“Go where?” Opal asked.
“Save her.”
And then the train was there, on top of them.
FIRST DO NO HARM HADbeen an oath Jagr repeated, his reason for being exacting about his formulas. Opal had harmed. She’d made a mistake, not once, not twice. She’d made several mistakes. She mustn’t blame anyone but herself. Dixie Ellison now reported more mysterious deaths of women who’d taken Comet Pills. Gossip, perhaps, but she couldn’t be sure.
If only Madame de Fluer had told her what to do. Or that voice.Save her, it’d said, leaving no further instructions. In moments of weakness, she longed for someone to be the boss of her. There had been some comfort in that with Jagr.
Yet, look at how capable she’d proven herself to be. Look at all she’d accomplished, alone. M had been right: She still had the power of self-determination. And this is how she’d use it: She’d refuse to fill another order of Comet Pills.
At Dowd’s, however, she discovered every last tin of Comet Pills had already been pulled from the shelves.
Clara explained the Tuttle’s lawyer had payed a visit. He was looking out for the interest of his client, especially after what Dixie Ellison had written. “You know how lawyers can be—nobody wantslitigation, and certainly not me,” explained Clara. She went quiet for a moment. “He’s bought me out of the contract. Took all the stock with him—just loaded it up in his automobile—and, honestly, I’m not sure what they plan to do. Possibly destroy it.” She arranged and rearranged some bottles in the cabinet, then made a few pencil markings in her ledger book. “It’s only business. Nothing personal. I don’t believe that nonsense in the paper. Sometimes nature just takes its course,” she said. “But people want to place blame so they feel safer from the whims of their own mortality.”
Opal struggled to understand. “What about my commission? From what’s already been sold?”
“Didn’t you read the terms of the contract?”
Now she felt foolish. She thought of how much it had cost to produce all those pills—money she’d invested with the guarantee of a larger return. The cost of doing business, she supposed, and perhaps she shouldn’t wish to benefit at all from the Comet Pills. The money felt tainted now—plus what would Madame de Fleur think of her?
“If Charles Tuttle cared so much about his Earthshine Girls,” she started to say, “then why wouldn’t he just—”
“That’s the odd part,” Clara interrupted. “The lawyer wasn’t sent by Mr. Tuttle. He was sent by Mrs. Tuttle.”
Mrs. Tuttle. Bertie.
Opal didn’t feel betrayal, exactly, since they hadn’t a relationship to betray. But, still, she had trusted the woman.
And now her own life was reduced to a formula: time over money. She didn’t have enough of either. It costs both to create a new self, which is why more women couldn’t do it. But medicines weren’t her only capital. First and foremost, she was a spiritualist.
Resourceful.
“SHE’S COME THROUGH AGAIN,” OPALtold the Colonel when he’d opened his door. She wasn’t sure what to expect of him since they’d been intimate. He hadn’t called for her again, yet now he invited her in.
The portrait of Hazel above the hearth had been rendered cartoonishly. Her head was small and tilted upward. A ring glinted on her finger. Her lips were parted. The portrait artist had caught her on the verge of speaking.
Like Bertie, Hazel Bloodworth was born into wealth. According to the Colonel, she showed early musical promise and aspired to become a pianist. Her parents sent her to the Conservatory of Paris for proper training. There, she met the Colonel. She married, conceived, then died in childbirth. A woman with talent and ambition is still, first, a woman.
Opal asked the Colonel to play something of hers, and he set the needle to the phonograph. They held hands and listened to Hazel’s piano arrangement from a performance in England. Not long ago, capturing such sound would have been impossible to imagine. Once, when a circus came to Gallipolis, the ringmaster brought a small phonograph into the tent and played a recording of a dog barking. The audience thought it’d been a trick, that a dog had been obscured with sheets, or perhaps a cage had been hidden beneath a recessed door. What once seemed impossible was now commonplace. Opal tried to imagine Hazel’s fingers on the piano keys, and she tapped her own fingers against the flesh of the Colonel’s hand. When the arrangement ended, he reset the needle. The world was changing quickly, but not quickly enough.
The two didn’t speak. After the song played for a second time, the Colonel led her to the settee. Perhaps women are a mystery to men because they’re hidden beneath so many layers of clothing. He removed her boots. He unbuttoned her dress and untied her slip. He unfastened her pregnancy corset, loosened the stiff plates that held her stomach in place until she felt the release.
Then he studied her stomach with such tenderness, she thought he might cry. He traced its arc with his thumb. He put his ear to her belly button and tapped her side, listening. Then, he guided her to lie down on her side.
Now, she became Hazel. She watched him undress. There was acoolness to him. The patch of hair on his chest resembled a thumbprint. He stood in profile to hide the scar beneath his eye, and this amused Opal, that he’d hide a simple scar while undressing, as though that old wound was more private than his manhood.
Soon they were face-to-face. The tips of their noses touched, and they laughed. Jagr used to mount her like a farm animal until she’d knock her head against the wall. Oren had… what had Oren been like in these intimate moments? The details had faded with time, and all that was left was a nostalgia for something she could hardly remember, except when she’d been with Madame de Fleur. Had she really believed Oren had come through? And what did it matter? It was the woman she’d touched. The woman she still wanted to touch. Now, she touched the Colonel’s scar. She pulled him close and had the sense she could not pull him close enough.
“I want—” she said, but then he’d pressed his warm lips upon hers.
After the act, the Colonel traced the curve of her stomach, the pop of her belly button, the way, perhaps, he’d done to Hazel the last time they had been together.
He drew his finger along her shoulder. She twisted her body. It was dusk, when the gray sky held on to the light. He searched her eyes. His skin was warm. She felt momentarily safe here against him, like nothing could go wrong, like nobody could find her.
But they would find her.
She tried to think of what Hazel might say. She considered how she might have told him of her pregnancy the first time: excitement blushing her cheeks, sheepish with the knowledge that part of him had planted itself in her. They’d speak in euphemisms. She might have told him to ready the chimney for the stork, and the Colonel might have tenderly whisperedHazel Storkinto her ear. But Opal knew that storks were carnivores that ate small mammals like mice and shrews. No baby would be safe with one.
