We Five (29 page)

An hour later, having betaken herself to the town common where the fresh air helped her to think more clearly, Maggie came to rue her accommodating subscription to Mobry's proposal that his visit to Manchester should precede hers. “After all, he's
my
brother!” she proclaimed to the grass and to the shrubberies, “and I have every right to find things out for myself without need of an intermediary. Moreover, if I am to betake myself with all dispatch to that city not so very distant, the trip will prevent me from exchanging harsh words with my mother over why she would ever do such a fell and cruel thing as to give up my brother, and why, once she'd done it, she'd never found need to tell me about it.”

Whereupon, Maggie rushed home and filled her little hand-portmanteau with a few overnight necessaries, and drew out a sovereign and some silver from the jewellery drawer in her bedroom bureau, and, not wishing to wait for her mother's return from her after noon visit with Mrs. Forrest, lest she miss the last train to Manchester, Maggie dashed off a note to Mrs. Barton, which said she was going away for the night. Maggie could not keep herself from adding, “to ascertain facts pertaining to my brother, which you should have named years ago, you blatant banisher of boy babies!” But then, thinking the last phrase superfluously hateful and not entirely accurate (there having been only
one
boy baby at issue, and the blatancy of its banishing having yet to be confirmed), she struck it through.

At the same time, Carrie could be found at the infirmary, standing next to the bed of her own mother and assisting the doctor and nurse in making the patient as comfortable as possible, for with burns as severe as those sustained by Mrs. Hale, not much more could be done other than the application of ointments and salves and the imposing of the salutary delirium of laudanum to put the sufferer into a state of anesthetic insensibility.

And where was Molly at this same time? Young Molly, having been released by her friend Carrie with strong words to the effect that she must go home and rest, was now in that very place and doing that very thing.

As it so happened, several other characters in our story found themselves, by either coincidence or design, in a different place still: the Fatted Pig Public House.

Here sate Jane Higgins and the man who sought that very after noon to win her favour, and decisively so: the outwardly charming and prepossessing Mr. Tom Catts, who was funny, and demonstrably endearing, and eager to see their two bumpers of old Madeira refilled until Jane's head was a-swim in a swirling pool of compliments and blandishments the likes of which she'd never heard in all her three-and-twenty years upon this earth. Close by and watching the two with the studied intensity of a drowsy infant was Jane's brother, a warm pint of porter clapped between two moist palms. As the room had become mist and haze for the increasingly alcohol-fuddled Jane, it was all that, as well, for Lyle Higgins, although, having grown used to living with his senses dulled and degraded, he had a stronger impression than did his sister of what was up and what was down, and what was up was this and no mistake: his sister Jane was become recipient of the most concerted form of love-making by a man who, unbeknownst to Jane, oozed dishonour and ill purpose from every pore.

And whatever was Higgins to do about it? Catts had been the first man ever to pay Jane more than casual notice. And were not disreputable overtures better than no overtures at all? It was a puzzlement, and he would sit with his porter and puzzle it out even after the two left the pub, directed for someplace he knew not.

Lyle Higgins would sit for upwards of a full minute. And then…

“Begging your pardon, lads,” said Higgins, after decamping from his chair and tottering with tangled steps to the table next to that previously occupied by his sister and her spurious admirer. “Did you happen to overhear any of what was said by the two what was just here?”

“Aye,” said the older and slightly more sober of the two young men. “What is it you'd be wanting to know?”

“Whither he was taking her. That's the thing.”

“And why, pray, would you be wanting to know such a thing as that? Have you a claim upon the girl?”

“It depends on how you mean the question. She's my sister.”

“Ah. Now that is a horse of a very different colour,” said the older man. “So I'll tell ye. There was mention of the emporium. Would you know the place?”

“Indeed I would.”

“Is the man up to no good?”

“I don't know it for a fact. I only know that I've crossed paths with his like afore.”

“Then join us for one last pint as be a send-off to rescue your sister from a fate unknown.”

Higgins bethought himself of the merits of the proposition and concluded that one drink more—strictly for the purpose of lubricating his steps in service to his mission of potential rescue—could do little harm, and perhaps very much good.

Jane Higgins and Tom Catts walked in the High Road with slow, careful steps to mask their having just spent the last two hours drinking intoxicating beverages at a public house (though Jane's incapacitation was far greater than her companion's). “You say you have a brother?” asked Catts, as Jane placed her hand upon his arm to steady herself.

“I have a brother, yes.”

“And he lives with you in the back of the family shop?”

Jane nodded.

“Yet you know with certainty he won't be there at this hour.”

“With certainty I know this.”

“And how is it, Miss Higgins, that you are so confident in this belief?”

Jane stopped in her place. She looked at Catts with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Because that was him sitting at the table by the old clock—the one drinking alone and slipping into his wonted state of daily hibernation. He'll not show up until all the chickens have gone to roost, he being the one confused cockerel that sometimes forgets where it even lives.”

Catts laughed hardily. “Miss Higgins, you are perhaps the most delightfully clever young woman I have ever met.”

“And is cleverness my
only
attribute?”

“Not by any measure, my dear woman. Allow me to enumerate your other fine traits when we are finally alone.”

The two went along thusly. But unbeknownst to Jane, they did not go along unobserved. For Jane was, in fact, being most closely watched by her friend Ruth through the window of a mutton pie shop. Only moments before, Ruth had slipped guiltily inside that establishment after bidding adieu to her friend Pardlow following their after noon tea. Though she had imbibed three cups of the tasty beverage, yet it was a most gastronomically unsatisfying hour and a quarter, for there was naught to be had of a victual nature—not even a fragment of a caraway-seed biscuit or a crumble of an old gooseberry scone. Thus a much-famished Ruth now stood alone in a dark corner of the shop gobbling a crusty meat pie with ravenous shame, and being glad the proprietor was nearly blind and did not identify her, until such point as that familiar gait, that instantaneously recognisable tall and gangly presence abroad, caught her eye.

Ruth betook herself to the window to get a better look, and there-through saw the thing for what it was: her friend Jane being led away by one who appeared to revel in her lurching debility. In that frightful moment Ruth knew there could be nothing propitious to be gleaned from their companioned procession in the lane. On the contrary, Ruth believed Jane to be careening down the path to dire consequence.

The well-being of her friend being more important to Ruth than the last three or four bites of mutton pie, she fled the shop with all due haste and bent her hurried steps to the doctor's infirmary to enrol Carrie in her mission of rescue (for any confrontation effected by Ruth singly would be misinterpreted by its recipient as officious intrusion in the customary Ruth Thrasher manner).

There was one other familiar to the reader who was at the Fatted Pig. This one sate drinking grog and a great deal of it, which was not a good thing, since the man of reference was one who had pledged himself to absolute temperance: Molly's father, Michael Osborne. Osborne was drinking to steal himself away from thoughts of Sylvia Hale and from his ineffective attempts to minister to her in the wake of the tragedy of her house catching fire from a toppled candelabra. It was right in his mind that he should do so, for not only did he know the good woman and felt her to be his friend, he also considered himself to be a legitimate member of the healing profession. Yet when he attempted to offer assistance to her through the herbs and other unconventional treatments he had learnt during his years of itinerate practise, he was insolently driven from the premises by the town doctor and made to feel small and unworthy in his adopted line of work.

And as Osborne took stock of his life and tallied the
reputable
paths he might have taken, which had eluded him, and faced the sad verity that he was in fine neither healer
nor
the best provider for a wife and child who had died in his deficient custody, and was not by any means the best claimant upon the heart of anyone, let alone the woman he now wished to marry, and was not nearly the prosperous and sober-headed father he should have been for his daughter Molly, he sank into a pit of despair and self-doubt, and then, by and by, into a state of wretched self-loathing, which caused him to drink ever the more and to lose all sense of himself.

In her dream Molly found herself in the middle of a field of daisies, or was it pennywinkles or marigolds or sunflowers? Yes, it was great sunflowers, bent like genuflecting Mussulmans from the weight of their Brobdingnagian seeds. She wandered amongst the flowers and did not know if she should be happy in their crowding presence or affrighted, for there were a good many of them and they choked her path and rose up to her own height. And there seemed traces of something lurking behind them—creatures of some mysterious sort. Lurking, Molly wondered, or merely abiding? Was there a human form to the creatures? If so, were they known to her? Dreams are never unambiguously revelatory, and sometimes they are not revelatory at all. So Molly was happy to have done with this one when into the field intruded the sound of a hand rapping upon a door. There being no doors in the out-of-doors, Molly found in this incongruity reason to waken herself. Once she had come fully to herself and realised the knocking had not suspended, it became incumbent upon her to rise and discover the identity of the visitor to the rooms she shared with her father over the stationer's and prints-seller's shop (for there was no maid or footman to do it, and of her father's whereabouts at the moment she had not the faintest idea).

With no need to dress, for she had lain down upon her bed without bothering to take anything off or to put anything on which was more appropriate for retirement, Molly plodded sleepy-eyed to the door that communicated with the public corridor and found, when she opened it, the young man who had touched her heart as no man had ever done before.

The two fell into one another's arms without the exchange of a single word. The door was shut, and all the world that had no place or claim on this moment was shut out with it.

The waiter swept his arm before him—silent indication that Cain and Ruth had their pick of all the tables in the empty tearoom.

“That sunny spot over there,” suggested Ruth, “right next to the door to the balcony.”

The waiter nodded and led the couple to the table Ruth had selected. But Ruth didn't sit down. Instead, she stepped through the open door. The balcony commanded a generous view of Dupont Street all the way down to Bush. Cain joined her.

“How did you find this place?” Ruth asked, her gaze drawn to a fish stand and the two men haggling stridently in front of it. This being a Saturday afternoon, Chinatown's main thoroughfare was bustling with boisterous, clamorous activity.

“I come here now and then. It's popular with some friends of mine.”

“The men with whom you work at the advertising agency, or a different set?”

“A very different set. The proprietor of this place is happy to entertain the patronage of Occidentals for whatever their purpose might be. The Plague's been over for some time now, but non-Asians—as a rule—still can't find the nerve to venture back into this part of town.”

Ruth stepped back into the room and sat down. Her eyes wandered about the room. She counted herself among those who seldom came to Chinatown, though she'd heard that it had many interesting restaurants and tasty noodle shops. The room was gaudily ornamented in the Oriental style. The walls were painted bright blue and adorned with vertical Cantonese legends in silver and red. The tables were partitioned off from each other by large screens of elaborately gilded ebony, a material echoed in the tables and stools themselves, each stool inlaid with a slab of speckled marble. The gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room was strung with tinsel, which glittered even in the suffused light of its subdued gas jets.

“It seems to me,” said Ruth, running her palm along the contour of the smoothly polished table, “that this is one of those places where San Franciscans come who want very much to be left alone.”

The waiter handed Cain a menu and took a few steps back. “And you'd be totally correct in that assumption,” said Cain, his eyes now lowered upon the menu.

“What happens in those curtained-off rooms over there?” asked Ruth with casual curiosity.

Cain glanced up. “Opium smoking, for the most part, but other things take place there too—human activities that aren't much spoken about in polite company. Do you mind if I order for the both of us?”

“Not at all.”

Cain signed to the waiter that he was ready to place his order. “A pot of Black Dragon, if you please. And we'll have a platter of the pickled watermelon rinds and candied quince.” Turning to Ruth: “Do you like dried almonds?”