Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear Page B

a knee beside the prone figure. As if her moving freed us all from some paralysis, I stepped up, too. Miss Bethel stood over us with the gun held easily, and Effie made a sideways triangle to her, watching back the way we’d come. We all trusted Crispin to bring the folk inside up to speed and all.
    I stepped around the girl on the ground. She was a sister, a stargazer like us. And she didn’t have the look of one of the dockside whores—she was white, for one thing—but she weren’t no parlor house girl. A streetwalker, rather, a ragged robin, sprawled half on her front and half on her side. Her face was lost in her tangled brown hair. Her boots were down at the heels and her hem was draggled and tattered.
    She wasn’t wearing stays, and the back of her dress was torn to ribbons and sticky brown with old blood. She’d been flogged.
    At least blood that old didn’t make me want to grab one of those dustbins and hide my head in it while I upped my chuck.
    Miss Francina laid the back of her hand against the woman’s cheek and paused a moment, head bowed. Then she looked up and found Effie’s gaze. “You get Crispin back out here,” she said. “And a cudgel and a lamp, and your pistol. And you and him run and get the constables, fast as you can.”
    “We should get that girl inside,” Miss Bethel said as Effie vanished in a patter of footsteps. Two runs for the constables in two nights, that were a mite unusual.
    Miss Francina shook her head. “She’s past help, Beth. We should wait for the brass knuckles and their whistles.”
    Miss Bethel said, “This is a threat.”
    “We don’t know that for sure,” Miss Francina said, but her expression agreed with Miss Bethel. “Karen honey, would you run and fetch my boots?”
    *   *   *
    As it turned out, there wasn’t much wait for the law. And it wasn’t the constabulary. By the time I came back with Miss Francina’s shoes—boots only by courtesy, as they was the frilliest, silliest girl shoes you’ve ever seen, and on the largest last—and gave her a shoulder to lean on while she put them on standing, there was a thump of much heavier boots coming down the ladder.
    We all turned—we being Miss Bethel, Miss Francina, and me, because Miss Lizzie was keeping the other girls in the library for now. Which was just as well; having them all gathered around sobbing or staring or sobbing and staring would of been more than I could of handled. The tromp of big boots turned the corner, and—
    I felt the skin around my eyes stretch as Marshal Bass Reeves stomped into view.
    He’d divested himself of his duster and spurs, but he still had a pistol on each hip. Now he wore a town suit—maybe gray, in the lamplight—and a silk kerchief tied into the gap of his shirt. Still the same pair of boots, though, with the stirrup scuffs in the arches.
    Under his big gruff mustache, he looked grim.
    “Ladies,” he said, and we parted before him like the Red Sea. He could of been our Moses, I suppose, but they say the Negro Moses was a woman and she lives in New York.
    Miss Bethel is never at a loss for words, and it was her who said, “How did you know to come here?”
    The Marshal crouched beside the girl. He touched her shoulder with some gentleness. The shadow that crossed his face at the sight of her ribboned back was no trick of the lantern light. He looked down again.
    I couldn’t read the Marshal’s face, because the brim of his big hat covered it as he crouched, so I looked at the creases across the toes of his boots and wondered how many states and territories they’d seen. He pulled a glove off—they were town gloves now, pearl kidskin, such as none of us nor the dead girl were wearing—and gently took her wrist. The shreds of dress across her back rustled.
    There was no wind down here in the well. It was just from him moving her. She weren’t stiff yet.
    “Marshal, she’s beyond any help but God’s,” said Miss Francina.
    He didn’t look