She stared from beneath carefully lowered eyelids at this man who was her husband. He knelt before the open door to the stove, jabbing with a poker at the smoking wood. His hands were small like a boy's, but spotted with age, his chin whiskers thick and stiff like the teeth of an ebony comb. His shaven crown shone in the lamplight. His queue was very long and a credit to him.
He turned his head, his spectacles glittering. He offered her a tentative smile.
Emboldened, she asked, "What is your honorable name?"
"Sam is my name now. You will call me Sam. I will call you Lily.
"Lily is a good American name," he went on when she said nothing. "As American as the Fourth of July and Yankee Doodle Dandy, yes? There was a chippy—a joy girl—who worked for Mrs. Yorke for a while and called herself Lily."
Shame burned in Erlan's chest. Once she had thought to marry a man of breeding and scholarship. Instead she must be obedient and pleasing to an old peasant from Canton who wished to call her after a joy girl. But she must stop thinking of herself as what she was. Her father had sold her, sold her to a slave broker. She thought of those haunted faces peering through the bars of those whore-alley cribs. How easily one of those faces could have been hers.
She looked down. Her hands were clenched in her lap, and she flattened them, smoothing them over the blood-red satin. A tremor of fear coursed through her. "Who are those men gathered outside the door?"
He rose to his feet, dusting off his hands. "There're not a lot of Chinawomen in the Montana Territory, so they're curious, you savvy? They envy this unworthy one such a young and beautiful wife."
"Perhaps it is your wealth they envy, that you were able to buy this foolish self."
He grunted in agreement. "Those little shits couldn't put together a string of copper cash between them, no sirree jingle. They work the tailings and played-out placer claims on the hill, what the white man no longer has use for. They're not allowed to work in the Four Jacks."
She hadn't grasped all he had said, for many of the English words were unfamiliar to her. She couldn't imagine why anyone would choose to work deep in a hole in the earth, but it made no sense that the men would be forbidden to do so. "Why are they not allowed?"
"Because they're Chinks." He studied her from behind his spectacles, his eyes unblinking. She thought that he would say more, that he had a secret to impart to her, or perhaps a sorrow. Instead he shrugged. "You will understand after you're here awhile."
She didn't want to understand; she didn't want to be here long enough to understand. She was overwhelmed suddenly by the thought that it might be years before she could go home. So many thousands of li of land and sea now lay between her and her lao chia. And a barrier of honor betrayed and honor lost that was wider and longer than the Great Wall itself.
She wasn't aware he had come up beside her until he laid a small box wrapped in red silk on her lap. "This is for you," he said.
She unfolded the silk, a little excited in spite of herself to be getting a gift. She opened the box to reveal a small hinged case of gold with a new moon and a star engraved on its round face.
"It's a picture locket," he said. He showed her how to pry it open with the tips of her fingers. "Look... This is Sam Woo, my photograph. Clementine McQueen took it of me. She shot me," he said, laughing.
His face sobered. "You wear it here," he said, this time in his rough Cantonese. And he touched her throat where the bone curved beneath the high collar of her robe. Her pulse beat so wildly she was surprised he couldn't feel it. He took the locket from her trembling fingers. He snapped it shut and pinned it on her breast, just above her heart. "Or here."
"I am unworthy of such a fine gift," she said. She was struck by what a strange sight it was—the fon-kwei locket on her red satin wedding robe.
The kettle shrieked, startling them both. He let out a short laugh and hurried to take it off the fire. She watched while he placed tea leaves in two porcelain cups, poured boiling water over them, covered the cups, and placed them in copper bowls. He set one before her and one at his place across the table, then took his seat.
He removed the lid and took the cup from the copper bowl, cradling it in both hands. She did the same. The steam of the dragon well tea wafted around her face, smelling of flower petals, sweet and soft.
"Empty cup," he toasted and drank his down to the last drop.
She took a sip. He was staring at her over the porcelain rim of his cup. There was something in his eyes, something she had seen before... Fingers of memory gripped her heart, of rough hands groping, squeezing, teeth nipping, lips slobbering, a prodding, and then a pain like a knife rending her open, thrusting into her, a heavy weight heaving on her breasts and belly, crushing her...
A scream filled her throat, sticking there. The skin of her chest pulled taut.
Her husband stood up abruptly and came back with an empty rice bowl, which he set before her. Above the bowl, he laid a pair of chopsticks neatly on their stand. "Thank you for honoring my unworthy table with your presence," he said.
He brushed his knuckles along her jaw while she sat in utter stillness. She had been taught always to appear serene, but inside, she wanted to scream at the feel of his hand sliding along her cheek and down her neck. She tried to breathe and couldn't. The scream... the scream was there, in her throat, choking her, and she couldn't, she couldn't—
"Now," he said, his voice rough. "I will lie with you now."
And something within her shattered. She lurched to her feet, thrusting him away from her. The table scraped hard across the floor, bowls and platters sliding, falling, shattering. She backed up and up until she slammed into the stove. She felt its heat through the thick padded satin of her robe. The scream, trapped in her throat, beat hard like the wings of a frantic bird.
"Stay away from me," she said, or might have. The scream was so loud, so loud...
He came at her, anger hard on his face, his spectacles flashing in the dim light. She groped behind her, her fingers finding the handle of the cleaver. The scream was now roaring in her head, darkening her vision.
She swung the cleaver in a wide, desperate arc, missing his face by inches, and he reared back, shouting, "Holy God!"
The scream in her throat subsided some. She felt herself breathe, felt words form and push their way out her mouth. "Forgive this unworthy girl, but I cannot let you touch me," she said. Polite words, proper words. She would be a dutiful, obedient daughter, but she would not, she could not let any man force his way inside her again. She would rather die. To die, to die, to die... was the only honorable way.
The merchant Woo stared at his wife, his lips folded tightly to his teeth. It was unthinkable that a woman would attack her lord and husband. That she would deny him the use of her body. "There will be nothing to forgive," he said stiffly, "if you put that down this instant."
The cleaver flashed again. He let out a snort of derision that turned into a grunt of surprise as she twisted the blade around and pressed it to her own throat.
"Stay away."
He drew in a deep, noisy breath. The oil in the lantern gurgled. A piece of burning wood collapsed with a hiss in the stove.
He took a step toward her, and she slashed with the cleaver, cutting through skin and flesh and sending a spray of bright red blood splashing through the air.
Drew Scully turned away from the bar, balancing two tin pails of beer in one hand.
He waited while a man jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon before he crossed the line of fire. He fended off the groping hands of a hurdy-gurdy girl and sidestepped around the jabbing elbow of a man shooting billiards. Jere was waiting for him at a table against the back wall, wearing a face down to his chin.
Drew said nothing when he put the pail of beer into his brother's hands. And he said nothing when Jere downed nearly all of it in one breath. They both had a bad case of the sours.
He sat down and let a groan run silently through him. He felt so dead tired and
full of misery, and he had a pain so deep it was like a bruise on the bone. He wasn't one for drowning his guts in drink of an evening, because he didn't like waking up the next morning with a head that felt as big as a bushel basket. But he wished now he had gotten some whiskey while he was up at the bar, a whole bottle of it. If he didn't get stewed tonight he was going to wake up screaming.
As the nipper had screamed.
Tears pressed against the backs of Drew's eyes and he squeezed them shut. God's Teeth... He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried. The boy's death had unleashed years' worth of tears. They kept filling his eyes, clogging his throat, and he hated himself for the tears. And for his cowardice.
He had cried earlier that night when he had at last stepped off the cage into the fresh night air. Air that had the bite and tingle of fermented cider straight from a cold cellar. He breathed it deep, tasting it on his tongue and in his lungs, and that was when the tears had come.
Later, sitting in a bathtub at Luke's barber shop, they had come again, running down his cheeks like rain on a windowpane, mixing with the sweat and the steam, and his chest had shuddered with the effort it took not to sob aloud.
He shook his head now, trying to shake off thoughts of the mine and death. He looked around the Best in the West, impressed by this Wild West pleasure palace, by the flocked wallpaper and varnished wooden floors, the glittering diamond-dust mirrors and the tinsel tarts in their silk stockings and short skirts.
But the Gandy Dancer was more his kind of place. Tawdry as a ha'penny peep show, it was, with sawdust on the floor and walls so full of bullet holes it wasn't weatherproof anymore. The whiskey was so cut down there it tasted like river water with a tang to it. But excitement always quivered in the air, as if all hell was about to break loose at any moment. It was a miner's place, where a man dropped his bucket on the bar and slapped down two bits for a shot of whiskey and a free beer chaser to celebrate surviving another shift underground.
The Best in the West, now... its clientele appeared to be mostly cattle and sheep punchers. He wondered what they celebrated, what demons haunted their minds that only the booze could chase away.
He twisted the pail of beer in his hands, watching it slop over the side. He drank some of it down, feeling the night settle over him, chasing away the mulligrubs. The frantic noise at least gave the illusion of gaiety. The click of chips and the clatter of billiard balls, the slap of cards. The loose laughter of loose women and the ripple of tinny piano keys. An odd sight caught his eye, a woman as heavily veiled as a mourning widow dancing with a man who groped her buttocks with a hook in place of a hand. This country attracted strange people, he thought. The freaks and the dregs and the drifters as well as the hardy and the brave. He didn't want to think about which category he fell into.
"I shouldn't have let her go and marry him," Jere said out of nowhere.
Drew slowly turned his heavy-lidded gaze to his brother. "You still strumming on that harp? 'Tes past too late, brother. She's his now. He'll treat her proper, will Sam Woo. You know the man for a good sort."
"Aye. I shouldn't have let her marry him, Drew."
"Only because you want her for your own self."
The lovesickness was known to strike the Scully men suddenly, or so the da had been fond of saying. Just like that it had been with the da the first time he'd seen Mam, like being felled in the heart by a sledgehammer. Drew laughed to himself whenever he thought of that story, because if you got the da to drinking enough he'd also tell you that the first time he saw his future wife she was swimming bare-arsed naked in the cove. So to Drew's way of thinking, it wasn't the da's heart that was struck at all; it was his cock and bobbles.
"I'm going to have her for my own."
"Aye..." Drew agreed, caught up in his thoughts, then his head jerked around. He didn't like what he saw on his brother's face. "You stood there and watched her marry Sam Woo and now you sit there cool as a frog on a stone and tell me you're going to have her."
Jere's look stayed stubborn. He lifted the bucket and swallowed off the last of his beer.
"She's a Celestial," Drew persisted. "There's probably some law against it. Not to mention the law there is against doing it with another man's wife."
"Then we'll find a place where tedn't any law."
Drew spread his hands. "Christ all-bleedin'-mighty. You're talking like she'll even have you. How d—"
"She'll have me."
Drew's hands fell to the table and made a pair of fists. He might as well converse with the head of his sledgehammer as the thick head of his brother.
Jere's chin had sunk to his chest. He was giving the bottom of his beer bucket a deep study.
A movement behind the bar caught Drew's attention—the gin-slinger had pulled open a small door and was speaking to someone beyond it. Drew craned his head, but the man's massive shoulders blocked his view. He saw the corner of a rolltop desk and a triangle of bright green skirt the color of tart spring apples.
The bartender started to pull the door closed, and Drew felt disappointment sink into him. Then the door opened wide and
Hannah Yorke stepped out into the area behind the bar, and Drew's heartbeat quickened. She was all smoke and heat and long legs that could wind around a man's waist and make him explode like a charge of giant powder.
He pulled in a deep breath and shifted in his chair.
Beside him Jere huffed a soft laugh. "And will you look at who's squirming now? You be eyeing her like she was a goose all ready for the Christmas pot."
Drew pressed his hands down flat on the table and pushed back his chair. Jere laid a hand on his arm. "And where be you off to, then, my handsome?"
"I'm thinking the lady could use a drink."
"The lady has a whole saloon full of drink should she be wanting some. And she already has herself a man to pour it for her."
The muscles tightened along Drew's jaw, but he eased his rump back down in the chair. "I know 'tes said she has a lover."
"Aye. 'Tes said."
"Well, where's he at, then? The man must be a bloody ghost for all we've seen of him."
Jere pointed with his chin. "Does he look like a ghost to you?"
Drew's gaze swept along the men standing hipshot at the bar, stopping at a cowboy in a dusty black Stetson and faded black britches tucked into worn boots. He looked roguish and rowdy and violent, though he was handsome in a hard-mouthed way. "That one? He's been leaning there on his elbows for ten minutes if it's been one. She hasn't looked his way once."
"'Tes the way she hasn't been looking at him."
The man wore his gun low on his hips and tied snug to his thigh, which fit with what else Drew had heard about Hannah Yorke's lover. He was a sometime rancher who disappeared for months at a time, riding shotgun for Wells Fargo, some said. Others said hunting bounty.
Whatever he did for a living, he didn't look like the sort of man to give up his woman without a fight.
"The bloody hell of it," Drew said, and pushed to his feet.
She was now in front of the bar, talking to the bartender, who was pouring them both double shots from a bottle expensive enough to have a label. Drew slowed his steps, taking her in a little at a time. The sharp curve of a cheekbone, the small bump on the end of her nose, the wide mouth that deepened at the corners. The way her dress dipped over the slopes of breasts the ivory white of summer clouds. The way it slipped off one shoulder, as if a man had just pulled it down to bare her for his mouth and eyes.
She turned her head when he came up, and her lips made a little movement that wasn't quite a smile, although it tugged at the crescents in her cheeks.
"Well, how... Mr. Scully, is it?" she said in a voice that was wispy and husky like woodsmoke. "And what makes you come slumming over here to the Best in the West?"
"You," he said.
She arched a taunting eyebrow. Her brows were a deep dark red, like cuts over her eyes. "My, my. Aren't you the one for calling a spade a shovel?"
Her face softened and grew wistful. "Yes, I know... My father was a miner." She was silent a moment, then lifted her shoulders in a small, careless shrug. "He was killed in a fall when I was ten."
"I was twelve."
She raised startled eyes to his, and her lips parted slightly. There was a vulnerability around that mouth that didn't go with the tough way she acted. And he knew in that moment that he'd been lying to himself, trying to convince himself it was only lust. Just like the da, he'd been felled in the heart by a sledgehammer.
Oh, he knew the good folk in the town thought her wicked, and maybe by their standards she was. But if they said a good woman could make a man good, then it seemed as if it ought to work the other way about. Maybe all she needed was a man who loved her to hold her in his arms at night and touch her sweetly. She acted tough all right, but he knew she wasn't. Maybe it took a fraud like him to see the lie in her.
"Might I be buying you a drink, Mrs. Yorke?" he said.
But she had turned her head, and her gaze had drifted down the length of the bar to the cowboy in the dusty black Stetson. The man's expression didn't change. All he did was look back at her, but her face became vivid, as if a gas jet had been lit deep within her.
"The way I was taught it, Mrs. Yorke, when a gentleman asks, a lady gives him the courtesy of an answer."
She started and spun back around, the smile that hadn't been for him still lingering on her mouth. "Oh... Thank you but, no, Mr. Scully. I was just leaving for the night. Perhaps Nancy—"
He laid his hand on her arm. Her skin was soft and warm. Her scent wafted up to him, sweet and summery like the violet posies they sold for a farthing at a Michaelmas fair. "I don't want to spend time with one of your sporting girls. I want to spend it with you."
Heart of the West Page 40