The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (14 page)

“This
is quite splendid, Miss Malone.”

Jessie
hands him the brass key. “Live up to my expectations, Mr. Watkins.”

“I
shall try my best, Miss Malone.” He reaches for her, embracing her waist.

She
breaks free, backs away. “I do believe you’ve been lonely too long, Mr.
Watkins. You need to hire yourself a filly.”

“I never
pay for whores. Rochelle, my cancan dancer in Paris, gave herself freely,
though I must say, I seldom touched her, if you understand my meaning.”

Jessie
understands his meaning only too well. Mr. Heald is only too fresh in her
memory and in her mouth. He seldom touches her, either.

“We
shall see after you get a load of my stable,” she says. “Just between you and
me, do not gamble at the Mansion. The games are rigged.”

He
laughs. “Thank you for the tip.”

“You
miss your mama, don’t you?” she asks, half hoping to cut him down a notch or
two.

“She
was a lady.” He shrugs. His eyes glint for a moment, then die out. “I am
famished, Miss Malone. Will you dine with me?” He turns away, crestfallen. “Oh,
pardon me, I haven’t got a red cent.”

Tomorrow
we die. “Meet me downstairs in half an hour. I’ll stand you for dinner at the
Poodle Dog.”

“You’re
very gracious.”

“Gracious,
pah. I shall add the expense to your bill when you scare up the scratch to pay
me.”

“Gracious
and fair.”

She
fairly flies up the stairs like a spring chicken. Dinner with a handsome young
foreign-looking gentleman at the Poodle Dog, where all them Snob Hill gentlemen
go to dine on some of the finest French food in town. How tongues will wag when
she strolls in with Mr. Watkins. She yells for Mariah, who has mounted her
watch on the rooftop again.

Mariah
wearily climbs in the window, softly cursing. Sure and Jessie knows them Snob
Hill gentlemen. When they get a gander of her with the likes of Mr. Watkins,
they’ll be panting at her door to see what new tricks she’s learned. If she’s
going to stand the pup for dinner, she may as well reap whatever harvest she
can from his company. The biz is the biz.

“It’s
advertising,” she tells Mariah, who helps her shimmy off the pink silk frock.
“It’s the American way.”

“I’d
watch out for that young gentleman, if I was you.”

“Sure
and I’m watchin’ him,” Jessie says gleefully. The ladies in France are
tightening the goddamn waist? “Relace my corset, Mariah.”

“Please,
Miss Malone. Madame De Cassin has pleaded with you to go see the doctor about
that pain.”

“Relace
the corset. Tighter. Tighter!”

Mariah
does and when Jessie cries out, Mariah feeds her another dose of Scotch Oats
Essence. Then they pour her into the mauve damask evening dress with lace
festoons, garlands of pearls, and crystal pendants on the bust. Jessie finds
her blue diamond earrings and filigree necklace, pulls on opera-length mauve
satin gloves. She fills her handbag with two hundred dollars in gold coins.
When the Queen of the Underworld goes out of the town, she goes with plenty of
gold. Then she saunters downstairs to Mr. Watkins.

He’s
waiting in the foyer, spruced up and spiffy in a black wool Prince Albert suit,
an ivory silk shirt with a thin red pinstripe, a red silk vest, a red silk
French necktie, and black leather boots. He’s slicked down his thick brown
curls so they fall behind his ears almost to his shoulders and donned a black
silk top hat.

“You’re
a daisy, darlin’,” Jessie says.

“You’re
a picture yourself, my Queen,” he says and offers his elbow.

They
stroll out the door of 263 Dupont Street into the dust and clouds of gunpowder,
the stench of spilled rotgut. The frenzied celebration of the Fourth of July carries
on well into the deepening dusk. Drunken brawls ring out from every corner.
Squealing horses rear and bolt. Wives scream and cry and plead with their husbands
to come home. Men lie passed out pie-eyed on the street or stagger in chortling
packs, arms entwined over each other’s shoulders. The street hookers flirt,
poxy and crude. Jessie sniffs with disdain. Them chits are as many classes down
from Jessie as Jessie is from a Snob Hill lady. Maybe more.

She
hails a hack just as Mr. Jackson’s elegant hansom is trotting up Dupont Street.
Abundant silver trim gleams on the fine mahogany leather. Jessie hesitates, her
idle flirtation with Mr. Watkins forgotten. Mr. Jackson is a good john, regular
and always very flush. An aging Silver King, he was once a rival of one of
Jessie’s beaux. Now he patronizes Jessie’s parlor as much as he patronizes the
girls on Sutter Street, if only for petty revenge. Is Mr. Jackson headed her
way? She cranes her neck.

Then
suddenly a black brougham careens through the intersection, slamming broadside
into Mr. Jackson’s hansom. Horses shriek and kick. The drivers leap down from
their seats and seize the horses’ bridles, trying to calm the beasts. Mr.
Jackson dismounts from the hansom, seizes his driver’s horsewhip, and confronts
the offending brougham and its occupants.

They
spill out, three tong men dressed all in black, their queues coiled at the
napes of their necks. They wear black slouch hats and black slippers. A wiry,
tattooed fellow with a knife tucked in his belt begins to berate Mr. Jackson in
a high, excited gibber. A fat man with diamond rings scornfully surveys the
gathering crowd. And a third man, tall and gaunt, a black eyepatch over his
left socket, barks orders at his driver.

Them’s
the hatchet men Jessie saw in the park! And there, crawling out of the
brougham, is the tall, thin lady in gray silk they accosted, towing the
squalling Chinese wretch by her elbow. Mr. Jackson’s driver and the driver of
the brougham shout at each other, curse and argue. The brougham driver swings
his fist at Mr. Jackson’s driver, and Mr. Jackson shouts at the hatchet men,
cracking the horsewhip.

Jessie
rushes over, her earlier outrage kicking up like a mule. A lady, a proper
citizen accosted by tong men! What’s the city coming to? What’s next?

Jessie
runs to the lady and takes her arm, and the lady throws back her veil. In the
dusk, Jessie stares, disbelieving. The lady has pale golden skin, high
cheekbones, and slanted eyes, the most amazing eyes Jessie has ever seen, the
irises the gleaming green color of shamrocks. A Chinese woman? In a proper
lady’s outing togs?

“They’ve
been driving and driving, going all over town,” the lady says, breathing heavily.
“I can’t think what they’re doing, except looking for a place where they can
imprison us.” She looks at Jessie, beseeching. “They seem to think they own
her, but they certainly don’t own me.”

Sure
and the lady speaks perfect, educated-sounding English. And then Jessie hears a
tiny voice tingling in the air over the lady’s head. Like a spirit! Lordy,
there’s something extraordinary about this lady!

Without
thinking twice—a bad habit of hers—Jessie strides up to the eyepatch.

“How
much for her?” she shouts at him, pointing at the lady.

The
eyepatch turns, surprised. He knows Jessie, sure and everyone in town knows the
Queen of the Underworld. His eye narrows. “How much?”

“Yeah,
how much?” she snaps. “Be quick about it.”

The
eyepatch spits words at the wiry fellow and the fat man, who withdraw from the
confrontation with Mr. Jackson and his driver. The eyepatch points at the
wretch. “That one, she ours.”

“Hmph!
I don’t want no Chinee chit.” She spills out a hundred dollars in double eagles,
which is probably way too much for the lady if she’s consumptive or poxy. Still,
Jessie is determined to get the lady out of this predicament. She’s got a
feeling. What do you call it? A premonition. “The one in the gray dress, you
dunce.”

The
eyepatch grins and seizes the gold. “She yours.”

Jessie
takes the lady’s arm. “Come along. We should vamoose.”

“Jade
Eyes!” cries the wretch as the fat man wrestles her back into the brougham. “Do
not leave me, Jade Eyes!”

“I
can’t leave that girl with those men!” the lady says angrily. The tiny voice
chimes again over her head. Like a spirit. Just like a sweet spirit.

Jessie
pulls her away, out of the street. “Miss, please. There’s nothing you can do
for that chit.” Jessie pats the lady’s hard, thin arm, well pleased with herself.
“As for you, now you belong to me.”

October
12, 1895

Columbus
Day

4

Up
and Down Dupont Street

This
is the United States of America, 1895. President Lincoln announced the
Emancipation Proclamation thirty-two years ago. Casualties of the War Between the
States have lain in their graves longer than Zhu Wong has been alive in the
future. Slavery has been abolished in America. Everyone here is free.

And
I’m not,
Zhu thinks as she sits at the breakfast table.

“What
I need is red wine and plenty of it,” Jessie Malone proclaims, tossing her blond
curls. Dissatisfied with her natural endowments, Jessie pins hair switches from
the Montgomery Ward catalog here and there in her tremendous coiffure. “Go
fetch me red wine, missy, and be quick about it.”

“For
breakfast, Miss Malone?”

“Lordy,
no, for the Mansion. For the gentlemen tonight. It’s Columbus Day! Don’t you
know anything?”

“I
beg your pardon, Miss Malone,” she says deferentially, as is fitting for an
indentured servant. She mutters to Muse, “Columbus Day? I can’t keep these American
holidays straight.”

“In
fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” Muse whispers in her ear, “Columbus sailed
the ocean blue.”

Excellent,
Zhu
mutters under her breath. Now Muse is spouting doggerel.

Jessie
looks at her askance. What must she look like, forever muttering to herself and
rolling her eyes to the side to view whatever Muse has posted in her peripheral
vision?

Muse
has turned out to be a serious problem. Her one tenuous, desperate link to her
Now, she can’t rely on.
Very excellent.

Zhu hasn’t
known what to expect of Muse since the first day of the Gilded Age Project when
the monitor spontaneously communicated in projection mode and advised her not
to fight the hatchet men, to let them abduct the girl and carry her off. Now how
can she secure a position at the Presbyterian mission when Jessie Malone holds
a two-and-a-half year contract for Zhu’s services and the madam fully intends
to enforce the bond? The girl she was supposed to rescue has been abducted, the
aurelia never showed up at all, and Zhu is taking orders from the Queen of the
Underworld over breakfast.

The
Gilded Age Project has turned out to be a disaster. Nothing like what the
Archivists planned.

Zhu
has no idea how to make things right and Muse is no help at all.

She
dallies at the breakfast table, overcome with a peculiar lethargy. Things
always change from moment to moment, don’t they? At the most basic quantum
level, reality is no static thing, but a flux, an incessancy, a great
trembling. Spacetime spins; it ebbs and flows. Yet in cosmicist theory, reality
is One Day, existing for all eternity. Isn’t that what Chiron said? Reality is
a set of probabilities constantly collapsing into the timeline. Multiple
universes coexist like motes of dust swirling in a sunbeam.

Quantum
physics has long supported these contradictions. Zhu chuckles to herself.
Quantum physics, hah. Oh, it ought to be quite painless. You won’t know the
difference. You awaken transformed, once a Self contemplated yesterday, now a Self
scarcely anticipated tomorrow.

But
what about today?

She
yawns and blinks, drowsy, and doesn’t know herself. She breathes the scent of
red roses and champagne, peeled oranges, roast quail and butter. Who is this
slender woman who lazes in a long silk dress at the opulent table of the Queen
of the Underworld, conversing with gentlemen boarders, sipping coffee with
cream and sugar?

Is
it really her, Zhu Wong?

Or
some other woman, altogether?

Only
three months ago, she stood accused of attempted murder. In a T-shirt, jeans,
and worn sneakers, she’d trudged through mud, a Daughter of Compassion, a
handgun strapped beneath her right arm, a black patch behind her left knee.
She’d been a comrade, a devotee of Kuan Yin. She’d been an abandoned skipchild,
a Generation-Skipping radical working hard for the only sustainable future the
world could hope for.

Three
months ago. Six centuries in the future.

She
tilts her head toward strains of music drifting from the saloon across the
street, where they’ve got a string quarter for the early-morning drinkers. A
lilting waltz, romantic and dizzying. She plays with her sleeve, the silk a
luminous blue, the buttons on her cuff nubs of mother-of-pearl.

Only
three months ago, she’d breathed the stink of petroleum fumes from the
antiquated ground traffic of Changchi. She’d breathed the stink of fumes from
fourth-hand recyclers beneath the shabby dome over the compound where the
Daughters of Compassion lived. She’d breathed the stink of compost,
disinfectant, too many human beings living too closely together.