The Spoils of Sin (3 page)

Exactly
where
to wait had not been obvious. Feeling nervous themselves, they had neglected to make allowance for the nervousness of their potential clients. At six o'clock, with daylight rapidly fading, there were sounds of boots on the stoop, and a subdued male laugh, but nothing more. Nobody came in. Fanny and Carola had situated themselves on two separate couches in the middle of the room, with nothing to do but pick their fingernails and twirl their ringlets. ‘We should have left the door open,' murmured Carola. ‘They're too scared of us to walk right in when they can't see what's inside.'

Fanny got up and marched to the door. Then she stepped sideways and moved the drape away from the window on the left. ‘Three of them,' she reported softly.

‘Open the door, then.'

Fanny did as advised, adopting a broad smile. ‘Come in, gentlemen. Nothing to be afraid of.'

The challenge worked as she'd hoped, and the men shuffled in, hats in their hands. They looked around with half-smiles on their lips. One nudged another and received an irritable shove in return.

They were all in their twenties, by Fanny's estimation. Men employed for timber clearance, house-building, road laying. Their clothes were stained with sweat, despite showing signs of being fresh on for the occasion.

‘Good evening!' Carola trilled. ‘Welcome to our boudoir. We can promise you a fine time. Now, this is Francesca and my name is Carlotta. We want nothing but your pleasure.'

It sounded stilted, unnatural, to Fanny's ears. The strangeness of the situation came over her in a tide of alarm and shame. What in the world was she doing? There was no trace of excited throbbing between her legs, no sense whatever that she too might experience pleasure in what was to come. She remembered words she had spoken to her sister Charity, long ago, claiming to have found a vocation in which her own desires would be fully met. Could she have been so profoundly mistaken as it now seemed?

One of the men was staring openly at her. He was tall, fair-haired and lightly bearded. He held his hat before his crotch in a suggestive manner. It seemed there was no room for doubt in his mind as to what was on offer in this place. Carola had worried about that. ‘They could simply expect a song and a kiss and nothing more,' she said. ‘At least to begin with.'

The fact that there were three of them was awkward. One would have to wait alone, listening to sounds from above his head and wondering to himself about taking the place of a friend so soon after his desires had been sated. Did men worry about that sort of thing, Fanny wondered. How complicated it all seemed, as she stood there on display like a cow in the market place.

Another man stepped forward, towards Carola. ‘Miss Carlotta,' he said, with a little bow. ‘Do I detect the accents of a Carolina lady?' His own tones were decidedly Southern.

‘You do indeed,' she rejoined.

He stared around the room, for the second or third time. ‘I congratulate you on this little piece of Charleston, out here in the wilds,' he said. ‘You have worked a small miracle.'

‘Thank you, sir. We have done our humble best.'

He moved decisively to the couch and sat down beside her. Shorter and darker than Fanny's admirer, he carried himself confidently. Fanny recognised the type – a younger son of a large Southern family, sent west to fend for himself in a territory with land to spare. And, no doubt, nostalgic for the comforts back home. Exactly as Carola had predicted, in fact.

The third man was the youngest and the most hesitant. He had already missed his chance, to nobody's surprise. With a resigned sigh he moved to the piano and sat down on its stool. ‘Do you play, sir?' Carola asked him.

For answer he opened the lid and began to pick out a tinkling tune on the tenor end of the keyboard. Fanny recognised a version of ‘Greensleeves' and began to sing softly. The ice was broken. They were all friends together in a front parlour, conducting a normal social intercourse. Carola completed the picture with an offer of a glass of whiskey. ‘All part of the service,' she smiled, ducking her chin at a notice on the wall, which announced: COMPLETE SERVICE $5.00.

‘Provided you just take one glass,' added Fanny quickly. It had been another point of extended discussion, to decide exactly how much was included in this promise.

All three men reached into the money pouch on their belts, preparatory to extracting the required fee. This readiness improved Fanny's mood considerably. They were, after all, gentlemen, however unpolished their appearance. Even Carola's beau was plainly working for his bread and not simply touring the west at his father's expense.

The drinks were dispensed, but before many sips had been taken, the atmosphere changed. The tall man had taken a seat next to Fanny, his hat on his lap and his colour high. He laid a hand on her leg, less gently than she might have liked. ‘Well then?' he said. ‘I guess we should go up them there stairs.' His accent was sing-song, suggesting the prairies of Ohio or Indiana. Fanny's heart pounded. This was it, then. The first of a thousand such moments. She told herself the pounding heart was a precursor to a more sensual beat, lower down in her body. The man was clean enough. He looked healthy and in no way brutal. He would do. Besides, she realised with another painful thump in her chest, she had very little choice in the matter. From this time on, she must accede to whatever male demands might be made on her, short of actual physical damage. And even that could well turn out to be beyond her control.

Carola's gentleman was quick to follow. ‘Yes, indeedy,' he said with a heartiness that was plainly artificial. He had placed his hat on a hook on the wall, and showed no signs of an uncomfortable engorgement. The piano player strummed softly and averted his eyes.

‘The door on the left,' Fanny told her client. ‘I must prepare myself. Three minutes.' She held up three fingers. ‘Remove your boots, if you please.'

He tilted his head at her. ‘Here or upstairs?'

The image of a pair of stockinged feet climbing the stairs was sufficiently domestic to allay a handful of anxieties. ‘Here will do,' she told him. Then she hurried out to the crude privy in the yard, lifted her skirts and inserted one of the vinegar-soaked sponges she and Carola had left in a glass jar inside a wooden box on the floor. They had both practised a dozen times, pushing the scrap of protective material as high as they could, and then desperately struggling to remove it again. Both procedures were vitally important – the removal to be done as soon as possible after the event, the sponge washed and
resoaked with the acidic fluid that would deter all damaging invasions. ‘Infection too,' Carola had told her. ‘There's as big a chance of the clap as there is of a brat.' Either one would be a disaster, spelling the end of their business. A further benefit came to mind, as well. The monthly courses might necessitate some days of idleness and loss of earnings, unless somehow concealed. The sponge, Carola suggested, could work to that purpose too.

Fanny had sighed softly to herself. The prospect of a few days' rest each month was already of some appeal, even before the work had begun.

She had no idea whether her visit to the privy had taken more or less than three minutes. The arbitrary time span had been a homage to her father, who would promise to attend to whatever was demanded of him ‘in exactly three minutes' when they had lived back in Rhode Island. Fanny's brother Reuben had been known to time him by the mantel clock.

A mistake, she realised too late. Thoughts of home, already aroused by the piano, were far from comfortable now. She was on the brink of becoming a loose woman - or worse. She was intending to earn her living by immoral means. The road ahead, once shining with promise, now looked stony and tawdry.

Nonetheless, she mounted the stairs, holding up her rustling skirt and pinning on a winsome smile. The man was waiting, boots, belt and breeches already off. His impatience made it all far easier. He clasped her to him, his member urgent against the cotton of his underclothes. When he found his way through her garments, his plunging drove the sponge even deeper, until she could feel it bunched against some inner part of herself.

He was quick, but not so quick she lacked time to think. Five or six thrusts, with his face buried against her shoulder, accompanied by unbridled groans and a final shout, and it was done.
Five dollars for this,
she thought, with some relief. By any standards, it had to be easy money.

His hips worked in a spasm, to which she responded with a slight wiggle. He slid out of her, everything wet and slippery, the sheet beneath her already damp. ‘Give me a few minutes, and I'll be ready again,' he muttered.

‘Again?'

‘If you please.'

Here was something she had not discussed with Carola. Abel Tennant had never come back a second time – they had been too afraid of discovery to linger unclothed for long. Should she make an additional charge, or simply insist that once was all there was on offer for today? Although unsure of the details, she had a suspicion that a second coupling would take considerably longer, and require more participation from her. Bewilderingly, she found her body reacting to the prospect. The speed of the act and the withdrawal had left her with a void that called out to be filled. This was another thing she and Carola had failed to confront – the degree of their own enjoyment. Fanny had understood from the first that the sensations brought intense pleasure. It had guided her initial plans for her future. But now she doubted the wisdom of taking her own satisfaction from a client. He would be so rapidly followed by others, and she could already see that it would be exhausting if she permitted herself to fully engage.

‘I regret, sir, that you have to make way now. I should be most happy to see you here again on another evening. For this evening, however, that must suffice.'

He said nothing, and she wondered briefly whether she might encounter violence from her very first session. But then he sighed and rolled away from her. He sat on the edge of the
bed and rubbed his hair as if to wake himself up. ‘That seems hard,' he muttered. ‘The second time is always so much better.'

‘I'm sorry,' she repeated firmly. She got up from the bed and straightened her clothes. Not a garment had been removed, which struck her a waste of the alluring silk bodice she had bought for twenty dollars – five down and another fifteen owed to the haberdasher. Listening for sounds from Carola's room, she caught moans and thumps that suggested the dark man was considerably slower to take his satisfaction than hers had been.

She led the man down the stairs, and bade him adieu. The third customer remained on the piano stool, but his hands were unmoving. ‘Sir?' said Fanny. ‘Thank you for your patience. If you would permit me a moment, I shall be happy to accommodate you.' The wording had been practised in advance. The girls had searched for terms that were plain but not shocking.
Accommodate
had struck them as especially felicitous.

The two men exchanged a glance that was oddly uneasy. The tall one was morose; the young one far from eager. Something was lacking, Fanny realised. Somewhere she had gone wrong. There should be lightness and laughter and a complete lack of shame. Instead there was a furtiveness, a sense of impropriety that she and Carola had been anxious to avoid.

‘I have yet to pay you,' said the fair-haired man awkwardly.

‘Ah! So you have,' she returned, thinking that was one mistake identified. ‘I have a box upstairs for the purpose, which I neglected to show you.' She resolved not to omit that detail again.

The man extracted a note from his pouch and handed it to her. He looked again at his friend. ‘Will I wait for you, John?'

‘No need. I can manage.' John's unease only seemed to increase with each passing moment. Fanny felt a helpless pity for him and a glancing pang for herself. New skills were likely to be needed from the outset, it seemed.

‘I'll take good care of him,' she told John's friend.

‘She's all right,' said the man. ‘You'll have a fine time with her.'

John smiled and raised his chin, causing Fanny to wonder if she had somehow misjudged him. ‘Should I go up, then?' he asked her. His eyes met hers with a direct look that came from a determined man, rather than the squirming inexperienced boy she had assumed.

‘Please do. I'll follow right behind you.' Holding the five-dollar bill tightly, she ran out to the privy, and resoaked the sponge in the jar of vinegar. The viscous fluid adhering to it floated off, and she pushed it back for a second time.

John was quite startlingly different from his friend. He asked her politely to remove her clothes, while he lay on the bed, slowly unbuckling his belt. He handled his organ without self-consciousness, until it was big and rigid. ‘I intend to enjoy this,' he said thickly. ‘Come here.'

She was unsure how to position herself, with him already prone. ‘Straddle me,' he ordered.

He was immediately transformed into a wholly different creature from the mild young man strumming the piano. As she lowered herself, he bucked violently, entering her further than she would have thought possible. He clutched her hips tightly, forcing her to join his rhythm, on and on, with his eyes closed and his lips clenched. She hurt, somewhere beyond the sponge. He was striking something tender, not intended for such treatment. She whimpered and tried to escape. ‘No!' he grated.

It went on for years, or so it seemed. He shouted, and there was a rush of fluid, but he did not stop immediately. But at last it was over. He pushed her aside and rolled away.

Fanny got off the bed and tried to find words of reproach. He had cared nothing for her, simply seeing her as a piece of flesh to fit around his own. He had become a mindless animal, intent only on his own gratification. It was insulting. It had a brutality to it that she had never anticipated.