Chapter 26 #2
“Well,” Pearl says, pleased as anything, “then you’re family after all. Come on. She’ll want to see you herself.”
Pearl slips her arm through mine as if ten years have not passed, and starts steering me toward the back.
I let her. Boone and Okee follow close behind, drawing glances from every corner of the room.
A few of the men look irritated at first, then think better of it when Boone looks back at them.
Okee does not hold anyone’s gaze long enough to invite trouble, but I can feel his attention everywhere at once.
“This way,” Pearl says. Then she glances over her shoulder at Boone and Okee, her mouth curving. “Do these two handsome fellows have names?”
Boone eyes her. “Ain’t you about twelve?”
Pearl lifts her chin. “I’m fourteen.”
“That ain’t much better,” Boone says.
She beams, as if he has paid her a compliment. “Don’t fret, mister,” she says, jingling the ring of keys at her hip. “I only see to the rooms. Goldie says any man asks after me, she’ll feed him to the hogs.”
He cracks a smile at that.
“This is Boone and Okee,” I say. “Boys, this is Pearl. I used to look after her when she was a little one.”
“How do you do,” Okee says, tipping his hat.
“Now you’re the little one. How ’bout that?” Boone follows.
My smile fades and my hand whips out, jabbing him in the arm. He feigns injury as Pearl and Okee chuckle softly.
We pass through a curtain into a narrower hall, where the noise of the front room softens into something lower and more luxurious.
The walls press closer here, hung with gilt-framed mirrors that throw back blurred slices of us as we move—my smoke-stained skirts, Boone’s battered coat, Okee’s grave face beneath the brim of his hat. The air grows warmer.
Behind the closed doors lining the corridor come the unmistakable sounds of the house’s true commerce: a woman’s low moan rising and falling, the rhythmic creak of a bed straining under its burden, a man’s rough grunt, another voice gasping softly in time.
A sharp cry pierces the wall to our left, followed by lazy laughter.
Farther down, the muffled sounds of rutting pulse behind another door, the headboard knocking a steady beat against the plaster.
None of it quite syncs. The noises overlap in a strange, carnal chorus that makes the narrow hall feel like the air is being drawn out.
“Lively place,” Boone remarks.
I shoot him a warning sideways glance.
Pearl chatters as she walks, unfazed by the noise and too delighted by my presence to hold her tongue.
“You should have seen this place when Goldie first took it. Rats big as pups. Wallpaper peeling off in strips.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I was left in West Virginia.”
She stops short. “I missed you terribly.”
The sharpness goes out of me at once. “I missed you too, dear.”
“But you’d married a prince.”
“Is that what Mother told you? He was hardly a prince. Just a wealthy, spoiled boy.” The words leave my mouth before I can soften them. I look away. “He died. In battle.”
Pearl’s face falls. “You’re a widow now?”
“She’s a sight more than a widow, miss,” Boone says. “She’s an outlaw.”
I let out a laugh, half amused, half appalled. “I am no such thing.”
“Bona fide gunslinger,” Boone goes on, ignoring me.
Pearl giggles. “Is this your new beau? I like him.”
Before I can answer, Boone says, “We both look after her.”
“Oh my,” Pearl says, delighted.
“Boone,” I chide.
Okee only shakes his head and admires the wallpaper.
Pearl leans closer. “You did have quite a reputation.”
I turn to her with a gasp. “What do you know about my reputation?”
“Only stories,” she says quickly. “From the others.”
“I’m sure.”
Her mouth twitches in a way that tells me she hears the rest of what I do not say. She turns us toward a staircase runner soft enough to swallow our steps.
At the landing, she slows. The house changes here. The laughter falls away. The lamps burn lower, steadier. The doors are thicker, the carpet finer. Pearl drops my arm and smooths a hand over her sash, suddenly more aware of herself.
“She’s in the blue parlor,” she says. Then she glances at me sidelong. “She won’t have changed her face much, but don’t let that fool you. She’s just as bad as she ever was.”
“I assumed as much.”
Pearl smiles, then sobers. “She missed you. In her own way.”
The words land harder than I want them to.
Before I can answer, a door opens at the far end of the hall and a woman sweeps out, balancing a silver tray at her hip. She pauses when she sees me, goes still, then bows her head in the faintest, strangest little gesture of respect.
At the end of the hall stand black double doors trimmed in gilt, their brass handles polished bright. Pearl lifts her hand to knock, then hesitates and looks back at me with a flash of the child she used to be.
“You all right?”
“Of course not,” I say.
Pearl nods, as if that is the proper answer. Then she raps twice and opens the door without waiting to be called in.
The room beyond is warm with lamplight and the scent of rosewater and ink.
It is less gaudy than the rooms below, but richer somehow—books bound in leather, a decanter on a side table, heavy blue drapes framing tall windows, a fine Turkish carpet.
A fire burns low in the grate. At a writing desk near the hearth, a woman in black silk sits with a ledger open beneath one hand.
She does not look up at once.
“Ms. Goldie,” Pearl says, and for the first time since I met her in the hall, her voice holds something like nerves. “You’d best put down your pen.”
The woman sighs, as if interrupted by foolishness she fully intends to punish. Then she lifts her head.
Time is not usually kind, but it has been selective with her. The gold in her hair has cooled, pinned up in a gleaming twist with a silver comb. Her mouth is painted dark red. When her gaze finds mine, she rises slowly.
Pearl retreats a step, suddenly wise enough to remove herself from the center of things. Goldie says nothing for so long that the fire popping in the grate sounds loud as gunfire.
Then, very softly, she says, “Well.”
My throat tightens. I make myself lift my chin. I hate that one word can still do this to me.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Lula Mae Eld. My beautiful baby girl.”