Gypsy (30 page)

That was something Beth hadn’t considered and it took the wind out of her sails.

‘I think you should be very grateful that a good person like Pearl was prepared to risk having trouble brought to her door,’ he added reprovingly.

Beth glanced at Pearl, who was still in her night clothes with a little lacy cap over her hair. Her kindly face was full of concern and Beth felt a little ashamed of her outburst, for the woman had welcomed her so warmly last night. It also seemed that Pearl wasn’t a mere housekeeper, but the owner of the house. ‘You could have warned me,’ she said weakly. ‘It was such a shock.’

‘You ought to have been smart enough to work it out for yourself.’ Theo sighed, running his fingers through his hair. ‘You’ve been in Heaney’s pay for months now, you worked in a shop where most of the New York whores buy their clothes, I would’ve thought that would have opened your eyes to reality. Besides, you lost your respectable image the first time you played in a saloon.’

Beth stared at him for a moment, hardly able to believe what he’d just said, but then, as it dawned on her that he was probably right, she burst into tears.

It was Pearl who moved to comfort her.

‘There now, don’t take on,’ she said, enfolding Beth against her large bosom. ‘No harm’s going to come to you here, you don’t even have to meet my girls less you want to. But if you’re set on earning a living playing your fiddle, then you’ve got to live with being seen as a floozy.’

‘But why?’ Beth sobbed. ‘No one thinks anything bad about a man who plays an instrument. I’m not a bad girl, I just love music.’

‘It’s a man’s world, honey. Dancers, singers, actresses and musicians, they all get branded the same,’ Pearl said soothingly. ‘You can choose to be Miss Prim, go-to-church-on-Sunday, but that means you have to dress quiet, and find respectable employment and lead a dull life. But if you choose to be Miss Sassy the fiddle-player who sleeps till noon and has a heap of fun, you’ve got to learn not to give any mind to what people say.’

‘What’s it to be then, Beth?’ Theo asked. ‘Because I’ve got a debut lined up for you tonight.’

Beth disengaged herself from Pearl’s arms, wiped her eyes and looked into his dark ones, hoping to see love in them. She could see amusement, but that was all.

‘Then I guess I’ll have to play,’ she said airily. ‘It wouldn’t do to let you down after you’ve gone to so much trouble.’

Maybe if she continued to amuse him he’d come to love her.

‘There you are, honey,’ Pearl said as she handed over Beth’s red dress which she’d just pressed for her. ‘And I’ve got a real pretty red hair ornament you can borrow if you like.’

It was six in the evening and Beth had managed to overcome her shock about the nature of the house, for no one could have been kinder than Pearl.

After their words that morning, Theo had disappeared off to his room which was further along the passage in the basement. Pearl told her that Jack and Sam wouldn’t surface until noon, and it seemed the girls upstairs were late-risers too.

After washing and dressing properly Beth went back upstairs to offer Pearl some help with the chores for she felt bad about her earlier rudeness. Pearl’s wide smile showed she appreciated the offer, but she promptly brewed another pot of coffee and made it quite clear she was happier just to chat than worry too much about chores.

Beth had seen many negroes in Liverpool, and even more since she arrived in America, but Pearl was the first she’d ever had a real conversation with. She was intelligent, witty and kind. Even her voice was a delight to listen to for it was low and melodious, with just a hint of the Deep South.

But the most astonishing thing about her was her age. Her face was unlined, she moved gracefully and quickly despite her bulk, and Beth had imagined she was no more than forty. But if the stories she told were true, and Beth did believe them, then she was over sixty, and she laughingly told Beth that the reason she covered her head with a turban or a cap was because her hair was snow-white.

She said she had been born into slavery in Mississippi, but she and her mother had run away when she was thirteen and been helped by some Abolitionists in Kansas.

‘Folk were making their way west then in wagon trains,’ she explained. ‘They were mostly good folk too and we tagged along helping them out with their children, the washing and the cooking in return for food. We meant to go all the way to Oregon, but a story got about that men had found gold in San Francisco, and a whole bunch of the folk on the train broke away to go there. Ma thought we should go too cos we could get work as cooks.’

Beth listened spellbound while Pearl described making their way over the Sierra Nevada to California as winter came upon them. ‘It was so cold and the snow so deep we feared we’d die up there, like some of the others did,’ she said. ‘But we got through to San Francisco somehow. There weren’t too many women there then, and it was a wild, rough place, but Ma was right, cooks were badly needed. We set up our tent as soon as we got there, made a big pot of stew and sold it ten cents a bowl as quick as look at you.’

Beth was expecting that Pearl would soon be telling her that she and her mother eventually found it easier to sell their bodies than their stews, but she was wrong. They continued cooking, gradually increasing both their prices and the range of dishes. They charged miners for washing and mending their clothes, and even opened a ‘hotel’.

‘It sure weren’t like no hotel you’d recognize.’ Pearl chuckled. ‘Just a big tent, and our lodgers got a straw-filled palliasse on the ground, and provided their own blankets. We made a bath-house out the back too. I could hardly lift those buckets of hot water off the fire, they were so heavy. But we made money, more than we’d ever dreamed of. We got a real hotel built in ’52, a fancy place with furniture and mirrors brought all the way from France, but by then respectable women were arriving and they didn’t want to stay in a place owned by darkies. They were real mean to us; if they’d had their way they’d have got us run out of town. So Ma turned the place into a brothel to teach them a lesson.’

She laughed uproariously at this, and Beth joined in, for by then she was seeing the scene through Pearl’s eyes. ‘But surely that would get you run out of town even quicker?’ she said, spluttering with laughter.

Pearl put her hands on her wide hips and rolled her eyes. ‘Ma knew a thing or two about men, especially those stuffed shirts who ran the city. She hired the kinda girls that turned those men inside out and made them come back howling for more. The polite ladies brayed for the place to be closed down, and their men nodded and agreed, but those same men slunk in the back way any chance they got.’

Beth could see why men would prefer the company of Pearl and her mother… She could imagine those sharp-featured, cold-hearted wives gossiping over afternoon tea, while their pompous but sex-starved husbands indulged themselves elsewhere. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘What role did you play in the business?’

‘By day I cleaned rooms, cooked and did the laundry, but by night I sang in the saloon,’ Pearl said. ‘I was never a whore. I ain’t saying there weren’t men in my bed. But I never took no money for it.’

Beth could believe that. ‘Were you a good singer?’ she asked.

‘They said so,’ Pearl replied modestly. ‘I loved to sing right from a small child; to me it was as natural as breathing. I had to sing, it was like my spirit being allowed to fly free. But I guess you feel the same way about playing your fiddle. I was young and pretty then too, I loved the attention, to be dressed in silk and satin, to have men looking at me as if I was their love. I’d come a long way from being a barefoot and hungry slave at the mercy of the master.’

Beth guessed that the reason Pearl’s mother ran away with her daughter was probably because she wanted to protect her from that master. Although Beth hadn’t suffered the kind of hardships Pearl had experienced, she understood that need to perform. ‘I feel just like that when I’m playing,’ she agreed. ‘I know I haven’t been a slave, but you can still feel bound by your background and the way you’ve been brought up.’

‘Respectability.’ Pearl nodded sagely. ‘Well, I’ve never had that, I never will. But I get respect from my girls, and the men who come here. That’s all I need.’

She went on to tell Beth that her mother was knocked down by a carriage and crippled, and it was her belief it was no accident. Her mother never walked again and Pearl had to take care of her and the business. ‘But I stayed on there till she died ten years later. I wasn’t going to let them win,’ she said proudly. ‘Then I sold the place and came here and bought this one.’

‘Why here?’ Beth asked.

Pearl smiled. ‘A man, honey, why else would I come clear across the country?’

‘Is he Frank, the friend Theo mentioned?’

Pearl nodded. ‘He’s good to me and a real gentleman, but a gambler and a charmer like Theo. Now, you listen closely to my advice! Don’t go dreaming of happy ever after. It don’t come with men like Frank or Theo. You have the good times with him, but make sure you hold on to the money you earn and anything he gives you. Give him your body freely, but don’t give him your heart, for he’ll break it.’

Beth was just going to try to get Pearl to enlarge on that when the girls began coming down to the kitchen. The blonde with the sulky expression was Missy, the two brunettes Lucy and Anna, and the beautiful redhead was Lola. Missy, Lucy and Anna were no more than eighteen, Lola perhaps twenty-three. All of them were wearing dressing gowns and slippers, their faces pale from lack of fresh air.

Beth sensed they weren’t entirely happy at finding a strange girl in their midst and she made her excuses and went back to the basement to see if Sam and Jack were awake.

They were, but both had sore heads from the previous night’s drinking. Jack went off to the kitchen to get them coffee and give Beth a chance to speak to her brother alone.

‘I’ve kind of got over the shock of staying in a brothel,’ she said cautiously. ‘I’ve been talking to Pearl and I like her. I guess last night I panicked, but that was Theo’s fault. He should’ve warned me.’

‘I was worried about how you’d react,’ Sam admitted.

‘Pearl made me see things from a different viewpoint,’ Beth said. ‘But enough of that. Tell me what you and Jack are doing.’

‘I’m managing the Bear, a big saloon just a few streets from here,’ Sam said. ‘Jack’s learning the ropes, the bar and the cellar. But Frank Jasper, the owner, runs several gambling places and he’s training me in that. He’s great, sis, nothing like Heaney, a real Southern gentleman.’

Beth smiled. She wondered if he knew that Frank was, or had been, Pearl’s lover. Somehow she doubted it, Sam wasn’t as interested in people as she was. ‘Are the wages good?’ she asked.

‘We haven’t been here long enough to see how it will go,’ he said. ‘But he gave us both ten dollars last night and said he’d talk to us about it in the New Year. We don’t have to pay for our keep here either, and Pearl is a great cook.’

‘Theo said I would be making my debut tonight. Is it to be in your place?’

‘I guess so, because as soon as we got here Frank wanted to know when you’d be coming. It seems Theo told him about you some time ago. You’ll go down well, sis, it’s a good place, not a rough house like Heaney’s.’

‘How do you get on with the girls upstairs?’ Beth raised her eyebrows enquiringly.

Sam grinned mischievously. ‘Pearl doesn’t let them give free ones, she made that quite clear on our first night here. And anyway, we’ve hardly seen them. Only time we go up there is when Pearl calls us for our dinner.’

They talked for a little while, Beth telling him about how it was over Christmas.

‘I hope Theo behaved himself.’ Sam sniffed. ‘I like him, but I don’t trust him.’

‘Pearl seems to think highly of him.’

‘She just likes men,’ Sam said wisely. ‘And I guess at her age she doesn’t need to worry about whether they can be trusted. But now you’re here, Jack and I will look out for you.’

‘I can look out for myself, thank you,’ Beth said, but she softened the remark with a smile. ‘I’ll leave you now to get up and dressed, and perhaps you and Jack will take me out and show me around while it’s still daylight. I don’t want to get a pasty face like the girls upstairs.’

The hair ornament Pearl gave Beth was a pearl-studded comb with a spray of red feathers. ‘Frank gave that to me when we first met back in ’Frisco,’ she said as she fixed it into Beth’s hair, up in the kitchen. ‘It was my lucky charm, and I wore it every time I sang. You look even prettier with it than I did, and I think Frank will be pleased to see it again. He’ll know I like you.’

Beth went into the hallway to look at herself in the big mirror. The brisk walk around the town with Sam and Jack had put colour back into her cheeks, and the way Pearl had caught up some of her curls at the side of her head with the comb made her look more sophisticated. She had always been a little nervous about the red dress because the neckline was low, but the feathers in her hair seemed to balance it better.

Pearl was watching Beth from the kitchen and she smiled to herself. The girl looked a picture with her black curls tumbling around her creamy shoulders. Such a pretty, expressive face, wide eyes, plump lips, the kind of girl any man would want.

She wished she could go to the Bear tonight to hear her play, but her place was here. Frank would tell her about it anyway.

As Sam and Jack had left for work some time earlier, Theo escorted Beth to the Bear. He was wearing his usual evening attire of a snowy-white shirt, bow tie, impeccably cut tail coat and top hat, with his heavy satin-lined cloak flung loosely over his shoulder.

‘The Bear got its name because in an old ale house somewhere nearby, the owner kept a bear out the back,’ Theo said as they walked down the street. ‘If anyone made any trouble he would threaten to throw them out with the bear.’

Beth knew he was nervous because he often told her old stories when he wanted to conceal his feelings. She didn’t know if he was worried that she might not live up to his expectations tonight or might be about to complain again about staying in a brothel. Or perhaps he was just a bit apprehensive because he would be playing cards later.