“I have never had many friends.” I halfheartedly tried to pull my hand away, but he grasped and held on with his fingers.
“Well, you have one now. You intrigue me, Bella. There’s malice in you.” He lifted his head and measured me, as if seeing me anew. He did not smile anymore.
“How would you know?” I fought to withdraw my hand again, but he held on.
“The same way you know me, I suppose. We are the same, you and I.” He said it as if it were the truth.
I let out my breath and finally relaxed my hand under his, savored the feel of his skin. “The rat had it coming.” I could not quite believe that I did it—spilled my secret as if it were nothing. It lay between us on the table like a red, pulsing thing.
“Rats have it coming just for being rats.” His hand on mine had grown warmer. “What was your father like?”
“I did not kill my father, Mr. Lee.” I laughed a little, quiet and insincere.
“I was only guessing. It’s so often the father who brings out the claws in a woman . . .”
“My father is a good-for-nothing drunk with hard fists, but he’s still alive. Unlike my mother, whom he wears—wore—down.” Thinking of her death made my throat thicken.
“Was he protective of you as a child?”
“Not at all.” I felt my lips twist into something cold and ugly. “He thought that I had it coming, everything that happened to me. Even when this old man down at the farm stuck his hand up my skirt when I was eight, he thought I shouldn’t complain. I shouldn’t have been alone with him in the first place, he said . . . Tenants’ daughters weren’t worth much back home, not even to the tenants. He acted as if I should be proud someone bothered sniffing up my skirts at all.”
“And yet you left him alive.” James’s voice was soft; he gave my fingers a little squeeze. Veins stretched like snakes under the skin on the back of his hand.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have eaten him up.” I smacked my lips as if tasting it.
“No one would hold it against you, I’m sure.” Another little smile appeared. They were intriguing, those smiles, as if he knew a secret. As if he found amusement where others might not. It made me want to see it too, what he found so thrilling.
“No one but God,” I said, from habit rather than conviction.
“God.” James snorted and lifted his glass. “He has not bothered for a long, good while.”
“The devil, then.” I gave him a smile to let him know I was only speaking in jest.
“Oh, he—he is all around us.” James laughed a little and lifted his hand away from mine to fill our glasses. I instantly missed his warmth. “To rats,” he said, and lifted his share; the golden liquor spilled down on the table. “To rats and those who eat them.”
When our glasses were back on the table, I said, “There was one rat. One I met here, while I lived with my sister. He tried to force himself on me, so I stabbed him.”
His eyebrows rose. “You did?”
“With scissors.” I could not help but smile at the memory. “He bled some, but he did not die. He recovered with just a scar. The other women thought I was wrong to do it, but I wasn’t. He had it coming. He shouldn’t have tried to force me.” The smile turned into a grimace.
“It’s a shame he survived.” James swilled the contents of his glass, looking at it with a thoughtful expression. “But you would surely have hanged if he did, so in that way it was a blessing. One needs stealth to accomplish an act like that and walk away unscathed.”
“I know, I do—I was stealthy before.” I did not want him to think me a fool.
“It’s hard to be stealthy when under attack.” He gave me an understanding look. “It’s a shame, though, that he walks around with nothing but a scar for what he tried to do.”
“Yes, isn’t it just?” I wished that James would take my hand again.
“Men like that should never touch a woman like you. It’s like a baboon courting a tigress.” He lifted his glass.
“At least I got him with those scissors.” I lifted my glass in turn.
* * *
—
I wanted James to become my lover since the very first day we met, even if I sometimes wished it were not so. He stirred something in me that Mads never could. Looking at him, I sensed danger and blood; looking at Mads I saw lukewarm milk left too long in the pot. The marital bed had always been disappointing to me. Ironed nightshirts and soft skin never much excited me; I needed a devil’s touch. I wanted it to be a battle on the sheets, a dangerous fight to survive. I did not want it to be nice; I wanted it to hurt. I was certain James could give me that.
On the night when it first happened, the two of us were out in the backyard. It was a nice, moonlit night; a frog sang in the distance and we were sharing a bottle out on the steps. I had two girls living in my house by then, Anne and another one called Lizzie. The latter had been scrawny when she arrived, but my cooking had already put some meat on her bones. She was not yet three, which suited me well. I liked them best as toddlers.
James retrieved something from his pocket, so small that it disappeared in his fist. “I brought you a present.” He reached his hand toward me.
I held out my hand palm up and felt him drop something smooth and cold into it. When I held it up to catch the light from the lamp we had brought with us, I could tell it was a pewter button. Stamped onto its face was a flower with four broad petals. “What is this?”
“Oh, just a token of something I took care of for you.”
“What do you mean?” I still inspected the button. It was a fine button, but it meant nothing to me.
“I think you’ll find that your rat is no longer around.”
“Oh, you didn’t.” I cocked my head and looked at him; my heart was suddenly racing. The flickering light from the lamp licked his face with warm tongues.
His lips split in a smile. “I did,” he said with undisguised glee. “That thing you’re holding is from his coat. I thought that you might want it.”
“How did you even know who it was?” I squinted toward him in the dim lighting, searching for some sign of dishonesty on his face, proof that he spoke in jest, but found none.
“Words travel fast, and that story about the scissors was well known. It was nothing.” He took a swig from the bottle. “From Bergen, was he? That little rat?”
I admired the button with a new appreciation. “He truly is dead, then?” I could not yet believe it, that James had done that for me.
“Yes, quite . . . I left him in an alley behind his boardinghouse.” He sounded smug.
“Are you sure no one saw you?” It would not do to lose my friend to the law.