Karen Memory

Chapter Nineteen

I don’t remember much of meeting up with Effie or the Marshal or of the ride back to Merry’s place, except I did it on Dusty, with Marshal Reeves holding me into the saddle. I remember him asking about Bantle and about Scarlet. I’m not sure what he got told.

They got me up three flights of stairs, and Merry made a complicated knock to get us in. You’d think she’d have a key to her own door, but I heard the rattle of bolts and chains and then Aashini was peeking through the crack, frowning.

The door shut, there was more rattling, and then it was yanked wide open. We must of tumbled into the room like a shivaree, because she went jumping backward with a yelp, then scrambled up to slam the door after us. More rattling and bolts thrown, and the Marshal laying me very gently on a much-patched yellow couch. I heard cups clinking, and before I knew it I was holding a china cup with a mismatched saucer full of hot tea laced with sugar and rum. I didn’t know if rum was the best thing for electrocution, but it looked like Tomoatooah had one, too, and he was only slowed down in drinking it by the steam coming off.

Effie was clucking over my face with cool cloths, and Priya was holding on to my hand. And all I wanted to do was forget the last hour … but I didn’t think I could.

And I didn’t dare ask Effie how bad my face was. I could tell from the way it hurt that there was going to be a scar. Or a lot of little scars, round like the ones on Priya’s arms.

Well, I’d meant to get out of the seamstressing business sooner or later. I guess now was as good a time as any. And I kept telling myself that over and over, like it was going to make a dent in the hollow scared feeling inside me if I thought it often enough.

I wondered if I had enough money saved to get any kind of a start in gentling. If Priya still had my savings, I mean.

If she’d give it back to me.

Well, she was there now, and she was holding my hand. That was something promising. And we’d blown up Bantle’s infernal machine. And maybe the man who built it, too, if we got lucky.

There. That made a dent in the hollow scared. Or maybe Priya rubbing between my shoulder blades was what did it.

Oh Christ, it hurt so much to cough.

I was thinking about that in a kind of not-too-discontented haze when my nose started working again. I tried to jump up, and Priya and Effie pushed me back into the couch. I wasn’t in no shape to fight ’em.

“Oh Christ, Merry, your couch! I’m…” soaked in piss.

“It’s seen worse,” she answered, and brought me another cup of tea. Less rum in this one. I thought about Bantle’s concern for his fancy rug, and Merry — who didn’t have nothing — and how little she cared for what she did have when a friend was hurt.

Well, Bantle’s rug was blowed up now.

And then I realized that I’d thought of myself as Merry’s friend. Smiling made my cheek hurt like the skin was cracking leather.

Hell, maybe it was.

I realized I’d lost track of the men and lifted my head enough to see that the Marshal had gotten Tomoatooah into a battered armchair, his feet on an ottoman. He was fussing over the Indian and the girls was fussing over me. I started to spiral down that sucking hole of scared again, but Priya kissed my forehead and I remembered that my scars — whatever they turned out to be — weren’t nothing on hers. We’d be fine. If she was sticking with me we couldn’t not be fine.

I patted her hand and tried to sit up. When I did, Aashini was there. She didn’t talk much, but I was getting the idea that she didn’t miss much, neither. Because she had a pile of fabric in her hands, and when she shook it out I could see it was a man’s loose flannel trousers and a check shirt and a knit wool cardigan.

She set them on the table beside the sofa. A moment later, she came back with a basin of steaming water and a clean, soft cloth. “Clean up?” she asked.

My heart about stopped at the kindness.

Her English wasn’t as good as Priya’s, which was a little reassuring. Or maybe it would of been easier to deal with a whole family of creepy geniuses. It’s hard to tell which way that would go. And it wasn’t like Aashini ain’t just as smart as Priya in her own way, though I didn’t find that out for a few minutes. It’s just that Priya’s got that gift for languages.

“Thank you,” I said.

Having the Marshal and Tomoatooah in the room bothered me — the Marshal turned his back ostentatiously and Tomoatooah never even glanced over, but I guessed maybe his people didn’t fuss so much about hiding what preachers might call their shame, not being Christians and all. But all those months in a whorehouse and I was still self-conscious about stripping off in front of Priya.

Maybe she realized it, because when Merry and Effie started peeling my clothes down, Priya stepped off. She went into the coat she’d been wearing — she’d tossed it over the chair by the door in just the manner that would of made Mama chew her ear off — and started pulling stacks of papers she’d rolled and squashed into tubes out of the pockets and the sleeves. She turned around before Effie was quite done sponging me off — Aashini and Merry was holding one arm apiece to keep me standing — and I was too interested in what she was holding on to to remember to blush.

“Those from Bantle’s desk?”

She nodded. “Everything from on top, and the top drawer.” She settled down on the ottoman beside Tomoatooah’s legs and started reading.

Those flannel trousers were the warmest and most comfortable thing I’ve ever put on. I suddenly understood why Priya might want to wear men’s clothing all the time. Effie and Aashini let me sit back down again while they put the shirt over my arms, which was a good thing. They’d been doing more and more of my standing for me.

“It’s safe,” I told the Marshal, and he turned back around.

Effie took the dirty clothes and that basin of water away. I was warm and — aside from the bruises and burns — I was comfortable and didn’t stink anymore. But something was still niggling at me. “Horaz said a meeting. What meeting?” I asked — Priya, mostly, as she had the pile of papers in her lap.

Priya, still flipping papers, frowned. “I don’t think you’re going to like the answer to that.”

Merry looked like she already didn’t like it, and she hadn’t even heard it yet. “Tell us.”

“There’s a note here that probably relates,” she said. She waved part of her pile with her left hand. “And a whole sheaf of sheets of figures I can’t make head nor tail of—”

Aashini stepped over to her and lifted the papers from her hand. I caught a flash of red and black ink on creamy paper. She squatted down on her heels — close to the same chairside lamp Priya was using — and started flipping through them. Her hair fell forward across her face, her brow wrinkling in concentration behind it.

Merry said, “Tell me more about this meeting.”

Priya continued, “I don’t know where this is. Baskerville?”

“North,” I said. “It’s a logging camp by the Quaker River. They load the barges there and float ’em down to the Sound. And us. Or the port, anyway. They’re always talking about building a seaport there — the river’s deep enough, I reckon? — and skipping Rapid City entire, but it ain’t happened yet. And there’s already a seaport here, so the papers all say why spend the money?”

The Marshal snorted. “And the papers are owned by the same people as own the Rapid shipping, right?”

I shrugged, in the sort of way as allowed as he was probably right, but I didn’t rightly know.

Priya pursed her lips. “Well, that’s where we need to get to.”

“Wait,” I said. “What?”

She tapped the papers, seeming not to notice that we was all staring at her. “Bantle is meeting with some other person — Bantle calls him or her Nemo — at dawn. I get a sense that this person is foreign. Bantle has a note to bring a translator.”

She made a helpless little gesture. That cold whirl was still inside me, but a kind of spark kindled in it. Curiosity — satisfaction? The satisfying excitement of a problem solved — or at least the solution glimpsed.

“Nemo,” I said. I shook my head, but it wasn’t from being confused. “From Vingt mille lieues sous les mers and L’Île mystérieuse!? He’s the Indian submersible captain fighting the British by destroying their warships with the powerful drill mounted on the nose of his ship!”

Every single person in the room stared at me. Even Effie, and I’d have thought better of her. Apparently she hadn’t been paying attention to the French lessons.“Jules Verne?” I asked. “No? Beatrice has the books — oh, they’re books, people!”

Marshal Reeves pursed his lips in disbelief. “Bantle’s meeting somebody from a book?”

“No,” I said. “I think he’s meeting a foreign agent that he calls Nemo. Probably because he’s an Indian. Maybe an Indian who’s fighting the British. And us.”

“We need to go there,” Priya said.

Effie looked at her. “We already broke Bantle’s machine.”

I tried to pitch my voice gentle. “Tomoatooah and me, we’re not moving so fast, Priya—”

“But we need to go there. To the meeting.”

I took a breath. “But why do we need to go there?”

“To stop them.” She said it like it was self-evident. “Whatever they’re doing. It’s no good for any of us.”

I hated myself for thinking she sounded a mite hysterical. Especially as she had the best of reasons to sound that way when it came to Peter fucking Bantle. I knew I should be holding her stirrup. But I wanted to understand why.

“I have a few questions I want to ask Mr. Bantle about this Bruce Scarlet fellow,” Reeves allowed in a leisurely fashion.

“Nothing Bantle’s doing anywhere is good news,” Effie said. She gave me a look that dared me to contradict her.

Aashini cleared her throat, and what had been on the brink of turning into a brawl got real silent real fast.

“These are accounts,” Aashini said. “I can’t be sure I’m reading them correctly. But it looks like Bantle’s paying this Nemo for girls.”

“I don’t like the British,” Priya said in a controlled monotone. “But I like anybody who would sell girls to Peter Bantle less.”

“You might know this Nemo,” I said. “When you and Aashini came over? If he’s supplying the cribs?”

“We never saw anybody,” Priya said. “Just the steward who brought rice. The men on the boat were white, anyway.”

I had a short horrible inkling of what their passage might of been like. It curdled me.

“Wait,” Aashini said in her soft, high voice. She brushed her hair back. “I read these wrong. It looks as if Nemo is paying Bantle, not the other way around. Or rather, they’re paying him. But he’s paying them twice as much.”

Nobody said nothing for a long minute, but we all just sort of looked at one another.

“Why would an Indian agent be paying American pimps to take his girls?” Effie asked.

“Because he ain’t paying them to take girls,” Tomoatooah said. He cracked his eyes — he’d been resting them and I’d thought he might of dozed off, but I guess not — and ogled us as if we were all a pack of idiots. And maybe we was. “He’s paying them to provide intelligence. Or perform sabotage.” He sat up, painfully.

“Nemo could as easily be an agent of the colonial British powers, you know,” Priya said.

“That’s not how the book goes,” I protested, but even as I said it I could hear how stupid it was.

“You think Bantle’s a real stickler for literary accuracy?” Merry asked.

“No.” I sat on my hands, because I couldn’t step on my damned tongue. Anyway, they felt sore inside the dirty disarranged gauze wraps and pressing on ’em make ’em hurt less.

“I say we go,” Merry Lee said. “Maybe we can find out something that will put a stop to Bantle. Once and for always.”

I looked around the room. Only Effie looked the least bit dubious, and she seemed willing to be swayed. I sighed and reminded them, “We ain’t getting there without a ship.”

“Or an airship,” the Marshal said after we’d stared at one another in dismay for a few more seconds.

And just like that, the penny dropped.

“I know a pilot,” I said. “I know where to find him. Maybe he can get us there.”

* * *

Of course, knowing a pilot and talking one into something were two different things. And I might of been exaggerating slightly when I said I knew one. But I’d met one, the very day before. And if I were lucky, he might even turn out to be daring.

I don’t know if it was the colors on his airship and his uniform that made me think Mr. Captain Minneapolis Colony If That Was His Real Name Which I Doubt might be sympathetic to Priya, but I remembered Priya pointing them out and that they’d made her homesick. And they sure weren’t colors that most white folk would put together to indicate their patriotism or whatnot.

And what the hell did I have to lose, anyway?

We took a streetcar back to the general vicinity of Mayor Stone’s, and weren’t we a gawker’s paradise. Me with my burned face; me and Priya and Merry in men’s clothes — at least Priya’s and Merry’s half-fit; Effie in what she thought of as a practical dress; Tomoatooah refusing to lean on anybody but just as plain needing to; Bass Reeves, a black man with his dapper coat and his gun on his hip and his silver star. Aashini stayed behind, tucked away at Merry’s after a whispered fight with Priya. But even so, and even by Rapid standards, we was an assemblage.

I half-expected to get stopped by the constables, either because we looked like an escaped circus or because Peter Bantle had set ’em on us. But maybe on account of it was so early there was next to nobody about we didn’t find no trouble. It’s comforting when God lets you get away with something once in a while.

And a little unnerving. You start to wonder what he’s got set up for you next and why he’s softening you up, like.

We staggered up the hill to the mayor’s yellow-and-sea-colored house, trying not to kill ourselves where the cobbles was icing. We weren’t stupid: we went around to the servants’ door. Miss Francina let us inside before we even had the chance to knock, and then her and Miss Lizzie and Crispin was all over us — all over me and Tomoatooah in particular.

I guess we looked rode hard, switched, and put away without a rubdown … and in fairness that’s how I felt. Miss Francina kept hovering her long, graceful fingers by my cheek and then snatching her hand back until Miss Lizzie shooed her out to find “some brandy or something.”

She held up a mirror for me, and I made myself look, though Priya had to hold my hand to get me through it.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I mean, bad enough, sure, and the blisters was already rising. But I’d imagined two big red bubbled handprints by the way it hurt, and what I had on my cheek and throat looked just like the scars on Priya: a scatter of circles, sharp edged and as big as dimes.

Marshal Reeves just about let Miss Lizzie and Crispin get some aloe juice on my face before he pulled Crispin aside. I heard him say, “That pilot — I know you ain’t no servant and I hate to ask it, brother…” and then Crispin sighed and nodded and vanished up the back stair.

Madame beat Crispin and Mr. Colony down. She was still dressed, or maybe dressed again, because she was wearing a different gown than when I’d seen her last. It fitted, and I wondered where she’d gotten it.

Priya slipped a little bag into my hand, and a little book, too. They were both familiar, weight and heft, and that along with her sitting beside me did more to give me peace than any amount of Miss Lizzie’s fussing.

Madame took one look at my face, sat down across from me, and balled her hands into fists on the scrubbed pine worktable. “I’ll fucking kill that fucking son of a bitch,” she said.

I had no illusions all her rage was on my behalf — Peter Bantle’s fate had been sealed since he burned down Madame’s house and killed Connie. But it was right sweet to see her flare up again. A good feeling that almost made me lose track how much my face hurt. And my knees. I’d almost forgotten about those, in all the adventures of the night, and now those blisters radiated pain again.

“I got plans in that direction myself,” I answered. “Just as soon as Captain Colony gets down these stairs.”

Then, all of us interrupting and talking over the top of one another, Effie and Priya and Merry and the Marshal and me filled Madame in on what we’d found at Bantle’s house and what we’d done there.

She asked a few questions — smart ones — and said, “Well, that explains some things.”

I waited.

“That pair of shitnozzles — I’m guessing they’re trying to run the honest whores in Rapid out of business. Maybe in the whole Oregon Territories. If they corner the market, and they kick that money back to this Nemo fellow…” She shrugged. “I can see why he’d make an investment in ’em.”

“Not to mention,” Miss Francina said, “folks talk to whores.”

Madame’s mouth corner twitched, but she didn’t say nothing. “What are we going to do about it?” Miss Lizzie asked.

There was another pause. Then, “I’m running for mayor,” Madame said.

Miss Lizzie brought over the laudanum then. I held up my hand to give her pause.

“With what money?” I asked. Then I slapped my hand over my mouth, because I oughtn’t of said that.

“I got investments,” Madame said at the same moment Miss Francina said, “I got money in the bank.”

We all looked at her.

She shrugged. “Banks fail. Houses burn down and get robbed. You pick your poison.”

“And the Ancient and Honorable Guild of Seamstresses will back Madame,” Lizzie said.

“We can’t vote!” Merry yelped, like it had bubbled and bubbled until it couldn’t help boiling out of her.

“No,” Madame said. “But there ain’t no law we can’t run. And if Dyer’s out of it, and the opposition is Bantle … well, without his infernal machine I think I got a fighting chance.” She waved her hand around vaguely. “Besides, we need a new house, and this is a nice one.”

“Mayor Stone’s house?” I asked.

“It’s not Dyer’s house. It’s the mayor’s house,” Madame said. “It comes with the job.”

Miss Lizzie started to pour some laudanum into a teaspoon again. I stopped her again. “I ain’t staying. I got a meeting to crash.”

“Karen. Honey—”

Miss Francina cleared her throat. “She’s a grown woman, Lizzie.” Then she looked at me. “Unless you want me to go in your place, Karen honey. I wouldn’t mind it.”

“Ma’am,” I said. And oh, I wanted to tell her, Please. Go. It had been a hell of a night, and my face — well, my face felt worse than my knees or hands, which was saying something.

But nobody was leaving Priya home and I wasn’t staying behind if she was going.

And besides, I owed Peter Bantle something fierce right now.

“Thank you, Miss Francina. But this is my business.”

I was interrupted in her turn by the tromp of man’s boots in the hall. Crispin pushed the door open, and Captain Colony stepped through it behind him. He was in shirtsleeves and britches and boots, but his hair was slicked back and his eyes were only slightly bloodshot. He drew up short just inside the door.

“Now what are all you doing in the kitchen?”

I reached into the bag of money, found that Morgan dollar by feel, and slipped it into my bodice. Then I tossed my four hundred dollars in gold and silver to Captain Colony.

The bag clinked when he caught it. He looked at it curiously, his ponytail twitching over his shoulder when his head turned. “I haven’t earned this.”

“I want to hire you,” I said. “We need to get to Baskerville before dawn, or not too much after.”

He glanced at the kitchen clock. It said 4:37 and a hair. He said, “Sun’s up around seven thirty? We could make it. But why?”

My mouth opened, then shut again. I didn’t even know where to start.

Priya put her hands on the table and leaned forward. “Because if we don’t, the whoremongers who enslaved me and my sister are going to meet up with somebody who is selling them more stolen Hindu girls like us, and we want to stop them.”

He looked at her. His mouth did something, and he nodded. Then his hand moved, and the bag of coins lobbed back to me. I was too surprised even to move my hand toward it, so it thumped to the table in front of me and sat there while my heart sank so fast and so hard that the rush in my ears almost deafened me to what Captain Colony said next.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

I blinked at him, dumbfounded. I’d always thought that was just a word, but it turns out to be a real thing and now I can say it’s happened to me.

“Your money’s no good with me, Miss Memery,” he said. He glanced at the clock again. “But if you want to be there by sunup, you’d better drink that tea and button up your boots.”

I don’t rightly recall everything that happened next, except Effie had fell asleep in the corner next to Tomoatooah and we decided not to wake either one of ’em — Effie on account of she was so tired and Tomoatooah on account of how bad Bantle had shocked him. I got burned, sure … but we’d all been pretty sure Tomoatooah’s heart had stopped. So he could snore all he wanted.

And it turned out that was plenty, thank you very much.

Crispin promised to wake him up and put him in a proper bed once we was safely away and he couldn’t follow. And I could tell that him and the Marshal and Priya and Miss Lizzie only wasn’t tucking me in next to him because Miss Francina was defending my right to go out and get my fool self killed if that was what it took to learn me.

I gave Miss Francina that purse and my diary, anyway, and made her promise to keep ’em for me. And she gave me a Colt six-shooter, and I didn’t ask her where she’d gotten it.

“I’ll never hear the end of this,” Marshal Reeves said softly as we shut the door behind us. But I think he looked relieved as well as troubled to be leaving his friend behind.

So it was me and Merry and Priya and Marshal Reeves who got into the hack with Captain Colony and rode through the dark streets at a fast trot like to rattle our bones. They was supposed to be putting a kind of pneumatic tube system in to move people around Rapid, but it weren’t there yet, so this was the fastest we could manage. We jounced along in silence, and I noticed Priya kept casting apprehensive glances at the eastern sky, and I couldn’t do much to comfort her. So, while Marshal Reeves cleaned his nails with his fighting knife — a risk I wouldn’t have taken on those springs — Captain Colony stared out the window at the Christmas candles that had begun flickering in people’s windows as of the past day or two, and Merry caught the nap she’d been smart enough not to commence until we’d have to stop the carriage not to bring her, I edged over beside lovely Priya and took her hand.

“How did you know?” I whispered in Priya’s ear, flicking my eyes at Colony. Of course she couldn’t see me in the dark, but she understood me anyway. Because that was Priya.

“He’s wearing navaratna,” she whispered back. She waved at his hand. The gaudy ring with the stones in a wheel shimmered faintly even in the dark. “You’d say … ‘nine jewels.’ Ruby in the heart for the sun. Then diamond, most sacred. Pearl, coral, saffron garnet, sapphire, cat’s-eye, topaz, and emerald. It’s a very powerful amulet. He could have gotten it from a maharaja or maharani for some service or great friendship. And he wears green and saffron.”

“You thought he might be a friend.”

“He is a friend,” she said. She leaned over and brushed my hair aside with her lips, then kissed the lobe of my ear. Such a shiver ran through me as I had only ever imagined, reading novels. “And so are you.”