The Shadow Palace

by Jane Steen

  I squared my shoulders, conscious of the noises in the corridor that reminded me we were not talking in private. “Just one thing before I go,” I said. “At Gambarelli’s, my name is Amelia Harvey, and you had better adopt that name if I have reason to come to you here again.”

  Joe nodded, but a small frown furrowed his brow. “Be careful how you step at Gambarelli’s. Don’t ask too many questions. Martin doesn’t need the extra worry of knowing you’re risking your skin for him.”

  By the time I’d worked my first two weeks at Gambarelli’s, I’d come to the conclusion that my main danger might be boredom. Either that or exhaustion. I’d never realized before how tiring a shopgirl’s life was.

  But it wasn’t the physical exertion or long hours that made me aware this job could only be a temporary expedient. I had taken off my wedding ring when I applied for the position, knowing many employers disapproved of married women working, and found, to my dismay, that I was expected to live in a mansard room within the store itself. There was row after row of them, all furnished exactly the same with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, and a small dressing table. I would only see Tess and Sarah on Sunday afternoon, after I had attended the Sunday morning service. This was held for all unmarried employees in the basement room where, on all other days of the week, goods not taken immediately were parceled up and sent out to their purchasers.

  Explaining to Sarah that her mother would be absent for the entire week was hard enough. But Sarah was, it seemed, becoming accustomed to Miss Baker, who was at her side from breakfast to her evening meal except for Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays. Tess staunchly asserted that she would visit her family only when Miss Baker was there and be at home otherwise.

  Yet it was Tess who rounded on me as soon as we were alone. She shut the door carefully, waited until the sound of footsteps told us that Sarah and Miss Baker had ascended to the schoolroom, and then stuck her bottom lip out as far as it would go.

  “Nell, I said it would be all right if you worked at Gambarelli’s to find out things. I even said I would lie for you. But I say it’s all wrong to pretend to be a spinster when you have a child. A little white lie to help people is not a sin, but this is a big lie. ‘Conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood.’ This is pretending Sarah doesn’t exist.”

  “It’s the only way I thought I could get the job. Tess, if we didn’t have the money Martin made for us—if we’d come to Chicago with just our savings from Kansas and I’d had to go out to work—wouldn’t you have understood if I had to lie? And this is to save Martin.”

  “Why is Martin more important than Sary?” Tess’s eyebrows contracted into a frown so fierce that her spectacles slid down her nose, and she pushed them back with a huff of annoyance.

  “He’s not. But he is important to me—and he’s in great trouble, as you know. I thought you’d understand that. Didn’t you always want me to marry him?”

  “I’m not so sure about that now.” Tess crossed to her chair and dropped down into it, grabbing her Bible and holding it on her lap. “Maybe if you marry him, you won’t have time for us anymore. You don’t have time for us now.”

  “You’re being unreasonable.”

  Tess rocked herself forward so that her feet hit the ground and stood up. “No, you’re being unreasonable. We’d just started being a real family again, and now we’re not even going to see you. And supposing you marry Martin and he says, ‘Let’s send Sarah to school and Tess to the Poor Farm again?’” She stalked to the door, still clutching her Bible.

  “He won’t.” Of that I was absolutely sure. “Martin loves both of you.”

  Tess sniffed. “Martin is a merchant prince—I saw it in the newspapers. Merchant princes spend all their time working or amusing themselves with society ladies in salons. Their wives spend all their time going to balls and dinners and paying visits and traveling to their country homes. So where does that leave me and Sary?”

  I opened my mouth to speak but shut it again. I was finding it hard to counter Tess’s insecurities since I honestly had no idea what kind of a life Martin did lead, under normal circumstances. I knew he traveled—his early letters had talked about restaurants and amusements. I knew he hunted and rode, sometimes with his merchant friends, sometimes without. I knew he worked hard. But did he, in point of fact, have any notion of a family life into which Sarah and Tess could fit?

  “Hmph.” Tess saw my indecision and gave a small, abrupt nod of the head. “And now you’re working too, which you always like the best. In Kansas, we were together when we worked, but we can’t be if you’re at Gambarelli’s and I’m here running the house. Think about that. Maybe you hired Miss Baker so you don’t have to be Sary’s Momma anymore, and Alice so you don’t have to look after me. Sary may have to stay and put up with you being out all the time, but I won’t.”

  21

  Crabb

  My mornings at Gambarelli’s began at five thirty so that I could be in the basement refectory by six. After breakfast and a brief morning service, the shopgirls all had to be on the floor at seven. By the time the earliest customers arrived, we had taken the covers off all the merchandise, fetched replacement items from the surplus store, and dusted, fluffed, and straightened the goods so that they looked as appealing as possible. At the end of our long day, we had to tidy every counter, polish the glass, and clean the wood trim so no fingerprints or marks showed.

  But in between were endless hours of standing with only short breaks every three hours for the washroom or a hastily gulped cup of coffee, and half an hour for luncheon. I was a good walker—could go for miles without fatigue—but I had never known that my feet could ache as they now did. Sometimes the ache became a burning sensation that was extremely hard to relieve.

  “You get used to it,” said Miss Sweeny, one of the other three millinery assistants, when I finally remarked on the pain in my feet. “I thought you said you’d been employed in Kansas?”

  “As a seamstress. I could sit down whenever I wanted.” I leaned for a fraction of a second against the counter to soothe the various aches that assailed my body.

  “Well, weren’t you the lucky one.” Miss Sweeny grinned, showing a chipped front tooth. “And if Mrs. Crowford catches you leaning on the counter, she’ll deduct twenty cents, so if I were you, I’d remember how grateful you are to have a job at all.”

  Mrs. Crowford was the head of millinery. I understood that the “Mrs.” was a courtesy title only, there being no Mr. Crowford. The heads of department wore their own clothes, while the rest of us were clad in simple dark gray dresses that were not as well cut as I would have liked. Still, they had quite nice overskirts, swept back into a knot and supported underneath with a ruffled pad of ticking, far more comfortable for working than a bustle cage.

  “Best way to relieve your feet is to stand on one leg, if you can manage it.” This advice came from Miss Dowling, pale and willowy, always pinching her cheeks to give herself more color. No shopgirl would dare wear rouge. Our third colleague, Miss Green, had succumbed to a toothache so bad she was going to have to get the tooth pulled, and had gone to her room crying.

  Apart from the physical drawbacks, I was enjoying myself. Hats weren’t my passion, but at least I could spend time talking about modes with other women. Being the junior and new to millinery, I wasn’t given many chances to make a sale. My role was mostly to stand by while Miss Sweeny or Miss Dowling—usually Miss Sweeny—chatted volubly with the ladies who stopped by to try on hats, snapping her fingers at me when she needed an item fetched. I received wages, but no percentage on sales until I advanced to full assistant.

  From afar, I’d seen Domenico Gambarelli, a man in his late sixties with a thick-necked, compact build and bushy gray beard flecked with black below bristling black eyebrows. He was usually flanked by his two sons, whom I soon learned to call Mr. Alessandro and Mr. Gianbattista. It seemed that their American names, Alex and Jacky, were only used by intimates.

  I
knew Alessandro Gambarelli, even from a distance, by his barrel chest and jutting black beard. His brother Gianbattista, by contrast, was tall and thin to the point of emaciation. He was the most feared and disliked by the employees, I soon found out. This was due to his habit of making sarcastic or critical remarks about almost everything his inferiors said, an unpleasant ordeal when you couldn’t answer back. Alessandro, at least, was appreciated for getting to the point. He had no tolerance for poor work, my colleagues told me, but if you did your job well and were polite, he’d give you no trouble. So it seemed his ruthlessness was held in check in the store.

  I hadn’t expected to learn much in two weeks, and I’d been right. We all wore black crape armbands for Lucetta, but the employees rarely talked about her except to sigh over her beauty, her dresses, or her voice. Those, of course, were no news to me, and I felt a strange pang every time she was praised in such ways.

  “Do try this one.” I was snapped out of my thoughts by a brisk lift of the chin directed at me by Miss Sweeny, who was now talking to a customer. “Miss Harvey, do you have a longer pin?”

  I crossed to one of the many drawers at the back of the counter and selected a four-inch pin topped with a green glass pearl. Miss Sweeny was holding out a hat of the virulent shade called Paris green. It was decorated with bunches of yellow and pink flowers that peeped from under the brim and bristled on the crown. I handed the customer the pin, and we both watched as she carefully fixed the hat to her front hair. That hair wasn’t a false front, and the silly bunch of flowers didn’t look nearly so bad under the arching curve of the hat atop her abundant, natural, dark curls. She was a good-looking woman, somewhere in her mid-thirties, with large, flashing dark eyes that reminded me somewhat of Lucetta.

  “A little vulgar, isn’t it?” She had a pleasant, low-pitched voice and seemed very sure of herself. “What do you think, Crabb?”

  A man detached himself from an ornamental pillar where he’d been lounging. He strolled up to the customer to inspect the hat, assessing us with bold eyes as he approached. He was of imposing height and breadth of shoulder with close-cropped, sandy hair and a fine, bushy mustache that curled over the edge of sensual, nicely delineated lips.

  “Makes you look like a flower-seller’s cart, Lizzie, my love. That color lights you up though.”

  Behind his back, I nodded significantly at Miss Sweeny and then at a dark green hat trimmed in bright ribbon. The flowers peeping from under the brim of this one were silk violets. She understood my glance and nodded briefly. She was too good a saleswoman to object to my interference. She held out her hand for the hat, and I passed it to her.

  “This one, perhaps, Madam? A little less gaudy.”

  “Rutherford’s would have better.” The man, who was definitely younger than his companion, lifted the head of his cane to brush his lips. The gesture drew attention to their fine shape, and I was sure he often employed it. He had the cocksure bearing of a handsome man used to being admired.

  “I’m cross with Rutherford’s. They sold me exactly the same hat as Carrie Watson’s, and hanged if I didn’t turn up at Simon’s looking like her twin.” She looked slyly out of the corners of her eyes as she took off the Paris green hat. “What has Field’s got?”

  The young man’s cheeks colored. “We’re not going there.”

  “Of course not.” The woman lifted her eyebrows at him and widened her eyes, as if they were sharing a great joke.

  “Should’ve ordered bespoke at Rutherford’s.” The man made an obvious effort to regain control of the conversation. “Why buy ready-made when you can afford otherwise?”

  The woman grinned. “True enough. Has Mr. Rutherford been jerked to Jesus yet? The store might not last long if they find him guilty. We’d better hurry.”

  The man’s expression darkened. “I’ll take you there another day. C’mon, Lizzie, this one’s not so bad.”

  “The dark green looks nice against your hair, Madam.” Miss Sweeny had been listening to their conversation, but her well-trained expression suggested that hats were the only thing on her mind. “And the violets are most appropriate for May.”

  “Very well. Miss Allen’s account, and have it delivered.” The customer removed the hat, replacing it with her own dark brown one. “Come along, Crabb, I could do with a drink.”

  “Do you know who that was?” Miss Dowling asked me when the pair had departed.

  “I gathered her name was Miss Lizzie Allen, but that means nothing to me.”

  “That’s Lizzie Allen all right, although ‘Miss’ is a bit of a laugh.” Miss Sweeny’s good-natured face broke into a broad smile. “She’s a famous chippie.”

  “She wouldn’t thank you for calling her a chippie,” Miss Dowling said. “She owns her place.”

  “She’s not bad looking,” Miss Sweeny mused. “I wouldn’t say she’s the finest-looking woman in Chicago, like they say she is though. A little coarse around the mouth.” She pursed her own lips, which were full and soft.

  “What’s a chippie?” I asked, puzzled.

  “You are green.” Miss Dowling laughed, though not unpleasantly. “A streetwalker, dearie. That’s why Lizzie wouldn’t like to hear herself called a chippie. She has her own parlor-house, with a good reputation for clean girls and nobody getting robbed.”

  “Such women shop here?” I felt curiosity rather than shock. After all, in the eyes of the world, I was no better than a prostitute.

  “This is Chicago,” Miss Sweeny said. “If you’ve got money, the stores will take it. You heard her mention Carrie Watson. Well, she's regularly seen at Field and Leiter’s and Rutherford’s. She buys the best silks and has diamonds for the evening.” She looked down at her own uniform dress with a sigh.

  “Don’t think I’m not tempted too,” said Miss Dowling. “It’s a hard thing on a girl, being respectable. On your feet all day and a garret room to look forward to at the end of it, and a fine if you’re caught with so much as a whiff of beer on your breath.” She sighed too and then brightened. “Shouldn’t complain though. It’s better than living with my ma in Kenosha and getting knocked down by my stepfather every time I express an opinion. And I’ll catch myself a husband here, see if I don’t.”

  “Carrie Watson,” said Miss Sweeny, ignoring Miss Dowling’s interruption, “has a white carriage with yellow wheels. Horses as black as coal and a coachman who’s even blacker. You can earn more in a day on your back than you can get in a week in a place like this.” She rummaged in a drawer for one of our soft brushes and carefully whisked a few specks of dust from the pink and yellow flowers on the bright green hat. “I’ll sell this thing today, I swear to both of you. I can’t look at those colors anymore. Miss Harvey, next time a customer comes around, you stay well away from that hat. It doesn’t look right next to your hair.”

  “It’s not a good color hair for millinery,” Miss Dowling agreed. “You’re elegant looking and you speak well, and I suppose that’s why they hired you. But I think you’re in the wrong department.”

  “Who was the rooster?” Miss Sweeny’s mind was still on Lizzie Allen and her companion.

  “He looks familiar.” Miss Dowling waved me back from the display as a pair of elderly women approached, arguing volubly in a Slavic language. “Pretty thing, ain’t he? Almost as pretty as our Mr. Gorton.”

  An opportunity to judge the good looks of Mr. Frank Gorton finally came once I’d been at Gambarelli’s for three weeks. Of all the people at Gambarelli’s, he was the one I most wanted to see. He was Lucetta’s lover and the only man I could think of who might have a motive for killing her, even if Joe Salazar didn’t think it likely. I envisaged a sudden access of passion over a new lover—although why Gorton would have tracked Lucetta down in a storeroom at Rutherford’s was something I couldn’t explain. The location of the crime, and the fact that the killer must inevitably have been covered in blood, were the most puzzling aspects of the whole affair.

  Mr. Gorton, of course, was too exalt
ed to speak to the shopgirls. However, he did come to speak to Mrs. Crowford. She, as well as being the head of millinery, was responsible for hat trimmings, umbrellas, muffs, and gloves.

  I knew who he must be as soon as I saw him, but I affected otherwise. “My goodness,” I said in an undertone to Miss Sweeny, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a handsome man.”

  This wasn’t strictly true. Judah Poulton, my erstwhile almost-fiancé, had been as beautiful as a painting of an angel. Yet Mr. Gorton came close with his thick shock of straight black hair and large hazel eyes with lashes as long as a girl’s. He wore a black armband like the rest of us, but I could discern no signs of grief. His manner was brisk and businesslike as he leaned in to inspect Mrs. Crowford’s books, one hand stroking his neatly trimmed beard.

  “Don’t get any ideas, Miss Harvey.” Miss Sweeny surreptitiously stuck her elbow into my side. “He’s never so much as looked at a shopgirl. Never heard of him being seen with a woman, come to that.”

  Which answered one of my questions. Frank Gorton was clearly well versed in the art of discretion.

  I moved along the counter with a dusting cloth, pretending to have spotted some smears on the glass. Mrs. Crowford, with remarkably clear recall, was regaling Mr. Gorton with details of the hats sold in the last two weeks.

  “And the shantung ribbon? I was not sure about it, if you remember. Has it sold well?” He had a strong French accent, the letter R a deep purr.

  “It holds a bow very well.” Mrs. Crowford looked around and caught sight of me. “Miss Harvey? The inventory for those broad Chinese ribbons, please.”

  I hastened to bring her the book where we noted the sales of trimmings. “The pale lilac has done particularly well for quarter mourning,” I ventured, opening the book to the last set of totals.

  “Hmm.” Mr. Gorton’s gaze flicked indifferently over me. “Hair a bad color for millinery,” he remarked to Mrs. Crowford.