Ace, King, Knave (17 page)

‘And which was it?’

Jeanne shrugged. ‘We’ll have to wait till it dies.’

Having made herself ill by constant fuddling in her Hellfire days, she had a disgust of drink and was the only one in the house never to touch it. With those culls who preferred the Sex drunk, she acted drunkenness to perfection. With others, her demure speech and gestures made her a favourite: the most pitiful and disgusting acts, calmly, steadily,
smilingly
performed, could be made to seem almost respectable. There was a certain duke, for example, who made use of her perhaps once a month. To nobody else in the house had he ever named his desires, but in her boudoir, lying outstretched on a leather sheet, he was able to whisper them, whereupon Jeanne promptly hiked up her robe, squatted over his face and pissed.

The duke, murmuring ‘My cruel defiler’ as he pressed gold coins into the fanny of Mlle DuPont, perhaps thought he was paying her to keep his secret. But Jeanne preferred treachery to discretion and her sharp, sober memory was mercilessly clear.

‘How much does he put in?’

‘As much as I can take. He’s pissing it away.’

The girls roared with laughter.

Lately she had been bragging of Ned’s amorous nature – ‘It’s in the blood’ – and as the door closed behind the two of them, some of her sisters smirked knowingly. They waited for Jeanne to reveal his particular letches, but in vain. This was Kitty’s son, after all.

Betsy-Ann, who had cared nothing for any man alive, now began to suffer. In fancy she explored with her fingers, with lips and tongue, the gloss of his neck, the firmness of his belly, the silken skin of his prick. She tasted the sweat and oil of his flesh. She rode astride him and felt him arch up beneath her. At the end of each day she lay in darkness, hand jabbing between her legs, clenching her teeth for Dimber Ned.

*

The New Buildings have a fresh, clean look, a neat and squared-off air. No doubt about it, Romeville is a fine city, and also what she once heard it called by some drunken cully:
the Great Beast.
Under its elegant skin it swells like plague, burying entire fields in stone and brick, gobbling up the dreary little farms where girls claw in the earth with their bare hands. Here are shops with rings and bracelets, silk and china. Let the farms go, who cares for them? Not the girls!

So Marylebone is the coming thing, and Marylebone’s New Buildings are rising in the world, rising on a tide of lust, for riches, for pleasure. Builders speculate and their houses are taken by women setting up in trade. Gold flows, molten, from street to street. Lina knows of a woman here who lives alone, keeps her own carriage and answers to no one. That’s the style in the New Buildings: not such a good place for anyone down on her luck, but Betsy-Ann sees them, as she sees them everywhere. Some signal their trade by the usual twitching up of the gown while others, bolder or more desperate, move towards any man who hesitates.

She watches a kiddey trying to make his choice. He ignores a mannish girl who pulls him by the arm and instead sidles up to a well-dressed stroller, but it seems she is beyond his purse, for after a few words she continues on her way. At last he strikes the bargain with a plump, lecherous-looking blonde and the pair of them disappear down some steps.

Along the same pavements trudge poor but respectable morts, shamming blind and deaf. Betsy-Ann watches these, too, and fears for them. Not a few of Kitty’s nuns started out like Betsy-Ann herself: innocent, until life knocked them into the mud and held them there.

A girl comes to ask if she has hot pastries to sell and goes away with a bottle of lightning. Another does the same. A third arrives, buys half a biscuit and lingers.

‘How’s trade today, my darling?’ asks Betsy-Ann.

The girl says there’s none to be had. Englishmen have gone limp in the prick. Betsy-Ann studies this girl: bloated face, pink, streaming eyes, no wonder the culls keep off. She says, ‘Bad times for honest whores.’

‘Isn’t that God’s truth?’ says the girl. ‘Every rag off my back is at Uncle’s.’

‘Then I hope you got plenty for it, sweetheart.’

The girl snorts. ‘Sixpence for a shawl of French lace.’

‘They’re all the same, God rot them. But it only takes one honest friend to set a woman up, eh? Who knows, perhaps you’ll be lucky today.’

‘Not I. Been too long on the town.’ The whore gives a rueful smile. ‘Look at me,’ she spreads her arms like a bird about to take wing, ‘I cost five guineas a night, once.’

You must’ve been a fine piece in those days, thinks Betsy-Ann. On impulse she pulls out a bottle and presses it into the whore’s hand. ‘Where’s your Uncle, sweetheart? It so happens an Uncle is what I’m looking for.’

‘Through the gardens along there, by the horse trough,’ says the girl, staring at the unexpected gift.

The lane is partly swallowed up by the New Buildings, its walls already crumbling to brick dust. She’s at the right place: here are the brass balls, dusty and dented where someone has tried to knock them down.

Nobody loves Uncle.

The doorbell clangs as she enters and Betsy-Ann shivers: it’s colder inside the shop than outside. Before her is a counter and fixed to the counter-top a metal grille that stretches all the way to the ceiling. Through it she can see shelves holding dusty boxes, velvet bags and heaps of papers. In the far corner, away from these, crouches an unlit stove.

The Uncle comes scurrying from his lair in the back room like a spider sensing a quiver in its web. His head is bound up in a turban, his face shrivelled, his jaws fallen in. If this is the man who gave sixpence for French lace, he should look fatter on his profits. Without a word of greeting, he mounts a stool behind the counter and unlatches a small window in the grille.

‘Pledge or redeem?’

‘To pledge, Sir, if you please.’ She slips a wedding ring off her finger, passes it over and watches him examine it. His hand, seen through the grille, appears divided off into tiny squares of veined, purplish skin.

‘Half a crown.’

‘I can’t take that, Sir. My man would kill me.’

He glances up at her with the weariness of one who has heard it all. ‘Then go elsewhere.’

‘Say two-and-ninepence, Sir, and it’s yours.’

‘Half a crown.’

‘For a gold ring, Sir! It’ll sell for ―’

‘I’ve told you ―’

‘I can’t redeem it – it’ll be yours to keep.’

The Uncle weighs the ring on a pair of scales. Betsy-Ann waits in silence. At last he slides it to one side before pushing some coins and a ticket towards her.

‘God bless you, Sir! And I’ve something else.’

He has to get the best of a cough before he can say, ‘Well? Pass it over.’

‘It isn’t here, Sir, not now. But my mother. She’s poorly, Sir.’ The man stares, unsmiling. ‘I’ll have things of hers, only the property won’t come all at once, what with her will and her lodgings, see? I’ll be fetching it over weeks, could be months.’

She can tell the exact moment he takes her meaning: his eyelids droop as if to mask the greed beneath.

‘Bring whatever you have,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you a price.’

As she begins the walk home Betsy-Ann mulls over the Marylebone Uncle. There was a moment, there in the shop, when she thought he was about to refuse her dying mother’s property, but he’s fly to the game, that much was plain. Still, a queer cove and no mistake, to sit and shiver with his face bound up when he could buy himself a bucketful of coals.

His price wasn’t so bad, considering. Her usual man might have raised her three shillings, but he’s too close to home: she’s not having her bits and pieces in his window for Sam to see, not likely! With the new Uncle, she’s not fouling her own nest. Fouling: that’s a laugh, when you think about it. The first thing she does with the bed, when Sam goes off for a few days, is strip the sheets – a mort that’s slept under sacking, on muddy ground, and still she can’t bear them.

But now – she steps out faster – she’s made her first move, now! Shifted some stock, and more to come, and Sam doesn’t know, and won’t know. She could skip with glee. The day will come, she’s making it come. O the fine day that’ll be, singing
Samuel Shiner, fare thee well.

And what a to-do, to get away from him! When Sam got chivvied, his sharping brethren parted company with him as smoothly as Sam’s finger parted from his hand. No hard words, no reproaches, that’s how it is with men. Who’d be a woman? A woman’s tied up, every which way. She’s heard some Newgate jailers turn pimp: for a consideration, a visitor can enjoy any female in their wards. From time to time Betsy-Ann’s thoughts return to those poor bitches. She sees them lying in darkness, listening for the sound of the key.

She strolls more slowly now, her toes rubbed raw. As a girl she tramped everywhere barefoot, with the result that her feet spread. Shoes pinch her cruelly but in Romeville you’re nobody without them: even the most wretched drabs try to show a neat shoe and stocking. At least shoes keep you dry. She remembers Mam, in a distracted moment, stepping backwards off the cart into a country road where cattle had gone by, churning the earth. She cursed and lifted her gown to reveal feet and ankles shod in shining, stinking boots of mud.

She’s still thinking about Mam when she’s startled by a warning cry from behind. She steps away as the horses rattle past and sees the carriage with its whip-happy driver come to a stop some yards ahead, outside a house with fashionable iron railings. A black boy jumps down and runs to the front door while the driver, dismounting, helps out a feeble-looking blonde piece who stands gazing about as if unsure whether she’s in England. The blonde taps her foot, waiting for someone still fussing in the carriage. At last her cull joins her on the pavement. She has just laid her fingers on his arm when the front door of the house opens. The cull turns for an instant in Betsy-Ann’s direction before speaking to someone inside.

Betsy-Ann smothers a cry.

He’s unhappy. That much can be seen at once: something beaten and angry in the way he holds himself. Even as she notices this, he straightens up and lifts his head. In that movement she sees something of the Corinthian that was.

How can she pass the pair of them? She can neither walk towards him nor move away. She stares fascinated at her rival, often imagined, now right there on the pavement. And how does
she
earn her bread, Betsy-Ann marvels, when many a better one goes hungry?

But now the mort seems to wake up. She looks about her, glancing at Betsy-Ann much as she might observe a scrap of rag blown about the road.

Is it her stance that warns Betsy-Ann – the set of her narrow shoulders? Or is it something else: her air of dull satisfaction, the air of one who expects to be served? Betsy-Ann gasps. This is no Cyprian. She’s his autem mort. Ned, laughing Ned, spliced! And to this creature, pale and gluey as a gob of phlegm . . . that blank little phiz of hers, as if the midwife tried to scrub her out at birth. Yet there she stands, her fingers on his arm.

It seems that Betsy-Ann is at last walking forwards. Either that, or the street is flowing past her like a river, bringing in its wake carriage, driver, horse, paving slabs and the elegant couple about to enter the house.

When she is almost upon them he turns round again. This time there’s no mistaking: he sees her. He says nothing but calmly hands his autem mort, if that’s what she is, up the steps. The blonde’s eyes, pale, discreet, flicker in Betsy-Ann’s direction for a second before she passes into the house and is visible only as the glimmer of a gown in the darkness of the interior. Betsy-Ann allows herself to stop and peer inside, frantic to see more, but the black returns with a maidservant. The two of them bustle to the carriage where the maid begins to load the boy with parcels.

Betsy-Ann hurries away, her belly pitching about like a boat on the high seas. Married, Ned! She must be very rich. Catch him tying himself down otherwise: the Corinthian, that could have any ―

Her face puckers as the truth hits her: not anybody. Any
whore
.

She’s cold now. She wishes she’d never seen him, standing there with that bitch clutching his sleeve. What does
she
know about him, about ―

Someone’s running behind her, alongside her. She turns her head away, but he falls into step.

‘Betsy! Don’t pretend you don’t know me.’

‘Ha!’ says Betsy-Ann, facing him. ‘Who’s ashamed to know who?’

‘You know I couldn’t,’ he says softly, taking her hand and smuggling a coin into it. Without looking at the coin, Betsy-Ann holds out her arm, opens her fingers and lets it drop. A guinea rolls across the pavement.

‘What a sulky child it is!’ exclaims Ned.

She hadn’t bargained on a guinea. It’s a lot to throw away. She wishes she could run back and take it up, but pride forbids. It seems Ned is as proud as she, so on they go, leaving the money to be found by someone else.

‘The Prodigy’s looking well.’ He again tries to take her by the hand.

Aye! Better than that piece of yours, thinks Betsy-Ann, flinging away from him. She says, ‘Let us be thankful for small mercies.’

‘Very high, though, ain’t she? Too grand to take a present from an old friend.’

‘I’ve no call for presents from,’ she allows the pause to develop, ‘strangers. Not even’ – another pause – ‘gentry.’

He whistles. ‘Lord! I see there’s money in the resurrection trade.’

‘In the buttock business, too, they say.’ She walks faster. ‘
I
know a bitch, got fat as a Dutchman on it.’

‘How’s Sam? Out all hours of the night, eh Betsy?’

His legs are too long, her feet too hot and painful. Betsy-Ann gives up the walking contest and stands facing him. Though she is tall for a woman, the Corinthian is taller. She can still refuse to look up, however, staring instead at one of his buttonholes.

‘You can go back,’ she says. ‘I won’t come this way again.’

‘But sweet girl, why ever shouldn’t you?’

Because if you thought I intended to pay a call, you’d shite yourself.

She says, ‘Because I don’t choose.’