Much Ado About Madams (15 page)

Petunia tugged on a beautiful pink dress. “Help me do up the buttons, would you?”

Lucinda studied the situation. She didn’t have any dresses that fastened in the back, only the side. “You’ll have to take your dress back off so I can lace your corset tighter. This dress won’t quite meet where it needs to.”

“
Hurry, please!” Petunia sounded harried as she whipped off her dress. Lucinda gave her corset laces a few good, strong tugs while Petunia held her breath.

“
I think that will do. Put your dress back on.”

Petunia could barely move, her corset was so tight. Lucinda picked up the dress and helped Petunia into it. The fit was perfect. No sooner had Lucinda fastened the last hook, Petunia was hurrying out the front door, waving her thanks on the way.

Sadie came in as Petunia left. “What in the world got the fire started in her britches?”

Lucinda stared at the tub Petunia had vacated, water still sloshing. “I have no idea, but the stage just pulled in, and the driver will probably want a meal.”

Then she remembered Midas and dashed out back again to get him. “Come on in to the office, please.”

As he followed her to the room that served both for business and schooling, her stomach churned. How could a decent woman talk to a man about something of such a delicate nature? Especially when she wasn’t quite sure the exact nature of the “delicate nature.”

She took the chair behind the desk and motioned for Midas to sit down across from her. He took off his hat as he seated himself.

Taking a deep breath, she prepared to use her firmest schoolteacher voice. “Now, then...” She grasped for words.

After a long pause, the twin prompted, “Yes, ma’am. Go ahead.”

There was no help for it, she decided. She inhaled deeply once more and started again. “Have you been, er, talking with Chrissy?”

“
Sure.”

Of course he’d talked to her—he talked to whomever he pleased. Mad at herself for asking the wrong question, she tried again. “Mr.—I’m sorry, I don’t know your surname.”

“
Swensen,” the twin supplied. “But you can call me . . .”

“
Mr. Swensen, I’m sure you understand that the ladies here are, shall we say, troubled.”

He nodded, but Lucinda wasn’t sure if he understood at all. She continued, “Many of the women in the working profession think little of themselves, even though they have valuable talents to offer.”

He nodded again. “They do.”

“
So it’s imperative that we treat these ladies in such a manner so they can learn their own self-importance, don’t you agree?”

“
Yes, ma’am.”

“
Now, about Chrissy—”

He scratched his head and wrinkled his brow. “What about her?”

She wasn’t the least bit sure he understood what she had attempted to say in genteel words, so she decided to be more direct. Men were definitely dense. “Please don’t trifle with Chrissy. She’s a nice woman who’s learning to be a respectable lady. Don’t ruin what she has worked so hard to gain.”

There, she had said her piece.

“
Are you done?” He stood, hat in hand, waiting to be dismissed like an overgrown schoolboy.

“
Yes. Thank you, Midas.”

“
You’re welcome, ‘cept I ain’t Midas. I’m Titus.”

* * * * *

Fannie sat at her dressing table, carefully applying eye makeup. Sudden pounding on the bedroom door caused her to jam the matchstick onto her eyeball instead of her lashes, which didn’t help her mood much. She drew in a deep breath, hoping she’d gain a little vigor as the evening wore on. She wouldn’t though. Entertaining gentlemen seemed more tiresome all the time, and she didn’t like the looks Gus gave her every time she took a customer to her room. Hell, he didn’t know she didn’t take anyone who wanted more than dirty-talk because she just couldn’t stand men touching her anymore. She longed for Gus, but he didn’t seem to return her feelings.

“
Of course not, stupid!” she answered herself.

“
What’d you say?” came Chrissy’s voice from the other side of the door.

Damn
. “Come on in, for Pete’s sake!”

Chrissy sauntered in and shut the door behind Fannie. “Having trouble with your makeup?”

“
Not until you tried to bust my door down.”

“
Hell, Fannie, I knocked several times. I knowed you was in here.”

“
I was thinking.”

“
Thinking and painting on makeup at the same time must be rough for you by the looks of things.”

Fannie dabbed a towel to her cheek, wiping off the smudge under her left eye. “Some days, thinking and doing anything is tough. This happens to be one of them.”

“
You’re fussing over Hannibal Hank, aren’t you?” Chrissy sat beside Fannie at the dressing table, her face sorrowful, her voice harsh in compliance of the whores’ first commandment:
Thou shalt never let a man get to you
.

“
I was hoping I was rid of that varmint forever,” she replied. “Hell, it’s been nearly eight years since I set eyes on him, and that ain’t nearly long enough.”

Chrissy licked her finger and wiped another makeup smudge off Fannie’s cheek, then said, “He beat you up pretty bad.”

Fannie nodded slowly. “Broke my arm and a couple of ribs. That’s why Stuart McAdams sent me here. He said Hank was pure-dee mean, and that once he got an itch for a woman, he worked her over until he was damned good and ready to stop.”

“
Fast Hands Stuart wasn’t ‘xactly no prize himself. I remember when Hank first brought me to the Scarlet Lady back in St. Jo. Stu took one look at me, then just took me right there over the bar. Hurt like hell, but I didn’t squawk. Hank told me if I made noise, Stu’d just go at it harder, and he was already going at it hard enough. Bled for three days.” Chrissy shook her head, as if doing so would change history.

Fannie hated thinking about those sordid days. “No matter how we wound up being sporting women, we’re stuck, and that’s why we need a new way to live.”

They needed the schoolmarm to teach them how to act and how to read. They needed jobs. They needed a respectable woman to marry Reese off to so he’d close down the brothel. They just plain
needed
.

She remembered her task at hand, and started re-applying her eye makeup. Chrissy snatched the stick out of her hand. “As bad as you’re shaking, woman, you’ll blind yourself. Let me do it.” Fannie complied, glad to have a helping hand. They had been friends for a long time, and a little ministration by a good friend was salve for the soul.

After finishing Fannie’s left eye, Chrissy spoke again, “Enough reminiscing about the good ol’ days, which wasn’t so damned good. Hank was in the house today during off-hours.”

“
Who the hell let him in?”

“
Don’t know.”

“
What was he doing here?”

“
Talking to Miss Sharpe.”

“
Miss Sharpe?” Fannie didn’t want Hank within a hundred miles of the schoolmarm’s tender spirit.

“
Called her Pansy.”

“
Pansy?” Fannie’s mouth dropped open and she snapped it shut. Pansy had been a kind-hearted soul at the Scarlet Lady who’d helped her ease into the life. Damn, she knew it! She’d known all along. The moment that prim and prissy schoolmarm stepped off that stagecoach, she’d felt like she had known Miss Sharpe somehow.

Miss Lucinda Sharpe was Pansy’s daughter.

And Pansy had been lynched for murdering Reese’s daddy.

Chapter 8

“
What a helluva pickle,” Fannie muttered into her hands. Feeling edgy, she left the dressing table and started straightening out her bed covers. Not that they needed straightening, just that she needed to do something.

Chrissy fussed with the lotions on Fannie’s vanity table. “Yup—a helluva pickle.”

Fannie gave the bedspread a final tug. “And it sure messes with our plan to get Reese hitched up with her. I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection sooner. ‘Course, you didn’t recognize her, either.”

Chrissy looked as puzzled as Fannie was herself. Sure, she’d known all along that Miss Sharpe looked familiar, but the last person on the face of this earth she’d ever expected to see was Pansy’s little girl.

“
Well, she’s plumb growed up,” Chrissy finally said. “Does Reese know?”

“
No, and I want to keep it that way until I know for sure what we ought to do. That man needs to get married up, but he might be a little harder to convince if his intended’s mother was strung up for murdering his father.” Fannie stood in front of the full-length mirror for a once-over.

“
Reese is pretty accepting,” Chrissy offered. “He didn’t throw us out, and he could have started his own stable with a bunch of younger whores. Lord knows, most any whore’d give her eyeteeth to get a noose around his pistol.”

“
Yup, and he didn’t take to his daddy none too good, either.” Satisfied that she couldn’t do any better with her looks, Fannie turned away from the mirror and faced Chrissy.

Chrissy pressed her hand to her forehead. “And there ain’t really anyone else to marry him up with.”

“
Nope. And if we don’t get him married, he won’t want to sell the Comfort Palace.”

“
And we’ll have to stay and help him out, which ain’t the plan.”

Fannie knew Chrissy spoke for all of them about not leaving Reese. No one had ever protected them, clothed them, or fed them as well as Reese had. Still, if they kept whoring, a lonesome, early death by disease or violence would be their only fate. “Nope, it ain’t. We need to get educated and respectable, and don’t forget it.”

“
That’s what
you
say,” Chrissy protested. “You’re the one who cooked up this cockeyed scheme.” She stood. “Look at us! Look at me. Hell, I been a whore ever since Bennie Green hauled me behind the outhouse and hiked up my petticoats when I was seven years old. No one ever asked me if I wanted to be one, and it sure as shootin’ wasn’t a lifelong dream of mine, but here I am—whore at the Comfort Palace in Dickshooter, Idaho Territory. Could be worse though, we could be working in the cribs.”

“
All the gals have a story just like yours, including me. But we can do better, and you agreed to try.” Fannie waited for Chrissy to nod her agreement, which she finally did.

“
I won’t tell a soul about our Miss Sharpe’s little secret,” Chrissy promised, “but dammit all, she acts so high and mighty sometimes, it’d be fun to bring her down a notch or two, just to see how she handles it.”

Fannie ignored Chrissy’s catty jab. Her money would be on Lucinda, anyway. That girl had grit and sense, usually, and she was just what Reese needed, whether he knew it or not. “Then we’ll keep on getting them two together and see what happens. I know he wants her. You should’ve seen him when he brought her home. He was plumb slobbering over her. Land sakes, I thought he wanted to eat her for breakfast by the way he looked at her backside when she was wearing his britches. Hell, maybe he did.”

“
Ha! That’ll be the day. She wouldn’t a been looking at him like a mare in heat if he’d got to her.”

Fannie nodded her agreement. “She’ll get that soon enough, soon as she’s married up proper to the boss.”

* * * * *

Reese bumped his horse’s belly and as soon as he heard Buster exhale, he yanked up on the cinch strap. Buster, contrary as always, had a nasty habit of holding his breath and blowing out his sides to prevent the saddle from being cinched good and tight.

The art of cinching was just one of the lessons Reese had been given by the school of hard knocks—much cheaper than Harvard and far more memorable. A good thump on the head when you hit the dirt while roping a maverick was a lesson that a man tended to remember—after he came to his senses, that is. He made a point of remembering the lessons and forgetting the pain of his greenhorn days.

He finished off the cinch and fetched the bridle. Not that he or the twins had been as green as some. The Indian campaigns had toughened them up considerably.
That
, he wouldn’t mind forgetting altogether. The only good things that came from the three years he’d spent in battle was Buster and the twins, and some days he amended that to only include Buster. Midas and Titus had been having great fun joshing him about that headstrong schoolmarm lately.

Buster took the bit and Reese slipped the headstall over the horse’s ears. Now why in the hell did he have to think about her? He didn’t think he’d ever get a decent night’s sleep again. Every time he closed his eyes he could feel that round bottom pressing right into his parts. Who’d ever have thought he could get tangled up worse than morning glory on a bramble bush just thinking about a schoolteacher—a suffragist schoolteacher, no less.

He liked her fire, though. She’d held to her guns long after a weaker woman would have given in, sitting on a blamed picnic blanket, wet, cold, and scared to death of snakes. He winced at the thought of snakes and hoped she’d never try to protect him from them again. It was too damned painful.

After he’d secured his saddlebags and scabbard, he led Buster out of the barn and mounted. Just as he was about to ride out, he heard Fannie calling him. Now what in the hell could she want at six in the morning, he wondered. She usually didn’t even get up until eleven.