Karen Memory (20 page)

“Madame,” I said. “I maybe have some things to tell you about.”

“My office,” she said. “Right now.”

Chapter Thirteen

Of course, Miss Francina weren’t about to let me get away with taking the fall for her, and she followed me right down the hall to Madame’s office and stood with me inside the door. Madame watched her do it with an expression of exactly zero surprise. Madame didn’t follow us right on, and I didn’t know whether she was making us sweat or taking a closer survey of the damage. Either way, I was pretty sure none of it looked good.

I wanted to say something to Miss Francina, but I wasn’t sure what. The door was closed, though, and she was eyeing me like maybe she was trying to reckon out what to say as well.

“It was my plan,” I said. “I should be responsible for the results.”

Miss Francina scoffed at me, “Ain’t you a martyr, just like our Lord. ’Cause I sure as hell didn’t volunteer myself as a grown free woman, and you’re the only one in the room as cares about Priya.”

Well, when she put it that way.

I frowned and twisted the toe on my boot on Madame’s blue-and-cream knotted silk rug. Her office is made to look like a boudoir, all lace and mother-of-pearl and silk draperies. “Damn me to hell,” I said. “I’m as self-important as Da always said I could be.”

Miss Francina shrugged. “You have your good qualities, too.”

Whatever we might of talked about next, we never got to it. Because there was a hitching tread in the hall and the door swung open, then closed again as Madame stepped into the room and shut it behind her. She walked between Miss Francina and me, went around her gilt, scrolled desk, and sat heavily in the armchair there, using her cane as a prop to lever herself down.

“You girls sit,” she said to Miss Francina and me.

We sat.

Madame stared at us for ten seconds or so. I could hear her desk clock ticking. Then she looked from one of us to the other and sighed and said, “All right, then. Which one of you wants to explain what exactly just happened in my parlor?”

We looked at each other, Miss Francina and I. Apparently it was one thing to volunteer. And another entirely to actually carry out the task you had volunteered for.

When we broke, though, we both started to talk at the same instant. Then I knuckled back and let Miss Francina have it, but she’d quit also. We stared at each other.

Madame sighed. “Karen,” she said. “You first. Though by rights I should be interviewing you separately. So you don’t get your stories straight.”

Miss Francina looked righteously hurt at that. “I have never lied to you.”

“Nor do you tell me everything,” Madame said. She held up her hand, forestalling further protest. “God help me, nor do I
want
you to, Francie. I want to hear from Karen, please.”

No way through but both feet in, I reasoned. I said, “Peter Bantle has a machine that lets him change people’s minds.”

“People,” Madame said. “Voters?”

I nodded. “And it can make people do hasty things. Hurt people they don’t mean to hurt. Get in fights with friends.”

When she sucked her teeth like that it was unsettling, because I knowed it meant she was thinking. She said, “That’s what happened downstairs, then? He … influenced a passel of
my
clients to wreck up my parlor?”

Miss Francina nodded. I bit my lip.

“How do you know this?”

“Priya told me,” I said. “About the machine. And he used it on me, when he chased her and Merry Lee in here. I just about took Miss Bethel’s shotgun from Effie and pointed it at her. And I know he’s used it on the Marshal, too—”

I choked up before I could tell her what had happened the previous night. We’d gone against her direct orders, and I knowed it. But whatever I was holding back—and I meant to tell her, I swear I did. I just … choked on it.

But Madame gave me a canny look anyway. “So why’d he pick today to have another go at us?”

“To scare us,” Miss Francina said quickly.

Madame shot her a warning glance. She subsided, but not without a sigh.

“Karen?”

I fixed my gaze on that carpet and stared at it like to set it on fire. “What I said about him using that machine on the Marshal?”

“Yes?”

“That were last night,” I said on a rush. “Marshal Reeves and his posseman and Merry Lee and me went and busted Priya’s sister out of the cribs.”

“And I,” Miss Francina said dryly, so at first I thought she were playing Miss Bethel and correcting my grammar, but then I realized she was putting herself in the rescue party, too, when I’d intentionally left her out.

“Francina, dear,” Madame said. “Fetch me that decanter, please?”

Miss Francina rose and did it and brought her a snifter, too. She set both on the edge of Madame’s desk blotter. As Miss Francina sat again, Madame poured two inches of brandy into the bottom of the balloon glass, and knocked it right back. Then she poured a second, smaller glass, closed up the decanter, and held the snifter under her nose for a long minute or two.

“I’m not overjoyed with either of you,” she said, unnecessarily in my holding. “Do you know what Bantle can do to this house—to all of us—if he makes mayor?”

I didn’t, really. Not know. But I could come up with some pretty chilling fantasies. And Miss Francina nodded, so I did, too.

Then she put the glass down. “But it can be fought off?”

“The men who started the fight,” Miss Francina said. “They were the ones who had been drinking the most, or smoking a little hemp. Maybe their idea of what was wrong and right had gotten a little … malleable.”

“That’s true,” I said. “None of the girls was drinking much. And none of the girls went crazy. And when he tried it on me, before … I was sober. And I could kind of … see around it?”

We didn’t drink much, on duty, in Madame’s house. She thought it weren’t safe to cloud our wits that way while dealing with customers. And she didn’t want no woman whoring for her who had to get herself tangle footed to get through it. “And you
and
the Marshal both shook it off on your own.”

I nodded. “And Mr. Jonathan Smith, who started it all downstairs—he could have kilt me with that stool he was waving around. But he just waved it around for a bit and then threw it at the back bar. And he’d
had
several whiskeys.”

“So maybe it ain’t too powerful.”

“I’m unsettled to point out that I’ve only ever witnessed him use it when he was right near whoever he was aiming at,” Miss Francina said. “Priya says it’s a big machine in his house that does the dirty work, but it seems to my observation as if he has got to focus it through his glove. If I’m right about that, he was right here. Right outside, maybe. Might still be, although I sadly expect he’s got more sense than that.”

“It sounds more like an urge than a compulsion,” Miss Francina said.

“Or he uses it on some drunk who already thinks it might be a good prank to bust up a whorehouse. Or dump a whore on her ass for laughs, especially if he ain’t none too comfortable around the sisters,” Madame said, as if she was thinking out loud. “So he’s got enough to sway somebody who thinks it’s their own whim. Like whether to run for mayor, or for whom to vote.”

“Especially,” I said slowly, “if there’s also some blackmail in train. You know, for the old-fashioned kind of attitude adjusting.”

I didn’t say
Dyer Stone,
and Madame couldn’t fault me on that. She nodded, though, and flicked a fingernail back and forth against the stitching of a leather-bound book that was resting on her desk. I weren’t used to seeing it there, but that didn’t signify: she kept the ledgers locked up when she was out.

“Well, that’s a shit sandwich and no mistake,” Madame said.

*   *   *

It got worse by morning. Priya still weren’t home—I hoped somebody had sent her a message to stay away, and nobody seemed upset that she wasn’t there, so I expected she’d sent Miss Lizzie or Miss Francina a note—but when I went out for Connie’s eggs I could feel the eyes of strangers following me. I was wearing my plain walking dress—I wasn’t out trying to drum up custom, and my hair was barely braided, to tell the truth—so it weren’t my stunning appearance of beauty drawing the attention.

I reckoned word of the fight had gotten around and tried to ignore the stares and the heads bent in mutters, and I didn’t have to leave the neighborhood. So it was the corner grocer Mr. Mulligan who shook his head at me and said, “Have you heard what they’re saying about that Negro United States Marshal of yours?”

I almost said,
He’s not mine,
but Mr. Mulligan wouldn’t of understood it the way I meant it, and his misunderstanding would make me feel disloyal. So I fingered the lucky silver dollar that was in my pocket now and I said, “What are they saying?”

He sucked his teeth and added two extra eggs to my basket, tucking ’em well into the padding straw. Brown ones. I missed hens, but not as much as I missed horses. “The frail sisters started dropping dead of an overdose of horsewhipping right about when he and his pet Comanche came to town.”

A chill crept through my belly.
Of course they were saying that.
Because Peter Bantle was putting ideas in their heads.

“You know,” he continued, “them Comanche are savages. Things they do as a matter of course would chill normal folk. Skinning, scalping, roasting people alive. They cut folks up—babies, women—and torture ’em just for the fun. And word’s gotten around that those two have been coming and going at Madame’s place. You might want to pass the word to her that some people aren’t too pleased about it.”

He dropped his voice down low. “Some people is even saying that Madame’s a colored girl herself, what’s been passing, and that’s why she lets all these”—he flipped his hand back and forth, like there was a word he weren’t going to say in front of a lady—“scalawags come and go as they please. Course, old Mrs. Mulligan and me, we don’t believe that for an instant.”

I thought of the shiny healed burns on Priya’s arms, the dogfights down by the docks, and I held my peace, though what I wanted to say was,
Does it seem to you that one race in particular holds the patent on savagery?

But I didn’t want to argue with Mr. Mulligan right now, especially if he was defending Madame in the court of gossip. What I wanted was to drop that basket of eggs and go running down the street shouting for the Marshal.

I didn’t do that, either. What I did do was pay for Connie’s victuals and smile nicely when Mr. Mulligan threw in some butter, too, and then I lifted my heavy basket up and went out to try to climb the ladder at the end of the block without spilling any eggs.

Made it, too. Without cracking any of the four dozen plus two. And once I’d delivered them to Connie, I went back out again, climbed up the ladder, and walked two more blocks to the telegraph station.

*   *   *

The telegram I sent was just:
WE MUST TALK SOONEST DONT COME TO THE HOUSE,
because I didn’t want to say too much where it would get around town. And I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a sort of agony, twisted up left and right and inside and outside and upside down with not hearing from the Marshal. But of course I didn’t know if he’d gotten the telegram yet or if he’d even been back to his rooming house. All my wild imaginings of him clapped in irons or lynched from a lamppost were just that. It’s a real particular twisting razor, having a bad intuition and no news as such. At least Priya had returned by the time I came back, and she was hard at work sweeping the parlor carpet with Madame’s newfangled suction engine that didn’t half work half the time.

The good—or bad—news kept coming, in that the only visitor we had all night other than a messenger was the john we’re not supposed to know about, and he went upstairs with Pollywog and neither one came back down. So us girls and the Professor entertained ourselves in the parlor playing cards and playing piano. Bea told fortunes from tea leaves for half an hour—my leaves looked like storm clouds breaking, she said, and that meant good fortune out of bad, but what I saw in them was a herd of mustangs running. The Professor said he was going home, fooling no one, and wandered out before the witching hour to find a card game for money. Most of the Misses was in bed not half an hour later.

I crinkled the note in my pocket, not much more crumpled than when the messenger had handed it to me, and didn’t even bother to change my dress. I pulled on street boots and buttoned them, though, and fetched my heavy coat. It was getting on December by then, and the air through the door when Crispin had opened it earlier had been sharp. I wasn’t sneaking out, not exactly—I told Priya where I was going and why; she worrited at me, but she didn’t nag or naysay, and I had that good feeling again that I hadn’t had since Da was alive—that somebody sensible cared about me and wanted to help me on my path rather than bending me to their own. I collected a kiss from her for luck and good measure. I could still feel it tingling on my lips long after the cold should of wiped it away.

I slipped out the kitchen door, because Connie had sent the day girls home and gone to bed herself already and because Bea and Effie was still playing bezique by the parlor fire with cups of Miss Bethel’s best sherry, pretending—if I’m not mistaken—at being the ladies of their own homes.

When I clambered up to the street, the abject dark of the sidewalks gave way to flickering gaslight. I was nervous being out alone, no mistake—but I didn’t think I’d have to go far. The Marshal’s note had said he’d be waiting for me, and the Marshal hadn’t let me down once yet. Which put him right up there with Crispin and my da and Madame, and damn few anybodies else. I felt bad for telling him to stay away from Madame’s, but I had thought of what Mr. Mulligan had said about how folk were talking and I had realized that I had even more of a duty to Madame and Crispin and the girls as I did to the Marshal and Tomoatooah.

Being a growed woman, it turned out, was harder work than it looked. But that’s a thing, too, ain’t it? Them as work hardest get no respect for it—women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics—and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day’s labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family’s bellies is all about.