I nod and file the information away for later.
The stairs are impossibly narrow and cramped, and we have to walk single file. They empty out into a laundry room, with a glorious copper tub in the middle.
“This is where you’ll wash your clothes. Some of my girls take in laundry, so if you want them to wash your things you can ask. That tub is yours to rent for a nickel, but I’ll let you use it today for free since you . . . just been through an ordeal. You want hot water you have to pump it into the big cistern in the corner, then light that stove right next to it. After that, turn this fancy spigot here. After you’re done, pull that plug in the bottom, and the water will run right out back to the trough I keep for the garden. Understood?”
I nod, and walk over to the contraption. I look at the copper pipes, the hand pump that brings water up out of the ground, the water heater that looks to be pressurized. “You got a way of handling the silt?” I ask, gesturing to the hand pump.
The Duchess shrugs one pale shoulder. “I don’t rightly know. You’d have to ask the professor, he’s the one that rigged up the contraption.”
“The professor?”
“The tinkerer. Gideon. Most of the fancy gadgets you see around town are his creation.” She pulls a pocket watch out of her skirt and sighs. “Dinner is in an hour or so, I need to get the girls fed before fellas start arriving.”
I incline my head. “Thank you, ma’am, for the fine tour of your establishment,” I say before bobbing another curtsy.
She gives me a bemused smile in return and just shakes her head as she slips through a door, off to see about her business.
There’s a shelf of glasses along a wall and I grab one, twisting the handle above the spigot. Water flows out, clean and clear. I fill the glass and drink deeply. The water tastes strange, as strange as anything else in this town, but not lethal.
At least, not yet.
The Bible has been a comfort, and one of the younger girls has even started a school for the little ones. It is such a miracle to listen to them read the Scripture, although I must admit it does make me heartsick for you, darling Jane.
Chapter 21In Which I Attend Church
After a bath, I head out to find dinner. The town ain’t all that big, and it’s easy to see what the Duchess meant when she said that all the girls ate together. Everyone spills out of a plain, whitewashed building with a cross hammered onto the door. The meeting hall is next to the church but separated from the grander building by a garden of white crosses, memorials to the deceased. In the old days it would’ve been a graveyard, but most sensible folks have taken to burning their dead and mounting a cross in a field or yard, like these. It’s just safer that way.
The meeting house smells of good things, so I push aside my worry that God will strike me down when I walk through the doors. I’m too hungry to worry about my tainted soul.
As I enter, every pair of eyes lands on me. Toward the back of the building are two large tables of boys and girls, all Negroes, hungrily shoveling food off tin plates. The Duchess and her girls sit at their own table near the door, plenty of room around them, some of the girls making lewd gestures to a few rough and ready white fellas sitting at a nearby table. I don’t see Jackson. More important, I don’t see Lily or the Spencers, and I wonder if we made a mistake, if we got ourselves sent out here for nothing.
I get a plate of a thick, hearty stew and a slice of bread from the woman at the window. My serving is about half that of the white man in front of me, my plate hammered tin instead of the stoneware. I open my mouth to complain, but I ain’t given the chance.
“Keep it moving,” says a high voice. Bill stands over me, shotgun propped on his shoulder. Why’s he need a shotgun at dinner? No one else is armed.
The old man from the church glides up to me. He smiles, but there ain’t nothing friendly about it. “Jane, Miss Deveraux will be so happy to hear you’re settling in nicely.”
“I got this, sir,” Bill says, a quaver in his voice. There’s an air of fear about him, and after I spot the large gold cross around the old man’s neck I figure this must be the preacher the Duchess warned me about.
“No, Bill, you have other matters to attend to. It’s Bible study night. Go watch the door. I won’t have the whores sneaking out again.” Bill walks off. The old man still smiles, thin red lips stretched garishly over large front teeth. His eyes are watery, the brown washed out to the color of a penny, his hair completely snow white and thinning. He looks like a walking skeleton, sun bleached and pale, and I involuntarily shrink back from him when he reaches a hand out to guide me toward the back of the building.
“Allow me to formally introduce myself; I am Pastor Snyder. You’ve no doubt already met my son, Sheriff Snyder. While my son enforces the laws here, my
