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.