Karen Memory

Chapter Eleven

It took us an hour and a half to get to where Merry Lee was supposed to be waiting if we needed our backup plan, because we rode in circles looking to befuddle any pursuit.

Tomoatooah and the Marshal caught up with us about a quarter hour after we all left the dockside, though. Tomoatooah had picked up the Winchester, but he didn’t give it back to the Marshal straight off. He must of leaned out of the saddle and snatched it up off the stones. There was a chip out of the hardwood stock, but it was otherwise serviceable. A deal of what they say about Indians is goose grease, but I’m here to tell you — there’s no goose grease in the stories of how Comanche ride.

And the Marshal couldn’t stop apologizing for having taken that shot at me. “I had no intention of it. But my hand just came around — I just managed to jerk the gun up before the trigger pulled. You must believe me — I could not be more sorry. I have no idea what possessed me. It was as if someone else had control of my hands.”

“I believe you,” I said at last. “I don’t think you miss unless you aim to. And—”

He shot me a sharp look. Miss Francina, off on my left, shot me a sharper one.

“I might know something about it,” I allowed. “Let’s talk later, when we’re dry and not looking for killers on every corner.”

Aashini might of fallen asleep against my back. Or she might just be huddled up like a mouse in the faint warmth of the oilcloth. Miss Francina’s shirt was plastered to her body, transparent as a jellyfish. Even the horses was grumbling with the wet and cold, and half the time we was picking down the darkest alleys imaginable and they was practically feeling their footing out with their whiskers as they went. The lit streets wasn’t any better, seeing as I kept expecting Bantle’s bullies to jump out and confound us.

Me, my shivering was half on account of I couldn’t stop thinking of the shame and horror I’d felt after Peter Bantle broke down Madame’s door. I could see that reflected in the stricken look Marshal Reeves kept shooting me.

And I also couldn’t stop thinking about how sure Priya’d been that all sorts of people might vote for Bantle, whether he seemed like the right choice for the job or not.

I reined back beside the Marshal and reached out between horses — and way up, given the relative heights of Scout and Dusty — to put a hand on his arm. Wet wool rubbed my fingers, and his startled glance rubbed my face.

“I think maybe I got an idea what’s going on,” I said. “But let’s talk about it back at Madame’s.”

He nodded. I could tell that much by the bobbing of his hat against the lesser dark of the walls behind him. When I let Scout head forward again — she was pretty obviously the lead mare in this bunch, for all Dusty was a sight bigger — I caught the speculative look Tomoatooah was giving me under Dusty’s neck. Maybe he thought I had designs on his partner.

Maybe he was just wondering how much I knowed.

* * *

When we got to where Merry Lee was supposed to be waiting if things went cattywumpus, she was nowhere in sight. We rode up under an awning, though, glad for a bit of shelter from the constant drip drip of the rain. It didn’t have the decency to really belly up and piss down on us. I missed the thunderstorms back in Hay Camp something awful. Here in Rapid, it just rained. There weren’t no romance nor suspense to it.

We paused there, and it was quiet just long enough for Aashini to start to uncoil against my spine. I could feel her back there, all bones and elbows. Skinny enough to take a bath in a shotgun barrel. She straightened and poked her head up but didn’t otherwise move. All of the rest of us just started exchanging unsettled looks. We had no way of knowing, see, if Merry Lee had gotten clear, or if she had fallen off a rooftop, or been gobbled up by a hidebehind or a gumberoo, for that matter. (Though I didn’t rightly know if such critters of the lumberwoods ventured this far into town, not having grown up local. I’d heard the polar bears in Anchorage would walk right up to front doors, so people laid nail strips across their porches to prevent it. But our own native hodags back in Hay Camp are shy and won’t come out where people can see ’em.)

We was in among some of those premade cast-iron buildings, the ones they ship in on barges and can get up in three minutes with the big armatures if they’re being paid by the piece, not the hour. They sure is pretty, though, with their big fine windows and slender columns, and the painted iron on the front makes for a fine, elegant facade. All those curlicues and rosettes was casting funny shadows in the gaslight, though, and I was full of evil thoughts. I saw every flicker of motion as evidence of Bantle and his bullies, heard every shift of rain as stealthy footsteps.

And the damn rain just kept dripping down, dull and unpunctuated.

Unlike the rain, it turned out, Merry Lee had a fine sense of the dramatic. I was just getting antsy enough with the waiting that Scout started stamping and tail-swishing from catching my nervousness when Merry came spidering down a cast-iron drainpipe on one of those tall buildings just exactly like someone who hadn’t had a bullet dug out of her back three weeks previous.

“She’s gonna rupture herself,” Marshal Reeves muttered as Merry set her boots neatly in the mud and turned to face us.

“Good to see you all,” she said. Her cap of short hair was plastered down. As she came up by Scout, her eyelashes glittered with raindrops in the gaslight. “You got our friend away safe?”

The funniest thing is, by then I had to wake Aashini up to explain to her that we were handing her on to Merry Lee. She’d fallen asleep with her head on my shoulder, and as I turned in the rig and shook her gently I wondered how long it had been since she’d had an uninterrupted kip. I’m sorry to say it, but after everything, her blinking awake, bleary and terrified — and then sharply grateful when she saw my face and that of Merry Lee — that right there might of been what it took to crystallize my hate for Peter Bantle from something hot to something cold and despising. I felt mean and recognized that mean, because the only other time in life I felt that way was about the colt that killed Da.

Difference being, the colt was a colt and didn’t deserve a ration of loathing. But Peter Bantle was a man.

I handed Aashini down and slid after, Scout waiting patiently while we sorted ourselves — though she allowed herself a little ear flicking and a snort over the clumsiness of riders.

“This is Merry Lee,” I told Aashini when she’d gathered herself a little. The men — and Miss Francina, who was dressed to look like a man — stayed well back in what was most likely a wise decision. “She helped your sister Priyadarshini, and she’s like to help you. Will you go with her?”

Aashini looked back and forth between us. I didn’t doubt she understood me well, because whatever expressions crossed her face, confusion wasn’t one of ’em. She seemed to weigh what I said, and then she answered, “You give me a choice?”

“From now on,” I said, “you have choices. I can’t bring you home with me, though — Madame wouldn’t like it.”

She flinched when I said “Madame,” and I thought I knowed why. She pictured someone like Bantle. It didn’t seem like the time to argue with her, so I let it slide.

For a moment, she chewed her ragged thumbnail and considered. I’d given her my oilcloth, and along with Miss Francina’s coat it made her look like … not so much like a waif as a ragged old tree with a ripped-up tent draped over.

Then she nodded. “I’ll go with Merry Lee,” she said.

* * *

The Marshal and Tomoatooah — and Scout and Pongo — even got Miss Francina and me home in time for breakfast. For Connie’s breakfast, that is. Not for the house’s. Connie gets up earlier than everybody.

We drew up on the street above, opposite the upper-floor windows. When I swung my leg over the cantle and slid down Scout’s side, though, I nearly fell down. Sure, my legs ached — a year out of the saddle will do that to you. But more than that, my whole belly ached with loss. I hadn’t felt a grief like that since Da died, and I didn’t rightly know what to do with it. So I buried my face in the mare’s pied mane for a bit and I gave her a big hard papa hug.

So maybe I could stand to be around horses again. Or maybe this horse, anyway.

For her part, she craned around and knocked my hat back on its strings to whuffle my hair, so that was all right then. The rain ran down my back, but I was so soaked already, who cared?

In truth, I had to hang on to her neck for them other reasons, too. It had been a good long time since I’d sat a horse, and the insides of my thighs were telling me all about it. I’d never had a lot of sympathy for the saddle sore before now. But it sunk in just then that maybe I’d just never felt real saddle soreness, having about grown up on a horse and been hardened off at a young age.

“I’ll see to getting the horses back to the stable,” Tomoatooah said to Marshal Reeves, “if you want to take the ladies inside.”

The Marshal nodded. Miss Francina took my arm and guided me toward the ladder. Just looking at it made me bite my lip in anticipation, given that I was walking like somebody’d dropped red-hot iron wires down the inside of my bloomers. But I still heard Tomoatooah ask the Marshal if he wanted him to leave Dusty and the Marshal allowing as how she probably needed a hot mash and a rubdown more than another hour in the rain.

“I’ll walk,” he said, and even managed to sound cheery about it.

Somehow, we made it down the rain-slick ladder — I’m not too proud to admit I whimpered some — and into the kitchen door. Connie about dropped her spoon when she saw us, or in particular Miss Francina in her male clothes. But Connie gathered herself up fast enough and pretty soon we three was seated around her kitchen table with rags for our hair and with no questions asked, but plenty of hot coffee and hot biscuits and butter and honey being parceled out. Connie’s kitchen gadget scrubbed and sliced and stirred and scraped, its octopus arms going every which way, and Connie herself presided and tasted and spiced and tweaked the knobs. I’d have thunk the clattering would drive her mad, but she just kept on smiling and lifting pot lids to sniff.

I don’t know when Connie sleeps. Maybe she’s related to the Marshal.

Speaking of sleeping, I knowed I needed to go upstairs and wake Priya and tell her her sister was safe and with Merry Lee. But I just didn’t have the strength in my legs to walk up the stairs, or the strength in my heart to make myself do it anyway. Some coffee, and a biscuit or two, and a sit and I’d make myself get on up there. My legs would be screaming all the more when I got up again, I knowed. But maybe my moral fortitude would of regenerated. And if Priya was asleep, well, it weren’t hurting her any to wait.

I thought about Scout and sipped my coffee. I had nearly four hundred dollars in gold and silver saved. I figured I needed a thousand to be safe, to buy my ranch and stock it and keep it running. I didn’t think Tomoatooah would sell me Scout. But maybe someday he’d sell me one of her fillies.

I’d ridden a horse that night. And it hadn’t broken me wide open to do it.

That was as comfortable and comforting in my belly as the coffee was, and I clung to it so as not to start crying over having to give Scout back to Tomoatooah. I always did fall in love hard and quickly. Da used to worry about it so. I remember this one sickly orange kitten.…

But that’s a terrible story, and I don’t feel like telling it today. I’d rather think about Molly, and Priya, and Scout.

Connie was kneading loaves on the other end of the table — she could have had the gadget do it, but she swore the results weren’t as good. I watched her muscles play under medium-brown skin as she put her weight into it. Miss Francina was watching her own hands on the coffee mug, staring down her long nose like a hunter thinking over a jump. The Marshal was watching Connie, too, but from the faraway eyes and the little smile on his lips, I thought maybe he was thinking about another woman somewhere else. He’d said something about his wife … his Jennie. That was her name. His Jennie.

I wondered what it was like for her, being married to a man gone so often and so far away, dodging bullets and hunting bad men. I wondered how she trusted he’d come home or if she had plans laid in case he didn’t.

Miss Francina sighed but didn’t look up. The Marshal had one hand under the table, and I could see he was fingering the strap securing his pistol. He frowned and looked down, as if his reverie were broken. I wondered if he was feeling that same filthy grief I had, after I nearly grabbed the shotgun away from Effie.

I thought maybe I should manufacture some conversation.

“Why do you think the cribs was guarded like that?” I asked. It wasn’t what I had intended to say … but I wasn’t actually sure what I had intended to say and it was the easiest to talk about of all the things that was weighing on me.

“Not to keep in the girls,” Miss Francina said. “They got bars on the window for that.”

Connie could hear every word, of course. But she was Connie, and never a more trustworthy soul was hatched. She gave us a look, though, like she was thinking hard about what we said. In case she had some answers squirreled away somewhere, like the chocolate she could produce at any provocation.

“He’s hiding something,” the Marshal said. “Something … more than just the killer. He’s got an armed camp there, and those whores are just … camouflage. Moneymaking camouflage,” he amended.

“I hope,” I said softly, “that Aashini’s strong enough to make it.”

The Marshal frowned more deeply at his coffee. “You ever seen a three-legged dog? Most times they get around just fine.”

“I don’t follow,” Miss Francina said. But she looked interested.

The Marshal seemed to realize then what his hand was doing and resolutely plucked it up and reached for another biscuit. It steamed as he broke it open, which encouraged me to take a third myself. It was every bit as fluffy and fantastical as the first had been.

Connie, still working away, didn’t look up as I complimented her. But she did mutter a “thank you.”

She got the machine to do the biscuits, and I wondered what the difference was between them and the bread. I’d asked her once, and she’d said something about keeping the butter cold. Which made no sense to me, because weren’t it all going in the oven?

Marshal Reeves, one hand on the butter knife, resumed speaking. “So you’ve got a crack in you,” he said. “A scar. A spot where the light don’t shine. That’s all right. Creativity comes out of that. Endurance.”

“Don’t tell me I’m better off for being an orphan,” I scoffed.

His face was serious, though, and he didn’t take offense. “No more so than I’m better off for having been a slave.”

Whatever I’d been about to say died in my mouth, and it didn’t taste so good in there, either. Of course he was talking about himself. Or out of his experience, anyway — and his experience related to mine, and to Aashini’s … and to Miss Francina’s and to Connie’s, too, for all I knowed. At least, based on the um-hum noise Connie was just then making.

Marshal Reeves swirled his coffee in his mug. “My life’d be easier if I had my letters, sure. But I had to exercise my mind and learn ways around it. Now I got those ways, and they serve me.”

He put the mug to his lips and took three long swallows. He set it down again. Miss Francina topped it up while he continued, “The means you figure out to bridge your lacks, those’ll serve you, too, Miss Memery. And it’ll serve that poor little mite we half-drowned this night, as well.”

His voice trailed off. I heard what he heard — mayhap keener, as my ears was younger. The rising trill of constables’ whistles. An idea they’d gotten from London, England, so I heard tell.

Heavily, the Marshal stood. He settled his pistols in their holsters.

“They’re playing my tune, Miss Memery, Miss Wilde. Miss Connie,” he said, and sat his front-creased hat on his head with a courtly nod.

* * *

I made up a plate with some of those biscuits, wrapped up in a napkin to stay warm, and some butter and honey as well. With a pot of coffee and a mug clutched by the handles in my other hand, I climbed the stairs to Priya’s room. I’d been right about what the steps felt like. I had to rest every few, and I wished to bejesus I’d been smart enough to put the food on a tray so I could balance it on one hand and use the other to haul myself up the banister. At least I’d taken the back stair and at least the house was still abed, so no one noticed me.

On the landing I paused and leaned against the wall for a moment before persevering.

The second flight was worse than the first, but eventually I found myself before Priya’s door. That was when I realized I’d left myself no way to knock.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to kick at the panel, although I’d left my soaked, filthy boots in the mudroom. But in a moment of ingenuity, I stepped up to the door and thumped my forehead on it lightly.

A half second later, I realized I could have used my elbow. But too late, and it was enough. I didn’t even hear the patter of sock feet on the floor or have time to step back before Priya was swinging the door open.

“Sorry to wake you,” I said softly, though she didn’t look like she’d been asleep. She wore a flannel nighty and nightcap and the woolen socks I’d guessed at, with a plaid dressing gown pulled haphazardly on. Looking over her shoulder, I saw the shade was up and there was a copy of Huckleberry Finn on her night table.

“You didn’t,” she said, confirming my surmise

“I brought breakfast,” I said unnecessarily, lofting the plate.

She stepped aside. “Have you been up all night? Out in the rain, also?”

I nodded. She shut the door, and I set the food and coffee on her little table. The pot and mug took a little juggling, as my fingers had fair gone numb on the handles. I took the chair when she gestured me to sit; she perched on the bed. The room was chill but bright — her windows faced east. “Only one mug,” she said, pouring.

“For you. I ate already. It’s right reverent coffee, good and thick. Keep you warm.” I took a deep breath, and waited until she’d set the coffeepot down, because I’m kind that way and also because Connie gets stern about breakage and Miss Lizzie gets stern about burns. “The first thing I have to tell you is that your sister is safe. She’s with Merry Lee. We’ll make sure you get to see her as soon as can be, but I can’t take you right this instant.”

I got it out on a rush, before she could stop me. Not that she tried: she just stopped, blinking, staring at me with one hand reached out to the coffee mug.

“You—” she creaked, at last.

“Me and Miss Francina. And the Marshal. And Tomoatooah. And Merry Lee, of course, but I already said her.”

Her hand fell into her lap. She sat for a second and then shuddered. And then sat again. Finally, she looked up at me.

“You did this for me.”

“I did.”

“It was dangerous.”

I nodded.

“Madame told you not to.”

I nodded again.

Very calmly, with that same calm she’d shown the first night we met, she took up her mug and sipped at it. When she set it down again, she said, “Why?”

Because I love you.

I just sat there, mouth hanging open. How do you even answer a question like that?

“Because it needed doing,” I said, which was also true and a hell of a lot less frightening.