the hedges barred his way, but it was simply a matter of a firm push to pass through. He eased the gate shut at his back, took a deep breath and straightened his cravat, and then he walked purposefully up the steps. He had a moment’s confusion of whether to knock at the door or enter without invitation. He chose the first option and waited as someone approached on the floorboards within.
The door opened, an aroma of Babylonian gardens wafted out, and standing before him was a huge black woman in a strawberry-red gown with pink and purple ribbons adorning the straining bodice. She wore a pink wig piled high and a pink eyepatch covering her left eye; on the eyepatch had been sewn a red heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow.
Her protuberant right eye inspected him up and down. In a West Indies accent and a voice like thunder over the Caribbean she said, “New blood.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ain’t seen you a’fore.”
“My first time,” he said.
“Cash or credit?”
He jingled the coins in his pocket.
“Welcome, guv’nah,” she said with a wide wicked grin, and stepped aside for his passage into a new world.
Thirty-Two
Matthew closed the door behind him. He stood in a vestibule with lavender walls and an oval mirror, the better to check one’s appearance before meeting prostitutes. In front of him, beyond the black strawberry, was a drawn red curtain. He heard feminine laughter from the other side, and not too dainty, either. Then a man laughed, with a snort. He began to doubt his wisdom at coming to this place, but there were answers here and so be it.
Suddenly the ebony woman, who stood so close to him Matthew felt the heat glowing through her gown, had a dagger in her hands and was cleaning her fingernails with its deadly point. Hidden under all that finery, he thought. Ready to come out and stab somebody in the heart at the drop of a disagreement.
“First time here,” she said as she continued her grooming, “needs rules spelt out, unnastand?”
“Yes,” Matthew answered, carefully.
“No rough play. Disrespect earn disrespect, in spades. No weapons. Got any?”
Matthew shook his head.
“Trus’ worthy face,” she decided. “First trouble, a warnin’. Second trouble, you goes out in separate pieces. I keep de rules. Unnastand?”
“I do,” Matthew said, in all sincerity.
“Verra good!” The dagger was flipped around on fat but nimble fingers and vanished into the abyss. “Half a shillin’ rents de room for a half-hour or any part a’ it. Customary to pay de lady a groat, ’fore you goes up. All money to be collected by me. First glass a’ wine’s on de house. That smooth your sails?”
“Yes, madam,” Matthew said, assuming it was the correct reply.
“Not madam,” she scoffed. “I’m jus’ ole Becca Black.” She grinned widely again. “We gonna be good friends,” she told him, and one treelimb of an arm whisked the curtain open.
A rather luxurious parlor lay before him, decorated with dark red wallpaper and illuminated by many candles. There were chairs and settees and sofas, everything overstuffed and covered with glossy fabric in shades of red, pink, and purple. Matthew thought the place was meant to tantalize, but he feared for his vision. Within the parlor, where the pungently sweet fumes of incense curled from a Turkish lamp, sat in various postures of relaxation two men and three women. The men were not together and paid no mind to each other nor to Matthew, as all their attention was devoted to the females, who wore shockingly casual garments more like pantaloons than gowns. Brightly colored scarves covered their breasts, with ribbons around their throats. Scandalously, their midsections were exposed and one of the ladies wore a green jewel in her navel. None of them were great beauties, but the exposure of so much feminine flesh was enough to make Matthew weak in the knees. He assumed this was the normal uniform of Polly Blossom’s prostitutes, designed to be shed and reapplied as rapidly as possible.
One of the doxies, a full-bodied and white-wigged wench who might have been able to throw Brutus the bull, stood up from her sofa and grinned with snaggle-teeth at Matthew, offering him the comfort of bone-crushing arms.
“Go right in, then!” said Becca Black, who seized Matthew’s shoulder and nearly flung him into the room.
The whore lumbered toward him. Matthew thought he was about to be consumed like a meat-pie when a saving angel glided between them, having come through another doorway at the left side of the parlor.
“Master Corbett, isn’t it?” Polly Blossom asked, her face right up in his own. Before he could speak, she said quietly, “Sit down, Barsheba,” without moving her eyes from Matthew’s. He was aware in his peripheral vision of the female beast retreating to her sofa and curling herself up with a little sigh of lost love or, at least, an unearned groat. Polly leaned in so close her eyes, startlingly blue and clear, became the world. “We don’t wish to frighten you away, your very first visit,” she all but whispered in his ear.
In spite of the rigid design of his mission, Matthew had begun to sweat both at temples and under his arms. His stomach felt crawly. Polly Blossom was a handsome woman, no doubt. Her thick blond ringlets had no need of a whore’s wig, and she wore only a modicum of blue shadow-paint above her eyes. Her full, pouting lips-so close to his own mouth!-were daubed with pink. Her color was healthy, her body with its full swell of breasts and hips clothed in a rich indigo gown embroidered with lighter blue silk flowers. He had to look down to see if she wore the metal-toed boots, and yes, for all of her gentlewoman’s finery and a perfume that smelled like peaches she did indeed wear the fearsome black kickers.
There came the sound of someone strumming a gittern. Matthew looked to one side to see that Becca Black had situated herself in a chair and was playing the instrument, her head cocked and the remaining eye half-closed as if in reverie. The woman began to sing what might have been a West Indian song, a soft and lilting tune that seemed to be half English and half the language of her island heritage. He couldn’t understand most of it, due to the lady’s heavy accent, but he recognized in the lovely yet wistful song the sound of a universal longing.
A hand slid into Matthew’s. “Come,” said Polly, her voice still hushed. “Sit with me.”
She led him to a sofa, where suddenly he found himself seated with New York’s notorious and beautiful whore-mistress leaning against his shoulder and offering him a sugared almond from a silver dish. When he started to take it from her, she just laughed and pushed it into his mouth.
“Tell me,” she said, as a hand lay upon his thigh, “about yourself.”
This water was getting deep. He had not come here for dalliance, but for information. A meeting with Grace Hester, if possible. He had to keep his wits about him, before they flew away. He wondered what Polly Blossom might say if she knew he was unsure whether he was a virgin or not, for his memory of a heated physical encounter with Rachel Howarth might have been true yet might have been produced by the strange elixirs given him by an Indian medicine man after his fight with Jack One Eye the bear three years ago. He could hear Madam Blossom say as she stared steadily at him, After you leave here tonight, your memory will serve you well. But he was here for professional reasons, not for yearnings of the flesh. He was here to get in and out as quickly as possible. To get to the essence of things. To…damn, this woman was sitting so close!
Footsteps descended a staircase. Matthew saw a narrow set of stairs at the opposite end of the parlor. Coming down and looking quite woozy, either from drink or his amorous exertions, was Samuel Baiter, whose face was still bruised from the dust-up during a dice game at his house on Saturday night. He carried his tricorn hat in one hand and the other was still tugging his breeches up. “Good night, Madam Blossom,” he croaked as he passed, and the lady answered, “Good night, Master Baiter.”
Then she turned her attention again upon her object of sugared almonds. “Oh,” she said, “you’re a very handsome young man. But surely you’ve been told this by many ladies much younger and prettier than myself, have you not?”
The question sounded as loaded as one of those multi-barreled pistols Ashton McCaggers had told him about. “I have not,” he replied.
“Then I fear for the taste of the ladies of New York, sir, as well as for their sanity in letting you walk the
