Authors: Elizabeth Bear
I … grinned. And said, “I’ll show you where the ragbags are. And how to work the sewer.”
Best of all, when we were leaving Threadneedly Street we saw the elephants. Five of them, arranged in size from biggest to littlest, walking in a line. They wore bright blankets and caps, alternating blue with red borders and red with blue, and each one carried a man in spangled tights or a woman whose short skirt resembled a bicycle costume.
They were gray and enormous, and the patterns on their skin was like the tiny triangles on the backs of your wrist only magnified a hundred times.
Priya stood beside me, squeezing my hand until I thought my fingers might pop off. “Those aren’t real,” she said. “They can’t be real!”
“Aw, miss,” Crispin said, laughing pleasantly. “It’s just that the circus is in town.”
It was a few nights later when Merry Lee declared herself well enough to leave us the following day. That was the night everything changed, and not for the better. Although we didn’t find out what it was about until the next day, it turned out that was the night Missus Parkins’ girls took unwilling delivery of the second murdered
nymph du prairie
.
It was just Beatrice, Effie, Merry Lee, Priya, and me in the library that evening. Miss Bethel was feeling poorly, and Miss Lizzie was with her. We were all a little agitated, hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be scarlet fever or God knows what, but we were also very cheered by Merry’s recovery. We were drinking sherry and whiskey; Merry was reading aloud from another dime novel while Priya pawed through the pile that remained, deciding what she wanted to hear next. The one Merry was working on was about the Dodge City Marshal Ed Masterson, a Canadian who was shot down just that April by a cowboy in the line of duty but swiftly avenged by his brother Bat.
That’s what the book said:
swiftly avenged
. It made me angry at first. Like avenging anything brings back the person you lost, or makes it hurt any damned less that they ain’t with you anymore.
And then I thought,
But if Peter Bantle does anything more to Priya, I’ll fucking kill him.
As if she had heard me thinking of her, Priya suddenly looked up, grinning. Just as Merry finished a chapter, Priya blurted, “Here’s one about your friend, Karen!”
The red-and-yellow cover she flourished held a completely unrecognizable image under lurid words that read:
BASS REEVES: THE LONE MARSHAL OF THE INDIAN TERRITORY
.
“Lone?” Effie scoffed. “Don’t Marshals always got a posseman?”
“Marshal Reeves mentioned one,” I allowed. Still, I itched to get my hands on that book. But I knowed better than to let Effie see me eager. She didn’t mean ill, but she’d never let me forget I cared, either. And she’d try to make it as if I was romantically inclined toward him, which just weren’t the case.
Maybe a little fascinated. And maybe a little envious as well.
Priya leaned forward. She wasn’t playing Effie’s game. She handed me the book.
I flipped it over.
Shootist. Legend. Master of Disguise. Lawman in a land without law!
For the law-abiders in the Indian Territory, Deputy United States Marshal Bass Reeves is the Last Recourse.
“Master of disguise.” I riffled the pages.
“We can read that one next,” Beatrice said. She had a grin on her face, too, but not a teasing one. I started to think maybe she liked the Marshal as well as I did. And he hadn’t even saved her life.
Bea has pretty good horse sense when it comes to who to trust and who not to, and I took a note. Sure, I liked him. But if Bea liked him, that meant something. “Master of disguise,” I muttered again.
Now they was all looking at me.
“Priya, I might know how to get a message to your sister. Maybe even how to bust her out.”
“First you have to find her,” Merry Lee said, lowering the book about the Mastersons—there were three of ’em in all, Mastersons and lawmen, that was.
I tried to hold in my grin, knowing it weren’t appropriate. But it crept across my cheeks as irresistibly as dawning before I let myself say, “If this works, Peter Bantle hisself will tell us right where to find her.”
I looked up right after I said it—and right into the wide, wide gray eyes of Miss Francina, who was leaning in the library door. She blinked them, and I jumped up from my chair and opened my mouth to explain. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought so frantically in my life, saving right when Da died.
Miss Francina held up a finger and said, “Shh.” Just like that. Like it was a word. She looked us over, one by one. Not a one of us had the moxie to pipe up to her.
Then, shaking her head, she continued, “Oh, you girls. No, not a word more. I don’t know what you
are
thinking … and I want to be honestly able to say I
didn’t
know what you were thinking, either, if you follow me.”
The door clicked shut behind her on a last glimpse of jiggling yellow corkscrews, and Beatrice, Effie, Priya, and me all looked back and forth at one another.
It seemed like we had a friend.
Priya watched the door shut, then put her elbows on her knees and hunched at me like a hairy-shouldered buzzard. Whatever demand was in her pose and her expression didn’t make it into her voice, though. It was hesitant, afraid to hope. “You have a plan.”
“We need to talk to Marshal Reeves,” I said.
* * *
As luck would have it, he came by just after breakfast the next day—or maybe the meal was luncheon for him. I wasn’t sure the Marshal ever slept. Or if he did, maybe it wasn’t on any kind of a regular schedule. He kept long hours, I guess I’m trying to say.
Crispin came in to tell me I had company while I was still sitting in the dining room after everybody else had gone. The funny thing is, I was writing out a note to the Marshal to go in the afternoon post and wondering who he’d find to read it and trying to phrase everything so there was nothing suggestive in it. Suggestive the wrong way, I mean: I didn’t care if people took it as a proposition. That was as good an excuse as any.
The Marshal had left us the address of the hotel he was staying in, and I guessed they’d have a concierge or somebody who could read it out loud. Anyway, I wanted to get it done fast, because I didn’t want anybody to catch me writing it and it was cold in my room for writing.
This time, the Marshal wasn’t alone. He had what looked like a full-blood Indian with him, and not Priya’s sort of Indian, either. And they asked for me special, at the door.
Crispin led them into the dining room, where I was the last one at the table, having pushed aside plates once piled with Connie’s flapjacks and bacon and sausages to write. “Karen,” he said, “the Marshal’d like a word with you.”
I snorted at my failed letter in amusement.
“Thank you, Crispin.”
He winked at me—
Karen’s got a special
friend—and left again without comment. I’d take it from Crispin in a way I wouldn’t from Effie, because I knowed Crispin didn’t feel no need to fix me, file off my edges to make me more comfortable to be around.
The Marshal took my hand and stood to one side to introduce me to his companion. “Tomoatooah, this is Miss Karen Memery. She’s helping with our inquiries. Miss Memery, this is Tomoatooah, my posseman. He’s a Numu. You’d say Comanche.”
“Hello, To … Tomoatooah,” I stumbled over his name, and tried again. “Tomoatooah?”
He corrected me. The vowels weren’t quite shaped like any sounds I was used to hearing. I tried again.
He shook his head and said, “I wish a good day to you, Miss Memery.”
I looked at the Marshal curiously. “
I’d
say. You wouldn’t?”
Marshal Reeves smiled tightly. “I lived on tribal land for a long time, between when I ran away and the end of the war. I speak some Indian.” I could tell by the way he said “Indian,” ironic, that he meant he spoke several kinds of Indian. You might not know this, but it’s a fact that they have as many languages as white folk has. Maybe more.
Tomoatooah had a Roman nose, narrow and arched, like a warm-blood stud’s. Full cheeks and a small chin, but a strong jaw that made his face look square in profile. Eyes like jet beads, glittering, and hair chopped at the shoulders except for two longer braids. He wore a lady’s hat that would of been plain and black except there was a pale blue muslin scarf with black polka dots tied around it as a band, and he wore a gray wool coat over a red sprigged cotton shirt and buckskin trousers. But his real glory was the necklace, or breastplate, or what have you: long stark white Campbell hairpipe beads, hung horizontal between smaller bits of silver and wampum. It rustled a little with each breath he took, and I thought it very fine.
I asked him, “What does your name mean?”
His eyebrows arched as he replied, “What does yours?”
I hadn’t thought about it until he said something, but his question was as good as mine, weren’t it? “Karen,” I said. “It’s Danish. From my mom. It means ‘pure.’” I held my hands up flat and shrugged. It was what it was. “And Memery, that’s Irish. My dad’s dad was a horsebreaker in Ireland before the potato famine. They came here to escape. I don’t know what it means.”
“Escaping famine,” he said. “My people too have traveled for that. Thousand miles, or more. And horsebreaking, that’s a good trade. My own name means ‘Child of the Sky.’”
“Does that commemorate a deed?”
“Of my namer,” he said. “Not of my own.”
“Won’t you sit?” I asked. “Have some flapjacks and bacon?” The servers still rested on the table.
“Don’t mind if I do,” the Marshal said. He proceeded to pull a plate from the warmer and load it up, finding some beans that I’d missed. “Oh,” he said, discovering the sausages. “Mysteries!”
He handed that plate to Tomoatooah and filled one for himself. The two men fell to as if they hadn’t seen food in a week. Maybe the Marshal treated it like sleep: a requirement of lesser men, until the need came unavoidable.
I knowed the Marshal hadn’t just come for breakfast, so I weren’t surprised when he got past the first flash of hunger, slowed down his fork wielding a mite, and poured himself another cup of still-warm coffee from the pot. Tomoatooah kept eating, chewing each bite meditatively before washing it down with coffee, but never slowing in his pace. Connie poked her nose out of the kitchen just then, saw that we was engaged, and backed out. I heard soft clattering behind the doors and wondered how long it would be before another piled-high covered platter appeared. Connie liked to cook for folk with an appetite.
“Miss Memery,” the Marshal said. He paused and sipped coffee and started again. “Another girl’s dead.”
My mug rattled on the table when I set it down. “Who?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head kind of sideways. Judicious, like. “We don’t rightly know. She was dumped outside Missus Parkins’ kitchen door last night, or more like early this morning. Done up the same way as the other.” That last he said with particular distaste.
I looked at him again—the weather-beated creases at the corners of his eyes, the tight-curled hair oiled and combed into a crinkle, pressed flat in a ring where his hat usually sat. Wrangler tonsure, my da would of said. His skin looked gray under his eyes. Maybe he weren’t so immortal after all.
As I studied the Marshal, I was aware of Tomoatooah studying me. The Marshal broke the triangle, though, gazing off into the distance as if his eyes tracked an invisible killer across an invisible range.
We might still have been there if there hadn’t been a thump and a creak—familiar to me, if not to the gentlemen. I started anyway, tossing my head up like a high-strung colt, and I swear the Marshal actually reached for his gun. Tomoatooah just folded another rasher into his mouth. That was the correct reaction; it was just Signor opening the door with his trick of jumping at the handle. He sauntered in, purring in a self-pleased fashion that about rang the crystal, and proceeded on a circuit of the table. He put a paw into my lap—he was big enough so it wasn’t much of a stretch for him—and butted his big, round head against my elbow. He was begging for my bacon scraps, of course—but the wobble of his belly made a pretty convincing argument that he didn’t need any.
Still, it broke the tension and made me able to talk again. “You think there’s a reason the killer’s doing that,” I said. “Dumping the dead girls that way.”
The Marshal glanced at me, then forked another flapjack and a couple of mysteries onto his plate. “I think it was good fortune and happy happenstance as led me to you, miss. And I think I’ve been an idiot not to realize before now that there’s some link between your nemesis and my murder writ.”
I knowed the word “nemesis.” It turned up in Bullfinch’s
Age of Fable,
which I’d read cover to cover about five times. I pushed Signor down gently. He reared up again, purring all the harder. In a minute, he’d start to caterwaul louder than a puma. Being deaf as a stone, he didn’t know his own power.
I said, “My nemesis … you mean Peter Bantle.”
“Given how he seems determined to threaten you lot, and you in particular, miss—and the fact that the first dead whore, begging your pardon, was dumped in your rubbish? I’d say it’s a fair guess he’s got it in for you, miss, personally as well as categorically.”
That made sense. I nodded, and when I followed Tomoatooah’s gaze back to his face I found him nodding, too.
“I did tell him to get the hell out of my parlor. And I didn’t let him see I was scared of him, neither.”
The Marshal looked at me with the same look he’d given when he’d said he’d seen folk survive worse floggings than the dead sparrow’d gotten. Like maybe he knew something about folk who needed to see you scared of them. He said, “He’d hate you for that.”
We were briefly interrupted by Connie with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of corn cakes, of which I took one just to be companionable. I weren’t too hungry, having just had breakfast and all, but a hot corn cake fried in grease, with a good drip of molasses, ain’t to be missed.