His Perfect Bride. Judy Christenberry
sighed deeply. She had just listed all the reasons why she was no doubt quite safe roaming the Barbary Coast unescorted. Plus her purse was rather thin. The cab driver’s extortion made it impossible for her to treat herself to a cup of tea and a pastry before finding another cab or hopping on an omnibus to take her home. If Edmund hadn’t offered to pay for her glass plates, chemicals, albumin papers and card stock, she would not have been able to supply her subjects with a cabinet card likeness of themselves at no charge.
Which reminded her of Belle Tauber, who was waiting to receive her photograph. Lilly hurried off, hoping that Belle would like the mounting she’d chosen for the picture and the double row of gold ruled lines she’d carefully added to the mat simply because it was the young woman’s birthday today. Strange to think Belle was six years younger than she herself was. Lilly would have guessed her to be ten years older, Belle’s features were so forlorn.
The young woman seated on the back stoop of her building, waiting patiently, looked so unlike the young prostitute she knew that Lilly had to blink. Belle still wore the same shabby gown, the color faded with age to a nondescript shade neither brown nor gray. Her threadbare shawl did little to protect her from the wintry air, nor did her worn shoes warm her otherwise bare feet. The change wasn’t due only to the fact that her fair hair looked freshly washed and carefully pinned up, but rather to the excitement that seemed to emanate from Belle’s whole being. She leaped to her feet and hurried a few steps down the alleyway when she spotted Lilly, her eyes glittering unnaturally, her buoyant spirits briefly restoring the beauty that too many years in her profession had stripped away.
“Oh, Miss Lilly! I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Belle cried.
For a moment Lilly wondered if her client would for once forget the difference in their situations and hug her, but Belle recalled herself before doing so. The fact that she did hurt. Beyond their circumstances, Lilly saw little difference between them, for she, like Belle, was not her own woman. She had come to consider the soiled dove a friend in the weeks since they had first met, but Belle always kept a careful distance between them that seemed to preclude friendship.
“I am sorry to be late,” Lilly said, hastily setting the camera aside so she could rifle through her bag of photographs. “My sister knows very well how I treasure my one afternoon away from home, but when she comes to sit with our parents, she still insists on telling me in great detail about the most trivial things her youngest child has done, thus delaying me.”
Belle smiled softly. “Mamas like to brag, Miss Lilly. I know I woulda if my man had let me keep my babies.”
Having learned more about Belle’s past than she had cared to, Lilly knew there were no words to comfort the young woman for her loss. “Well, nevertheless, I thought it quite uncivil of her,” she said, as her hand found the correct package. “Here you are. Happy birthday, Belle. I hope you like the photograph I chose.”
“You sure took a passel of them,” Belle said, eagerly accepting the cabinet card. “I was beginning to think I was so ugly your picture box was refusing to have anything to do with me.”
She had taken a lot of photographs, Lilly agreed silently. Some showed Belle with unsightly bruises that even a heavy hand with powder could not conceal. In preparing the cabinet card as Belle’s gift, Lilly had spent hours studying proof sheets until she found an image she felt Belle would cherish.
“Oh, Miss Lilly!” The words were a sigh of appreciation. When Belle glanced up from the carefully posed photograph, her eyes were swimming with unshed tears. “You made me look beautiful again,” she whispered, as if she had doubted such a feat could be done.
“Nonsense,” Lilly declared stoutly. “You know very well that while a painter can improve the looks of his subject, a photographer can only reproduce what nature has given a person.”
“I’m gonna take this with me when I go, and treasure it all my years,” Belle promised.
Lilly glanced up from buckling her satchel closed once more. “You’re leaving the Coast? When?”
“Soon as I have a talk with a certain gent,” Belle announced brightly. “See, I know something about him that he don’t want known.”
“You’re planning to blackmail someone?” Lilly gasped. “But, Belle, you can’t do that. It’s wrong.”
Belle’s smile faded. “And what these men do to me every day ain’t?”
“I didn’t say that,” Lilly said. “It’s only that—”
“You and me’s from different worlds, Miss Lilly. You just visit in the Coast. I live here, and there ain’t no gettin’ out unless it’s with a handful of twenty-dollar gold pieces.” Belle carefully placed the cabinet card in the pocket of her skirt. “I aim to get me some of those and clear out while I got the chance.”
Lilly had been privy to conditions in the Coast long enough to know that leaving the neighborhood was the dream of nearly every woman there. A dream that would never come true for most of them. But Belle was gambling with fate and, as Lilly had learned in the weeks she’d spent there, in the Coast fate always won.
“Be careful, Belle,” she urged. “Whether it’s right or wrong, what you are planning to do is most definitely dangerous.”
The prostitute smiled wanly. “Don’t worry ’bout me, Miss Lilly. I’ve seen this man enough to know he values his reputation even more’n he loves money. I’ll be fine and I’ll be gone. There can’t be nothin’ better’n that.”
“You’ve talked to this man already then?” Lilly asked.
Belle shook her head. “Not yet. I know where to find him later tonight, though. Once he pays me, I’ll be on the first train out of town and startin’ my new life.”
And if he decided not to pay her? Lilly wondered if Belle had considered such an outcome. Despite her own feeling of foreboding, she realized reasoning with the determined woman would be difficult. Perhaps in Belle’s place she would have been just as reckless, just as willing to gamble with the future.
Taking the initiative, Lilly quickly hugged Belle and was pleased when, after a slight hesitation, the woman returned the gesture. “Then I hope your new life is everything you want it to be,” Lilly said.
“Thank you, Miss Lilly. I just know it will be.” Belle giggled nervously. “It can’t help but be better than this, can it?”
A truer statement Lilly had yet to hear, but it didn’t lessen the fact that Belle’s plan was fraught with danger. She wished briefly that she did not have other photographs to deliver, that she hadn’t promised a group of newsboys to take their pictures that day. Still, Belle had far more experience in dealing with men than she herself had, Lilly admitted. Or was likely to have. No doubt the young woman knew exactly what she was doing.
Lilly shouldered the camera once more. “I wish I could stay longer but…”
“I understand,” Belle assured. “Thank you so much for my photograph.”
“It was my pleasure. I hope the rest of your birthday is just as pleasurable,” Lilly said as she turned to retrace her steps down the alley.
“It will be, especially when I show my photograph to the other girls,” Belle called.
Lilly gave a quick wave, then rounded the corner onto the street, and Belle was lost to sight.
Belle’s plan continued to nag at Lilly. She’d barely taken a dozen steps, threading her way through the bustle on Pacific Street, when she decided nothing was more important than convincing Belle that blackmail was not the answer to her prayers. Despite the weight of the camera, she’d walk home, forgoing the luxury of an omnibus in order to spend her fare on tea and cakes for Belle. Somehow Lilly would find a way to convince the prostitute that there were other, less risky ways of leaving behind her life in the Coast and beginning anew without a grubstake gained through blackmail.
Her decision made,