Free Son of Fortune by Victoria McKernan

tawdry excitement to it all. Most of the places were narrow and dark. Some of the bars offered little more than a few rough planks set on top of boxes, and served vile liquor out of a jug to the shabbiest men. But many places had brightly painted signs advertising shows and dancing girls. A few even had women standing outside to lure men in, women dressed in satin corsets and ostrich feathers and little else. Aiden was relieved when they turned a corner and Fish stopped in front of a large, brightly lit building.
    “Here’s the place.” Fish tugged him into a garishly painted doorway. “The top place! The Elysium!”
    A bouncer in a blue velvet coat with shiny gold buttons stepped up to open the door. It seemed a little pretentious to Aiden, until he noticed the two hundred pounds of pure muscle inside the silly coat. The man had fists the size of ducks. He probably didn’t need to use them much, since his evil-eye glance was enough to make most men cower just at the sight of him. Aiden followed Fish inside, then stopped, awestruck.
    Fish grinned. “Look at all this—it’s like a place in France!”
    The room was grand as a cathedral, only where an altar might be there was an acre-long bar with a marble top and gleaming brass footrail. Instead of organ pipes there were tiers of liquor bottles, all reflected in gilt-framed mirrors that hung behind them. There were marble statues, though not of saints or angels. The walls on either side of the bar were painted with pastoral scenes in which beautiful girls tended fluffy lambs on gentle hillsides covered in buttercups. The artist had clearly never spent any time with any real sheep on any real hillsides, Aiden thought, for he had dressed the girls in floaty white gowns as flimsy as cobwebs, not at all practical for tending livestock.
    “Come on, let’s have a drink.” Fish expertly muscled his way through the crowd to the bar. Aiden had never seen so many people in one place. There were probably two hundred men. At one end of the room, there was a band with a piano, two fiddles and an accordion, a little stage and a small space in front of it for dancing.
    Fish nodded at the bartender. “Two whiskey sodas.” The bartender poured the liquor into the glasses, then added water from a bottle with tiny bubbles fizzing up from the bottom. Aiden had never seen anything like it, but Fish treated it as ordinary, so he was embarrassed to ask. He watched the stream of bubbles boil up in his glass.
    “Skoal!” Fish raised his glass in a toast. Aiden took a big swallow. The bubbles buzzed at the back of his throat and foamed through his head, making him cough and choke. Just as bubbles fizzed out his nose and dripped all over his shirt, two beautiful girls slid up next to them, sparkly as diamonds, silky as cats.
    “Need a hankie, sweetheart?” One of them plucked a bit of frilled lace from the very low neckline of her very tight dress and dangled it before him. He smelled a wave of sour perfume. Aiden struggled to squelch the coughs but felt his face turning red.
    “He’s more of a straight whiskey fellow,” Fish explained, clapping Aiden hard on the back.
    “Stick with us, boys, and you can have it any way you like,” the other girl said, fluffing her blond curls over her shoulders. “My little sister and I have a special tonight for handsome young gentlemen such as yourselves.”
    “I’m sure you do,” Fish said, looking them up and down.
    “Then why don’t you buy us a drink?” The dark-haired “little sister” trailed a finger down Fish’s arm and batted her eyes.
    “Thanks anyway,” Fish said, reluctantly pulling his gaze up to her face.
    “We don’t look good to you?” she persisted with an exaggerated pout.
    “I’ve been at sea over a month,” Fish laughed. “Your grandmother would look good to me. But I’m afraid my pockets aren’t full enough to take care of ladies as fine as yourselves.”
    “Oh, I’m sure we can find something in those