The Downstairs Girl

by Stacey Lee

  Caroline, who had refused all hairstyles except for her Newport knot, wrings her mouth into a grim smile. “Of course. Maid, go fetch a brush and pins.”

  When I return with the items, Mrs. Payne has joined the threesome, the perfect model of poise as she deals the cards. Unlike Caroline, her spine doesn’t touch the back of the chair. And unlike Salt, whose knees bounce under her pink gingham skirt like two frogs caught under a picnic blanket, the lady of the house has mastered the art of sitting quietly.

  After brushing out Salt’s considerable white-blond mane, I begin to weave.

  When I was little, Lucky Yip and Hammer Foot let me braid their queues, mostly to keep my fingers out of their games of Chinese chess. Lucky Yip would turn red in the face when he found his hair done up in a “staircase to the heavens,” but Hammer Foot always accepted his hairdo with a grateful bow.

  I have often wondered if either of them was my father, but quickly dismissed the idea. Hammer Foot had been almost monk-like in his dedication to virtuous and harmonious living, while Lucky Yip was a devoted family man, sending every penny he earned back to China.

  Salt wiggles her shoulders, and I lose my grip on her hair. Gritting my teeth, I retrace my work. “If this looks fetching on me,” she gushes, “maybe I’ll ask Mr. Q to the horse race today.”

  Caroline trains her cold gaze on a birdcage that contains no bird.

  Mrs. Payne tosses down her winning hand. “I wish more ladies had your spirit. Ever since Mrs. Wordsworth forbade her daughters from asking, no one wants to do it. Atlanta Belles can be so stuffy.”

  Pepper and Salt exchange an uncomfortable glance. Not every branch in Atlanta can be bought, like the premier ladies’ society, Atlanta Belles, where membership can only be inherited. Pepper shuffles the deck, all elbows and thumbs. “Miss Sweetie approves, too. Did you see the new advice column in the Focus, Caroline?”

  The braid goes uneven again, but not because of Salt this time. The Bells published it? My shaking fingers grip the braid tighter, twisting and winding.

  “She told women to ‘quit their stalling’ because their gentlemen may not be available ‘furlong.’ Isn’t she a holler?” Pepper laughs and the deck nearly scatters.

  Caroline’s mouth puckers, like her lemonade is too sour.

  Mrs. Payne discreetly returns a card that has flown into her lap back into Pepper’s deck. “Jo, fetch Mr. Payne’s copy of the Focus.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I pin Salt’s braid to hold my place.

  This time, I nearly fly up the staircase.

  Eleven

  All is quiet on the second floor, where Mr. Payne keeps his office. The man rises earlier than even Etta Rae and stays at the mills past sundown most days of the week. Beyond the family telephone, which used to scare me with its unpredictable shrieking, the door to Mr. Payne’s office is closed. I knock once, just in case, but no one answers.

  Mr. Payne’s quarters haven’t changed a bit since the last time I was here. A desk carved from good old Southern red oak anchors one end of the room, along with a matching chair cut extra-large, though the man barely reaches five and a half feet. The somber walls are infused with the scent of tobacco smoke and the ylang-ylang oil Mr. Payne uses to keep his curly hair flat. The smell stirs up memories of my first encounter with him. Old Gin had come here to discuss a matter, and I had tagged along, only four or five at the time.

  Smoke from the man’s cigar billowed out of his nose and his ears. “Are you a boy or a girl?”

  I’d been wearing trousers, and my hair was cut above my ears, so the mistake was understandable. “Girl,” I replied. “Are you a man or a dragon?”

  His eyes bulged, and I thought he would eat me up. But then he let out a wheezy laugh and jabbed his cigar toward me. “That one has trouble spelled all over her face, mark my words, Old Gin.”

  I shake myself from the memory and cross to the desk. Several newspapers are piled in a neat stack, with the Focus second from the bottom. I unfold the newspaper, and my fingers leave damp spots on the paper. There on the front page in bold type reads:

  INAUGURAL ADVICE COLUMN FOR DEAR MISS SWEETIE—SHE ADVISES ALL

  Below the title, Nathan had drawn the silhouette of a lady in an old-fashioned hat adorned with cabbage roses, brandishing an ostrich quill. A giggle fizzles out my nose at the cross-hatching that emphasizes a feminine waist, and at the delicate poise of the arms, which are a far cry from these drumsticks. Well, Nathan, I am not the lady you imagine me to be, but may you never find out. So much for my misgivings of last night. I bounce on the balls of my feet and squeal. People will be reading my words, my words. I hug the paper and circle the desk one way and then the other.

  Mrs. English’s advertisement for English’s Millinery occupies a prime seat next to my byline. May she be enjoying the glacial pace at which her star worker, Lizzie, moves, and the clumsy way she trims, using paste when she should be using stitches.

  Below the ad, another catches my eye. Pendergrass’s Long-Life Elixir promises to rid one of “anything that ails you, including dyspepsia, cough, liver spots, toothache, lethargia, diarrhea, ingrown toenails, warts, and especially impotence. If we don’t fix your problem in three days, we’ll refund your fifty cents with no questions asked. Sold at Buxbaum’s.”

  I float back down the stairs, clutching the paper. Would Pendergrass’s elixir work for Old Gin’s deterioration? Ordinarily, I disregard such snake oils, but Buxbaum’s stands behind its products.

  By the time I bring the paper to Mrs. Payne, I have composed my face into something resembling a cheese curd, mild and unremarkable. Caroline leans over to read the article, her eyes narrowing as they go.

  While she reads, I return to Salt’s braid. Salt and Pepper polish off their sandwiches, and Noemi brings around a tray loaded with more. “More egg salad, misses?”

  Pepper takes two. “These could use more pepper.”

  “Yes, miss,” Noemi says deferentially.

  “I’m allergic to pepper,” Caroline snaps, still reading the paper.

  “Not everything has to have pepper, Linney.” Salt plucks up a sandwich, pulling loose the strand I’m trying to braid by her ear. “Noemi could make a hash out of a block of wood, and I bet it would slide down the gullet.”

  Noemi dips her head and murmurs, “Thank you, miss.”

  Mrs. Payne raps the Focus with her index finger. “This column is just the thing.” She gets up from her seat. “I’m sorry to leave the game, ladies.”

  “What are you up to, Mama?” Caroline demands.

  “I shall buy as many copies of the Focus as I can for tonight’s meeting of the Atlanta Belles. Melly-Lee, you should definitely ask your Mr. Q today.” She glides out of the room.

  I tie an extra-loopy ribbon around Salt’s braid, feeling a little loopy myself. Perhaps this edition will be a sellout. Long-term subscriptions are what count, but Miss Sweetie is off to a grand start.

  I hold a mirror in front of Salt, who tests the limit of her neck, twisting to see every angle of her new hairstyle. With her curls, her hair resembles more a bubbling spring than a waterfall. “Oh, oh!” Salt squeals, pressing her sandwich to her heart.

  “Look out, Mr. Q,” breathes Pepper.

  Caroline’s frosty glare is enough to keep the glass of lemonade she is drinking chilled for hours. “If I have to hear another word about Mr. Q, I may need a tincture for headache.”

  Pepper cuts her green eyes to Salt and shakes her head.

  Salt pats Caroline’s hand. “Oh, don’t be cross with me, Caroline.”

  Well, that is a horse saddled backward. If Salt knew how Miss P was minding her Q, she wouldn’t be simpering like that. The chores seem to fly by while I fantasize about my alter ego as a columnist for the Focus. When it’s time for our ride, Caroline sets off at a fast clip for Our Lord’s Cemetery, and I hardly notice until she i
s out of sight. Entertaining one’s lover’s sweetheart must build up a powerful thirst.

  Sweet Potato carries the distinguished yet enigmatic advice columnist off for a romp of her own.

  Six Paces Meadow got its name from a duel gone wrong, when one of the duelists turned at six paces instead of ten and shot off his opponent’s top story. It is said that the ghost of the wronged still haunts this lot, which is why Old Gin liked to bring the “honored sons and daughters” of the stable here—we mostly had the field to ourselves. Old Gin reassured me that a ghost without its head could not see, hear, or smell, so the chances of bumping into it were slim.

  “What about the ghost of the head?” I asked, but he didn’t have an answer for that.

  We clear a grove of trees and an abandoned hansom cab, which hasn’t moved in the years since Old Gin used it to boost me onto the horses. “Don’t be afraid,” he assured me once I got topside. “I am right here beside you, though you might not always see me.” The memories forged in this field were sweet and tinged with summer gold.

  Thickets of bright sassafras and old man’s beard have crept into the meadow, and even clusters of young trees. When I began my women’s cycles, the only thing Old Gin said about it was that all meadows, after an awkward stretch as a thicket, eventually ripen into beautiful forests. That left me more confused than ever. There were bits about being a mother even Old Gin couldn’t replace.

  Sweet Potato whinnies. She’s been to this playground before, but not with me. Old Gin hadn’t started to break her yet when Mrs. Payne dismissed me.

  “For my next article, perhaps I will write about what to do if you’re in love with someone else’s man. I’ll call it, ‘Why Buy the Pig If the Sausage Is Free?’” I laugh wickedly, and I swear Sweet Potato snorts. “Or maybe I’ll write about the blacklisting of milliner’s assistants. ‘Watch Your Hat.’” Sweet Potato paws at the ground, probably bored. “All right, enough about me. Show me your legs.” With a good tap of my heels, I cry, “Giddap!”

  Sweet Potato answers with a neigh like a trumpet, surging forward so fast, I leave my breath behind. A thousand pounds of muscle and bone stretch and collect under me.

  “Wahooo!” I bump along like a feather in a top hat, just trying to hang on.

  Moments later, I find my rhythm, and the ride goes easier for both of us. We weave through dense strawberry bush, skirting wet slicks as smoothly as a hawk dancing through air currents. The meadow transforms into ribbons of green and yellow streaking past me, and the air plasters my smile to my face.

  A shriek splits the air. From out of nowhere, another horse powers up beside us, a bay with a distinctive wedge-shaped head. I nearly tumble off my seat when I recognize the rider as none other than Caroline’s brother, Merritt. He snaps a riding crop. “Giddap! C’mon, Jo, to the hansom!”

  Mischief dangles from his smile like a feather from a cat’s mouth, and the good looks that hail from his mother’s side tie my stomach into complicated knots. Of all the people to catch me in a lark, why Merritt Payne?

  While I wrestle with my memories, the bay, who must be Merritt’s new Arabian, bursts away like a squall. Sweet Potato charges after him. My thighs burn as I struggle to hang on. Hooves thunder across the meadow, scaring the blackbirds off their bug hunts.

  I lean as far forward as my legs will allow, standing slightly with my bum bouncing along the saddle as we try to catch up. I should be running in the other direction, but Merritt has already seen me. I will need to assure myself that he will not tell his mother. The Arabian’s ears flick, monitoring us with his keen hearing. As we close in, he surges another length ahead, the cheeky tassel of his tail taunting us.

  The heat of battle lights my skin on fire. “You’re not going to let that frisky wedge-head sass us, are you?” I dig my heels in deeper, and Sweet Potato lunges, closing the distance once again. “Thatta girl!”

  But then a mud slick flashes twenty yards ahead, and we veer to avoid it, losing ground. As we fall behind, the stallion slows, too, ears flicking. Horses are like people. Some work better under pressure. The more hat orders we got at the millinery, the faster I worked, unlike, for example, Lizzie, who crawled at the same snail’s pace regardless of whether it rained or shined.

  We clear the slick and then charge ahead, the hansom in clear view only a furlong away. As we approach, the stallion—now two lengths away—ups his tempo again.

  I crouch low over Sweet Potato’s neck. My hat blows away in the heat of battle, and my hair streams behind me like a black banner. “Come on, Sweetie, dig in!” I yell, bracing myself for the final few yards.

  We push and grunt, heaving forward as if there were a knife coming down on our back. But Merritt lays on his crop, and the Arabian cruises across the line.

  “Thatta boy!” Merritt cries, throwing up his hat.

  My breath comes in gulps, and I lean over Sweet Potato’s neck as she slows her speed, her tongue tipped out one side of her mouth. Merritt sidles up to us, his oval face one gloating grin as the Arabian dances and skitters under him. In the four years since I saw him last, the Payne heir has puffed out his piecrust, as Noemi might say. His coat no longer sags upon a too-slim frame; the gray wool skims his muscled shoulders. The mustache that was only a smear at seventeen is now pointed and trim, accenting his upper lip like the hands of a handsome grandfather clock stuck at three forty-five.

  He hooks one leg upon his saddle. “It wasn’t a fair fight,” he says in that animated tone he uses for everything, even something so mundane as “looks like rain.” “Girls just don’t have enough coal in the box. Still, pretty legs like those would fetch a pretty sum, if Old Gin ever wants to sell.”

  “Yes, sir,” I reply, even though Old Gin would sooner sell his own pretty legs than Sweet Potato’s. Perhaps I can tell Merritt Caroline sent me on an errand . . . in the middle of a haunted meadow . . .

  “This is Ameer.” The Arabian stands a hand taller than Sweet Potato, with a cresty neck and hind legs like birch trunks. Tossing his head, he puffs and struts the way males do when they know the females are watching. Sweet Potato, who is not in season, pulls the heads off a clump of daisies. “His name means ‘chief,’ and he’s faster than a hat in a hurricane. Those other horses will be eating his dust.”

  “He’s on the roster?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Even got Johnny Fortune to ride him.”

  “Johnny Fortune?”

  “Best jockey in the States.” His blue-gray eyes glint like war medals. “He’s like a bird on a fence. You can’t topple him. Father isn’t happy about it—why play when you can work?—but it’s Mama’s race.”

  Mr. Payne is grooming Merritt to take over his mills, but Merritt has always been more interested in pleasure than paper. “Well, good luck with that. I must be on my—”

  “I hear you’re wrangling my little sister these days.”

  I brace myself.

  “Where is she?” He glances around him with mock concern. “There are no silken divans here on which to rest her mollycoddled posterior.”

  “Paying her respects.”

  “I see. To whom?”

  “Friends.” Dearly departed ones. I cringe as the net closes over me.

  “Wonderful. If she were visiting enemies, I fear that would take all month.”

  I cough. It is no secret that Caroline is the sort of girl many like but few love. Merritt’s grin stretches, while I scrape around for a lie.

  He wiggles his fingers. “Jo, I don’t wish to vex you. Women’s pettifogs are the least of my concerns right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighs. “Father wants me to settle down, gain some respectability, work, of all things. I’m supposed to be at the mills. And my bride, Jane Bentley of Boston, is a bore who insists on staying through the horse race, which means I must ferry her around everywhere. It isn’t fair. I am only twenty
-one, and still have many”—his eyes widen a fraction—“wrong turns left to make.” Even as a lad, Merritt was always a rake, catching the neighborhood girls by their pigtails and kissing their cheeks. “If only she had your spunk. You haven’t forgotten Chattahoochee?”

  My cheeks warm. When I was eleven and Merritt fifteen, he’d gotten it into his head that he would catch dinner. His father had taken him fishing at the Chattahoochee River the week before, but the only thing Merritt had caught was a cold. After he failed to return by late day, Mrs. Payne sent me to look for him.

  I found him throwing rocks into a pool at the base of a waterfall. He was drenched. “Forgot to bring hooks.”

  A trout leaped off the top of the fall. In fact, there were so many trout, the water was a writhing, silvery mass.

  “There are other ways to catch a fish.”

  “I’ve tried,” he lamented. “They’re too slippery.”

  Sweet Potato bugles out a neigh, startling me from my thoughts.

  Merritt pushes back the round top of his gambler-style hat, exposing squirrel-brown hair shot with gold. “I was doing it all wrong. Trying to catch a fish with my hands was like trying to wrestle a greased hog. You showed me how to catch it only long enough to sling it onto the riverbank. We caught five.” He chuckles.

  “That’s Old Gin’s trick, sir. The fish just need redirection.”

  “No ‘sir.’ It’s just ‘Merritt’ between friends.” Sea-blue eyes travel around my face.

  He got me fired. I have never known the Payne heir to be wicked in the way men with money can be, but a maid cannot be too cautious around her master.

  “Well, good day, sirs.” Sweet Potato carries us off. When I glance back around, Merritt, still watching, gives me a bow.

  Twelve

  Dear Miss Sweetie,

  My husband chews with his mouth open, despite my asking him to close it for over sixteen years. He tells me that he will close it only if I will stop slurping my soup. But slurping is the best way I know to avoid burnt lips. Please advise before we kill each other.