No one would understand how Sadie Arnett had had her charges dropped and was released from jail without a trial. And people sometimes looked to the decision to allow Justine and Juliette to be sold in bookstores as the moment the city had turned completely mad: When a book about two amoral, promiscuous women would be deemed as having literary merit and people were too intimidated to criticize it.
Marie had paid everyone off before the Arnetts knew what was happening. Marie was also aware that freeing Sadie and allowing her words to be published freely would destroy the Arnetts. There were so many advantages to this move. She smiled when she thought of it. She had been waiting for the moment she would strike against them. She had waited until she had more power and she could take everything the Arnetts held dear away from them. What did they hold dear? It was their reputation. They wanted others to believe they were better, purer. They couldn’t do it through money, so they were doing it through morality.
Marie went down to the police station herself to collect Sadie.
CHAPTER 37
Stockings
Sadie was sitting in a prison cell. There were pigeons on the cell’s windowsill. They were rustling their wings, making the sound of someone tearing through books. One of the guards had given her a cigarette in exchange for her flashing her breasts at him. She inhaled and considered her situation. She had taken a risk. She would normally be outraged and terrified by her imprisonment. But, as she knew this arrest would be good for book sales, it was something an author had to endure. They couldn’t keep her there very long. She knew Madame had strings she could pull to get her out.
Sadie began to pace in the cell. She would have felt better if they’d allowed her a notebook and pen to write with. Opening a notebook was like throwing open the shutters of a huge window and seeing crowds of people outside on the street. Being unable to write made the thoughts crowd in her head like a group of people trying to exit a theater on fire.
She waited. She waited.
It was the unknowing that was driving her crazy. She tried not to think about how she was always being punished for something she didn’t consider a crime. Was it a crime to put into words how she felt about Marie? Her relationship with Marie was the purest, most innocent part of her life. The period when she really had a connection with someone. She had liked Marie so much as a child, she would be chronically anxious about whether Marie liked her back. She couldn’t imagine feeling like that again. It was the only time in her life she had made herself so vulnerable.
The book was about innocence. It was about delight. It was about connection. It was about true love. It was about how the rest of the world does not exist for true lovers. They would murder, rape, and kill for their love, but it was celebrated nonetheless. And is that not a beautiful thing?
Wasn’t it beautiful? She was convinced she had written something of worth. So what if she used the female body and its sexuality as a metaphor for freedom and creation? She had liberated it from the shadows. She had used the language of female desire to create something great and unusual and beautiful. And even if she was in a jail cell, they could not convince her otherwise.
She had imagined Marie coming to see her after she wrote the book. She knew in many ways she had written the book all the while imagining Marie reading it. Marie had reached such heights, she felt the book had to be great to compete with them. She kept thinking, Is this good enough to compare to the wealth Marie has accumulated, to the social power Marie wields? She had found herself thinking as she had as a child, Are we really equals?
George had believed Sadie was writing the book with her as its principal reader. And that every time she made editorial choices it was with George in mind. But it was Marie. Nonetheless, it was George she was depending on now. She knew George was doing everything in her power to free her. George and Madame had always told her they had influence in the city. They had dirt on everyone who was in office. So many important men had come to the brothel and had let their guard down. They had enacted their most hidden and corrupt desires. Madame could blackmail so many men.
Sadie tried to have faith in George’s machinations and tried not to worry. But at the same time she was aware there were men who would be above blackmail of that nature. They had never been to the brothel and they would laugh at, if not be outright disgusted by, a young woman who dressed like a man and attempted to sway their position.
Sadie was concerned about Madame’s reach. If it were not for the fact that her father was in charge of the morality law, she would have been out by now. He was putting all his political leverage into having her locked up and punished. The only way he could protect his political career was to show he had defeated and silenced her.
George was up against men like her father and brother. They were cruel. And cruelty was not something George could negotiate with. There was nothing about their cruelty that made them vulnerable or that they could be called out on. They were men whose cruelty was domestic and was confined to women they possessed or were related to. This was largely socially acceptable and even encouraged. They were immune to the type of power Madame wielded.
When a guard came to the door and unlocked it, telling her she was free to go, she regretted immediately having ever doubted George. She felt such a flood of relief, it was akin to peeing in her clothes, releasing a bladder she had been brutally holding in. She rose from the bench, full of elation. It was such a relief, it was as though she were an air balloon. She felt the second she stepped out of the prison that the lightness might cause her to lift right off her feet and float into the air.
She was surprised to see an expensive carriage in front of the prison. She did not assume the carriage was there for her. Perhaps another well-to-do prisoner was being released, although everyone she had seen while incarcerated was distinctly lower class.
This carriage had definitely descended from the Golden Mile. Sadie thought she had best get as far from that carriage as was possible. She felt a presence inside it. A presence so intense and aware of her, it could only be dangerous. She was about to distance herself from the carriage and head back to the brothel on foot when the door of the carriage opened. It stayed open, clearly waiting for her.
At this point there was nothing she could do other than approach it. A shining head of blond curls was framed in the doorway. It was Marie. Sadie had never been so surprised. Her heart started fluttering. As though she were a moth and Marie were a giant flame.
She had relegated Marie to fiction, where she could visit her. She had never expected to see Marie in the flesh again. But there she was. Marie had come for her.
Sadie climbed into the carriage. She sat across from Marie. The two were silent. They would both have liked to control and contain the smiles on their faces, but they could not.