Honeyville

  ‘There are guns, Dora.’

  ‘What? Guns? Where?’

  ‘Shhh! For heaven’s sake.’ She sounded frantic.

  I sighed. ‘Honey, let’s not stand here in the street. Let me take you home. Better still, let me take you to your aunt and uncle. You’re in a state. I don’t want to leave you alone.’

  ‘But you have to help me,’ she whispered vehemently. ‘You have to tell Lawrence … it wasn’t my fault.’ She shook her head, correcting herself. ‘I should never have joined the march. Is he very angry with me?’

  ‘He’s not happy.’

  ‘Oh God!’ she cried. And then, like a tragedy queen: ‘It’s all so pointless, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is pointless?’

  ‘I can’t go back to the cottage. Not until he’s cleared it.’

  ‘Cleared what? What are you talking about Inez?’

  But she wouldn’t say. She just shook her head and began to weep. ‘He will be so angry with me. I know it.’

  She refused to return to the cottage, refused to go to her aunt, and I could hardly leave her standing alone in the cold night. I had no choice but to take her back with me to Plum Street. She would have to hide in my little dressing room, I told her. On no account was anyone to know she was there.

  And somehow, in spite of everything – her terror, her sadness, the seeping, swelling gash on her cheek, she began to giggle. ‘Shall I hear you at work then?’ she asked. ‘I can make noises if it helps. Perhaps I can hide under your bed?’ she continued to laugh, but she was half hysterical. I wanted to shake her. Knock some sense into her. She stopped laughing as abruptly as she began. ‘Anyway, I can’t go home,’ she said, ‘because I have allowed the Union to use my cellar as a storeroom.’ Another stupid laugh, ‘I should think there are more guns in my cellar than in the rest of Southern Colorado altogether.’

  I had known she was in love. I had known she was reckless, too – and unimaginably foolish. But this seemed to me to be stupid beyond all comprehension. She saw the look on my face.

  ‘But they had to use it, Dora. You know as well I do – the general’s men confiscate our guns wherever they find them, and then they hand them over to the other side. How could I refuse? Well, I couldn’t. That’s all. And the police are bound to come now, aren’t they? And Lawrence – I shan’t see him for the dust. Will I …?’ A feeble note of hope lingered. ‘I just wanted to help him,’ she said.

  ‘Help him?’ I laughed. ‘You wanted to fuck him.’

  She sighed. Didn’t argue. ‘Well, what does it matter now, anyway?’

  20

  We continued our journey in silence. When we arrived at Plum Street, I gave her something to clean the wound and told her to hide in my dressing room until she heard from me again. I sent a message to Phoebe that I was sick and would not be working that night, and set out in search of Lawrence.

  They’d not seen him at the Union office. Nor was he at the Toltec, nor at any of the Union’s preferred saloons. It seemed obvious to me that I should return via the cottage, if not to venture inside (I had no wish to be implicated in her trouble), then at least to inspect the place from afar, and take note of any activity within.

  I approached it with trepidation, intending only to glance at the house as I strolled on by, preferably without even turning my head. But as drew up beside it, I noticed the front door hanging open and, in the hall, the electric lights were on. I stopped and waited, fiddled with my coat and then my hat, and then made a show of looking for something I had dropped on the sidewalk – but no one came or went. There was no sign of life inside. I couldn’t bring myself to walk on by, simply leave the place with the door wide open for all to see, so – with heart in my throat and legs trembling – I walked through the front gate and up the few steps to the porch.

  I could see that the door lock had been forced. The latch was hanging from a single nail. Other than that, however, the house appeared to be in order. There was ash in the hearth, and a couple of empty glasses balanced on the ottoman, but (I reasoned) they had no doubt been left there by Inez, since the house-girl only visited in the mornings.

  I called out. No answer came. There had been men passing through, though, I felt certain of it – and not many moments before. I could smell them in the cold air: sweat, tobacco and a mix of colognes. It was not an unpleasant smell. I checked the bedroom, the bathroom – and finally, though I dreaded what might be lurking, I ventured, along the short dark corridor at the back of the parlour, into the scullery and kitchen.

  I had never seen the cellar – was unaware, until Inez informed me there were munitions stored inside it, that the property even possessed such a thing. It didn’t take me long to find it. There was a hatch on the scullery floor, with steps leading down and in their haste, whoever had been there had not paused to close it. A single electric lightbulb still burned from the ceiling. The cellar was empty. There was no sign of Lawrence. No sign of any living thing.

  I switched off the light. I reattached the screw on the front lock as best I could so that the door would at least stay closed behind me, and headed home to Plum Street again.

  21

  Inez had removed herself from her hiding place in my dressing room and was lying limp as a doll on my bed. She looked sick: there was a waxy film about her – her cheeks and neck had taken a whitish glow against the angry red gash – and there was an oily gleam behind the eyes, detached and yet frantic. It alarmed me.

  ‘Your cut is worse. It’s swelling up.’ I said. ‘We should call a doctor.’

  She pulled herself up, or halfway up, before the effort sent her tumbling back on the pillows again. ‘Did you find him?’ she asked. She had wrapped my green silk kimono around her torn clothes, and though there was a fire burning in the grate and the room was warm, her body was shaking. ‘What did he say? Is he terribly angry? Oh God –you didn’t tell him I told you? Please Dora, tell me you didn’t tell him you knew about the cellar.’

  ‘Honey. You need a doctor,’ I said.

  ‘Dora, Did you tell him?’

  I shook my head. ‘I didn’t find him. But I went to the cottage and, whatever it is you were keeping down there, it’s gone. The trap door was left open and I think someone had only just that moment left. So you’re safe. It’s safe. The guns are gone. You can go home whenever you’re ready.’

  She hardly seemed to hear me. ‘But Lawrence?’

  ‘Forget Lawrence,’ I snapped. ‘A man who asks to store illegal weapons in your house – in this town, at this time in our history – is no friend for you, Inez. No friend for anyone.’

  ‘But he said …’ Her thin shoulders seemed to fold in on themselves, and she began to sob. ‘Now the guns are gone, do you suppose he will ever come back?’

  She cut a pitiful figure among the silks and satins of my ludicrous, opulent bed. I longed to hoist her out of it. Send her home. I needed to get back to work. But she was sick – too sick to move, and too crazy to be left on her own.

  From my small parlour behind me, there came a tap on the outer, far door. I gritted my teeth. ‘Give me a half-hour,’ I shouted through. ‘Tell Phoebe I’ll be down in a half-hour.’

  But it was Phoebe who was knocking. She didn’t wait to be given permission to come in. The door between my bedroom and my parlour was wide open and, in my bed, Inez languished, centre stage, perfectly framed. Phoebe – short, round, trussed and perfumed, and as beady as any woman anyone ever met – stepped through the threshold, from parlour to bedroom. Her busy eyes flicked from Inez to me and then back to Inez again and I could hear her mind rattling: a body in the bed. Clothed. A body unknown to Phoebe. Was I cheating her of commission? Yes? No? Who was this clothed woman? Not a pro. A sick woman. With a gash on her face. Why was she lying in one of Phoebe’s beds without Phoebe’s permission? Was Phoebe being cheated in some way, not immediately obvious? WERE THERE DOLLARS OWED?

  I said: ‘Phoebe, this is Inez. Inez, Phoebe. My friend Inez is unwell. I was just arrangi
ng—’

  ‘She needs a doctor,’ Phoebe said. ‘I can see that. But you’ll need to get her out of here. There’s a gentleman downstairs, wants to see you …’ She eyed Inez, taking in the sickness, the torn hat, the delicate features. ‘Get her out of here,’ Phoebe said. ‘For all I know her husband is sitting downstairs.’ She turned to Inez. ‘What’s your name, missie? What are you doing here? What in the hell’s the matter with you, Dora, inviting trouble in?’

  ‘I was in the protest,’ Inez muttered.

  ‘What protest?’ asked Phoebe, though she must have known.

  ‘And please don’t blame Dora. It’s not Dora’s fault I’m here. Only I wouldn’t go home.’

  ‘Well you gotta go home,’ she said.

  ‘I was looking for – tell me: do you happen to know Lawrence O’Neill?’

  Phoebe blinked. The smallest of pauses. It told me that Lawrence was downstairs right now. She looked at Inez, said: ‘Can’t say I do.’ And then, to my surprise: ‘There’s a maid’s room lying empty up a floor. Why don’t you get yourself up there, so Dora can get on with some work.’ She looked at me. I felt her cold eyes, calculating her commissions, lost and gained, and I felt a chill crawling slowly along my spine. I was getting old. Worse, I was getting lazy. One day – inevitably, but perhaps sooner than I realized – my time would be called. Just then, with her eyes on me, I felt that day lurching closer. ‘You can go home tomorrow,’ she said to Inez. ‘When you’re feeling stronger.’ She turned and left the room.

  Inez put her head in her hands. I thought she might have apologized for the trouble she’d caused. Instead, she let out a pathetic whimper, and once again began to weep. ‘She knows him, doesn’t she? She probably knows where he is right now—’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘What am I to do?’

  I told her to do as Phoebe said. I rang for Kitty and asked her to make Inez comfortable in the unused maid’s room, and finally I prepared myself for my work – with more effort than usual. Phoebe was watching. I knew it. And the strike would end eventually, and the years were rolling by.

  The ballroom beyond the long salon was exceedingly busy, as it had been every night of the strike; always full of life, and light, and music, and laughter – no matter what ears had been severed from what heads just a few hours before, or what pathetic colonies of the dispossessed sat shivering under snow-covered canvas a few miles up the road. The ballroom at Plum Street floated separate, in a magical, carefree world of its own.

  Phoebe, ahead of all of Trinidad’s madams, had a talent for keeping the two warring factions apart. Gentlemen guests, depending on their affiliations, were guided towards one side of the room or the other, and it was our task, when we danced on the floor in the middle, to keep them so happily amused that they would forget each other altogether; and they generally did. If not, at the first sign of a disagreement, Phoebe would descend on them, a cloud of smiles and lace and perfume. She would disarm them with playful chatter. And if that failed, everyone knew she had no qualms about throwing them out on the street. Since the troubles began there had been only two brawls at Plum Street, both initiated by Baldwin-Felts men. It was after the second that Phoebe banned Baldwin-Felts from the house altogether.

  When I came to find Lawrence, he sat at a table on the side of the room furthest from the general’s men. He was alone, tapping his foot to our ragtime music and slurping his bourbon from crystal.

  Lawrence O’Neill had asked to see me in private and so, with Phoebe’s beady eye following, I brought him upstairs to my rooms. He was drunk, unhappy, agitated.

  He lay fully clothed on the bed that poor Inez had just warmed and vacated – rather, he tumbled back onto it, bleary eyed, and asked me to lie beside him.

  He pawed at me half-heartedly.

  ‘What in hell’s the matter with you?’ I asked, slapping him off.

  He rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know.’ He sighed. ‘Forgive me … I thought it was expected.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Didn’t want to offend … Thought it was expected,’ he said again.

  ‘Dear God,’I laughed. ‘You are crazy!’

  A pause. ‘Just a little oiled.’ He smiled at me. ‘That cockchafer friend of yours, Phoebe, wouldn’t fetch you down until I ponied up some.’

  ‘Well of course she wouldn’t. What did you expect?’

  ‘I said I only wanted to talk.’

  ‘I’m guessing she told you she wasn’t running a charity?’

  He smiled faintly. ‘Her exact words. Fifty bucks she took off me. My, but you’re expensive.’

  ‘Worth every cent,’ I said. ‘As you no doubt remember. I assume you’ve come to ask about Inez?’

  A long pause. He looked wretched.

  ‘She was all right, was she?’ he asked at length. ‘They hadn’t beaten her too badly?’

  I didn’t want to tell him she was here in the house. After the danger he had placed her in, I didn’t want to offer him any information at all. As best I could, I wanted to keep the two apart – at least until Inez was back in her senses. ‘She was OK,’ I answered. ‘She was fine.’

  He sat up, delved into a pocket for his pipe. Another silence. I watched as he lit it. He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together, but he sounded no less maudlin when he spoke again – the same question: ‘So she was all right?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘You took her to her aunt’s, did you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And they were good to her? Were they? They took her in?’

  ‘Of course they did.’

  ‘And did she ask about me?’

  ‘What do you think? Of course she asked about you. She couldn’t understand why you hadn’t come to fetch her yourself.’

  ‘And did you explain to her –’ his tone changed abruptly; he was drunker than I had ever seen him – ‘how it was impossible? Did you tell her what a damn coot she’s been? How she’s wrecked it for us now? She’s going to get herself killed. She’s going to get us all killed. Did you tell her she’s a damn coot, and a dangerous one, and I can’t see her any more? And did you tell her she had better stay out of sight, hide out at her aunt’s place for a while, if she wants to stay alive?’

  ‘She knows you’re angry.’

  He leaned across to me, loomed over me, and every part of him reeked of liquor: ‘Does she understand the kind of danger she is in?’

  ‘Maybe she does,’ I said, pushing him away. ‘She didn’t use her own name at the station. I had to look through the list to find her.’

  ‘Is that right?’ He sounded pleased; and as surprised as I was, I think.

  ‘I don’t know why you ever involved her, Lawrence.’

  ‘I never should have,’ he said, and then, clumsily, he stood up. ‘I have to leave. I only wanted to be sure she was safe.’

  I watched him straightening his shirt, adjusting his hat, running his fingers over his moustache; looking at me, not quite looking at me. ‘I’m gonna miss her,’ he said abruptly. ‘Too bad, huh?’ His face looked bleary with the drink and sadness. ‘It’s too bad.’

  I imagined Inez, upstairs, pining. He was about to leave. ‘Can I give her a message maybe?’ I asked him. ‘Anything? Just a word from you.’

  ‘You tell her to take care of herself,’ he said. He kissed his fingertips, and brushed them against the end of my nose – a strangely affectionate gesture, not intended for me, I sensed – and he closed the door gently behind him.

  I didn’t go to visit Inez that night. I left her to sleep. In the late morning, after I had eaten breakfast and still heard nothing from her, I ventured up the rickety back stairs to the maids’ quarters, and tapped on her door. When she didn’t answer, I crept in all the same. She lay still on her back, her eyes half open and her pale skin glowing with the fever. She looked terrible. It seemed unlikely she would be able to sit up in bed, let alone have the strength to leave Plum St
reet that day.

  … Nor even the next day. Phoebe sent for a doctor (‘don’t imagine for one second I’m paying for it’), who administered various medicines, and was adamant that Inez should remain in the house until the fever lifted.

  Two more days passed and still the fever didn’t lift. Phoebe didn’t want Inez in the house any more. So, finally, I did the only thing I felt I could do. I called on Philippa McCulloch.

  22

  She didn’t recognize me, or at least she pretended not to. I suppose neither of us saw much point in rehashing past events. I told the housekeeper – who looked about ready to slam the door in my face – that I had come regarding Inez, and the old woman raced off to fetch her mistress. Within moments Mrs McCulloch had come to the front door herself.

  She was sweet: worried and embarrassed in about equal measure. She showed me into the parlour, where I avoided looking at the piano, and so perhaps did she. She invited me to sit down but I declined. She asked if I would like tea. I shook my head. Finally, her manners gave way. ‘Sakes alive – Miss … Mrs—?’

  ‘Whitworth,’ I said. ‘My name is Miss Whitworth.’

  ‘What has happened to her, Miss Whitworth? I left a note for her three days ago, and another at the library – but there’s no sign of her! And my girl Rachel goes to clean there each afternoon and she says she’s not laid eyes on Inez all this time – and none of her old friends has seen her – not for weeks. These past few months she’s been so strange with all of us … But you …’ She looked at me, and there was panic in her eyes: fear, suspicion, confusion and the threat of imminent tears. ‘But I understood you had left town?’

  ‘I have not left town.’

  ‘You haven’t left town,’ she repeated vaguely. ‘Dag-blame it – excuse my language, but what has become of her, Miss Whitworth? Is she in trouble? I know she has got in with a terrible crowd. And I don’t mean to insult you, ma’am. Miss. Of course I don’t mean to insult you but …’

  As she spoke, the door to the parlour opened and a man I had not met before slipped quietly into the room. He was in his late thirties – my age, perhaps a little younger – and the resemblance was unmissable. The same slim build, the same straw-blond hair and heavy-lidded, clear grey eyes. And yet, where Inez seemed to burn with hope and life, this man emanated sadness: an elegant, exhausted melancholy. He was rather beautiful. Just like his sister. Effeminate. He wore a pink silk pleated shirt, collarless and unbuttoned at the top; no jacket, no tie, a large beret of dark brown felt, a pair of chocolate brown silk pants, snugly tailored, and beneath them some flashy white and tan pumps.