James Lee laughed and raised his glass in a toast. “You tell me, Mrs. Sorensen.”
Between us on the table was a wad of cash, the bills greasy and worn. The little girl, Anne, sleepy and compliant with laudanum upon her arrival, was already in bed. Oh, how sweet it had been to hold her in my arms and press her soft form to my chest. Such a pretty child too, with dark tresses and blue eyes, almost as lovely as Olga. I could not wait to meet her proper when she arose the next day. I had already prepared another bed for me in the room where she slept, so I could listen to her breathing all night.
“She seems to be a quiet girl. A little dark for a Norwegian,” I mused.
“We come in all sorts of coloring, don’t we?”
“Of course.” And the money was good so I would not complain.
He looked around the room, at my pots and pans. “You have a lovely home. It seems to me a good place for an enterprise such as this. What you need, Mrs. Sorensen, is children who aren’t abandoned but secrets someone wants to hide. Then you could charge for their upkeep monthly, and even adjust the price. You’d be surprised to learn how many children like that are born in this city every day. Pregnant mistresses and whores abound.” He leaned back in the chair and grinned with his hand around the glass.
“I am doing this from the goodness of my heart. It’s not some enterprise—”
“Oh, come, Mrs. Sorensen, we both know you would not mind if it were.” His eyes glittered merrily across the table. He swept a drop of brandy from his lip with a darting red tongue.
I could not help but laugh a little. “If I am to make this a business, my earnings will be hard won. It’s not easy keeping children.” I lifted the ruffled collar at my neck a little away from the skin for air. I could not help but think how it would be if it were this man I lay next to in bed instead of my stocky husband. This man, with the devil in his eyes.
“It takes so long for them to grow up too.” James called me back to the matter at hand. “Which is why it might suit you better to keep those who merely need shelter for a while.”
“For a simple man from Norway you know quite a lot about this type of enterprise.”
“I was born in America, in St. Louis. My parents came from Norway, but neither of them was simple.”
“Did they take in children?” I could not help but tease him.
He laughed. “No, I picked up that knowledge elsewhere.” Now that I knew he was born in America, I could hear the American accent hidden in his Norwegian.
“Is this to say, Mr. Lee, that you are prepared to offer me more children to keep in my house for cash?” I had to look away while I spoke; I found the sight of his lips most distracting.
“It is.” His eyes were glittering again in that way that they did and I busied myself with counting the cash, although I had already done it once before.
“It would certainly make it less wholesome, less about the goodness of my heart and more about Mammon,” I muttered with my hands full of bills.
“What do you think would bring you more pleasure? Satisfying your conscience or lining your purse with gold?” I wished that he would not speak of pleasure. His hand around the glass distracted me—oh, to think what those fingers would feel like traveling on my skin.
“Do you think me so simple that it’s all about the gold?” I tried to mask my discomfort with words.
“Yes, Mrs. Sorensen, I do.” His smile never wavered. Our gazes met briefly across the table.
“What would your part in this enterprise be?” I dropped my gaze to the bills.
“I would provide the children, of course.”
“And your price?”
“None—not from you.”
I snorted. “No one does something for nothing.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “I’ll take my share on the other end,” he said, when the laughter had died out. “I’ll charge to find the children a suitable home. As for you, I think it is enough to know that I have a friend who might help me out someday.” The longevity implied in his statement was both disturbing and thrilling. I did not quite know what to do with this man, with the way that he made me feel.
“So you want this to be a home for the children of thieves and whores.” It was a statement, not a question. It did not leave me shocked, as perhaps it ought to.
“The money would never run out if you choose to go into business with me.” His eyes glittered merrily.
“That is certainly a tempting prospect.” I licked my lips, tasted the liquor.
“Isn’t it just?” He laughed again; it was a soft, purring sound. “I can be a good friend to a woman such as yourself, who has seen hardships and seeks some solace.” He winked at me across the table. “I would never take you for a fool, Mrs. Sorensen, you can be sure of that.”
“What makes you think I’d be a suitable business partner for a man like you?” My chest heaved a little from the exhilaration, straining against the tightness of the corset.
James Lee leaned toward me and caught my eyes. “I know hunger when I see it. I know what you want and how you may get it. If you think you can trust me, the two of us may go far.”
“No farther than this kitchen table, I reckon.” I huffed and looked away, then felt myself redden from my own words. It seemed no matter what I said to him, it was treacherous somehow, brought all sorts of images in its wake.
He smirked and downed his drink. “We’ll see, Mrs. Sorensen . . . We’ll see.”
* * *
—
“So this is her.” Mads looked at us with wonder as he rose the next day to find me in the kitchen, spooning milk-soaked bread into Anne’s little mouth. “This is the little girl who will make us all better.”
“This is her.” I gave him a smile. “This is Anne, and she is of good Norwegian stock.”
“She is a good girl.” He gently trailed the girl’s scalp with his fingers. “Maybe you won’t be so angry all the time now that you have her.”
I swallowed the annoyance that flared up in me. “No.” I pressed my lips tightly together. “Now I will be happy for sure.”
I enjoyed having the girl around. She kept my mind occupied. I enjoyed bathing and dressing her, and the rare smile that lit up her features. I enjoyed that she wanted only me, and reached for me when I entered the room. I longed for her to grow older, to talk with her and sing songs to her. I ogled toys I saw on display in shop windows and brought home tiny dolls, although she was far too young for that.
We had set up a small bed in the vacant room and it was the happiest I had been since the first days of our marriage when I sewed and embroidered little covers for her pillows and hung white muslin curtains in the window above her bed. I moved a lacquered armoire into the room and filled it with small dresses, and even bought a music box to help her go to sleep. Little Anne was my darling angel who could fill the emptiness of the house. If Mads thought my spending on the girl too lavish, he did not say a word.
I enjoyed the smiles that greeted me at church functions, as the congregation admired not only Anne but the size of my heart as well. Mostly, though, I enjoyed parading her among strangers who did not know she was not mine. I was her mother for real then, proudly showing off my daughter. I told everyone who wanted to hear: the girl behind the counter, the clerk at the bank, and couples we met in the park, about how sickly she had been at birth. How I nursed her back to health.
I immensely enjoyed the money too, and the man who delivered it to my door.
* * *
—
I had never understood what other women spoke of when they described their longing and need for a certain man. I had longed for Anders and been flattered by his attention, but my infatuation had been much about what he could provide. With James, it was different. It was raw, this feeling, like a pull. I lay awake in bed every night, no matter how tired, think
ing about his hands on my skin. Come morning, I would look at myself in the tarnished bedroom mirror and judge the thickness of my brown hair and the shade of my complexion.
Maybe it was the kinship I sensed that made him so enticing to me. Maybe it was the sense of danger. Some days I loathed him for the lust he inspired, as I felt it left me at a disadvantage—as if he had a sway over me. Other days it was what pulled me through hours of cooking and mending. Potato peeling had never been as sweet as when I had him to think of.
James always came at night when Mads was at work. I never knew exactly when but placed a kerosene lamp on the windowsill to let him know when the house was empty. Our friendship was one of shadows and moonlight, a heady drug to the senses. I was surprised that a man like him would take such a keen interest in me, a housewife with a spotless reputation, but I reveled in the fact that he did. He brought out the best in me, James Lee: he helped me see the possibilities.
“I bet you could be anyone,” I told him one night when the bottle between us was half empty. “I bet you could shed your skin like a snake.”
“I once was a merchant from Germany,” he said, chuckling, “another time a salesman from Prague. I have been an envoy to a Turkish ambassador and a general in the Swedish army. Mostly, though, I am nobody—just a Norwegian immigrant working at the docks. I have found that can take me far.”
“You are such a slick fish slipping through the net.” My flattery was entirely sincere.
“No more than you, my dear. You know how to blend in like me. It’s the mark of a true survivor—we adapt and we change whenever we have to.” The light from the kerosene lamp painted his face in gold.
“You cannot change your nature, though.” I straightened up a little. His fingers were splayed out on the glass of golden liquor. Splayed out as on skin.
“Would you even want to?” I could hear the smile in his voice.
“Sometimes . . .” I looked at the bottle and scratched at the label, peeled it a little from the glass.
“Would you truly be like the dull people around you, satisfied with what little they have? No, Bella, you are more than that. Those other people, they are like mice, scurrying on the ground, but you”—he paused and lifted the glass—“you are a cat.”
“Rats,” I corrected him and lifted my gaze to his face. “They are rats.”
“And you eat rats. You eat them all up, bones and innards and long pink tails. You are nothing like them.” His voice had dropped to a husky whisper.
“Do you enjoy it, James? Eating rats?” I filled our glasses anew. The sweet liquor smelled warm and safe; the man, however, was not. When I put the bottle down again, my heart was beating wildly.
“I eat what I need to survive—and yes, if I have my claws in a particularly fat rat, I like it.” He said it as if it were nothing at all; a pang of sweetness exploded in my belly.
“You never even feel sorry for the rat?” I leaned back in the chair and did not even try to hide my admiration when I looked at him. I wished I had taken more care with my hair, and that my dress had not been so drab and plain. For once, it did not make me uncomfortable looking into another’s eyes; our locked gazes were like a bridge between us, dripping with lust and danger.
“Did you?” he asked, and made me startle enough that I looked away. “Did you feel sorry for the rat?” He cocked his head and smiled.
“What rat?” I ran my tongue over my lips, suddenly feeling hot all over.
“Oh, I’m sure you have one, or you wouldn’t be so comfortable asking me about mine.” He sent me a lazy wink and sipped his liquor. Droplets of whiskey caught in his mustache and glittered in the kerosene light.
“If you are right and there is a rat, why would I tell you—a stranger?” I lifted my chin just a little.
His hand landed on mine on the table; his skin was cool from cradling the glass. “Am I, though? A stranger?”
“I have never had many friends.” I halfheartedly tried to pull my hand away, but he grasped and held on with his fingers.
“Well, you have one now. You intrigue me, Bella. There’s malice in you.” He lifted his head and measured me, as if seeing me anew. He did not smile anymore.
“How would you know?” I fought to withdraw my hand again, but he held on.
“The same way you know me, I suppose. We are the same, you and I.” He said it as if it were the truth.
I let out my breath and finally relaxed my hand under his, savored the feel of his skin. “The rat had it coming.” I could not quite believe that I did it—spilled my secret as if it were nothing. It lay between us on the table like a red, pulsing thing.
“Rats have it coming just for being rats.” His hand on mine had grown warmer. “What was your father like?”
“I did not kill my father, Mr. Lee.” I laughed a little, quiet and insincere.
“I was only guessing. It’s so often the father who brings out the claws in a woman . . .”
“My father is a good-for-nothing drunk with hard fists, but he’s still alive. Unlike my mother, whom he wears—wore—down.” Thinking of her death made my throat thicken.
“Was he protective of you as a child?”
“Not at all.” I felt my lips twist into something cold and ugly. “He thought that I had it coming, everything that happened to me. Even when this old man down at the farm stuck his hand up my skirt when I was eight, he thought I shouldn’t complain. I shouldn’t have been alone with him in the first place, he said . . . Tenants’ daughters weren’t worth much back home, not even to the tenants. He acted as if I should be proud someone bothered sniffing up my skirts at all.”
“And yet you left him alive.” James’s voice was soft; he gave my fingers a little squeeze. Veins stretched like snakes under the skin on the back of his hand.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have eaten him up.” I smacked my lips as if tasting it.
“No one would hold it against you, I’m sure.” Another little smile appeared. They were intriguing, those smiles, as if he knew a secret. As if he found amusement where others might not. It made me want to see it too, what he found so thrilling.
“No one but God,” I said, from habit rather than conviction.
“God.” James snorted and lifted his glass. “He has not bothered for a long, good while.”
“The devil, then.” I gave him a smile to let him know I was only speaking in jest.
“Oh, he—he is all around us.” James laughed a little and lifted his hand away from mine to fill our glasses. I instantly missed his warmth. “To rats,” he said, and lifted his share; the golden liquor spilled down on the table. “To rats and those who eat them.”
When our glasses were back on the table, I said, “There was one rat. One I met here, while I lived with my sister. He tried to force himself on me, so I stabbed him.”
His eyebrows rose. “You did?”
“With scissors.” I could not help but smile at the memory. “He bled some, but he did not die. He recovered with just a scar. The other women thought I was wrong to do it, but I wasn’t. He had it coming. He shouldn’t have tried to force me.” The smile turned into a grimace.
“It’s a shame he survived.” James swilled the contents of his glass, looking at it with a thoughtful expression. “But you would surely have hanged if he did, so in that way it was a blessing. One needs stealth to accomplish an act like that and walk away unscathed.”
“I know, I do—I was stealthy before.” I did not want him to think me a fool.
“It’s hard to be stealthy when under attack.” He gave me an understanding look. “It’s a shame, though, that he walks around with nothing but a scar for what he tried to do.”
“Yes, isn’t it just?” I wished that James would take my hand again.
“Men like that should never touch a woman like you. It’s like a baboon courting a
tigress.” He lifted his glass.
“At least I got him with those scissors.” I lifted my glass in turn.
* * *
—
I wanted James to become my lover since the very first day we met, even if I sometimes wished it were not so. He stirred something in me that Mads never could. Looking at him, I sensed danger and blood; looking at Mads I saw lukewarm milk left too long in the pot. The marital bed had always been disappointing to me. Ironed nightshirts and soft skin never much excited me; I needed a devil’s touch. I wanted it to be a battle on the sheets, a dangerous fight to survive. I did not want it to be nice; I wanted it to hurt. I was certain James could give me that.
On the night when it first happened, the two of us were out in the backyard. It was a nice, moonlit night; a frog sang in the distance and we were sharing a bottle out on the steps. I had two girls living in my house by then, Anne and another one called Lizzie. The latter had been scrawny when she arrived, but my cooking had already put some meat on her bones. She was not yet three, which suited me well. I liked them best as toddlers.
James retrieved something from his pocket, so small that it disappeared in his fist. “I brought you a present.” He reached his hand toward me.
I held out my hand palm up and felt him drop something smooth and cold into it. When I held it up to catch the light from the lamp we had brought with us, I could tell it was a pewter button. Stamped onto its face was a flower with four broad petals. “What is this?”
“Oh, just a token of something I took care of for you.”
“What do you mean?” I still inspected the button. It was a fine button, but it meant nothing to me.
“I think you’ll find that your rat is no longer around.”
“Oh, you didn’t.” I cocked my head and looked at him; my heart was suddenly racing. The flickering light from the lamp licked his face with warm tongues.
His lips split in a smile. “I did,” he said with undisguised glee. “That thing you’re holding is from his coat. I thought that you might want it.”
In the Garden of Spite Page 13
