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Chapter one
Jeffrey
Ialways wondered what it might be like to be the real me.
But I’m still figuring out who that is.
“Introduce yourself, Madame Mattie!”
I kick my leg out from behind the wall where I’m hiding, and the hollers and whistles that follow make my heartrate quicken.
“Our seamstress for the evening!” Cas emphasizes the loaded word, and her raspy alto nearly sands smooth the stone walls of the underground. “Don’t worry, folks. She’s no stranger to entertaining this many at once.”
The crowd laughs, as I shimmy into view, shaking my behind with my back to them. There is a reason the midnight tours—starting at seven, eight, nine, and ten respectively, with none actually at midnight—is for eighteen and over only.
“Our story begins, dear dashing and distinguished guests, one hundred and thirty-five years ago!” Cas ends with my lead-in, and I flourish my lace and feathered fan with only the barest hint of my profile peeking at the crowd.
Cheeks rouged, hazel eyes heavily lined, and lips painted red, I am a knockout like this, and I know it. Blond waves cascade down my back, shoulders bare from the straps of my dress having purposely fallen, and a powder blue corset cinches my waist. When I spin to face the crowd with all but my eyes hidden behind the flutter of my fan, my skirt is bustled high enough to show milky thighs and the lace of high-cut bloomers.
My name is Jeffrey, by the way.
“And what have we here?” I announce in my naturally deep voice, sweeping aside my fan to reveal a flat chest and prominent Adam’s apple. “I might be the wealthiest woman in this town, but you fine folks look talented enough for me to teach you the same tricks.”
The crowd laughs harder since it is obvious now that their “seamstress” is in drag. To be fair, I was teased plenty for being pretty long before I knew how to use a contour brush. But in costume as Madame Mattie, I thrive off the applause.
“While I am certain you are all aching to learn how I made my millions, and let’s be honest…” I use my fan to point out people in the crowd who are most responsive to the act, whether laughing or looking flushed with interest—like the college boy about my age whose buddies just pushed him in front of them. “As a seamstress, I know my way around bobbins and buttonholes.”
That gets a laugh too, every night, even if it only sounds dirty.
“But first! A little history lesson on when your favorite madame came to this city—and I am always honest about when I’ve come.” I blow a kiss to the blushing college boy, and he darts his eyes downward, while his friends chuckle.
“What’s the real story, Mattie?” one of them calls. “Heard you sold your soul to the Devil.”
“Me? Go against the church?” I feign a swoon, fan fluttering wildly. “Perish the thought! Although there has been talk of a certain gentleman caller with a forked tongue.” I flick mine out between two fingers, and the crowd howls.
The real Madame Mattie was Matilda Swaine, and she was a freaking queen. Ruthless and conniving and not someone to trust serving you a drink if you even thought you might be on her bad side, but a queen, nonetheless. Her seamstresses serviced every high-profile man in this town once, and though she died young from syphilis—no surprise there—she made enough to give every employee a retirement plan.
For as long as they avoided syphilis too.
“But! We’ll get to my many benefactors later,” I continue, strutting in front of the crowd packed into the tunnels beneath the city, the only still working entrance being the one under Mad Madame Mattie’s Underground Tour. The building was the brothel itself, but the tunnels go all throughout the neighborhood and used to have entrances into almost every establishment—including St. Mary’s church.
They bricked that one up first.
“I arrived by boat in 1883—and boy did those sailors disembark happy.”
Another laugh. I do care about the history, but it’s the performance I really love, because only when I am Madame Mattie do I feel like I am almost, maybe, me.
“I bought the building above only two years later, and if you believe the stories—and you should always believe mine—these tunnels weren’t manmade but discovered by yours truly after taking refuge in the sewers to escape a very misinformed policeman.” I stop in front of the college boy still keeping his eyes averted and tilt his chin up with the tip of my fan. “Come along, darlings, if you’d like to explore my passages.”
His friends erupt again, and one grabs his shoulders to shake him in encouragement, then pushes him after me when I start to lead the tour. We’re only a few blocks from the queer district, so they’re probably headed to the bars after this, like The Manhole or The Rainbow Lounge. This neighborhood is the last stretch of old city that’s still behind the times. Behind in building codes mostly, but once in a while a group of college boys might mean trouble. Usually though our harassers are pearl-clutchers or men with confederate flags on their hats.
They don’t like hearing about a woman running this city anyway.
I tell the tale of that wayward entrepreneur, while my coworker, Cas, takes up the rear. She herds the stragglers and keeps an eye out for five-finger discounts, both of the pickpocket variety and those thinking they can pilfer a souvenir rather than pay for one in the gift shop.
Each section of the tunnels has a display of what something really looked like in Mattie’s time, from bedroom depictions that actually would have been upstairs—and still are; I should know, since I live there—to sewing machine stations for inspection days, and dressmaker dummies wearing outfits like mine. It’s a fascinating story of a self-made millionaire who ran more of this city than its mayor. The tunnels have no origin before Mattie found them, a cave system probably. The stone bricks and wooden girders to fortify the passageways were added later, but these caverns are as ancient as before the city had a name.
Mattie got away with everything short of murder, maybe even that, with all the police and politicians she had in her pocket, and just as often in her bedchamber. Officially, she and her employees were indeed documented as seamstresses, but it was no secret that any pumping going on wasn’t done with a sewing pedal.
