The Fisk Jubilee Singers were prominently billed, and somebody called Anna Bichurina — we were getting a lot of Russians over, with the new fast steamers and the airship route from Vladivostok. “Who’s Ram Shankar Bhattacharya?” I asked, no doubt mangling it terribly.
Priya reached out to touch the posted bill with one fingertip. The touch lingered. I noticed that she chewed her nails and loved her a little bit more than I had already. “A court musician,” she said. “Very famous in my homeland.”
I wondered, suddenly, how long she had been in the territories. How she had come here and where her family was. What had happened to them. When you meet someone in our line of work — or, I guess, my line of work, as she’s out of it now — you sort of assume that if they had any family they’d be doing something else with their lives.
I thought again about the stable, about my idea for a little business of my own. I wondered if Priya liked horses.
For her, I bet I could stand to be around them again.
“How long have you and your sister been in America?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Since last winter.”
Ten months, then. Twelve at the outside. She must of seen my expression and read it flawlessly, because her spine got longer and her chin came up. “I’m quick with languages.”
Crispin elbowed me. I looked at him, and he was grinning.
“Yes,” I said to him. “She slapped a brand on me, all right. How kind of you to point that out.”
I turned back to Priya. “I noticed,” I said.
Priya was looking at Crispin and me in slight confusion of her own now, though. “He laid hands on you.”
“An elbow,” I said. “Not exactly the same thing.”
But she looked wounded, and I took pity on her. “Among the things Madame don’t tolerate is lording it over people on account of their skin.”
“She was a — an abolitionist?”
Crispin patted her on the arm. He glanced around; there was nobody nearby. As I said, the opera house was dark Mondays.
“She’s black,” he said. “Just very fair complected. We’d say that she ‘passes.’ But she’s got a black great-grandma, and that makes her black, by American law.”
It was an interesting thing, watching the procession of emotions dawning and fading across her face like the sequence of the seasons, each replacing the last. Consternation gave way to surprise, which gave way to something else.
“She’s low caste, then. But she can employ people of higher caste?”
I didn’t know what a caste was, then. Now I know it’s like classes, in Priya’s homeland — lords and commoners and gutter scum.
“Does Bantle know?”
Crispin shrugged. “Maybe suspects. It’d be hard to prove out here in the middle of the wilderness, especially as none of us knows where Madame came from, or even her right name. We ain’t never lied about it, to my knowledge. Just let people assume.”
“He called her Alice,” I remembered with a twist of unease. “Bantle called her Alice. He knows something. Or he thinks he does.”
Priya nodded, and I could about see that glittering brain of hers work and spin. She said to Crispin, “You shouldn’t of told me. You trust me too much.”
He winked. “You was going to tell anybody, either way?”
She shook her head, but she didn’t seem appeased. I could almost feel her thinking what a weird country we had. Rather than remarking on that, though, she seemed to steel herself and seize an opportunity for conversating. She turned to me. Quietly, she asked, “Have you … you’ve been so kind other ways. Have you learned anything about my … about Aashini?”
Damn. I’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask. And the way she had to sneak up on her sister’s name about broke my heart.
I had tried. The problem, it turned out, was finding ways to slip it into conversation. Natural like. Men liked to brag, true. But they didn’t always like to be distracted.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m thinking there has to be a way to find out where she is, and maybe get her a message. But I haven’t found it.”
Her face fell like Connie’s soufflés don’t. Like when you put your lips against a vacuum tube, except as if somebody had done it to her expression from the inside. “I’ll think on it, too,” said Crispin. When Priya cocked her head at him, he said, “Slaves had families, too, miss. Sometimes it ain’t so easy to keep in touch. We had our ways of getting word around, and keeping track of kin.”
When the air came out of Priya and her shoulders fell, that was when I realized how twisted up inside she’d been and how much courage it had taken to ask that question. I thought about the burn scars on her arms.
Bantle had dozens of girls in his cribs. Surely he didn’t have time to give that sort of attention to each and every one of them.
Priya, I surmised, might of been a special favorite. And the special favorite of a man like Bantle … well, in her shoes I would pretty fast get so I didn’t let anybody know what I did or didn’t care for, I imagined. Because vulnerability … that’s the sort of thing that a man like Bantle would use against you.
Well, a man like Bantle would use anything against you that he could. And — it occurred to me — a man like Bantle might have ways of getting hold of somebody’s sister, if he wanted to hurt that somebody. And, like Crispin’s relatives, he might have ways of making sure word reached that somebody. Sooner or later.
“Hey,” I said. “Friends do things for each other.”
She stared at the toes of her new blue boots, frowning on one side of her mouth. That long face of hers made all sorts of complicated whimsies happen when she wasn’t careful to guard it. I could see the leather flex as her toes wiggled restlessly beneath.
When she looked up, though, her eyes were bright. Her expression impulsive. “Let me make you a new rug,” Priya said, bouncing on her toes a little, swinging her arms like a boy of seven bursting with so much excitement he has to share.
Friends do things for each other. So were we friends, or was I courting her? Did they have to be exclusionary? How did I find out which she wanted it to be? It bothered me for a whole half a second before I realized that if I was only being her friend because I wanted to get into her bloomers then I was a pretty lousy friend and a pretty lousy romantic prospect.
And maybe if we spent enough time being friends, I’d study out for myself if she had some kind of interest in making more of it. Or at least I’d study out if that was the sort of thing she might not care to be asked about. Because I was pretty sure I could ask … but I wouldn’t if it would chase her away. Because I wanted Priya in my life any way she’d have me, so scaring her as to my intentions just wasn’t in the plan.
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.”
Chapter Nine
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.