They both looked up when I came in, and Beatrice bounced to her feet wearing a worried look none of us would ever let a john catch us in. That was probably why it smoothed away again the second the Marshal stepped through the door behind me.
Girls in my profession know a little too much about men. The ones who want to know a woman as a person are fewer than you’d hope, and most of those don’t even realize it about themselves. They don’t care who a woman is, or what she’s scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear. Easy enough for me; it’s my job, ain’t it? I’m not as good at it as Pollywog, but I can mostly keep my face straight on my skull.
Harder if you have to live with one and play that role all night and day, without your sisters to keep you from going starkers. I can’t imagine being married to most men.
Well, maybe a man like Da. But I suspect most women don’t even know that men like Da are possible.
Anyway, the Marshal came in and I saw Bea and Priya both assemble their sweet, stupid faces in a hurry. What was funny was I saw him noticing them doing it and I saw the sharp little twist of his frown when he did. He got control of it again right quick, and I was left with the strange thought that everybody in that room just then was wearing a mask for the purpose of not upsetting one another.
It was a queer thought, and it rightly unsettled me.
“This is Marshal Bass Reeves,” I told the ladies. “Marshal, this is…” I stumbled, realizing all at once that he’d want the last names and that I did not know Priya’s. Hell, I didn’t know if the Indian girls had last names, exactly. The Chinese did their names in some kind of a funny order, and the Spanish girls had three or four last names apiece, and our Indian girls — the American ones, I mean, rather than the Oriental ones — might have last names or might not, as suited them and depending on what tribe they came from. “… Miss Beatrice Malvot,” I finished when I realized everyone was staring at me. “And Miss Priya—”
She winked, and she came to my rescue. “Priyadarshini Swati,” she said. “Priya is fine.”
“Miss Swati,” he said. He’d lifted off his hat and tucked it under his arm when he stepped inside, so he touched his forehead. “Miss Malvot.”
“Charmed, Marshal Reeves,” said Beatrice with her beautiful manners. She extended her hand like a real lady, and nothing in her face gave away that Marshal Reeves hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with it after he took it. If I’d been her, it would of been endless awkwardness — but she just lifted her glove away from his after a moment, and nodded like the French Queen. If France still had Queens, which it hasn’t since my da was alive, which I know because he was at pains to tell me when it happened that another great nation had become a Republic.
Whatever that means.
“Polly?” I asked.
“Miss Lizzie took her up to bed. Perhaps you would like a drink, Marshal Reeves?” Bea offered, and I realized that I should of rung for Connie already. Her accent made her sound even more regal. “Madame will be with you in a moment. I assume you’re here about … what happened outside?”
“Yes,” the Marshal said. “And a cup of Arbuckle’s would go down just fine, if you don’t mind. Sleeping hasn’t been much on my mind of late.”
Bea would of rung, but Priya slithered out of the afghan and headed to the kitchen, still wearing her trousers and cardigan. Bea and I watched her go, then hastily collected ourselves. I was the one who remembered to offer the Marshal a chair.
I hoped Priya would be back with the coffee around the same time Madame finally put in her appearance. It’d strike a good note.
“So, Marshal,” I said after we’d both found chairs not too far from either Beatrice or the fire, “I have the distinct impression that nothing in that alley much surprised you.”
He’d hung his hat on his knee. Now he huffed and moved it to the floor. Signor stood up in Bea’s lap, stretched his portly self six ways, and hopped down to the floor with a bump that was the shame of supposedly graceful and elegant cats everywhere. He thudded over to Marshal Reeves and began investigating his boots and hat with a pink, twitching nose.
The Marshal, meanwhile, had at first kept talking. “You’d be right, Miss Memery.” Then he seemed to get stuck. His breath went in and out, flaring his nostrils, and he found that deaf cat inordinately distracting.
At last, he said, “I’ve followed this son of a bitch from the Indian Territory. Begging your pardon, ladies.”
“If you have followed him,” Beatrice said, “you must know who he is, no?”
Behind the luxuriance of his mustache, Marshal Reeves’ expression pickled. “I wasn’t sure I’d even come to the right place until now. I don’t mind saying it, I’m half-sorry to have my theory proved.”
He reached to his inside pocket, past his gold watch chain, and brought out a scrap of oilcloth tied with a bit of bootlace. He laid it on the low table and was just about to start unwrapping it when Priya backed into the room balancing a coffee tray — the same one I’d brought upstairs to her not twenty-four hours before.
She had set it down on the receiving table by the door and had just commenced to pouring when a commotion arose in the parlor. Miss Bethel’s and Miss Francina’s voices combined with some male ones, and through them I heard Madame’s heavy tread on the stair.
I might of stayed in the library, to speak honest, but the Marshal tucked his packet back in his coat and stood. “I’ll show you before I go,” he promised when Beatrice and I protested.
We followed him out into the parlor, though I hesitated for a moment at Priya’s hand on my sleeve. She whispered me a question and I answered, likewise under my breath.
Priya looked like the best kind of savant when she slipped a coffee cup into Madame’s hand, cream and one lump, just as Madame preferred it. And I hid a smile behind my hand at Madame’s brief expression of respect. I think only I and possibly Marshal Reeves noticed the exchange, but it would of been easy to miss anything in the sudden chaos and bustle of the parlor. Effie and Crispin was there, out of breath with running, and with them were Miss Bethel, Miss Francina, and three constables — two roundsmen and a sergeant. Miss Lizzie had come downstairs with Madame. And of course there was Bea and Marshal Reeves and Priya and me.
Eventually, Miss Francina got everyone settled and introduced and Priya outdid some professional butlers of my acquaintance with that tray of coffee. The sergeant — one Waterson — even sat, though the roundsmen shifted about uncomfortably, accepting no coffee and looming by the door. Waterson looked a little put out to find a U.S. Deputy Marshal already on the scene and made a little fuss about Reeves being out of Judge Parker’s court district. “You’re a long way off your patch,” he said.
“I am that,” Marshal Reeves allowed.
Nobody else paid that much mind, however, and Sergeant Waterson dropped it. After that I thought Madame was going to send Beatrice and Effie and Priya and me out of the room, but apparently it was Pollywog mostly who they wanted to talk to, so we all stayed while Miss Lizzie went back upstairs to fetch her, since she’d sent her up to her bed. It weren’t all real organized like, and I wondered what was taking them all so long. And then Polly came down in her robe — not a peignoir such as we’d wear for entertaining, but a warm dressing gown — with her hair all crinkled on her shoulders from her braids — and I realized what they’d been up to.