Tory

by Vikki Kestell

  “This is not a life,” Tory growled.

  “Do not think such a thing. Do not say it.”

  Tory sighed. “All right, go. I will hurry, then come help you.”

  Tory was on her way to Helen’s room when she came upon Mei-Xing.

  “Hello, Mei-Xing.”

  Instead of answering Tory, the girl sucked in her bottom lip and her eyes skittered away.

  A chill of alarm ran through Tory. Glancing both ways first to ensure they were not observed, she grabbed the tiny girl’s wrist and whispered, “Mei-Xing! Please tell me you are not considering . . .”

  Tory couldn’t finish the statement. If Mei-Xing tried to run again, Darrow would—again—punish her. If Mei-Xing survived the punishment, Roxanne would certainly sell her down mountain.

  Mei-Xing smoothed her expression and smiled sweetly. “You have a kind heart, Tory, but please do not concern yourself over me.”

  Mei-Xing had never opened herself to any of the girls, so what she murmured next terrified Tory. She had started to turn away, when Mei-Xing added, “What I do, I do with my eyes wide open. I choose to die a free person.”

  “Oh, Mei-Xing!”

  But the girl had slipped into her room.

  LATE INTO THE NIGHT, Tory felt that she had only fallen asleep when shouts and bellows jolted her awake.

  “We got ’er. She didn’t get far.”

  “Bring her here!”

  Tory ran to her door; it was, as usual, locked. She placed an ear to the wood and listened. Someone was being dragged up the back stairs. Not carried, but dragged. She could hear the body thumping up the carpeted steps.

  Darrow’s unmistakable baritone swore; a girl’s defiant voice answered, but with words screamed in a language Tory did not recognize.

  Chinese?

  Mei-Xing!

  Tory clutched her nightgown in helpless dismay. Darrow was dragging Mei-Xing to the punishment room at the end of the hall. His shouting went on, even after the door to the room slammed shut, but Mei-Xing’s voice went silent.

  Tory knew every girl in the house had to be awake and dreading the screams that were sure to come. The worst part was that they could do nothing—nothing to prevent the violence to follow. She stood at her door for a long time. She did not hear Mei-Xing crying out or begging for mercy. Not once.

  Had Darrow or one of his men killed her? Was she unconscious? Tory waited, listening to the silence of the night, a silence punctuated occasionally by Darrow’s occasional shouted slurs.

  An hour passed without a sound from Mei-Xing. Fear for her little friend was like an oppressive weight on Tory’s chest. Tory found herself praying for Mei-Xing and, for the first time, she put a name to her desperate pleas.

  “Jesus, if you are the Lord, the same Lord who thinks thoughts of peace and not evil, please help Mei-Xing! If you really walked on water and made bread and fish to feed the crowd that came to listen to you, can you not help my friend?”

  After a lengthy time, Tory heard the slam of a door and the thud of boots descending the back stairs, Darrow and his men leaving Mei-Xing alone in the punishment room. Tory twisted her doorknob in frustration. While the front and back doors of the house were key locked each night, the bedroom doors were bolted from the outside by the simple twist of a latch. Every night after the club closed, one of Darrow’s men walked the halls of the second and third floors, the clack of latches turning and doorknobs rattling to test the locks intermixed with his footfalls.

  Tory growled in frustration—and then went cold as an audacious idea came to her. She raced to her bureau and removed the bag of mending Roxanne foisted on her each week.

  She yanked the stocking she had been darning from the bag and felt for the thin crochet hook she used to pull broken threads from the outside of the fabric to the inside. She slid the hook from the stocking, then fumbled a hairpin from her head. She straightened the hairpin and bent its end to a sharp right angle. Tory returned to the door, knowing full well that if she succeeded with what she planned but was found out, she, too, like Mei-Xing, would be punished.

  “I do not care,” she muttered over and over. The truth was, Tory did care. She was terrified—but she poked hook and hairpin into the keyhole anyway, feeling for the bolt’s locking mechanism.

  The bolt snapped open more quickly than Tory had anticipated.

  She inhaled slowly and, for a long moment, did not move. Then she eased the door open an inch, listening.

  All was quiet.

  With crochet hook and hairpin still in her hand, Tory crept down the hall to the punishment room. Esther’s bedroom shared an adjoining wall, so Tory was careful to make no noise when she turned the latch and entered Mei-Xing’s dark room. Moments later, she crouched over Mei-Xing’s bed.

  The girl was turned on her side, her knees pulled to her chest. Tory bent closer. “Mei-Xing?”

  Tory heard a single, soft sob.

  “Mei-Xing? It is Tory.”

  Tory heard movement outside the door. She dropped to the floor and pushed herself under the bed—no mean feat, as the bed was low to the floor.

  She heard a woman—Roxanne!—muttering, “How could they have been so derelict! Leaving her door unlocked. Why, even in her state . . .”

  Roxanne took a moment to light the lamp, then stood over Mei-Xing, the toes of her shoes but inches from Tory’s face. “Mei-Xing, turn over. I wish to speak to you.”

  When Mei-Xing did not respond, Roxanne added a threat. “If you do not obey me, I shall call Darrow back.”

  The bedsprings above Tory’s head squeaked as Mei-Xing began the painful process of turning her body.

  Roxanne held up the lamp. “Let me look at you.”

  Several moments passed before Roxanne sighed and said, “It is too bad, Mei-Xing, it really is. You could have had such a good life here.”

  Another pause was followed by, “Your nose is broken. Likely your looks are ruined. In any event, you are no good to us here anymore. We will make arrangements to have you moved in a few days.”

  Mei-Xing did not answer. Roxanne put out the lamp and left the room, locking the door behind her.

  Tory wanted to make sure that Roxanne was gone before she crawled out from under the bed. She was amazed when the bedsprings creaked and Mei-Xing’s tiny feet, one at a time, touched the floor. The girl, gasping at the effort, leaned on the edge of the bed.

  Tory wriggled and crawled out from beneath the bed. “What . . . what are you doing?”

  Mei-Xing, doubled over and breathing hard, did not answer. Sucking in another pain-filled breath, she pulled at the bedsheets.

  Tory understood: Mei-Xing was not going to wait for Roxanne to send her down mountain. She placed one hand on Mei-Xing’s shoulder. Gently. “Are you sure?”

  Mei-Xing nodded once.

  Tory saw the puddle of Mei-Xing’s nightgown on the floor where Darrow had stripped it from her. Mei-Xing left the house in only her nightgown? In the snow and cold? Mei-Xing’s shoes were nowhere to be seen. Darrow had probably left them downstairs where his men caught her.

  “You are braver than I, Mei-Xing, but I will help you.”

  Tory picked up the nightgown and drew it down over Mei-Xing’s nakedness, helping her lift her bruised arms and put them through the sleeves. Together the two young women stripped the bed and made a rope of the two sheets. Tory pulled with all her strength on the knot joining the sheets then looked to the window. How would they secure the rope of sheets so Mei-Xing could slide down it? And it was three floors to the ground! The two sheets would not be nearly long enough.

  Mei-Xing was already at the window. As she slid it up, the swollen wood screed and stuck. Tory helped her push until the protesting window was half raised.

  “Hold . . . sheet for me, Tory.”

  “But . . .”

  “When I am down . . . tie it to a chair. Wedge . . . chair against window.”

  Tory looked from Mei-Xing to the chair. The girl could not weigh above eighty p
ounds. Theoretically, the chair could hold her weight. “All right.”

  Mei-Xing, barefoot and dressed only in her nightgown, climbed over the window sill and, holding onto the upraised window frame, poised there. Tory handed her the sheet. She had knotted the end, too, and Mei-Xing grasped it. In the pale moonlight, Tory saw the devastation of Mei-Xing’s face, the blood dripping from her battered nose onto the sheet’s bleached muslin.

  Tory reached her palm to the girl’s face and, as gently as she could, cupped it. “I . . . I wish you well, Mei-Xing.”

  She sat on the floor and braced her feet against the wall beneath the window, taking up the slack in the twined sheet and tightening her grasp. “I am ready.”

  Mei-Xing was fearless. When the sheet went taut, she released her weight to it. Tory’s arms strained with the pull, but she held tight and began to feed out the sheet. When she came to the end of the rope, she let Mei-Xing’s weight pull her to standing until she could give the girl no more length without tumbling out the window behind her.

  A moment later, the rope went limp. Tory leaned out and saw Mei-Xing’s figure far below, crumpled in the snow behind the shrubs. Mei-Xing’s head turned. She glanced up. Then she got up and, limping, hobbled across the snow-covered expanse of lawn.

  Tory looked for the roving guard that should have been patrolling the circumference of the house at night. Did he think trudging through the wet snow too much effort? Perhaps he believed Mei-Xing’s capture would discourage another escape attempt?

  Tory pulled her head inside. She fastened the sheet to the small vanity chair and laid the chair on its side against the wall under the window.

  Tory picked the lock to the punishment room and left, latching the bolt behind her.

  Jesus? If you are there? Please give Mei-Xing enough time to get away? And please, Jesus . . . please let the blonde lady at the lodge help her?

  THE DAY BEGAN AS USUAL. Tory had to mask her anxiety; regardless, Helen knew something was bothering Tory. Helen, however, was too savvy to do more than whisper a one-word question.

  “What?”

  Tory’s chin lifted a fraction, and Helen dropped her eyes to her plate: Tory would tell her later.

  After breakfast, before she apportioned tasks, Roxanne assumed a sad, reluctant expression. “I apologize for the disheartening news I must report, ladies. Last evening, shortly after closing, Mei-Xing chose to hide herself in a downstairs closet and sneak out the front door—in her nightgown, of all things!”

  Roxanne wagged her head in mock sympathy. “She was, of course, immediately found, returned to the house, and punished—but this, her second attempt, I am afraid, will be her last.”

  Roxanne even managed a false sigh. “Mei-Xing will be confined to the, ah, discipline room on the third floor until I have made arrangements to send her down mountain. It pains me that such a gifted and accomplished girl has willfully chosen to waste her talents in a foul bawdy house servicing flea-ridden farmers and factory workers.”

  She leveled her gaze on the girls, studying each one’s reaction, before adding, “Savannah, you will tend to Mei-Xing today, but she is to have nothing to eat—not even broth—and nothing to drink but water.”

  “Yes, Miss Cleary.”

  The girls, when they were dismissed from the table, whispered their consternation and regret over Mei-Xing’s fall from grace. Tory said nothing and went about her business.

  Not many minutes later, Savannah’s excited shouts for Roxanne echoed down the stairs, and Mei-Xing’s daring escape from the third floor became known.

  The girls, drawn to the drama, clustered in the hallway as Roxanne examined the rope of sheets and Darrow issued directives to his men.

  “She could not have gone far in this snow wearing nothing but a bloody nightgown,” Roxanne ground out.

  “We’ll find her, Miss Cleary,” Darrow promised.

  Esther, not a particular friend of Tory’s, sidled up and linked arms with her. “I could not bear to listen to Mei-Xing’s screams last night, so I covered my head with my pillow,” she confided.

  Tory slid her eyes toward the beautiful blonde with midnight blue eyes. “I believe that once they got her into the punishment room, she was quiet. At least, I heard nothing more.”

  “Hmm. Well, as I said, I had my pillow over my head and heard nothing. Why, I was as amazed as anyone to hear the commotion just now.” Esther cut a glance toward Tory.

  Tory answered with the briefest of nods.

  Esther had heard Mei-Xing’s preparations; she had heard the window complain as Me-Xing raised it. Perhaps she had even heard whispers and recognized the second voice as Tory’s. Maybe she knew that Tory had found a way out of her locked room and that she had helped Mei-Xing!

  Esther could have reported Tory to Roxanne and earned a reward, but she kept silent. Tory pressed the hand Esther rested on her waist.

  “I can only hope the best for Mei-Xing, Esther. She is not suited for this life.”

  “I agree. She is not like you or me.”

  Like you or me? Tory thought. Oh, Esther. I am not like you. Not at all.

  Chapter 27

  Contrary to Darrow’s promises, his men did not find Mei-Xing. Her trail led across the club’s snow-covered lawn and onto the road but, from there, her tracks disappeared.

  “What do you mean, you cannot find her? She was barefoot and bleeding on snowy ground! How could her trail vanish?” Roxanne shouted. “Have you asked around the village? The nearest houses? What about that woman and her lodge? The smithy? Someone had to have seen Mei-Xing. Someone is hiding her.”

  “We walked the perimeter of the lodge and the smithy and found no indication that she went there. Put my best man on it, and he says—”

  “I don’t care a fig what your ‘best man’ says! Get out there yourself—and don’t come back until you bring the girl with you.”

  But, days later, when Darrow did return to the club, it was without Mei-Xing—and Roxanne’s temper mounted. No one was exempt from the rough side of her tongue.

  Tory had her own concerns. Helen was not at all well, and they both knew that it would not be long before Roxanne noticed. If Helen did not recover her looks and energy soon, Roxanne would send Helen down mountain.

  Late in the night after the club closed, Tory helped an exhausted Helen to her room and into bed. Afterward, when she went to her own room, Tory could not sleep until she had pleaded with the Jesus she had read of in John, chapter 6.

  “Jesus, I have no hope anymore. If they send Helen away, I will surely die! I do not know what to do, Jesus!”

  Somehow, calling on Jesus brought a measure of peace to the landslide of troubles hanging over Helen and her. She recounted Sassy’s promise to pray for her and the old woman’s sorrow that she had not told Tory about Jesus.

  “I, too, wish you had told me about Jesus, Sassy,” Tory murmured to herself.

  When winter set in fully, and more snow fell, Darrow offered a plausible rationalization for Mei-Xing’s disappearance. “The boys and I figure the girl followed one of the paths ’long the side of the mountain. Not being able to see the path clearly ’cause of the snow, she stepped too close to an edge. Fell. New snow’s covered her up. Find her in the spring.”

  Roxanne scowled. “That explanation may suit you, Darrow, but it will not satisfy Mr. Morgan. Mark my words.”

  Roxanne’s warning hung in the air until mid-January when Darrow received notice to take the train to Denver for a meeting with the mysterious Mr. Morgan. When Darrow returned that afternoon, his face was set in barely contained belligerence—and he was not alone.

  At dinner, Roxanne clapped her hands to capture the girls’ attention. “Ladies, may I present Mr. Banner? Mr. Banner is now in charge of security for the club and, of course, our other house.”

  The girls schooled their expressions into docile, accepting lines and nodded in his direction, eyes downcast. For his part, the new head of security was soft-spoken—soft-spoken in the
manner of someone whose mere whisper imparted fear.

  “I am certain we shall get on well,” Banner murmured, “and that no unpleasantness will be needed.”

  Tory chanced one look at the man and was horrified to see his appraising glance fall upon—and remain on—Helen.

  Helen had been particularly ill the day before, vomiting all morning, unable to keep food or water down. Miss Cleary had granted her the evening off for Helen to recover from her intestinal distress.

  “We cannot, of course, have you running to empty your stomach while we have guests—or passing on your illness to them.”

  Tory watched Banner catalogue Helen’s lank hair, pale skin, and spiritless demeanor. When he nodded to himself, Tory’s gorge rose. Banner must have felt Tory’s eyes upon him, for he turned to her and, with a lazy smile, looked her up and down.

  Tory was distracted all that evening, concerned for Helen, worried about Banner’s first action as the club’s head of security, struck with fear that Banner was planning something that involved Helen.

  Her fears came home to roost late the following afternoon when Roxanne summoned Tory to her office. In the corner, lounging in a chair, sat Banner. He again eyed Tory and smiled in a hungry, way—a knowing inspection with which Tory was familiar.

  “Tory, you are friends with Helen, are you not?”

  “Yes, Miss Cleary.”

  “Can you help me understand the nature of her illness?”

  “Not being a doctor, I cannot, Miss Cleary, but I am certain that, with a few days of rest, she will recover.”

  “Not a doctor but certain she will recover, are you? And yet she has lost a great deal of weight, has she not? I hardly think her illness to be as transitory as you assert.”

  Tory focused her eyes on the wall behind Roxanne. She did not answer. Nothing she said would change what Roxanne and Banner were deciding.

  Roxanne glanced at Banner before dismissing Tory. “Thank you, Tory. You may go.”

  Tory left Roxanne’s office and closed the door behind her—but not so it latched. She made a point of walking away, her footsteps deliberate and audible. When she reached the foot of the staircase, she crept back and listened at the door.