Kathleen Kent - The Outcasts

She arrived at the docks before midnight, pulled herself hand over hand along the gangway rope, and limped onto the deck. She knocked timidly on the door to Bill’s cabin and felt her head grow dim with fear over his reception. He opened it and she almost fainted, her eyes rolling back in her head. He carried her to the bunk, where he cut the laces of her boots with his knife and took them off her swollen ankles. He put a damp handkerchief over her face and washed her naked feet gently in a bowl of cool water. He cooed to her, stroking her hair, and told her, “I’m the only one left to take care of you. I’ll always take care of you, Lucy, but you must never again go against me.”

Her wounds, her helplessness, her contriteness, all seemed to excite him, and he pulled up her skirt and took her on the narrow bed, her head rhythmically tapping the wall with every thrust like a metronome.

When he was finished, he got up from the bed and moved to look out the one porthole window. She watched his profile, the tension in the curves of his hip and thigh, and she hid a smile in the hollow of her shoulder. He’s forgiven me, she thought. He would never truly hurt me.

“Tonight I had to kill a man who would have killed me.” He said it quietly, without emphasis on any one word. She sat up, tense with fear again.

“There will be others looking for us,” he said. “I’ve given my last fifty dollars to the captain to keep quiet about us being here, but we need money as soon as we dock.” He looked at her and she nodded once that she understood. He would go to the streets and alleyways, anywhere there was gambling, or an easy mark to fall under a confidence game or a robbery. She, in turn, would do the work she did best.

He lay on the bunk again. “I had to do it, Lucy.” He circled one arm around her, soothing her, and whispered into her ear, “We need to look to the future. What we need is a wealthy fish, and I know just the fishing hole.”

The morning they arrived in New Orleans, Bill took Lucinda to the Fourth Ward, to a grand house that sat on South Basin Street. In front of the building’s entrance were two large pagan statues holding gas torches, still lit.

Bill knocked and they were at once admitted to a downstairs receiving room in which every piece of furniture, every ornament, was sharp-edged, glittering, and false. Cold as death, with more than a whiff of decay, Lucinda could hear her father saying.

A large black man dressed in evening wear led them upstairs to the madam’s office. Hattie C. Hamilton owned the second-finest bordello in New Orleans, after Kate Townsend’s palatial crib down the street, and had a long acquaintance with Bill. That Hattie had shot and killed her lover a few months earlier, a senator named Beares who had entirely financed the building, served only to heighten the allure of the place.

Bill made the introductions, and Hattie squinted her eyes at Lucinda and proclaimed her hair and skin exceptionally fine, but she shook her head at Lucinda’s torn shoes and wrinkled dress. She asked, “How old are you now? Twenty-seven?”

Lucinda knew it was a negotiating tactic, but it pricked at her vanity. She smiled and answered, “I’m twenty-three today. Tomorrow I might be nineteen.”

Hattie had laughed at that, her wide shovel jaw working like the hinge to a tool chest, but her eyes, as well as her handshake, were bloodless. They agreed that Lucinda was to work exclusively for House Hamilton. She’d get twenty dollars per customer for an hourly, and fifty dollars for a night’s stay-over, and she’d pay an exorbitant 40 percent of that to Hattie the first month. “For debut expenses,” Hattie said.

“But you can keep whatever tips the customers care to give you,” the madam added. “You’ll need clothes to start and a sitting with my hairdresser. You can’t appear downstairs looking like you do now. I’ll want you ready to start right away.”

By nine o’clock that evening Lucinda was sitting in the parlor, having already received in her room two customers eager to try the new girl. She let her eyes drift about the room to the other men and women in various stages of negotiation and undress, and to the front door, which seemed to be open more often than it was closed. It was attended by the black doorman, Lucius, who carried a double-bladed knife sheathed in his long formal coat.

Bill would not come again before morning—he had his own business to take care of—but she searched the clients walking through the door for his angular form anyway. It was a way to take her mind from the bone-crushing restlessness of waiting, and it gave some warmth to the chill of sitting in the gilt perfection of Hattie’s parlor.

Lucinda turned her eyes to a couple nearby: a wealthy customer and his regular, a French whore wearing white-and-red stockings that showed beneath her linen chemise like lurid ribbons under a wedding cake. They were sprawled on a narrow settee, the whore sitting on the man’s lap, and she rocked her hips and swung her shoeless feet, making him laugh. One of her hands disappeared into the waistband of the man’s trousers, but she frowned when she followed his gaze and saw the object of his attention.

The man shifted in the settee, allowing her hand to slip farther into the pleated folds of his pants. “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing to Lucinda.

The whore kissed his neck and answered, “She’s no one. She’s new.” With her free hand she unpinned her hair, which fell in a complicated frizz around her shoulders, and then set about the business of distracting him.

An older man approached Lucinda, disturbing her thoughts, and she turned her head away from him. He’d attempted earlier to engage her, but he smelled of day-old grease and beer, even through his expensive worsted suit, and she rebuffed him. She’d have to be careful about refusing customers. Hattie would not be pleased. But she had in mind another fish, the one she had been watching carefully and who she knew had special, expensive tastes. The fish was now enmeshed firmly in the grip of the whore with legs like a barber’s pole, but he snuck a look at Lucinda and she parted her lips, creating a small, rounded O with her mouth. She needed to work fast, and subtle gestures would not achieve the needed results.

She smoothed out her skirt, running her hands lingeringly over her thighs. It was a simple woolen travel suit of evening blue, cut straight and high across her bosom. She looked like a schoolteacher, which was the point.

Hattie had given her a gown in advance of her wages, a dress of champagne silk, the décolletage cut almost to her nipples, and the hem shortened in front to her knees. The same sort of tart casing that every girl in the place would be wearing. But against Hattie’s wishes, Lucinda put on the more modest dress, telling the madam it would be more alluring to place herself apart from the other girls.

With studied decorum, she leaned forward and brushed an imaginary bit of dirt from her new kid boots, then let her fingers slowly trace the outline of the seams. They were the only shoes that she could tolerate wearing, as the blisters and swelling on her feet were still painful.

Lucinda’s fish had been watching her movements and he smiled broadly at her. She smiled in return, encouraging him, knowing that he had had the French girl for weeks and was in all likelihood growing bored with her. Lucinda caught the huff of tension and anger rising from the whore on his lap.

“Hallo,” he said. “Tartine says you’re a schoolteacher. Is that so?”

Lucinda dipped her chin, but kept her eyes on the mark.

“How did you get your students to mind you, looking so sweet?”

She leaned forward slightly and said, “Discipline.”