The Kingdom of Bones (23 page)

THIRTY-TWO

I
n his suite of rooms on a second-floor corner of Murphy’s Hotel, the young man known as Jules Patenotre was contemplating his shoes. He had them all out in a line, and was trying to decide which pair to wear today. All had been burnished until the leather shone. Not by his own hand, of course. Twice a week he had the houseboy come up and shine them while he watched. Watching the houseboy distracted his mind. Jules Patenotre’s mind had a tendency to race and, if he did not take care to guide it, to seek out unexpected torments with which to entertain him.

Hotel living suited him, though. His needs were taken care of at the ring of a bell, and he was relieved of any need to keep a personal staff. He’d occupied these rooms for more than two years, ever since the Jefferson fire had destroyed his lodgings—and all his old shoes—there. No one had died, but the place had been gutted. They were rebuilding the Jefferson now. If this place should happen to burn down, he might move back in there.

When a knock came at the door, he made a quick decision and stepped into a pair of English Oxfords. He left the rest for the maid to deal with. By now, he’d have expected the visitor to have entered on a passkey. They had not, which suggested that it was someone other than hotel staff. He was expecting no one. This was awkward—one of the drawbacks of having no valet or manservant to deal with intrusion. He went to open the door himself.

A man stood there in the hotel corridor, his hat in his hands. He had a Slavic look to him. His head was shaven close, the gray stubble showing.

“Well?” Jules said after waiting for a few moments. “You knocked at my door. Do you intend to speak?”

“Sir,” the man said, and seemed to stop there. Jules studied him for a moment, and then recognized him.

“You’re Mary D’Alroy’s man,” Jules prompted. “I saw you at the Academy of Music.”

“I am sent to inform you.”

Again, Jules waited. “Of what?” he said.

“Miss D’Alroy—”

“Is a wonderful employer? That’s very loyal of you.”

He tried again. “Miss D’Alroy—”

“Has been discovered having carnal knowledge of an ape?” At that, Jules saw the man blush. “Forgive me,” he said. “Go on.”

“Miss D’Alroy told me to tell you. She offers that which you were seeking to collect.”

“Ah,” Jules said. He glanced to left and right, to see if they could be overheard. It would seem not. Without a hint of a smile and in a slightly lower voice he said, “And what must I do to collect it, then?”

“That I cannot say. But if you will follow me, I will take you to her.”

“Oh. A jaunt. Do I need to bring money? Or is Miss D’Alroy a philanthropist today?”

“Any gift you care to make would be welcome. But mainly you would be obliging the lady.”

“I’ll bring money, then. Just in case she likes her obligations in hard cash.”

The man dipped his head in a kind of subservient affirmation.

Jules found the pleasure of mockery growing very thin. The man was doing his best. Jules said, “You find this difficult, don’t you? Do you disapprove of your mistress?”

The man said nothing.

“We all have to do things we do not care for,” Jules said. “Sometimes due to circumstance. And sometimes when our nature demands it. But take heart from my example. If a shame remains a secret…then in what sense is it a shame? Wait there.” He pointed to a chair that stood with a side table and a jug of fresh flowers on the other side of the corridor. “Sit if you want to.”

The man was still standing when Jules emerged, fifteen minutes later, fully dressed and ready to go. As they descended the stairway to the foyer, Jules said, “Walk on ahead of me and wait for me outside. When you see me coming out of the hotel, set off and don’t look back. I’ll be there behind you.”

They arrived in the foyer as strangers. The silent one was on his way out of the main doors as Jules approached the counter.

The clerk said, “Good morning, Mister Patenotre.”

“Good morning, Charles,” Jules said. “I need my box.”

“Of course, sir.”

The clerk reached under the counter and brought out the security ledger for him to sign. Once that was done, he handed over a key on a large ring.

Jules took the key around to the strong room near the counter where the guest boxes were. It was small, but gave privacy to residents so they could access their valuables without having them on public display. In the room was a bank of metal doors, each with two locks. The guest’s key operated one of these but no thief could use it without also signing out the hotel’s master, which opened the other. Jules turned both keys, swung open the door, and pulled out the long, shallow tray behind it. The room was reckoned to be proof against fire, and Jules preferred it to any bank. A bank expected you to keep to its hours; he was happier in a place that respected his own.

As he counted out some bills, he found that his vision was blurring and his hands trembling slightly. He stopped, until this settled. It was only anticipation, he knew, but he was annoyed at himself. His body was a rebellious servant, and often it disgusted him.

He dropped the house key off at the desk and went out into the street. The man sent by Mary d’Alroy was standing some way along the street, by a store window under a striped canvas awning. He saw Jules nod to him as he was approaching. When he turned and moved off, Jules followed.

The man walked for more than a mile. The sidewalks were busy until they turned north of Broad Street, into the area where most of the saloons were. These streets were almost deserted. It was too early in the day for most Richmond men to be out drinking, while no decent Richmond lady would want to be seen around here at all. In their gored skirts and leg-of-mutton sleeves, with parasols to shade them from the sun and preserve their unpainted, pale-and-interesting complexions, Richmond women tended toward lives of classic southern propriety.

On the face of it, at least.

They turned into a street where every building had been boarded and marked for demolition. One of the railroad companies buying up the land, at a guess. They’d already built a new terminus on Main Street, and the development wasn’t going to stop there. These were mostly low-rise warehouse and office buildings but across the end of the street, its box office gutted and its marquee stripped to the bones, there stood the dead shell of a variety theater.

They entered it down a rubbish-strewn alleyway to the side, and the shaven-headed man secured the door after them. As far as Jules could see, the interior had been stripped of most of its fittings and anything else of value, but was dry and intact. At the back of the empty auditorium, they ascended to a suite of offices above the foyer. Here there was a wide lounge with an empty fireplace. As they entered it, a woman—Mary D’Alroy’s other servant—rose to her feet. A moment later, Mary D’Alroy herself appeared in one of the doorways.

She was dressed in a plain off-white linen shift. Her hair was up and her arms were uncovered. She looked as if she ought to be barefoot on a riverbank somewhere, rather than walking the board floors of this ruin in the middle of a great southern city.

“You’d better come in,” she said, and turned away. He followed her into the room.

“Close the door,” she said.

He did as instructed, looking all around. There was a smell of old dust and horsehair. Light came from a skylight above, and through gaps in the thick boards that had been nailed across the windows. There was a mattress over in the corner, raised up a few inches from the floor on a wooden pallet. Alongside that were a chair, a table that didn’t match the chair, and a water jug and basin on the table.

Knowing a squat when he saw one, Jules said, “I see now why you keep your address private.”

The woman who called herself Mary D’Alroy ignored the comment. She said, “Before we begin, there’s something you have to do for me.”

Her tone began to stir something in him.

“Command me,” he said.

“
Before
we begin,” she corrected him. “Pen and paper. Over there on the table.”

He moved to the table and saw that she’d laid out some sheets of good writing paper and a self-filling pen.

She said, “You keep a suite of rooms at Murphy’s. I imagine your standing with them must be good.”

“You want a letter of recommendation.”

“I want to move to somewhere better than this. But hotel managers are a suspicious crew.”

“Miss D’Alroy, you could charm a dog off of a butcher’s wagon. I can’t imagine the manager who’d turn you away.”

“Write me the letter,” she said. “Then we can discuss what you’re here for.”

He drew up the chair, sat himself down, picked up the pen, and then thought for a few moments before starting to write. After dating the note, he wrote quickly and without hesitation. When it was done, he picked up the paper and read it aloud.

“To whom it may concern. Please extend every courtesy to Miss Mary D’Alroy during her time of residence. She is a personal friend of the Patenotre family, formerly of Iberville, Louisiana.”

“Signed?”

“If you’re happy with the wording.” He added his signature in full. Then she took it from him and read it for herself.

“This is very impressive,” she said. “And I have to say I’m honored. The entire Patenotre family?”

He made a wide gesture. “You’re looking at them,” he said.

“No other relatives survive?”

“Once upon a time we were one of the biggest plantation families on the Mississippi. Two hundred slaves and three thousand acres. After the war—slaves all freed, the crops on fire, and just widders and children left to watch ’em burn. I’m the last of the line. Well, I had two choices. I could spend my days in debt like my daddy, trying to hold together something that won’t be held. Or I could do what I did. Which was to sell off whatever I could, borrow against the rest, and start spending the last of the fortune. When it’s gone it’s gone, and so are we all.”

“That’s a sad story.”

“You should hear it with a violin.”

He was still on the chair and she was standing close beside him. As she leaned over to slide the letter under a green book, she brushed against his shoulder. There was no mistaking that she was naked under the shift. In an instant, it was as if every fine hair on his skin was alive and bristling with static.

She said, “It must be very hard to carry the disappointments of all those generations on one set of shoulders. Stand up.” He stood, the chair scraping back on the boards. “Does it help if you harm yourself?”

“It calms me down,” he admitted.

“Let me see.”

He hesitated for a moment. Then he took off his jacket and vest, and put both on the chair behind him. He pulled the links from his cuffs and the stud from his collar and unbuttoned his shirt. He dropped the suspenders that held up his pants and then pulled shirt and singlet together over his head.

He stood with his hands down by his sides, not meeting her eyes, knowing that she was studying him, sensing her gaze like the track of a burning glass across his skin. She was looking at his scars. Some of them were fresh, and not yet healed.

“I got more than this down below,” he said.

“Show me.”

“Please,” he said. “Lock the door first.”

There was no key, but the door had a bolt. By the time that she’d crossed the room, slid the bolt, and turned around to face him again, he was stripped to the skin from his head to his socks.

“Are you cold?” she said.

“No,” he said. He was shivering, but he was not cold.

She came back and walked all the way around him, giving him a close inspection. It was almost as if she was taking an inventory of every mark and scar, noting every object, sharp and otherwise, that he’d managed to shove under his skin and which remained lodged there. He was no Adonis, but he was hard-muscled and thin. She couldn’t miss the physical evidence of his anticipation.

He said, “How did you spy me out?”

From behind him, she said, “Like always seems to know like. Who can say what the signals are?”

“That won’t explain it. My instincts aren’t always good. I paid a woman in Iberville to horsewhip me. When we got to it, she said it was a disgusting thing to ask a Christian woman to do. She was one of the reasons I had to leave town.”

“Only one of the reasons?”

“The main one.”

She stopped and ran a fingertip lightly along a weal that crossed his belly, just above the pubic bone.

“And now you’re here,” she said. “Risking it all again. Is it the pain or the danger that you most enjoy?”

“You are nothing like her,” he said. “I do not believe you would expose me.”

“But I am a Christian woman, too. Do you think you deserve me?”

“I’ll be damned if I do,” he said.

“Very good,” she said, and then turned serious again. “How would you like to feel clean?” she said. “Really clean for the first time in your life? How would you like to feel cleaner than you’ve ever felt before? That’s something I can do for you. Kneel.”

It took him a moment to realize that she’d instructed him. He knelt. She went over to the mattress and, with her back to him, drew off the shift in one single flowing motion. The body that she uncovered was long, lean, and rounded in its contours, pale and flawless, as white and smooth as newly worked marble. She folded up the shift and leaned over to put it in a safe place. She was not undressing for erotic effect. She was stripping for work.

She turned to him. She had the body of an alabaster Venus, toned and taut and entirely without blemish. His chest tightened so that he was hardly breathing.

“You need to know something,” she said. “You should understand that this next hour will spoil you for all others. Perhaps even for all time. You can back out now before it’s too late.”

“No,” he said, and the sound almost didn’t come out.

“Very well, then,” she said, and she turned away again for a moment and picked up something that had been lying out of sight alongside the low bed.

“You wanted to pay me for a kiss?” she said. “Then kiss this.”

She walked across the room toward him.