“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.
I was spending the time with the notebook I don’t care if people see, sketching away at my idea for curtains for Priya. I’d do those first, I decided, though they’d need lining to hide the seams between the patchworks, because they was just rectangles. They’d serve as practice for the duvet and maybe for cushions.
It was all busywork, of course, to distract myself from what I was really thinking. That I needed—needed—Priya to stay. So she had to want to stay. So it was up to me to make her comfortable. To make her like it here.
And of course I was all at the same time painfully aware that if I made it too obvious I was scrabbling after her I’d just drive her away. Anybody who just wants a dog to kick isn’t somebody you’d want to be loved by, my da used to say. Nor somebody you’d ever give a dog, Mama would always answer.
Time went by, and people drifted in and out of the parlor. By three on the big grandfather clock by the library door, the last of the johns had either done his business and gone out or settled in for the night with the girl of his dreams. Those picketers we’d had earlier apparently didn’t stay up past ten, so they was long gone, too, and in their absence custom had picked up a bit. Me, I was just starting to think about some supper — I could smell the mutton with garlic and the huckleberry sauce wafting out from Connie’s cookpots every time the hall door was opened — when, muffled through the brick walls, I heard Pollywog start in to screaming out in the alley.
I say I heard, but we all did. “Christ, what now?” Miss Francina said, heaving herself up from the chair where she’d been bootless, toasting her socks by the parlor fire. Crispin was already on his feet, grabbing up an old train signal lantern we keep beside the door. Miss Bethel ducked under the bar pass-through with her shotgun ready. Effie jumped up beside me, and so did Miss Lizzie. Madame’s office door creaked and I heard the thump of her cane, but Crispin was already out the door and I wasn’t letting him and Polly face whatever it was alone for as long as it might take for Madame to get down the stairs. If Polly needed rescuing, then by God we were there to effect her rescue.
I bolted out behind him, in between Miss Francina and Miss Bethel.
Pollywog’s real name is Mary, from which comes Polly and therefore, by the irrefutable logic of affection, Pollywog. She’s got that straight blond hair like I described, and maybe not a whole mess of common sense, but she ain’t in general a screamer. She’s got a lot of regulars; the johns who want her usually only want her, and I think it is as much to do with her big blue eyes and her listening expression and her trick of petting their hair back as it is to do with her trick hip.
There weren’t nothing in sight from the front stoop. I looked this way and that — and up the ladder, for good measure — but them red lamps burned steady in the still air and there was nobody in any direction. Polly screamed again — breathier this time, like a balloon running out of air — and I caught sight of the colored-glass glow of Crispin’s signal lantern vanishing around the corner to my right.
I lit out after him, Miss Francina and Miss Bethel on either flank, Effie at our heels. Miss Francina was still stocking foot, but that didn’t seem to slow her none.
“Aw, shit!” Crispin’s voice, and I braced for a crash or a thud of fist on flesh, but all that came was Pollywog’s sobbing. I rounded the corner in time to see that it muffled as Crispin pulled her face into his coat. In the light of the gas lamp beside the kitchen door, I could make out the dustbins we lined up against the scaffold holding the street fill back. There also was a pile of rags and a spilled pail of peelings — Pollywog must of dropped it — beside them.
We lot all planted our heels and piled to a halt like characters in a funny strip. Fortunately, it was Miss Bethel who bounced off my back, not Miss Francina. And fortunately, she did it with her forearm and not the shotgun. Half-carrying Pollywog, Crispin started drawing her the way we’d come, back toward the front door. Her face never came out of his shoulder.
“She hurt?” Miss Francina asked as they passed our little huddle by.
“Look to the girl on the ground,” Crispin said. “If there’s any use to it.”
“Fucking shit,” said Effie, echoing and enhancing Crispin’s sentiments. I didn’t say it myself because my mouth had dropped open and was hanging there as if I was a hooked fish, gasping.
The dustbins were dustbins. The dropped pail of peelings was exactly that. The pile of rags …
It was a girl. Or a woman.
Miss Francina, unsurprisingly, got herself together first. She darted forward, heedless of the peelings and her stockinged feet, and dropped a knee beside the prone figure. As if her moving freed us all from some paralysis, I stepped up, too. Miss Bethel stood over us with the gun held easily, and Effie made a sideways triangle to her, watching back the way we’d come. We all trusted Crispin to bring the folk inside up to speed and all.