Rebecca Hagan Lee (8 page)

Chapter Nine

“Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.”

—VICTOR HUGO, 1802–1885

S
he came to him in a dream for the first time in weeks. Will woke up, heart pounding and skin damp with perspiration, afraid that the face and form he knew so well would be the blend of Mei Ling and Elizabeth that had driven him from Coryville and proximity to Jamie’s new wife. But this time she came with Mei Ling’s face and form and Li Toy’s cackle. Mei Ling, the gentle girl he had loved for so long was gone. In her place was a woman who taunted him for his foolishness in thinking that he could drive her out of his heart by purchasing a harem of concubines. For believing that he could save them when he could not save her . . . For trying so hard to save
them
when he hadn’t tried hard enough to save
her
 . . .

Will sat up amid the tangle of twisted bedsheets, turned to the side, and placed his feet on the floor. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and cradled his face in his hands until the pounding of the blood rushing through his veins subsided and his erratic breathing calmed. His head told him that the dream was a result of an evening spent buying human beings—buying girls—at the Jade Dragon, but his heart . . .

He had bathed in steaming-hot water after dinner, washing away the stench of the auction, doing his best to wash away the stain of what he’d done, but it hadn’t been enough. It wasn’t the first time he’d purchased girls at auction and it wouldn’t be the last—although he fervently hoped it would be the last time he would ever see children forced onto the auction block and displayed for the prurient pleasure of grown men.

Will shuddered, remembering. His reaction following the first two auctions had been much the same. The hot bath and the whiskey he’d consumed afterward hadn’t been enough to make him feel clean or to keep the dream away. Will rubbed his hand over his chest. He inhaled deeply, then slowly exhaled.

Just when he thought the dream was gone, it returned anew. Fortunately James’s wife, Elizabeth, hadn’t played a part in this newest incarnation. The woman in tonight’s dream had brown eyes, Mei Ling’s features, and Li Toy’s laugh.

With his hands shaking so badly, Will didn’t bother lighting the lamp, but reached out and grabbed his dressing gown from the foot of the bed.

He shoved his arms into the sleeves, tied the sash at his waist, and stood up to retrieve his trousers from the trouser press. He stepped into them and pulled them up his legs and over his hips, buttoning the top as he searched beneath the edge of the bed with his right foot for his slippers. Unable to locate them, Will gave up the search and padded barefoot across the room.

A lamp on the wall opposite his bedroom door burned low, illuminating the landing and a portion of the hallway. Another lamp mounted on the wall halfway down the hall illuminated the remainder.

Closing his bedroom door behind him, Will stepped into the hall and made his way toward the bedrooms along the right-hand side of the corridor. The Silken Angel Saloon had eight upstairs bedrooms, three on one side of the hallway and four on the other. Will’s bedroom was located at the east end of the hall and included a sitting room and a small washroom. A larger washroom with two basins and a full-size bathtub occupied the space at the opposite end of the hallway, past the landing at the top of the stairs. Fitted into an alcove between Will’s suite of rooms and the nearest single bedroom was a large armoire that held linens and towels, toiletries, and other female necessities.

When the saloon opened for business later today, there would be chairs positioned beside each of the seven bedroom doors for the men posted there. Not to keep the girls in. It was almost unheard-of for any bound prostitute to escape or attempt escape. The contract forbade it. And even though the girls were illiterate, Will knew Madam Harpy had read and explained the contract to them item by item. Li Toy had a reputation for striking fear in the hearts of the girls she smuggled into the country. No, Saturday nights were the saloon’s busiest. The men posted by the bedrooms were there to protect the girls from the unwanted attention of curious downstairs customers who might be tempted to wander upstairs.

The fact that girls occasionally occupied the upstairs rooms was not a secret. Since it was impossible to keep their presence hidden, Will made certain that Li Toy, the tong leaders, and his saloon customers understood that the girls were housed in the Silken Angel only as long as it took their intended “husbands” to come claim them.

Early in the planning stage of the operation, Will and James realized that saving female infants and toddlers like James’s Treasures was far easier than attempting rescues of young women who had value to the men and women who had purchased them. Infant and toddler females were often unwanted, abandoned, and discarded like refuse. The same could not be said of girls purchased for the purpose of prostitution.

After analyzing several plans, Will and James had based their rescue operation on the American Underground Railroad abolitionists had created to smuggle black slaves from southern slave-holding states to safety in the north and Canada using trusted associates and safe houses as stops on the “railroad.” The plan was not without flaws and was a constant work-in-progress, but it was the best they had. The safe houses and identities of the conductors on the Silken Angel railroad were closely guarded secrets, known only to Will, James, and Jack O’Brien. The identities of the men who pretended to be husbands come to claim their brides were also kept secret for their protection and for the protection of their “brides.”

Will tapped lightly at the first door on the right, then eased it open and peeked inside. One glance told him that at least two of the other bedrooms would be empty, the beds unoccupied. Inside on the single bed, huddled together like puppies in a litter, were little sisters Ling Yee and Ling Tsin and older sister Ling Lau. He and Jack had put the Ling sisters in adjoining bedrooms so the two youngest girls would be close to their older sister. Will had purposely left the adjoining doors open so Ling Yee and Ling Tsin could move back and forth between their bedrooms and that of ten-year-old Ling Lau. He wasn’t surprised to see that sometime after he had bidden them good night, the little ones had crowded into bed beside their sister.

Smiling in spite of himself, Will quietly closed that door and moved on to the next one. He opened it. The coverlet on the bed had been thrown back and the sheets were mussed, but the room where he’d tucked Ling Tsin into bed was empty. He entered the room, walked across to the connecting door, and stepped inside the third of the adjoining bedrooms. He expected to find Ling Yee’s bedroom empty, but there were two girls curled together on the bed. He thought they might be Ah So and Ah Woo, but he couldn’t be sure. They might just as easily be Ah So and Ah Fook, or Ah Woo and Ah Fook. The room assigned to Ling Yee was now home to two of her cousins, but without a much closer look, Will couldn’t tell which two.

The girls all bore a remarkable resemblance to one another. Not that he found that surprising. While listening to Li Toy bark instructions to them in their native tongue during the contract signings, Will had learned that they were family. His group of seven girls was two sets of sisters, first cousins to one another, who had been sold to Chinese “bride” brokers by their parents, whose farms had been devastated by drought. In danger of starving, unable to feed themselves, their livestock, and all their children, the parents had decided to keep their sons and sell their daughters for cash that would enable them to buy the rice and grain they needed to survive.

Will wondered whether the girls’ parents felt as guilty about selling them as he did about buying them. He wondered whether his motives were as pure as theirs, or whether it mattered. The girls’ parents had sold them to pay debts and to keep the rest of their families from starving. Will was fighting to keep from drowning. They were trying to save their families. He was trying to save himself. And still he dreamed of Jamie’s wives. . . .

Continuing his check on his charges, Will exited Ling Yee’s bedroom through the main door and moved to the last room at the back of the building on the south side of the hall, which belonged to Ah So. He knocked on the door, then gently eased it open. He expected it to be empty, expected Ah So to be the sister sharing the bed with Ah Woo or Ah Fook in Ling Yee’s bedroom, but the room was occupied. Ah So was in bed. Her back was to him, the coverlet on the single bed pulled up close over her shoulders and neck, and unlike the other girls, this one had made use of the feather pillow, curving her left arm around it and hugging it to her face. She seemed different somehow, maybe taller than he remembered, despite the fact that she was curled into a tight ball in the center of the bed. Will stared at the covers. Not just taller. Taller and curvier. He frowned, amazed at the ability of a simple Chinese tunic and a pair of cotton trousers to hide a woman’s assets. And yet, he’d seen her uncovered at the auction. He’d seen all of them uncovered at the auction, and he didn’t remember feminine curves on any of them. Will closed his eyes, then opened them once again. Maybe he was just recalling the way the younger girls had looked. If he remembered correctly, Ah So was about fifteen. She had to be a bit curvier than her sisters and cousins, who had no curves at all.

Leaving Ah So’s room, Will moved across the hall to the other bedrooms. These rooms had been assigned to Ah Woo, Ah Fook, and Ah Lo, respectively. He knocked softly, then pushed the first door open, unsure of what he would find.

Ah Lo, the eldest of the seven at seventeen, sat up in bed as he opened the door.

“Shh.” Will put a finger to his lips, then quietly retreated, closing the door behind him. In the room next door, Ah Fook was sound asleep alone in her bed. Ah Woo’s bedroom was empty. The mystery was solved. It seemed Ah Woo had tiptoed across the hall to join the Ling sisters. She was sleeping in Ling Yee’s bed.

With the girls all safe and tucked into bed, Will gave serious thought to returning to his, but, afraid of what his dreams might bring, he turned and headed downstairs.

He stopped briefly at the bar for a bottle of the hair of the dog that had bitten him after he and Jack had gotten the girls settled and into bed last night, then headed to the kitchen to put a pot of coffee on to boil.

Entering the kitchen, Will grabbed the coffeepot from its customary place on the stove. He primed the kitchen pump and, after checking to make sure Jack had measured the coffee and crushed an eggshell into it to keep the coffee grounds from floating to the surface, filled the pot with water. He set the pot on a rear burner, stirred the banked coals to life inside the stove, and added more coals from the scuttle to the firebox. His stomach rumbled, and Will checked the warming oven on the range for biscuits or bread and found it empty. The soup and the chicken and vegetables and rice from supper were also gone, the pots and pans left beside the sink. Glancing at the regulator clock on the wall, he saw that it was still too early to send to Ming’s or one of the other kitchens along the street for something to eat, but the bakeries on Fillmore Street should be open for business in a half an hour, and the milkman would soon be making his rounds through the neighborhood.

His chore done, Will turned to pull a chair out from the kitchen table and discovered a dirty bowl, a spoon, a pair of wooden chopsticks, and an empty bar glass on the table. Seemed he wasn’t the only one who’d worked up an appetite last night. Jack had polished off the last of the soup and chicken and rice and vegetables. Grabbing a clean mug from the overhead cabinet beside the sink, Will shoved the dirty dishes aside, pulled the half-empty whiskey bottle from his bathrobe pocket, sat down at the table, and waited for the coffee to boil.

Jack exited his rooms some ten minutes later and joined Will in the kitchen. “You’re up early this morning. Coffee smells good. Is it ready yet?”

Will stood up as his second in command entered, then walked to the stove, grabbed a towel, and hefted the coffeepot. “You’re just in time.”

Jack snagged a mug from the cabinet and set it on the table along with the sugar bowl. “Apparently not.”

Will frowned as he filled the mugs with the steaming brew. “Come again?”

Jack sat down at the table across from Will and nodded toward the dirty dishes. “Save any for me?”

“I didn’t leave those there,” Will told him. “I thought you did.”

Jack shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

They looked at each other. “If it wasn’t me,” Will continued, “and it wasn’t you, who was it? Kitchen help?”

Jack looked at the dirty pots and pans stacked beside the sink. “Kitchen was clean when Luis left last night.” He added a spoonful of sugar to his coffee, then offered the bowl to Will. “One of the ladies, perhaps?”

“I don’t think so.” Will waved away the sugar bowl, then added a splash of whiskey to his coffee before offering the bottle to Jack. “Hair of the dog?”

Jack grimaced. “No, thanks.” He rummaged around the kitchen pantry until he located a tin of biscuits. Retrieving a plate, Jack arranged the shortbread on it and set it on the table between them to share with their coffee.