There was another girl in the street selling herself. She looked no more than seventeen or eighteen, in the full flush of youth, yet she knelt straight-backed in the busiest street in Kyoto in a dull hemp mourning dress with a blade of grass stuck in her hair. Beside her, on a broken mat, lay the body of her father. "My name is Afeng Hanamura," she kept saying. "My village was flooded. My father and I came to the city to seek kin, but on the road he fell ill and died. I beg you all to help me bury him." There were plenty of people on the street, but almost no one stopped to listen. Floods had ruined the harvest, and these days it was common to see people selling daughters, wives, servants, even themselves. No one found her story unusual enough to hear to the end. Only a middle-aged man drinking tea in a nearby teahouse took an interest. He sent the waiter over with a few coppers to bring the girl to him. She stood before him with her face lowered, repeating the same tale. He studied her while blowing across his tea. She was poorly fed, but her bones were straight and her features were not bad at all. At last he set a silver ingot on the table. "Enough for a coffin," he said. "Bury your father, buy yourself decent clothes, and then come to Master Chen's house in the east of the city." The girl stared, stunned, until he rose to leave. Then she dropped to her knees and struck her forehead to the ground in a proper bow.
With the money he gave her, Afeng buried her father properly, even hiring monks to chant over the grave before she changed her clothes and went to the great estate she had been told to find. She had inquired on the way and learned that the man was a wealthy shipping boss with more money than he could count and no shortage of servants. Buying her had probably been no more than a moment's whim. The old house steward with the beard led her to a small room and warned her never to enter the north courtyard. If she did not understand something, she was to ask Lan, the maid she would share with, and in general to speak little and work hard. The north courtyard was not exactly abandoned. In fact it looked large, bright, and almost new. What made it seem desolate was the rank growth of weeds all through the ground. Even the wall of the little room where Afeng and Lan slept was choked with wild grass from that side. Lan was delighted to have company and admitted that she had always been afraid living so close to the north courtyard by herself. Afeng asked no questions at first. She followed Lan through days of washing, mending, and starching, and though the work was hard, it gave her food and a place to sleep, which was more than the street had offered. Yet before long she began to feel the old life pressing at the edges of memory. In the countryside her father had been a schoolteacher. Their home had not been rich, but neither had it been poor. She had grown up like a proper little daughter of a decent family. Her marriage had even been arranged already. She was supposed to be married that winter. Who could have known a flood would come and sweep the whole future away?
Many nights, after Lan had long since fallen asleep, Afeng lay awake staring into the dark. On such nights she would think of the women in the big house, all those mistresses and young ladies in glossy silk who did no washing and no mending and never worried over a full stomach. Once, unable to bear the room any longer, she slipped outside. The north courtyard at night was terribly still, so still that even insects seemed afraid to sing. Along the wall she suddenly saw blossoms she had never noticed by day: balsam flowers, glowing faintly in the dark. Their petals were delicate pink, and when she bent closer she discovered that they grew not from her side at all but through a crack in the wall, as if the flowers themselves were crossing over from the forbidden courtyard. Lan called her from inside, and Afeng quickly broke off a few stems and dropped them before returning to bed. For reasons she did not yet understand, she did not want Lan to know about the glowing flowers. Later, after enough coaxing, she learned a little of the courtyard's history. The north courtyard had been built only three years before for the third mistress, the one Master Chen had liked best. But the woman had died young and never had the chance to enjoy it. The servants were forbidden to speak of her. Still, Lan whispered that the dead third mistress had been fond of staining her nails with balsam juice, and that a whole patch of the flowers had once been grown just for her.
By then something had already begun changing in Afeng. One night she used the balsam flowers herself, crushing them for their pink stain and painting her nails with the juice. The effect was astonishing. The color made her hands look suddenly fine and tender, and somehow, along with the bright pink on her nails, her whole face seemed to change too, as if a hidden loveliness had stepped closer to the surface. She did it again the next night, and then the next. Before long the master's eye fell on her. The poor flood girl who had been bought as a servant became, almost without understanding how it had happened, the new fourth mistress of the house. She moved into the north courtyard. Lan was transferred to serve her there. Afeng ordered the courtyard carefully cleaned, but she would not allow a single one of the wild flowers or grasses near the outer wall to be disturbed. She even had the crack in the wall repaired once she had made sure she could still reach the flowers from within. She needed the north courtyard's silence. She needed the balsam flowers. The servants began whispering at once. They said the new fourth mistress was growing more and more like the dead third one. Lan pretended not to hear until her old friend Chunhong, who worked in the west garden, showed her a rolled portrait hidden atop a cabinet. The woman in the painting had narrow brows, delicate eyes, and ten fingers stained pink with balsam dye. In her hand she held a round fan, and behind her bloomed clusters of balsam flowers. Lan looked from the portrait to her new mistress and felt the blood turn to ice. The resemblance was no longer something she could laugh away.
By the end of summer the north courtyard had become a place no one entered lightly. The weeds had been left to grow half wild, and under the slant moon the whole yard seemed to breathe in silence. Because the new fourth mistress liked quiet, even the guards rarely came near. One night Lan woke to the faint sound of the door. Peering from the window, she saw at first only blurred weeds silvered by moonlight and small lights flickering among them like fallen stars. Then a woman moved through the grass. Her long black hair hung straight down her back, and both hands shone with fresh pink balsam stain. In the moonlight she seemed half transparent, like a ghost risen from the ground. Lan nearly screamed. She knew those hands, knew that silhouette. It was not the dead third mistress after all, but the living fourth one, Afeng herself, moving with the lightness of a cat through the overgrown courtyard, plucking the glowing balsam blossoms and collecting them in a little bamboo tube. Terrified, Lan buried herself beneath the covers. The next morning, perhaps from fear, perhaps from envy, perhaps from a foolish wish to borrow a little of that same magic, she stained her own nails. Afeng discovered it while Lan was dressing her hair. What followed was a storm of rage. Hairpins and brushes flew. Afeng slapped her hard enough to split the skin of her cheek with one painted nail and screamed that she had no right to imitate her. Lan stumbled out weeping and furious, clutching the burning side of her face. Behind the door, Afeng stared into her mirror and saw at once what had frightened her so badly: without the fresh balsam stain, she was plain again. It was not that the dye merely beautified her. It changed her. With it, she could become another woman. Without it, she was only herself, and she no longer knew how to live as that girl.
Autumn came, and still the balsam flowers in the north courtyard bloomed. One night, after Lan had long since gone to bed with her cheek half-veiled, Afeng rose as usual with a bamboo tube in hand. But before she reached the flower beds, a voice spoke behind her. It was Master Chen. He had come silently into the courtyard and was glaring at her with eyes already red with suspicion. He asked what she was doing wandering at midnight with wine in her tube. She stammered that she was only taking a walk, that the tube held alum for the flowers. He would not hear it. Servants rushed in on his shout and soon turned out her rooms. In moments they found a man's handkerchief hidden among her things, embroidered with the line: Though we have no colored wings to fly together, our hearts beat in perfect understanding. Lan, face scarred and voice trembling, said that the mistress often stared at the handkerchief and smiled to herself. Enraged, Master Chen demanded the name of the adulterer. Afeng could only cry that there was none, that she had no lover, that she came out only to gather balsam flowers. But the more she denied it, the more frenzied he became. His words made the truth plain at last: he had believed the same thing of the third mistress too. He had beaten one woman to death already and meant to do it again. The whip rose and fell. Tied fast, Afeng could not even protect her face. After a dozen lashes she had no strength left even to scream.
Afterward the story spread in pieces, as such stories always do. The fourth mistress had died suddenly, they said. The north courtyard was ill-fated. Two mistresses dead there in just a few years. The weeds always grew back no matter how often they were cut. The balsam flowers bloomed too thick and too bright. Lan, who had served the fourth mistress, was dismissed and sent away, and like the maid before her, she was said to have died on the road home. In the end all that remained was rumor, and another season, and another street somewhere in the city where people were once again saying that a flood girl had knelt beside her dead father, selling herself for burial money. Someone would buy her. Someone would take her into a rich house. Somewhere there would be another north courtyard, another patch of balsam flowers opening in the dark, and another woman learning too late what it costs to become beautiful in the wrong man's eyes.