Redeeming Love (12 page)

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remembering and hurting all over again. Mama would hug her hard and rock her and hum. “Things will be different for you, darling,” she would say, and kiss her. “Things will be different for you. You’ll see.”

And Angel had seen.

She stopped thinking about the past. She let the curtain drop back in place and sat down at the small, lace-covered table. She stuffed the memories down again. Better the hollow nothingness than the pain.

Hosea won’t come back. Not this time. She closed her eyes tightly, her small hand a fist in her lap. Why did she think about him at all?
“Come away
with me and be my wife.”
Sure, until he tired of her and gave her to someone else. Like Duke. Like Johnny. Life never changes.

She lay down on her bed and covered her face with a pale satin sheet.

She remembered the men sewing the shroud closed over her mother’s stiffly smiling face and felt empty inside. Whatever hope had once been inside her had drained away. There was nothing left to hold her together. She was cav-ing in.

“I’ll make it on my own,” she said into the silence around her, and could almost hear Duke laughing:
“Sure you can, Angel. Just like last time.”

Someone knocked on her door, jerking her back from her dark memories. “Can I come in, Angel?”

Angel welcomed Lucky. She reminded her of Mama except Lucky drank to be happy. Mama drank to forget. Lucky wasn’t drunk right now, but she was holding a bottle and two glasses.

“You’ve been keeping to yourself lately,” Lucky said, sitting on the bed with her. “Are you all right? You’re not sick or anything, are you?”

“I’m fine,” Angel said.

“You didn’t have breakfast with us.” Lucky set the bottle and glasses on the side table.

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“You’re not sleeping well, either. You’ve got shadows under your eyes.

You’re just feeling sad, aren’t you?” Lucky gently stroked Angel’s hair back.

“Well, it happens to the best of us, even an old harlot like me.” She liked Angel, and she worried about her. Angel was so young—and so hard. She needed to learn to laugh a little at the cards she had been dealt. She was 84

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beautiful, and that would always come in handy in this business. Lucky liked to look at her. Angel was a rare flower in this weed patch, something special. The others didn’t like her because of it. And because Angel didn’t mingle. She was self-possessed.

Lucky was the only one allowed close, but there were rules. She could talk about anything except men and God. She never stopped to wonder or ask why. She was just grateful Angel allowed her to be a friend.

Angel was especially quiet today, her lovely face pale and drawn.

“I brought a bottle and two glasses. You want to try drinking again?

Maybe it won’t turn out so bad this time. We’ll go slower.”

“No.” Angel shuddered.

“Are you sure you’re not sick?”

“Sort of, I guess.” She was sick of living. “I was thinking about my mother.”

It was the first mention of anything from Angel’s past, and Lucky was honored to be trusted with even a tidbit. It was a great mystery among all the girls where Angel had come from. “I didn’t know you had a mother.”

Angel smiled wryly. “Maybe I didn’t really. Maybe it was just my imagination.”

“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I know.” Angel stared up at the ceiling. “It’s just that sometimes I really do wonder.” Had there ever been a cottage with flowers all around and the scent of roses drifting in through a parlor window? Had her mother ever really laughed and sang and run with her across the meadows?

Lucky touched her brow. “You’re feverish.”

“I have a headache. It’ll go away.”

“How long have you had it?”

“Ever since that farmer started pestering me.”

“Has he been back?”

“No.”

“I think he was in love with you. Are you sorry you didn’t go away with him?”

Angel tightened up inside. “No. He’s just a man like all the rest.”

“You want me to leave you alone?”

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Angel took Lucky’s hand and held onto it. “No.” She didn’t want to be alone. Not when she had been thinking about the past and couldn’t seem to push it away. Not when death was all that was on her mind. It was the rain, the constant, battering rain. She was going mad.

They sat silent for a long while. Lucky poured herself a drink. Tension rippled through Angel as she remembered Mama’s drinking herself into oblivion. She remembered Mama’s grief and guilt and the endless weeping.

She remembered Cleo, drunk and bitter, raging against life and telling her God’s truth about men.

Lucky wasn’t Mama or Cleo. She was funny and uninhibited, and she liked to talk. The familiar words flowed like balm. If Angel could just listen to Lucky’s life story, she might be able to forget her own.

“My mother ran off when I was five,” Lucky said. “Have I told you all this?”

“Tell me again.”

“My aunt took me in. She was a fine lady. Her name was Miss Priscilla Lantry. She gave up marrying a fine young man because her father was ill and needed her. She nursed the old miser for fifteen years before he died.

He wasn’t even cold in his grave when my loving mother dumped me on her doorstep with a note. It said, ‘This is Bonnie.’ And it was signed

‘Sharon.’” She laughed.

“Aunt Priss didn’t much like the idea of having a child to raise, especially a castoff from her no-good sister. Everyone in the neighborhood thought she was a saint for taking me in.” She poured another glass of whiskey. “She said she was going to make sure I grew up proper and not like my mother. If she didn’t use a switch on me at least twice a day, she didn’t feel she was doing her duty. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’”

Lucky plunked the bottle on the side table and pushed her dark hair back from her flushed face. “She drank. Not like I do. She did everything proper. She just sipped. Not whiskey, mind you. Madeira, fine Madeira.

She’d start in the morning, a sip here, a sip there. It looked like liquid gold in her pretty crystal glass. She was so mellow and sweet when neighbors came to call.” She giggled. “They thought she had such a charming lisp.”

She sighed and swirled the amber fluid in her glass. “Meanest woman I 86

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ever knew. Meaner than the Duchess. As soon as the guests were out the door and off in their fine carriages, she would start in on me.” She began to mimic an elegant southern drawl. “You didn’t curtsy when Missus Abernathy came in. You took two biscuits from the tray when I said to take only one. The schoolmaster said you didn’t do your arithmetic yesterday.”

Lucky drank half her whiskey. “Then she would make me sit and wait while she searched for just the right switch to cut from the willow tree. It had to be as thick as her pointer finger.”

She held her whiskey glass up to the lamp and looked through it before she emptied it. “She went to tea one afternoon with the parson’s wife. They were going to discuss my enrollment in a young ladies academy. While she was gone, I chopped the tree down. It flattened the roof and fell right into the middle of her fancy parlor. Smashed all her fine crystal. I ran away before she came back.”

She laughed softly. “Sometimes I wish I had stayed long enough to see the look on her face when she came home.” She held the empty glass and stared at it. “And sometimes I wish I could go back and tell her I’m sorry.”

She took her bottle and stood, her eyes glazed. “I’d better go to bed and get my beauty sleep.”

Angel caught her hand. “Lucky, try not to drink so much. Duchess was talking about kicking you out if you don’t slow down on the booze.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Angel,” Lucky said, smiling bleakly. “Last I heard there was still one woman to twenty men out here. The odds are defi-nitely in my favor. You watch out for yourself. Magowan hates you.”

“Magowan is a worthless piece of horse dung.”

“True, but Duchess has a thing for him, and he’s been telling her you’re lazy and insolent. Just watch out for yourself. Please.”

Angel didn’t care. What was the difference? Men would still come and pay to play, until the decent women arrived. Then they’d treat her like Mama. They would pretend they didn’t know her when they passed by her on the street. The good women would turn away while the children gawked and asked who she was, only to be cuffed into silence. She would still have work—after dark, of course—until she wasn’t pretty anymore or was too sick to be appealing.

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If only she could be like one of those mountain men who went out into the wilderness and stayed there, hunting their food and building their own shelter and never having to answer to another living soul for anything. Just to be left alone, that must be heaven.

She got up and went to the washstand. Pouring water into the bowl, she washed her face, but the coolness gave her no relief. She held the towel over her eyes for a long time. Then she sat at the small table beside the window and looked out through the curtain. She saw an empty buckboard in the street below and thought of Hosea. Why did she have to think of him now?

What if I had gone with him? Would things have been any different?

She reminded herself of the one time she had run away with a man. At fourteen, she had still been too inexperienced to recognize Johnny’s ambi-tions. He’d been looking for a meal ticket, and she’d wanted to get away from Duke. As it turned out, neither of them got what they wanted. She closed her eyes tightly at the horror of what Duke had done when he had them brought back. Poor Johnny.

She had been fine before that farmer had come. He was just like Johnny.

He held out hope as bait. He painted images of freedom and promised it to her. Well, she had stopped believing the lies. She had stopped believing in freedom. She had stopped dreaming about it…until Hosea came, and now she couldn’t get it out of her mind.

She clutched the curtain. “I’ve got to get out of here.” She didn’t even care where. Anything else was better.

She had earned enough gold by now to build a little house of her own and quit working for a while. All she needed was the courage to go down and demand it from Duchess. She knew the risk, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Pit, the bartender, was polishing and stacking shot glasses when she came downstairs. “Morning, Miss Angel. You want to go for your walk? You want me to see if I can find Bret for you?”

Her courage faltered. “No.”

“You hungry? Henri just put something together for the Duchess.”

Maybe food would staunch the queasiness. She nodded, and he left the glasses and went out the door at the end of the bar. When he came back, he 88

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said, “Henri will bring something out in a minute, Angel.”

The small, dark Frenchman brought a tray and uncovered a plate of fried potatoes and bacon. The coffee was lukewarm. He made his apologies and said supplies were low. Angel couldn’t eat, anyway. She tried, but the food stuck in her throat. She sipped the coffee instead and tried to drown her fear, but it was there like a hard knot inside her chest.

Pit watched her. “Something wrong, Angel?”

“No. Nothing’s wrong.” She might as well get it done. Pushing her plate back, she got up.

The Duchess’s quarters were on the first floor behind the casino. Angel stood before the heavy oak door, her palms sweating. She wiped her hands on her skirt, took a deep breath, and knocked.

“Who’s there?”

“Angel.”

“Come in.”

The Duchess was dabbing her mouth delicately, and Angel saw what remained of a cheese omelet on her Dresden plate. One egg was worth two dollars, and cheese was very hard to come by at any price. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had an egg. The deceitful cow. Fear lessened as resentment grew.

The Duchess smiled. “Why aren’t you sleeping? You look dreadful. Are you upset about something?”

“You’ve been working me too hard.”

“Nonsense. You’re just in one of your moods again.” She smoothed the flowing red silk of her lounging gown. It did little to conceal the rolls of flesh gathering around her waist. Her cheeks were puffy, and she was developing a second chin. A pink ribbon held her graying hair back. She was obscene.

“Sit down, darling. I can see you have something unpleasant on your mind. Bret told me you didn’t come down for breakfast. Would you like something now?” The Duchess waved an indolent hand magnanimously at a basket of muffins.

“I want my gold.”

The Duchess didn’t look the least surprised. She laughed and leaned 89

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forward to pour herself more coffee. She added cream. Angel wondered where she had gotten it and how much it had cost. Duchess lifted the elegant cup and sipped while studying her over the rim. “Why do you want it?” she asked, as though merely curious.

“Because it belongs to me.”

The Duchess gave her a bland, amused look of maternal tolerance. “Pour yourself some coffee, and let’s talk about it.”