The Gilded Age, a Time Travel
Page 24
“A gift for you, Miss Cameron,” Zhu says deferentially and lays the Bible on her desk.
Miss Cameron looks her up and down coldly. “Miss Wong. You look like a proper young lady. Is it true you are employed by that scourge, Jessie Malone?”
Zhu hesitates, her anger quickening at this fine, pampered lady running this bleak mission. Muse flashes a warning in her peripheral vision, and she bites her tongue. Of course she needs Cameron’s help. How else can she rescue Wing Sing ? ”I’m merely her bookkeeper.” At Cameron’s contemptuous glance, she adds, “Miss Malone isn’t so bad. She’s fair.”
Cameron takes the Bible, runs her finger down the leather binding. “That is the first time, Miss Wong, I have ever heard anyone call a purveyor of female flesh fair.” Dark circles underscore her large, pretty eyes. “What can I do for you?”
“I know of a girl, an abducted girl.” And Zhu tells Cameron about Wing Sing and her servitude at Madam Selena’s on Pacific Street.
“Oh indeed, I know all about Selena,” Cameron says, suddenly freed of her foul mood. Her tired eyes light up. “Selena is despicable. Miss Culbertson rescued a five-year-old from that sink last spring. The child had been smuggled in and sold as a mooie-jai, a household slave. When the child didn’t serve tea properly, Selena poured boiling water on her hands. Let me see.” Cameron seizes a ledger, leafs through the pages. “Selena’s house has got a trapdoor in the roof leading up from the southeast bedroom. There’s a butcher’s shop in back, a narrow gap between the rooftops, and a fire escape leading down from the shop. That route of escape will have to be watched.” She slaps the ledger shut and narrows her eyes. “Why do you want me to rescue this girl?”
“Because… .” Zhu hates lying to Cameron, but she’s got to. “She’s a distant relative of mine. A distant cousin. I truly do not want to see her live like that.” At least that’s true enough.
“I see. You wouldn’t by any chance intend to recruit your distant cousin for Jessie Malone’s Morton Alley cribs?”
“No, no! I swear it on that Bible! Nothing like that!”
“Well, Miss Wong, your employment hardly recommends you. We’ve been deceived by the likes of you many times before.”
“I want Wing Sing to live here,” she declares with genuine passion. “She must live here. She’s supposed to live here. Please, I implore you, Miss Cameron. Take Wing Sing into your home. Keep her safe.”
This is the truth. This is the object of the Gilded Age Project.
Cameron studies her. Then the gleam returns to her eye, a slow smile to her face. She actually rubs her hands with glee. Glee! “Very well! Let us go rescue Wing Sing.”
Cameron sends a messenger to the callbox on Kearny Street, and the officer with the patrol wagon there takes her message to the Chinatown station. Before Zhu has finished her tea, five local bulls show up at the door bearing hatchets, sledgehammers, crowbars, ropes, wedges, and determined scowls.
“Hallo there, Mr. Cooke, Mr. Andrews, gentlemen,” Cameron greets them briskly. Zhu thinks the policemen are rather dapper in their bowler hats, high starched collars, cravats, and tweed jackets neatly buttoned. “This,” she says to Zhu, “is our raiding squad.” She tells the bulls that Zhu is her informant and mentions Madam Selena, whose name excites their chatter, the flexing of manly muscles, and twitching of mustaches.
Off they go, crammed in a brougham, bound for Pacific Street.
The plug-ugly Stick Victorian has got a red light burning in the window, in spite of the city ordinance. Cameron confers with the police, and two bulls stride around back to stand guard at the fire escape leading down from the roof of the butcher’s shop. The rest of their party climbs the stairs to Madam Selena’s front door. To Zhu’s amazement, Cameron hoists up her skirts and petticoats and bounds up the stairs, leading the way. Zhu follows.
“Even the highbinders dare not harm my person,” Cameron declares. “Stay close to me, Miss Wong. You will need to identify her.”
The door—Zhu notices for the first time—comes equipped with an outer door of iron bars. A security door that is, at the moment, securely locked. Cameron reaches through the bars, seizes the door knocker shaped like a rooster, and knocks. Nothing happens, but curtains stir in an upstairs window.
“Mr. Andrews?” Cameron says. “Break it down.”
Andrews wields his ax and, in a moment, he’s smashed the wood all around the door of iron bars. Cooke applies his crowbar, plucking the bolts right out, and pries the door from its frame. Andrews smashes his ax against the inner front door, splintering the wood. A third bull kicks the door in.
Cameron storms inside, her black skirts a thunderhead of fury, and Zhu steps into the parlor she entered before in her coolie’s disguise. Andrews whirls, smashing rosewood chairs, tables, statuary, the lewd paintings on the walls. Cooke kicks at the spittoons, the vases, sending porcelain shattering against the baseboards. The third bull heaves the lamp with its red light through the front window, shattering the glass. Selena’s girls fly out of their rooms, shrieking, scrambling here and there, to the back of the house, upstairs.
Zhu and Cameron charge up the stairs, Zhu leading the way now, recalling the bedroom where she last saw Wing Sing. Madam Selena, in a black silk nightgown and robe, steps out of Wing Sing’s bedroom. She slams and locks the door, and stands defiantly in their way, barricading the room with her body.
“That’s her room, at the end of the hall!” Zhu cries.
And then she stares—is that a figure darting behind Selena into the room? No, no, no. It can’t be. Selena just closed and locked the door. Zhu’s breath rasps in her throat. Suddenly she’s dizzy, disoriented. Reality is shifting and tilting all around her again.
What on earth is happening?
Selena heaves herself at Zhu, cursing and punching. “You go now! No one here!” One of the cops pulls her off and slams her against the wall.
Andrews swings his ax at the door, and Cooke wedges his crowbar. They pop the bedroom door right open, and Zhu and Cameron rush inside.
“No one here!” Selena shouts and spits. “Fahn quai!”
There is no one here. The bedroom is empty. Cameron throws open the closet, throws back the bedclothes, kicks at the flimsy wire frame of the bed.
“She not here, fahn quai!” Madame Selena shouts. “You go now, white devils!”
“Wait,” Cameron says, cocking her head. She presses her forefinger to her lips.
Zhu strains to listen. And there! A tiny, scratching sound.
“You turn into turtle!” Selena yells. “All your children, they turn into toads!”
Cameron seizes the bed, struggles to push it away from the room’s corner. Andrews and Cooke join in, shoving the bed frame across the room. Andrews breaks the washstand with one stroke of his ax, sending water and basin flying. Cameron hugs the walls, tapping, listening. “Listen for a hollow sound,” she tells Zhu. “There’s a secret compartment in here, I can smell it.”
Zhu starts tapping on the walls, too, but she hears nothing unusual.
Cameron wipes her noble forehead with her hand, flushed and sweating.
Again that tiny scratching.
Cameron drops to her knees with a cry of triumph, scratches at the floor with her fingernails. Zhu pushes her aside, takes out and runs the mollie knife down the crack between the floorboards. Cooke applies his crowbar, a loose nail flies out, and two floorboards pop up.
And there, in a narrow space beneath the floor, lies Wing Sing, wide-eyed and trembling.
“Ai!” screams Madam Selena. “All go to hell!”
A tong enforcer stands watching at the door, but he makes no move to interfere. He smiles a little, staring boldly at Zhu.
“Wing Sing,” Zhu says, taking her hand, and helps her sit up. The girl is glassy-eyed, her makeup smeared. Drugged? Her mouth hangs open, her limbs are limp, her hair disheveled. She wears the same apple-green silk pajamas, now soiled and wrinkled. Foreboding rises in Zhu’s throat as she glances at
the girl’s feet. She wears the same straw sandals threaded with green silk. But now her feet are concealed by thick white cotton stockings. Bound or unbound? Zhu can’t tell.
“We’re going to go now, just like I promised you. Okay?”
“Jade Eyes?”
“Yes, it’s me. We’re going to take you home.” But that’s not strictly true. How she hates lying to this girl! “We’re going to take you to the home,” she amends.
“My jade, my gold,” Wing Sing says. “My dowry. I take my dowry!”
“Where’s the jewelry she brought with her?” Zhu says to Selena.
The madam shrugs. Zhu exchanges a look with Cameron, and Cameron tears around the bedroom again, tapping, prying. She finds another secret compartment in the floor of the clothes closet. Officer Andrews breaks the planks open with his ax.
And there, the rosewood box!
“I know that my cousin brought a dowry given to her by her mother in China,” Zhu says carefully. “I want to see if Selena has stolen anything, the way she’s stolen Wing Sing’s innocence.”
“Indeed, yes, take a look,” says Cameron.
Zhu eagerly flings back the lid.
The aurelia. She will have it.
Glitter of gold, bracelets of jade, earrings and rings. Zhu peers breathlessly. Several new pieces she doesn’t recognize—amber beads, a necklace of lapis lazuli, a brooch of freshwater pearls. Please. Zhu doesn’t care how or where or when the girl got the aurelia. If a john gave it to her, if she bought it herself at Colonel Andrews’s Diamond Palace, if it materialized out of thin air. It doesn’t matter. Please make this right. Wing Sing has got to have the aurelia. Wing Sing has got to be the girl Zhu is supposed to rescue so that all of spacetime in the future survives.
But the aurelia isn’t there. It isn’t there.
Cameron beams. “Praise Jesus Christ!”
Officer Andrews hands his ax to Officer Cooke. With a gentleness Zhu didn’t think possible, the policeman lifts Wing Sing in his arms.
*
At Nine Twenty Sacramento Street, Zhu and Cameron escort the trembling girl into a tiny dormitory with twelve cots and on into the bathroom. Miss Olney is waiting with a basin of steaming hot water, a bar of soap stinking of lye, a burlap wash cloth, and rough cotton towels.
“Let us get you clean in the name of the Lord, my dear,” Miss Olney says. Her tone implies more than physical dirt.
Wing Sing looks at the homely walls, the sticks of furniture, the bare floors. Her drug-addled eyes widen. The other girls peek at her with their scrubbed faces, disciplined hair, homely cotton clothes. Wing Sing backs away from Miss Olney, hugging her silk around her. Her apple-green silk, the intricate black and yellow embroidery, and gold frogs stand out in this plain place like some glorious pennant of sin.
Olney advances on her, gripping the dripping bar of soap. “Tut, tut, dear. Take off those rags and let me wash you.”
“You not touch me, fahn quai.” Wing Sing spits at her.
“The girl may have some trouble adjusting,” Cameron says calmly to Zhu. “They often do.”
Olney seizes a green silk sleeve. “I cannot get you clean, dear, if you won’t take off your clothes.”
‘”Oh ho!” Wing Sing cries. “You not pay, I not take off clothes.”
“Really!” Olney says and glares at Zhu.
“Hey, you know where she’s been,” Zhu says, glaring back.
Wing Sing darts to Zhu, seizes her sleeve. “Please, Jade Eyes, I go home now, okay?’
“You are home, dear,” Cameron says, seizing her hand. Wing Sing flings her hand away. “We’ll get her busy soon enough, Eleanor. Sewing, do you think? She seems to like clothes.” To Zhu, “Do you know if your cousin can sew?”
Zhu shakes her head, worried now. The girl is supposed to live here, stay here, according to the Gilded Age Project. She says harshly, “Wing Sing, take off those dirty clothes and wash that crap off your face. You won’t need any of that here.”
The two Presbyterian women throw startled glances her way. Zhu doesn’t care. Maybe brusqueness will work when kindness fails. The madams and the johns push these young women around as a matter of course. The girl isn’t accustomed to kindness.
“I not sew! I not sew!” Wing Sing wails. “I have maid. She sew!”
“Get the jewelry box,” Cameron says to Olney, and Olney makes a motion to take the box. Wing Sing clutches the box to her chest and backs away, rolling her eyes.
“I don’t think you should take her jewelry,” Zhu says evenly. “This is her dowry. All the wealth she has from her family.”
“Miss Wong, you do not really suppose it is hers?” Cameron snaps.
Zhu turns to Cameron, troubled by her attitude toward her new charge. “This girl and her mother were tricked by a would-be husband, Miss Cameron. I know that for a fact. She’s not a thief. Her mother gave her this dowry to facilitate her marriage. Isn’t that right, Wing Sing?”
“Yes, yes,” she sobs. “Is true.”
Cameron exchanges a long look with Zhu, and Zhu can see in Cameron’s eyes self-righteousness and ferocity. And also that her soul flies out to this abused girl.
Muse posts a file in Zhu’s peripheral vision, alphanumerics dancing as the monitor tabulates the probabilities. The Archives amply support Wing Sing’s presence at Nine Twenty Sacramento Street. Or a girl a lot like Wing Sing.
At least the probabilities look right to Zhu. And that will have to do.
“She may keep the box,” Cameron says. “Go on, then, Eleanor. Clean her up.”
Zhu follows Cameron out of the bathroom. Cameron shuts the door, leaving Miss Olney to her task.
Wing Sing screams, “I go home now, okay? I go home!”
*
“I do apologize for any misunderstanding we may have had earlier,” Cameron says as she and Zhu sit again in her office, comparing their notes on Wing Sing’s successful rescue. A new spirit of camaraderie graces them. They sip cocoa out of exquisite rose-glazed cups, the scent of chocolate perfuming the air. “You are good at rescuing, Miss Wong.”
“You’re really good, too, Miss Cameron,” Zhu says. “You always will be.”
“Oh, well, that remains to be seen. But you. You are a strong young woman. You understand them. I confess I’m impressed. We could use you here.”
“I confess I wanted to seek a position here.”
Surprise flickers in Cameron’s eyes. “Why did you not?”
“Something unexpected happened, and everything changed.” She couldn’t possibly leave Daniel now. He needs her. She smiles a little to herself. Even if he doesn’t know it himself yet, he needs her.
Cameron ruefully examines her ravaged fingernails. Perspiration stains the underarms of her plum shirtwaist. Her pompadour is wispy, her skirt less crisp. She unpins the gold brooch at her throat, tosses the dove onto her desk. She takes up a ledger, dips a pen in an inkwell, and commences writing an account of the rescue in precise curling script. “I feel so grateful to Our Father every time we rescue a wretched girl.”
“Everyone is grateful to you, Miss Cameron.” Zhu can’t resist adding, “You enjoy the excitement, don’t you?”
Cameron smiles a little. “Perhaps you are right. I only hope our Wing Sing will find happiness here, but I cannot guarantee that.”
A prickle of alarm climbs up Zhu’s spine. I cannot guarantee that. But of course she can. She must. “How is Miss Culbertson getting on? Is she feeling better?”
Cameron raises her eyebrows. “Forgive me, Miss Wong, but how do you know about Margaret?”
“Everyone knows about Miss Culbertson. She, ah.” Muse helpfully posts a phrase in her peripheral vision. “She’s been doing her good works in the city for years.”
“Very true.” Suddenly Cameron looks gaunt and haggard. And fatigued. She sets down the ledger, the pen, and sips her cocoa. “No, her illness worsens, and I am swiftly assuming more of her duties. It’s a pity there’s so little time to train a repla
cement. I have not received many responses to the advertisement I placed in our congregation’s newspaper.”
“Advertisement?”
“For a new director. A permanent director.”
Zhu’s alarm deepens. Donaldina Cameron will be the new permanent director. She will manage this mission till the day she dies. The Archives are unequivocal about that. The spartan room suddenly seems gossamer, as if reality trembles. She rubs her eyes. What can she do?
“I assumed you would be the new permanent director.”
“Heavens, no, Miss Wong. I intend to stay on only till the Chinese New Year next February.”
“The Chinese New Year?” Zhu swallows hard. That’s when she’s scheduled to depart from 1895 and return to 2495. “What happens then?”
“Why, I have a fiancé.” Cameron blushes. “We intend to marry in the spring. Charlie is a wonderful man, God bless him.” She gives a troubled little smile. “Well, you know, he is a man. But I am so looking forward to marrying and having my own home, my own children.”
“But you’re superb in this position.”
“Thank you, Miss Wong, but I could not possibly stay.”
“But you have to stay.” Zhu wants to say—because you do stay. Because it is your destiny to stay. The Archivists know all about Donaldina Cameron. Her life is thickly documented. Her single-mindedness, her faith. Her devotion to this Cause. Zhu’s stomach clenches. Will she violate Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle if she tries to influence Cameron? Or will she fulfill the object of the Gilded Age Project by persuading her?
“Help me out here, Muse,” she mutters under her breath.
Cameron glances up curiously from her cocoa.
“Surely,” Zhu says, her voice rasping in her throat, “you know how the girls need you.”
“They need someone, certainly, but they do not need me.” She sets her cup down and slumps, bowing her face in her hands. Her shoulders begin to shake. “I have a life, Miss Wong. A life with books and music and flowers. Pretty clothes and jewelry and fine furniture. I want my life back. I want my own house, not this place. Charlie loves me, and we are going to marry, and that is that. That is our plan.” She raises her face, her eyes anguished. “Oh, but I hate the brothels! I hate the cribs. I hate what the highbinders do to these innocent girls stolen away from their families and their faraway land. It is more loathsome to me than I can possibly express. My very soul shrinks from it.”