One of the biggest challenges here at Rose Hill is boredom, and making sure that the people here don’t fall into vice.
Summerland’s church is bigger than I expect. I’ve only seen a handful of folks walking around the town, but the church is easily the size of the First Baptist, the second largest church in Baltimore. While the rest of the town looks ragged and tired, the lone house of worship is fresh and clean: the building’s walls are crisp with whitewash and a real stained glass window is set high in the front of the building. The only similarity between the rest of the town and the church is the small windows covered with iron bars, but the shambler proofing is barely noticeable on such an impressive building.
We walk up the path in silence, and before we can reach for the door it swings open. The whitest white man I ever saw beckons us, his blue-veined hands shaky, his false teeth overly large in his mouth. “Miss Deveraux. Please, join me inside. The sun is frightful fierce today.”
Katherine gives the man a beatific smile. “Sir, your kindness is greatly appreciated. Oh, I fear what this sun is going to do to my complexion. I can already feel a powerful flush coming upon me.”
She sweeps inside the church and the cool darkness beyond the threshold. I make to follow her but the old man stops me with a hard look. “I’m sorry, but it’s our way here that those bearing the Curse of Ham don’t enter the church.”
I scowl. “The Curse of Ham?” I ain’t ever heard of such a thing, and I have a feeling it’s got nothing to do with supper.
Katherine sighs softly from behind the old man. “It’s a euphemism for the curse Noah put upon Canaan, Ham’s son. It’s the reason the Negro was enslaved,” she says. There’s a tightness in her voice that reveals she doesn’t agree with this particular line of thinking, but the old white man doesn’t notice. He nods in agreement with Katherine’s explanation.
“In these days of His castigation upon the earth, we must reaffirm the hierarchy of His creation and His will. Your soul will be cleansed in Heaven; in the meantime, your kind are made to serve His image through toil and labor, girl.”
“What part of the Scripture is that from?” I mutter. The old man either doesn’t hear me or chooses to ignore me.
“Your mistress won’t have use of you any longer. Here in Summerland we take care of our blossoms the way the Lord has always intended. We have no need for Attendant companions to live alongside our fair blossoms, no matter what Mayor Carr has instituted in those heathen cities of the east. Here, we have worked to reestablish the Lord’s natural order, and peace and safety has been our reward. You’ll serve the patrols. Take yourself to the house of soiled doves. The Duchess will take care of you.”
With a vacant smile, he closes the door in my face.
I stand there for a few moments, sweating, arms piled high with boots and clothing. I consider kicking in the door, but then what? I don’t know how anything works around here, and I have nowhere to go.
So I turn around and go back the way I came, toward the house of ill repute.
When I reach the end of the boardwalk, I keep walking past the saloon and back toward the rail yard where we entered town. For a moment I think that maybe I could just keep walking, out toward the mystery of the wall, past that to the open prairie, continue moving until I’ve left this whole mess behind. Running away has never been my style, but it doesn’t seem so bad, now.
The road past the rail yard is lined with poles, and beyond it are houses, which I can get a better look at now. Beautiful houses, whitewashed and large, the kind of house where you could raise a nice family. Screams filter up the road from the houses, and I tense until I see a pack of kids come running around the side of one of them, playing some game of chase and laughing in between their proclamations of mock terror.
The sight stops me in my tracks. When was the last time I saw kids running and playing, not a care in the world? Even back on Rose Hill we tended to be cautious in our play, the memory of Zeke casting a long shadow for years to follow.
If kids can run and play and scream in delight, then maybe Summerland ain’t all bad.
I turn back the way I came and head to the saloon.
As I walk, I think of what Miss Preston said, that Katherine came from a brothel, and wonder if that’s why she has such pretty manners. Even now, in the midst of a full-fledged crisis, Katherine has managed to retain her deportment. I grew up in the big house on Rose Hill, and even I didn’t have manners as pretty as Katherine’s when I got to Miss Preston’s. I figured she’d grown up someplace where appearances would be important, but not a cathouse.
Of course, everything I know about brothels I know about from books. I read a novel, The Captain’s Forbidden Woman, that was all about a poor girl named Annabel who ended up as a working girl after her father’s rival ruined her family; she was eventually rescued by a dashing ship’s captain. I think Jackson got it to scandalize me, since the red velvet cover was decidedly lurid, but it ended up being a very good story. Annabel spent many paragraphs relating the extravagant furnishings and decorum of the brothel. It all sounded very glamorous, although the idea of tossing up my skirts for pay struck me as being even more laborious than killing the dead. Especially if being a working girl meant a lot of swooning. Annabel swooned at least once every chapter, sometimes twice.
Thinking of Jackson and the things he used to smuggle me makes me think of my mother—the silence from the postmaster every time Jackson came calling, or so I thought. I touch the small packet of letters tucked in the pocket of my dress. I’ve been gone from Rose Hill going on three years, but it’s only been a year since the last letter I got from my momma. The packet seems too small to hold a year’s worth of correspondence. What if she gave up on me? What if she is dead?
I need answers about my momma and the fate of Rose Hill, now more than ever. That is enough of a reason to find a way out of Summerland, fine town or not.
I draw even with the brothel and find the doorway empty. There’s no door, and the room beyond is so dark that I ain’t sure there’s even anyone inside.
“Hello?” I call. “Is anyone there?”
“Come on in, sugar,” says a voice from inside, dark and smoky like whiskey. My penny hasn’t gone cold, and this seems like the place where I’m supposed to be, so I walk on in.
The room beyond the doorway comes into focus, the haze from a trio of half-dressed ladies sitting around a table smoking cigarillos and playing cards. Along the one wall is a bar, a half-dressed Negro girl perched at the end talking to a rough-looking fellow. Behind the bar, a white man, bald and shiny, leans against the polished wood counter, eagle eye on the coarse fellow and the girl.
I suspect that every kind of vice an enterprising sort could imagine can be found under this roof. And I am determined that I will not let this place cow me.
I zero in on the redhead I saw earlier and head straight to her. She sits next to an empty hearth in a big tapestried chair, the kind you’d find in a ladies’ sitting room.
“Ma’am,” I say, bobbing a curtsy. “I reckon you might be the Duchess?”
She puts down the book she holds, Gulliver’s Travels, and fans herself with a ragged peacock feather fan. Up close, it’s easy to see the layers of face paint she wears. “I am. And who might you be?”
“My name is Jane McKeene. I’m begging your pardon for disturbing your afternoon repose, ma’am, but I was directed to see you about lodgings, a bath, and the possibility of some sustenance.” The last two are my own additions. I ain’t sure what the standard protocol is, if there is one, but I might as well ask for the sun, moon, and stars while I’m at it.
The woman laughs, showing a gap in the back of her mouth where she’s lost a few of her teeth. “Look at you, with those pretty manners. Wherever did they find you?”
“At the junction of hard luck and bad times,” I answer. It’s something that my momma says.
Used to say?
Best to just not think about it.
The Duchess’s expression softens, and she hauls herself to her feet. “I reckon I’ve passed through there a few times myself. Well, follow me, I’ll show you where you can draw your bath and where you can sleep. As for food, you’ve got a couple of hours until we eat, but you’re welcome to join me and my girls if you’d like. Everyone on this side of town eats down at the meeting hall. Only the respectable folks get the luxury of preparing their own food.” There is a tone to her voice, and I wonder what it is that I’m missing.
She leads the way up a narrow set of stairs and past a room with curtains hung as partitions. The sounds of someone visiting with one of the girls filters out of the room, and I’m very careful to keep my eyes forward lest I see something I ain’t expecting.
The Duchess stops at a door at the end of the hall. The room beyond is small, with a shelf along one wall. About half the spaces are taken up with extra sets of clothing, and the Duchess points to the shelves.
“You girls stow your stuff there. You got anything worth a damn, you’re going to want to keep it with you. There’s a bunch of thieving bastards in this place.” She eyes the gown I wear greedily, and I get the sense that she’s including herself in that group. Makes no matter to me, she can have the dress. The only things I want are my lucky penny and the packet of letters secured in my pocket.
And Tom Sawyer, of course. I’ve taken a liking to the little urchin, and I’d like to see where he ends up. It seems the boy is always running afoul of a pack of shamblers in the midst of his Missouri adventures, and the boy’s derring-do reminds me of my own exploits.
I put my extra set of clothing on one of the far shelves, then follow the Duchess down a back staircase. “These are the stairs you’ll use. Don’t come down those front stairs, those are strictly for my girls and their clients. Negroes ain’t allowed to drink in the saloon, anyway—or anywhere in Summerland, strictly speaking.” She leans back and whispers, “You want whiskey, you’ll get your spirits from the kitchen entrance. Woman named Maybelle. Don’t let anyone catch you, though. They’re free with the strap around here. The preacher sees to that.”
“The preacher?” I ask. She can’t possibly mean the old man I saw just a few moments ago. He was too frail to wield anything.
The Duchess nods. “Don’t let that old man fool you, he’s got a vicious streak. The sheriff is his son, and nothing in this town happens without one of them saying so. The preacher thinks it up, but the sheriff makes it happen. Watch yourself around the two of them.”
“Good to know. Anything else of note regarding the sheriff and the preacher?”
The Duchess purses her lips for a moment before telling me in a low voice, “Sheriff lost his wife to the plague going on three years ago, right before the wall was completed. She was a pretty blond thing, as sweet as he is sour. Went out to gather berries by a nearby creek and got surprised, turned right in front of his eyes. Anyway, you want to make your life easy? Don’t question his authority when it comes to the dead. He’s never reasonable when the question of the undead plague is involved.”
I nod and file the information away for later.
The stairs are impossibly narrow and cramped, and we have to walk single file. They empty out into a laundry room, with a glorious copper tub in the middle.
“This is where you’ll wash your clothes. Some of my girls take in laundry, so if you want them to wash your things you can ask. That tub is yours to rent for a nickel, but I’ll let you use it today for free since you . . . just been through an ordeal. You want hot water you have to pump it into the big cistern in the corner, then light that stove right next to it. After that, turn this fancy spigot here. After you’re done, pull that plug in the bottom, and the water will run right out back to the trough I keep for the garden. Understood?”
I nod, and walk over to the contraption. I look at the copper pipes, the hand pump that brings water up out of the ground, the water heater that looks to be pressurized. “You got a way of handling the silt?” I ask, gesturing to the hand pump.
The Duchess shrugs one pale shoulder. “I don’t rightly know. You’d have to ask the professor, he’s the one that rigged up the contraption.”
“The professor?”
“The tinkerer. Gideon. Most of the fancy gadgets you see around town are his creation.” She pulls a pocket watch out of her skirt and sighs. “Dinner is in an hour or so, I need to get the girls fed before fellas start arriving.”
I incline my head. “Thank you, ma’am, for the fine tour of your establishment,” I say before bobbing another curtsy.
She gives me a bemused smile in return and just shakes her head as she slips through a door, off to see about her business.
There’s a shelf of glasses along a wall and I grab one, twisting the handle above the spigot. Water flows out, clean and clear. I fill the glass and drink deeply. The water tastes strange, as strange as anything else in this town, but not lethal.
At least, not yet.