Speak Easy, Speak Love

by McKelle George

Of course. Hero, not Benedick, was her relation in this place. “Come in,” Beatrice called, annoyed at herself.

  “Oh, good.” Hero slipped around the door, a silk robe tied around her middle. “I was hoping you wouldn’t be in bed yet.”

  Beatrice was used to sharing a room. At Miss Nightingale’s she’d boarded with a girl from Buffalo named Charlotte, who was fond of saying things like “Don’t you think it would be exciting to be poor sometimes, Miss Clark? Poor and free, like the people in books!” Her roommate at St. Mary’s, an Irish girl, had been less imbecilic but often passed the night chewing a kidskin glove slowly to shreds.

  Having Hero in the space where she slept felt different, perhaps because Beatrice wanted Hero to like her. Or maybe because for the first time the added presence seemed to take up half the room. Either way, a foreign sensation of shyness overtook Beatrice.

  “I just wanted to check on you,” said Hero. She laced her hands together. “Make sure you were settling in all right. You had quite the day.”

  “I feel fine, thank you.”

  “I had hoped to ease you in to the idea a little more slowly.” Hero’s ice-blue eyes widened; she’d washed off the makeup she’d worn earlier in the day, but she was no less stunning. The kind of face to launch a thousand ships, that sort of thing. “But, surprise! Papa and I run a speakeasy.” Her gaze turned wary. “What do you think?”

  “I think I’m wondering where it is?”

  “In the basement. The Masquerade tomorrow is always our first big bash of the summer. Of course I’d love for you to come, but if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed after today, I completely understand.”

  Beatrice was not overwhelmed; in fact a part of her was glad the day hadn’t given her much chance to pause and think: Now what now what now what?

  Hero watched her as if she were a hand grenade about to detonate.

  “You’re not just worried about my feelings, I guess,” said Beatrice.

  “Well, no.” A zinger of a chagrined smile slipped through. “You’ve got to know Mama’s speakeasy means the world to me. But you are family. I found this a few days before you came. Want to see?” She passed a feather-edged photograph over Beatrice’s shoulder.

  Beatrice brought it down to her lap. “Oh,” she breathed.

  There was Beatrice’s mother, hands on her five-year-old daughter’s shoulders, beside a laughing Aunt Anna, holding Hero on her hip. Their figures were slightly blurred, and Beatrice remembered that it was because they hadn’t been able to hold properly still. The photographer had been annoyed at first, then charmed when Aunt Anna winked and thanked him for his patience. Coney Island, wasn’t it? Yes, little Beatrice gripped a bag of kettle corn in her tiny fist. Hero’s hair was pinned up with bows.

  Beatrice’s mother, Ursula Stahr at the time (she dutifully and legally changed both their names to Clark the same day of her quiet wedding), smiled in an almost bewildered way. An impossibly gentle woman, prone to sickness and nerves, who blossomed under the adoration of her first husband and shrank under the strictness of the second.

  Next to Anna (who met her own husband by accidentally clocking him in the face with a women’s rights poster), Ursula appeared like the dour face of reality. The sort of woman to be sorry she’d given birth to the daughter in front of her because it meant a life of humiliation and hardship.

  Yet that same woman had left all her worldly possessions to her daughter’s dream of becoming a doctor. Somewhere, not visible through a photograph, was a thread of steel under the pale skin.

  Beatrice set the photograph down. Hero knelt, propped her elbow on the vanity top, and leaned one of her pillowy cheeks on her curled fist. “Funny, isn’t it? I don’t even remember that day.”

  Beatrice asked, “How did Aunt Anna die?”

  “Influenza.”

  Beatrice knew that expression. The scarred look of someone who’d watched a life disappear from the confines of a bed. The helplessness of it. Wanting more time and wanting, in your exhaustion, for it to end.

  The difference was that for Hero it was still fresh.

  “The thing is, you’re not at all what I was expecting.” Hero traced a finger between the black-and-white faces of their five-year-old selves. “I was nervous. About how you’d like it here. About how you’d like me. I wanted—well, I know we don’t know each other well. But I could do with a friend. That’s all.” She glanced up, the same shyness in her eyes that Beatrice felt.

  “I could do with a friend, too,” Beatrice whispered.

  Hero broke out a smile that could melt glaciers.

  “And I don’t mind,” said Beatrice. “About the speakeasy, I mean. Your secret is safe with me.” She picked up the brush again. “Mr. Scott explained it a little.”

  “Yes, that stinker. I told him not to overwhelm you, and what does he do?”

  “He did try to go alone. I asked to come. To be fair.”

  “It worked out for him, I gather—here, let me.” Hero stood, grabbed the brush from Beatrice’s hand, and gathered a handful of messed curls.

  “Oh, don’t bother.” Beatrice grimaced at the first pull of the brush. “It’s no treat trying to get a brush through my hair, I assure you—”

  Hero smacked Beatrice’s reaching fingers with the brush’s end. “Don’t be silly. Anyway, it’s always nicer to have someone else brush your hair. Don’t you think?”

  Beatrice rubbed her stinging knuckles, said nothing.

  “Haven’t you ever—” Hero shook her head. She brushed slowly, carefully, holding each section against her palm so it didn’t yank on Beatrice’s scalp. “Mama used to do it for me all the time. Just like this. Then we’d talk about boys. Like Ben Scott, for example . . .” Hero’s reflection raised an eyebrow at Beatrice, too casually.

  Beatrice’s own brow flattened.

  “It didn’t even occur to me that you might end up liking each other,” Hero said, undeterred. “Ben has notoriously refused every single girl I nudge in his direction. But it would be perfect. If you and Ben got married, then he’d be actual family.”

  Before Beatrice could detail for Hero the multiple ways in which this would be disastrous, someone else knocked at her door. “Who is it?” Hero called gaily.

  The girl from earlier, the one who said Beatrice was halfway to crazy, stuck her head into the room. “Hey there,” she said to Hero. “Your room was empty. Look what Tommy brought me back.” She held up a handful of cone-shaped, tinfoiled candies.

  “Kisses! Get in here and share. Did you get properly introduced before? This is Margaret Hughes, Beatrice. She sings for us; one of our boarders, like Prince. What do you think of Beatrice and Ben as a couple, Mags?”

  “I think Ben is a fine specimen of manhood, as judged by the expert eye of yours truly. But he’s too in love with his typewriter.” The words rolled around the chocolate sucked into Maggie’s cheek. She dropped stomach first onto Beatrice’s bed without a hint of self-consciousness. She stretched out her arm, and Hero grabbed a few of the chocolates and handed one to Beatrice.

  “You’ve tried these, haven’t you?”

  Beatrice shook her head, unwrapped the tinfoil, and hesitantly set the chocolate on her tongue. It melted smoothly, sweetly.

  “Tell Tommy thanks for us,” said Hero. “When are you going to throw that poor boy a bone, Mags?”

  “I never asked for the chocolates. He brings them of his own doing.” Maggie considered one of the Kisses, then sighed. “It would make things easier. But I think I already love someone else, so it doesn’t matter.”

  Hero’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  Hero sniffed. “Nobody appreciates my expertise anymore.”

  “I’m sure Ben’s a perfectly nice boy.” Beatrice hedged. “And I can see he’s a good friend of yours. But honestly, I find him a little . . . slippery?” Was that the word?

  “He’s got a silver tongue,” Maggie agreed, nodding.

  “But h
e’s not dishonest,” Hero insisted. “Maybe hard to explain? I say a little mystery in a person is like a nice dash of salt.”

  Beatrice said, “Only if I’m stranded in the desert and no other form of nutrition is available.”

  Hero sighed. “That’s exactly the sort of thing he would say, too,” which made Maggie laugh. Neither seemed too serious about pursuing the match, and Beatrice relaxed.

  Relaxed, and this time didn’t feel as if something bad might catch up to her.

  “I heard you and he got into a tangle with the Minskys on the East River,” Maggie said.

  Hero paused in her brushing to shoot Maggie a look black enough to wither flowers. “Of all the nerve. Over Sage’s moonshine. The next time I see Conrade I’m going to throttle him with that stupid striped necktie he’s taken to wearing.”

  “If he shows his face again after Beatrice chased him off with a shotgun.” Maggie grinned wildly.

  Hero snorted. “Maybe I’ll tell them we brought Beatrice on as the new muscle, and they’ll all be too scared to try again.” Hero had gotten through every tangle at last, and though Beatrice’s hair was a poofed cloud, it was soft and allowed the long, continuous strokes of the brush without complaint.

  They didn’t care, Beatrice realized.

  They didn’t care that she fixed cars with sap or shot rifles or arrived weighed down with a trunk of medical supplies, science equipment, and a farfetched dream. In fact they seemed to like her for it. Surely, in the years since her mother had died, someone at some point had liked her for the same reasons, but as a sudden tremor started in her shoulders, she found she couldn’t recall any.

  In the quiet Hero started humming “My Blue Heaven.”

  Then Maggie sang, joining her smoky voice with Hero’s sweet hum:

  “You’ll see a smiling face,

  a fireplace,

  a cozy room,

  a little nest

  that’s nestled where

  the roses bloom.”

  Perhaps it was Maggie’s voice, husky and sure, perhaps the song, which lifted a lifetime of yearning and loneliness out of Beatrice to hang vulnerable in the air. Perhaps the comfort of having her hair brushed, with the taste of chocolate in her mouth, or the reminder of her mother, or just feeling safe and accepted for the first time in years, but—

  “We’re happy in my blue heaven . . .”

  With no warning whatsoever, her eyes welled up, and she . . .

  Cried.

  She ducked her head and cried as if she did it all the time, instead of almost never, which was the truth.

  “Oh, honey.” Hero kissed her cheek and handed her a handkerchief. “Maggie’s singing does it to me, too.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I WOULD MY HORSE HAD THE SPEED OF YOUR TONGUE

  Benedick dreamed that Anna was alive.

  He dreamed he’d gone back to Manhattan, but he was a writer, and Anna was married to his father, and they were all toasting the success of his first novel.

  The sheer unlikelihood of this scenario, outside of the feverish quality of exhausted sleep, was enough to pull him awake breathless and disoriented. For a hazy second his room at Stony Creek and his room at his father’s Park Avenue apartment swam together, and where he was or who he was remained a mystery, until he was hearing not snores nor the rumble of city taxis, but nothing.

  Sweet nothing but the rustle of cherry blossoms and a room still dark, but not so dark that dawn wasn’t far behind. The room was small and unheated and undecorated, with a slanted roof and piles of books and clothes and other assorted belongings he’d been depositing for years like a nesting bird. It felt like home.

  He sat up. Searching for the cot he used as a bed had seemed too much trouble last night, so he’d dropped like a stone on the hideous fat sofa upholstered in red velvet, which he loved and everyone else hated.

  He’d eaten something last night, he couldn’t remember what, because Beatrice had made him do it, staring until he’d chewed and swallowed a portion she deemed commendable.

  His nose wrinkled, and he slumped back. It was too early to be reminded about Beatrice Clark. With a deliberate mental turn away from her, he rose to wash and dress. A quick look at his pocket watch reminded him only that it had stopped working after a dunk in Mosquito Cove.

  Never mind.

  The sun hadn’t even risen. He had several hours before anyone else would be up and preparations for the Masquerade would begin. Off in Brooklyn, dozens of Stony Creek Academy boys would graduate, and he wouldn’t be among them.

  He lit a lamp—the electric wiring didn’t reach to the attic, another thing he loved—and lifted Isabella out of her case. The Remington typewriter fit just so on his desk, next to a beat-up dictionary and a globe worn through at the equator.

  After a loving pat for Isabella, he went to the washroom, taking his time, then boiled water in the kitchen for coffee, the quality of which had taken a serious downturn once business got slow, but yes, even that warranted Benedick’s affection.

  He was practically whistling until he set the thirty-four pages of his novel on the desk and rolled a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. He’d written other stories, of course, but this was his first serious attempt. Now was the time, freedom at last, et cetera, et cetera. He ignored the panic creeping up his shoulders. He knew from experience that the moment he began typing, any ideas would somehow, in the journey from thought to fingertip, degenerate entirely.

  He stood, practically leaped, to his feet and paced. Just to get the juices flowing. Maybe he’d jot down some ideas first. Anything that didn’t have to sound smart and important and feed him for the rest of his life.

  Naturally what came to mind was the madness of yesterday and, by ratio of presence, Beatrice Clark.

  He was not sure he liked her, but it wasn’t that he disliked her either. Rather, he considered himself lucky to have stepped in the path of a speeding train and gotten out unscathed. How was it that a girl could be so irritating that instead of saying, My God, you were impressive back there, which he did think—or had thought in the thick of things—he instead had to use all his gentleman’s training not to strangle her?

  She was like . . . weather maybe? Instead of a person?

  Oh, that was good.

  He dug out a paper and scribbled it down.

  One could admire a bolt of lightning, after all, but from a distance. One didn’t want to touch it.

  All right, but she couldn’t be both, a speeding train and a bolt of lightning. Using the metaphors together seemed a little heavy-handed. He’d come back to it. Something, something, about being a spectacle, but not, such as it were, beautiful in the traditional sense.

  He was in the swing of his thoughts—literally, swift strides back and forth through the very short space of his room—when something banged on his floor. He stopped, looking down.

  Thump, thump.

  There it was again. Someone was definitely knocking on the ceiling under the attic, but nobody lived in that room. Nobody—

  Oh, no.

  He knelt and rapped his fist on his wood floor two times.

  A long pause.

  He’d nearly decided that was that before the knocks came again, this time with a pattern. Short taps and long taps. “Is that Morse code?” he wondered out loud, which settled the issue nicely. Who else would happen to know Morse code?

  Well, he knew a bit, too, thank you very much.

  Tap-tap-tap. Taaap-taaap-taaap. Tap-tap-tap.

  No answer.

  It occurred to him, too late, that he ought to have thought through the repercussions of the message he sent, but a heartbeat later there was a sound like a rushing wind, and in blew Beatrice at fifty miles an hour under her own steam.

  Which, honestly, seemed only a mild exaggeration.

  Her hair certainly looked as though it had just experienced high speeds.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said.

  Her face went all exasperated, an expres
sion he rather enjoyed. “Are you aware that SOS is a distress signal, you intolerable lunatic?”

  “I am not a lunatic. You knocked on my floor. Uninvited, I’ll add.”

  “Because you were pacing around! At four-thirty in the morning, I’ll add.”

  “I don’t suppose you possess among your character strengths the ability to ignore something that bothers you?”

  “No,” she said, without pausing to think about it. “While I’m up here, I may as well check your condition.”

  “Absolutely not. Put that hand back where it belongs, thank you— Ow.” He winced as she took hold of his ear and effectively turned his face around. He glared at her, for all the good it did him.

  “The eyes and the mouth are the best judge for extended dehydration,” she said, pulling at his lower eyelid, her other hand holding his chin. She smelled like cotton and some sort of metalish scent, like iron or oil. “To tell the truth, you look just fine, Mr. Scott. That’s quite the rebound. I’m impressed.”

  She released him, and he rubbed where her fingers had been. He pushed himself to his feet. “Look, I’m sorry if I woke you, but you can—”

  “Oh, you didn’t.” Her big eyes took in his room with rapt fascination. She was barefoot, he noticed, arching up on her toes to see over stacks of books and as unconcerned about her nightshirt and dressing gown as she’d been about his undergarments yesterday. “I was already awake. I don’t sleep much. . . .”

  “There’s your trouble in a nutshell.”

  “Is this where you stay? I admit it’s shabbier than I would have imagined, but also rather quaint— Oh! What a spiffy typewriter.” She leaned over Isabella, finger extended to touch one of the keys. Benedick lurched forward and snatched her wrist.

  “Don’t touch,” he said.

  She blinked at him. Whatever was on his face, she unexpectedly nodded and backed off. “All right. I won’t. It’s a nice one, though.”

  “Anna gave it to me as a Christmas present.” Her last Christmas, before she’d died.

  “Really? Say—” She squinted, like the know-it-all she was. “You’re a writer, is that it?”

  She made it sound cute. His voice grew a sharp end or two, but he answered, “I’ve been known to fence with the quill, yes.”