City of Glory (56 page)

O’T
OOLE WAS UNSURE
how long he had slept. “What time is it?” he demanded of Bearded Agnes.

“Middle of the morning. Brought you some breakfast. Time you had something solid in your stomach.” She put the tray on the table beside the bed and started to go.

The Irishman looked around him. The small bedroom was done up a bit, not like those in most bordellos. God knew he’d been in a few o’ those in his day. Not usually alone, however. “Where’s the woman?”

“Cecily,” Agnes supplied. “She’s gone about her business. This place ain’t a hotel, you know—for all Miss Delight put you up here in this nice little room as is beside her own private parlor. You’d o’ been turned out yesterday or the day before, weren’t that Miss Delight has a kind heart.”

“Kind heart? That one? She’s—” The bearded lady’s look silenced him. “Yesterday or the day before you said. How long have I been here then?”

“Since Monday night.”

“And what day is it now?”

“Friday.”

“Christ Almighty Savior. Four days. At the tables, was I?”

“Some o’ the time.”

“And the rest?”

“Up here with Miss Cecily. Though she says you weren’t worth the bother most o’ the time.”

“That will do, Agnes.” Delight stood at the open door. “At the Dancing Knave the ladies do not tattle. Good morning, Captain. I trust you slept well.”

His head was thumping like a longboat drummer beating stroke for the oarsmen. “Well enough.” He reached for the mug of spiced ale Agnes had brought and downed it in a couple of quick swallows. It helped some.

“Since you are, as you say, ‘well enough,’ Captain, I think it is time you got out of that bed and went on your way. Do you not agree?”

“I might do. But not until you and her get yourselves gone.” He was stark naked beneath the thin summer coverlet.

“I assure you, Captain O’Toole, you have nothing to display we have not seen before. But I will leave, as I’m expecting my mantua maker, and Agnes will wait outside. When you’re dressed, you will, I’m sure, wish to settle your account. You owe Miss Cecily three dollars for four full nights’ companionship. I will take that out of the golden guinea you left with me. And for your gaming…” Delight consulted a slip of paper she carried in the pocket of her morning gown. “There is a balance due of one thousand seventeen dollars and twenty coppers. Your luck was not the best this visit, I’m afraid. The seventeen dollars are covered by what’s left of your golden guinea, and…” She paused, frowned, then smiled. “We have enjoyed your company, Captain. I will forgive the twenty coppers.”

Where in Christ’s name was he to get a thousand dollars? He remembered it all now. Taking the cat to that careless bastard Tammy Tompkins, and the tar telling Blakeman about Thumbless Wu. Blakeman turning him off the
Star
so he got blind drunk, and that wretch as called himself Peggety Jack stealing the six thousand he’d made for running the blockade. Joyful thought he was lying about what Jack said about the Jews having his treasure, and that Finbar O’Toole wouldn’t sail
Lisbetta
to the Caribbean for fear o’ the poxed British navy. Holy Mother o’ God. What a mess.

O’Toole got up, yanked the coverlet off the bed, wrapped it around his hips, and threw open the door. Agnes was still there, standing with her arms folded, waiting for him. “Get me a proper drink,” O’Toole said. “Rum. I’ll not manage to get my trousers on else-ways.”

Agnes took a moment to consider. The ladies were all asleep on the floor below, getting their beauty rest now that their night’s work was done. Except for Preservation Shay, standing guard a feet away outside Miss Delight’s door, even the chuckers-out were abed. As for Miss Delight herself, her mantua maker had arrived with an assistant to carry some extra bolts of silk. The three women would likely be in Miss Delight’s private parlor for some time. All the same…

Preservation nodded in Agnes’s direction. “It’s all right, Miss Agnes. Go get the captain what he wants. I’ll keep an eye out.”

Why not? Irish the captain might be, but not a bad sort as men went. That’s why it had been in her mind to say he was there when Dr. Turner came t’other night. Never got the chance what with him and Miss Delight quarreling the way they was mostly doing these days.

“Rum, woman. For the love o’ Holy Mary and all the saints.”

She didn’t hold with Catholic idolatry, but the poor man surely to God looked in need of that tot of rum. “I’ll be back before you can blink,” she promised, heading for the stairs.

Something was wrong with the mantua maker this morning. She had pricked Delight with her pins three times. Now, as she gathered a length of turquoise-colored silk tight below Delight’s breasts to show how the fabric would drape when the dress was made up, there was a fourth offense. “Ouch! You must be more careful, madame. Please.”

“I’m so sorry. I can’t seem to…” The woman glanced at the caped and hooded figure who had accompained her to the fitting. So slight of…that it was easy enough to take him for a girl. Her assistant, she’d said. Newly hired. God forgive her, what else could she say? She was a widow with three small children and the one-eyed pirate had threatened to kill them all if she didn’t cooperate. But Delight Higgins was her best customer, and sometimes the young women as worked in the place had frocks made as well. How would she survive and feed her family if she lost the custom of the Dancing Knave?

The mantua maker gathered all her courage. “I thought to see your other chucker-out today, Miss Higgins. Mr. Clifford. And his whip.” It was the only thing she could think to say. Perhaps if this so-called assistant who had been wished upon her understood how well guarded these premises were, he would call off the pirate’s plan. “I believe his wife was asking about having a gown made.”

“His wife? I no longer employ Vinegar Clifford, but I never heard he had—” Delight broke off. The mantua maker was jerking her head in the direction of the assistant. Over and over. It was extraordinary. The girl, meanwhile, was ignoring the bolts of cloth and peering out the window. After a moment she started to open it. “Here, you! Stop. I do not wish to—”

The figure in the cape spun around, throwing back the hood of the cape and revealing himself to be not a girl but a man holding a pistol. “Don’t matter much what you wish. Not just now.”

Delight turned to the door. Preservation was just outside. If she yelled—

“You call out and I’ll shoot,” the man with the pistol said. Tammy Tompkins had never before held a pistol, much less shot one, and he had no idea if his aim would be true enough to kill the mulatto woman. But like Tintin had said, that didn’t matter none long as she thought otherwise. “Come over here. Beside the window. Come on. Move.”

Delight looked once more at the door, then at the pistol in the hands of the stranger that beckoned her forward. She moved toward him, the half-pinned turquoise-colored silk trailing after her.

“You,” Tompkins jerked his head at the mantua maker, “get that stuff off her.”

The seamstress’s hands were shaking too badly to do as he asked. She fumbled with the pins, sobbing under her breath. “It’s all right,” Delight said, softly. “Do as he says.” If she were to have any opportunity to fight the birders for her freedom—and Delight was quite sure that was what this was; a robbery would proceed in a quite different fashion—she would much prefer to be in her corset and pantaloons than tangled in a bolt of silk.

Tompkins glanced out the window. “Now,” he called softly to the man below. Tintin tossed up the rope ladder. Tompkins expertly grabbed one end while maintaining his hold on the pistol, still pointing it at Delight.

“I’m a free woman. I have papers that say so,” she said. “The magistrates have to approve the taking. They won’t approve me.”

“No concern of mine.” Tompkins had fixed one end of the ladder to the leg of a heavy chest. “Either you climb down so’s you get to the bottom with both arms and legs in one piece, or I toss you out and you take your chances. Choice is yours.”

“Miss Higgins.” The mantua maker stretched out her arms, and words bubbled out of her, a stream of remorse: “I’m so sorry, Miss Higgins. They were going to kill my babies. I couldn’t say no. I—”

“It’s all right. I understand.” Delight was at the window. She saw Tintin standing below, grinning up at her. “You. I might have guessed.”

The pirate simply bowed. Delight looked once more at the door of the parlor, then at the pistol, then at the rope ladder. It was frayed and covered in barnacles, but it was a far sight safer than being thrown to the ground by the man with the pistol. She sat on the window ledge and swung her legs over the edge.

The screams brought the women who had been sleeping on the floor below racing up the stairs in their nightdresses. The other chuckers-out as well. Finbar O’Toole, dressed only in trousers and boots, came out of the little bedroom in time to see them all converging on the doorway a few paces from his. “What’s happening? What’s the matter? Damn, if you ladies would stop yelling and make some sense, might be we could—”

Actually, it was only one woman doing most of the howling. “I couldn’t help it! I swear to Almighty God! They were pirates and they were going to kill my babies. I couldn’t help it!”

The others were clustered around her, offering comfort and questions in equal measure. O’Toole pushed his way into the heart of the melee. “Holy Mary and all the saints, couldn’t help what?”

“She’s the one as let ’em in,” Agnes said.

“Let who in?”

“Them as got Miss Delight, from the sound o’ it.”

“Blackbirders?” It was the first explanation that came to O’Toole, and he had little doubt it was the correct one.

“Has to be,” Agnes confirmed. Amid all the tumult her voice was strangely calm. “She lived in deadly fear of ’em, and now they got her.”

Preservation Shay had been into Delight’s private parlor and come out again. “A rope ladder,” Preservation said. “That’s how they got her out o’ there and down to the ground without me knowin’ a thing ’bout it.”

“Pirates they were. And the one in there had a pistol,” the mantua maker said between her sobs. “There was nothing I could do.”

Nothing more rotten than blackbirders. Delight Higgins didn’t deserve that. Same time, it weren’t nothing to do with him. O’Toole slid along the wall to the door of the room he’d been in for the past three days and finished dressing, then came out, went down the stairs, and exited by the front door. In the tumult no one thought to ask him to settle his bill before he left.