The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [54]
He stared in surprise at the girl asking him for a job. She was too tall to be called a waif because waifs were always tiny, and yet she had the haunted look of the hungry, that telltale yellowish tinge to her skin and deep-gray shadows under her eyes. But by golly, they were beautiful violet eyes, and her brown hair shone in the sunlight streaming in through the open doors. She was neat and clean in her white blouse and blue skirt, and she had ankles pretty enough to turn any man’s glance. O’Hara thought she was a lot different from the usual rawboned, black-haired tired Irish women he saw in the saloon or at St. Savior’s on Sunday, hidden under their shawls with a brood of ten or fourteen children flocking at their heels. With a bit of feeding up, this colleen might be a beauty. But as for giving her a job, it was hard work and she just didn’t look up to it. Besides, his customers were a rough lot and she was obviously a refined sort of girl.
“Well … I’m not sure we be needin’ anyone,” he said doubtfully. A look of despair crossed her face and he sighed and said, “The trut’ is y’don’t look strong enough t’ lift a pint of ale.”
“Oh, but I am, I am,” she cried, grabbing his arm eagerly. “I’ll clean, I’ll wash dishes, I’ll serve … anything. Just try me … please.”
Pulling herself up to her tallest, Missie tried her best to look “strong” as O’Hara looked her up and down speculatively and then said with a sigh, “Out o’ the goodness of me heart then, but just on trial, mind. The pay’s a dollar a night. Y’start at six and finish when I say the word—and not before. Understood?”
Too close to tears to reply, Missie nodded and rushed out of the saloon back to Rivington Street to tell them the good news. O’Hara followed her to the doorway, watching until she turned the corner of Orchard, wondering what her story was. Because in this part of the world, everyone had a story.
For a month O’Hara kept her busy. She swept the previous night’s filthy sawdust from the floors and scattered fresh; she washed hundreds of glasses until her hands became red, chapped lumps; she polished the counter and scrubbed vainly at the beery circles staining the tables. Trying her best to get used to the smell, she carried heavy trays laden with a dozen pints of beer without spilling them and served them, anxious and unsmiling, to the rough crowd of stevedores, bricklayers, laborers, and whores who made up O’Hara’s clientele. And at the end of each evening, she pocketed her dollar triumphantly and dodging the drunks who tried to manhandle her, she fled back through the dark streets littered with stinking refuse from the pushcarts to the room she now called “home.”
Sofia would be waiting up for her with a glass of hot milk flavored with cinnamon, and Missie would always protest she was too tired to eat the plate of food she had brought home. “It’ll do for Azaylee’s breakfast,” she would say, slipping a scrap to Viktor, who wolfed it down as if it were a peanut. She sipped her fragrant milk gratefully before subsiding, exhausted, onto the little iron cot that served as her bed, knowing that Sofia would wait until she slept before she climbed into the sagging brass bed beside Azaylee. But she never told her that she was afraid to go to sleep, afraid of the dream that came every night when she saw Alexei’s terrified face and heard his voice begging her to help him.
Azaylee was the only one who didn’t seem to mind her new circumstances, playing happily out on the dirty streets with the neighborhood’s teeming population of children. Missie and Sofia would lean from the window watching her as, with Viktor always at her heels, she darted among the pushcarts, blond braids flying