Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Michael McDowell Page B

whispers of the three fat whores at the very small table rose suddenly in pitch and volume and they loudly debated who she was, and what she was doing on West Houston Street, and whether she really imagined that she had gouged anyone into believing that she was a real lady. Their admiration for her clothing, however, was genuine if grudging, and they listened intently when the druggist, coming over with the bottle of absinthe—Death’s Green Wine—and replenishing their tall glasses, smirkingly described the jeweled rings on her white-gloved hands.
    “She’d best be careful!” cried one whore.
    “She’d best stay away!” cried another.
    “If she takes her dainty hands out of her muff on this street,” cried the third, “someone’ll do her the favor of chopping ’em off!”
    Maggie followed the route that the twins had taken when they carried the corpse of the young girl to the medical students the night before. But she went up Bleecker in the other direction, all the way to Downing Street, where a latchkey let her into a small, well-kept brick house. She walked up a single flight of the blue-carpeted steps and with another key unlocked a large set of double doors. These she opened quietly and just enough to pass through. She slipped inside and pulled them shut behind her.
    Light from the streetlamp shining through the front windows was sufficient for her to move about withoutstumbling and she did not turn up the gas. Laying aside her muff, she unfastened the silver chain at her throat and folded the cloak over the back of a chair. She unpinned her hat and placed it carefully atop the cloak. The money she had got that night she slipped into the drawer of an ornamental table beside the door.
    Holding the pink envelope, she was just about to move toward her bedroom, when she detected a slight movement at the far end of the room—a rustle of cloth, the fall of a foot against the double-laid carpets. Without saying anything, Maggie turned the key of the gas and brought the lights of the brass chandelier up just enough to dispel the obscurity.
    The small chamber was fashionably decorated in deep rose and dark blue. The furniture was quite expensive and the fabrics and the upholstery and the papering were all sumptuous and soft and deep. At the far side of the room, on a high-backed couch covered in a heavily napped blue velvet, sat a handsome gentleman with short brown hair and a thick brown beard. He was modestly but quite elegantly dressed in a brown-checked suit.
    “Hello, Maggie,” he said easily, “Mrs. Weale let me in.”
    “I told her she might,” said Maggie, slipping the pink envelope beneath the lid of her desk.
    “I’ve brought you something—my New Year’s gift. Look on the mantel.”
    The octoroon glided to the hearth, which was of a deeply veined pink marble, and there beside the blood-red Bavarian vase which held a mass of blue campanulas, was a small red box tied up with a blue ribbon. She untied the ribbon and opened the box; it contained a gold ring set with a circle of small but brilliant rubies.
    “Do you like it?” said the man, who rose from the couch and came near the cold hearth.
    Maggie, with voluptuous weariness, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and then rubbed her cheek tenderly against his beard.
    “Oh yes, Duncan, very much.” She clasped her white-gloved hands behind his neck. “I’ve a weakness for rubies, such a weakness.”
    When Maggie turned her head beneath the chandelier, Duncan Phair searched out the slight flaw of blackness in each of her fine green eyes. “You seem very tired tonight,” he said.
    “Oh no,” she protested, “no no, earlier I was tired, but you’re here now, and I feel that everything’s come right.” She pulled back, and smiled with a ravishing tenderness. “Everything’s come right,” she whispered.

Chapter 8
    Judge James Stallworth lived alone now in his large, old-fashioned mansion on Washington Square, at the southern