Honeyville (17 page)

‘I was in the protest,’ Inez muttered.

‘What protest?’ asked Phoebe, though she must have known.

‘And please don’t blame Dora. It’s not Dora’s fault I’m here. Only I wouldn’t go home.’

‘Well you gotta go home,’ she said.

‘I was looking for – tell me: do you happen to know Lawrence O’Neill?’

Phoebe blinked. The smallest of pauses. It told me that Lawrence was downstairs right now. She looked at Inez, said: ‘Can’t say I do.’ And then, to my surprise: ‘There’s a maid’s room lying empty up a floor. Why don’t you get yourself up there, so Dora can get on with some work.’ She looked at me. I felt her cold eyes, calculating her commissions, lost and gained, and I felt a chill crawling slowly along my spine. I was getting old. Worse, I was getting lazy. One day – inevitably, but perhaps sooner than I realized – my time would be called. Just then, with her eyes on me, I felt that day lurching closer. ‘You can go home tomorrow,’ she said to Inez. ‘When you’re feeling stronger.’ She turned and left the room.

Inez put her head in her hands. I thought she might have apologized for the trouble she’d caused. Instead, she let out a pathetic whimper, and once again began to weep. ‘She knows him, doesn’t she? She probably knows where he is right now—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’

‘What am I to do?’

I told her to do as Phoebe said. I rang for Kitty and asked her to make Inez comfortable in the unused maid’s room, and finally I prepared myself for my work – with more effort than usual. Phoebe was watching. I knew it. And the strike would end eventually, and the years were rolling by.

The ballroom beyond the long salon was exceedingly busy, as it had been every night of the strike; always full of life, and light, and music, and laughter – no matter what ears had been severed from what heads just a few hours before, or what pathetic colonies of the dispossessed sat shivering under snow-covered canvas a few miles up the road. The ballroom at Plum Street floated separate, in a magical, carefree world of its own.

Phoebe, ahead of all of Trinidad’s madams, had a talent for keeping the two warring factions apart. Gentlemen guests, depending on their affiliations, were guided towards one side of the room or the other, and it was our task, when we danced on the floor in the middle, to keep them so happily amused that they would forget each other altogether; and they generally did. If not, at the first sign of a disagreement, Phoebe would descend on them, a cloud of smiles and lace and perfume. She would disarm them with playful chatter. And if
that
failed, everyone knew she had no qualms about throwing them out on the street. Since the troubles began there had been only two brawls at Plum Street, both initiated by Baldwin-Felts men. It was after the second that Phoebe banned Baldwin-Felts from the house altogether.

When I came to find Lawrence, he sat at a table on the side of the room furthest from the general’s men. He was alone, tapping his foot to our ragtime music and slurping his bourbon from crystal.

Lawrence O’Neill had asked to see me in private and so, with Phoebe’s beady eye following, I brought him upstairs to my rooms. He was drunk, unhappy, agitated.

He lay fully clothed on the bed that poor Inez had just warmed and vacated – rather, he tumbled back onto it, bleary eyed, and asked me to lie beside him.

He pawed at me half-heartedly.

‘What in hell’s the matter with you?’ I asked, slapping him off.

He rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know.’ He sighed. ‘Forgive me … I thought it was expected.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘Didn’t want to offend … Thought it was expected,’ he said again.

‘Dear
God
,’I laughed. ‘You
are
crazy!’

A pause. ‘Just a little oiled.’ He smiled at me. ‘That cockchafer friend of yours, Phoebe, wouldn’t fetch you down until I ponied up some.’

‘Well of course she wouldn’t. What did you expect?’

‘I said I only wanted to talk.’

‘I’m guessing she told you she wasn’t running a charity?’

He smiled faintly. ‘Her exact words. Fifty bucks she took off me. My, but you’re expensive.’

‘Worth every cent,’ I said. ‘As you no doubt remember. I assume you’ve come to ask about Inez?’

A long pause. He looked wretched.

‘She was all right, was she?’ he asked at length. ‘They hadn’t beaten her too badly?’

I didn’t want to tell him she was here in the house. After the danger he had placed her in, I didn’t want to offer him any information at all. As best I could, I wanted to keep the two apart – at least until Inez was back in her senses. ‘She was OK,’ I answered. ‘She was fine.’

He sat up, delved into a pocket for his pipe. Another silence. I watched as he lit it. He seemed to make an effort to pull himself together, but he sounded no less maudlin when he spoke again – the same question: ‘So she was all right?’

‘I told you.’

‘You took her to her aunt’s, did you?’

‘I did.’

‘And they were good to her? Were they? They took her in?’

‘Of course they did.’

‘And did she ask about me?’

‘What do you think? Of course she asked about you. She couldn’t understand why you hadn’t come to fetch her yourself.’

‘And did you explain to her –’ his tone changed abruptly; he was drunker than I had ever seen him – ‘how it was impossible? Did you tell her what a damn coot she’s been? How she’s wrecked it for us now? She’s going to get herself killed. She’s going to get us all killed. Did you tell her she’s a damn coot, and a dangerous one, and I can’t see her any more? And did you tell her she had better stay out of sight, hide out at her aunt’s place for a while, if she wants to stay alive?’

‘She knows you’re angry.’

He leaned across to me, loomed over me, and every part of him reeked of liquor: ‘Does she understand the kind of danger she is in?’

‘Maybe she does,’ I said, pushing him away. ‘She didn’t use her own name at the station. I had to look through the list to find her.’

‘Is that right?’ He sounded pleased; and as surprised as I was, I think.

‘I don’t know why you ever involved her, Lawrence.’

‘I never should have,’ he said, and then, clumsily, he stood up. ‘I have to leave. I only wanted to be sure she was safe.’

I watched him straightening his shirt, adjusting his hat, running his fingers over his moustache; looking at me, not quite looking at me. ‘I’m gonna miss her,’ he said abruptly. ‘Too bad, huh?’ His face looked bleary with the drink and sadness. ‘It’s too bad.’

I imagined Inez, upstairs, pining. He was about to leave. ‘Can I give her a message maybe?’ I asked him. ‘Anything? Just a word from you.’

‘You tell her to take care of herself,’ he said. He kissed his fingertips, and brushed them against the end of my nose – a strangely affectionate gesture, not intended for me, I sensed – and he closed the door gently behind him.

I didn’t go to visit Inez that night. I left her to sleep. In the late morning, after I had eaten breakfast and still heard nothing from her, I ventured up the rickety back stairs to the maids’ quarters, and tapped on her door. When she didn’t answer, I crept in all the same. She lay still on her back, her eyes half open and her pale skin glowing with the fever. She looked terrible. It seemed unlikely she would be able to sit up in bed, let alone have the strength to leave Plum Street that day.

… Nor even the next day. Phoebe sent for a doctor (‘don’t imagine for one second I’m paying for it’), who administered various medicines, and was adamant that Inez should remain in the house until the fever lifted.

Two more days passed and still the fever didn’t lift. Phoebe didn’t want Inez in the house any more. So, finally, I did the only thing I felt I could do. I called on Philippa McCulloch.

22

She didn’t recognize me, or at least she pretended not to. I suppose neither of us saw much point in rehashing past events. I told the housekeeper – who looked about ready to slam the door in my face – that I had come regarding Inez, and the old woman raced off to fetch her mistress. Within moments Mrs McCulloch had come to the front door herself.

She was sweet: worried and embarrassed in about equal measure. She showed me into the parlour, where I avoided looking at the piano, and so perhaps did she. She invited me to sit down but I declined. She asked if I would like tea. I shook my head. Finally, her manners gave way. ‘Sakes alive – Miss … Mrs—?’

‘Whitworth,’ I said. ‘My name is Miss Whitworth.’

‘What has happened to her, Miss Whitworth? I left a note for her three days ago, and another at the library – but there’s no sign of her! And my girl Rachel goes to clean there each afternoon and she says she’s not laid eyes on Inez all this time – and none of her old friends has seen her – not for weeks. These past few months she’s been so strange with all of us … But you …’ She looked at me, and there was panic in her eyes: fear, suspicion, confusion and the threat of imminent tears. ‘But I understood you had left town?’

‘I have not left town.’

‘You haven’t left town,’ she repeated vaguely. ‘Dag-
blame
it – excuse my language, but what has become of her, Miss Whitworth? Is she in trouble? I know she has got in with a terrible crowd. And I don’t mean to insult you, ma’am. Miss. Of course I don’t mean to insult you but …’

As she spoke, the door to the parlour opened and a man I had not met before slipped quietly into the room. He was in his late thirties – my age, perhaps a little younger – and the resemblance was unmissable. The same slim build, the same straw-blond hair and heavy-lidded, clear grey eyes. And yet, where Inez seemed to burn with hope and life, this man emanated sadness: an elegant, exhausted melancholy. He was rather beautiful. Just like his sister. Effeminate. He wore a pink silk pleated shirt, collarless and unbuttoned at the top; no jacket, no tie, a large beret of dark brown felt, a pair of chocolate brown silk pants, snugly tailored, and beneath them some flashy white and tan pumps.

The effect was – above all – of a man who didn’t come from around here. He looked eccentric, dandy. He looked wonderful, and I took an instant shine to him. He also looked like what he was: like the sort of gentleman – how might I have worded it to Mrs McCulloch? – who would be unlikely to be paying a visit to the fallen ladies of Plum Street any time soon. Xavier was a nancy boy: as clear as the nose on my face. Or so it was to me.

Mrs McCulloch glanced at her nephew with a mixture of exasperation and relief. ‘Oh Xavier – thank goodness … This is my nephew, Mr Dubois. Xavier, this is …She stopped, too bashful to continue. ‘Well, this is …she said again.

‘I am Dora Whitworth. I am a friend of your sister. She’s talked about you a great deal.’

‘Has she?’ He sounded pleased. He crossed the room to take my hand. ‘Have you seen her? She’s all right, is she? My aunt is horribly worried, and I admit I am—’

‘She’s quite safe,’ I interrupted him, though – after three days’ fever, an afternoon in jail, and who- knew-how-long harbouring munitions for the Unionists in her cellar – that might not have been the most accurate description. At once their faces relaxed, and the thought flitted through my mind:
what must it be like to be so well loved?
‘However,’ I continued, ‘I have come here to tell you that she is sick. And she needs you to come and fetch her. One of you – perhaps, Mr Dubois? It might be better … She doesn’t even know you are in town, so far as I am aware. She will be so happy to see you!’

‘Where is she?’ they asked at once.

‘Where is she?’ Of course they would ask, and of course I would have to tell them. Until that moment I had not quite envisaged how. ‘Well, she is at my home,’ I said at last. ‘I have been looking after her. She has seen a doctor.’

Mrs McCulloch rested a pudgy hand on my forearm: ‘We heard she had been in the cells. But there were no records. Nothing. Do you know about that? Is it possible?’

‘The cells? I certainly don’t see how,’ I said quickly, with a little laugh. ‘I have been with her all this time. I think you are mistaken.’

Mrs McCulloch looked flustered. ‘Somebody said something … It’s too silly.’

‘She is sick in bed, Mrs McCulloch.’

‘They must have been confused,’ she agreed at once. ‘And thank goodness for that. So … where has she been? Tell me, dear.’ She dropped her voice to a tactful whisper. ‘Is there a … man?’

‘No!’ I said. ‘No, no, no. There isn’t a man. But you must ask her, in any case. When she is well again. For the moment she is quite sick. It’s what I came here to tell you. And she can’t stay where she is. My landlady has said she has to leave today.’ I turned to Xavier. He was holding a glass of whiskey, watching me with thoughtful eyes. It seemed to me that he understood. I smiled at him. ‘Mr Dubois, why don’t you come with me? Your aunt might prefer to wait here and prepare for her arrival?’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs McCulloch. ‘Of course I want to come.’ But she glanced at Xavier as if hoping to be overruled. She was nervous. As was I. The prospect of leading her through my home – past the fish-eyed stares of the other girls, through the reek of perfumes and perhaps of burning opium – made me feel quite queasy. I sent a meaningful look to Xavier.

‘Perhaps it would be simpler if you stayed home, Aunt,’ he said. He had a soft voice with a promise of laughter in it. ‘Call the doctor. Get him to come visit her here at once. Have her room made ready. Have cook make her some honeycake. Is it still her favourite?’

‘Well – you bet it is!’ Mrs McCulloch grinned, on safe ground again.

‘Good then. It’s settled. Don’t you think so, Aunt? It doesn’t need a great crowd of us. And you must take care of your heart. Don’t put it under unnecessary strain – didn’t the doctor say so? Miss Whitworth and I will only be gone a short while. It’s not far, is it?’

‘Not at all.’

So we set off, he and I, armed with broth and syrup cookies from the McCullochs’ kitchen, and a thousand messages and instructions. ‘You can tell her from her aunt,’ Mrs McCulloch said, as she followed us out through the hall, ‘that she’s not going back to that silly cottage again – not until I know she is well. And not until I can trust her to keep out of mischief. And Xavier, honey, I expect you to find out
exactly
what it is she’s been getting herself into these past few weeks and months. Because really, if there’s anyone to blame for all this, then it’s surely you …’