The Women of Nell Gwynne's (3 page)

THREE:

In which she Gets On with Her Life

T
HE WORK SEEMED by no means as dreadful as Lady Beatrice had heard tell. She realized, however, that her point of view was somewhat unusual. The act was never pleasurable for her but it was at least not painful, as it had been in the Khyber Pass. She took care to carry plenty of lambskin sheaths in her reticule. She worked her body like a draft horse. It obeyed her patiently and earned her decent meals and a clean place in which to sleep, and books. Lady Beatrice found that she still enjoyed books.

She felt nothing, neither for nor against, regarding the men who lay with her.

Lady Beatrice learned quickly where the best locations were for plying one's trade, if one didn't wish to be brutalized by drunken laborers: outside theaters, outside the better restaurants and wine bars. She discovered that her looks and her voice gave her an advantage over the other working women, who were for the most part desperate country girls or Cockneys. She watched them straggle through their nights, growing steadily drunker and more hoarse, sporting upper-arm bruises ever more purple.

They regarded her with disbelief and anger, especially when an old cove with a diamond stickpin could walk their importuning gauntlet unmoved, shaking off their hands, deaf to their filthiest enticements, but stop in his tracks when Lady Beatrice stepped out in front of him. "Oi! Milady's stole another one!" someone would cry. She liked the name.

One night three whores lay for her with clubs in an alley off the Strand. She pulled a knife—for she carried one— and held them at bay, and told them what she'd done to the Ghilzai tribesmen. They backed away, and fled. They spread the word that Milady was barking mad.

Lady Beatrice wasn't at all mad. It was true that the snows of the Khyber Pass seemed to have settled around her heart and left it incapable of much emotion, but her mind was sharp and clear as ice. It was difficult even to feel contempt for her fellow whores, though she saw plainly enough that many were ignorant, that they drank too much, that they habitually fell in love with men who beat them, that they wallowed in self-pity and festering resentments.

Lady Beatrice never drank. She lived thriftily. She opened a bank account and saved the money she made, reserving out enough to remain well-dressed and buy a novel now and again. She calculated how much she would need to save in order to retire and live quietly, and she worked toward that goal. She kept a resolute barrier between her body and her mind, only nominally resident in the one, only truly living in the other.

One evening she was strolling the pavement outside the British Museum (an excellent place to do business, judging from all the wealthy clientele she picked up there) when a previous customer recognized her and engaged her services for a gentlemen's party on the following night. Lady Beatrice dressed in her best evening scarlets for the occasion, and paid for a cab.

She recognized some of her better-dressed rivals at the party, at which some sporting victory was being celebrated, and they nodded to one another graciously. One by one, each portly financier or baronet paired off with a courtesan, and Lady Beatrice was just thinking that she could do with more of this sort of engagement when she heard her name called, in a low voice.

She turned and beheld an old friend of her father's, whom she had once charmed with an hour's sprightly conversation. Lady Beatrice stepped close to him, quickly.

"That is not the name I use now," she said.

"But—my dear child—how could you come to this?"

"Do you truly wish to hear the answer?"

He cast a furtive look around and, taking her by the wrist, led her into an antechamber and shut the door after them, to general laughter from those not too preoccupied to notice.

Lady Beatrice told him her story, in a matter-of-fact way, seated on a divan as he paced and smoked. When she had finished he sank into a chair opposite, shaking his head.

"You deserved better in life, my dear."

"No one deserves good or evil fortune," said Lady Beatrice. "Things simply happen, and one survives them the best one can."

"God! That's true; your father used to say that. He never flinched at unpleasantness. You are very like him, in that sense. He always said you were as true as steel."

Lady Beatrice heard the phrase with a sense of wonder, remembering that long-ago life. It seemed to her, now, as though it had happened to some other girl.

The old friend was regarding her with a strange mixture of compassion and a certain calculation. "For your father's sake, and for your own, I should like to assist you. May I know where you live?"

Lady Beatrice gave him her address readily enough. "Though I do not advise you to visit," she said. "And if you have any gallant ideas about rescuing me, think again. No lady in London would receive me, after what I endured, and you know that as well as I do."

"I know, my dear." He stood and bowed to her. "But women true as steel are found very rarely, after all. It would be shameful to waste your excellent qualities."

"How kind," said Lady Beatrice.

S
HE EXPECTED NOTHING from the encounter, and so Lady Beatrice was rather surprised when someone knocked at the door of her lodging three days thereafter.

She was rather more surprised when, upon opening the door, she beheld a blind woman, who asked for her by her name.

"I am she," admitted Lady Beatrice.

"May I come in for a moment, miss, and have a few words with you?"

"As many as you wish," said Lady Beatrice. Swinging her cane before her, the blind woman entered the room. Seemingly quite by chance she encountered a chair and lowered herself into it. Despite her infirmity, she was not a beggar; indeed, she was well-dressed and well-groomed, resembling, if not a lady, certainly someone's respectable mother. Her accents indicated that she had come from the lower classes, but she spoke quietly, with precise diction. She drew off her gloves and bonnet, and held them in her lap, with her cane crooked over one arm.

"Thank you. I'll introduce myself, if I may: Mrs. Elizabeth Corvey. We have a friend in common." She uttered the name of the gentleman who had known Lady Beatrice in her former life.

"Ah," said Lady Beatrice. "And I expect you administer some sort of charity for fallen women?"

Mrs. Corvey chuckled. "I wouldn't say that, miss, no." She turned her goggled face toward Lady Beatrice. The smoked goggles were very black, and quite prominent. "None of the ladies in my establishment require charity. They're quite able to get on in the world. As you seem to be. Your friend told me the sort of things you've seen and done. What's done can't be undone, more's the pity, but there it is.

"That being the case, may I ask you whether you'd consider putting your charms to better use than streetwalking?"

"Do you keep a house of prostitution, madam?"

"I do and I don't," said Mrs. Corvey. "If it was a house of prostitution, you may be sure it would be of the very best sort, with girls as beautiful and clever as you, and some of them as well bred. I am not, myself; I was born in the workhouse.

"When I was five years old they sold me to a pin factory. Little hands are needed for the making of pins, you see, and little keen eyes. Little girls are preferred for the work; so much more painstaking than little boys, you know. We worked at a long table, cutting up the lengths of wire and filing the points, and hammering the heads flat. We worked by candlelight when it grew dark, and the shop-mistress read to us from the Bible as we worked. I was blind by the age of twelve, but I knew my Scripture, I can tell you.

"And then, of course, there was only one work I was fit for, wasn't there? So I was sold off into a sort of specialty house.

"You meet all kinds of odd ducks in a place like that. Sick fellows, and ugly fellows, and shy fellows. I was got with child twice, and poxed too. I do hope I'm not shocking you, am I? Both of us being women of the world, you see. I lost track of the years, but I think I was seventeen when I got out of there. Should you like to know how I got out?"

"Yes, madam, I should."

"There was this fellow came to see me. He paid specially to have me to himself a whole evening and I thought,
oh, Lord, no,
because you get so weary of it, and the gentlemen don't generally like it if you seem as though you're not paying proper attention, do they? But all this fellow wanted to do was talk.

"He asked me all sorts of questions about myself—how old I was, where had I come from, did I have any family, how did I come to be blind. He told me he belonged to a club of scientific gentlemen. He said they thought they might have a way to cure blindness. If I was willing to let this Gentlemen's Speculative Society try it out on me, he'd buy me out of the house I was in and see that I was physicked for the pox as well, and found an honest living.

"He did warn me I'd lose my eyes. I said I didn't care— they weren't any use anyhow, were they? And he said I might find myself disfigured, and I said I didn't mind that—what had my looks ever gotten me?

"To be brief, I went with him and had it done. And I did lose my eyes, and I was disfigured, but I haven't regretted it a day since."

"You don't appear to be disfigured," said Lady Beatrice. "And clearly they were unable to cure your blindness."

Mrs. Corvey smiled. "Oh, no? The clock says half-past-twelve, and you're wearing such a lovely scarlet dressing-gown, miss, and you have such striking gray eyes—quite unlike mine. You're made of stern stuff, I know, so you won't scream now." Having said that, she slid her goggles up to reveal her eyes.

Lady Beatrice, who had been standing upright, took a step backward and clutched the edge of the table behind her.

"Dear me, you have gone quite pale," said Mrs. Corvey in amusement. "Sets off that scarlet mouth of yours a treat. House of Rimmel Red No. 3, isn't it? Not so pink as their No. 4. And, let me see, why, what a lot of books you have!
Sartor Resartus, Catherine, Falkner
—that's her last one, isn't it?— and, what's that on your bedside table?" The brass optics embedded in Mrs. Corvey's face actually protruded forward, with a faint whirring noise, and swiveled in the direction of Lady Beatrice's bed. "
Nicholas Nickleby
. Yes, I enjoyed that one, myself."

"I do hope I have proven my point now, miss."

"What a horror," said Lady Beatrice faintly.

"Oh, I shouldn't say that at all, miss! My condition is so much improved from my former state that I would go down on my knees and thank God morning and night, if I thought He ever took notice of the likes of me. I have my sight back, after all. I have my health—for I may say the Gentlemen's Speculative Society has an excellent remedy for the pox— and agreeable employment. I am here to offer you the same work."

"Would I pay for it with my eyes?" Lady Beatrice inquired.

"Oh, dear me, no. It would be a crime to spoil
your
looks, especially when they might be so useful. You were a soldier's daughter, as I understand it, miss. What would you think of turning your dishonor into a weapon, in a just cause?

"The Society's very old, you see. In the old days they had to work secretly, or folk would have burnt them for witchcraft, with all the astonishing things they invented. The secrecy was still useful even when times became more enlightened. There are all manner of devices that make our lives less wretched, that first came from the Society. They work to make the world better still.

"Now, it helps them in their work, miss, to have some sway with ministers and members of Parliament. And who better controls a man than a pretty girl, eh? A girl with sufficient charm can unlock a man's tongue and find out all sorts of things the Society needs to know. A girl with sufficient charm can persuade a man to do all sorts of things he'd never dream of doing, if he thought anyone else could see.

"And I can't see, of course, or so he thinks, for I never let my secret slip. When a man is a cabinet minister it reassures him to believe that the lady proprietress of his favorite brothel couldn't identify his face in a court of law. All the easier for us to trap him later. All the easier to persuade him to sign a law into being or vote a certain way, which benefits the Society.

"You and I both know how little it takes to ruin a girl, when a man can make the same mistakes and the world smiles indulgently at him. Wouldn't you like to make the world more just?

"You and I both know how little our bodies matter, for all the fuss men make over them. Wouldn't you like to put yours to good use? There are other girls like you—clever girls, well-bred girls. They did one unwise thing, or perhaps, like you, they were unlucky, and the world sent them down to the pavement. But they found they needn't stay there.

"You needn't stay there either, miss. We can offer you a clean, quiet room of your own, with a view of St. James's Park—I never tire of looking at it, myself—and a quiet life, except when working. We need never fear being beaten, or taking ill. We are paid very well. Shall you join us, miss?"

Lady Beatrice considered it.