Patricia White, page 3
Added to that was another irrefutable fact-- she, Jane Murdock, was the tawdry room's present occupant, the resident whore, as it were. And, despite the odd jumps and descents in whimsy her mind seemed to be taking, Jane was far from being amused.
And, judging from the loud shouts and drunken laughter coming from somewhere beyond the curtained doorway, the room was very much in service. Jane, with a shudder of revulsion, knew she was, more than probably, on the current bill of fare. It had all the aspects of a melodrama, but there was no noble hero waiting off stage to save her.
Indeed, what would a noble, virtuous, and lily-pure hero be doing in a place like this? Hell, heroes weren't even supposed to know places like this even existed, were they?
Making herself take a deep breath, of not exactly pollution free air, Jane straightened her back and tried to straighten her errant thoughts, to make them stop skittering and jumping, making weird connections, and flittering on to something else. It wasn't something she could allow, especially under the present circumstances.
If she was going to get out of this particular predicament, she was going to have to do what she had always done and save herself. And if the sound of feet climbing up a creaking stair was a viable indication, she was going to have to do her saving pretty damned quick.
But how? There wasn't a single window in the room; the only light came from the flickering flame in the oil lamp. She turned abruptly, feeling the solid thump of her black shoulder bag against the jut of her hip, and walked to the door. She pulled aside the curtain to peek into a shadowy hallway before she took a tentative step out of the room. Despite the oddly pooled areas of dark, there was still light enough-- and it seemed to have no real source-- for her to see the man who had ascended the stair.
Every smear of dirt on his whiskery face, every patch on his filthy shirt, every speck of dried sweat and ingrained grime on the man himself grew increasingly plain as he came toward her. He rubbed his hands together in obvious glee while he grinned in what could only be described as anticipatory delight.
Jane stood her ground. His grin faded when he got his first glimpse of her.
Stopping short, he stared at her, shook his head. "I might'a knowed. Cordelia said she brought us a present, but..."
He pulled a flat, brown bottle from his hip pocket, lifted it to his mouth, and took a healthy swig of what had to be, from the smell that was joining the general stench in the air, rot-gut whiskey.
"Oh, well," he said, more to himself than to Jane, "I won the toss, and to my thinking, a skinny old whore is better'n nothing. 'Sides that, Cordelia gets a mite riled iffen her presents ain't rightly appreciated and it's a right chancy thing to rile a wizard. 'Deed it is."
After taking another pull from the bottle, he staggered toward Jane, arms outstretched, evidently intending to embrace her or to do something equally repulsive.
Disbelief and growing horror smothering the swarm of questions in her mind, Jane backed through the doorway and into the bedroom. She knew full well it wasn't the smartest move to make, but not seeing any other way out of the present confrontation.
Jerking aside the soiled curtain, he followed her into the small room, pausing just inside the doorway to lean forward and peer at her. "You be more'n a sight peaked. You ain't be having the whore pox or nothing bad like that, be you?"
She didn't know what whore pox was, but she wasn't about to demand an explanation. Explanations weren't first on her list of priorities, getting away from him was. "Certainly not! Get away from me!"
Jane took another step back, fumbled in her purse, trying to find one of the cans of pepper spray she knew was in there somewhere. She'd bought two canisters yesterday, or what seemed like yesterday, and dropped them both in her purse. She was certain she had done exactly that, but she couldn't seem to find either of them in the welter of objects inside the large purse.
"Nah, I ain't going nowhere. I paid my two-bits just like the rest of 'em, and I won first shot at you fair and square. From the looks of you, I reckon I ain't gonna get my money's worth, but, by damn, I ain't gonna do nothing to make Cordelia mad neither. Wizards take offense mighty easy, and she's a mite unhappy already."
Scratching at an itch on his backside, he said, "Well, you'd best just flop on your back and let's get going. I ain't got all night." He guzzled down what was left in the bottle, tossed it into a corner, and motioned toward the bed as he staggered in that direction himself.
It was too much. Jane wanted, more than she would have thought possible, to scream something totally inane, like, "Damn it all to hell, women aren't wizards, they're witches or something." And then blast the drunken idiot with a full-faced spray from one of the cans; the pepper spray cans her scrabbling fingers absolute could not seem to find.
Instead, feigning a calmness she wasn't even close to possessing, she said, in her most authoritarian voice, "Get out of here and leave me alone. Wizard or not, your Cordelia has made a bit mistake this time and that's all there is to it."
"Come on. It ain't right for an old, wore-out whore like you to be acting like a scardy-cat girl what's never been bedded. 'Sides that, like I done told you, I ain't got much time. We ain't had us a whore for a right long spell and the rest of them horny devils do be a-waiting. They'll do be climbing up the stairs in three shakes of a lamb's tail, howling for their turn to ride you and..." He pulled down his suspenders and started to unbutton his pants.
"The rest of them?" Jane didn't know if she had spoken the words aloud, the same words that were circling round and round inside her head, making her sicker by the minute. It was beyond reason. It couldn't be happening. And whether she wanted to believe it or not, it was true. Jane Murdock was in a parlor house and men, who had already paid their service fee, were standing in line, waiting, as this drunk had so crudely expressed it, for their turn to ride her.
"Awww, come on. There ain't no sense playing them kinda games. I paid my two-bits and I gotta right to..." he whined as he unbuttoned another button on his pants, exposing his soiled underwear and all too obvious intent, and took several unsteady steps toward her.
The oil lamp flickered, flared, sent up a cloud of acrid smoke to cloud the globe. It tinted the shadows a darker hue, and add to the almost overpowering stench old sweat, old lust, and too new whiskey. Within her purse, Jane's hand dug frantically, discarded item after item, and, when she had almost given up hope, found one of the cylinders of pepper spray.
Now she was armed, and if her anger was any gauge, very, very dangerous. She pulled the can from her purse, trigger finger at the ready. "That's far enough," Jane said, unconsciously assuming what could best be described as a gun- fighter's stance: feet slightly apart, knees bent, eyes narrow, the business end of the spray aimed straight at his bewhiskered face.
Possibly he was too drunk to understand her warning-or possibly he was so horny that he just plain didn't care what happened to him in the process of getting what he had purchased with his two-bits. Jane didn't know which, nor did she actually care.
Arms outspread to grab his paid-for doxy, grinning, he took another step forward, straight into a hot, burning, choking cloud of mist. Coughing, wheezing, gasping in more of the burning spray, he went down to his knees and started to cry.
Tears running down his face, sort of choking and whimpering at the same time, he moaned, "You blinded me. Damn it, ma'am, why didn't you say you was a wizard? I ain't got me no hankering to bed no wizard. Or to get me in the middle of no bedamned wizard quarrels neither. Swear to God, I ain't."
For a very fleeting instant, Jane felt sorry for the man, but the pity wasn't strong enough to keep her from threatening him with another dose of the same medicine. As to the blubbering accusations he was making, she didn't have a clue as to what he meant, or why he was even saying it.
She certainly wasn't a wizard, and, as far as that went, she had very serious doubts as to their existence. Discounting his blabber as nothing more than drunk-talk, Jane asked one of the questions that was important to her at the moment, "Where are we?"
"Jake's. Brummelville."
"No, the country, or state, or whatever it is?"
"The Great Northwest," he mumbled, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, hiccoughing, and sort of wiggling back and away from where she stood. "Please, ma'am, let me go. I ain't no good to you. Hell, I'm a-blubbering like a babe and I can't see a blamed thing. Ain't that hurt enough for what I do be trying to do to you? Seeing as how I ain't gonna have me no woman and I ain't gonna get to see the lynching neither?"
The smoke from the guttering lamp mixed with the spray, burned the inside of her nose, stung her eyes, and tickled the lining of her throat. Jane ignored it. The man was either a fool or thought she was one. The Great Northwest indeed! There was no such place, and she knew it. She had to, in her business, geography could be very important.
Jane started to demand an immediate explanation, but something else he had said finally found its way into the receptors in her brain, added up the evidence at hand, and formed some very far-fetched conclusions. Sincerely hoping she was wrong, that a horse thief, or a bank robber, or even a cattle rustler was going to be the guest of honor at the necktie party, she asked, "Who, exactly, is being hanged?"
"That lying son-of-a...'scuse me, ma'am. I meant that lying wizard, Will. The one Cordelia drug in and tossed on the card table downstairs in the saloon. Afore she told us you was up here waiting to pleasure the rest of us what hadn't tried to break spell against having wives and such."
He rubbed his eyes a little harder, tried to pull his foot out of his mouth, so he could talk without offending Jane still more. She was already beyond being offended and was verging on pure rage. "Who is being hanged," she asked, lifting the spray again.
"You know, ma'am, the wizard who came prissing into town a-driving that purty red wagon and a-promising to bring in a passel of brides to... Hell, ma'am, I don't reckon you need me to tell you anything about..." He squirmed his way backward until he was almost at the curtained doorway.
Anger still burned in her chest, but fear was beginning to pinch and writhe in her flat stomach. Jane took a deep breath before she asked, trying her best to sound meaner than a snake, "Where is he now? Where's Will?"
"Ma'am, I didn't have nothing to do with that. Honest. I didn't send for no bride. No siree-bob. Whores are good enough for... Oh, God, ma'am, I didn't mean that you..."
His trembling hand clutched the curtain and he tried to scoot back under it, to escape what he obviously thought was a wizard's wrath. Although Jane wasn't sure what had given him that particular idea unless it was the blast of pepper spray he had taken full-face.
As unwizardly as was humanly possible, Jane's wrath was probably greater than the drunken lecher knew, but her fear-- that Will was going to swing before he could get her out of whatever it was he had gotten her into-- was what made her ask, "Tell me where Will is, or I swear I'll..." She lifted the pepper spray canister a little higher.
Perhaps he could see the fury on her face, or perhaps the threat in her voice was enough. Whatever the cause, the man gulped mightily, hunkered down a little lower, and his voice was almost a whisper when he said, "After they judged him, they put him in Nell's room. She was a right good madam, but she vanished with the rest of her girls when Cordelia got on her high-horse and hexed the whole damned country all on account of that bedamned Max Farrel."
He gulped again and whimpered deep in his throat. Trying, once again, to escaped from Jane and her pepper, he tangled himself in the curtain, pulled in down, rolled out into the hall, and started to crawl toward the head of the stair. His unbuttoned pants slid down, tangled around his knees, and sent him into a nose-dive.
Jane followed him through the doorway, into the oddly shadowed hall, and stopped his floundering flight with a question, "Where is Nell's room?"
"That one." He pointed to a closed door on the other side of the hall. "Please, ma'am, that's all I know. I gotta go down and... Hear 'em? They be having a fit for me to hurry, so's they can have a shot at the whore what Cordelia done brung for..."
Not even daring a single furtive glance in her direction, the man gulped loudly. He reached down and tried to pull up his pants. He managing to do so only after he had clawed his way up the rough, splintery boards of the unfinished wall and stood, owl-eyed and swaying, as he restored something of his rather drunken dignity. It was a dignity short-lived.
Either his fear of Jane, or the rot-gut he had swilled, or a combination of the two took the starch from his bones and the teaspoon of sense remaining in his brain and left him limp and mindless. Snoring softly, he sort of melted down, in slow-motion, until he looked like nothing more than a sprawled heap of soiled clothing lying against the base of the wall.
Some part of her wanted to kick him good and hard in a very meaningful place, and maybe do it more than once, but despite her fear and anger, Jane's reason still had the upper-hand. Prodding him with her toe, to make sure he was really passed-out and wasn't just pretending in order to escape from the terrible wizard he thought she was, Jane took in a quick breath. She tensed, ready to jump back at his slightest response. His only response was to take another rasping, snoring breath.
Letting out her pent breath in silence, she eased around him, and cautiously made her way to Will's prison. Her hand closed on the door knob, tried, unsuccessfully, to turn it. "Locked," she muttered, "I should have been smart enough to realize they would..."
Then, Jane Murdock, who was far from being a frivolous lady, grinned like a kid at Christmas. The randy dolts had left the key in the keyhole.
It took next to no time for her to open the door. Having the foresight to take the key with her, she looked into a small, smelly room that greatly resembled the one she had just vacated. Except this one had a small window high in one wall. It let in a pale shaft of daylight to fall across a man. His face hidden by his arm, he lay sprawled on the soiled and spotted, black-and-white striped mattress that covered a truly saggy bed. One that had clearly seen too much use, most of it unkind and unclean.
She couldn't tell for sure, but, as far as Jane could deduce, the sprawled figure had to be Will. This man was wearing the same cowboy regalia, even if it was slightly the worse for wear, that Will had worn when she had seen him in the New York brownstone. And, even if every nuance of his posture shouted defeat, he was still lanky, young-looking, and everything else he had been to her last seeing, as unpleasant as it had been.
Angry, sorely tempted to let him hang, Jane sighed. As much as the so-called wizard deserved his punishment, she couldn't allow him to hang, not when she needed him to get her out of this place and get her home.
Working on the adage, nothing ventured, nothing gained, Jane swallowed hard, squared her narrow shoulders, and stepped into the room as if she owned it. Will, if that's who it was and not something else set up to trick her, didn't move when she closed the door behind her. She walked, with no attempt to conceal the sound, across the creaking floor boards, stopping at the foot of the filthy bed, staring down at the not much cleaner occupant. She frowned a little, gnawed at her lower lip and tried to puzzle out why the occupant was so still, so unresponsive.
It was as if he was being held in place by unseen chains, bonds that restricted not just his movement, but also stopped his ears, blinded his eyes, kept him from all knowing. It was a frightening thought, one she absolutely didn't want to pursue. If Cordelia had done something terrible to him, what was Jane going to do?
It was a false worry. His arm fell back to his side and his head, with its mop of floppy brown hair and too young face, came up in an instant when she whispered, "Will? Wizard Will?"
* * *
Chapter Four
Earlier that afternoon, Cordelia and the angry, shouting men in Jake's saloon had left no doubt in Will's mind about what they intended to do to him, and now he wasn't entirely sure he could stop them. Cordelia was a very strong wizard indeed. So strong, in fact, that whatever prisoning spell she had set on the him controlled him completely. And not just his body.
His mind, especially that part that communicated with Sojourner, was blocked. It was as if Sojourner had ceased to exist-- and even the thought of that happening made Will sick, not body sick, but soul sick. The great cat was his family, his friend, his...
Swallowing down the thickness that was crowding his throat, Will shook his head. That couldn't have happened. Sojourner was stronger, in all ways, both magically and physically, than the irate, vindictive woman. Cordelia, even is she was proving the truth of the saying, Hell has no fury like a wizard scorned, was no match for Sojourner; and never would be. She probably wasn't even aware that he actually existed.
Sojourner was hidden away with the spelled wizard wagon and was, in all probability, still safe. It was only Will who had run afoul of Cordelia's magical edict, an edict he hadn't been aware of, and now, when he did know, it was too late to...
That thought led him to another worry. He might know about Cordelia and her thwarted love life now, but he didn't know what had happened to Maggie and the rest of the brides. He was incredibly weary-- using their magical powers did that to wizards-- but weary or not, the brides were still his responsibility.
They had given him their trust, and there had to be a way to live up to that trust, to save them from whatever fate Cordelia was planning to push onto them. He had to rescue them. He just had to; especially when one of the young women might be the one to free Sojourner from the curse that kept him a cat and...
One further worry slid into his mind, one that shouldn't even be there, nagging at him, tugging at emotions he wasn't free to have. But it didn't matter what he wanted, the worry remained, told him in doom-struck tones, "Maggie is with the rest and she, too, is in danger." It made him ache, but it couldn't release him from Cordelia's spell.
