That name again. “Elizabeths?”
“It’s not my place to explain,” she said. “Ask your Beatrix. I don’t want to step on Morgenstern’s toes.”
“Tonight,” Claire said, tracing a circle on the bar, “I saw a side of Beatrix I hadn’t before. She . . . she’s invested in whatever it is they’re doing there. And I suppose I knew that, but I hadn’t realized that she was telling them things she knew about me. I don’t know if I want to be involved in their business. Some of it is nasty, Perpetua. Though I suppose it doesn’t matter. I—”
I’ll be gone soon enough.
Perpetua tipped her head to the side, thinking. Her wedding cake of a wig tottered but stayed put. “I’ll need to go greet guests in a moment,” she said. “May I make an observation first?”
Claire tensed. “I won’t stop you.”
“That might be the issue.”
“Pardon?”
Perpetua sighed. “I don’t know what you’re afraid of, girl. Or—I don’t know why your courage shies back at the precise line that it does. All I know is that you and that hoyden show up here, week after week—which is risky enough, the two of you being respectable ladies and all—and then you watch her throw a punch, find a man or two, and then slip off to foment treason, all while you brood here at this bar.”
Claire opened her mouth, then shut it. She didn’t have a response ready.
“Think on that,” Perpetua said, and left her the champagne bottle.
I’m running away from under my father’s nose, she thought, to marry a man I’ve never met, all so that I can be safe. Isn’t that bravery? Besides, anyone would look like a coward next to Beatrix. She loved her best friend with a loyalty she hadn’t felt for anyone since her mother died. Claire was, by nature, an idealist and an observer (and afraid, her heart whispered, afraid of what you are, what you might be). Beatrix wasn’t. Beatrix had seven siblings and a mother who didn’t obsess over her body, her every move. She was adored by every last person she met.
Look at her now, Beatrix, sauntering out of the back room of Perpetua’s and directly into a man’s arms to dance. As though she believed the best in him. As though she believed the best in everyone. Claire refilled her glass, drank it down. Refilled it again.
While she was distracted, a pair of red-coated Livingston-Monroe men sidled up to the bar. They had that particular look to them—something like mountains, something like a long, clear view to nowhere.
Her future countrymen. Claire gave them a sidelong look.
“The waitress disappears, the barman’s gone—what kind of an establishment is this?” The blond one fiddled with the buttons on his coat.
“A Levee one,” the other said. “You know why we’re here.”
“None of these fellows knows a thing about that weapons exhibition,” the blond one said. One of the buttons came off in his hand. “Son of a bitch.”
“Keep buying them drinks, then.”
“I would if there was someone to buy drinks from!” The soldier pounded on the bar. The noise was immediately swallowed under the swell of the orchestra.
Perfect, utopian Livingston-Monroe, where the men are all kind. Claire studied her hands intently. Maybe not all the reports are right.
“We’ll go to the Governor’s Mansion tomorrow. You’d prefer that, anyway, Jonathan. Prettier girls.”
Jonathan snorted. “We’ll be talking to the scientists. They don’t wear skirts.” The two of them howled, as though the idea itself was preposterous. Claire thought of Beatrix’s glider, and glowered.
“You’ll be talking to Remy Duchamp. He might as well, effeminate bastard.”
Something about her expression must have drawn them in, because the blond soldier sidled up to her. “That whole bottle yours, miss?” he—Jonathan—asked.
She looked into his eyes. Blue, and guileless, despite what was coming out of his mouth. With her teeth, she pulled off one glove, then another. His eyes looked less guileless then.
Her touch could make a man’s dearest wish come true, if her father were to be believed. It had been months since she’d tested it on anyone but Jeremiah Emerson.
Here was someone who wanted to work against him.
Here, Father, she thought. A parting gift.
“Let me pour you a drink,” she said, and reached out to touch the soldier’s face.
Five
Claire left the champagne with the soldiers, took her hat from the doorman, pulled on her gloves in the street. In front of Perpetua’s, a knot of wide-eyed travelers had paused, and now they watched Claire reassemble herself as though she was one of the Fair’s storied exhibits.
“Is this—is this a brothel?” the man in front asked.
Claire squinted at his collar. A priest. “You won’t find any butterflies here, Reverend,” she said, tucking an escaped curl under her top hat.
“Pardon me. Butterflies?”
Claire sighed. “Prostitutes, Reverend. None at Perpetua’s, not anymore. No one for you all to save.”
This was faddish, now, the reformers walking the Levee at night in frightened clusters, as though they might be set upon at any moment by bandits. Judging by the crowd on tonight’s streets, those bandits would have to be can-can dancers, or Alta California men with fat pockets. The Levee wasn’t the safest place in Monticello, to be sure, but in the days leading up to the Fair, there was less trouble on these streets than people out rubbernecking for it.
Somehow her day had begun with her supplicating herself to her father and wound its circuitous way here. Claire couldn’t help the words coming out of her mouth. “Is this part of your itinerary, then? Dinner at Engel’s, then a brief spin through the slums? Have you thought, instead, of taking time to visit the orphans at the Home for the Friendless instead? Or is it part of your calling to gawk at girls in dire straits?”
The beak-nosed woman behind him crossed her arms. “All I see is one girl who doesn’t know her place. You adventuresses. Lightskirts, all of you.”
Claire opened her mouth to unleash another stream of invective—who was she tonight, this girl furious and useless in equal measure? But the priest said, “Peace, child,” cutting his eyes over to the woman beside him, a warning. “We’re here to save you,” he said earnestly to Claire. “You and your brethren. We’re here to show you a path back to the sanctity of the home, where you belong. Where you’ll be safe.”
It was against the common thinking, which held that the city needed its pockets of vice, needed its beer gardens and dance halls, since the sinners would go ahead and sin anyway. There wasn’t any saving those people. And how inconvenient would it be for the General to shake down his madams for “protection fees” all over town? Better keep them in the one half mile of the Levee.
Even Perpetua paid a monthly sum to the Crown. That’s what they called it, paying the Crown, though Claire rather doubted any of the “taxes” got to the official coffers.
“If you were here to save me,” Claire said with a tight smile, “you’re about ten years too late.” She ran her hands down the lapels of her brother’s dinner jacket. “My house was never the safest place, Father.”