“What if she don’t?”
That stunned me into silence. She wouldn’t — Priya wouldn’t do that to me. I didn’t believe it for a heartbeat.
“She might of just made a run for it,” Miss Lizzie said. “Collected that sister of hers and moved on. Or she might be in hiding. Odds are better that than the other, Karen honey. There.” She patted my shoulder and stepped away from my laces to glance me over. “It’s not the best fit, but not bad for borrowed, and for now it’ll do.”
“Do for what?” I asked.
“For the parlor,” she said. “For the council of war we’re about to have.”
* * *
The character of the house changed from threadbare respectability to opulence when we left my sickroom and descended to the second floor. We used the servants’ stair, and I wish I could say that surprised me. From back there, I could see how expenses had been spared, but the public rooms of the house were as luxuriant as anything Madame’s had had to offer.
That thought put a pang in me, and no mistake.
What was going to become of all of us? What was going to become of Madame? Everything she’d earned and owned was in that house. And she was, as she had said, too old to go back to whoring on street corners. I’d survive, even if Priya was gone with all my savings — and I felt like a miserable weasel even for considering that she might be, but I had to consider it. There’d be enough there to get her and Aashini back to India, and if it were my sister mightn’t I do just that? And feel like I had to, even if I also felt awful about it all the while?
Maybe the Marshal would take me with him and I could get a job breaking horses in the Indian Territory. I heard they were less stiff about what women could and couldn’t do the farther into the wilderness you got. That weren’t without its own kinds of risks, though; people back east might think Rapid was the Wild West, but we had constables and an opera hall. There were places where the law was whose arm was strongest, and that was all.
Those weren’t no places for a woman all alone.
Anyway, all my dreadful musing was brought to a screeching halt as soon’s Miss Lizzie and me walked into the parlor. And I do mean “screeching,” because there was Signor, stalking at me across the royal-blue, honey-gold, and ivory Oriental carpet, yelling his tiny head off until the crystal chandelier vibrated. I was surprised the crystals weren’t popping like squeezed grapes, to tell you true.
Somebody had washed the soot from his coat, and he sparkled every time his little fat tummy wobbled. The colors of the carpet made his eyes look like jewels. I’d never been so damned happy to be yelled at by somebody as left a four-inch gouge down my forearm the last time we met. He twisted around my ankles, leaving the usual dusting of white fur and me feeling painful self-conscious about my lack of shoes and stockings.
I didn’t try to scoop him up, though. He might be happy to see me, but I knowed better than to push my luck.
Also, I weren’t half-distracted by the people in the room.
The sheers was drawn across the windows, so the afternoon sun shone through ’em with a soft orange glow that made everybody in the room seem not a mite otherworldly. Madame was there, and the misses except for Lizzie, who came in right behind me of course. Miss Bethel and Effie had their different shades of red heads together, Miss Bethel’s arm around Effie’s shoulder. Effie might of been sleeping, or she might just have been resting her eyes. Miss Francina sat in a back corner with Crispin and Bea, and I could tell they was all trying to melt into the upholstery. Pollywog … well, she was on the arm of one of the other two men in the room, leaning into him with that trusting kind of … sincere melt that we all learn to fake first thing. She was gazing up at him out her big blue eyes and tugging at her pigtail in charming nervousness with the hand that wasn’t wrapped around his elbow, and I knowed I was watching a professional at work.
She was three times the politician of old Dyer Stone, the middle-aged lump she was making up to. I remember thinking that if only she could run for mayor we’d have it sewn up.
The Professor wasn’t there, though I didn’t really expect him to be. He wasn’t part of Madame’s family, exactly, in the way the rest of us was. And that was his choice; I’d always gotten a feeling he was a man didn’t like too many commitments.
The other man in the room, the one who weren’t the Professor … well, he was the most flamboyant thing I’d seen this side of a saloon girl in full whoop-de-do. He was tall — not quite as tall as Marshal Reeves — and he had straight dirty-blond hair slicked back in a ponytail under a bottle-green tricorne hat with vermilion piping. He had the strength of feature to carry it off, too — notched chin, planed cheeks, a nose like a ice skate blade. He so resembled my mother’s people, I felt a kick in my chest to look at him.
His coat was in the same shades as his hat, with the addition of plenty of bullion on the left shoulder, and his trousers was a darker green. He had — of all things — a cavalry sword belt slung about his waist. The sword was not currently in evidence, but the rig to sling its scabbard through was, the straps pattering against his leg as he stood.
I blinked at him for a moment before I realized he was standing for me and Miss Lizzie. That ain’t something whores get accustomed to. “Mr. Colony,” Madame said, “this is Miss Karen Memory and Miss Lizzie Bach. Karen, Miss Lizzie, this is Mr. Minneapolis Colony.”
With the airship that matched his coat! Of course. I remembered glimpsing it when Priya and Crispin and me were all out shopping for Priya’s now-burned-up wardrobe. I wondered where she’d run off to, barefoot in her nightgown. I ain’t the praying sort, but I prayed she was unhurt.
And somehow I managed to collect myself, keep my cool, and remember to be polite to Mr. Colony.
“Charmed,” I said, and gave him my hand. “Please make yourself comfortable. You don’t need to fuss on my account”
He had a gold ring on his right hand, set with seven or eight different-colored stones in a kind of wheel pattern. There was a kind of winged figure on either side of the band. It pinched my hand when he gave me a gentle squeeze. He settled back, garish on ivory silk, and I looked around for a place to settle. I wanted to hide my bare feet under my skirt hem as soon as possible. I was seating myself on a gold-and-ivory settee when Miss Bethel leaned forward, obviously resuming an interrupted conversational thread, and said, “I think we ought to consider taking Mr. Colony up on his offer of transportation.”
“Mr. Colony is a business acquaintance of the mayor’s,” Madame said for my benefit — and maybe for Lizzie’s. “He’s offered to take us as far as San Francisco if we like.”
“I’m supposed to be heading down there to pick up Edwin Marsh, anyway,” he said.
I blinked. “He writes those dime novels!”
Mr. Colony smiled indulgently at me. “I’ll tell him he has readers in Rapid. Unless you come down with me and get to meet him your own self, of course.”
“Where are you taking him?” I asked, because I could tell from Bea’s expression that she was dying to find out.
“He’s heading out to Tucson to interview some shootist who tracked down a road agent out there last summer. For his next book.”
I watched Mayor Stone as Madame was talking. The possessive way he stroked Polly’s hair, and the little lean forward while Miss Bethel was talking — he wanted us out of town, I realized. This was his idea. I wondered if he meant to have Pollywog stay on with him and if he’d marry her or just set her up as a servant or something. If I were Polly, I’d hold out for the ring. Assuming she wanted to spend the rest of her life yoked to Dyer Stone, I’m meaning.