I’m sure we didn’t look the least bit suspicious at all.
Crispin opened the door, and in walked that constable, Sergeant Waterson, and one of his towers of muscle. He paused inside the door, shifting from foot to foot as if embarrassed, and said, “I’m sorry, ladies, but I’m here to investigate a complaint that there’s a woman on the premises dressing in men’s clothing.”
He very carefully didn’t look at Miss Francina, and Miss Francina very carefully kept her back turned to him. She was perched on a bar stool, leaning against Miss Bethel, and though they each took a breath, neither one of them acknowledged Waterson in any way.
Madame happened to be in the parlor herself just then, and she stood up slow, leaning on her cane. “Sergeant?” she said in her warning voice. “Who was it, exactly, that swore out this complaint?”
“It was anonymous,” he said. “And you know I don’t take it seriously, Madame. But you know I have to make a visit.”
“Right.” She sighed. “Bethel, my cash box, please?”
Waterson held up a hand. “There’s no fine.”
We all blinked. If he wasn’t going to take a bribe, then what was this all about?
He scuffed a boot on the edge of the rug. “I can see there’s nothing amiss here. I was asked—”
He quailed under Madame’s advance, though, and whatever he might have said next was lost. He dug in his pocket and produced an envelope. He held it out to her.
She slit it with a thumbnail smooth as I might have used a pocketknife. It took her fifteen seconds to read the half sheet within. Then she grunted, crumbled the whole mess in her hand, and pitched it underhand into the fire.
“You tell Peter Bantle that I’ll kowtow to him when he breaks both my knees,” she said evenly.
“Madame—”
“And another thing, Christopher Waterson,” she continued. “He ain’t gonna win this. So you better decide right now which side you think you’d like to be on.”
Chapter Sixteen
The fifth night after my talk with Madame, I went to bed early with a book, because there weren’t nothing more I could do. Priya was still at work in the kitchen.
I hadn’t been sleeping so good, and it turned out that was a blessing. When someone knocked at my door about four in the morning, I was awake and curled around the pages of Bea’s copy of this French book translated from the Arabic that I’d been struggling through. I liked it a lot, when I could make head or tail of it. It was about a woman who’s married unwilling to a sultan who murders each of his brides after consummating to stave off getting an heir, but she keeps him at bay every night by outwitting him, and telling him stories he can’t bear not to know the end of, so he keeps letting her live another day.
So I was lying on my side with the blankets pulled up to my ears, bent toward the lamp. Miss Francina always claimed reading in the dark would ruin my eyes sure as stitchery, and she was probably right. But even she couldn’t tell me nothing when I had an idea in my head. I save all my better judgment for dealing with horses.
I got up — getting out from under the quilt was hard, the air was that sharp — and stuck my feet in my slippers as fast as I could. Of course, the slippers was cold, too, though not as cold as the floor. Still, cold enough that I hissed and limped as I scuffed over to the door.
I had my hand on the latch when I heard Priya’s voice outside. “Karen, I’m cold. Let me in?”
I probably would of jumped out of bed faster if I’d known it were her, and no mistake. As it was, I yanked that door open so fast I made a draft.
Priya was bundled up in shawls over her shirt and trousers, her hair braided for bed but unmussed. She stepped out of the way so I could shut the door behind her. Then I gestured her toward my rumpled bed and she sat, sliding her sock-clad feet into a fold of the blankets. I should of gotten her slippers better than the carpet ones.
“Hi,” I said, and sat down on the bed, too. Closer to the head, though. Just close enough that our shoulders brushed together. I had made up my mind early that as long as she knowed I was willing, it was going to be Priya made all the moves between us. I was giving her time, and you know it weren’t easy. But like gentling a badly broke horse, I knowed I had to let Priya do most of the traveling if I didn’t want to spook her away for good.
I handed her a pillow. She smiled and leaned back against it. I stuck my legs back under the covers.
“Hi,” she said. She looked down at her hands, picked at her cuticle, and tucked her fingers into her armpits under the shawls while I tried not to stare at her.
A minute or two later, I said, “Did you want something?”
“Um,” she said.
She looked at me and glanced away again. In the lamplight, her dark eyes seemed opaque. She dropped her head as if she meant to hide behind her hair, but the braid thwarted her.
Then she said, “Company.”
I wanted to reach out and take her hand so bad I could taste it. But her hands were tucked up warm under her arms, and anyway the foot and a half between us seemed unbridgeable. I wanted to kiss her, too, but she didn’t look too kissable just then. More remote, and worrited.
I wished I could offer her tea. You don’t think about it, but all those little fusses we make over company have their purposes. They give us something to do with our hands and our anxiousness until everybody settles in and starts having fun. It’s probably why the men who come into Madame’s spend so much money at the bar. Even though they gotta know — the savvy ones, anyway — that we girls is drinking soda water or cold tea. But it gives everybody something to do with their hands.
“I want company, too,” I admitted. It was on my lips to say, In kind of particular, I want your company, but all I could see was her jumping up and scooting for the door. When people have only lured you close to hit you or throw a rope over your head before, it’s hard to learn to trust the ones who aren’t going to. Hell, it’s hard to learn to even know which is which.
So I just sat there like an idiot, watching the most beautiful person I’d ever seen huddled up on my bed, and I didn’t put an arm around her.
She pulled her hands out of her armpits and twisted them together, all pale with the chill. She had the most elegant fingers — tapered, like a lady’s, even with her nails kept cropped for the domestic work she was doing. Mine were blunt and plump, though I grew my nails out to make them look more genteel.
Looking at them, not at me, Priya said, “Karen, have you ever thought about leaving here? About what you might want to do after?”
“Are…” … you asking me to come with you? It died on my lips. It was too much to hope, and it would give too much away.
She waited patiently, still not raising her head.
“I have,” she said when I was quiet too long.
“Me too,” I answered. “I’m saving. I want a stable someday, a horse ranch. A breeding operation. Sell good cow ponies, and maybe break ’em for folks.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t sound disappointed so much as concerned, so I hurried to say, “You would always be welcome. I … I’d build you a machine shop, and you could fixit while I wrangled, and you could cook and I could sew. And, and we could each read to the other while we did it.”
It was about the prettiest dream I’d ever put to words, and no mistaking. I held my breath while I waited to see if she was going to shoot it down.
She said, “I don’t know anything about horses. My family had cattle and sheep … but the cattle weren’t for eating. We don’t eat cows at home. They’re for milk and cheese and ghee.”
I didn’t know what ghee was and made a note to ask her. But it seemed more important to say, “I know all about horses. I practically grew up on one. I could teach you, especially if you know cattle. If you’re not afraid.”