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another house”.’ Their mother shook her head and laughed sadly. ‘The daughter of Fujino of Gion, getting married. Whoever would have imagined that? Some of my friends married their lovers but not me, your father never chose to take me as his wife. I’ll always be a geisha. But my Haru a bride, imagine! And you too, Taka. You’re going to school and you will be a bride too. Soon no one will ever know we’re of geisha stock.’
    Kneeling with her back gracefully rounded, Haru looked more like a great lord’s daughter than a geisha. Taka couldn’t believe she could be so grown up, so calm and collected. ‘If it was me going off to be married I’d be desperate to know what my new husband was like!’ she cried.
    ‘They’re a respectable family, they’re of the highest rank and he’s an upright man with excellent prospects. The go-between assured me of it.’ Fujino savoured the word ‘go-between’. Taka knew how proud her mother was that she’d had Haru’s marriage properly arranged, just as respectable samurai families did. It was a union of families, not a spur-of-the-moment geisha alliance. ‘He’s had the family thoroughly investigated, through several generations. There are no financial problems, no hidden scandals, no insanity, no reasons for worry.’
    ‘I’m looking forward to putting on my wedding kimono and going off in my lacquered palanquin,’ said Haru quietly. ‘Though I am a little worried that I might not meet the family’s expectations. I hope I’ll be able to satisfy my mother-in-law.’
    She twisted her small hands. She was actually very nervous, Taka could see that now. To be sent away to marry a man she wouldn’t even meet until her wedding day … Taka knew that her mother had only the best of intentions for both of them but it was a terrifying prospect all the same.
    Secretly, in her heart of hearts, Taka wished her own life might turn out more like her mother’s, or like the lives she read about in romances and the diaries of court ladies of long ago. She daydreamed about exchanging verses with a mysterious gentleman on a moonlit night, as Lady Sarashina had done hundreds of years ago, or having a secret tryst in the overgrown grounds of a ruined mansion, like Ocho and Tanjiro in
The Plum Calendar
, or being consumed with forbidden passion like the lovers in kabuki plays who killed themselves because it was the only way they could be together.
    Or perhaps she would run away with one of the imperial guards, the dashing young men with their cropped haircuts and uniforms with shiny buttons who had filled the house when her father had been there. She used to admire them from a distance. There was one in particular who’d been tall and quiet and rather intriguing. She could see that he was her father’s special confidant, though he was far too grown up to pay the slightest attention to a child like her.
    She knew that in reality geishas were no happier than wives, that her mother was often lonely and missed her father and wished she could go back to Gion. But at least she and Taka’s father cared for each other. From what Taka’s schoolfriends said, samurai wives hardly ever saw their husbands. But in the end it made no difference what Taka wanted. Her life was not in her own hands. Soon she too would be sent away, like Haru, to marry a man she didn’t know. That was what happened to samurai daughters, which was what she’d now become.
    ‘I’m going to miss you, Haru-
chan
,’ said Fujino, sighing. Her eyes swam with tears. ‘It’s going to be so quiet when you leave. First your father, now you. I don’t know how I’ll bear it.’
    ‘Will Father come back for Haru’s wedding?’ Taka asked softly. She knew the answer. Of course he wouldn’t.
    It seemed so long since she’d seen her father. She did her best not to think about it, to forget his absence, but now, unexpectedly, she remembered his big comforting hands and bulky body and large square face, as sharp and