by Rose Lerner
* * *
Helen couldn’t get her breath. She couldn’t feel her fingers. Or her feet. She couldn’t…her face…
“Helen?” Annie, the mousy woman who had done nothing to deserve having Helen here in her house, dragging around her tawdry drama like the ragged hem of her skirt. “Are you all right?”
“I can’t…breathe…”
Annie opened a door and pulled Helen inside a dark room. “It’s the corset,” Annie said, the mouse all business. “Stupid things.”
She turned Helen around and began undoing the back of her dress.
“What-”
“Shhh. Let’s just get you out of this thing and then we can talk.”
Within seconds Annie had the back of her dress open and was pulling apart her corset, and Helen sucked in breaths so deep she got lightheaded. She braced herself against the bed in front of her and collapsed there. And then somehow she was half naked and sitting on the floor, resting against the bed while Annie bustled around the room, limping, her right leg dragging slightly behind her as she started a fire.
“Can I get you something?” Annie asked, as if Helen had just come calling.
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. I’m sorry to be here. I’m sorry I’ve somehow gotten so dirty. Tears burned in the back of her throat, bitter and salty. I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry I’ve come to this. I’m sorry I’ve fallen so far.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Annie said, leaning back against the bed. “I’m not entirely sure what’s happening, but James wouldn’t bring you here if it wasn’t important.”
“Delilah seems to have thought of everything.”
“It’s what Delilah does.”
“Who…who are all of you?”
“Well,” Annie sighed. “We are James’s friends, as much as he’ll let us be. He’s rather lousy at it.”
Helen smiled and lifted a sagging sleeve up over her shoulder as if protecting her modesty.
“I think…I think I’m going to be very sick. And if I don’t leave now, I may not be able to leave for a few days.”
“Are you telling me I should kick you out? Throw you into the night? Before things get messy?” Annie smiled and shook her head. “No. You’re safe here.”
“Charles and Guy-”
“Delilah and Kyle will send word the moment one of them leaves Delilah’s. You are truly safe here.”
“Safe,” Helen whispered. And then again. Like any word, it lost its meaning if you said it enough times.
“Can I get you some tea?” Annie asked. “Whiskey, perhaps? I have wine downstairs.”
No, she thought, feeling kindness leaving her, feeling manners and sanity departing. The hunger was creeping up on her. The twitch and anger. But I would love a bottle of laudanum and a syringe of morphine.
I would love oblivion.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Could you… could you send up James?”
Annie’s eyebrows wrinkled over the edge of her glasses.
“Let me get you some clothes.”
“I’m fine. Just get James.” Oh, that tone wouldn’t do. “Please.”
Annie watched her for one more moment, and Helen wanted to open her mouth and scream. Just scream. But Annie didn’t deserve that.
Annie left, and within a few moments Helen heard the heavy tread of James coming up the stairs.
Carefully, she got to her feet. She couldn’t stand, much as she wished she could meet this man and this moment on her own two feet. But it had been a very long night and it was enough that she sat on the side of the bed, her trembling hands clenched together.
James knocked, the gentleman.
“Come in, James,” she said and he pushed open the door, revealing himself in the hallway.
He really was a handsome man. No one could argue with that. The girls at the whorehouse were all mad for him. They talked about his height and his dark hair. His whiskey eyes and sly grin. But she knew what they really were attracted to.
It was what that sly grin covered.
His heart, bruised and battered, neglected and ignored.
And yet it beat on.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She swallowed and pressed a hand against her stomach. “For the moment. It’s going to get bad, though, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “This is…this is the part where you save yourself. We have just cleared the way for you. This is the hard work.”
She swallowed back nausea. “I’m beginning to get a sense of that. What happened to Charles?”
He lifted a note between two fingers. “Delilah says the sheriff has arrested Guy, Kyle and ten other men. Park is unconscious. They have moved him to his hotel and are sending for a doctor.”
“You?”
“As much as I would love to be the man to put a knife in his heart, I am otherwise engaged. I sent Davey back to the hotel with instructions to bring word as things unfold.”
“I don’t know how to thank you. Any of you.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “It was perhaps as much for me as it was for you. After so many years of being selfish, I needed to remember how it feels to help someone. To do the right thing, instead of what served me best. I needed to remember that I could.”
Her hand, cold and shaking, touched his cheek and in the privacy of the room, it felt outrageously personal. Brave, even.
“I feel ridiculous admitting that to you,” he said. “You and your mother. You did the right thing instead of what served you best, and your mother…” He stopped.
“Died for it?” she finished.
“I’m sorry, we don’t need to talk about it.”
“I want to,” she said. “Charles tells that horrible story about her. Those ridiculous lies, and I don’t ever get to tell anyone the truth about her.”
“Tell me,” he said. “If you’d like.”
Oh, what a strange and beautiful gift.
With shaking fingers she pushed her hair off her face, wondering idly where her veil had gone.
“She was a singer. That part was true. And she was beautiful. She loved games. All kinds. Would rather tell a story than read one. A rather weepy drunk. And very, very smart. About people. About what motivates them and makes them behave the way they do. Terrible at math and directions. Oh, she was awful with directions. I had to redo every map she ever drew. And any calculations about troops or distances… a mess. Once, because of a terrible map she’d drawn, an entire cavalry division of the Army of the Potomac went twenty miles the wrong way.”
“It sounds like you had a lot of power.”
“We had information. From all kinds of sources. Our friend Mary, she was the real spy. The work she did in the Capital under the guise of working as a house girl for the Davies, was invaluable.”
“She was a slave and a spy?”
“There were so many more black men and women working as spies for The Union than you might think. Men and women who will never get recognized, who didn’t survive to see the end of the war. Mother and I at least had the protection of wealth and white skin. I cannot imagine the fear those men and women must have lived with.”
“Where is Mary now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I know she was alive at the end of the war. She and her husband.”
“Perhaps we can find her.”
“Yes, that...that would be lovely. Wouldn’t it?”
She sighed and felt the press of heavier memories. She ran her thumb over a wrinkle in her skirt. Smoothing it flat.
“Park was a regular at our table during the war. A plum source of information. So bewitched by Mother and so pompous at the same time. He never imagined Mother and I would betray him. So much so that it was an actual delight doing it. But then the war ended, and it was madness in Charleston. And there was no one to protect us. My father had died before Lee surrendered, but I don’t know that if he’d survived it would have made a difference. We stayed as long as we could. But after a month passed, it
was clear this was no longer our home. It was dangerous in the city for us. For anyone who knew us. We dismissed all of our servants and prepared to leave.
“And like he knew our plans, there was Charles. Just standing in our parlor with his traveling trunks. Like he belonged there. Like he owned the house and the two of us inside of it.
“Mother had a rifle, and he just took it from her. Took it from her and swung it at her with both hands…” She shook her head, pressed her fingers to her mouth as if by stopping the words she would stop the memories. But she was a jar uncorked and everything was spilling out. All the memories the laudanum kept away. The secrets she’d buried under the morphine and the act.
“He hit her in the chest, and she flew across the room. I went after him with my knife, and he backhanded me to the floor.”
She turned to look at him. “For three weeks we lived as prisoners. Without servants or friends, there was no one to help us. And then Mother got sick. Sicker and sicker.”
“Park…?”
“Poisoned her, I believe. And then, one night I wasn’t just a prisoner in my house, but I was locked in my room. For three days. And I screamed and screamed and smashed things, but in the end my door didn’t open until the third day, and Park stood there with a marriage certificate signed by Mother and told me she was dead. I don’t remember what happened after that.”
“It’s a kind of hysteria,” James said. “Forgetting like that. I’ve talked to many soldiers who have no memory of a battle. They remember marching and then nothing.”
“He let me go to the funeral a few days later, for appearances. That was the first time he gave me laudanum, and I didn’t fight it. A year later he sold our home and we’ve been moving around for the last eighteen months. Orchestrating these little dramas in whorehouses and saloons. The minute I would fight him, he would pull out his guardianship papers and a letter from some doctor saying I was unfit and threaten asylum. After the asylum in Philadelphia, it was enough to keep me quiet.”
She closed her eyes and grimaced, her hand against her head. It felt like a knife was sawing her skull in half.
“It’s starting, isn’t it?” she whispered, suddenly scared.
“I’m going to bring you some towels and water. A clean gown that’s more comfortable.”
She nodded, her head bowed.
“You’re not alone, Helen.”
“You promise?” she gasped. Her hand found his, clutched at it. A lifeline amidst this terrible suite of pain. She thought briefly that this attachment she had for him might be born from the wrong things, but she found at this moment she could not be bothered to care.
He was here.
And she wanted him here.
Pride meant nothing against the truth of that.
“I promise.”
Chapter 13
* * *
The night went as James imagined. Helen’s headache got worse. The stomach cramps followed. The fever started, with its intermittent hot flashes and chills. Muscle cramps and vomiting.
Helen tossed and turned in sweaty sheets, crying and moaning. Screaming at him that she wanted the morphine. That she wanted to die.
“I know,” was all he could say. And he said it over and over again.
“Fuck you,” she raged with red-rimmed eyes, her dark hair in sweaty ropes against her flushed neck.
He smiled at her language.
“I know.”
“I’m sorry,” she said a few moments later, limp and wasted in the rumpled bed. She wept into her pillow.
Useless in the face of her misery, he took careful notes on her condition. The timing and duration of the sleep. The amount of liquid she swallowed versus what she brought back up.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a weak voice, limp on the bed.
“Nothing.” He put the notebook away.
“Am I an experiment?” she asked, coughing into her pillow.
“No.”
She made a soft sound in her throat, pure skepticism. Pure doubt.
“Could you leave me?” she asked, looking away.
“Of course,” he said understanding something about clinging to a little personal pride in the middle of all this. He had deeply disturbing memories of time spent with a chamber pot at Delilah’s.
“Do you need help?”
“No.”
“I could send in Annie.”
“Please.”
Right. He left quickly. Closing the door behind him and then walking over to the top of the stairs, with great purpose as if on an errand.
But then he stopped. Right there at the top of the stairs. Like outside of her company he was a clockwork mechanism all wound down.
No errand. No purpose.
He realized in a slow sort of way that there was something more he could do. Not for Helen; that was a matter of time and patience and her own very strong will.
But for others like her. Like him. Soldiers and doctors and survivors and widows.
He ran downstairs and wrote a letter. And then another. And one more for good measure.
* * *
At dawn there was a knock on the door hard enough to rattle the windows, and James woke up with a start from the uneasy doze he’d fallen into in the rocking chair in the corner of Helen’s room.
Another knock, just as loud, and Helen woke with a start.
“It’s him!” she cried, sitting up.
It had been two days waiting for word from Park. Davey had reported that Park woke up sometime around supper last night. But nothing since then.
Kyle, Guy and the other men that had been arrested in the brawl had been released at dawn with fines and warnings.
A note from Kyle said that Guy had paid his fine, saddled his horse and headed East out of town.
James was not ready to believe they’d seen the last of him.
“Shhh.” He jumped to his feet to calm her, and at her bed he pushed aside the curtain to see down to the front door.
“It’s Davey,” he said. “I’ll go see what he has to say. Are you all right?”
She nodded, her nightgown under his hand damp with sweat.
He made it downstairs before Annie and Steven and pulled open the door only to find Davey, bent over in the doorway, his hands on his knees as he struggled to catch his breath.
“What’s happened?” James asked.
“Park…is…”
Dead. Please say dead.
“Coming.”
“What about his man? Guy?”
“No…sign…of him.” The boy panted. “Kyle went to the sheriff and is coming fast as he can. He says…get ready.”
“Go on inside to the kitchen. There’s bread and some pork chop from dinner.”
James shooed the boy inside and shut the door. He turned to find Annie and Steven standing behind him. Each in their night clothes. Steven with his rifle.
Annie left to help Davey, which left James and Steven.
“You heard?” James asked.
Steven nodded. “What kind of ready do we need to be?”
James looked down at Steven’s shotgun. “That kind of ready.”
James turned toward the stairs only to find Helen, sitting at the top of them like she’d been dropped there.
“He’s coming,” she said and took a deep ragged breath. He could see her wanting to talk about leaving. Thinking about horses and ill-fated rides across the wilderness.
“Would you like me to give you a gun?” he asked. “A rifle? Like a sniper, you could shoot him out your window. He’d never see it coming.”
Her laughter was part sob.
“Or perhaps you’d like something a little bloodier? I could give you a meat cleaver. I’ll hold him down while you chop him into pieces.”
She lifted her shaking fingers as if to show him she could not hold a gun or a knife.
“A chair on the lawn? You can scream at him. Throw stones.”
That made her laugh and then clutch at her head. He all but leapt
up the stairs to crouch at her feet.
“Tell me what you want me to do,” he said, quietly. Her hair was a damp rope down her back, strands clinging to her sweaty neck.
He resisted the urge to pull them free.
“Just let me sit here. Just…let me sit here for a second.”
It was awful that that was the best he could give her. In his mind, he had a pile of things he wished to give her; bloody revenge, a whole and healthy body and mind, a future that didn’t involve bird cages. His small, madly beating heart and a place by his side in this meager life of his.
All those things he would give her. But the world conspired and what he had was this: leaving her alone at the top of the stairs because that was what she asked for.
“You’re safe,” he said. “I promise. I left my derringer in the top drawer of the nightstand.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with that,” she whispered down at her shaking hands. “But thank you.”
He nodded and went downstairs to gather his own weapons.
* * *
There’d been a dinner party, at the very beginning of the war. One of their first. Oh, she’d been so nervous she’d been unable to look at her mother, in fear of revealing something. Afraid every time she opened her mouth that she would scream “We’re spies!”
She’d eaten everything in sight, even the shrimp in cream which never agreed with her. Stuffing herself out of nerves was a nervous habit she wasn’t entirely proud of. But there’d been no stopping her.
Mother had warned her of one of the guests, an oily lieutenant from Louisiana who was only there because he came with the general who had all of the information they were after. But Mother said he was dangerous, and should she get caught alone with him she should not hesitate to scream for help.
She should not hesitate to defend herself.
Lieutenant Oily had watched Helen all night like she was a prize pig. Something that made her only eat more.
And when she finally excused herself, sick to her stomach, he’d followed her. She didn’t realize it, preoccupied as she had been by her belly and her nerves and the crushing fear that everyone she loved was going to be killed.
But he’d cornered her on her return to the dining room.