Chapter 1

The madam blocked the doorway and weighed the silver. Eighty taels, good in purity and full in weight.

Yujiao, my own younger sister, rested one hand on the cloth merchant’s arm and swayed into the house like a willow in the wind.

I stood blankly before the sedan chair.

Thirty-five of those taels had been mine.

But until I was redeemed, any silver Madam Chun saw belonged to her.

Behind me, the bearers spoke awkwardly. “Miss, if you would move aside? We must find another fare.”

The chair left. Madam Chun glanced at the boy guarding the door.

He gave me a tiny shake of his hand.

I understood. Though I stood outside, I could not run.

The Crimson Bower kept a massive hound from the Western Regions, fed on raw meat and trained to be savage. It was not there for show.

If a washed-up courtesan were torn to death, her end would make a fine warning to the others.

Carrying my thin bundle, I obediently went back inside and walked all the way to my narrow, shadowed room.

Perhaps I would never leave it again.

As the new top courtesan, Yujiao occupied the grandest room in the house.

Yet that night she specifically ordered the boy to prepare the room beside mine.

Those rooms stood on the dark side of the building, shoddily made, their plank walls paper-thin.

Every sound carried.

I sat hugging my knees while a woman shrieked and moaned next door and a man bellowed along with her.

After five years, such filthy clamor still turned my stomach.

Fortunately, I had swallowed nothing but a little tea, so there was nothing to bring up.

Near midnight, the sounds subsided.

A cricket chirped twice in the lonely corner.

I thought of the cloth merchant, Wang Debao: short and squat, with a coarse face and the manners of a common peddler despite his little shop. He did not look like much.

Few women in the house would receive him except someone as faded and unlucky as I was.

Even when I did, we merely talked through the night.

An old injury had robbed Wang Debao of his virility. But his business prospered and there was money at his waist, so he came here to keep others from laughing at him as less than a man.

At the end of each month, after collecting his accounts, he would stop by for tea and pastries. I massaged his shoulders while he spoke of his late wife.

Sooner or later, he always cried.

She had married him at sixteen, he said, and been the best of wives. She bore him a daughter and a son and worked tirelessly, only to die just as their circumstances improved.

No one cherished the children, and their careless father left them in ragged clothes and shoes.

He could afford another wife, but once the bride-price was paid and she crossed his threshold, who knew what face she might show when no one was looking?

“Brother Wang,” I said, “bring me some cloth next time. I will make the children a few things.”

He thanked me over and over, calling me elder sister with every breath.

He did bring cloth, but he was so careless he had forgotten to take their measurements.

I made him show me their heights, cut two outfits by guesswork, then pieced together scraps left from the madam’s sewing jobs to make two pairs of shoe uppers.

Watching me sew beneath the lamp, he suddenly called my name with extraordinary gentleness. “Qiu Niang, you cannot stay here forever.”

I went still.

Sparks glimmered in the ashes of my heart.

Patrons always avoided speaking of redemption with courtesans. Marrying a respectable woman cost far less than marrying one of us.

Money meant nothing inside a brothel.

A grown girl sold as a servant fetched sixteen taels at most.

Even someone as unlucky as I was cost eighty to redeem, to say nothing of gossip sharp enough to kill.

He knew how to reckon money and had said it anyway. He must have meant it.

Oh, to leave the trade and the upside-down nights of the Crimson Bower. To live on an ordinary lane, cook three meals a day, sew through the changing seasons, and watch the children grow—how peaceful, how comforting that would be.

The eighty-tael price exceeded Wang Debao’s expectations.

Only when I brought out the thirty-five taels I had saved did we settle the matter.

And then my own sister shattered that lovely dream.

I sighed.

The noise began again next door.

For a man like him, Yujiao was exerting herself astonishingly hard.

Perhaps she had even given him some costly aphrodisiac.

What did she want from him?