Page 59 of No Mistress Of Mine

“I’m sorry.” Such easy words to say, and so inadequate.

“I went to see her once. When I was living in New York, before I went to Paris, I took the train down to Baltimore. She wouldn’t see me. She told her butler to tell me she didn’t have a daughter, she didn’t know who I was or what I was talking about. She wiped me out of her life, you see. Like wiping a slate clean.”

Denys’s anger, banked for a short while, came roaring back, and he vowed that if he ever returned to America, he would pay a call upon Mrs.Angus Hutchison of Baltimore.

“In America, one can do that, you see,” Lola said, breaking into his thoughts. “Start over, change your name, become someone else. It’s different here—at least, it is for people like you. If I had married you, there wouldn’t have been any way out of it, for either of us.”

“You think I would have wanted a way out,” he said slowly. “You think I would have abandoned you?”

“I...” She frowned, staring down at the bottle of beer on the table. “I don’t know. But either way, I couldn’t have made you happy.”

He tilted his head, studying. “I’m beginning to see why you think so.”

She roused herself, shaking her head. “Anyway, my father was shattered when my mother left. He took to drink. He stopped working, lost his butcher shop, he even sold his knives. He wanted to die. He finally succeeded. He drank himself to death when I fifteen.”

“Is that why you had no money?”

She nodded. “I’d been taking in laundry, singing in the local saloon, trying to make enough to keep body and soul together, and my father hadn’t been much help. After he died, and the rent came due, I didn’t have quite enough to pay it. I knew the girls who served the whiskey in the saloon got tips if they... smiled pretty, if they flirted. So that night, when I sang, I lifted up my skirt a bit—not much, just enough to show an ankle, and one of the cowboys tossed me two bits.”

He frowned. “Two bits?”

“A twenty-five-cent piece. That’s when I really began to understand how it’s done.”

“How what is done?”

She met his eyes across the table. “Making men want you.”

His chest hurt, like a fist squeezing his heart. One heard about girls going down the road to ruin, but even in his salad days, he’d never thought much about how, precisely, that happened. Now he knew.

“The next morning,” she went on, “I learned making men want you had consequences.”

“What happened?” he asked, his voice a harsh whisper to his own ears, his fingers gripping the beer in his hand so tightly, they ached.

“One of the cowboys who’d seen me waving my ankles around came to my place. He told me he knew I was all alone in the world, and he offered to help me out. ‘Take care of me,’ was how he put it.”

I’ll take care of you.

His own words came echoing back to him, and his dismay deepened, bringing a sense of shame he’d never felt before. “And what was your answer?”

“I told him no. He didn’t take it kindly.”

“No,” Denys muttered, feeling sick. He remembered her declaration that she’d only been with two men, and he wondered if this was the other man, if her only other sexual experience had been an assault. “I don’t imagine he would.”

“He shoved me down on the floor,” she said, and Denys squeezed his eyes shut. “But I managed to grab the Erie on my way down, and I bashed it over his head.”

He felt a relief so great, it shook him down to his bones, and it was several moments before he could speak. “What’s an Erie?” he asked, opening his eyes, easing his death grip on the beer bottle in his hand.

“A cast-iron skillet. Knocked him out cold. He had ten dollars in his pocket, and I took it. I went straight to the train station, got a ticket on the first train out, thinking to go as far away from Kansas City as I could get. I got all the way to New York on that ten dollars. I was thinking I’d sing there, work in a music hall, or something. But my voice wasn’t good enough. So...” She paused and gave a shrug. “That’s how I ended up at the dockside taverns in Brooklyn. It started with waving an ankle, then a flirty little flip of the back of my skirt... it kept getting easier, to go a bit further. And it seemed harmless, I made money, I got an apartment in Flatbush and learned to keep a knife in my garter. Eventually, I got enough money to get to Paris.”

He expelled his breath in a deep sigh. Then he sat back and raked a hand through his hair. “Hell,” he muttered.

Unexpectedly, she smiled. “I know you asked, but that’s probably a lot more than you wanted to know.”

“No, I’m glad you told me. And I’m just glad you were all right. That no man...” He stopped, then tried again. “That no man ever forced you...”

In it was a question, and she answered it. “No, Denys,” she said quietly. “No man ever forced me.”

She looked down, and absently began turning the bottle on the table round and round. “Denys? May I ask you a question now?”

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