The Girl from Everywhere (The Girl from Everywhere #1)(30)

“We served biscuits in it, of course.” Kashmir answered. “Only the lowest sort has tea without biscuits. Can you make up a new pair to match?”

We left the shop with the promise of a dimity cotton skirt and an embroidered jacket, a white-and-pink striped silk dress with a “modified bustle” of some description, and a new pair of silk shoes, all to be ready next week. We also had a drastically lighter coin purse, although Kashmir had only put down a deposit, with the balance to be paid on delivery. Once we’d left the shop I shook my head and whistled.

“Don’t worry,” Kash said. “Money is best spent quickly. You never know when someone might pick your pocket.”

“I never knew you had such a fine eye for fabrics,” I said as we continued up the street. “You should have been a tailor instead of a thief.”

“I have a fine eye for all things, amira, which is why I’m a thief and not a tailor.”

I laughed in spite of myself. “I just hope I do those fine fabrics justice.”

He looked at me then, with one eyebrow up, and said something under his breath in what sounded like Farsi.

“I didn’t understand that.”

“You weren’t meant to.”

His expression—a peculiar half smile—embarrassed me, so I turned toward the shops on the other side of the street and pretended to be interested in the hats in a window. They were fantastically styled, with swooping brims and showy feathers.

“You don’t want those,” Kashmir said. “They’ve used albatross.”

“Ugh, really?”

“To a landsman, they’re very fashionable.”

“How did you learn so much about clothes, anyway?”

“Necessity. Clothes have always told most of my lies for me.”

“Ah.” We were both quiet for a moment, staring at the window. I could see his shadowy reflection outlined in the glass. “This isn’t what you usually do on shore leave.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I can’t deny it.”

“So what do you actually do for fun?”

A slow smile spread across his face. “I told you before.”

“Dens of iniquity?”

“Drinking, brawling, gambling. Think carefully, amira. You may regret it.”

“I’m counting on it.”



From the milliners, I followed Kash to Fid Street, where we fortified ourselves with a dinner of potpies and watery beer at the koa-wood bar of the Anchor Saloon. When the cheering started next door, he drained his glass and stood. “Hurry up and get your drinking done, or we’ll miss the brawling.”

The Commissioner’s Saloon advertised boxing matches between sailors, only a nickel to watch. Kashmir elbowed me. “What do you think, amira? If we fight, we get in free.”

I dug out ten pennies, but only after pretending to give it careful consideration.

The next match was between a massive harpooner and a scrappy coalman. We placed our bets, Kashmir for the one, and I for the other, and I looked to be winning until the coalman ducked a swing and the harpooner hit a cook in the crowd. Kashmir pulled me outside and we watched through the window as the ensuing brawl broke two tables, five chairs, and half a dozen noses.

“That’s more than a nickel’s worth,” I said, a bit breathless.

“Only the best for you!”

We found a more genteel atmosphere at the Royal Saloon, where the laughter spilling into the street was hearty but not raucous. We split another pint—the beer here was dark and strong—and sat at a tiny table in a dark corner, catching our breath and listening to a fat man tell a bawdy joke.

He roared at his own punch line, and so did the cadre of men around him. The bartender delivered another beer; the big man drained the rest of his glass and made a sizable dent on the next, wiping the foam from his thick mustache on the sleeve of his jacket. It was a fine jacket, with gold braid and epaulets on the shoulder above the thick black mourning band . . . an awful lot of epaulets.

Suddenly thrilled, I grabbed Kash’s wrist. “Kashmir—”

“I know. They say he comes here almost every night.”

We watched the last King of Hawaii drink with his people. The jokes and the beer kept flowing, and about an hour in, Kalakaua bought a round for the entire bar in honor of his cousin, the late Princess Pauahi. Under the merriment was something familiar in his deep brown eyes as he stared into his fourth empty glass, and my thrill faded like an old photo.

“He dies of it,” I said under my breath. “The addiction.” I sighed. “Do you know . . . most people think his last words were ‘Tell my people I tried,’ but that was a novelist’s invention.”

“What were they really?”

“‘I’m a very sick man.’” I pushed aside my own mug, no longer thirsty. “We should get back to the ship.”

A shadow crossed our table. Kashmir sighed. “I wish you’d said that ten minutes ago.”

I looked up into a pair of angry, blackened eyes. The sailor looming over us wasn’t tall, but he was broad; his shoulders were twice the width of my own, and they moved under his shirt like a python constricting. The man was a stranger to me, but apparently not to Kashmir. “Where’s my money, darkie?”

I choked, but Kashmir barely raised an eyebrow. “Do I know you?”