“Like a train ran me over,” said Prince.
“Sounds about right. The vodka you fell asleep to certainly didn’t help.” Beatrice, efficient and competent and mesmerizing to watch, checked Prince’s bandage. Prince’s skin was bruised, the slash of skin where the bullet had nicked him enflamed, but Beatrice declared it uninfected. “No heavy lifting or cartwheels, and you’ll be just fine. Take these.” She set a few aspirin and a glass of water on the bedside table.
“Thanks,” said Prince. He held the glass of water but didn’t drink it. Finally he asked, “Hero doesn’t know?”
“As per your orders, she does not. Last I saw, she was downstairs making calls about her party.”
Prince nodded and knocked back all the aspirin at once.
Benedick yawned. He tried not to, and tried harder still to hide it when it became inevitable, but Beatrice sighed, not looking at him, book in her lap. “You shouldn’t have slept on the floor.”
They sat side by side on the porch, nestled into a wicker love seat, and the afternoon sun warmed their shaded spot. Her shoulder pressed lightly to his. Her presence next to him felt like the quiet hum of an engine. “I didn’t sleep on the floor,” Benedick murmured. Beatrice flicked her eyes sideways at him. “I was awake most of the time.”
“Semantics, Scott,” she said, just before the front door opened.
“Well! Mr. Scott, Miss Clark. You two have a lovely weekend, you hear?” Mr. Hansen, also known as the Prohibition agent Dogberry, tipped his hat at them on his way down the porch. He and Verges had loaded their bags into the Oldsmobile. Benedick and Beatrice were stationed in their current spot to make good and sure they left.
“Thank you,” said Beatrice. “And yours as well.”
“Got any humdinger plans?” Dogberry grinned. He set his foot on the porch step and rested his hands on the considerable swell of his belly.
“I wouldn’t call them humdinger,” said Beatrice. “I’ll be studying.”
“Oho! No parties for you?”
“Jazz gives me a headache. To say nothing of the demon liquor.” Her voice was prim as a widow’s collar; her lips were a thin line. Benedick nearly believed her.
“Just so.” Dogberry nodded solemnly. He glanced at the book in her lap. “You in school then, Miss Clark? Last I checked, it was summer.”
“I’m soon to medical college, I hope.”
“Nurse?”
“Doctor,” Beatrice corrected him, her tone that of a cumulonimbus on the horizon.
“You kids!” Dogberry huffed. “Full of spit and fire. Isn’t that right, Mr. Scott? Out here to save the world with a novel!”
Benedick stiffened. He had not, to his recollection, told the disguised agents he was a writer. “Why not?” he asked. “A person ought to accomplish something in his life.”
“There are worse things, you know. Don’t put so much weight in a job.” Dogberry suddenly looked a lot more like Dogberry than like Mr. Hansen. His gaze was penetrating, and for the first time Benedick wondered if it wasn’t strictly the speakeasy he was after. “You could fail as a human being. Want to know what I think is the greatest thing a person can be? Kind. I put kindness before anything else!” He puffed out his chest, waiting, and at last Beatrice succumbed to the twinkle in his eye.
She smiled back. Benedick did not feel the same urge.
“More than a good wit, I’m guessing?” asked Benedick.
“Oh, gosh, no, smarts is one of the worst! You can be a tip-top person without brains, absolutely top-shelf. Isn’t that right, Smith?”
“What ho!” Verges called from the car.
“You see.” Dogberry touched the brim of his hat a final time. “Take care, Miss Clark. Mr. Scott. And remember, a place is just a place. A job is a job. Any can go at any time. Better to be a good person.”
“Thank you,” said Benedick. “I’ll remember that when I’m homeless with a clean conscience.”
CHAPTER 25
OUR OWN HANDS AGAINST OUR HEARTS
The same Christmas Anna had given Benedick his typewriter, she had gifted Maggie her own electric Victrola. Her father would have swooned, which was partly why Maggie had never told him. Anna had meant it with love, but it was still a reminder of the advantages of living with an affluent white couple. Before money had gotten tight, Maggie had spent any extra she earned on new records. She put on “Creole Love Call,” performed by Adelaide Hall and the Duke Ellington band, recorded just this year. John had given it to her, making out like he’d picked it up in a haymarket instead of its being one of the hottest jazz standards this year.
Maggie sang along in her room, at half voice, swaying and searching for the bass chords, practicing for her audition tomorrow night. Just when she thought she’d found her rhythm, nerves would catch her, and she’d lose it.
After half a dozen failed run-throughs, Maggie lifted the needle, rubbing her brow in defeat. It was past dark; she ought to call it a night and get some sleep.
But if she was honest, the nerves weren’t only over the audition. The Cotton Club wasn’t the only thing on her mind.
John had let Borachio live, and his cousin hadn’t seemed the type to forgive a grudge easily. What if John got plugged up with bullet holes in some alley? She shook out her hands, chasing away the thought. She moved to set the needle back onto the record, but a scream came from the hallway.
Maggie opened her door, just in time to watch Hero, yanking her dressing gown around her middle, hop out of her bedroom.
“Somebody die?” Maggie asked.
“There’s a dead mouse in my bed.” Hero wriggled, as if she could still see it. Her mouth puckered into the beginnings of a pout. “Where is Prince?”
Maggie didn’t think they’d spoken hardly a word to each other since their fight yesterday morning. Hero still didn’t know he was sporting a bullet wound along his ribs.
Down the hall Beatrice opened her door in her nightgown and frowned. “What’s wrong? Who’s screaming?”
“Dead . . . mouse.” Hero pressed her hands together, wincing. Here come the eyelashes, Maggie thought as Hero began to flutter them. “If one of you wouldn’t mind just tossing it out the window and maybe taking my sheets off to be cleaned . . .”
Beatrice gave her a flat look. “I’m studying, Hero. My regents’ exam is on Monday.”
“Well, I’m practicing,” Maggie argued, “and my audition is tomorrow night.”
“I guess neither of us can help you then,” Beatrice said matter-of-factly. “Hero, you are perfectly capable of taking care of that mouse yourself. Maggie”—she raised an eyebrow in Maggie’s direction—“don’t give in to her.” Then she shut her door, as if it were nothing.
Maggie looked sidelong at Hero, whose full mouth immediately puffed. She came over and tugged on Maggie’s arm. “Mags, pleeeeeease. I hate mice more than anything in the world.”
“More than a party without gin?”
“What I really hate is a party without jazz. And guess what I’ve got tomorrow? On my birthday no less.”
“Aw, that’s not fair—”
Hero poked her in the ribs. “You owe me.”
Maggie sighed, lifting her eyes to the ceiling. “Fine. But after this, I don’t want to hear about it.”
Hero beamed with victory. “You go get that gig, and I won’t say a word.” She winked and hurried down the hall.
“Where you going?”
Hero glanced back over her shoulder. “Well, I can’t sleep in my bed tonight with contaminated sheets. So I guess I’ll have to sleep with Beatrice. That’ll teach her.” She swept into Beatrice’s room without knocking.
Shaking her head, Maggie went to locate the mouse. The little thing was buried at the bottom of the sheets, where it had probably gotten twisted up and panicked. These days Hey Nonny Nonny was crawling with all sorts of creatures, with the weather turning warm. They ought to patch up the holes and cracks that made it easy for them, but that was a ways down the long list of
things Hey Nonny Nonny needed.
Using a handkerchief, Maggie plucked the mouse up by the tail and tossed it out of Hero’s window into the dark. She stripped the sheets off and dumped them in a pile on the floor. As usual, Hero’s room was strung with dresses and jewelry and stockings, all of it fine. Her Masquerade costume was still draped across her vanity chair, and Maggie picked up the Cleopatra wig. No person’s hair would be so perfectly cut, not a strand out of place. It belonged under a spotlight, where the unreal sparkled.
Maggie draped one of Hero’s silk scarves across her shoulders and pretended she was wearing a long gown. “Hello. I’ll be singing ‘Downhearted Blues.’” Of course the wig wouldn’t stay even half on over her curls.
After plopping in front of Hero’s vanity mirror, Maggie attempted to wrestle her hair flat. Pins in her mouth, she sang through her teeth: “‘Gee, but it’s hard to love someone when that someone don’t love you. . . .’”
She nearly fell out of her chair when the door opened. There was John, as if her singing had conjured him. They stared at each other a moment; then Maggie spit out a pin. “What are you doing here?”
“I was looking for Hero,” John said. “But I heard you singing.”
“I was barely singing.”
“I can feel when you sing,” he replied, which might have been the most romantic thing he’d ever said to her. As if realizing this, he averted his eyes and shut the door behind him. “What’s wrong with your hair?”
“It’s Hero’s Cleopatra wig. I was just trying it on.”
“Because of those club owners? They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Maggie lifted a shoulder. “I know. I just thought I’d try a more . . . sophisticated approach.” She stood, tossing the scarf back and tilting her chin. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said softly, “for the first time ever in Carnegie Hall, Miss Margaret Hughes. The audience gently applauds.” She demonstrated. “What do you think?”
John pressed his lips together, his face unreadable. “Not your style.”
Maggie tossed the scarf off. “Oh, you mean something like . . . ‘Shake it like a bowl of jelly on a plate,’” she whisper-sang. She shimmied and pointed at him with a wink. His lips twitched. So close to a smile. She sashayed in, poked his unmoving bulk. “‘I may be late, but I’ll be up to date, when I can shimmy like my sister Kate.’”
He snatched her hand, and she fell silent. His eyes were warm, like a fire lit beneath the ice. “It’s crooked,” he murmured, reaching up to her hair. “Come here.” He pulled her closer to the window, where Hero’s lamp was. He tilted her face to the light. After plucking a few pins free, he righted the wig and secured it in place.
“You’re pretty handy with those.”
“Sometimes I help my mother with her hair.” John’s hands fell away. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, she realized, just sleeve garters and an open collar. Strangely casual, for him.
“Hero’s in Beatrice’s room,” Maggie said. “What were you going to talk to her about? You’re not armed, I hope.”
He hesitated. “I’m not now.”
Maggie glared at him.
“I may have talked to Claude first.”
“You said it wasn’t a good idea to threaten him.”
“I didn’t, exactly. I merely suggested a few things, and I was only going to suggest a few things to Hero.”
Maggie studied him. The breeze from the window lifted the gauze curtain, where it brushed her arm. “Prince would be furious if you told Hero he loved her.”
“Even better,” he said quietly. Maggie waited, searching his face. In his eyes, a hint of guilt, grief, and a rainy desire that made her toes curl a bit. She laid her palm on the lapels of his vest, the rhythm of his heart answering beneath it. How slow the beat was, as if he were taking ponderous leaps between living and dead. “We didn’t grow up together, you know. I knew about him, but we didn’t meet until I was nine, when I was sent to live with my mother, who hated me, but we agreed about Pedro, so that kept us from killing each other.” His head tipped up. “I am not a good person, Margaret, but if I can let Prince stay one, the world is a better place.”
Then he sucked out the rest of the space between them. His mouth pressed over hers.
He shuddered when her fingers found the nape of his neck, as if he were afraid. He transformed entirely in her arms, into a creature she barely recognized: slow and gentle and warm as the sun. It made her wonder if he’d ever done it before.
He broke away first, panting a little, his eyes two wells of deep and dark, and it was wonderful, in that moment, just to stare at him with this new ribbon of you-and-me between them, like a song.
“Encore,” Maggie murmured.
He frowned, as if confused—and then Hero’s bedroom door opened, and John sprang away from Maggie with those unearthly reflexes of his.
Hero stared at them. Rather, at Maggie, then John, then back to Maggie, because John had launched a whole yard between them, his back against the wall, his skin flushed.
“I forgot my brush,” she said, but what Maggie heard was: Just what is going on here?
Maggie had forgotten entirely—poof, presto—that they were in Hero’s room. She’d lost the fact of them in any room at all, the whole universe compressed to the small, intimate space. Maybe there was no space small enough that would allow them to be together.
“I . . . got the mouse,” Maggie finally managed to say. Apparently she was going to do all the talking. His regret perfumed the air like a red cloud. “And I used your hairpins. Sorry.”
Hero’s expression said she couldn’t give a damn about mice or hairpins.
When no one else spoke, Hero asked, “Is it a secret?” Looked between them again. “We’d support you no matter what. There’s no reason to be ashamed—”
“I am not ashamed.” John’s head snapped up.
Maggie blinked. The passion of his declaration struck through the room like lightning.
But then he straightened his lapels, adjusted the collar Maggie’s fingers had worked slightly askew, and said, “I’m not ashamed because there’s nothing between us to be ashamed over.”
He walked out, just like that, and Maggie opened her mouth wordlessly, too stunned to refute his dismissal. Hero met Maggie’s eyes and a split second later went after John. Maggie briefly closed her eyes, exhaled, and then one by one removed the pins to take the wig off.
CHAPTER 26
HOW LIKE A MAID SHE BLUSHES
Benedick and Prince spent the better part of the evening agent-proofing the speakeasy, taking care to lock up any purchase records, sealing all compartments with imported alcohol. Benedick offered to do it alone—neither of them had told Leo—but Prince insisted, even as the exertion dampened his skin, drained his cheeks of color. At least tomorrow they weren’t expected to do any serious labor, not with Claude’s hired entourage.
Sometime after dark Prince straightened with a wince. “Let’s go out the main entrance, lock up behind us.”
They climbed the cellar stairs, their feet finding the path easily without a light.
“One weekend won’t give us a reputation,” Prince said, “do you think?”
“Nah. Besides, the crowd will be different tomorrow, I imagine. More blue blood.” Benedick shoved open the cellar doors. Prince made his labored way behind him. While he caught his breath, Benedick looped the chain in place and secured the padlock.
They walked around the house, toward the main door. Almost to himself, Prince muttered, “I guess I ought to talk to Hero about all this. You didn’t tell her?”
“No, actually. But maybe Beatrice . . .” Benedick trailed off. Claude was waiting on the porch, his arms crossed.
“Excuse me. Mr. Morello,” he said as they approached. His voice came out blade sharp, his face pinched with an unflattering combination of hurt and fury. The rigid line of his shoulders was backlit from the light in the house. “I’d like a word with you about your brother.”
<
br /> Prince stopped, ankle deep in nettles, before he reached the porch. “My brother?”
“Exactly what line of business is he in?” Claude pressed. Benedick had never seen Claude’s temper in true form, but now the full breadth of his wealth and influence glittered behind his eyes like an army.
Prince, scrappy and used to fighting on an empty stomach, settled back into his own upbringing; he cocked his chin up and asked, “What’s it to you?”
“The conversation was not exactly conducted in clear terms,” Claude said. “But I’m sure I was being threatened.”
“Threatened?” Prince asked, not bothering to hide his incredulity.
“From what I gathered, as a benefactor to the speakeasy,” Claude said, “which is absurd. I may have lent my participation to certain activities, but I haven’t done anything, with proof, that could be held against me in a court of law.”
There it is, Benedick thought. Bootlegging was fun so long as you weren’t the one paying for it. “Of course not, Claude. Don’t be a moron.”
“He seemed rather serious to me,” Claude said. The volume of his voice maintained its gentleman’s decibel, but underneath it was a real note of fear.
“At first I thought it was simply a misunderstanding, that he thought I was trying to cut into his business,” Claude continued darkly. “But then I realized what it was truly about.”
Benedick could not hope to guess where this would be arriving. Prince’s expression was just as blank.
“Hero,” Claude snapped. “Why else would he come at me with such ridiculous accusations?”
Silence. Then Prince asked, “You think John was threatening you because he was jealous of you and Hero?”
“That’s precisely what I think.”
Prince laughed, making Claude flush. “That’s— No.”
“No?” Claude asked, red faced.
“Come on, Claude,” said Benedick. “You can’t think so little of Hero.”
“What I think is that even if she’s terribly fond of me, she’s not fond of anything so much as her mother’s speakeasy.”
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