Free The Pillow Book of Lady Wisteria by Laura Joh Rowland Page B

peasants and samurai, gangsters with arms and chests covered by tattoos, and even a few priests in saffron robes. They dealt, shuffled, and flung down cards. Shouts and laughter accompanied the games. Piles of coins shifted, while slovenly maids served sake. Tobacco smoke from the gamblers’ pipes filled the room with an acrid haze that wreathed the ceiling lanterns.
    Beyond a curtained doorway, in the dim back room of the gambling den, Lady Wisteria sat on a straw mattress. Her head was wrapped in a blue kerchief, and her lovely eyes gleamed with anxiety in the light that shone through the curtain. She shivered beneath her cloak as she listened to the clink of coins and the men’s raucous voices. Whenever arguments and curses erupted, she winced. Her fearful gaze roved the bare rafters, the sake urns that lined the walls, and the barred window.
    A day had passed since Wisteria had left Yoshiwara, and she’d traded one prison for another. This pause between her old life and new seemed almost harder to bear than had the prospect of years in the brothel. Impatience unfurled in her like a growing thistle plant. Her solitude frightened her, and she puckered her sensuous mouth in an ironic smile. How often had she yearned for solitude! She’d not anticipated how defenseless she would be.
    The silhouette of a man appeared on the curtain. Alarmed, Wisteria shrank into the corner. Then he flung aside the curtain and entered the room, carrying a large bundle tied in a cloth. He was short but powerfully built, his shoulders broad beneath his cloak, and his calves knotted with muscles in his leggings. His neck resembled a stone column, and his face was all hard lines and angles: slanted brows that met over a bladelike nose; chin and jaws hewn; hair in a topknot crowning a slab of a forehead.
    “That’s a poor welcome,” he said, striding toward Wisteria with a quick, animal grace. His eyes, dark gashes in his face, looked everywhere at once, watching for threats, calculating his next step. “Something wrong?”
    Wisteria breathed easier, though not quite in relief. “Lightning,” she said. “You startled me, that’s all.”
    She rose to meet him, feeling the attraction that his strange, mercurial beauty inspired in her, and fear of his edgy temper. “Where have you been?”
    “Out,” he said curtly, his brows slanting farther downward. “I had business to take care of.”
    He didn’t like accounting for himself to anyone, Wisteria knew. “I’m sorry for asking,” she said. “It’s just that you were gone all day, and I’m afraid to be alone.” In the outer room, a brawl had started; the sounds of punches, crashes, coins scattering, and loud cheering clamored.
    Lightning laughed. “You’re safer than you were last night.”
    Wisteria wished she could believe him. Though she’d traveled far away from the room where Lord Mitsuyoshi had died, life outside the walls of Yoshiwara promised new hazards. The police would have begun looking for her by now. And while she’d escaped her brothel master, she was now at the mercy of Lightning, nicknamed for the way no one knew what he was going to do until it was too late.
    “What’s the matter?” He regarded her suspiciously. “You don’t like it here?” Hurling down the bundle, he advanced on Wisteria. “Don’t like the company either? Miss your fine rooms and fancy friends?”
    “No, it’s fine,” Wisteria said, stumbling backward from the menace in his voice. “I’m happy to be here, with you-”
    “Do you know what would have happened to me if I’d gotten caught smuggling you out of Yoshiwara?” He seized her wrist, and his painful grasp provoked a yelp from Wisteria. “I’d have been arrested, beaten, maybe even killed. I risked my life for you, and you ought to be satisfied with whatever I give you, and not complain.”
    “I am satisfied.” Wisteria hastened to placate Lightning. “I thank you for all you’ve done for me.” Lowering her eyelids,