Song of the Spirits (47 page)

Charlene brushed Elaine’s freshly washed hair. She did not seem to think it strange that the newcomer had not brought any baggage with her. Madame Clarisse’s hotel was a sort of depot for lost girls.

“You still need a dress. But mine are too big for you. Wait here, I’ll ask Annie.”

Charlene disappeared briefly and returned with a low-cut sky-blue dress decorated with lace and a thousand flounces.

“Here. Annie doesn’t have anything at the moment, so it’ll have to do for today. You can wear something underneath if the cleavage is too indecent for you. But I’m sure we can find a shawl for you. The fellows aren’t supposed to be ogling you, after all.”

Elaine looked the dress over. It was so much flashier than anything she had ever worn before that it almost scared her. When she looked at herself nervously in the mirror, however, she was pleased. The azure-blue material went with her eyes. The black lace at the neckline emphasized her pale coloring, and her glowing-red hair highlighted it. The matrons of Queenstown might find her outfit outrageous—and she dared not think what Thomas would have said about it—but Elaine thought she looked beautiful.

Madame Clarisse whistled when she saw the girl. “Sweetheart, if I offered you double, wouldn’t you do two or three a night? The boys would lick their chops for you.”

Elaine looked worried, but Madame Clarisse’s tone was jocular. She even lent Elaine a black shawl.

“Tomorrow we’ll have a dress made for you. The tailor’ll sure be delighted. But it’s not free, sweetheart. I’m taking it out of your pay.”

Madame Clarisse asked for rent for the little room too, but Elaine thought that only fair. At first, she had been worried she would have to live in a room on the first floor, where the men “visited” the women. However, Madame Clarisse showed her to a tiny servant’s room near
the stables. A stableboy was meant to live there, but Clarisse had no need for anyone like that. Her customers left their horses there only for a few hours and cleaned up after themselves. Still, the stables were very roomy, and there was a run in the back courtyard. Elaine asked timidly if she could house Banshee there.

“So we have a horse too,” Madame Clarisse said, frowning. “Dearie, dearie, if you didn’t have such a respectable face… You promise me you didn’t steal the nag?”

Elaine nodded. “Banshee was a gift.”

Madame Clarisse raised her eyebrows. “For an engagement or wedding? I’m not judging, sweetheart, but I’d like some warning if next thing I know a husband is going to show up on my doorstep in a rage.”

“Definitely not,” declared Elaine. “Not a chance.”

Madame Clarisse noted the girl’s strange undertone, somewhere between guilt and satisfaction, but she could not pinpoint it. Regardless, the girl did not appear to be lying.

“Well, all right. Then bring your horse over here. Otherwise, the stables’ll take half your pay. But you have to feed and clean up after it yourself.”

Elaine decided to wait until the following morning to retrieve Banshee. She could afford one night in the stables. In the meantime, she washed her clothes and hung them up to dry in her tiny room. Outside it was still raining, and the air was cool and uncomfortable. Elaine still did not like the town—there was no comparison with Queenstown, which was so often sunny and where rainstorms rarely lasted long. Though the winters were appreciably colder there than on the West Coast, they were clear and snowy rather than gray and damp.

Despite the weather, the pub did good business. The men entered like wet cats out of the rain, and Madame Clarisse hardly knew what to do with all the soaked-through jackets and coats. Elaine thought of Gwyneira’s waxed jacket—the coal miners could have used something
functional like that, but it seemed they could not afford it. It was quite a long way from the mines to town. They must have been in great need of a little warmth and entertainment to brave such hardships after their shift.

“You should see how they live out there,” Charlene said when Elaine mentioned it to her. “The mine owners place sheds in the mining compound for them to use, but they’re hardly more than a roof over their heads. They don’t even have proper washrooms, mostly just an iron bucket. And those swine charge them extra for water, so we end up with coal dust on our sheets.”

Most of the customers did, in fact, look badly in need of washing. Their faces were covered in a smeared layer of gray. Since coal dust was greasy, the men could not completely remove it from their faces, no matter how hard they scrubbed.

Elaine felt a bit sorry for them, but to her amazement they seemed happy despite their hard lives. Though the majority of the men came from English and Welsh coal-mining regions, she heard all and sundry dialects. Almost all of them were immigrants—second- and third-generation New Zealanders did not slog it out underground.

The men applauded enthusiastically when Elaine played an old Welsh song that her grandmother Gwyn had taught her. A few of them sang along, while others grabbed girls to dance, and soon the first whiskey was placed on the piano in front of Elaine.

“I don’t drink whiskey,” she objected when Madame Clarisse pointed it out to her and to the man who had bought it for her. A squarish Englishman from outside Liverpool.

“Try it first,” Madame Clarisse said as she winked at her, and when Elaine hesitantly took a gulp, she discovered it was cold tea. “None of the girls here drink, or they’d be too drunk to stand by ten. But you get half of every glass the boys buy you.”

That sounded like a good deal to Elaine. She sipped her “whiskey” and smiled at her benefactor. He came right over to the piano and asked for a rendezvous later. However, he took it calmly when Elaine refused and disappeared with Charlene a short while later.

“You’re livenin’ the place up,” Madame Clarisse said as she brought Elaine her third drink. “We do good business on Tuesdays. It generally peters out by Thursday and Friday, because the boys are out of money. But Saturday is payday, so things really pick up, and then the mines’re closed on Sunday, so everybody winds up here to drink the world into a better place.”

As the evening wore on, Elaine even began to enjoy herself. She had never had as gracious an audience as these miners, and in truth, no one gave her cause for offense. In fact, they seemed to view her with a measure of respect. The men never called her by her first name like the other girls but always politely said “Miss Keefer” when they asked for a particular song or asked if they could buy her another drink.

She was deeply satisfied when she closed the piano for the night, while Charlene and the others said good-bye to the last men. It was long before closing time, but the first workers went down at four in the morning, and the work underground was not without its dangers. No one wanted to risk a hangover.

“But wait for the weekend. Then the booze flows in streams,” Charlene declared.

The next day, Elaine walked over to retrieve Banshee, and the stable owner complimented her on her piano playing. He had stopped by the pub briefly and listened. He no longer wanted payment.

“No, forget it. But let me have three songs, all right? And you’re not allowed to laugh at me when I begin to howl at ‘Wild Mountain Thyme.’”

The tailor, too, had heard about Elaine’s new job and was delighted to take her measurements for a dress.

“Not too wide a neckline? But that will mean fewer tips, miss. You should know that,” he teased her. “And you have to have a little lace. You don’t want to look like a nun.”

But Elaine would have liked to look like just that when she ran into Mrs. Tanner on Main Street. After looking her over from head
to toe, she did not deign to greet Elaine as she passed. Elaine could understand that to some extent. Even she did not feel right in Annie’s clothes. On the street in the bright light of day, the dress looked much more salacious than it had the night before in the pub, where all the girls were similarly attired. Her own clothes were not yet dry, however, and it was raining again. She would eventually need a few new dresses, but she was considerably more optimistic about getting them now. Three dollars a week was not much, but the side money from the “whiskey” would bring in almost twice that.

That Saturday evening was quite demanding. The pub was full to bursting. It looked like every miner from far and wide, as well as several businessmen and workers from town, had found their way there.

“Even more than usual!” Madame Clarisse rejoiced. “It seems these rascals prefer music to dogfights.”

Elaine learned that the other coal-miner pub in town specialized in entertaining its customers with gambling. Dogfights and cockfights took place in the courtyard every weekend. Elaine’s stomach turned at the mere thought. Though a few bookmakers did some business at Madame Clarisse’s, they placed bets on dog and horse races in Dunedin, Wellington, and even England.

The men sang, drank, and danced on Saturday until closing time—if they did not fall over first, that is. Several customers approached Elaine with unmistakable intent, but she firmly rejected every intrusion, and the men accepted her answer without complaint. Whether Madame Clarisse’s admonishing gaze or the look in Elaine’s eyes, which flitted between panic and rage, was responsible for their leaving her in peace, she did not know.

Instead, the revelers soon began to take the girl at the piano for some kind of mother confessor. Whenever Elaine took a break, a young man would appear beside her, wanting more than anything to pour his—usually tragic—life story out to her. As the evening wore on, the confessions became more openhearted. Elaine vacillated
between disdain and sympathy when lanky Charlie from Blackpool told her between sobs that he did not want to hit his wife, but it just came over him, while Jimmy from Wales, a bear of a man, revealed in a halting voice that he was afraid of the dark and died a thousand deaths every day in the mine.

“And the noise, Miss Keefer, the noise. Every sound echoes through the shafts, you know. You hear every blow of the pickax a dozen times. I sometimes think my eardrums are going to burst. Play ‘Salley Gardens’ one more time, Miss Keefer. I want to listen to it close, so maybe I’ll hear it down below.”

By the end of the evening, Elaine’s head was booming, too, and when the men had finally left, she drank a whiskey with Madame Clarisse and the girls.

“But just the one, girls, I don’t want you to smell like booze in church tomorrow.”

Elaine almost had to laugh, but Madame Clarisse really did lead her flock to Sunday service, the whores following along with sunken heads like a line of chicks behind a hen. It did not seem quite right to the priest, a Methodist, but he could hardly turn the penitent sinners away. Elaine was glad to be able to wear her riding dress, whose neckline closed high up, and even dared to look Mrs. Tanner in the eye.