nothing of leaving a proper young woman alone in the most disreputable neighborhood in San Francisco.
Well, perhaps she didn’t look as helpless as other females. Or as proper, considering she was lugging photographic equipment. What other middle-class woman would have taken up the science of the camera with the intention of making her living by it? None to her knowledge, for how many other of the gentler sex were strong enough to transport the weighty camera and equipment without help? Again, none of her acquaintance, nor of her sister’s. Nor, as they so often reminded her, of their parents’.
At times it seemed as if the members of her family had but a single theme: her inability to be like the other women of her class, which, they felt, resulted in her sad lack of suitors.
It never crossed their minds that she was just as they had created her, her tall frame similar to that of her father and brother, her unfeminine strength the result of years of nursing duties, supporting and lifting her invalid mother. Lilly’s dearth of suitors was quite a natural state of affairs, considering she had no social life outside of her parents’ narrow circle. Pouring tea for her mother’s visitors, all of whom were elderly women, or acting as hostess when her father entertained an old business associate at dinner, had yet to put her in the way of an eligible, single gentleman.
Granted, she didn’t possess the golden haired beauty that had made her elder brother and sister much sought after. Not only had she been born a decade behind Edmund and nearly nine years after Vinia, Lilly had also been overlooked when physical assets were handed out. Rather than blond curls like her siblings, she had brown hair with nary a wave in it unless she used a crimping iron. Rather than eyes that rivaled the summer skies, as her brother’s and sister’s did, Lilly thought her eyes an unremarkable, washed-out shade of blue. Kind matrons described her as handsome, for her nose was too long to be fashionable, her jawline too square and her cheekbones too high. To top things off, she had never outgrown the angularity of girlhood, being barely rounded compared to other young women her age, and inches taller than was considered desirable.
Lilly 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
