Karen Memory

Chapter Six

Well, it turned out Priya didn’t like the bedroom when I brought her up to the one Miss Francina had suggested was clean and empty. She didn’t say so — too polite or too scared — but when I opened the door and held the lantern up I could see from the way she looked at the narrow cot with its clean white sheets and the narrow room with its clean white walls that she was six inches, maybe less, from bolting.

“There’s a window,” I said, walking in to show her how to pull the shade. I had to set the lantern down on the side table to free up my hands. Priya followed me in. The path beside the bed was so narrow she couldn’t stand beside me, so she peered around my shoulder.

“It opens,” I added. I demonstrated how to work the casement. When I glanced at her for approval, her frown was a little less pinched. Just a little.

“I like the window,” she allowed. She still looked like bucking, though.

“Hey,” I said. It dawned on me that maybe this narrow room didn’t look too different from the cribs she was used to, if more freshly painted and probably with cleaner sheets. If Bantle even saw to it that they got sheets. I think I said about how some girls just lay a slicker down. “You never have to have anyone else in here, unless you want to.”

“The walls are close,” she said helplessly. Then, again, “The window helps some.”

I thought about where she’d come from. What she’d lived through. I thought about third-class berths on steamships from India. I thought about how I could maybe make a living gentling — it was work I might be able to get, even as a girl, because I was good at it and had my father’s name. And people could pay me less.

Except I couldn’t bear to be around horses anymore. They reminded me of Da.

Well, and I couldn’t bear not to be around them, either. Because they reminded me of Da.

I reckoned I was going to have to sort that particular conundrum by the time I opened my stable and gave up on sewing.

I tried not to think about the cribs and how I heard some of the girls down there never left them. Dead or alive.

“Look,” I said finally. Helplessly. “This is what we’ve got. What would make it better for you?”

That stopped her dead, as if she’d never paused to consider it. She blinked, licked her lips, stepped back — and tripped when the edge of the cot caught the backs of her calves. Like I said, it was that narrow.

She sat down hard, the bed catching her. A puff of clean alfalfa smell surrounded her as her bum smacked into the ticking. We’d dragged all the mattresses out and restuffed them in September. Somebody had filled this one with hay and not straw. Softer, but wasteful. Still, I figured she’d earned it. I wondered if I could find her a featherbed somewhere to go over the ticking.

I realized I was staring again and her face was steadily flushing. Mine must of flamed red — even redder, being paler to start — and I covered it by holding my hand out to help her up. She didn’t take it.

Instead, with an expression of some surprise, she settled sideways across the cot, her arms spread wide and her feet still dangling off the side. Her neck was bent at an awkward angle, her head against the wall — the cot was that narrow. She gazed up at me and I — well, I’m ashamed to say I just gawked at her.

“This is comfortable.” Her voice was as surprised as her expression. “Well, bugger me!” Then she clapped a hand across her mouth and giggled.

“You won’t find none in Madame Damnable’s house as doesn’t know that word,” I said. “Though Miss Bethel may pretend she don’t.”

I knowed she was giddy with exhaustion and I knowed I should swing her around so her head was on the pillow and her feet were on the bed, but I didn’t want to leave her just yet. “May I sit?”

“Sit,” she said. She tried to drag herself upright and made it to her elbows. I took the opportunity to stuff the pillow under her head before she collapsed again. Now it hurt my neck less to look at her.

There was no chair, so I sat on the bed. “What would make it better?” I asked again.

“Colors,” she said. “Fabric. Some brightness. Paint.” Her face crumpled. “I think I missed Diwali already. I don’t even know.”

I wanted to ask if Diwali was a person, but it made me feel ignorant and stupid, so I held my tongue. I know better now; Diwali is Priya’s people’s festival of lights. It celebrates the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness.

I reached out automatically and took her hand. She squeezed my fingers hard enough to hurt me. I didn’t care.

“At least I have new clothes,” she said — or kind of mumbled. Every blink she took was longer than the last one. “Well. New to me.”

I was thinking about the sewing machines downstairs and about my rag rug. And about what it would take to make another and maybe a patchwork hanging or curtains or a duvet out of scraps. Not too much, I thought. And most of it, save thread, I could get out of the ragbags.

“Wait right here,” I said. “Leave the lamp,” she muttered.

Before I left, I poked and prodded and coaxed Priya until she was lying the right way along the bed at least. I couldn’t get her under the covers, but I pulled off her carpet slippers and I sort of folded the quilt up around her. Then I ran down the hall to my room and dragged the braided rug out from under my table and two legs of the bed. I had to lift the bed to do it, and once the rug was up I realized I hadn’t been doing too good a job of sweeping under it. I could see the pattern of the braids in the dust on the floor.

That could wait, though. I shook the great heavy, awkward thing out and bundled it up in my arms. I had to back out the door and then sort of edge sideways into Priya’s room. She didn’t say anything as I turned to her—

She was sound asleep on her side, mouth open and eyes closed, knees drawn up as if she were thinking of kicking out at somebody. I snorted at myself.

Well, the rug would just have to be a surprise for when she woke up.

I spread it out on the floor — she never stirred — and I made sure the brighter, prettier side was on the top. It glowed softly in the lamplight, all greens and golds and ruby brocade and the sapphire-blue of Effie’s old threadbare silk gown. We went through a lot of party dresses, did Madame’s girls. And about twice as many petticoats.

“There,” I said when it was done. I pulled the covers back up around Priya, left the lamp — as she had asked — turned down to just a satiny glow, and went downstairs to see what I could salvage of my work for the evening.

* * *

It started off as an uneventful working night. I think we all expected Priya to sleep until sunset the next day, if not the second night through, too, and Merry Lee had a bell to ring for Connie or one of the day girls who kept house and served food and helped Connie in the kitchen — who was night girls at Madame’s, really — if she’d need. Custom was steady but not too strong, and I spent my time between goes sitting in the parlor, listening to the Professor chat up the tricks when he wasn’t barrelhousing out hot tunes on that baby grand of Madame’s.

The Professor — his name was Shipman, but nobody ever used it — was average height and slender, a white man with strawberry-blond hair and a red mustache. He had knotted on a gray silk cravat — he wore a different color for every night of the week — and the only time he ever took his matching kidskin gloves off was to play the piano. He looked gentlemanly, or at least gentle, with his wire-rimmed glasses and his mild expression, and there was something aristocratic about the way the bones of his thin nose turned into the arch over his eye. His handkerchief was folded into four points.

His cheeks was dotted along the stand-out bones with old, round pox scars, and you could see the knife scars across the back of his left hand. Between tunes, he got up and sauntered over to the game room to keep an eye on the faro and billiards tables. He weren’t big, but he could handle himself in a whorehouse fight as it came necessary.

Most of our business came by way of what they call referrals. Appointments and introductions. The johns stayed overnight more often than you might think, if all you’ve ever been in is a regular bordello. Not most of ’em, mind — which suited me fine. Madame and Miss Francina know I prefer to sleep alone, even if it means sewing more than one coat of an evening. Pollywog, Effie, Miss Francina — even Bea — they’d rather one and done, because if they want you for all night they pay for all night. And you know for all men like to brag up their prowess, ain’t but one in twenty of ’em going to keep you up too late. But me, I like to sit in the library with the ladies and maybe get a little reading of my own done before I turn in.

Anyway, like I said, it was slow custom, and I was in the parlor with the Professor and Miss Francina and Pollywog. And Miss Bethel, of course, but all she was doing was polishing her glasses. Pollywog was singing along with something the Professor was playing, and her French was even worse than mine. Miss Francina was playing Patience and losing. Miss Lizzie came down, seeing off her last john, and settled in with a cigarette in an amber holder and one of the little clockworks she fidgets with sometimes. This one was no bigger than Bea’s fist, and when you wound it up it walked on clattering ivory thimbles. I think it was supposed to be an elephant or a rhinoceros, but if I’m being honest the likeness weren’t striking.

I was spending the time with the notebook I don’t care if people see, sketching away at my idea for curtains for Priya. I’d do those first, I decided, though they’d need lining to hide the seams between the patchworks, because they was just rectangles. They’d serve as practice for the duvet and maybe for cushions.

It was all busywork, of course, to distract myself from what I was really thinking. That I needed—needed—Priya to stay. So she had to want to stay. So it was up to me to make her comfortable. To make her like it here.

And of course I was all at the same time painfully aware that if I made it too obvious I was scrabbling after her I’d just drive her away. Anybody who just wants a dog to kick isn’t somebody you’d want to be loved by, my da used to say. Nor somebody you’d ever give a dog, Mama would always answer.

Time went by, and people drifted in and out of the parlor. By three on the big grandfather clock by the library door, the last of the johns had either done his business and gone out or settled in for the night with the girl of his dreams. Those picketers we’d had earlier apparently didn’t stay up past ten, so they was long gone, too, and in their absence custom had picked up a bit. Me, I was just starting to think about some supper — I could smell the mutton with garlic and the huckleberry sauce wafting out from Connie’s cookpots every time the hall door was opened — when, muffled through the brick walls, I heard Pollywog start in to screaming out in the alley.

I say I heard, but we all did. “Christ, what now?” Miss Francina said, heaving herself up from the chair where she’d been bootless, toasting her socks by the parlor fire. Crispin was already on his feet, grabbing up an old train signal lantern we keep beside the door. Miss Bethel ducked under the bar pass-through with her shotgun ready. Effie jumped up beside me, and so did Miss Lizzie. Madame’s office door creaked and I heard the thump of her cane, but Crispin was already out the door and I wasn’t letting him and Polly face whatever it was alone for as long as it might take for Madame to get down the stairs. If Polly needed rescuing, then by God we were there to effect her rescue.

I bolted out behind him, in between Miss Francina and Miss Bethel.

Pollywog’s real name is Mary, from which comes Polly and therefore, by the irrefutable logic of affection, Pollywog. She’s got that straight blond hair like I described, and maybe not a whole mess of common sense, but she ain’t in general a screamer. She’s got a lot of regulars; the johns who want her usually only want her, and I think it is as much to do with her big blue eyes and her listening expression and her trick of petting their hair back as it is to do with her trick hip.

There weren’t nothing in sight from the front stoop. I looked this way and that — and up the ladder, for good measure — but them red lamps burned steady in the still air and there was nobody in any direction. Polly screamed again — breathier this time, like a balloon running out of air — and I caught sight of the colored-glass glow of Crispin’s signal lantern vanishing around the corner to my right.

I lit out after him, Miss Francina and Miss Bethel on either flank, Effie at our heels. Miss Francina was still stocking foot, but that didn’t seem to slow her none.

“Aw, shit!” Crispin’s voice, and I braced for a crash or a thud of fist on flesh, but all that came was Pollywog’s sobbing. I rounded the corner in time to see that it muffled as Crispin pulled her face into his coat. In the light of the gas lamp beside the kitchen door, I could make out the dustbins we lined up against the scaffold holding the street fill back. There also was a pile of rags and a spilled pail of peelings — Pollywog must of dropped it — beside them.

We lot all planted our heels and piled to a halt like characters in a funny strip. Fortunately, it was Miss Bethel who bounced off my back, not Miss Francina. And fortunately, she did it with her forearm and not the shotgun. Half-carrying Pollywog, Crispin started drawing her the way we’d come, back toward the front door. Her face never came out of his shoulder.

“She hurt?” Miss Francina asked as they passed our little huddle by.

“Look to the girl on the ground,” Crispin said. “If there’s any use to it.”

“Fucking shit,” said Effie, echoing and enhancing Crispin’s sentiments. I didn’t say it myself because my mouth had dropped open and was hanging there as if I was a hooked fish, gasping.

The dustbins were dustbins. The dropped pail of peelings was exactly that. The pile of rags …

It was a girl. Or a woman.

Miss Francina, unsurprisingly, got herself together first. She darted forward, heedless of the peelings and her stockinged feet, and dropped a knee beside the prone figure. As if her moving freed us all from some paralysis, I stepped up, too. Miss Bethel stood over us with the gun held easily, and Effie made a sideways triangle to her, watching back the way we’d come. We all trusted Crispin to bring the folk inside up to speed and all.

I stepped around the girl on the ground. She was a sister, a stargazer like us. And she didn’t have the look of one of the dockside whores — she was white, for one thing — but she weren’t no parlor house girl. A streetwalker, rather, a ragged robin, sprawled half on her front and half on her side. Her face was lost in her tangled brown hair. Her boots were down at the heels and her hem was draggled and tattered.

She wasn’t wearing stays, and the back of her dress was torn to ribbons and sticky brown with old blood. She’d been flogged.

At least blood that old didn’t make me want to grab one of those dustbins and hide my head in it while I upped my chuck.

Miss Francina laid the back of her hand against the woman’s cheek and paused a moment, head bowed. Then she looked up and found Effie’s gaze. “You get Crispin back out here,” she said. “And a cudgel and a lamp, and your pistol. And you and him run and get the constables, fast as you can.”

“We should get that girl inside,” Miss Bethel said as Effie vanished in a patter of footsteps. Two runs for the constables in two nights, that were a mite unusual.

Miss Francina shook her head. “She’s past help, Beth. We should wait for the brass knuckles and their whistles.”

Miss Bethel said, “This is a threat.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Miss Francina said, but her expression agreed with Miss Bethel. “Karen honey, would you run and fetch my boots?”

* * *

As it turned out, there wasn’t much wait for the law. And it wasn’t the constabulary. By the time I came back with Miss Francina’s shoes — boots only by courtesy, as they was the frilliest, silliest girl shoes you’ve ever seen, and on the largest last — and gave her a shoulder to lean on while she put them on standing, there was a thump of much heavier boots coming down the ladder.

We all turned — we being Miss Bethel, Miss Francina, and me, because Miss Lizzie was keeping the other girls in the library for now. Which was just as well; having them all gathered around sobbing or staring or sobbing and staring would of been more than I could of handled. The tromp of big boots turned the corner, and—

I felt the skin around my eyes stretch as Marshal Bass Reeves stomped into view.

He’d divested himself of his duster and spurs, but he still had a pistol on each hip. Now he wore a town suit — maybe gray, in the lamplight — and a silk kerchief tied into the gap of his shirt. Still the same pair of boots, though, with the stirrup scuffs in the arches.

Under his big gruff mustache, he looked grim.

“Ladies,” he said, and we parted before him like the Red Sea. He could of been our Moses, I suppose, but they say the Negro Moses was a woman and she lives in New York.

Miss Bethel is never at a loss for words, and it was her who said, “How did you know to come here?”

The Marshal crouched beside the girl. He touched her shoulder with some gentleness. The shadow that crossed his face at the sight of her ribboned back was no trick of the lantern light. He looked down again.

I couldn’t read the Marshal’s face, because the brim of his big hat covered it as he crouched, so I looked at the creases across the toes of his boots and wondered how many states and territories they’d seen. He pulled a glove off — they were town gloves now, pearl kidskin, such as none of us nor the dead girl were wearing — and gently took her wrist. The shreds of dress across her back rustled.

There was no wind down here in the well. It was just from him moving her. She weren’t stiff yet.

“Marshal, she’s beyond any help but God’s,” said Miss Francina.

He didn’t look up.

“She’s got to be dead,” I said. “The blood … the flogging—”

She had to be dead. Did I hope she was dead?

Would I want to be dead if it was me?

“I’ve seen men survive as bad,” he answered. “Women too.” But as he stared down at his fingers on her floury-looking wrist, I knowed the answer wasn’t what he would of wanted.

He pulled a compact out of his breast pocket and opened it. He held the mirror under her nose for two, three minutes before he shook his head.

Marshal Reeves looked up at me and heaved a tired sigh. “That’s a right pisser.”

“I did say,” said Miss Francina. The Marshal raised his eyebrows at her, tilting back his hat. She sighed. “But you just had to see for yourself, didn’t you?”

“It’s a character flaw,” he allowed.

Miss Bethel said, “You didn’t answer how you knew to come here.”

She sounded suspicious, even though the silver star glinted on his town coat just as it had the duster’s lapel. Possibly because of it. You learn a little something about the law when you work on your back.

“I was on my way here, actually,” he said. He smoothed the ragged robin’s hair and stood. Easily, his gun belt creaking but his breath untroubled. “I wanted to talk to Miss Wilde and Miss Memery here about what happened … well, I guess now it’s yesterday. It occurred to me that you might know something about the man I’m hunting, and I didn’t think in your line of work you ladies would be abed yet. I passed your man and your girl on the street, and they saw my star. They went on to find a roundsman.”

As if his words had been a harbinger, I heard a distant whistle blowing. The shrill cry was taken up by another, and another after that, until the night echoed with them — tinny, thin, and frail.

I looked at the girl again. I wanted to cover her. “She can’t of been thrown. We’d have heard the thud.”

“She’s not one of yours, then?”

“In that dress? Madame wouldn’t let her scrub floors dressed like that, let alone entertain clients,” Miss Francina scoffed. I knowed it was to cover her horror — she hides the softest heart in the house, and Signor isn’t the only one who knows it — but the Marshal gave her a sidelong glance.

“Look at her face,” the Marshal said.

“I’d prefer not.”

His lips stretched into a moment’s grim smile. “Fair enough. She wasn’t thrown.”

I said, “So somebody got her down here — down the ladder — and left her.”

“Someone did,” the Marshal said. “Which makes me think even more that you might know something that could help me find the man I’m looking for.”

Miss Francina twined one perfect yellow corkscrew curl around her finger — how she keeps her hair unmussed I’ll never know — and pursed her lips at him. She said, “Something tells me you’d better come inside, Marshal. You and Karen go on. Miss Bethel and I will wait for the constables.”