All in Good Time (9 page)

8

“SIR! SIR!”

Henry had barely climbed out of his carriage before a scrawny youth stepped in his way on the bank steps. He waved an envelope in Henry’s face so fiercely that Henry raised the handle of his walking stick to put some distance between himself and the offending item.

“What is it, young man?”

“You’re Mr. Hawkins, ain’t ya?”

“I am.”

“Then this is for you.” He slapped the envelope to Henry’s chest.

To prevent it from flying in the wind, Henry grabbed the item as the boy raced off down the street. “Wait just a minute!”

But the youth had already gone too far and obviously had no interest in answering Henry’s call. Henry found that odd; most boys who delivered notes—even those who’d been paid on the front end—expected a tip upon delivery.

Henry slipped the envelope into his pocket with an undeniable sense of foreboding. He wished he’d had the quickness to grab the boy by the collar and demand to know who’d hired him for the delivery.

Once inside the privacy of his office, before even hanging up his hat or putting aside his walking stick or removing his gloves, Henry pulled out the note he wished to ignore.

He should light a match to it without opening it.

Instead, he tore open the envelope, and a small piece of familiar onionskin floated out. On one side were scrawled the words:

Henry crumpled both the paper and the envelope, wishing once again he’d detained that boy. He must find out where these intolerable notes originated.

Dessa held the note in her hand, her heart dancing, fingers trembling. A prospect!

The note wasn’t signed, but it had a clear purpose. A purpose Dessa was only too eager to fulfill. She glanced at the watch she wore like an adornment every day. Eleven o’clock. She had enough time to finish the embroidery on a handkerchief, then hire a hack to take her to City Park, where she was to meet by two o’clock the woman who’d authored the note.

Dessa was used to seeing women from various parlor houses and brothels paraded through the city in open carriages—it was a form of advertising that Denver’s growing, more respectable population might resent but had no recourse against. And City Park, set beyond Denver’s limits—and therefore beyond its jurisdiction—was a natural magnet for anyone who wanted to leave behind the city’s noise and stench of smelters’ coal smoke along with its laws and judgments.

Yet as she left the hired cab at the park gate, she wasn’t sure what to look for. The note said only to identify the author by a red flower on her hat. It didn’t name the person as someone from the sporting end of town, a maid who might be in trouble, or even
the daughter of one of the donor families Dessa had met in the last two years. Manner of dress could be quite different depending on one’s station.

Dessa paid the driver, instructed him to wait, then clutched her handbag and set off along the open, grassy parkland.

There weren’t many amenities to this park, though officials promised a future in which patrons would visit a water garden, monuments, and a variety of trees and flowers. So far, though, the park boasted little more than squatters and surrounding farmland.

But Dessa wasn’t alone as she paced herself to stroll as if she were only taking in the fresh country air. Though she saw few families, there were a number of adults—both men and women—taking advantage of a view of the mountains on the horizon that Dessa never tired of.

She saw no one wearing a red flower, on her hat or otherwise. Dessa walked along, wishing the note’s author had been more specific. The parkland was fairly extensive. Suppose Dessa had come to the wrong end? She had no choice but to keep looking.

A breeze cooled the air today, but under the warmth of the sun Dessa was comfortable. She occasionally stopped, looking before and behind, breathing deeply. Whenever a new carriage came along, Dessa would stop and wait. Either someone rode off or new visitors emerged. None of them wearing a red flower.

A half hour passed, and Dessa considered returning to the hired hack and going back to the city. If the girl was serious about meeting Dessa, she would make another attempt. If only Dessa knew where she could contact the girl; she wasn’t the least bit afraid of going to her rather than meeting in a public place.

Still, she walked a bit longer, surveying the area, occasionally turning her gaze westward toward the mountains. A squall erupted
in the sky but too far off to pose Dessa any threat. She watched the rain paint vertical gray stripes on the horizon.

Once she saw a man who, from a distance, looked like Mr. Hawkins, but she quickly dismissed the thought. Even if it were he, torn away from his beloved bank, she hardly wanted to acknowledge him. He wouldn’t welcome her anyway. She wished thoughts of him didn’t haunt her, but if she imagined seeing him at every turn, she couldn’t deny the fact that he remained on her mind.

At last, convinced whoever had sent the note was indeed not coming, Dessa returned to the carriage that had waited all this time—for an extra charge. She couldn’t afford to wait longer.

The ride back to the city seemed quicker than the journey out to the parkland. An hour wasted, when there was so much to do at the house. Dessa alone couldn’t produce enough textile goods to cover the loan. But she wouldn’t have help until she reached the women that so far seemed bent on avoiding her.

Dessa’s footsteps on the front stairs to the porch were far slower and heavier than they had been earlier at the prospect of meeting with her first potential client.
Have I misunderstood, Lord? What am I not seeing? What have I done wrong?

Thoughts of Mr. Hawkins’s judgment made her steps nearly unbearable.

The door was, as usual, left unlocked. It was said that these few square blocks near the tracks were the only ones in the city where the few upstanding citizens left needed to lock their doors. Dessa refused to do so. If someone was so desperate as to break into her home, a home that offered little as far as earthly possessions, then they were in far greater need than she.

After removing her gloves, hanging her hat on the hook, and wishing once again she could afford a small table for such things as gloves and pocketbooks and handbags, she stuffed the gloves
inside the hat, laid the handbag on the dining room table, then headed to the kitchen. Although Dessa enjoyed cooking, she had little desire to prepare anything for herself. A cheese and tomato sandwich would do for dinner.

But at the kitchen threshold, all thoughts of food disappeared. Dessa wasn’t alone.

9

“HELLO,” DESSA SAID
, half to cover her surprise and half because she had no idea what else to say. At the kitchen table, eating the very sandwich Dessa had planned to assemble for herself, was a woman still garbed in jacket and hat. A hat without a red flower. Cheese and a slice of tomato peeked out between two slices of bread left over from yesterday’s baking.

“You the gal who runs this place?” The woman spoke with her mouth half-full, swiping her chin before taking a drink from the cup in front of her.

Dessa approached the table, seeing upon a closer look that the woman was perhaps twice her age. Although her hair was unkempt and the tight-fitting, low-cut jacket over her equally low-cut dress was somewhat rumpled, her fingernails were clean and her skin marred only by the fine lines of age.

“Yes, I’m Dessa Caldwell.” She smiled. All she’d needed to do was leave the house and someone was finally seeking her! “Welcome to Pierson House.”

The woman smiled, but it was crooked in a way that might have had something to do with the food still in her mouth. “I heard you’re willing to take in women in trouble.”

Dessa felt her eyes widen. “Are you . . . in trouble?”

The other woman laughed so loudly Dessa winced. The laugh went on, long and hearty, so that the woman had to set her
sandwich on the napkin in front of her and hold her side as if it would burst if she didn’t.

At last she drew in a long breath, exhausted by mirth. “Any monthly irregularities in me is due to age, girlie, and not any contribution from the male persuasion.” Then she frowned as quickly as the laughter had erupted a moment ago. “Though I did have a baby once. A long time ago.” She studied Dessa with a tilt of her head, eyes narrowing to reveal new wrinkles. “Would’ve been about your age by now, I guess. Twenty years?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Hmm. That old and no husband? You the sportin’ kind yourself, girlie?”

Dessa shook her head, approaching the bread and other items the woman had left out on the end of the table. She’d just as soon join her as have the woman eating in front of her. Taking a plate from the nearby cabinet, she returned to the table to assemble her own sandwich.

There was a single slice of tomato left, but before Dessa could add it to her cheese and bread, the woman grabbed it. She ate it in one quick bite, smiling afterward without a trace of compunction.

Dessa lifted a brow but said nothing, settling for the cheese and bread alone. “How did you hear about Pierson House, Miss . . . ?”

“You can call me Belva. It’s what everybody calls me here in the city.”

Dessa wondered if Belva kept her identity a secret to protect a family somewhere, or to keep anyone she once knew from finding out how she earned money. Or was it more personal than that? Sophie had once mused to Dessa that some women might hide their names to protect that secret part of themselves they never wished to sell.

“Did you find one of my applications?” Dessa poured herself a glass of lemonade from the pitcher Belva had taken from the
icebox. “I’ve left them in the kitchens of every house that would let me, but I’m afraid they weren’t very well circulated or I’d have had more response by now.”

Belva laughed again, though this time it seemed more with derision than amusement. “I heard about them applications. You think any of them you sprinkled here and there actually got passed to the people you want? You know what would happen to a girl who tried to get away from one of them houses, let alone take someone else with her?”

“I see the girls on the street all the time. They seem free to do as they please.” Sophie had once told her about some foreign women, mainly Chinese, who had been brought in for the Chinese men working on the railroad. Slaves, so it was rumored. But that didn’t happen in other areas as far as Dessa knew. “Aren’t they free?”

Belva pushed away her napkin, now empty of her own sandwich, then leaned back in her chair as if to find a fuller picture of Dessa. “Is anyone? Free, I mean?”

Dessa offered a quick, silent, barely noticeable prayer of thanksgiving for the food before biting into her sandwich. Then she allowed another moment of silence rather than acknowledging the question she doubted Belva thought answerable anyway.

The journal Sophie had left behind, one chronicling information she’d gathered from other institutions that helped fallen women, said that the older the woman, the less likely she was to reform. Dessa didn’t know if that was true, or true in every case, but somehow because of that, she’d never expected someone older than herself to seek her help. Was this a person Dessa
could
help?

She pushed away her doubt. Belva was here, wasn’t she? That meant she must want to try what Pierson House had to offer, and Dessa wasn’t about to refuse anyone.

Besides, it might be that Belva could help Dessa as much as the other way around.

“How do I reach more women, then?”

Belva looked surprised by the question. “You want my help? Ha.” But even as she revealed her surprise, she hung one arm on the back of her chair and folded her hands like a swing. She leaned closer, and the ruffle of her bodice fell onto the soiled napkin on the table. “This is what you do, girlie. You pack up and leave. Ain’t nobody gonna come here; you may as well know it right now.”

“You came. Aren’t you here to stay?”

Belva laughed again.

Dessa placed her sandwich on her plate. “But why not? Why would women rather end their sporting career by poisoning themselves with a dime of morphine or throwing themselves from the fifth-floor staircase at the Windsor than come here?”

“At least either one of those is permanent.” Her words, harshly spoken, were followed by a lift of her brows and a look around the kitchen. “Say, you got anything to drink? Other than that horrid lemony stuff? Like wine? Or better yet, whiskey?”

Dessa shook her head.

Belva huffed. “That’s the first thing you ought to do, then. Get something here they want. Strong drink, for one.”

“I have good food,” Dessa said. “Did you like the bread?”

Belva dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “Look, I like you, kid. You remind me of what my own daughter might have looked like, if she’d lived a minute past birth.” Her brows drew together so quickly that the expression of sadness seemed almost unexpected to Belva herself. “It was just as well, I guess. I couldn’ta given her anything but heartache and shame.”

“But that’s just it, Belva,” Dessa said. “Wouldn’t it be better to get away from a lifestyle that makes you feel that way?”

Another disgusted
pfff
came from her lips. “Listen, them girls don’t want to come to a place that’ll only remind them of the shame. ’Specially the ones who are settled into the choices they
made. I know what you do-gooders do best, and that’s dole out the judgment. We ain’t no frail sisters nor fallen angels, because we ain’t frail and we certainly weren’t never any angels.”

“But I don’t want to ‘dole out the judgment,’ as you say. Who am I to do that? My father died in the war without knowing I was on the way. My mother died the day I was born. My brother was three and we were sent to an asylum. Do you know who gave us the only love we ever knew in that place? Women just like you, Belva. Until the officials sent us away to work. I haven’t any judgment against you, because I might just as well have had to earn my living the same way.”

Dessa stopped her story far before it was finished, but even that much was more than she’d told anyone since coming to Denver, even Mariadela. Somehow thinking of it reminded her of a lingering cloud she found easy to ignore only when working her hardest. Memories of the day she’d turned twelve and learned her brother had been killed in an accident were darkest of all. Fallen from a hayloft, which shouldn’t have killed anyone, except somehow he’d landed so that his neck had been broken. That was the last day she’d ever dreamed of reuniting with him when they were grown, to live like a real family did.

Maybe Dessa ought to have known from that day on that she hadn’t been destined for family life. Her own mistake, not many years later, had closed that option for her.

Belva stood. “I gotta go.” She looked away, perhaps unwilling to see the tears stinging Dessa’s eyes. “Thanks for the vittles.”

Then she left the kitchen and walked to the door in the parlor.

Dessa ran as far as the dining room. “But . . . are you sure you don’t want to stay?” she called after Belva. “You’re more than welcome! Always!”

Belva didn’t even turn back as she walked out the door, leaving Dessa alone with only an urge to cry.