Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

There was never any forcing of boarders to stay if they wanted to leave. But every woman was searched foot to mouth before she exited through the always-locked front door, taking with her only what she’d brought into the house. Rarely did a woman depart with any money after her accounts had been settled, and even a trip to the dry-goods merchant or postal office earned a close inspection.

The enforcer in this was Mrs. Landry’s German. The German spoke halting English and was never tempted by bribes of any kind, either flesh or money. High-voiced and sloe-eyed as the German was, house gossip had it that he had somehow been gelded as a boy and thus had no weakness for women, even though he shared a bed nightly with Mrs. Landry. He also had fists the size of Easter hams.

Mrs. Landry’s bedroom was off the parlor closest to the door, and the trick for Lucinda would be slipping through the door without waking the pair of them. The woman was a notoriously wakeful sleeper and, it was said, could tell the number of times each of her girls used the chamber pots from the squeaking of the floorboards overhead.

For days Lucinda had been greasing the lock and hinges of the door with a feather covered in lard, and she carried in her stays a key made from a mold of the German’s own key, a mold she’d obtained by pressing the key into a thin brick of soap hidden in a small tin box.

The German always kept his key on a chain fastened to his belt. But it had not been difficult to distract him with a turn at cards. Lucinda had sat near him, her head bent towards his, the better to patiently teach him the rules of faro. She spoke encouragingly to him, laughing and gesturing extravagantly as she deftly slipped the key from his pocket, pressing it into the soap, and then passed it back into his pocket again before the hand had played out.

She didn’t know whether the copied key would even turn the lock, but she would get only a few tries at the door before Mrs. Landry would wake thinking the oily rattling was the cleaning woman come early.

Bending her knees, she dipped down to grasp the top of her bag, and then slowly raised herself again to standing. She pushed away from the bedroom door and used the forward momentum to grasp at the wooden finial at the top of the stair rail. She placed both hands on the railing to steady herself, the bag’s handles looped over one arm, and stepped carefully down the stairs, riser to riser, the carpet absorbing the sounds of her progress. At the bottom of the stairs, she rested a moment, breathing through her mouth, waiting for the play of stippled lights inside her eyes to subside. A renewed wave of nausea came and went. The scrabbling of a mouse, or a rat, settling in the walls sounded faintly and then stopped.

At the door, she pressed her forehead against the wood, and the key slid easily into the lock, but she paused one last time to listen for any movement within or without the house. There were no sounds coming off the streets, and she turned the key soundlessly, and felt the heavy bolt slip open.

Through a narrow space, she eased out, and then shut the door gently behind her. She inserted the key in the outside lock and slipped the bolt back into place. Dropping the key into the pocket of her day coat, she turned and walked, carefully at first, and then more briskly, southwards, away from the direction the cleaning woman would come.

Past Jody Strange’s sporting house and gaming parlor, she turned left onto Fourth Street, unmindful of keeping her head down or veil drawn. The streets were yet empty and hollow-feeling, as she’d known they would be; the girls of Hell’s Half Acre of Fort Worth and their stay-over clients were still unconscious. After the cleaning woman arrived, Mrs. Landry would likely go back to her bed until noon, and it might be another hour after that before Lucinda was discovered missing from the house. But by then she would be several hours gone.

She followed Fourth Street to Rusk, then turned southward again, towards the better hotels and saloons closer to the coach depot and wagon yards. September had been dry, and, instead of the usual sucking mud oozing through the pine planking, the only thing caking her yellow boots was a fine scrim of dust.

She entered the Commerce Hotel, sat in the lobby, and ordered tea and a piece of bread. The clock behind the clerk’s head struck the half hour past seven. At eight o’clock the coach would come.

She smiled wanly at the clerk, making sure he took note of her face, and asked if the coach to Dallas would be on time. A few pleasantries were exchanged, the clerk being made to believe that Lucinda would be visiting family there, so that when the German came looking for her, and he would certainly come, he’d be told she was in Dallas, and Lucinda would gain some much-needed time.

She was in fact taking the coach beyond Dallas, through Waxahachie, Hillsboro, Waco, and finally to Hearne; over one hundred and fifty miles. At Hearne she would board the rail line to Houston, a hundred and twenty miles farther on.

She had begun to feel better, only a tightening at her temples and a kind of burning sensation at the back of her skull to prove she’d had the fit. She finished her tea and bread and paid for them with a few coins drawn from a delicate embroidered pouch. When she replaced the small pouch in the carpetbag, her hand instinctively felt for the reassuring weight of a much larger pouch filled with a comfortable sum of money taken from Mrs. Landry’s cache under the floorboards of her room.

Lucinda had discovered the hidden place only recently, and by accident, while caring for Mrs. Landry during a brief illness. The madam’s fever-pooled eyes had constantly, and anxiously, sought out a place on the floor near her bed, as though by habit, and when Lucinda gently tapped the boards with the toe of her shoe, she heard a hollow sound. After an extra draft of laudanum for Mrs. Landry in the early afternoon, Lucinda made a quick examination of the floorboards that proved her suspicions right: something of value had been tucked away underneath. In a hollow space she discovered a canvas sack filled with hard currency; merchant tokens; and shinplasters, the paper money given out during the war. The heavier gold and silver coins had settled to the bottom and she removed as many as she dared, reducing the size of the bag imperceptibly.

Later today, after Mrs. Landry realized Lucinda was gone, she would immediately check the space beneath the floorboards. A quick count, and the German would be out the door like a baying hound.

Robbery had not been part of Lucinda’s original plan. She had merely wanted to leave unmolested, carrying the little bit of money she had managed to hide from the prying eyes of her employer. The old bawd was as tight as a Gulf oyster with her pay, and it was simply happy circumstance that Lucinda had found the hidden cache and the opportunity to take it. Once she had secreted the coins in her own room, she gave herself only a few days to plan and execute her escape. To be caught thieving from Mrs. Landry would most likely bring an unending bath in the Trinity River.

The clerk, who had been staring at her yellow boots, looked quickly back at her face and smiled broadly with the kind of come-on she had grown used to. The town men, even the dullards, seemed to size her up with telegraphic precision. Assessing his frayed coat and collar, she guessed the clerk would have been good for only about three dollars and, at most, thirty seconds of energetic pushing. She turned her head, nullifying him, and stared out the window.

Within five minutes the coach arrived, and, after a hand up from the driver, she paid her fare and seated herself across from a gentleman who, she was pleased to discover, was a doctor traveling to Hillsboro. She immediately closed her eyes, hoping to sleep while discouraging conversation. At least, she thought, she could get proper care if felled by another bout of palsy while in his company.