Elizabeth Bear: Karen Memory

Their boots crunched in the glass outside. He couldn’t resist a parting shot, but he called it over his shoulder, and it didn’t so much as shift Madame Damnable’s nighttime braid against her shoulder. “You ain’t heard the last of this, Alice.”

“For tonight, I damn well think I have.”

He took two more steps away. “And it’s Hôtel Ma Cherie, you stupid slag!”

I wrote down in my journal that the big grandfather clock in the parlor chimed three as he slammed the doors behind him, but I don’t remember now what it did that particular night. The clock is a particular project of Miss Lizzie’s. She’s clockworked the thing up so it has about a hundred different mechanicals and figurines and cuckoos in it and near as many chimes and bells. The gears have some kind of offset that makes ’em perform different combinations of actions and sounds every time. Miss Lizzie says it ain’t really random, but it sure seems that way. I do remember that one time she had it playing “Time Was When Love and I Were Well Acquainted” off a piano roll, so if you like, that’s what you can imagine.

She probably ought to get her inventor’s license and pay the city its Mad Science Tax — which is less than the sewing machine tax, actually — but that’s a hard life for a woman, too. And I’d hate to see her leave Madame’s house.

The chimes died down, and over the last echo we finally heard the boots on the broken ladder. Madame Damnable breathed out and let herself look around at us. “Well,” she said cheerfully, “what a mess. Effie, fetch a bucket. Miss Bethel, put that gun away and find the broom, honey. Karen, you go tell Crispin when they’re done with the Chinese girl he’s to come down here and board up this window and sweep up the glass. He’ll just have to sit by the door until we can get in a locksmith. Miss Francina, you go after Beatrice and tell her we won’t need the constable.”

Miss Francina bit her lip. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

Madame Damnable’s hand glittered with diamonds and rubies when she flipped it. “I’m sure. Go on, sweeties, scoot.” She paused. “Oh, and ladies? That was quick thinking. Well done.”

* * *

When I came back up the grand stair with coffee in the china company service, the sickroom door was still closed, but I didn’t hear any screaming, or any steam engine chugging through it, which could only be a good sign. If Merry Lee was still under the knife, she would of been screaming and the machine would of been whining and wheezing away, and if she had died of it I thought the girl would be screaming instead. So I rapped kind of light on the frame, on account of if Crispin or Miss Lizzie was busy in there I didn’t want to startle them. It took me two tries to make my hand move, I was still that ashamed of myself from downstairs.

Crispin’s voice floated back. “It’s safe to come through.” So I set the tray on my hip and turned the knob left-handed, slow in case there was somebody behind the door. The sickroom’s different from our company bedrooms. There’s no wallpaper and the sheets ain’t fancy, and the bedstead and floor and all is just painted white. It makes it easy to bleach or paint over again if there’s a bad mess, and you’d rather paint stained wood than throw out carpets with puke or pus or crusted blood in them any day.

The knife machine kind of hangs in one corner on a frame, like a shiny spider with all black rubber belts between the gears to make the limbs dance. It’s one of only three or four in the city, and it needs somebody skilled as Miss Lizzie to run it, but it don’t hesitate — which when you’re cutting flesh is a blessing — and it don’t balk at some operations like other doctors might. And you always know its arms and tools is clean, because Crispin boils ’em after every use.

When I stepped inside, that whole white room looked like it had been splashed about with red paint, and none too carefully. Crispin looked up from washing his hands in a pink-tinged basin with clotted blood floating like strings of tide-pool slime around the edges. Merry Lee was laid sleeping or insensible in the bed — on her side, clean sheets tucked around her waist and a man’s white button shirt on her backward so you could get to the dressings on her back. There was a mask over her face, and Crispin’s other big enamel-knobbed brass machine that handles all those sickbed things that the steam-powered knife machine doesn’t was kind of wheezing and whirring around her, its clockworks all wound up fresh and humming. The bloody sheets were heaped up in the basket and the Indian girl was perched on the chair by the head of the bed, holding Merry’s sallow hand clutched between her olive ones and rocking back and forth just a tiny bit, like she was trying with all her might to hold herself still.

I picked my way between smears of blood. Crispin looked up, grinning instead of grim, so I knowed Merry Lee was going to be just fine unless the blood poisoning or the gas gangrene got her. “Karen honey, you are a delivering angel.” He nodded to the tray. “This here is Priya. She helped me change the sheets.”

I got a good look at her and at Merry Lee while I set the coffee on the cleanest bureau. Merry was a lot younger than I would of expected from the stories, fresh faced and sweet as a babe in her sleep and maybe seventeen, eighteen — not more than a year or two older than me.

Given she’s been a thorn in the side of Peter Bantle and the rest of those cribhouse pimps for longer than I’ve been working, she must of started pretty young. Which ain’t no surprise, given some of Peter Bantle’s girls — and boys, too — ain’t no older than your sister, and given that before she got away from him Merry Lee is supposed to have been one of them.

The Indian girl had dried her hair and Crispin or somebody must of given her a clean shift. She must of warmed up some, because she was sitting in the blankets like a nest instead of wrapped up in them.

Now I could see her arms and legs and neck, she was skinnier than anybody ought to be who wasn’t starved to death. I sat there watching the knobs of her wrists and elbows stick out and the tendon strings move in the backs of her hands. I guess sailors and merchantmen don’t care so much if the slatterns and stargazers they visit are pretty so long as they’re cheap, and it’s dark in a whore’s crib anyway; plus, I guess if Peter Bantle underfeeds his girls they’re easy keepers.

Still, as I sat there looking at her, her tangled hair with the blood drying in it and her long face and her cheekbones all sharp under skin the color of an old, old brass statue’s, it more and more griped me thinking on it. And it more and more griped me that I’d been going to let Bantle have her.

That weren’t like me at all.

Unless it was, I thought, sickened, and I was just making comforting noises at myself now.

There was plenty coffee in the pot, cream and sugar, too, and I’d brought up cups for everybody. But it didn’t look like the Indian girl — Priya — was going to let go of Merry Lee’s hand and pour herself a cup.

So I did it for her, loaded it up with cream and sugar, and balanced all but one of the biscuits I’d brought along on the saucer when I carried it to her.

She looked up surprised when I touched her hand to put the saucer in it, like she might of pulled away. She weren’t any older than me, either, and this close I could see all the bruises on her under the brown of her skin. Layers of them. There was red fresh scrapes that would blossom into something spectacular. That might of been from dragging Merry Lee bleeding across half of Rapid City. There was black-purple ones with red mottles like pansy blossoms. And there was every shade of green and yellow, and you could pick out the hand- and fingerprints among ’em. And the red skinned-off slick-looking burns from Peter Bantle’s electric glove, and some white scars, too, which made me angry and sick in all sorts of ways I couldn’t even find half the words to tell you.