Love and Other Consolation Prizes(31)

One older girl tucked her spoon into a soft-boiled egg. “Aye, aye, Captain Flora. Hear that, girls? Our standing orders from the captain and her first mate—by day we’re expanding our minds. And by night we’re spreading our—”

“That’s quite enough, dear,” Madam Flora interrupted with a wan smile.

“Always the button burster, that one,” Miss Amber grumbled.

Ernest blushed again as the ladies twittered and finished their breakfast.

“And you, young man, I have something important for you to do today.” Madam Flora pursed her lips as she produced a small stack of elegantly addressed letters. “These are special invitations for this month’s festivities. See to it that they’re all delivered today. My little Mayflower will show you around, won’t you, dear?”

“Thank you, madam, but there’s no need to trouble her,” Ernest said. “Perhaps there’s a fellow servant who could show me.”

“Nonsense,” Madam Flora said. “Maisie can do it one last time.”

Maisie took an enormous bite of bread and then shoved her plate away.

“Go on, girl,” Miss Amber huffed. “Do as Flora says. You can’t be a gamine runabout forever, you know?”

Maisie stared at Miss Amber as she chewed slowly and then swallowed. Then she smiled and said, “I’d be absolutely delighted to show him around.” Her expression suggested she’d rather pluck a live chicken with her teeth.

—

MAISIE WALKED SO fast down Second Avenue that Ernest almost had to run to keep up with her. He tagged along as she led him through traffic, around parked carriages and swerving, honking automobiles. The slower drivers were accompanied by footmen, who ran ahead of their owners’ motorcars with red flags of warning.

Maisie marched through business districts cluttered with knots of power lines, telephone cables, and crowded residential streets that smelled like soap and lye from the clotheslines and hanging laundry. She took strange alleyways, skirting houses with warning signs, quarantined by whooping cough, and backtracked so much he was certain she was trying to confuse him at best and lose him at worst. She ignored the gentlemen on the street who occasionally tipped their hats or nodded as she tromped by, and she seemed annoyed with the little boys on crate scooters who noisily raced past them on the sidewalk.

“Where are we going?” Ernest finally asked, out of breath as they passed the Great Northern Tunnel for a second time and headed back toward Pioneer Square.

“Anywhere and everywhere.” Maisie handed him half of the envelopes. There must have been fifty in all. The white lace invitations had been sealed with scented beeswax, each stamped with an ornate T. “You met Jewel in the motorcar yesterday. She’s turning sixteen and having a coming-out party—all the Tenderloin’s best patrons are invited. No traveling businessmen, no good-time Charlies or cellar smellers, and certainly no soldiers or sailors. Madam Flora says we’re not that kind of place.”

“Coming out?” Ernest had visions of Seattle’s elegant Grand Cotillion, of horse-drawn surreys and string quartets. He remembered how the little girls at the children’s home would carefully clip out photographs of young women in fancy gowns from the society page of the Sunday paper. They’d play with them like paper dolls. “Like a debutante ball?” he asked.

“Judas Priest, did you just fall off a turnip wagon?” Maisie snorted as she kept walking. Then she put a hand on her hip and spoke in a deep, breathless voice, imitating the way the older girls cooed. “It’s her sweet sixteen, darlin’. She’s going to the highest bidder. Let’s just hope he’s as handsome as he is rich.”

Ernest stopped in his tracks.

“What’s the big deal?” Maisie asked with a shrug. “Is the carriage trade too much for your delicate sensibilities? Or is the new servant boy suddenly too good for us? I sure hope not, because that would be quite funny considering how we just won you in a cakewalk.”

“It was a raffle.”

Maisie shook her head and kept walking. “Honestly, I’d been hoping for a pony, but evidently that was given away last week.”

Ernest gave up the last shreds of his denial and followed her up the street and across the Deadline, beguiled by the Tenderloin, which wasn’t a fancy hotel or a women’s social club, as he’d initially tried to convince himself. In fact, the stately-looking brick building was precisely the kind of place Mrs. Irvine had warned him about in their yearly interviews. If children didn’t protect their virtue, then their carnal nature would invariably lead them to ruin. And to Mrs. Irvine, ruin always looked a lot like the Tenderloin—a crib joint, a sporting home, a den of iniquity, a bawdy house of ill repute.

“It’s just a coming-out party,” Maisie said. “Besides, the age of consent is ten, and half the girls in the city are married off and pregnant by sixteen anyway. Probably up to their eyeballs in dirty diapers by the time they’re twenty, living in some Sears mail-order house on the prairie, doting on their drunken, philandering husbands, who backhand their wives to keep them in line. And if they’re single, they end up as factory girls working twelve-hour days, being pawed at by some creepy boss, all for five dollars a week, which isn’t even enough to live on. Or worst of all, they wind up as old maids—schoolmarms who aren’t allowed to date or even let their hair down because they might give their students the wrong idea. The girls at the Tenderloin are the lucky ones, Ernest. They get a proper education, they get to see a doctor whenever they want, and get their teeth taken care of. And they get fifty dollars a day. Plus they get to visit their boyfriends once a week, if they care to have one.”