Without waiting for Paige to say anything, Lulu gave Rob a meaningful look, sniffed, and shook her head. Her tone was syrupy, but the words made Paige bristle. "I'm sorry, Rob, but I don't think my boardinghouse is the place for the likes of your Miss Randolph."
Paige opened her mouth to give Lulu a good piece of her mind, but a sharp kick on her ankle from Rob's heavy boot silenced her.
Rob had a story all prepared, and Paige listened in amazement as he manipulated Lulu Leiberman as smoothly as any con man.
Now and Then: Chapter Five
"Ye see, Lulu, Miss Paige was the unfortunate victim of a vicious attack now under investigation," Rob improvised with a touch of pomposity Paige hadn't dreamed he was capable of. "The poor lass lost all her worldly goods and was left unconscious in the middle of the bare prairie."
Lulu clucked her tongue and shook her head, her blue eyes round with curiosity and avid with interest, her voice no more than an awed whisper. "Indians, Rob?"
"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to say, Lulu. The matter is under investigation."
Even Paige was impressed with the somber and mysterious tone he used.
"Why, that's terrible," Lulu said, patting Paige's arm. "Of course you can board with me. I didn't understand the circumstances. You must tell me all about it."
But superficial sympathy didn't keep her from spelling out her rules and regulations, and Paige realized that Lulu might look soft and rounded, but inside there was a core as hard as steel. "Now, as Rob knows, this is a decent establishment," she pronounced, "and there'll be no funny goings on allowed in my house. Three dollars a week, payable in advance, fresh sheets every fortnight. Breakfast at seven, lunch at noon, dinner six sharp, no food served in between. No comings and goings after ten at night, and no male visitors allowed in the rooms, I'm very strict about that." Her chilly blue gaze and pursed mouth underlined her words. "You keep your own room neat and tidy. Margaret will do it out proper every Thursday."
A wave of agonizing homesickness for her own comfortable apartment nearly choked Paige. This sounded worse than a girl's dormitory, and unless Paige was mistaken, Lulu was a bitch.
And Paige also knew that right now she had no choice. Still, it was a moment before she could nod and hand over three of the one-dollar bills Rob had loaned her. She had to remember, she told herself, that she was as homeless as any bag lady on Cordova Street in Vancouver, with probably less money in her pocket.
As they ate cake and drank coffee in the immaculate kitchen, Rob told stories of chasing bank robbers and being chased by wolves, of bootleggers and con men and contrary horses, and Lulu oohed and aahed and hung on his every word.
At last Rob got to his feet and bowed to the women, settling his hat on his head at a jaunty angle and tugging down his scarlet tunic.
"I'm on patrol for the next few days, Miss Paige, but as soon as I'm back I'll look in on ye." He gave Lulu Leiberman a flirtatious wink, and she fluttered around him like an overstuffed pigeon.
"Yer coffee and cake are a treat, Lulu. I thank ye."
The moment the door closed behind him, Lulu reverted to what Paige knew by now was her real self.
"I don't mind doing Rob a favor, but personally I prefer male boarders," she snapped as she led the way up the steep stairs to the second floor. "Men aren't always needing things the way women are."
A balding white-whiskered man with a sizable paunch stood to one side at the top of the stairs to let them pass. "Morning, Mrs. Leiberman." He dipped his head in a little bow to Paige and smiled, revealing two missing teeth. "Madam, good day."
"William Sweeney, this is Miss Randolph," Lulu said in curt introduction, and Sweeney held out his hand to Paige. "Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Randolph." Paige shook his hand.
"If you need any help with your baggage, I'd be pleased to—"
"She hasn't any baggage, Mr. Sweeney. Not a scrap, except what she's carrying there. Indians attacked out on the prairie, made off with everything, left her for dead," Lulu told him with relish, already hustling Paige along the hallway.
"My goodness, what a terrible calamity." Sweeney's kindly face was full of sympathy. "If there's anything I can do, Miss Randolph—"
"Thanks," Paige said, smiling at him. He seemed both genuine and friendly, and after Lulu, that was reassuring.
"Come along, please, Miss Randolph, I have to get lunch on the table," Lulu snapped. She stopped at a door halfway down and flung it open, standing back so Paige could go in. "This here's your room."
The room was pleasant enough, large and sparkling clean, with a view of the river out the window and a big, soft looking bed.
There was a washstand, with a rose patterned pitcher and a china bowl, and the inevitable chamber pot shut away in a cabinet at the bottom of the washstand. Lulu pointed it out and said the "necessary" was out the back, at the bottom of the garden, and that Margaret would empty the chamber pot each morning.
Poor Margaret.
"And where're you from, Miss Randolph?" Lulu Leiberman stood in the doorway of the bedroom, arms folded across her pouter pigeon bosom, apparently having forgotten all about getting lunch on the table.
"Vancouver."
Lulu shook her head. "And where would that be, then?" It was like being in a foreign country where they spoke a different language, Paige thought in despair. "It's out west, on the Pacific Ocean."
"That far away? Humph. That's a long and dangerous journey for a single woman. You are single, are you?"
"Yes, I am." Paige wished the landlady would leave, but Lulu seemed intent on lingering. She didn't make conversation so much as interrogate, Paige decided.
"Well, no need to be single long out here, dearie, unless it's your own choice." Lulu added in a coy voice, "I've had plenty of offers myself, but when you've got property, why, you just can't be too careful. But this is the place to come, if you're hunting a man."
"I'm not, Mrs. Leiberman." Paige tilted her chin up and gave Lulu a level stare. "I'm a doctor, and I assure you I'm not in the market for a husband."
The landlady's eyebrows shot up to her hairline, and her mouth dropped open. "A doctor, you say?" Her eyes went up and down Paige, taking in the ill fitting skirt, the sweat-stained blouse, as if there ought to be some physical mark that proved Paige's claim. "And what kind of doctor would you be, then? I've never come across any women who were doctors before." The cold blue eyes were both suspicious and mocking.
"I'm an obstetrician."
Lulu's blank look indicated her ignorance. "I specialize in pregnancy and childbirth."
"Oh, so you're not a real doctor, then." Lulu sounded smug. "You're a midwife, are you? Well, you want to step careful, because Mrs. Donald's the midwife around here. She's a nasty old battleaxe, and she might not take kindly to you moving in on her territory, so to speak." Lulu looked as if the prospect of a confrontation between Paige and the midwife delighted her.
Paige was irritated beyond belief by Lulu. There was no point, she told herself, in making an issue out of any of this with the landlady. But if it turned out she really was stuck here, if she couldn't find a way back, then she was going to have to find a way to make some money. The only thing she knew was medicine, and the response she'd received from almost everyone so far when she said she was a doctor was disbelief. It didn't make her optimistic about setting up a practice, that was certain.
"I need some things from the store. Can you tell me where I'm best to go?" Paige deliberately changed the subject. "I need a toothbrush, some underwear, shampoo." She paused, boggled by the list of things she was going to need to just exist. She only had three dollars left. Would it stretch to cover even some of the items? Did people even use such things as toothbrushes and shampoo in 1883?
Lulu shrugged, indifferent. "Hudson's Bay Company store stocks most everything." She went out the door. "Lunch will on the table at noon. Try not to keep everyone waiting."
Alone at last, Paige stripped off her clothes and had a thorough was
h in the large china basin. Unable to face putting on her soiled underwear again, she pulled on her running shorts and tank top instead, using the basin to scrub out her bra and panties. She'd find a clothesline to hang them on when she went out; in the meantime, she hung them over the iron bedstead.
She hated having to put on the crushed and less than clean skirt and blouse, but it was that or go naked, and she figured Lulu wouldn't exactly approve of nudity.
Lunch was served by Margaret in the dining room, and there were only four boarders present: a round little man named Mr. Raven, Paige, William Sweeney, and, of course, Lulu.
Paige was the last to arrive, and it was clear that Lulu had already entertained the two men with her own embellishments on the story Rob had told about the "vicious attack."
"I hear you lost all you owned in that ambush, Miss Randolph," Mr. Raven said the moment Paige sat down. "What a frightful experience for you to endure. How many savages would you say there were?" He paused and waited expectantly, and Paige silently cursed Rob Cameron.
"I didn't get a chance to count them," she lied, and for the rest of the meal she had to sidestep curious questions and listen to grisly tales of Indian atrocities.
The food was both plentiful and heavy as lead: potatoes mashed with butter and cream, overcooked beef roast, gravy with fat floating on top, turnips, sauerkraut, and a raisin pudding with thick cream for dessert, all served with endless cups of hot, strong coffee. As one rich, substantial dish followed the next, Paige found herself longing for a salad with sprouts and avocado, served with a croissant.
"Mrs. Leiberman sets the best table in Battleford," Mr. Raven boasted after his second helping of pudding. He belched loudly behind his hand, and Lulu blushed and simpered while Paige wondered what the incidence of heart attack was among Lulu's boarders.
Paige excused herself as soon as she could. She went up to her room, intending to go to the Hudson's Bay Company store and see what she could buy with the money she had left.
She was trying to sponge a gravy stain off the front of her blouse when a timid tap sounded at her door.
William Sweeney stood there, looking embarrassed and determined. He was balancing two large boxes in his arms.
He cleared his throat twice. "Miss Randolph, I hope you won't be insulted, but my wife died some time ago and I haven't known what to do with her clothing. When I heard that you'd lost everything but the clothes on your back, I wondered if there might be some things here that would be useful." He shifted uncomfortably, his broad face and baldhead flushing. "I think you and she were about the same size. I do hope you won't be insulted. I thought some of it might do till you get back on your feet, so to speak."
Paige was moved by his kindness. "Mr. Sweeney—William, how nice of you." She stood back and gestured him in. "Please call me Paige. And I'm very grateful for the clothes. I'm getting really sick of this skirt and blouse, I tell you." She sighed.
He beamed with pleasure. "They're yours, dear lady, do with them what you will." William set the boxes on the bed and immediately hurried back to the door. "If you can make use of them, I know my dear Letitia would be delighted. She hated waste of any sort. And I thought perhaps you might also like to know"—He blushed scarlet and ran a finger around the tight collar of his white shirt and cleared his throat—"Letitia always shopped for her—ummm, her more personal items, at Miss Rose Rafferty's Ladies' Emporium. She said she found the prices and selection better than at the Company store." He couldn't look at her, he was so embarrassed, and Paige suddenly had the urge to giggle.
These people made inhibition into a whole new science. She stifled her laughter and thanked William again. She was grateful and also touched by his generosity. "Sit down for a minute." She gestured at the high-backed chair by the window.
"Oh, my, no, thank you, Miss—umm, Miss Paige." His eyes darted from side to side, never quite meeting her gaze. "I must go. Mrs. Leiberman would be scandalized at my being in your room. It's against the rules, you know." He peered around the corner of the door as if he expected Lulu to leap out at him with a Bible in her hand and vengeance in her eye, and finding the coast clear, he scuttled off down the hallway.
Mystified by his actions, Paige closed the door behind him and then realized that he must have been looking at her underwear, draped in plain view across the end of the bed.
She did giggle then. Poor, dear William.
Still laughing, she opened one of the boxes, taking out a cotton dress, a voluminous green affair with long sleeves, a high neck, a lot of lace, and what could only be a bustle.
Paige groaned and turned the box upside down. A mound of similar garments spilled out. Paige looked them over, trying not to be horrified at the cumbersome long skirts, the awkward rows of endless buttons up the back of the dresses and the front of the blouses. It was all too obvious zippers hadn't been invented yet.
The clothes were all clean and in good repair: dark skirts, fussy white blouses, several gingham dresses, an elaborate black silk dress, a stack of slips—petticoats, Paige corrected, fingering the delicate embroidery on one of the voluminous items. There was a heavy winter coat, several pairs of sturdy high-laced boots, and a daintier pair of black high-heeled shoes. Paige looked at the shoes and shook her head. Women's feet must have grown much bigger in a hundred years, or else Letitia Sweeney had awfully tiny feet for the rest of her.
There was a pervasive odor of mothballs about everything, but at least she had a wardrobe again.
In the second box, there was even a nightgown, plainer than the elaborate one Dr. Baldwin had given her, but serviceable all the same. There was also a pretty white satin wrapper to go over it, and with a pang, she thought of Letitia Sweeney, wearing these for her William. She hoped he'd overcome his reticence enough to strip them off a blushing Letitia at least once or twice.
Filled with gratitude, Paige took off Clara's skirt and blouse, grungy and smelling of sweat, and tried on some of her new secondhand clothes.
They fit pretty well, but God, how did women stand these confining sleeves, these high necks, these long skirts? She shuddered. She'd give anything for a pair of her well worn Levi's and a T-shirt right about now.
Paige tugged on the coolest of the collection, a blue gingham dress that made her feel like an actress in a western movie, brushed her hair with the doctor's horse hair bristled brush, and shoved her feet into her track shoes.
Then she grabbed her wet underwear and headed down the stairs and out of the house to look first for a clothesline and then for Miss Rose Rafferty's Ladies' Emporium.
Those first few days were pure culture shock for Paige, and she struggled through them in a fog of disbelief and denial and incredulity and occasionally helpless laughter.
Inconceivable as it was for Paige to accept, in 1883 Queen Victoria was still the reigning monarch of Great Britain and Ireland, and even here in a small town in the middle of the vast Canadian prairies, the Victorian influence was strong. It seemed to Paige that the prudish and fussy women's clothing styles reflected a general attitude that put appearances above what she considered to be basic values and human comfort.
There was the whole matter of underwear, for instance.
That very first afternoon, she'd gotten a thorough tongue lashing from Lulu Leiberman for something as innocent as pinning her bra and panties on the clothesline in the backyard. The landlady had been waiting for Paige when she came back from shopping. Paige's scanty ivory lace trimmed bra and matching bikini panties dangled from Lulu's fingers as though they were contaminated.
"Miss Randolph, I shouldn't have to remind you that a lady never, ever hangs her unmentionables on the clothesline in plain view of the neighborhood. And these... these ..." Lulu Leiberman sputtered and waved the garments at Paige and rolled her blue eyes as though words failed to convey just how obscene she found them.
After the harrowing hour she'd just spent learning what constituted underwear in this era, Paige did have some faint idea why Lulu would loo
k askance at her bra and panty set.
At the emporium, in utter desperation, she'd had to buy a pair of the ridiculous pantaloons of the day, along with a garment that looked like a camisole—the nearest thing Rose Rafferty had to a bra. It seemed bras hadn't been invented yet.
Paige's bare ankles and uncorseted figure horrified the prim, elderly Rose Rafferty, so Paige had reluctantly added a pair of ribbed black stockings that hooked to an elaborate system of garters, which in turn attached to the camisole. She rejected a corset despite the shocked disapproval of Rose and the other two elderly female clerks.
Just looking at the horrid stockings made her hot and itchy, but the alternative—which she now understood to be instant classification as a whore by everyone she met—was even less desirable. The only good news was that all her purchases came to just two dollars and forty-three cents.
As each day passed, her hopes of somehow miraculously flipping back to her own era seemed less and less probable, and Paige had to face the prospect of staying where she was.
That brought her face to face with the whole problem of money.
She'd have to find a way of earning her living, and soon. Day followed day, and she was soon going to have to pay Mrs. Leiberman for another week's lodging.
Through talking to the other boarders, Paige determined that there wasn't any doctor in Battleford; the town relied on Dr. Baldwin, up at the fort.
Just walking around town showed her that a high percentage of the female population was pregnant, so surely there was a need for a highly trained obstetrician in the area.
There were a few little problems with setting up an office, however.
The first was that she had no way of proving she was a doctor. Her accreditation was with a university that wasn't in existence yet.
Now and Forever: Time Travel Romance Superbundle Page 8