat soup at every meal.

After Farmer the crybaby had gone, Dong-hui turned to Scrooge, whose nose had gone red along with everyone else’s.

“You said you had lived here a long time, did you not?”
“Yes, my lady. From the moment I was born I have lived on the Grace estate, without a break.”
“Your family have been treasurers here for generations, so I dare say you have.”

The bookshelves she had seen in Scrooge’s room not long ago came back to her. The old account ledgers filling one whole wall had been like a second self to him.

Dong-hui’s eyes went to the new notebook he was gripping like a lifeline. Grace Castle’s finances had improved, and the work had made its treasurer several times busier than before, but there was far more life in his face for it.

“Yes, my lady.”

Watching him with quiet satisfaction, Dong-hui thought that Scrooge of all people might know where the false persimmon trees grew.

“Do you happen to know of a fruit about the size of a fist, orange, with a bitter taste to it?”

Scrooge narrowed his eyes to slits, thinking a moment, then opened them wide.

“Ah! Might my lady mean the false persimmon?¹”
“Yes! That’s it! That’s the one!”

The name of the fruit had come straight out of him, and Dong-hui was so glad she sprang up out of her seat. Her heart was thumping away.

“My lady means the tree that bears an orange fruit about this big, does she not?”

Scrooge made a circle the size of a baseball with both hands as he asked, to be sure that what her ladyship had in mind and what he had in mind were the same thing.

“Yes, that’s it, that’s the one! Is there one in the garden too, by any chance, like the Komo trees?”

If there were one in the garden, how fine that would be. She asked it full of hope, but Scrooge shook his head.

“There were, once, but there are none now.”
“Why not?”
“However well they were tended, every one of them dried up and died before long once it had been moved into the garden. However much water they were given, it made no difference. The false persimmon begins to die the moment its roots come out of the ground it first grew in. It can never be transplanted.”

Expectation turned to disappointment in an instant.

“Then do you know where I should have to go to see one?”

All Dong-hui hoped was that it would not, please, be far.

“Has my lady not seen them?”
“Where are they?”
“My lady passed right by one of those trees only yesterday.”
“What? No, I didn’t see anything.”
“There are dozens of them growing along the outer wall of Grace Castle. And in the village too, of course.”

Now that he said it, she rather thought she had caught a glimpse of them. Yesterday, though, every scrap of her attention had been on land to farm, and the trees on the outskirts of Grace Castle had never so much as registered.

While Dong-hui groped carefully back through her memory, Scrooge’s explanation went unhurriedly on. Handsome knew it too, apparently, and nodded in agreement each time Scrooge spoke.

“The fruit may not be fit to eat, but the bark is of considerable use, so they are not hard to come across here and there.”
“Really? What is the bark used for?”
“It is used for the washing, my lady.”
“The washing?”

Never once had such a use crossed her mind, and Dong-hui’s voice went up in surprise. She was turning over what might be done with it when the blue status window flashed up before her eyes without warning.

Hidden Points! Oh yeah!

While Dong-hui let out an inward whoop, the status window’s explanation went on.

Push the Hidden Points up good and hard, why don’t you, so my happiness index rises sharply too.

Dong-hui looked at the status window with her whole heart in it and thought the words like a prayer. The window pretended not to have heard and went on saying only what it wanted to say.