The Fire Rose em-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  Perhaps they take me for a suffragette relation, or one who has a religious mania and has given all her worldly goods to Billy Sunday. No matter. The respect they accorded to Professor Cathcart extended even to such peculiar females as he chose to bring with him; service was prompt and polite, and the headwaiter treated her with the deference that might be accorded to one who wore a gown by Worth, rather than one from the cheaper pages of Sears and Roebuck.

  She had once worn fine gowns not by Worth, perhaps, but by one of the better Chicago seamstresses. That had been before her father's run of bad luck with his investments, and she had chosen to economize on her gowns as well as in other household matters. It had not mattered to her teachers and fellow students; they probably would not have noticed unless she had donned the chiton and stola of an ancient Greek maiden, and perhaps not even then. Her economies had gone unremarked, which had saved her pride. Since another of her economies was to abjure eating out, she was not forced to parade the slender state of their purses in public.

  The Bergdorf was comfortably warm, lit softly with candles and a few well-placed gaslights. The only sounds were those of conversation and the clink of silver on china. The Professor was one who gave a gourmet meal all its due reverence, so they ate in silence. Rosalind was not loath to do so either; the peculiar sour-savory tang of the sauerbraten awoke a hunger of intensity she had not realized was possible, and although she seldom drank, she joined the Professor in a lady sized stein of the Bergdorf's excellent beer. The food vanished from her plate so quickly she might have conjured it away, and the attentive blond-haired, blue-eyed waiter brought her a second serving without being asked.

  "Vielen dank," she said to him, surprising a smile from him. He winked at her, and hurried to answer the summons from another table.

  She devoured her second helping with a thoroughness that would have embarrassed her a month ago. Now her capacity for being embarrassed had been exhausted, and her pride flattened like a sheet of vellum in a press.

  The waiter returned at the Professor's signal, and cleared away the plates as the Professor ordered Black Forest torte for both of them. Rosalind did not even make a token protest; it might be a long time before she ever ate like this again. Her torte was long gone before the Professor had finished his, and she settled back in her chair with a sigh of melancholy mixed with content.

  I must think of some way to earn my way. She had a vague idea that she might take a position as a governess somewhere, or even as a schoolteacher in some Western state. Any thought of achieving a Ph.D. in the classics and medieval literature was out of the question now, of course. She only hoped that she could convince someone that her unconventional education had made her fit to teach the "Three Rs."

  The waiter arrived to clean off the dessert plates, and with him came coffee. Professor Cathcart settled back in his chair as she sugared and creamed hers liberally, cradling his cup in both hands.

  "You must forgive your old friend and teacher his bluntness, but how did you come to such a pass?" he asked. "I had not thought your father to be the improvident sort."

  She shook her head, bitterly. "You may lay the cause of our loss at Neville Tree's door," she replied, with bitterness not even the savor of her dessert could remove from her mouth. The Professor had the grace to blush, then, for it was he who had introduced that scion of prominent politicians to the elder Hawkins.

  He said nothing more, for indeed, there was no more to be said. For all of Neville Tree's illustrious parentage, the man was no better than a common sharpster. He had come looking for investors in his bank, and he got many, including Professor Hawkins; he then ran the bank into the ground with his poor management-all the while drawing a princely salary-leaving investors and depositors alike holding nothing but air and empty promises. Not content with that, he concocted another scheme, with many promises that he would get the money back and more-he would go and find oil and make them all rich. Throwing good money after bad, Professor Hawkins and others had fallen for his plausible tale a second time, and once again found themselves with shares of useless stock in a company that had drilled for oil where no geologist would ever anticipate finding any. Presumably he had taken himself to another state with more schemes designed mainly to allow him to draw a handsome wage at the expense of others.

  Under the table, Rosalind's hand clenched on her napkin. When her father had told her of the loss of all of their savings and more, she had not had the heart to reproach him. "I only wanted to give you what you should have had, Rose," he had said plaintively...

  "But the History Department Cathcart began again."

  "You know that none of them have ever approved of my I 'unwomanly' interests," she retorted sourly. "Doubtless, if they knew, they would be pleased enough, and advise me to go and get married like a proper female."

  As if any young man had ever, or would ever look twice at me. Plain, too clever by half, and with the curse of always saying what I think. That latter habit had gained her no friends among her fellow students, who could look elsewhere for romantic interests. Any man at the University can find himself a nice, stupid girl with good looks or money who will assure him he is the cleverest creature on earth. Why should he take one with neither who will challenge him to prove he is her equal?

  "Your mother's people-" Cathcart ventured.

  He knew nothing about her parents' relationship with her maternal grandparents-Professor Hawkins had been careful to keep that unsavory situation very private. It was natural for Cathcart to bring them up, but only the fact that she had already borne with so much already made it possible for her to bear this as well. "They appeared the day of the funeral," she said. I will not call those-creatures-my grandmother and grandfather. "They insulted my father, slandered my mother, and told me that if I admitted some specious sort of guilt, agreed to be a good and obedient girl, and gave up my nonsense about a University degree, they might consider permitting me to take up some position within their household. I assume they meant for me to come be a drudge to Uncle Ingmar, and be grateful to them for the opportunity."

  Cathcart's expression grew horrified. "Even when he was still sane, Ingmar Ivorsson was not fit company for a female, and certainly is not to be left alone with one!" he blurted.

  She only nodded. "I told them what I thought of them, what Mother had thought of them, and what they could do with Uncle Ingmar, and showed them the door." That might have been what brought Mr. Grumwelt down upon my head with such uncanny swiftness. They probably went off and alerted every one of Papa's creditors. Did they expect me to come running to them as soon as the vultures arrived, begging forgiveness?

  Cathcart gave her the ghost of a smile. "So you have burned all your bridges, then. That was brave of you. Not necessarily wise, but-"

  "Professor, that bridge is one I would not cross under any circumstances. I had rather take Charon's boat than the Ivorssons' offer." She set her chin resolutely, but could not help a shudder of fear. Charon's boat ... it could come to that. She had contemplated suicide that very night, alone with her despair in the echoing house. She had more than enough laudanum in her valise to suffice....

  But now the Professor's expression turned-calculating? Definitely! She had seen him look precisely like this when he was about to prove some obscure point, or had found a new research trail. She felt interest stirring in her, a feeling she had not experienced in days.

  "I wanted to ascertain whether or not you had any other prospects," he said, quietly, but still with that calculating look in his eyes. "I have had a-well, a rather peculiar communication from a man in the West. It is so peculiar that I would not have advised that you consider it, unless you had no other recourse."

  Now her interest was surely piqued. "Professor, what on earth are you hinting at?" she asked, sitting up a little straighter.

  He reached into his coat pocket. "Here," he said, handing her a thick, cream-colored envelope. "Read this for yourself."

  Obeying, she opened the envelo
pe and set aside the thick railway ticket, and read the single sheet of thick vellum contained therein with growing perplexity. "This-this is certainly strange," she said, after a moment, folding the sheet and returning it to its paper prison. "Very strange." She slipped the railway ticket to San Francisco in beside it.

  Cathcart nodded. "I've had the man looked into, and from what I can find out, he's genuine enough. He's something of a rail baron on the West Coast and lives outside of San Francisco. The ticket is genuine; I telegraphed to his office to be sure that the letter had truly come from him, and the offer is genuine also. He's said to be as rich as Croesus and as reclusive as a stylite, and that's all anyone knows of him. Other than the fact that he has phenomenal luck."

  "He might have been describing me, precisely," Rose said aloud, feeling again that little thrill of apprehension, as if she was about to cross a threshold into something from which there would be no escape and no return.

  "That is what was so peculiar, that and the offer itself." Cathcart flushed. "I thought of all manner of other possibilities; one does, after all-"

  "Of course," she said vaguely. "White slavery, opium dens-" She noticed then that Cathcart's color had deepened to a dark scarlet with embarrassment, and giggled; she could not help herself. "Really, Professor! Did you think I was that sheltered? After all, it was you who let me read the unexpurgated Ovid, and Sappho's poems, and-"

  She stopped, for fear that the Professor would have a stroke there and then. It never failed to amaze her that the scholars about her could discuss the hetairai of the Greeks, Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, and the loves of the girls on the Isle of Lesbos, and then blush with shame when one even mentioned the existence of certain establishments not more than a dozen blocks from the University.

  "Don't decide at once," he urged her, swiftly changing the subject. "I'll take you to Mrs. Abernathy's boarding house; rest and think for a few days. This should not be an act of impulse."

  "Of course not," she replied-

  But she already felt the heavy, cold hand of Fate upon her sleeve. She would go to this man, this Jason Cameron. She would take his job.

  After all, she had no choice.

  Rose woke with a shock, startled out of disturbing dreams by sounds she did not recognize. For a moment, as she glanced around, she panicked with disorientation, her heart racing with fear as she groped for her glasses. This was not her room! Nothing was where it should be-why was that rectangle of fight at the foot of her bed, and not off to the side-and why was there only one, not two? Why were the walls white, and what was that huge, looming object at her left?

  And why weren't her glasses on the stand beside the bed, where they should be?

  Then, as the bed beneath her creaked in a way that her bed never had, the steadying knowledge of where she was and why she was here came flooding back.

  Nothing was where it should be, because she was not at home, and never would see her room again. She was in a narrow, iron-framed bed in Mrs. Abernathy's boarding house for respectable young ladies.

  Rose had met a few of them last night, and had immediately been reassured as to the solidity of this establishment. Several of the ladies were nurses; one worked at the Hull House with the indigent. Another was a typist for Professor Cathcart at the University. Her own shabby-genteel clothing fit in perfectly here, giving her no cause for embarrassment.

  Mrs. Abernathy was a stolid woman who had not been at all disturbed when they appeared on her doorstep after dark. She had taken in Professor Cathcart's whispered explanation and the money he pressed into her hand with a nod, and had sent Rose to this room on the second floor, just off the common parlor. Her trunk was still downstairs in a storage closet, but she hardly needed what was in it. She'd brought up her carpetbag and valise herself, and had attempted to be sociable with some of the other boarders, but fatigue and strain had taken their toll, and she had soon sought the room and the bed.

  She stopped groping for her glasses, preferring the vague shapes of furniture and windows to the stark reality of this sad little room. She closed her eyes again, and lay quietly, listening to the sounds that had awakened her. Down below, someone, presumably Mrs. Abernathy, was cooking breakfast; from the scents that reached her, it was oatmeal porridge and strong coffee, cheap and filling. Other girls in tiny rooms on either side of her were moving about. By the very faint light, it could not be much past dawn-but these young women were working girls, and their day began at dawn and ended long after sunset, every day except Sunday.

  That was when the full impact of her situation hit home. Within the week, she would join them. She had not realized just how privileged her life had been, even with all the economies she and her father had practiced these last several years. She had always been something of a night-owl, preferring to study in the late hours when she would be undisturbed; her classes had always been scheduled in the afternoons, allowing her to enjoy leisurely mornings. Now she would obey someone else's schedule, whether or not it happened to suit her.

  Everything was changed; her life, as she had known it, was over. It lay buried with her father.

  The rest of her life stretched before her, devoid of all the things that she cared for-the joys of scholarship, the thrill of academic pursuit, the intellectual companionship of fellow scholars. She would be a servant in someone else's house, or a hireling in someone's employ, subject to their will, their whims. Very likely she would never again have access to a resource like the University Library. Her life, which had been defined by books, would now be defined by her position below the salt.

  Professor Cathcart had insisted that at she think Cameron's offer over carefully before deciding, but her options were narrower than he thought; the choices were two, really. Take Jason Cameron's job (or search for another like it) and become a servant in the household of a wealthy, and probably autocratic man-or take a position teaching in a public school.

  The latter actually offered fewer opportunities. It was unlikely that she would find such a public school position in Chicago; there were many aspiring teachers, and few jobs for them. She would have to seek employment out in the country, perhaps even in the scarcely-settled West or the backward South, where she would be an alien and an outsider.

  In either case, as a private tutor or as a teacher, she would be a servant, for as a schoolteacher she must present a perfectly respectable front at all times, attending the proper church, saying the proper things, so as to be completely beyond reproach. Neither a schoolteacher nor a child's private tutor could even hint that she had read the uncensored Ovid. Neither would dare to have an original thought, or dare to contradict the men around her. The days of her freedom of thought, action and speech were over.

  She had not wept since the funeral; she had remained dry-eyed before the Ivorssons, before Mr. Grumwelt, before his greedy minions. She had stood dry-eyed for days, but now something broke within her at the realization of how much a prisoner of society she had become overnight.

  Her eyes burned, her throat closed, and she bit her knuckle trying to hold back the tears. She was unsuccessful, and quickly turned her face into the pillow, sobbing, smothering her weeping with the coarse linen so that no one would overhear her. How could any of the women here hope to understand her grief'? This prospect of life that she found intolerable was the same life that they had always led.

  One born to slavery finds nothing amiss with chains ....

  She curled up into a ball, forming herself around the pillow, as she cried uncontrollably. She had never believed that a heart could be "broken," but hers certainly felt that way now.

  Oh Papa-why did you have to die and leave me like this?

  Then came guilt for thinking such a terrible thing, which only made her weep the harder as she realized she would now face the rest of her life without his dear, if absentminded, presence. Finally, she could weep no more; she huddled around the soaked pillow, muscles and head aching, eyes swollen and burning, throat sore with holding back
her sobs, nose irritated and raw. Her physical discomfort did nothing to distract her from her sorrow.

  While she had cried out her grief, the noises to either side of her disappeared, leaving only the sounds of activity below-stairs. She did not feel that she could face anyone, and as for breakfast-the very notion made her ill.

  Evidently either no one had missed her or Professor Cathcart had indicated that she was to be alone, for no one came to disturb her. Despair held her in that hard, narrow bed in invisible bonds; she could not even muster the strength to reach for her glasses. Once again, the presence of the laudanum in her valise beckoned temptingly. She need only drink down the entire bottle, and all her troubles would end in a sleep with no waking.