cut of beef. “Jar me, you are a skinny one. My johns don’t much cotton to skinny ones. You ain’t got the consumption, eh? No pox? No clap? No plague? No worms?”
Chastened by her argument with Muse, Zhu quickly established that she was fit and capable. “My name is Zhu.”
Jessie tried it out. “Shoo? Zoo?”
“It means ‘pearl,’” Zhu said.
“Then I’ll call you Pearl.”
“Also ‘pig,’” Zhu laughed.
Jessie liked that, too. “I’ll call you Pearls Before Swine.”
“Call me Zhu. Zzsh. Zzsh. Zhu.” She demonstrated the buzzing noise.
Zhu proceeded to pull a copy of Poems of Pleasure by Ella Wheeler Wilcox off a bookshelf and read from it. She set out a column of numbers, added them, then divided the result by five.
Jessie Malone didn’t miss a beat. She produced a written contract, crossed out some clauses, scribbled in others. The contract stipulated that Zhu agreed to work for Jessie as her personal servant for a term of two years, during which time Zhu would earn back the hundred dollars in gold and reside, rent free, at the boardinghouse.
“But what am I to live on?” Zhu asked, amazed at the document.
“I’ll feed ya. You got a bed.”
“What about clothes? I’ve got nothing but these. What if I need medicine?” Zhu cast about for other necessities. She needed to get her hands on some cash. If young women were so easily bought and sold in San Francisco, maybe she could buy Wing Sing from Chee Song Tong. “Jewelry,” she tried again. “Books? Entertainment?”
“Lordy, now her highness wants jewels and the theatre.”
“Come on, Miss Malone. Pay me a salary. Something.”
Grumbling, Jessie scribbled in a monthly stipend of five dollars and added six months to the term.
And Zhu signed. She never held a pen like this in her life. You dipped the tip in a pot of ink. She offered her handshake, and Jessie took it. Pulling herself together after the dreadful first day and even more dreadful first night of the Gilded Age Project, Zhu advised Jessie--with all due sympathy and a charm she didn’t know she possessed—that the corpulent madam really ought to loosen her corset because the undergarment could be causing her internal organs to hemorrhage.
* * *
Now Zhu scrapes back her chair from the dining table, strides out of the room. Her face burns with anger. She won’t tolerate abuse from Jessie, not in front of Daniel and Mr. Schultz.
Jessie chases after her, catches up with her in the foyer. “Hell, I’m sorry, missy,” she says. “I know you don’t drink. You’re damn near the only one around here who don’t.”
As the gentlemen drift from the dining room to the smoking parlor, the madam’s eyes pool with sorrow, contrition, and genuine perplexity. A jumble of passions plays across her face. Jessie is only forty years old, but she looks like a centenarian from Zhu’s day. She slips a gold coin into Zhu’s palm. “You know I like you. You’re a smart kid. You’re different from the rest of the girls. In the time you’ve been here, I’ve come to depend a lot on you. Honestly, I don’t know what comes over me.”
“You want them to know you control me. It gives you pleasure. That’s what comes over you.”
Jessie’s cornflower-blue eyes widen. “Lordy, am I as terrible as all that?”
“You are,” Zhu says and pockets the precious coin.
Jessie smiles at her bluntness. “I’m the Queen of the Underworld, and I take crap from no one, no how.”
“And I don’t take crap from you, Miss Malone. I will order your red wine, and I will check up on the Mansion, including Li’l Lucy. But I am my own woman, and I have my own business affairs in San Francisco. Don’t you forget that.”
Jessie’s eyes turn dark and suspicious, then shrewd. Zhu braces herself for Jessie’s challenge, but she only says, “Never met a chit like you, Zhu. You can’t be more than sixteen. That’s why I paid through the nose for you.”
Zhu wants to say that she’s thirty. She wants to boast that she can expect to live to one hundred twenty years and more. That even a bumpkin like her from a jerkwater town like Changchi has been gene-tweaked, edited, Blocked, jacked for telespace, and morphed. But she swallows her boast. It’s not Jessie’s business how old she really is.
“I’m older than you know,” is all Zhu says.
* * *
Zhu climbs the stairs to her room, intending to change her morning dress into suitable outing togs, when Daniel confronts her in the hall.