Curse of the Blue Tattoo: Being an Account of the Misadventures of Jacky Faber, Midshipman and Fine Lady (12 page)

I'm looking him over, tryin' not to be sick myself. He's got on what was once a blue uniform coat and dirty brown knee breeches with loose buckles and torn stockings below, and, curiously, a tartan plaid sash across his chest.

At last he's done. He gets back to his feet and unsteadily comes back to the bars between our two cages and stands there weaving.

"Give me some more, girl."

I look down at the dipper. It is too close to his cage.

"Kick it over here and I will," I says.

He puts his leg through the bars and kicks the dipper, skittering it across the floor. I pick it up and fill it again, again without spiders, and hand it to him at arm's length. He drinks, and this time he keeps the water down. Satisfied, he flings the dipper back into my cell.

He leans his face against the cold iron bars and lets his arms dangle through. "So, what've they gotcha in for, my pretty little miss—"

I don't get to answer 'cause of loud shouting and laughter from outside the outer door through which the constable and his bride had disappeared after putting me in here, and the door bursts open and a gaggle of brightly dressed women are thrust into the room followed by Constable Wiggins with his club and his wife.

Goody Wiggins waddles over and unlocks my cell and starts shoving the women in. There has to be at least fifteen
of them, and every one of them drunk and in high spirits, it seems. I retreat to my bench and sit down and try my best to look invisible.

The key once again locks the cell door and the women mill about and one of them, a large woman with a great expanse of chest and a huge mass of tightly curled bright red hair, spies the man in the next cell and bellows, "Well, if it ain't Rummy Gully MacFarland! Let's have a tune, Gully, damn your eyes! Wiggins busted up a fine party and we ain't done with our carousing yet!"

The other women shout out their agreement. Several link arms and dance about. The air is thick with the smells of perfume and ale, which have mixed with the smell of the man's sickness, and I don't think I've ever seen so much bright clothing in one room before and I'm getting dizzy with it all.

"Sorry, Hortense, my dear," says this Gully, "but that fat fiend over there has taken the Lady Lenore into his foul keeping and I am helpless to entertain you without her."

"Keep it up, Rummy, and I'll break your damned fiddle over your damned head and you'll never play the damned thing again," growls the constable as he and Goody take their leave. The man whose name is Gully don't say nothin' to that, so I guess he takes the threat with all its damnings for real.

"That one there can give you a tune, though," says Gully, pointing at me. The crowd turns as one to gaze upon me cowering on the bench, where I am trying my best to fade into the stonework of the wall.

The one named Hortense comes over and looks down upon me and grins widely, her hands perched on her ample
hips. Her cheeks are rouged as red as her hair and she has a round black patch the size of a penny on one cheekbone. She is showing a
lot
of powdered chest.

"Hey, Mam'selle," she calls over her shoulder to someone in the rear of the bunch, "come see what we've got for you."

The crowd parts and a yellow apparition walks grandly through the hooting and whistling throng. She's tall and slender and is all in yellow, from yellow shoes to yellow stockings to a yellow dress trimmed in yellow lace, to a wide-brimmed yellow hat topped with a great yellow plume. She carries a folded-up yellow parasol and her hair is yellow, too, but I don't think it's natural-like. Her face is long and thin and her skin is smooth with the color of ivory and she wears an expression of wide-eyed wonderment as she brings her yellow eyes to gaze upon me.

"Oh, isn't it just the most
precious
little bit of a thing?" she breathes, and looks about as if for confirmation from the others. They all giggle and snort and nod and say that yes, I'm just about the most goddamn precious thing they've ever seen. The yellow woman's great dark yellow eyes soften and seem to mist up as they go all over me. She puts her long-fingered hands together and casts her eyes heavenward and says, "Thank you, Lord. Thank you." She says this like she really, really means it. I shrink back against the wall.

The woman in yellow comes and sits down beside me and her perfume, which smells like the tropical flowers I had sniffed in Jamaica, wraps around my head and I don't know what to do 'cept sit there like a trapped mouse. Her eyes hold mine and I can't look away, I can't speak, I can't...

"Precious. That is what I shall call you from now on, because you
are
the most precious little thing I have ever seen.
Oh, it is trembling, poor baby. Here, Precious, let me hold your hand to calm you." She reaches out and takes my hand from my lap and folds it in both of hers. Her hands are cool and soft, unlike mine, which are sweating like little piggies.

"I am Mam'selle Claudelle de Bour-bon of the New Orleans Bour-bons and
none
of that Baton Rouge Bour-bon trash, thank you, and I
am
your new best friend."

I thinks that's what she says. 'Cept she says "frey-und" for friend. Then she drops her eyes and turns her head and leans into me, and I feel her face touch the back of my neck and I hear her inhale long and deep...

"
Ahhhh...
The precious sweet smell of precious little schoolgirl neck just beneath her precious and lovely schoolgirl hair," she says, and breathes in again. "You
are
a little schoolgirl, aren't you, Precious? You are dressed as one and I, for one, find it most becomin' on you."

She pauses, then sucks in some more of whatever my neck smells like and says, "But you have been a
bad
little schoolgirl, haven't you, Precious, to be put in a place like this. Tell me, Precious, just how
bad
have you been?"

And then I feel her lips behind my ear and...

And I leaps to me feet and whips me whistle out of my sleeve and tootles a couple of simple runs, and then I puts my arms to my sides and lifts my chin and says all in one rush of breath, "Ladies and Gentleman, you have the great good fortune to be present at an appearance of the fabulous Jacky Faber, famous in legend and song, who will be singing and playing many humorous and historical songs, some happy and some sad, and telling stories for your amusement and delight!"

I goes into an easy tune and dances a few steps and gets
some delighted "oh-ho's!" and claps for it, so I winds that up with a flourish and then says, "For my first number I'll be doin' the well-known favorite, 'The Maid of Amsterdam'! Sing along with the chorus now, ladies, sing it out loud and strong!"

And they do. They are a good audience. Soon they're all singin' and linkin' arms and dancin' and bellowin' out the chorus.

"
A-roving...
A-roving...
Since roving's been my ru-i-in,
I'll go no more a-roving with you...fair...maid!
"

All except for Mam'selle Claudelle, who sits twinkling on the bench with the air of a proud parent watching the performance of a beloved child. "Isn't my little Precious just the most talented thing?" she asks, comin' down heavy on
thang.

And then I gives 'em a fast jig, "The Hare in the Corn," and pounds the floor with some different steps, and then I slows it down with the sad ballad, "The Sally Gardens," and cranks it back up again with "The Flowing Bowl," and then I feels the need of a break but I know I can't stop so I tells 'em the sad story of "The Cruel Sister," wherein I tells the story and then sings the verses of the song and in between plays the melody with the whistle, and they're all sitting around like any classroom of girls and some of them are nodding off, which I don't think is a comment on my storytelling but rather on the drink, and I think it would be a good thing if they
all
fell asleep but no, Mam'selle Claudelle is beamin' at me as brightly as ever and my throat is getting
sore and my voice is beginning to rasp and squeak when the door swings open and the constable comes in and says, "All right, Rummy, out with you. I won't be having you stinking up my jail anymore this night, but I catch you drunk in the street again, it will be the stocks for you and you'd better take me at my word."

The prisoner don't say nothin', no, he just shuffles to the door of his cage and waits while Constable Wiggins opens the door, and then he steps out.

"And the Lady Lenore?" says Gulliver MacFarland.

The constable goes to a cabinet along the wall and opens it and pulls out a fiddle case and, without looking, flings it in the general direction of Gully.

Gully lunges forward and catches the case just before it hits the deck. On his knees, he opens the case and pulls out the violin that rests within. He runs his hands lovingly over the curves of the fiddle's body and neck and he croons as if to a lover, "Ah, Lenore, did the beast have his filthy jailhouse hands on you, sweetness? Did the touch of his greasy fingers forever stain—"

"Get out with you, you wowthless dwunkawd," says Constable Wiggins, and he pulls back his booted foot and aims a kick at Gully's retreating rump as it disappears through the outer door, the fiddle and her case clutched tightly to his breast.

There is silence for a moment and I don't think I'll be able to get up for any more performing, and Mam'selle Claudelle is beckoning to me with her finger and patting the bench next to her and...

And then from outside the tiny window, Gully MacFarland puts bow to the Lady Lenore and plays "Billy in the
Low Ground" better than I have ever heard it played before, and I lifts the whistle and I play along in my poor fashion, but somehow it works together and the crowd is pleased and claps and stamps and hollers "More! More!" but then the outer door clangs open again and in steps a smallish woman dressed in sombre clothing that is nevertheless cut in the highest style and in the finest of tailoring. She is followed by Constable Wiggins and a pleasant-looking young man who wears a buff jacket and a fawn vest and white trousers in the new style. He also wears a slight smile on his round and pink face.

"Missus Bodeen!" shrieks Miss Hortense, rushing forward and wringing her hands and whipping out a handkerchief from between her breasts and dabbing at her eyes. "We warn't doin' nothin', 'cept quietly entertainin' some generous gentlemens in the Plow and Anchor when Wiggins here comes burstin' in with his badge and club and hauls us off to the slammer! It warn't fair nor sportin' of him at all!"

The women, except for Mam'selle, who continues to simper and wink at me, have forgotten all about me and have rushed to the bars and are joining in with their protestations of their innocence.

Mrs. Bodeen does not reply but instead pulls out a packet and hands it to the young man, who, in turn, bows and presents it to Constable Wiggins, who takes it and slips it into his vest.

The constable advances to the cage and unlocks the door. The women pour out the door and Mam'selle comes up next to me and whispers, "Get in the middle of us, Precious, and maybe we can get you out," and I do it and try to look small and hope arises in my chest, but it is dashed when
Wiggins's hand reaches out into the gang of women and clamps around me neck and hauls me out and tosses me back in the cage.

Resentful and without hope, I go whining and weeping and despairing back to the bench and sit down upon it. Mam'selle whispers something in the Bodeen woman's ear and she glances at me and reaches in her purse and takes out several bills and holds them out toward Wiggins and nods toward me, but he looks shocked and aggrieved and shakes his head as if to say you know it ain't done that way, and Mrs. Bodeen shrugs and puts the money away and Mam'selle pouts at the constable and then turns to me and says, "See you later, Precious. It won't be so bad, you'll see. And if they do hurt you, you come to see me and I'll make it better, I promise. I do have the most soothing and restorative salve. 'Bye now, Precious." A flutter of fingers and eyelashes and Mam'selle Claudelle de Bour-bon and the rest of them are gone and I am alone once again.

I drop exhausted down on the bench, facing out so nothin' can sneak up on me, and I turn on my side and pull up my knees. I put my hands together and put them under my cheek. My hipbone begins to ache, grinding into the hard wood of the bench. I would pray for deliverance if it warn't all my fault, which it is.
Why can't I ever be good, why can't I ever think before I do something stupid? Why?

I want to be back sleeping between the cannons on the ship. I want to be back in the hammock with Jaimy. I want to be back in my bed at school. I want to be anywhere but here, but here is where I am.

I did not think I would sleep at all last night because of the worry and the hardness of the bench, but I do sleep in spite of all and I awake in the morning with a sickening lurch when I realize where I am and what is likely going to happen to me.

I stand up stiff and aching and I think how used to sleeping in a bed I have become. My side hurts from where my hipbone spent the night grinding itself into the bench. Goody Wiggins has come in and shoved a tray under my cage and sits down in a chair by the door without a word. The breakfast seems to be a cup of weak tea and a bowl of thin gruel. I do not eat it.

A while later, the young man I had seen last night with Mrs. Bodeen comes in and looks at me and says to Goody, "What is this, then?" He has the slight smile I had noticed, even in all my confusion the night before. I have the feeling the slight smile never leaves his face, at least not in public.

Goody looks up from her breakfast, which looks a good deal better than mine, and says, "Lewd and Lascivious Conduct. Judge Thwackham's got a horse thief to deal with, then she's up."

He nods and comes over to my cage and sticks his hands in the pockets of his waistcoat and leans back and says, "Would you like to tell me who you are and what has happened that brings you to this state?"

I look up all scared and confused and say, "Are they really gonna whip me?"

"I don't know, dear," he says. "I must know the circumstances before I can help you."