by Rose Lerner
“Is this agreeable?” Delilah asked.
“Only if Guy turns his back,” James said.
“You seem to be quite a…prude for a doctor who lives in a whorehouse.”
“Yes, well, I’m complicated.” James turned to Delilah. “We need warm water. Towels.”
“She’s clean,” Charles said with a sniff.
“But I am not.”
They all blinked at each other, and James felt blood beat in his neck, stunned at the depths to which he meant those words. How true they were in every sense.
Delilah pulled the rope that made a bell ring down in the kitchen behind the bar, and within moments there was a knock at the door. One of Kyle’s many kitchen boys, this one Mexican and skinny, stared at his shoes and said “Ma’am.”
“Warm water,” Delilah said. “And towels. And some of the leftover beefsteak for Dr. Madison.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Delilah didn’t even pause. “Charles, if you’ll come with me, I’ll buy you a drink and introduce you to the girls.”
Charles smiled at her, very nearly leering. “Are you…one of the girls?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“Pity. And if that is the case, I’ll take my leave. I’ll be at the Inter-Ocean Hotel.”
James wondered if the odious Mr. Park was aware that the Inter-Ocean was owned by Barney Ford. A former slave, Barney owned businesses across Denver and was part of the territorial legislature.
“What about Helen?” Delilah said.
“You can find a room for her here. Guy will stay with her.”
“I do not run a hotel, Mr. Park.”
He sighed as if Delilah was exhausting him. “Find her a bed with one of the whores. She’s hardly picky.”
And with that Charles Park stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him with a soft snick.
“What a loathsome man,” Delilah said, very nearly gape-faced.
“I can’t argue,” James said. “Which makes me wonder why you are doing any kind of business with him. Why not tell him to fuck off and be done with it?”
“Indeed,” Delilah said, revealing nothing.
“Do the exam.” Guy’s voice was low and deep and thick with a French accent.
“This whole thing is in very bad taste,” James said.
“When did you get so squeamish?” Delilah asked.
“We both know the answer to that, don’t we?” Chloroform could blunt the worst of a man’s misgivings. Being without it made him squeamish. Made him squint and doubt and judge.
Sobriety was an awful thing.
“Perform the exam. I’ll…find a room for Helen.” James walked with her to the door, aware of Guy behind him the entire time.
“She has not consented to any of this,” he murmured. “What if this is not what she wants?”
As if he’d spoken some kind of magic words, Delilah sharpened and became once again the woman he knew. Sharp. Cunning. Amoral.
“Dr. Madison,” she said in a tone that made him brace himself. “You of all people should know we don’t get what we want in this world. We get what we deserve.”
And then in a swirl of taffeta and rosewater Delilah was out the door.
A moment later there was a knock, and the boy was back with water and towels and a cold slab of meat that James had no interest in eating. James took them, gave the kid a few coins and shut the door behind him.
Leaving him alone with Guy and The Northern Spy.
“Are you hungry?” he asked Guy, holding out the plate with the steak. The smell of the cooked flesh made him slightly nauseous.
“No. Thank you.”
“Well, if nothing else I like your manners,” he said and set the food down on a table by the door. “What part of France are you from?” James asked in French, and Guy’s eyes widened in the shadows. But only for a second.
“You speak French?”
“Not very well. So? You don’t sound Parisian.” He’d spent some years in Paris, perfecting all the behaviors that would later get him disowned. Earning money for the medical school his father would not pay for. They’d been lovely days. Debauched nights. A delight start to finish.
“I am from Montreal, Quebec,” Guy said.
“Canada? I am intrigued. How did you end up with Mr. Park?”
“I work, he pays me. Nothing is intriguing about that.”
“No.” James sighed as if disappointed. “I guess not.” He poured the warm water into the basin near the lamp and rolled up his sleeves. He used the sliver of Delilah’s rose-scented soap.
“So, you look after…”
“Helen.”
“What is her last name?”
“I don’t know.”
James turned.
“You’re joking.”
Guy shrugged. The man’s implacable face made James want to be particularly annoying.
Perverse. He was feeling perverse. How nearly like his old self that was.
“What do you know about her?”
“Is this required?”
“A patient history? Yes. And since she’s unconscious and Mr. Park has left, that leaves you.”
“She is healthy.”
“And the laudanum? How much of that is she given?”
“A day?”
Oh, this was worse than he thought. “You give it to her daily?”
“She is…how you say…excitable.”
James made a sound of dubious agreement.
“Is she here of her own free will?” James asked, drying his hands with needless, meticulous care.
Briefly their eyes met, and James had no sense at all of what the man was thinking. Devil or angel—he could not tell. But James had been a gambler at one time, and he would put everything he owned on devil when it came to Guy.
“Do the exam,” Guy said. “Before she wakes up.”
The big man turned his back, his dark coat and hat blending seamlessly into the shadows.
“Yes. We would not want her excitable, would we?”
He walked back over to the couch, only to find Helen with her eyes open.
They were blue. A gray blue, cool and calming, the color of his mother’s sitting room in the old house in Massachusetts. And they were wide open. She was still under the influence of the drug, but he could see her fighting through it. Struggling through the soft, fat, comforting embrace of the opiate.
Why? he wondered distantly. Why fight something that felt so good?
Ah well, sometimes drugs were wasted on the unappreciative.
He held a finger to his lips, telling her to be quiet, but she shook her head.
“Who are you?” she asked her speech slurred.
“The doctor,” he said.
“Are we alone?” she asked, her gaze darting around the room with some frantic, hopeful emotion.
“I am here,” Guy said, and the girl sagged at the sound of his voice.
“Where are we?” she asked the giant.
“Denver. Un bordel nomme Delilah’s.”
“A whorehouse,” she said as if tasting the words. As if they tasted familiar but awful.
She struggled to sit up.
“Don’t,” James said, stepping forward, but she jerked back so hard and so fast so as not to be touched that her head audibly smacked against the wooden edge of the settee. She didn’t flinch, and he wondered if in her drugged state she even felt it.
He held up his hands and stopped on the rug between the couch and the washstand.
“I’m not going to examine you,” he said very clearly. “I never was.”
The girl sighed, relaxing back against the settee.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. “In any way?”
Her eyes drifted shut and she struggled to open them again. “What?”
“Does he hurt you? Mr. Park-”
“Pas d'autres questions,” Guy said. He stepped between James and the girl.
Like James was the threat.
“It’
s all right, Guy. He can ask his questions,” she said, her pale hand lifting to touch Guy’s jacket. She missed by nearly a foot. “What was the question?”
“Does Park hurt you?”
She shrugged, long and slow. “Define…hurt.”
Once when he was young, he chased his brother into the field of stinging nettles that surrounded one side of the pond on the farm. It had been a dare—he couldn’t remember who dared whom, or why they both went in. But it was made worse by the fact that they’d stripped down to their drawers and run nearly naked through the field into the pond.
Their skin had crawled and stung for days.
His skin was doing that now. Some kind of long-forgotten alarm system telling him something was wrong. That he’d wandered into a hostile territory.
For an instant he longed for the cotton toweling and the brown bottle and its sweet and complete oblivion. He longed for it with such force he was dizzy.
“Doctor, if you aren’t going to examine her, we will leave.”
Guy stepped forward again, menacing with his size, but James stayed put. Surprising himself.
“Do you need help?” he asked the puddle of a woman on the couch.
“That’s not medical,” Guy said.
“It is, at its essence, medical.”
Helen said nothing, her pupils the size of buttons.
There was nothing he could ask her that she would fully understand.
“Guy,” she whispered. “I do not feel well.”
“Finish your exam so we may leave, Doctor?”
This was a puzzle James could not solve. Not in this extraordinary moment. He had no business trying, and if he was going to be brutally honest with himself, this brief momentary interest in it would fade, because he was that kind of man.
“C’est la vie,” he murmured.
“Pardon?” Guy asked.
“Nothing.” James waved him off. “I’m only talking to my conscience. I’m going to tell Delilah you’re a virgin.”
“It won’t matter,” she said, her voice growing softer and softer. “No one ever wins a night with me.”
“What…what do you mean?”
“He might lose the poker game, but he doesn’t lose me. All my nights are with him.”
James tried to step around Guy, but he only shifted further in his way.
“I really don’t understand,” James said.
“C’est la vie,” Guy said.
And that, somehow, was that.
Chapter 3
* * *
Nights were hard, blunt events to be endured. Occupied as they were with poor productions of memories better forgotten. At first he’d tried to shake off the hauntings, but they were not easily dissuaded and so now he just closed his eyes and let the memories come.
They filled the room. They clamored and roared. Sometimes they even brought odor with them, the faint tang of a taste on his tongue.
Tonight, in his parade of sins, it was the Union surgical tents again, where he spent his war, and the boys who begged him not to cut off their legs.
Hundreds of them.
“Please, Doc,” the conscious ones all screamed. “Please, I need it. Don’t cut it off. I need it.”
Of course they did. Because it was a leg he was cutting off. A leg.
And he’d cut it off anyway, because there was no time to do anything else. No time to repair the blood vessels. The nerves. The meat and bone that had been pulverized to dust and slime.
All he did was amputate.
All he did was ignore those begging boys.
And now he could not forget. And it was night, so he could not walk.
He stood naked in front of the window, feeling the chill against the glass from the outside world. It was snowing again. But still he was sweating.
How long ? he wondered, pushing his head against the glass. How long will this go on? How long can it?
The soft snick of his door opening brought his head up and around.
“Janey.”
The girl had started sneaking into his room. He worried she had dreams of being a doctor’s wife, and so he could not bring himself to take what she offered.
But every night she came back, trying to change his mind, not believing him when he told her she wanted no part of him.
But the shape of the person slipping through the light of the hallway was not willowy Janey. It was a woman, but she was shorter, stockier.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
Good God, I sound like a ninny.
The door was shut again and it was dark in his room. The moon outside behind a cloud. The stars too timid to reveal themselves.
“Help me,” the woman said.
It took him a moment to place the voice without its slur. “Christ. Helen?”
Cold hands gripped his. “Please,” she begged. Her cold hands slipped to the skin of his stomach and he sucked in a breath, feeling himself splinter. He was here and entirely not here at the same time. He jerked back and hit the window, his bare ass pressed against the glass.
Lovely. He only hoped no one outside bothered to look up.
“Helen,” he said, trying to dodge the warmth of her hands. “Let me get dressed and we can talk.”
“There’s no time,” she whispered. “I need you to hide me and then help me get out of the city. I have no money. You should know that. I have nothing, but I can give you-”
She stepped closer until she was pressed to the front of him.
Cold against his back. Hot and soft and terrible against his front.
Desire was an inclination he’d left behind him years and years ago. Choosing instead a lover that came in a glass bottle. But suddenly and without warning, desire was there. There. In his belly, a suddenly hot fire. Wrong and inappropriate but there.
I am a man. I am alive and I am a man.
For a moment there was nothing he could do but experience his reaction to Helen. The elevated heart rate, his testes pulling up into his body and his cock twitching with blood flow.
Oh God. He could have laughed.
He wanted to weep.
Her hand grazed his hip bone, and he lurched back into the moment. The horrible moment. Stupid beast that he was, he could still control himself.
He stepped sideways, away from her. “Wait-”
“No. Now. It has to be now. Otherwise I’ll lose the will. Please. I’m…I’m begging you. Begging. I’ll-”
There was a sharp knock on his door and she sobbed, pitching herself forward as if every bone in her body had broken at once.
“Go away!” James shouted, but the door opened anyway and he was not surprised to see Guy there.
“Helen?”
“No, Guy,” she whispered, her voice ragged and wet. “Please just let me go.”
“Don’t do this, Helen,” Guy said, sounding—if James had to make an assumption—remarkably sad.
“If I could perhaps get dressed, we could talk about this in a more fitting manner,” James interjected into the conversation.
Guy glanced over his shoulder at some commotion in the hallway and he stepped further into the room, shutting the door.
A strange panic filled James at being locked in this room with them. Before, when he was living in a haze, this might have been funny. Or entertaining in some distant way—an anecdote he could craft to make people laugh.
But now it was only stressful. Sharp.
He would rather jump out his window naked than be in this room.
“Do you remember what happened last time you did this?” Guy asked, and Helen’s entire body flinched. “No one needs to get hurt, if you just come with me now.”
“Yes. You have to leave,” James cried, the words erupting from his throat without thought. He just wanted them gone. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, and he didn’t want to know how terrible things were for her. How criminal her situation. How she was kept against her will. He had no desire to understand these things. If he knew them, as a gentleman he’
d be obliged to help.
I’m not a gentleman. I’m barely human. Only slightly a man.
He could sense their attention in the dark, and his nudity practically glowed.
“I need…I need you to get out. I can help. But not like this.” Not naked. Not alone in his room with all this wretchedness she brought with her. In the morning. With coffee and clothes. He would seek out the truth, and if there was something he could do… Well, perhaps he’d do it. Or perhaps not. He did not need her trouble heaped on top of his own.
His hands were full.
He was not the hero.
And he was fucking naked.
“Respectfully,” he added. For good measure.
“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Helen said after a moment. “About all of this. Please. Forget we were here.”
“Unlikely.”
“Yes,” she said. “I imagine. Come on, Guy. Let’s leave the doctor alone.”
“Tomorrow,” James said, feeling guilty. “Tomorrow we’ll talk.”
“No.” Her voice rang with finality. “We won’t. There is nothing to talk about.” Slowly, bone by bone, muscle by muscle, she straightened and crossed the room toward Guy.
He could see what it cost her in the way she forced her chin up. Her shoulders back.
“Helen,” James said, forgetting for a moment that he was naked. That he was trying—actively, with every muscle in his body—to not care about anything. To save himself.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. He got an impression of her long, raven-wing hair falling down her back. And those blue eyes.
And then she was gone.
Chapter 4
* * *
In the morning, the whorehouse looked like a church. Undoubtedly James was hell-bound for thinking such a thing, but Kyle and his merry band of kitchen boys cleaned meticulously after the doors were locked so the pale wood floors gleamed. There was no stench of whiskey or smoke or humans. It smelled new.
The storm had passed, and the sun came through the high windows in great sheets. Buttery yellow and warm.
It was an empty room that had been wiped clean. That had been illuminated with sunlight. The dark sins and secrets were vanquished by the light.