by Tom Murphy
“You must have fainted, ma’am. Are you feeling better?”
Lily blinked, realized she wasn’t dreaming, looked up.
The sun was behind him, and it made a bright halo all around the pale gold of his hair. She could see firm white teeth in his smile, but the face was shaded.
“I’m fine, thank you. What happened?”
“Damn fool—begging your pardon—nearly ran you down, stampeding his carriage like the world’s on fire. I grabbed you just in time.”
He offered his hand and pulled Lily to her feet. She could see him clearly now. He had a nice face, but it wasn’t the face that was forever associated with that kind of hair in Lily’s dreams. She smiled at the same time as she quickly dusted off her long skirt.
“Well, I surely thank you, sir. I must have been fast asleep, not to see him coming. You may have saved my life.”
“My name’s Luke Ransome, ma’am, and you still—if you’ll forgive me—look pretty pale. Could I fetch you some tea, maybe, or something to eat?”
Lily looked quickly down into the dust of Folsom Street, unable to credit her luck. Something to eat! The words could hardly have held more magic to her if he had offered her all of Rincon Hill, Mrs. Stanford Dickinson included! No, he’ll think you’re being forward, God knows what else he’ll think! But then Lily thought of all the lost-sheep looks in the eyes of all the lonely men on the streets of San Francisco: they meant no harm, those looks, those eyes. Simply sad, as sad they were, for women lost or left behind. They were alone, those men, this man, and felt it deeply. And you’re alone, Lily, never forget that, and what’s the harm in it?
She felt herself blushing even as she answered. “My name is Mrs. Fergus Malone, sir, and I would be delighted to take tea with you.”
He walked her to a small Italian coffee shop on Market Street not far from where she’d had her strange interview with Charles Linton. They had dark bittersweet coffee and very sweet pastries. Lily liked her rescuer at once. Luke was twenty, had survived the terrible overland journey from St. Louis that had killed off both his parents and one sister. He was clerking in a law firm now, but what Luke really wanted to do was buy a farm.
“Nobody values the land, yet, Lily: they’re all in gold or in trade, and you can still buy big old ranches from the land-grant Mexicans for a few dollars an acre. And look what produce costs.”
Lily smiled and nodded. A handsome farmer will ask you to marry him, you’ll fall in love and have five sons for Kate to play with, and live happily ever after. Luke Ransome was handsome enough, tall and straight and with a built-in kind of honesty about him that was direct and reassuring. Not smooth, not elegant as a Brooks Chaffee, but who could be? A decent young man, thinking right. They finished, she thanked him, and he asked if he could walk her home.
“It’ll be a long walk, Mr. Ransome.”
“My pleasure.”
Why did I ask him to call me Lily so early on? He’ll think I’m a loose woman. She told him a sketchy version of her made-up story, about sailing the Horn to meet her husband, only to find him dead, and her with the new baby. Don’t mention that you’ve got less than a week’s worth of money to live on, Lily, pride is pride after all, and something is sure to turn up. The strong coffee and the sweetness of the pastries warmed her, and her good luck warmed her too. It was luck to meet such a fine young man, and to have him like her enough to want to walk her home.
The walk home took most of the afternoon, for Luke insisted on showing her all the sights, pointing out landmarks that Lily had passed many times without knowing—or caring—what they were.
Lily told him about Kate, what a fine happy infant she was, how she smiled. And Lily found herself smiling, laughing even, for the first time in weeks.
How very good it felt to have a friend, someone who seemed truly to be interested in her, and without the dark edge of temptation that Sophie’s friendship held for Lily now. Luke was gentle for a San Franciscan, and while he was the first to admit his family had been simple people, farmers, uneducated, he seemed to have natural good manners, and that, surely, was what counted most. He took her arm as they crossed the many streets, and that felt good too, reassuring, steady, warming.
Finally they were in front of Mrs. Moss’s gray, grim residence. Lily turned to her rescuer, and smiled, and held out her hand.
“It has been delightful, Mr. Ransome.”
“Please, Luke.”
“Luke, then. Thank you very much.”
“I thank you, Lily, and I hope, maybe, that…sometime—”
Lily cut him off quickly then, afraid to continue in this delicious but possibly dangerous vein. “We’ll see, won’t we? Again, Luke, I thank you. Good day.”
“Adios, Lily.”
The next morning a large basket of groceries was delivered to a frowning Mrs. Moss. It contained a card addressed to Lily. The card said simply: “Dear Lily, these are for your baby. Maybe we could have supper tonight? I will call for you at seven. Your friend, Luke Ransome.” Lily looked at the basket, dumbfounded. If it had been heaped with rubies, it could hardly have been more welcome. A glimmer of happiness flickered on someplace deep inside her, and grew, glowing, warming the damp morning. He cared. He remembered her—and the baby. How very kind. How very promising. Lily accepted the basket with a smile, ignoring Mrs. Moss’s sniff of disdain, for Mrs. Moss was forever sniffing disdainfully. It was her normal way of expressing herself. Let her sniff! Lily was sure she’d read Luke’s message, for the note was not sealed. Well, just let her read, then: nothing and no one was going to deprive Lily of the fullest enjoyment of this unexpected treasure. A gift from heaven itself, nothing less!
Lily arranged for Mrs. Moss to look in on the baby, and then dressed carefully for the occasion. She reminded herself that in the story she had invented, she was a widow, and a recent one at that. She chose a simple dark blue dress figured with small white flowers, dressed her hair simply in a bun, and took a green shawl against the night’s chill. Then she kissed the baby and went down to the parlor.
Luke appeared promptly at seven, dressed in his best dark suit, looking handsome, wearing a smile that could have lit up the whole California sky. Lily introduced him to Mrs. Moss, who sniffed noncommittally, and they left.
“Luke,” Lily whispered as they walked down the stairs, “truly, you should not have been so generous, with that basket. But it was kind, and Kate and I thank you.”
“My pleasure. It’s a better use, Lily, than where my money usually goes in this wicked town.”
“You, wicked? I can’t believe that.”
“Good. I don’t believe most people are either good or wicked, really. We are what we have to be.”
They walked for a few blocks, and then Luke hailed a passing hansom cab.
“The Golden Rooster, please.”
“What’s the Golden Rooster?”
“Oh, it’s a fine place to eat, Lily. You’ll see.”
The Golden Rooster was both fine and golden. It had walls of wine-red silk and dark wood paneling. There was a profusion of brass and mirrors and potted palm trees. The head-waiter led them up a wide flight of carpeted stairs and into a private room that contained a fireplace, a small round table set for two, discreet candlesticks here and there, a wide chaise longue upholstered in dark blue velvet, and a silver ice bucket with a bottle of champagne cooling in it. The waiter took Lily’s shawl, then uncorked the wine and poured it. Luke handed her a glass, which was not merely glass, but the finest crystal, etched with scrolls and flowers. Lily blinked at the contrast between this opulence and her small gray room in Mrs. Moss’s small gray house. And here she was drinking champagne in a room with walls of silk while all there was between her and Kate and starvation was one basket of groceries donated by this amazing stranger!
He lifted his glass to hers. “To the most beautiful girl in California.”
Lily quickly looked over her shoulder to see who that might be. What she saw was a thin startled face in t
he dark mirror, and Luke’s big golden head behind her.
“You’re mad!”
“No, very lucky. But for that reckless driver, I might never have found you.”
His glass touched hers with a small silvery chiming sound. They sipped the bubbling wine. Maybe it was the sudden warmth of the fire, or the small amount of champagne in that one sip, but Lily could feel a gentle glow slowly spreading through her. For a moment she panicked, and could think of nothing at all to say.
There was a discreet knock on the door, Luke said “Come in,” and the waiter appeared with a cart on wheels covered by a dome of pure silver. He whisked two bowls of clear brown soup onto the table, bowed, and indicated a discreet bell pull hanging next to the fireplace.
“Ring, sir, should you need anything more.”
“Thank you,” said Luke as he helped Lily into her chair.
The soup was turtle, laced with Madeira, and it was followed by venison ragout, buttered noodles, and small green peas the like of which Lily hadn’t seen or thought of since Louise’s kitchen in the Wallingford mansion in the old days. There was a salad, too, and a tray of petits four for dessert. And more champagne.
Luke looked at the luxurious spread, happy as a pig in new mud. He grinned a small boy’s grin, and laughed out loud before he spoke.
“If you’re wondering how a law clerk can pay for all this, Lily, let me tell you that you’ve already brought me luck. For on the very day I met you, I won near to three thousand dollars in a poker game.”
“But that’s a fortune!”
“In San Francisco, Lily, it’s play money. I could tell you of broken-down bums who made millions overnight, and lost ’em just as quick as that. It’s a crazy place, this town. Anything can happen here.”
Lily looked at him and said nothing. But she was coming to feel that his words were true ones.
Luke did most of the talking. He spoke of his Missouri boyhood, how they’d decided to join up with a wagon train over the southern route, through Utah territory to California, the slow, dragging oxen, the broken axles, bad water, dysentery, furniture abandoned by the trailside, animals rotting, stinking, vultures circling, people dying, and dying.
“The signposts on that trail are gravemarkers, Lily. Sometimes you’ll see a whole family, spread out over a thousand miles, the kids go first, most times, and nearly always the women go last, they’ve got the most fight in ’em, I guess. But not Ma. She was always sickly, and she went first. Then Sally. Then Pa.”
“And you were the only one left?”
“Sixty-three of us started out. When we got over the Sierras, there were nineteen, and three of them died later on, from things they’d caught on the trail.”
“I’m glad I sailed, then, bad as that seemed at the time.”
“I am, too, Lily, for there were things I’ve seen on that trail I’ll tell to no man, much less to a lady.”
He got up then, and came around and stood next to her chair. His hand rested lightly on her shoulder. Suddenly Lily was reminded of another rich, dark room, and another young man whose hand had rested on her shoulder. Luke knelt beside her and reached out with one hand and touched Lily’s chin. She turned and looked into his wide-set brown eyes.
“Sometimes, out in the desert, on those cold clear nights, when all you could see for a hundred miles was the white sand stretching out in the moonlight, and the coyotes would be howling for blood, banshee howls they called ’em, and you knew there were Indians somewheres not far away, and so many of us had died there was no betting on whether any of us’d see the next sunrise, much less the next moon, well, at those times I’d think of a woman, of a perfect, beautiful woman, Lily, and she was always slender and delicate-like, and she always had hair like a mountain sunset, and eyes green as jade.”
He buried his face in her neck then, and kissed her, and then he was kissing her lips, and the warmth of him touched her and she was kissing him back.
And Lily thought: This isn’t how I wanted it to happen; if he loves me so, I should make him marry me first, except that’s just like what Sophie said, selling myself on the altar. Her mind swam, and logic drifted away from her on waves of pleasure. It had been a very long time since anyone had needed her so. Jack Wallingford, surely, had never truly needed her, Jack, who could have any woman, anywhere. This was something different, a rare and special thing. When Luke stood up slowly, lifting her as though she had no more weight than his need for her, Lily floated up with him, locked in his arms, and still he kissed her, and still he whispered her name.
He carried her slowly to the waiting chaise longue.
His hands were gentle, undressing her, and his lips were warm too. Lily gave herself to him, and gave herself up to the pleasure in it, to his deep need for her. He was strong, and urgent, and yet gentle too, kissing her and whispering her name like a prayer. She took pleasure in his pleasure, for Luke fairly glowed with it. And when did Jack Wallingford spend some long desert night dreaming of redheads with green eyes? The candles were still lit and she could see their glint reflected in the gold of his hair, feel the warmth of the fire reflected on his smooth flesh and hers, feel the warmth of his loving set her on fire as his need exploded inside her with a gentle violence she had never known before. And through all of it, Lily was comforted by the echo of her name, whispered gently through the half-light of the room, through the urgency of his lovemaking, down all the distance of his lonely dream.
Finally she slept.
It was the chill that woke her.
Lily blinked, sat up, saw that the fire had burned down, though the candles still flickered against the red walls of the room. And she saw that the room was empty. And the chill of the room was nothing compared with the chill that spread in Lily’s heart and in her mind. He’d left her. He’d used her and bought her and left her like a common whore! And where were all his fine words now, or his dreams?
Slowly, trying against heavy odds not to panic, she got up and pulled on her clothes. The remains of their meal had vanished. Someone had thrown her own green shawl over her nakedness. The waiter, then, had seen her like this, naked on the chaise! She could never forgive Luke for that. It was only when she approached the mirror that hung over the fireplace that Lily saw the bag.
It was a soft leather pouch about six inches deep, cut round and tied with a leather thong. The pouch sat on the pink marble of the mantelpiece next to a torn bit of paper. On that paper, in Luke’s handwriting, was one word: “LILY.”
She opened the thong, knowing and dreading what might be inside. The little pouch was heavy, heavier far than it looked. And it gave a faint metallic clink when she moved it. Slowly, dully, as though she were in a dream, Lily poured the contents of the pouch onto the shining pink marble. Gold! A stream of bright nuggets came rolling out, a small avalanche of riches, nuggets of all sizes with that odd, soft-edged burnished quality of things that have been tumbled in mountain streams for years and years.
Lily looked at the gold in disbelief. It hypnotized her. She had only the vaguest idea what it might weigh, or what gold was worth per ounce these days.
But well she knew what it meant.
Lily looked up over the pile of gold nuggets then, looked herself straight in the eye in the gilt, expensive, wicked mirror of this sinful room in this house of assignation.
The harlot and her gold!
It might have been the title of some allegorical painting in a child’s textbook, meant to warn the innocent young away from the temptations of the flesh. His flesh was tempting, Lily, don’t be a hypocrite, and so was that basket of groceries, and the fine supper.
And where were all Luke’s dreams that he’d told her about so gently? Were they lies, to be bought and sold as he obviously thought her body could be bought? A small desperate voice somewhere in her shock-struck brain kept insisting: No! But Lily wasn’t sure of that, or anything else beyond the very obvious fact that a decent young man had thought her a whore, and treated her like one.
&
nbsp; She thought of these last weeks, of all the doors she’d knocked on, of all the answers she’d received, of Mrs. Stanford Dickinson, of Mrs. Moss’s constant disapproval, of the six dollars and change that stood between her and Kate and starvation, the gutter.
Until Luke came along, and his gold.
A handsome young farmer will fall in love with me. I’ll have five strong sons to play with Kate, and live happily ever after.
Lily’s image in the mirror blurred through her tears. Automatically her hands began scooping up the nuggets and replacing them in the pouch. At last the pouch was filled, and the tears stopped. “Save your tears, child, for one day you may truly need them.” Still she looked at herself in the mirror, facing facts.
And as she looked, Lily saw her chin rise just a little, saw her green eyes blink away the final tear, saw the small beginning of a smile start to form on her pale lips. Well, then, my fine young lady: you are going to be used by them in any event, let’s see how much we can make them pay for the privilege! The favors of Lily Malone aren’t going to be scattered to the winds of California, not when there’s bags of gold to be had, and who knows what else!
Suddenly Lily thought of Luke Ransome with a strange gratitude. He was only the latest in the long line of men who had left her, beginning with her own father. No more would she pin her high hopes on a man. Well they might love her or leave her, or she them, but they’d pay now, and pay well, she’d see to that. Lily slipped on her shawl, adjusted it in the mirror, slipped the small sack of gold into her pocket, and smiled. For all at once she knew just how to make them pay, and pay they would!
25
Lily woke the next morning with her head in a whirl of conflicting emotions. Almost without realizing why, she found her hand reaching up slowly, dreamily, to the place under her pillow where she’d hidden the leather sack of gold nuggets.
And there they were. Her small hand closed around them, she could feel the hardness of them, and in that moment all the pain came back, the remembrance of Luke’s fine words, and how she’d sold herself without even knowing it. To be such a fool, such a silly little goose. She got up then, and fed Kate, and dressed with care. Lily had an apple from Luke’s fine basket, and nearly choked on it when she thought where it came from. She sipped a little milk, kissed the baby, carried her downstairs to Mrs. Moss, and went out.
