Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [106]
Frank took his cigar from his lips and leaned closer to Theo across the table. ‘You didn’t string me a line this time — she’s red-hot.’
Theo nodded and smiled. His heart was bursting with pride, for Beth wasn’t just hot, she was burning the whole place up. He’d been afraid she might have lost her fire because of that ordeal in the cellar, but she was playing even better than she had at Heaney’s.
He and Frank were at a table on the raised platform at the side of the saloon with an excellent view of the stage. Beth looked very small up there, like a scarlet flame in her red dress. She’d won the crowd with ‘Kitty O’Neill’, but then she’d gone on to play ‘Tom Dooley’, ‘Days of ’49’ and ‘ The Irish ’69’, all numbers that meant a great deal to Americans. But she really came into her own with her fast Irish jigs, and down in the main part of the room they could see a hundred heads nodding and feet tapping.
Theo smirked at Frank. ‘So I win the hundred bucks?’
‘Sure, you son of a gun. She’s good. I guess Pearl took to her too, she’s wearing her feathers.’
Theo picked up his whisky and drank it down in one. He was a happy man: he’d won his bet, Sam and Jack had proved to be assets, and he had all the gaming tables in Philadelphia awaiting him. And his little gypsy to seduce.
Chapter Twenty-one
‘So what do you think of my new home?’ Theo asked. ‘Are you shocked into silence because of its grandeur?’
Beth giggled. She’d had a few too many drinks at the Bear tonight and Theo had sweet-talked her into coming back here with him.
He was joking about the grandeur. It was just two rooms above a coach house, not unlike the ones she and Sam had lived in at Falkner Square. The furnishings were much nicer though — thick curtains, a bright rug on the floor and an old brocade couch that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a country mansion. But its real appeal was the heat coming from the enamelled pot-bellied stove in the centre of the living room. Outside in the street the snow was three feet deep, and Beth had expected that it would be equally cold inside.
‘I’m impressed by the tidiness and the warmth,’ she said, speaking slowly so she didn’t slur her words.
‘That I cannot take credit for,’ Theo replied, opening the door of the stove and putting another shovel of coal into it. ‘I have a maid. Actually she belongs to the people I am renting this place from, but I crossed her palm with silver and now she takes care of me too. She is old and as ugly as sin, but I appreciate how comfortable she makes me.’
Beth smiled. Theo was destined always to have some woman waiting on him hand and foot. Pearl hadn’t wanted him to leave her place, for he had charmed her just as he had Miss Marchment and Miss Doughty before her.
‘That will keep it going all night,’ Theo said as he closed the stove door. ‘Now, let me take your coat and get you a drink.’
It was the beginning of March now, but even when the church bells had rung out on New Year’s Eve to welcome in 1896, and she’d only been in Philadelphia a couple of days, Beth knew she was going to be happy here.
Pearl’s genteel Federal-style house in Spruce Street showed no outward signs of what went on behind its shiny, black-painted door, yet close by in Camac Street and the many narrow alleys that ran off it, brothels, gambling dens and taverns abounded. Respectable people bemoaned the crime and brawling, but to Beth and the boys the whole area was an extraordinarily colourful and joyous conclave of free spirits, who were not bound by the rigid social mores that prevailed elsewhere in the city.
The Bear was situated between Pearl’s and Camac Street. Although the majority of its clientele were hard-working artisans who lived in the area, the number of artists, musicians, dancers and actors who frequented it too attracted many middle- and upper-class people who liked being seen in a place deemed risque´.
Beth had