Karen Memory (8 page)

Her voice broke in a way I didn’t understand. Hadn’t Madame just given her permission to stay? Even if she didn’t want to take in alterations? Me, I’d rather whore than scrub floors; it’s easier work and the money’s better. But I could see how after Bantle you might not want any man’s rooster making up to your birdie, so to speak. What more could she be wanting?

“Speak up, child,” Madame said. Not cruelly, she continued, “I can’t fucking abide fucking mealymouthed women.”

Priya’s back straightened. I laid a hand on her elbow, realizing too late that I should of asked her first, but she seemed to stand up straighter at the touch, so that was all right, probably. Her throat rippled with a swallow. Nobody was ever braver than Priya.

“I have a sister,” she said. “I don’t know if she’s still with Bantle, or if he sold her on. She’s two years younger. Her name is Aashini.”

That wrinkle of a smile on Madame turned into the furrow of a frown. She said, “I’m sorry.”

“I want to get her out.”

“I’m sure you do,” said Madame. She glanced at Merry. “But there’s not much
I
can do about it, child. None of those cribhouse pimps would sell her to me, not with the way things now stand between us. And it’s one thing to shelter an escaped whore. It’s another to go steal one.” She paused, brows beetling. “Do you even know if she’s alive?”

Priya looked at her feet.

Madame nodded. It wasn’t a kind nod, but it weren’t cruel nor satisfied, neither. It was a tired, just-what-you’d-expect-then nod. Her eyes didn’t look as bright as I was used to. “Well then,” she said. “I’ll take on Peter Bantle if he comes to my house, never fear. But going after him in his den might stretch my resources, young lady. And without more to go on … Still. Maybe we can find out something about young … Aashini. But I wouldn’t hold my breath about it, and doing more may take money.”

Money Priya wasn’t going to earn as a domestic. That much went without saying.

“I understand,” Priya said.

I knowed from the set of Madame’s jaw that she was considering ordering Priya not to go looking on her own, neither—and realizing that it would be useless. My da would of said that a good master keeps his authority in part by not asking for the impossible except when he really has to. If he does that, then his horse won’t realize it’s impossible when he asks for it.

“Go on then,” Madame said. “Get on with you.”

Priya gave a glance to Merry Lee. Merry Lee nodded wearily. “Go rest,” she said in a cracked voice. “I think you’ll know where to find me.”

It’s God’s truth that she didn’t look like she was getting far, anyway.

I led Priya out the door, shutting it carefully, and showed her where the back stair was. What would of been the servants’ stair in most houses, but we used it for getting around without the tricks getting in our way, when the house was working. We rattled down. I should of been eager to get to the parlor before the other girls got all the sober men, and the ones with good breath—there’s nothing duller than trying to charm up a snake that won’t rise due to whiskey. I like to do my work and get it over with. But Priya seemed to move in a warm glow of comfort, like a good fire on a cold day, and walking along beside her made my heart lift.

We hadn’t made the second landing when I thought of something. And as I tend to, I said what I thought before I thought about it enough. If you know what I mean. “A lot of men come in here,” I said with a rush. “Most of ’em won’t be the same ones that go to the cribs. At least not regular. But one of ’em might … know your sister. Or at least have heard of her.”

Men brag,
I didn’t explain. Didn’t need to, by the spark of understanding on Priya’s face when I turned to look at her.

“Madame said you couldn’t help me.”

“Madame said
she
couldn’t help you.” I knowed it was a fine distinction, but wasn’t that what the whole profession of lawyers made their living off? “She didn’t say nothing about me. Besides, it’s just listening. There’s no harm in it.”

Listening and maybe asking a question or two. But wasn’t that part of a whore’s job? Being the sort of ear that lonely men could turn to?

I wondered who lonely women paid to listen. As with so much, it seemed as if the world had a solution for the one but not the other.

Priya had stopped walking down the stair, so I stopped, too. A step lower, so our heads was level. She stared at me suspiciously.

“What do you want?”

“I want to help.” Which was the truth. I wanted to kiss her, too, and slide my hand over the warm skin under that white shirt. But that was probably a conversation for another day. Maybe a day after I had a better idea how Priya might feel about French favors and the rites of Sappho.

She stared, still. I shrugged and went back to descending. “You’ll like the bedrooms,” I said.

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.