Mercedes Lackey: The Fire Rose

"Professor, that bridge is one I would not cross under any circumstances. I had rather take Charon's boat than the Ivorssons' offer." She set her chin resolutely, but could not help a shudder of fear. Charon's boat ... it could come to that. She had contemplated suicide that very night, alone with her despair in the echoing house. She had more than enough laudanum in her valise to suffice....

But now the Professor's expression turned-calculating? Definitely! She had seen him look precisely like this when he was about to prove some obscure point, or had found a new research trail. She felt interest stirring in her, a feeling she had not experienced in days.

"I wanted to ascertain whether or not you had any other prospects," he said, quietly, but still with that calculating look in his eyes. "I have had a-well, a rather peculiar communication from a man in the West. It is so peculiar that I would not have advised that you consider it, unless you had no other recourse."

Now her interest was surely piqued. "Professor, what on earth are you hinting at?" she asked, sitting up a little straighter.

He reached into his coat pocket. "Here," he said, handing her a thick, cream-colored envelope. "Read this for yourself."

Obeying, she opened the envelope and set aside the thick railway ticket, and read the single sheet of thick vellum contained therein with growing perplexity. "This-this is certainly strange," she said, after a moment, folding the sheet and returning it to its paper prison. "Very strange." She slipped the railway ticket to San Francisco in beside it.

Cathcart nodded. "I've had the man looked into, and from what I can find out, he's genuine enough. He's something of a rail baron on the West Coast and lives outside of San Francisco. The ticket is genuine; I telegraphed to his office to be sure that the letter had truly come from him, and the offer is genuine also. He's said to be as rich as Croesus and as reclusive as a stylite, and that's all anyone knows of him. Other than the fact that he has phenomenal luck."

"He might have been describing me, precisely," Rose said aloud, feeling again that little thrill of apprehension, as if she was about to cross a threshold into something from which there would be no escape and no return.

"That is what was so peculiar, that and the offer itself." Cathcart flushed. "I thought of all manner of other possibilities; one does, after all-"

"Of course," she said vaguely. "White slavery, opium dens-" She noticed then that Cathcart's color had deepened to a dark scarlet with embarrassment, and giggled; she could not help herself. "Really, Professor! Did you think I was that sheltered? After all, it was you who let me read the unexpurgated Ovid, and Sappho's poems, and-"

She stopped, for fear that the Professor would have a stroke there and then. It never failed to amaze her that the scholars about her could discuss the hetairai of the Greeks, Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, and the loves of the girls on the Isle of Lesbos, and then blush with shame when one even mentioned the existence of certain establishments not more than a dozen blocks from the University.

"Don't decide at once," he urged her, swiftly changing the subject. "I'll take you to Mrs. Abernathy's boarding house; rest and think for a few days. This should not be an act of impulse."

"Of course not," she replied-

But she already felt the heavy, cold hand of Fate upon her sleeve. She would go to this man, this Jason Cameron. She would take his job.

After all, she had no choice.

Rose woke with a shock, startled out of disturbing dreams by sounds she did not recognize. For a moment, as she glanced around, she panicked with disorientation, her heart racing with fear as she groped for her glasses. This was not her room! Nothing was where it should be-why was that rectangle of fight at the foot of her bed, and not off to the side-and why was there only one, not two? Why were the walls white, and what was that huge, looming object at her left?

And why weren't her glasses on the stand beside the bed, where they should be?

Then, as the bed beneath her creaked in a way that her bed never had, the steadying knowledge of where she was and why she was here came flooding back.

Nothing was where it should be, because she was not at home, and never would see her room again. She was in a narrow, iron-framed bed in Mrs. Abernathy's boarding house for respectable young ladies.

Rose had met a few of them last night, and had immediately been reassured as to the solidity of this establishment. Several of the ladies were nurses; one worked at the Hull House with the indigent. Another was a typist for Professor Cathcart at the University. Her own shabby-genteel clothing fit in perfectly here, giving her no cause for embarrassment.

Mrs. Abernathy was a stolid woman who had not been at all disturbed when they appeared on her doorstep after dark. She had taken in Professor Cathcart's whispered explanation and the money he pressed into her hand with a nod, and had sent Rose to this room on the second floor, just off the common parlor. Her trunk was still downstairs in a storage closet, but she hardly needed what was in it. She'd brought up her carpetbag and valise herself, and had attempted to be sociable with some of the other boarders, but fatigue and strain had taken their toll, and she had soon sought the room and the bed.

She stopped groping for her glasses, preferring the vague shapes of furniture and windows to the stark reality of this sad little room. She closed her eyes again, and lay quietly, listening to the sounds that had awakened her. Down below, someone, presumably Mrs. Abernathy, was cooking breakfast; from the scents that reached her, it was oatmeal porridge and strong coffee, cheap and filling. Other girls in tiny rooms on either side of her were moving about. By the very faint light, it could not be much past dawn-but these young women were working girls, and their day began at dawn and ended long after sunset, every day except Sunday.

That was when the full impact of her situation hit home. Within the week, she would join them. She had not realized just how privileged her life had been, even with all the economies she and her father had practiced these last several years. She had always been something of a night-owl, preferring to study in the late hours when she would be undisturbed; her classes had always been scheduled in the afternoons, allowing her to enjoy leisurely mornings. Now she would obey someone else's schedule, whether or not it happened to suit her.

Everything was changed; her life, as she had known it, was over. It lay buried with her father.

The rest of her life stretched before her, devoid of all the things that she cared for-the joys of scholarship, the thrill of academic pursuit, the intellectual companionship of fellow scholars. She would be a servant in someone else's house, or a hireling in someone's employ, subject to their will, their whims. Very likely she would never again have access to a resource like the University Library. Her life, which had been defined by books, would now be defined by her position below the salt.

Professor Cathcart had insisted that at she think Cameron's offer over carefully before deciding, but her options were narrower than he thought; the choices were two, really. Take Jason Cameron's job (or search for another like it) and become a servant in the household of a wealthy, and probably autocratic man-or take a position teaching in a public school.

The latter actually offered fewer opportunities. It was unlikely that she would find such a public school position in Chicago; there were many aspiring teachers, and few jobs for them. She would have to seek employment out in the country, perhaps even in the scarcely-settled West or the backward South, where she would be an alien and an outsider.