Frog Music Read Free Page A

gone!
    But by the time Blanche has hauled her bustle straight and slapped the dirt from her skirts, the rider’s back. Perched above the gigantic front wheel, she glides down the street to Blanche, then swings one leg over, hops down, and hits the ground running. “Jenny Bonnet,” she announces as if it’s good news, the accent thoroughly American now even if she says her surname in the French way, with a silent t . She tips her black hat to a natty angle. “And you are?”
    “None of your business.” Blanche blows at the strand of hair that’s stuck to her damp lip and summons her crispest English, because what she lacks in height she can make up for in hauteur. “Listen, you he-she-whatever, the next time you get the notion to make the street your playground—”
    “Yeah, this thing’s the devil to steer,” interrupts Jenny Bonnet, nodding as if they agree. She has only about six inches on Blanche, up close. “Didn’t hurt you, though, did I?”
    Blanche bristles. “I’m bruised from head to toe.”
    “No bones sticking out, though?” The young woman makes a show of looking her up and down, mugging for a laugh. “No actual bloodshed per se?”
    “You might have killed us both, imbecile.”
    “If it comes to that, I might have fallen off a steamer to Lima this morning, and you might have caught your death,” says Jenny, jerking her thumb at a smallpox flag on a tobacconist’s just behind them.
    Blanche jerks back and takes a few steps away.
    “Instead, it appears we’re both safe and sound, and so’s my high-wheeler.” Jenny lets out a cowboy whoop.
    And oddly enough, Blanche’s wrath begins to lift a little. Maybe it’s the whisper of a breeze rising off the Bay, where the masts of the quarantined junks and clippers seem to be swaying a little, unless that’s a trick of the dusk. Or the soft trill from a flute player in some apartment overhead. The lights are flaring on in the cafés and shops along Kearny, and soon Chinatown’s border will be as glittering as a carousel.
    “Let me buy you a drink,” suggests Jenny, nodding toward Durand’s brasserie.
    Blanche always likes the sound of that. “As an apology?”
    “If you like. Never found them worth the candle myself.”
    Blanche hoists her eyebrows.
    “If you’re sorry, folks can tell,” remarks Jenny. “No use piling on the verbiage.” She lays her bicycle flat outside the brasserie’s door and beckons a boy over to guard it.
    “Do you reckon this kid won’t run off with it as fast as the others did?” asks Blanche, sardonic.
    “Ah, I know where this one lives.”
    That disconcerts Blanche. “I never imagine them as living anywhere in particular.”
    Jenny nods up at the building’s rickety overhang: “He’s a Durand.”
    As the two of them step into the garlicky fug, a couple of customers glance up, but nobody gives the young woman in pants a second glance. This Jenny must be an habitué.
    Monsieur Durand greets her with a nod and clears a space at the bar with his elbows. His fat mustache is leaking wax as he comes back and slaps down their glasses and a carafe of wine. Blanche pours the wine, takes a long drink. Ah, that’s better. She wipes sweat out of her eyes. “Aren’t you sweltering under all those layers?”
    A shrug as Jenny fills her own glass.
    “September can’t come too soon for me. It has to cool down by then.”
    “The City’s the exception to any rule,” says Jenny. “I’ve known it to be hottest in October.”
    Blanche groans at the prospect.
    Durand returns with two bowls of cuisses de grenouille au beurre noir they didn’t ask for. Discovering that she’s hungry, Blanche rips the firm, aromatic flesh from the frog thighs. “These aren’t like back in France.”
    “No, they’re better,” Jenny counters. She lets out a grunt of pleasure as she chews. “Only ten minutes dead, that’s the trick. But a touch too salty. Tell him he’s still oversalting,” she throws at Durand.
    The owner