Elizabeth Bear: Karen Memory

Miss Bethel and Miss Francina had let me sleep right through it, too, which only happens if you’re sick.

I’m not sure the sleep had left me feeling any the better. My nightshirt was stuck down with sweat despite the chill by the window. I felt tacky and bloated and sore like my courses was coming on, though it wasn’t time for that yet. I smoothed out my diary best I could and pressed the book out open under the ticking to draw some wet out of it, but I couldn’t get the wrinkle out of the page. Then I washed my face in tepid water from the basin and found pencil lead all over the rag when I was done. I combed and corralled my hair and found a clean chemise. All part of the routine.

When I finished it, I finally let myself think about the night before, about Effie and Crispin and Merry Lee. And Peter Bantle.

And Priya.

I started to shake all over again and had to sit back down.

By the time I made it into petticoats and a country dress — I wasn’t fighting my way into stays and a bustle alone — and groped my way down them narrow stairs, it was late enough that I figured I’d best avoid the parlor, me without makeup nor a company dress and all. There might be men out there any time after breakfast — luncheon I suppose it was, for some. I came down all prepared to sneak through the hall back to the kitchen and annoy Connie for whatever the news might be.

But the double doors from the hall into the parlor stood open, and the outside doors was shut. The grandfather clock by the library door said 2:20, so I hadn’t really slept all that long. The rugs Merry Lee’d bled on were missing, replaced for now by some slightly worn ones that usually lived in the hall upstairs. Signor was tea-cozied in the armchair by the fire, though — the blue-and-lemon settee that I think he knows makes his eyes look brighter — and he blinked at me in recognition.

Crispin crouched down between his knees with a whisk and a pan chasing crumbs of ruby glass — you’d think they’d of all fallen outside from the gun blast, but maybe that only happens in detective stories. Street noise drifted down. Some of it sounded like chanting, and I wondered if we was being picketed by those placard-waving hypocrites of the Women’s Christian Anti-Prostitution and Soiled Dove Rescue League again — though it seemed like I was mostly hearing male voices. Crispin hadn’t gotten around to boarding the broken bits over yet, though his hammer hung in a belt loop and some boards lay across the outstretched arms of the unoccupied sewing machine to his left. It was a great brass armature, gears and pistons, every flat surface ornamented with curlicued gold-chased plates and carved plaques of ivory and shell cameo. A cast-iron door on the fabric coffer in its chest read: SINGER SEWING MACHINE COMPANY.

If you’re going to pay fifty dollars tax per week per head on something you won’t much use, Madame Damnable figures it might as well be pretty.

The sun was high enough and at the right angle to trickle in dusty rays through the broke-open fan transom. In its better shine, even down here at the bottom of the well, you could see where Effie’s shotgun pellets had chewed up the fancy woodwork over the door. The light picked out rusty tones in the curls around Crispin’s pate — and a sprinkle of tight-coiled gray — before bouncing up across the room to sparkle on Miss Bethel’s crystal, on the looking glasses in the back bar, and off the gold threads in the striped silk bodice Miss Bethel wore under her starched white apron, too.

She stood behind her bar, fitting the pieces of her shotgun back together after cleaning and oiling. I felt a lick of shame — Effie or me should of seen to it last night — but I reckoned it was too late now. I stopped in the doorway beside the short leg of the bar, though, and waited for her to notice me.

Miss Bethel had curly dark red hair and a spray of freckles across her turned-up nose, and though she was born in the United States, she looked as Irish as the potato famine. To my knowing, nobody ever got out of her what she was doing out here in the territories, but she was one of the ones who went to church every Sunday. She had a soft-seeming sweet round face given the lie by her chin and her disposition. Though she weren’t big nor broad, she wore enough skirts to make up for it, in a silk striped between emerald moiré and white with emerald figures. A long fall of cream lace dripped from her cuff at each elbow. The gleaming back bar — pride of Madame Damnable’s and in fact the whole waterfront district of Rapid City — dwarfed her, but that don’t signify. It would of still dwarfed her if she were Miss Francina’s size: a great carved cliff of mahogany inlaid in borders with jet and ivory, it was figured with wiry satyrs, centaurs with two broad chests apiece, plump cupids, and embonpoint nymphs with their great spirals of carved hair like carousel ponies’ manes. They was all nude, and I’d seen men take upward of seven minutes just to order a double brandy at that bar, so taken were they with those voluptuous carved bellies and thighs.

Miss Bethel finished oiling the rails of the bolt and slid it into place with a greasy click. She frowned over her work, nodding. When she set the shotgun down and noticed me, the frown stayed. It weren’t no welcoming expression. But she tipped her head to the rack of the bottles against the spotless looking glass set in the carvings behind her and said, “Do you want a bit of sherry, Karen dear?”

“I’d better have a bit of breakfast first,” I said. I didn’t feel hungry, but food would likely be wise. Eat when you can, my father used to say. You never know when can will turn to can’t. “I should of cleaned the gun. I’m sorry.”

Crispin glanced over his shoulder and nodded at me. I nodded back. Signor ignored us all like a sultan.

“Fear not,” she said, and bent her knees to drop it once more across its hooks under the bar. “You’d other things on your mind. Both of the colored girls are fine, by the way — Merry Lee hasn’t woken, but Lizzie says she’s sleeping naturally and hasn’t taken a fever. The other girl won’t leave her side. Connie brought her up a cot and more food.”

Miss Bethel can call Miss Lizzie just Lizzie. I’d never dare.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad you wasn’t angry about the gun.”

“Weren’t angry, dear,” she said, and handed me the glass of sherry anyway. “Connie set you aside some breakfast, I think. You’d better go see.”

* * *

In the kitchen, I found that Connie hadn’t just set me aside some breakfast — she’d laid plans to make me some special. I set the sherry glass down on the table to wait until after I got some food in my head, and in the meantime I sipped the big mug of coffee she gave me. We save the pretty coffee cups that don’t hold but a mouthful for the customers. She also gave me an even bigger mug of buttermilk kept cool in the cistern, since we was too close to the Sound to have a well. As soon as I tasted that buttermilk, I realized that “didn’t feel hungry” was a lie: my stomach growled like a pit dog, and Connie shot me a sharp sideways grin from over her smoking black fry pan.

Connie was medium everything: medium size, medium color, medium featured, medium aged, medium bosomed … with a temper that never much varied up or down. But she had enough energy for three women. She bustled around for ten minutes and dished me up bread soaked in eggs and fried in dripping with molasses and butter on top. The salmon weren’t running anymore, but there was a big piece of smoked Chinook with it, sweet and flaky and splashed with dill and cider vinegar.

It’s plain farm food, sure, but I’m a plain farm girl. I like it better than the poached eggs and hollandaise and asparagus and whatnot we serve to the tricks at a 500 percent markup. They come in special for the food, and Connie’s in charge of the maids as serves in the dining room and changes our sheets. Those girls don’t live in the house, and a lot of ’em is younger than Madame would employ in a horizontal position anyhow.