On the landing I paused and leaned against the wall for a moment before persevering.
The second flight was worse than the first, but eventually I found myself before Priya’s door. That was when I realized I’d left myself no way to knock.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to kick at the panel, although I’d left my soaked, filthy boots in the mudroom. But in a moment of ingenuity, I stepped up to the door and thumped my forehead on it lightly.
A half second later, I realized I could have used my elbow. But too late, and it was enough. I didn’t even hear the patter of sock feet on the floor or have time to step back before Priya was swinging the door open.
“Sorry to wake you,” I said softly, though she didn’t look like she’d been asleep. She wore a flannel nighty and nightcap and the woolen socks I’d guessed at, with a plaid dressing gown pulled haphazardly on. Looking over her shoulder, I saw the shade was up and there was a copy of Huckleberry Finn on her night table.
“You didn’t,” she said, confirming my surmise
“I brought breakfast,” I said unnecessarily, lofting the plate.
She stepped aside. “Have you been up all night? Out in the rain, also?”
I nodded. She shut the door, and I set the food and coffee on her little table. The pot and mug took a little juggling, as my fingers had fair gone numb on the handles. I took the chair when she gestured me to sit; she perched on the bed. The room was chill but bright — her windows faced east. “Only one mug,” she said, pouring.
“For you. I ate already. It’s right reverent coffee, good and thick. Keep you warm.” I took a deep breath, and waited until she’d set the coffeepot down, because I’m kind that way and also because Connie gets stern about breakage and Miss Lizzie gets stern about burns. “The first thing I have to tell you is that your sister is safe. She’s with Merry Lee. We’ll make sure you get to see her as soon as can be, but I can’t take you right this instant.”
I got it out on a rush, before she could stop me. Not that she tried: she just stopped, blinking, staring at me with one hand reached out to the coffee mug.
“You—” she creaked, at last.
“Me and Miss Francina. And the Marshal. And Tomoatooah. And Merry Lee, of course, but I already said her.”
Her hand fell into her lap. She sat for a second and then shuddered. And then sat again. Finally, she looked up at me.
“You did this for me.”
“I did.”
“It was dangerous.”
I nodded.
“Madame told you not to.”
I nodded again.
Very calmly, with that same calm she’d shown the first night we met, she took up her mug and sipped at it. When she set it down again, she said, “Why?”
Because I love you.
I just sat there, mouth hanging open. How do you even answer a question like that?
“Because it needed doing,” I said, which was also true and a hell of a lot less frightening.
Chapter Twelve
Priya jumped up off her bed, suddenly decisive, animated. “We should go right now!” She started rummaging around, finding shoes and her trousers, sniffing the armpits of shirts.
“You should drink your coffee,” I said.
“You can’t just sit there — well, maybe you can. I can’t just sit here!”
“I don’t know where Merry Lee’s safe house is,” I said reasonably. “Do you?”
She shook her head. Her olive complexion took on a greenish cast. She said, “And I don’t want to.”
“Neither do I,” I answered. “And I bet we have the same reasons.”
She watched me like a prairie dog watching a coyote, and I hated myself for the expression on her face.
It didn’t stop me from saying, “You know something about how Bantle makes people do things they ordinarily wouldn’t, don’t you?”
Her eyes widened incrementally, but she didn’t blink.
“Besides the electrocuting folks, I mean.”
“Don’t make me—” she said.
“I ain’t going to make you do nothing, Priya. You’re your own woman. But it’d be a damn big help if, if’n you knowed anything about how to fight off Bantle’s mind control machine, you passed it along before me or the Marshal or somebody got wrangled into actually shooting somebody, instead of just nearly so!”
I hadn’t realized as I was angry until it come out of my mouth. And once it come, I weren’t angry anymore. Especially because her face froze and she thought about it and then, if anything, she turned greener.
Her hands came down, trailing her trousers on the floor.“I’m sorry,” she said.
I went on in a much softer tone — I hadn’t been yelling before, just forceful. Da didn’t hold with raised voices. “You didn’t think it was important to tell us this?”
“I was ashamed!” she blurted. She dropped her clothes on the bed. “I was ashamed, all right?”
I reached out toward her, but either I was smart enough not to touch her or I was too cowardly to push through being scared. My hand hovered, though, and I said, “You got nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Nothing? He used that glove on me, and he used that machine. And he made me … do things.”
Things she didn’t want to do. And I didn’t need to know what they were to know how it’d hurt her. I could still taste my own shame as hot and fresh as if it were just yesterday that I’d nearly grabbed that shotgun away from Effie. And I’d seen the Marshal’s crooked feelings last night.
“It ain’t the same,” I said after a time, sitting back down again. I didn’t remember having stood up. “I know it ain’t the same as being held by him and hurt again and again. But I maybe sort of understand, Priya. He … nearly made me hurt Effie. And he nearly made Bass Reeves shoot me.”
It was harder to get those words out than it had any right to be, but I did it. And then I stayed there with Priya while the sun spilled brighter and brighter through the clouds and her curtains, just thinking and sitting and breathing the same air.
It helped some. Both of us, I’m thinking.
I pulled my jaw closed and squared up my shoulders and proceeded to spin her a tale of midnight raids and derring-do until we both forgot to be strange, and eventually she laughed and rocked and ate biscuits and hugged me a whole lot of times.
But though we didn’t say it, we was also thinking about Peter Bantle and about him running for mayor and how we and Merry Lee and everybody at the Hôtel Mon Cherie would keep safe if he got the votes he seemed in line to get. Not to mention how anybody would go about finding the man killing our frail sisters if the mayor himself were to run Marshal Reeves out of town.
“Do you think he’s the Marshal’s murderer?” I asked.
Her eyes got strange — opaque, as if they was suddenly made of jet rather than dark coffee amber. Her face went still and cool as the water down deep in a well, and all I could think was, I shouldn’t of asked her that.
Whatever she was thinking of — whatever awfulness I’d stupidly made her recollect — she came back from it quickly. She tipped her head and a wisp of hair fell across her forehead. I wanted to smooth it back so bad I had to sit on my hand.
“I’ve never seen him flog a girl,” she said at last, forcing the words out. “That doesn’t mean he hasn’t, but it doesn’t seem to be what he’s looking for. If you take my meaning.”
I did, when I thought about it. Bantle liked to hurt girls, sure. But he liked to do it up close, with his hands. Tying somebody up and flogging her — that’d be too much remove for him. He’d want to make her come close with that filthy glove of his, and then put it on her.