The attraction was that several of the girls were performing tableaux, in tight, coloured fleshings, for the benefit of the clients in the room, who surveyed the young actresses and then made their choice of bedfellow. Outside, the impecunious voyeurs gloated over the sight of Jennifer, the nearest beauty. Like Maggie, the Asian girl was hardly tall enough to carry the softness of breasts and slight heaviness of hips with true elegance. The voyeurs, pop-eyed at her shape in clinging dark blue tights and white bodice, hardly cared. There was a general shifting in the group of men. Some tried to catch the girl's eye, to show her their interest in the soft fall of breasts, the bow of her thighs, the smooth triangle of her lower belly. Others showed her their boisterous amusement as the display required her to turn her back to them and stoop.
Dacre paused, coolly observing the effect of this final derision on the dark contempt with which Jennifer treated her uncouth admirers. Her eyes moved uncertainly and her glance wavered. Soon she avoided the gaze of the laughing onlookers when her performance brought her to face them. Dacre was aware of Maggie's soft anger at his side.
'Stop them! Stop them! Make them go away! Make them leave her!'
'Damme,' said Dacre, smiling over Maggie's head to
Morant-Barham, 'your Jenny had best learn humility, Mag, as a moral principle. If the missioners never taught such lessons, it's quite the best thing she should learn her place from these fellows.'
The door opened at his touch. Like sentries at their posts, Cowhide and Lucifer guarded the threshold. Lucifer, stout and clean-shaven, was Dacre's 'foreman'. He stood in a shabby green evening coat, fair hair cropped short on his large round head, an almost feminine softness in his yellow face. His dark eyes promised a capacity for inflicting suffering equal to any of his master's orders. Cowhide was instantly recognizable for what he was, by the width of his shoulders, the straining of his jacket across chest and back. The slack jaw and wandering eyes held the supreme recommendation of being able to impart pain or death without the distraction of imagining his victim's ordeal.
Dacre's hand brushed back Maggie's almost childlike curtains of blonde hair. He stroked the pale silken skin of her warm neck.
'Now, miss,' he said gently, 'remember what's to be done. If it ain't acted well, you may wave goodbye to your tawny bitch. And if that happens, you know the road she must follow!'
At the centre of the house was a small room, hardly ten feet square. It was furnished with two wooden dining-chairs and a little table. The floor was bare of carpets and there was no light except for the lamp which Dacre had brought with him. In the four walls, there were thin strips of glass, covering chinks that were narrower even than those through which an archer might have fired an arrow from a mediaeval fortress. Morant-Barham moved softly from one to another of these spy-holes, surveying the bed-roomy by which Dacre's private apartment was surrounded.
'You might tell a fellow,' he said resentfully.
'Keep a watch, Joey. And listen for every word.'
The spy-holes had never had such use as this evening. Dacre had uncovered those on one wall. They looked upon a room with a fine, ornamental bed covered in maroon silk. The chairs and sofa were also silk, candy-striped, while the walls were papered in Regency pillaring of white and gold. The shaded lights, arranged so that they appeared to spring upward from the pillars of the design, were golden torches, held by naked nymphs who earnestly contrived to embrace one another as well as the phallic lamp. The gilt-framed pictures upon the walls were almost evenly divided between representations of men making love to women, and women making love to one another. The place of honour among the objets d'art was taken by a copy of Hiram Potter's sculpture of the Grecian Slavegirl, chastely naked in her manacles.
Maggie, in linen drawers and bodice, sat on a velvet-topped stool before a mirror. Jennifer, still in the dark blue tights and white top, was busily clearing a small occasional table. She picked up two empty glasses and a long-opened bottle of Moet et Chandon. Hiding these behind a chest, she then opened the table drawer and tidied into it a cylindrical douche and a thin rod. As Dacre and Morant-Barham looked into the room, there was a light tap at its door. Dacre motioned Morant-Barham to silence and closed the shutter on his lamp so that it should not illuminate the glass spy-hole. At the same time, Maggie and Jennifer were hastily assuming their places for the performance. Maggie sat on the stool in her underthings, gazing soulfully into the glass, while Jennifer stood behind her, the bed-slave of a blonde young mistress, combing through Maggie's pale gold curtains of hair.
Almost soundlessly, the door opened to admit Willson Moore, tall and earnest in his blue evening-coat and fawn breeches. Everything about him seemed to breathe whole-someness and decency, from the cleanly-cropped red curls of his head to the sober boots of a working gentleman. His pale face was lightly freckled and might almost have been better placed on a boy of ten than on a man of thirty. He moved as one on the threshold of a great moral adventure.
At the same time, nothing could have been more calculated to bind Willson Moore to his blonde young mistress and her tawny slave than this present cameo. Maggie, catching his reflection in the glass, rose and turned, covering the bust of her bodice with crossed arms, as though taken unawares by her lover's early arrival. But she hurried towards him, her voice low and lilting rather than raised with excitement.
'Willie! Oh, Willie, thank God you're here! I thought of so many things! Of such dangers you must pass!'
Her face was hidden from Dacre and her words muffled as the young giant folded her in his arms.
'Why, Miss Maggie!' he said presently. 'I guess you thought they'd stop me! I guess you thought them bullies on the door might keep me out! I'd surely like to see-'em try. You wasn't born to be a slave, my sweet. You shall be saved from here any day you choose.'
'Oh, Willie!' The little blonde was running her hands over him from shoulders to hips. 'Oh, Willie! I'm not worth the trouble I've caused you!'
'You!' said the young man gallantly. 'Miss Maggie, you're worth more trouble than there is in the whole world! If next week is the week, you have only to name the day or night. I will be in New York, and I don't care if they invest this building with the United States Marine Corps. I will carry you out of here and you shall be free!'
Maggie had coaxed him toward the bed, on which they now sat.
'Not free, Willie,' she said with her gentle Celtic lilt. ‘I shall be yours, to do as you please with. And if Jennifer is my slave, then we shall both be yours. You shall command us as you please.'
Willson Moore swallowed visibly at the prospects which passed before his inner vision. The darker-skinned girl, who had been standing obediently to one side, now stepped forward.
'Take the captain's coat, Jennifer,' said Maggie firmly, 'and hang it in the dressing room.'
Jennifer helped Willson Moore off with the blue evening-coat. As she did so, she raised her modestly lowered eyes and looked directly and meaningly into his own. Then she took the coat into the far room, out of sight of Dacre and Morant-Barham.
'Willie,' said the blonde girl softly, 'Willie, I want you to take this and keep it for both of us. It's not safe with me any longer. If they find it . . .' She tugged at the waist of her bodice and produced a tiny purse.
'I can't, Miss Maggie!' His pale face creased with honest anxiety, 'I can't take money from you like a pimp. . . '
'Keep it for me, Willie. Till next Tuesday.'
'Tuesday ?' he said quietly. 'That's the day, then ?'
She nodded.
'But, Willie, promise me not to tell a soul. Tell no one that you're coming to town, nor that you're to be away. These men, my love, they have friends and spies. There are policemen who are in their pay. On Tuesday, there will only be two of them here. I've got a friend, Willie, who will kick up a row enough to keep them occupied for ten minutes. Then you must break us out, Jenny and me.'
'You shall be fetched out, Miss Maggie, if I have to burn down this house of abomination!' The f
ierce young lover almost glared at her in his determination. 'And it shall be the day you choose.'
Her hands were busy in his red curls.
'Oh, Willie! Don't fail us. The secret won't keep for another time. You may find us both gone to the same place.'
'What place?' he asked, pulling from her.
'You don't get the town news, my love. There's two men in the Tombs prison, waiting to be hanged, Hicks and Sanchez, for dealing in girls - white and tawny - and using torture and murder. When a girl gets difficult, as they call it in these houses, they send her far away. She has no comfort but her tears, Willie, and no hope but death.'
Willson Moore slipped on to his knees before her.
'Miss Maggie, I swear that they may cut my heart out before I'll let such a thing happen to you, or to little Jennifer.'
The dark-skinned girl, who had prudently remained in the dressing-room during this conversation, now returned.
'Jenny, my love,' said her blonde mistress, 'put this purse into the captain's coat. And, Willie, make sure you count the notes after you go. Count the notes, my love.'
As Jennifer walked back to the dressing-room, out of sight, Dacre cupped his hands over Morant-Barham's ears.
'There's a screw loose, old fellow, I'll swear it. Get Lucifer to send his best light-foot little thief into that dressing-room from the far side door, fetch that purse from the feller's coat, and see what's in it!'
The two girls were giving Willson Moore a foretaste of his bliss to come. As Maggie, lying on the bed, raised her hips and divested herself of the white linen drawers, Jennifer acted the part of their lover's valet. His voice trembled slightly as he turned excitedly to his blonde mistress.
'Miss Maggie,' he gasped, 'there ain't no objection, I guess, to your handsome brown-skinned Jennifer taking off those navy tights and posing where we both might admire her?'
Maggie's answer was to draw her lover down upon her. As the couple embraced, however, the young Asian woman wriggled the dark blue fleshings off and stood proudly beside them, her sturdy young hips smooth and firm, her golden thighs like those of an Eastern goddess. She turned slowly, offering first her soft warm belly to the caresses of master and mistress, then the statuesque hind-cheeks. In an ecstasy of admiration, Willson Moore planted several resounding kisses on the tawny body, before Maggie absorbed all his energies.
Verney Dacre watched the easy fool and his two girls with a faint sneer of contempt on his lips. He despised Willson Moore for his honest stupidity, but he felt a vindictive relish at the manner in which he was certain that the two young women had betrayed themselves. Morant-Barham returned with a scrap of paper, extracted by Pauline or Sue from the purse in the blue evening-coat. He slid the shutter of the lamp back by half an inch, trusting his own body to block the light from the spy-hole.
Willie. We are watched, my love. Tuesday is a plan of theirs. We must act sooner. Be in the square before the house on Monday and we will try to come to you. Don't come in or let them see you. They plan to rob you but we will beat them. If we are not with you by ten, Monday night, go to the police department. The man who is here did murder a girl with Hicks and Sanchez. Willie, my love, I can't say this as anything might be overheard. Your devoted girl, Maggie.
Dacre's face tightened, not in anger but in a thin grimace which was his nearest approach to a smile of satisfaction. He motioned Morant-Barham out of the little room which spied so effectively on the others.
'Joey, old fellow, would you say that Lucifer and Cowhide are chaps who might like Maggie and Jennifer all to themselves, under lock and key? If they were assured that no tales would be told afterwards, might not they do the thing very finely?'
Morant-Barham looked uneasy.
'Come now, Joey,' Dacre continued, brushing his fair moustaches thoughtfully, 'a man can't let his stomach turn at the first skirmish. There ain't but one choice for those two doxies now.'
He walked down the deep pile of the stair-carpet, the ground-glass lamps of the gas-pillars harshly illuminating his way. He spoke to the two bullies. A broad grin creased Cowhide's mulatto face. The feminine pallor of Lucifer's expression was quickly animated by the eagerness of bright little eyes. Clean and wholesome, Willson Moore took his innocent departure.
Neither Maggie nor Jennifer had bothered to dress. It was now the tawny Asian bed-slave who lay on the silk covers, her fair mistress toiling over her with fingers steeped in scented oils. Maggie's blonde hair almost brushed the Moslem girl's nudity as she worked the oil over the responsive breasts, belly and thighs. She turned her patient gently over, massaging the golden indentations of the spine lingeringly, reaching the cool double-swell of the rump, her hands moulding and stirring the olive-skinned cheeks of Jennifer's bottom.
Cowhide and Lucifer burst in without ceremony, causing Jennifer to roll over and Maggie to draw away. Dacre unfolded the paper in the blonde girl's face.
'There ain't further explanation needed for what must happen now,' he said contemptuously. 'You shall both go into the keeping of Lucifer and his man. You shall serve them in a very private place until the present matter is over. You shall deny them nothing. And when I have the leisure, by God you shall answer to me!'
Jennifer maintained her dark-eyed defiance of the men, but Maggie's eyes showed that she recalled too easily the scandals of Dacre's conduct in Langham Place with Miss Jolly. Cowhide escorted Jennifer through a doorway to an inner room. Maggie, following in Lucifer's grasp, turned to implore the man who had so lately been her bedfellow. Dacre dismissed her with a glance.
'See to it the door is stopped tight,' he told Lucifer, 'and the house ain't woken by caterwaulin'.'
The closing panel muted a wail of depair.
'Here's a pretty pickle!' said Morant-Barham uneasily.
'Why should y' say that? We might have swung for those two whores, Joey. But they ain't to be croaked, not even to be hurt. They shall stay fast in there till no harm can come from them. Then, Joey, when the dodge has been pulled, you shall have your Khan doxy and Mag too if you choose. They won't be needed further, old fellow. Ain't you seen Willson Moore, private secretary at the Mint, and God's own fool if ever there was such? Ain't he happy? Then keep those two bitches tight, here and in Philadelphia, and you shall have them both.'
'They won't be snuffed, then?'
'Joey, Joey! I ain't a complete fool! There's no cause to snuff 'em when there's no harm they can do. And suppose the case should alter and we must show Mag as bait, we should curse ourselves for hanging her a week earlier!'
'If Willson Moore don't play . . .' said Morant-Barham, taking up that line of thought.
'Play, Joey? He shall play and never know it. When Captain Moore takes one step from Philadelphia to New York, the trap is sprung.'
'A dishonest fellow would have served us better than that canting fool. A villain can be used, and bent, and made to pull weight.'
Ah, well,' said Dacre philosophically, 'if you care to think so, you may. When you've eaten more vittels, however, you'll find that it ain't villains who trap easiest. There's no easier game than a cove that thinks himself honest.'
In order not to rouse Joey Barham's anxieties one upon another, Dacre reserved his other revelation until noon on the following day. They were at lunch in a private room of the river-steamer which carried them up the Hudson to Verney Dacre's modest Westchester estate.
'Joey, old fellow, it's best you should know the whole account. It seems the police-fellers over here know that I'm alive still, after all that London nonsense. They take it au serieux.'
Morant-Barham, on the far side of the table, spat a mouthful of ham back on to his plate. 'What?'
'Lie easy, Joey, there's not proof of it. They think it, and they expect to go to work one day and find all the bank-vaults in America empty!'
'How should you know what they think?'
Dacre took a long swill of hock and seltzer.
'First, Joey, His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales is guarded by
a London policeman, a fat fool who stumbled on the dodge with the railway bullion in England. It seems he had a fight with a New York constable, and a paragraph in the papers to show it.'
'What's that to you?'
'Hold hard, Joey. It might be no odds for him to be here.
But there's a girl who was once mine, a Miss Jolly. After Harper's Ferry and Charley Temple not dying sweet as we hoped, Miss Jolly is fetched to New York. She's seen by the putters-up of burglaries going the rounds of jewellers' shops and looking as if she might be giving them the run. But she gives her real name and nothing is taken. She has her likeness snapped and framed in the window of a Broadway studio. Now, Joey, even in New York, a story like that is round the parish in a few days.' 'Is it her?'
'Oh, yes, old fellow. A speaking likeness. Smallish-built and trim. Golden skin, dark hair worn straight back and lacquered, eyes a bit on the slant and brown as Miss Jennifer's. A sharp little nose and a randy walk.'
Morant-Barham chanced another mouthful of ham. He spoke through it.
'I still don't see, old fellow, what it is to us.'
'This,' said Dacre fiercely. 'I am here as a fugitive because of Miss Jolly. She was mine, and I ploughed her every way. Then she crossed me after the gold robbery. I had two bullies then as well. In my presence, they took her things off and horsed her. Then they took their turns with the rod and raised a few dozen welts across Miss Jolly's backside.'
‘I still don't see . . .' Morant-Barham began, but Dacre's glittering eyes silenced him.
'When they had done with her, Joey, I should have swung her. That was my mistake. The little whore got loose a few days after and sang the whole bloody cantata. Now they think I mayn't be dead and there's a trap set for me, with that randy little piece as the bait. They know I must have her for my revenge. And I will!'
Sergeant Verity and the Blood Royal Page 9
