by Maren Smith
It was standing room only tonight. Cowboys were dancing with grizzled miners, raising thick clouds of dust because very few ever bothered to hit the washhouse before coming here. At the bar, Amethyst looked both frazzled and fantastic. It was amazing how effortlessly she did that. Her eyes were bright and her color high as she rushed to fill order after drink order, flashing tantalizing glimpses of both bosom and ankle as she worked, climbing up and down the ladders behind the bar, reaching for the upper-shelf liquors even though there were easier bottles within reach. It was those “stolen” glimpses of calf that kept the tips rolling in. And for every coin or grain or pebble of gold dust they offered, she always did the same teasing gesture, leaning over the bar, offering not her hand to accept, but the valley of her mostly bared breasts for them to drop their money in. By the end of the evening, she jingled with every flouncing step that took her on up to bed.
Chin envied that. She envied that look. Even with a face shining with perspiration, Amy always looked fresh and sweet and beautiful. When Chin’s face grew shiny with sweat, her makeup ran. Very early on, she had learned that while Jade the Dancer had the power to draw the crowds, it was her small, delicate, China-doll features that the miners and cowboys wanted. Without her makeup, Chin was nothing more than another immigrant. She might as well be working at any one of now thirteen laundries that had sprung up in Culpepper Cove or out of her own tent.
“I see some regulars,” Rose murmured, widening the crack in the curtain so she could see out too. “There’s your Mr. Jackson. He’s brought flowers again.”
Probably because he meant to propose again; Chin withered at the thought. Not that Jackson wasn’t a nice man. He was—kind, gentle, courteous, with weathered hands that knew how to play a woman’s body in those small hours of the night when he left his sleeping children (all seven of them under the age of ten) to find comfort in arms that, when he closed his eyes, she couldn’t help but think he imagined were his dead wife’s. That he needed a helpmate was clear, but that helpmate wasn’t Chin. Once upon a time, swearing her love and loyalty to a man had been her favorite dream, one carefully cultivated by her mother. These days, Chin was her father’s daughter. She was practical. She could not—would not—make vows of forever when she knew she could not honor them. Too many ghosts haunted her past. Even if they didn’t, in places like the Red Petticoat, dreams of hearth and home, husbands and families, did not exist for women like her.
Except for the rare few exceptions. Ruby, for instance. Automatically, Chin located the vibrant redhead as she dashed between tables and dancers, distributing food from Nettie’s kitchen and drink from the bar, all while dodging pinches and pats as only the wife of the sheriff could. But then, Ruby was the only one of Jewel’s gems not wearing the red petticoat of a whore and she never had. Hers was pink. She was untouchable.
Lapis had worn the red, though. Not only had she also found a husband, but she’d married the mayor, of all people.
And then there was Crystal, now the traveling bride of the wealthiest gambler Culpepper had ever known. And Amber, and Citrine. But, Chin’s stubborn mind insisted, these were the exceptions, not the rule. These were the fairytale endings that she knew better than to believe she’d ever find for herself. No, she’d gotten out of China. She still had her life when no one else—not her grandparents, her aunts, uncles, parents, cousins, and certainly not any of her brothers, their wives or their children—none of them could say the same. That was her fairytale ending. It would never get any better than that, and Chin knew it even if Mr. Everett Jackson, Editor-in-Chief at the Culpepper Daily with his weekly visitations, flowers and hat in hand, did not.
“Ladies.”
Sapphire and Rose jumped, and all three spun to stare at Gabe. His frown was as impressive as the unspoken threat he made when he hooked his thumb in the wide black leather of his belt. Though it wasn’t directed at her, it was a threat Chin felt shiver straight up the back of her legs before shimmering across the surface of her bottom, like the softest summer breeze slipping beneath her bloomers.
“Why do we have men dancing with men out there when there are two ladies, both of whom are, I believe, scheduled to work but who are instead—” He gave the blushing gems a stern look. “—standing idle back here?”
“Sorry, Mr. Gabe,” Rose stammered. A woman normally quick with a smart retort, it was amazing how quickly looks like his could reduce her—or Sapphire, or any of them, for that matter—to flushes, stammers, and a prompt about-face in behavior, especially when he stood, as he was now, with his thumbs hooked in the belt he rarely used as anything but a visual reminder for how it could be employed. “We were just on our way out now.”
“Long, hard night ahead of us,” Sapphire cheekily agreed. Dipping in close to Chin’s ear, she mock whispered, “Only profession in the world where that’s a good thing.”
Giggling, Rose grabbed Sapphire’s arm and both ducked through the curtains, disappearing down the stairs that flanked either side of the stage.
“Oops,” Sapphire apologized, accidentally bumping into the trio of Chinese musicians coming up the stairs. Lin Wei tipped his head, long ponytail falling over his shoulder as he shouldered his pipa lute, and he and his two sons made way for the ladies to pass. Without a word, they then continued to the stage, taking their usual place in the rear to provide Chin with as much room as possible to dance while they played.
With nothing left to do herself now but wait until they were ready, Chin lingered at the curtain, alternating between watching as they tuned the strings on both pipa and erhu, and Xi, the youngest boy, practiced silent notes on his flute, and noting who in the rough-stock crowd were already taking notice of them. Men began to cluster around the stage, jostling one another in their eagerness to claim the best vantage spots.
“Busy night,” Gabe commented, and for the second time Chin jumped a little. It was amazing how cat-like a man that big could move. She hadn’t realized he had crept in to stand right behind her until he reached past her shoulder to part the curtains for himself.
“No more so than any other night,” Chin replied. How true that was, too. They were all busy nights these days. The cool of spring had faded into the heat of summer and gold fever only made the lonely hours of darkness feel hotter. And the influx of miners just kept coming, arriving by the dozens every day, overflowing the hills and streambeds with claim stakes—the vast majority of which never yielded more than a poke’s worth of dust for all the blood, sweat and tears poured into the back-breaking hope of finding more.
Chin wouldn’t be a miner, not for all the gold in the world. Subconsciously, her fingers trailed along the red stitching of her silk gown. It was the same color red as the petticoat she normally wore, the one this place was named for.
“They look about ready,” Gabe said, glancing to the musicians next.
That, too, was a statement that required no answer, which made her suspicious of what Gabe wasn’t saying.
“Almost,” she agreed, checking Wei’s progress for herself. He and his sons, Ling and Xi were almost set up. Gold miners by day, twice a week the Lins offered their musical skills so Chin could dance to proper music, the way her mother and grandmother had. Chin always paid Wei for their time—two dollars a night, of which he always gave her one dollar back when he took his place as her first customer. Because she reminded him of his daughter, he’d once told her. He never once acted anything but fatherly, and so she never charged him what her time was worth. Instead, she always let him lead her into the bathing room for a hot bath, and then sat silent and still while he used a pearl-backed comb to painstakingly brush out her long black hair.
Chin didn’t know the smallest details about Wei’s daughter—whether she was young or grown, living or gone—all she did know was how the old man’s hands held a complete lack of lust as he washed, then dried and then spent the remaining allotment of his purchased time caressing her hair. To the best of her recollections, Chin couldn’t remember her o
wn father ever doing that. But in the shadows of the bathing room, with the piano music pounding out “Old Folks At Home” to the accompanying stomp of all these boots keeping lively time, sometimes it was hard not to place Wei’s hands (if not his face) in her own father’s stead.
Drawing a deep breath, Gabe let the curtain fall. “You’ve got a full dance card.”
They both knew dancing was not what she would be doing once she came down off the stage. Even as she felt it, Chin disregarded her instinctive pang of regret. It was the most useless emotion of all, and she knew it. The fortunes of men are as variable as the winds, as her father used to say. He would not have encouraged her to wallow in regrets.
“Jade?” Gabe asked, startling her back to herself. Had he asked her something? She hadn’t heard.
She turned from the curtain, giving him all her dark-eyed attention. “I’m sorry?”
“Your first assignment after the dance,” Gabe repeated. “You have the right to choose, you always will, but the gentleman who approached Jewel has offered a hundred dollars if you’ll consider allowing him to be the first.”
One hundred dollars? Chin held herself frozen, at first too startled to do anything but fixate on so princely a sum. It was a joke. It had to be. Nobody paid that much for sex, not with one woman. Not when such a price could have bought the favors of every gem in the Red Petticoat!
Suspicion, like a heavy boulder, crashed down through the middle of her. Her eyes narrowed. As her temper flared, the accent she worked so hard to banish came popping out. “He wants to put his fingers in my ass,” she accused.
“If you get completely tore up in temper, are you going to start yelling at me in Chinese?” A faint glint of amusement lit Gabe’s teasing smile. “The client has already assured both Jewel and me that he wants nothing out of the ordinary.”
Nobody paid a hundred dollars for “ordinary.” Chin’s eyes narrowed further. “He wants me to put mine in his!”
That spark of amusement very nearly became a smile, but Gabe knew better than that, especially with her. He bit it back even as he reached for her, closing his warm hands on her shoulders and giving her a gentle attention-snaring shake. “He said nothing out of the ordinary. Just a half-hour of quiet time with a woman from his own country, that’s all he wants.”
A woman from his own country. Chin would have shied back a step except that Gabe continued to hold her.
“I know,” he said, anticipating her withdrawal, albeit an understanding that was lined with threads of hardened resolve. “I’ll support your decision if you want to say no; we all will, and you know that. But—”
Chin flattened her mouth. She could hear that “but” coming long before he’d said it.
“—one hundred dollars,” Gabe reminded her. “That’s a lot of money to dismiss without so much as a second thought.”
And with Chin it was always money first. Always. Because nothing had scared her so deeply as that long voyage across the ocean, with only the clothes on her back and her bundle of family heirlooms in her arms, and nothing—no security of any kind; financial, familial, or cultural—to help support her once she got here. Though she’d been running for two years, it was the first time in her life that she’d truly been alone. Four years had passed since that boat had landed at American soil, but she could still taste the fear. Worse were those mornings when she awoke with not just the taste of it in her mouth, but the chill knots once more tangling up her guts. She’d hoarded her money ever since. That Gabe mentioned it now meant he probably knew. Which meant Jewel knew it too. Maybe the others as well. She wanted to cringe.
Offstage, the piano music came to a boisterous end to the whooping cheers of more than fifty dusty patrons showing their appreciation.
“Think about it,” Gabe said as he let go of her shoulders.
But she didn’t want to. Her mind was a whirlwind, without any discernible thoughts; just feelings. Like dread, a giant weight of which she could already feel settling into the folds of her silk gown. It made her legs feel odd. She couldn’t afford that right before her performance.
“Wei is first,” she said, too abruptly. Gabe’s fading smile vanished and disapproval took its place. Because of her tone, she knew, rather than her choice. Chin did not apologize. Just then, the first plucking of lute strings sang out from the stage and only too grateful for the chance to escape, she stepped through the curtain, leaving the frowning Gabe behind her.
A great whooping cheer followed her to the center of the stage. It was deafening, vibrating. She could feel it through her pale silk slippers, shaking the smooth stage floor. That roar didn’t begin to die until Chin took her place, and then the Red Petticoat became eerily quiet. All talking grew soft, and then ceased altogether.
From the inner folds of each sleeve, she withdrew her fans, white silk stretched over fragile bamboo sticks engraved with peacocks—the white silk colorfully painted to show a flowering countryside with red-wall and yellow-tile buildings that, if she didn’t look too closely, could almost have been her own family’s home. She posed, a demure woman striving for peace and serenity though internally she was having a hard time finding a rooting place in either. Somewhere in this room was a man from her own country. Someone willing to pay a princely sum for the pleasure of being her first for the night. Apart from Wei, Chin had no Chinese regulars. Very, very few of her homeland people came to this country with money. Even fewer became wealthy once they got here. So, who was he?
Where was he?
Chin kept her eyes on the floor, waiting while the quiet turned heavy. She stretched out her arms, letting the fans become extensions of her hands. For almost a full minute, silence reigned, broken only by the creak of chairs, the shuffle of cards, and the clink of chips tossed upon the gambling tables far across the room. Amethyst and Ruby never stopped moving. They rushed behind the bar and through the dense crowd, respectively, filling food and drink orders. The sound their shoes made seemed obscenely loud in the quiet.
Then the reed-thin notes of a flute piped one warbling stanza before Wei and his eldest son followed on both lutes. It was an age-old melody, one she remembered her mother dancing to in those shadowy years of her childhood, back when life was perfect. Closing her eyes, the graceful shadow of her mother in her mind, Chin snapped out both fans and let the melody move her.
Her knees felt weak. So weak that when she took that first step, she almost went down. She disguised that wobble with a spinning turn and a fluttering swoop of one fan, and used the opportunity to steal her first peek out over the sea of watching men. Charlie was still sitting at his piano, flipping through his music sheets to pick out the next set while she kept the patrons occupied. Everett Jackson had vaulted to his feet already. He was standing, flowers in hand, checking his tie, smoothing down his hair, trying to smile and yet looking as if she were already telling him no. Again. Turn complete, she dropped her gaze to the floor once more and pulled herself into the next regal pose.
The fan dance was best when done in a group of carefully choreographed women, but nobody here knew that, so Chin didn’t bother with perfection. Her mother was surely looking down from the back of the shen of the Dragon King, shaking her head with her mouth held in that pinched, disapproving way. Still, not caring allowed Chin the freedom to direct her thoughts not to the lack of other fans snapping open and fluttering in flawless synchronization with her own, but to who in the crowd might have one hundred American dollars to waste on an extravagant half-hour with one woman. Her gaze went to the gamblers at the far tables, but none of those were looking her way.
Dip…step, toe, step…turn. She snapped out her fans, fluttering to make the silk shimmer as she brought them in close, drawing the hungry eyes of every lonely patron in the room: cowboys with pay burning holes in their pockets; miners with a little gold to show for a week or more of hard panning in cold mountain streams. She drew their eager stares to the curves of her breasts, the flare of her hips. She turned again, letting her fans
snap shut… and that was when she saw him: the only Chinese man aside from Wei and his sons in the Red Petticoat. He was leaning up against the bar, dressed in a dark suit and a top hat, with two men standing expressionless in the long black robes of royal bodyguards at the bar behind him. The bodyguards weren’t looking at her. They weren’t looking with all the practiced determination of men who wanted to, but who knew better.
The man in the suit, however, was watching. He was equally without expression. His mouth did not smile. His white-gloved hands tightened imperceptibly atop the ivory head of his ornamental walking cane. His almond eyes followed her every move, sharp with interest, though not with desire
She knew those eyes; she’d seen them before, although the face that bore them now was far younger than that of the man who’d rode onto her family’s estate six long years ago, a company of armed palace guards following in his wake. She knew those hands; the way they held that cane was the same relaxed grip she’d seen that other man use back when he’d drawn his imperial scroll and proclaimed, by order of the Great Dragon himself, her entire household to be that of traitors. Not for anything her father or brothers had done, or his father and his brothers, but for an unforgiveable crime committed by a relation so distant, Chin did not even know his name. For that, her family’s rank and property were forfeit, their honor was stripped from them, and her entire household condemned to death. That was when the imperial guard had dismounted. Her father and her brothers had simply stood there, but her mother had grabbed her, yanking her back into the house.
Chin stood frozen on the stage, trapped in the dark of that man’s unwavering stare, hearing again the cries of their servants as swords were drawn and the slaughter began. Chin didn’t know if her father tried to defend himself. His honor may not have allowed it. All Chin knew was the confusion and panic that had gripped her from the inside as her mother fled with her through the house, grabbing all that was sacred or of value, wrapping silk around jade and ivory heirlooms, and bundling all into a blanket before tying the corners securely. She’d grabbed Chin’s hand, racing with her out the back screen door just as the heavy stomp of boots invaded through the front of their home.
