“Mostly cosmetic and restricted to the forearms and hands. If the girls hadn’t been staggering drunk, the damage might have been considerable.” He gestured to O’Reilly. “Have a biscuit?”
“Thank’ee laddie, but I’ve eaten at the hotel. Do help yourself, sir. I jist stopped in t’ see to Aggie.”
She glanced at Doc, a curious mixture of excitement and sorrow behind her green eyes. “Pat tells me that Sarah has paid my debts.” A faint smile came to her lips. The pink weblike tracery of scars on her forehead and cheeks bent and flexed with the power of it. “She’s coming to Denver. Has title to a new house.” Her eyes hardened. “Parmelee’s.”
“Now, isn’t that a turn of fate?” Doc asked as he bit his biscuit. Damn fool that he was, of course she’d go back to a house. “I helped to bankrupt the son of a bitch, and I didn’t even know him.”
“And how moight that be, sir?”
“I helped Parmelee’s battered girls escape beyond reach. His professor cleared out the next morning, figuring he’d be held to blame. Last I heard, Francis Heatley had a lien on it. It’s a nice house. One of the best in Denver. Brick construction. Two stories. Phillipa spared no expense when she built it. And the location couldn’t be better.”
“Sarah wants me to come and help her,” Aggie said, hesitation in her voice for the first time. “It’s such a relief, Doc. First the attack, then my house is burned, my people scattered. Because of you, I may be scarred, but I’m not a monster. Then I learn my debts are cleared, and I have a place to go.”
You could stay with me, a voice in his head said, startling him. Did he want that? A madam? A purveyor of prostitution?
“Which brings me t’ me purpose.” O’Reilly placed his hand on the desk. “What do I owe ye, Doctor, for all ye done for Aggie, here?”
“Nothing, sir.” Doc took another bite of biscuit, the panic settling like a rat down in the pit of his stomach.
“Nothing?” O’Reilly and Aggie asked in unison.
Doc smiled at her, a melancholy sorrow building. She’d told him that she’d been born Bridget O’Fallon in New York. Her parents were famine Irish. Crowded ten to a room on the east side of the city, the family had scraped by. Her father had scrounged menial day labor. Brought home moldy bread for the family and watered alcohol for himself.
As a young girl, Aggie had had a choice to make. She could scrub floors for twenty-five cents a day, which she’d have to surrender to her father. She could marry one of the local boys, move into his tenement, and bear his children in squalor. The third option had presented itself on the street one day; a man in a flashy suit promised her a passage to Chicago, employment at two dollars a day, room and board included in what he called, “a house of entertainment.”
On arrival, she’d discovered that her virginity was worth an extra five dollars to her first client. Being no one’s fool, she had bargained it up to ten, and never looked back.
He remembered the night she’d told him. They’d been seated across from each other at his table, sharing a cup of tea by lamplight. “Philip, in my world, a poor woman with no education sells her body one way or another. The only man who will marry her stinks of old sweat, stale tobacco, and cheap whiskey each night when he crawls into her bed. She prays he won’t beat her too hard or often, and that he keeps a little food on the table while she pops out his kids one after another.
“She can get work for a tenth the wages a man can make in a factory, or maybe cleaning in a business or household, but she’ll live ten-to-a-room in hungry filth. Either way she’s sold her body whether it be to bear a man’s children or for the labor it produces. But if she sells her cunny the work isn’t as hard, the hours shorter.
“Sure, she’ll face a brief and fast life. Odds are, one way or another, she’ll be dead by the time she’s forty. However she ends, it won’t be pretty. If it isn’t disease, beat to death by a johnny, or suicide, she’ll finally starve to death in the streets when the drunks won’t even pay a penny for her. The brave ones conjure up the cost of a bottle of laudanum and drink it down to end it all.”
“But you did well?”
“I paid attention. Learned to read and write. Taught myself to talk to a man about more than his johnson. Listened when smart folks talked. And I gambled everything when I walked out the door in Chicago and spent every penny I had on a ticket to Colorado.”
Where she had put her body up as collateral, and this man, O’Reilly, had bankrolled her.
And why the hell is that bothering you?
“You’re smiling, Doc.” Aggie’s voice brought him back to the present.
“Aggie, truth be told, I amuse myself sometimes. Any idea when your partner will arrive?”
“End o’ the week,” O’Reilly told him. “About your bill, sir? We owe you.”
Doc waved it away. “Mr. O’Reilly, Aggie has cooked, straightened, assisted me in the surgery, and scrubbed up the gore afterward. She’s kept the ledger. For the first time, I know my accounts! She has reassured me that my wayward brother is all right. Dear Lord, she’s cleaned my house spotless.” He gestured down. “My clothes are immaculate. And my trousers pressed. My shoes are blacked and polished. I … I can’t take a penny.”
“You housed me, Doc. Bought food,” she said. “Gave me your brother’s room.”
“Well … it felt better. Like he wasn’t gone. If I’d been in that house alone, it would have all come crashing down like … like…”
What the hell, he couldn’t find the words. He shot an imploring glance at Aggie. Bridget. Whoever.
“If you’ll excuse me,” O’Reilly said, rising and
