Authors: John Joseph Adams
“You’re going to leave this parlor now,” I said. “And shut the door behind you. And
Madam Damnable will send somebody around in the morning so you can settle up for the
lock you busted.”
“I know they came in here,” Bantle said. “There’s Chink whore blood all over your
hands and the floor here.”
Oh, I knew the answer to that one. I’d heard Madam Damnable say it often enough. “It’s
not the house’s policy to discuss anyone who we may or may not be entertaining.”
Then the thing happened that I ain’t been able to make head nor tail of. My head went
all sort of sticky fuzzy, like your mouth when you wake up, and I started feeling
like maybe Bantle had a point. That
was
one of his girls upstairs, and Merry Lee
had
brought her here—or vice versa maybe—without asking. And didn’t she owe him, that
girl, for paying to have her brought over from India? And there was Effie pointing
a gun at him.
Bantle was pointing that glove at me, finger and thumb cocked like he was making a
“gun.” I had another skin-flinch, this time as I wondered if Bantle could
shoot
electricity out of that thing. His eyes sort of… glittered, with the reflections
moving across them. It was like what they say Mesmeric—I think Mr. Mesmer was the
fellow’s name?
“Do it,” Bantle said, and God help me didn’t I think it seemed like a good idea.
I was just about reaching over to grab the barrel of Effie’s shotgun when the library
door eased open off to my left. Through the crack I could see Beatrice’s bright eyes
peeping. Bantle saw her too, because he snarled, “Get that Negra whore out here,”
and one of his standover men started toward her.
I had just enough warning to snatch back my reaching hand and slap my palms over my
ears before Effie jerked the gun up and sent a load of buckshot through the stained
glass over the door panels that didn’t never get no sun no more anyhow. The window
burst out like a spray of glory and Bantle and his men all ducked and cringed like
quirted hounds.
I just stood there, dumbfounded, useless, as full of shame for what I’d been thinking
about doing to Effie and Madam Damnable as some folks think I ought to be for whoring.
“I got four more shells,” Effie said. “Go on.
Go and get her
.”
The bully who’d started moving couldn’t seem to make his feet work all of a sudden,
like the floor’d got as sticky as my head had been. Without looking over at Beatrice,
I said, “Bea sweetie, you take Pollywog and go run get the constable. It seems these
gentlemen have lost their way and need directions.”
When it was coming out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe it. The words sounded calm
and smooth, the opposite of the sticky fuzz I’d been feeling a moment before. I even
saw one of the bully boys take a half-step back. It didn’t impress Peter Bantle, though,
because while the library door was closing across Beatrice’s face he started forward.
Effie worked the pump on the shotgun, but he looked right at her and sneered, “You
don’t have the
balls
,” and then he was reaching for me with that awful glove and I didn’t know yet if
I was going to scream or run or try to hit him, or if Effie was really going to have
to learn to shoot him.
But a big voice arrested him before I had to decide.
“Peter Bantle, just what the hell do you think you’re doing in my house?”
Peter Bantle didn’t have the sense to turn around and run when he heard the ferrule
of Madam Damnable’s cane clicking on the marble tile at the top of the stair. He did
let his hand fall, though, and stepped back smartly. I heard Effie let her breath
go. I looked over at her pale, sweaty face and saw her move her finger off the trigger.
She really had been gonna shoot him.
I stepped back and half-turned so I could watch Madam Damnable coming down the stairs,
her cane in one hand, the other clenching on the banister with each step.
She was a great battleship of a woman, her black hair gone all steel-color at the
temples. Her eyes hadn’t had to go steel-color; they started off that way. Miss Francina
was behind her on the one side and Miss Bethel on the other, and they didn’t look
like they was in any hurry nor in any mood for conversation.
“You got one of my girls in here, Alice,” Peter Bantle said.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and Miss Bethel fanned off left to come take
the shotgun from Effie.
“You speak with respect to Madam Damnable,” Miss Francina said.
Bantle turned his head and spat on the fireplace rug. “I’ll give a tart what respect
she deserves. Now are you going to give me my whore back or not?”
Madam Damnable kept coming, slow and inexorable, like a steam locomotive rolling through
the yard. She was in her robe and slippers, like the rest of us, and it didn’t one
wit make her less scary. “I’ll give you your head back if you don’t step outside my
parlor. You may think you can own folks, Peter Bantle, but this here Seattle is a
free city, and no letter of indenture signed overseas is going to hold water. The
constable’s on his way, and if you’re not gone when he gets here I’m going to have
him arrest you and your boys for trespass, breaking and entering, and malicious mischief.
I pay more in taxes than you do, so you know how that’s going to end.” She gestured
to the broken door and the busted-out window. “The evidence is right there.”
“Your own girl shot out that window!” Outrage made his voice squeak.
I had to hide my laugh behind my hand. Effie squeezed the other one. She was shaking,
but it was okay. Madam Damnable was here now and she was going to take care of everything.
Peter Bantle knew it, too. He had already taken a step back, and when you were faced
with Madam Damnable, there was no coming back from that. He drew himself up in the
doorway as his bully boys collapsed around him. Madam Damnable kept walking forward,
and all four of them slid out the door like water running out a drain.
Their boots crunched in the glass outside. He couldn’t resist a parting shot, but
he called it over his shoulder, and it didn’t so much as shift Madam Damnable’s nighttime
braid against her shoulders. “You ain’t heard the last of this, Alice.”
“For tonight, I think I have.”
He took two more steps away. “And it’s Hôtel
Ma
Cherie, you stupid slag!”
We heard the boots on the broken ladder before Madam Damnable breathed out, and let
herself look around at us. “Well,” she said cheerfully, “what a mess. Effie, fetch
a bucket. Miss Bethel, put that gun away and find the broom, honey. Karen, you go
tell Crispin when they’re done with the Chinese girl he’s to come down here and board
up this window and sweep the glass up. He’ll just have to sit by the door until we
can get in a locksmith. Miss Francina, you go after Beatrice and Pollywog and tell
them we won’t need the constable.”
Miss Francina bit her lip. “Are you sure, ma’am?”
Madam Damnable’s hand glittered with diamonds and rubies when she flipped it. “I’m
sure. Go on, sweeties, scoot.” She paused. “Oh, and ladies? That was quick thinking.
Well done.”
* * *
When I came back up the grand stair with coffee in the china service, the sickroom
door was still closed, but I didn’t hear any screaming or any steam engine chugging
through it which could only be a good sign. If Merry Lee was still under the knife,
she would have been screaming and the machine would have been whining and wheezing
away, and if she had died of it, I thought the girl would be screaming instead. So
I rapped kind of light on the frame, on account of if Crispin or Miss Lizzie was busy
in there I didn’t want to startle them. It took me two tries to make my hand move,
I was still that ashamed of myself from downstairs.
His voice floated back. “It’s safe to come through.” So I set the tray on my hip and
turned the knob left-handed, slow in case there was somebody behind the door. The
sickroom’s different from our other bedrooms. There’s no wallpaper and the sheets
aren’t fancy, and the bedstead and floor and all is just painted white. It makes it
easy to just bleach or paint over again if there’s a bad mess, and you’d rather paint
stained wood than rip up carpet with puke or pus or crusted blood in it any day. The
knife machine kind of hangs in one corner on a frame, like a shiny spider with all
black rubber belts between the gears to make the limbs dance. It’s one of only three
or four in the city, and it needs somebody skilled as Miss Lizzie to run it, but it
don’t hesitate—which when you’re cutting flesh, is a blessing—and it don’t balk at
some operations like other doctors might. And you always know its tools is clean,
because Crispin boils ’em after every use.
When I stepped inside, that whole white room looked like it had been splashed about
with red paint, and none too carefully. Crispin looked up from washing his hands in
a pink-tinged basin with clotted blood floating like strings of tidepool slime around
the edges. Merry Lee was laid sleeping or insensible in the bed on her side, clean
sheets tucked around her waist and a man’s white button shirt on her backwards so
you could get to the dressings on her back. There was a mask over her face, and Crispin’s
other big enamel-knobbed brass machine that handles all those sickbed things that
the steam-powered knife machine doesn’t was kind of wheezing and whirring around her,
its clockworks all wound up fresh and humming. The bloody sheets were heaped up in
the basket, and the Indian girl was perched on the chair by the head of the bed, holding
Merry’s sallow hand clutched between her olive ones and rocking back and forth just
a tiny bit, like she was trying with all her might to hold herself still.
I picked my way between smears of blood. Crispin looked up, grinning instead of grim,
so I knew Merry Lee was going to be just fine unless the blood poisoning got her.
“Karen honey, you are a delivering angel.” He nodded to the tray. “This here is Priya.
She helped me change the sheets.”
I got a good look at her and Merry Lee while I set the coffee on the cleanest bureau.
Merry was a lot younger than I would have expected from the stories, fresh-faced and
sweet as a babe in her sleep and maybe seventeen, eighteen—not more than a year or
two older than me.
Given she’s been a thorn in the side of Peter Bantle and Amrutar—who’s like Bantle’s
older, meaner, richer, Indian twin—and the rest of those cribhouse pimps for longer
than I’ve been working, she must have started pretty young. Which ain’t no surprise,
given some of Peter Bantle’s girls—and boys too—ain’t no older than your sister, and
before she got away from Amrutar, Merry Lee is supposed to have been one of them.
The Indian girl had taken off that coat and Crispin or somebody must have given her
a clean shift. Now I could see her arms and legs and neck, she was skinnier than anybody
ought to be who wasn’t starving to death. I sat there watching the knobs of her wrists
and elbows stick out and the tendon strings move in the backs of her hands. I guess
sailors and merchantmen don’t care so much if the slatterns they visit are pretty
so long as they’re cheap, and it’s dark in a whore’s crib anyway; plus, I guess if
Peter Bantle underfeeds his girls they’re cheap keepers.
Still, as I sat there looking at her, her bloody tangled hair and her cheekbones all
sharp under skin the color of an old, old brass statue’s, it more and more griped
me thinking on it. And it more and more griped me that I’d been going to let Bantle
have her.
And what the hell had I been thinking? That wasn’t like me at all.
There was plenty coffee in the pot, cream and sugar too, and I’d brought up cups for
everybody. But it didn’t look like the Indian girl—Priya—was going to let go of Merry
Lee’s hand and pour herself a cup.
So I did it for her, loaded it up with cream and sugar, and balanced all but one of
the biscuits I’d brought along on the saucer when I carried it to her.
She looked up surprised when I touched her hand to put the saucer in it, like she
might have pulled away. She wasn’t any older than me either, and this close I could
see all the bruises on her under the brown of her skin—layers of them. There was red
fresh scrapes that would blossom into something spectacular, that might have been
from dragging Merry Lee bleeding across half of Seattle. There was black-purple ones
with red mottles like pansy blossoms. And there was every shade of green and yellow,
and you could pick out the hand and fingerprints among ’em. And the red skinned-off
slick-looking burns from Peter Bantle’s electric glove, too, which made me angry and
sick in all sorts of ways I couldn’t even find half the words to tell you.
She was a fighter, and it had cost her. My daddy was a horse-tamer, and he taught
me. Some men don’t know how to manage a woman or a horse or a dog. Where a good master
earns trust and makes a partner of a smart wife or beast—acts the protector and gets
all the benefit of those brains and that spirit—all the bad ones know is how to crush
it out and make them cringing meek. There’s a reason they call it “breaking.”
The more spirit, the longer it takes to break them. And the strongest ones you can’t
break at all. They die on it, and my daddy used to say it was a damned tragic bloody
loss.
He probably wouldn’t think much of me working on my back, but what he taught me kept
me safe anyway, and it wasn’t like either of us asked him to go dying.
Priya looked up at me through all those bruises, and I could see in her eyes what
I saw in some of my daddy’s Spanish mustang ponies. You’d never break this one. You’d
never even bend her. She’d die like Joan of Arc first, and spit blood on you through
a smile.
My hand shook when I pushed the coffee at her.
“I can’t take that,” she said, and that was my second surprise. Her English wasn’t
no worse than mine, and maybe a little better. “You can’t wait on me. You’re a white
lady.”
“I’m a white tart,” I said, and let her see me grin. “And you need it if you’re going
to sit up with Miss Lee here. You’re skin over bones, and how far did you carry her
tonight?”