Jackson shouts at the hatchet men, cracking the horsewhip.
Jessie rushes over, her earlier outrage kicking up like a mule. A lady, a proper citizen accosted by tong men! What’s the city coming to? What’s next?
Jessie runs to the lady and takes her arm, and the lady throws back her veil. In the dusk, Jessie stares, disbelieving. The lady has pale golden skin, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, the most amazing eyes Jessie has ever seen, the irises the gleaming green color of shamrocks. A Chinese woman? In a proper lady’s outing togs?
“They’ve been driving and driving, going all over town,” the lady says, breathing heavily. “I can’t think what they’re doing, except looking for a place where they can imprison us.” She looks at Jessie, beseeching. “They seem to think they own her, but they certainly don’t own me.”
Sure and the lady speaks perfect, educated-sounding English. And then Jessie hears a tiny voice tingling in the air over the lady’s head. Like a spirit! Lordy, there’s something extraordinary about this lady!
Without thinking twice—a bad habit of hers—Jessie strides up to the eyepatch.
“How much for her?” she shouts at him, pointing at the lady.
The eyepatch turns, surprised. He knows Jessie, sure and everyone in town knows the Queen of the Underworld. His eye narrows. “How much?”
“Yeah, how much?” she snaps. “Be quick about it.”
The eyepatch spits words at the wiry fellow and the fat man, who withdraw from the confrontation with Mr. Jackson and his driver. The eyepatch points at the wretch. “That one, she ours.”
“Hmph! I don’t want no Chinee chit.” She spills out a hundred dollars in double eagles, which is probably way too much for the lady if she’s consumptive or poxy. Still, Jessie is determined to get the lady out of this predicament. She’s got a feeling. What do you call it? A premonition. “The one in the gray dress, you dunce.”
The eyepatch grins and seizes the gold. “She yours.”
Jessie takes the lady’s arm. “Come along. We should vamoose.”
“Jade Eyes!” cries the wretch as the fat man wrestles her back into the brougham. “Do not leave me, Jade Eyes!”
“I can’t leave that girl with those men!” the lady says angrily. The tiny voice chimes again over her head. Like a spirit. Just like a sweet spirit.
Jessie pulls her away, out of the street. “Miss, please. There’s nothing you can do for that chit.” Jessie pats the lady’s hard, thin arm, well pleased with herself. “As for you, now you belong to me.”
October 12, 1895
Columbus Day
4
Up and Down Dupont Street
This is the United States of America, 1895. President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation thirty-two years ago. Casualties of the War Between the States have lain in their graves longer than Zhu Wong has been alive in the future. Slavery has been abolished in America. Everyone here is free.
And I’m not, Zhu thinks as she sits at the breakfast table.
“What I need is red wine and plenty of it,” Jessie Malone proclaims, tossing her blond curls. Dissatisfied with her natural endowments, Jessie pins hair switches from the Montgomery Ward catalog here and there in her tremendous coiffure. “Go fetch me red wine, missy, and be quick about it.”
“For breakfast, Miss Malone?”
“Lordy, no, for the Mansion. For the gentlemen tonight. It’s Columbus Day! Don’t you know anything?”
“I beg your pardon, Miss Malone,” she says deferentially, as is fitting for an indentured servant. She mutters to Muse, “Columbus Day? I can’t keep these American holidays straight.”
“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,” Muse whispers in her ear, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Excellent, Zhu mutters under her breath. Now Muse is spouting doggerel.
Jessie looks at her askance. What must she look like, forever muttering to herself and rolling her eyes to the side to view whatever Muse has posted in her peripheral vision?
Muse has turned out to be a serious problem. Her one tenuous, desperate link to her Now, she can’t rely on. Very excellent.
Zhu hasn’t known what to expect of Muse since the first day of the Gilded Age Project when the monitor spontaneously communicated in projection mode and advised her not to fight the hatchet men, to let them abduct the girl and carry her off. Now how can she secure a position at the Presbyterian mission when Jessie Malone holds a two-and-a-half year contract for Zhu’s services and the madam fully intends to enforce the bond? The girl she was supposed to rescue has been abducted, the aurelia never showed up at all, and Zhu is taking orders from the Queen