Chapter 1 #2
She raised one hand to take the cloth, but it was shaking so out of control that she lowered it to the bed again and turned her head to one side, closing her eyes. He took her hand in his, turned it palm-up, and placed the cloth in it.
“You may dress when you have finished,” he said, and he turned his back on her in order to dress himself.
The quiet rustlings behind him told him that she had brought herself under control and was doing as she had been told.
And yet when he turned at last, it was to find her trying to do up the three buttons of her cloak with hands that were trembling too badly to accomplish the task.
He took the few steps toward her, brushed her hands aside, and did the buttons up for her.
The sheet at the edge of the bed, he could see over her shoulder, was liberally stained with blood. He had ripped her quite effectively.
“When did you last eat?” he asked her.
She straightened her cloak, looking down at it.
“When I ask a question, I expect an answer,” he said curtly.
“Two days ago,” she said.
“And what did you eat then?”
“Some bread.”
“Was it only today you decided to turn to the profession of whore?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Yesterday. But no one wanted me.”
“I am not surprised,” he said. “You have no idea how to sell yourself.”
He took up his hat, unbolted the door, and left the room.
She followed him. He paused at the foot of the stairs and looked about the noisy taproom.
There was an empty table in a far corner.
He turned, took the girl by the elbow, and crossed the room toward it.
Any customer who was in his path took one look at him, at his fashionable clothes and harsh, scarred face, and instantly moved to one side.
He seated the girl with her back to the room and took the seat opposite her. He instructed the barmaid, who had followed them to the table and was bobbing curtsies to him, to bring a plate of food and two tankards of ale.
“I am not hungry,” the girl said.
“You will eat,” he said.
She did not speak again. The barmaid brought a plate on which were a large and steaming meat pie and two thick slices of bread and butter, and he gestured to her to set it before the prostitute.
The gentleman watched the girl eat. It was very obvious that she was ravenous, though she made an effort to eat slowly.
She looked about her when her fingers, which still trembled, were covered with crumbs of meat and pastry, but of course it was a common inn and there were no napkins.
He handed her a linen handkerchief from his pocket, and she took it after a moment’s hesitation and wiped her fingers.
“Thank you,” she said.
“What is your name?” he asked.
She finished chewing the bread she had in her mouth. “Fleur,” she said eventually.
“Just Fleur?” He was drumming his fingers slowly on the top of the table. He held his tankard of ale in his other hand.
“Just Fleur,” she said quietly.
He watched her silently until she had eaten the last crumb on her plate.
“You want more?” he asked her.
“No.” She looked up at him hastily. “No, thank you.”
“You don’t want to finish your ale?”
“No, thank you,” she said.
He paid the bill and they left the inn together.
“You said you had no place in which to ply your trade,” he said. “Do you have no home?”
“Yes,” she said. “I have a room.”
“I will escort you there,” he said.
“No.” She hung back in the doorway of the Bull and Horn.
“How far away do you live?” he asked.
“Not far,” she said. “About a mile.”
“I will take you three-quarters of a mile, then,” he said. “You are an innocent. You do not know what can happen to a woman alone on the streets.”
She gave a harsh little laugh. And she hurried along the street, her head down.
He walked beside her, experiencing for the first time in his life, though only at second hand, all the despair of poverty, knowing that his own problems, his own reasons for unhappiness, were laughable in comparison with those of this girl, London’s newest whore.
“Please do not come any farther,” she said at last, stopping at a corner outside a dingy shop that advertised itself as an employment agency.
“You cannot find employment?” he asked her.
“No,” she said.
“You have tried?”
She looked up at him with that little laugh again. “Do you think that this is anything but a very last resort?” she said. “It is hard to persuade oneself to starve to death when there is one last thing to sell.”
She turned and would have hurried away. His voice stopped her.
“Have you not forgotten something?” he asked.
She looked back at him.
“I have not paid you,” he said.
“You bought me a meal,” she said.
“A meat pie, two slices of bread, and half a tankard of ale in exchange for your virginity,” he said. “Was it a fair bargain?”
She said nothing.
“A word of advice,” he said, taking her hand in his and closing her fingers about some coins.
“Don’t undersell yourself. The price you asked would invite only contempt and rough treatment.
The treatment I gave you, by the way, was not rough.
Your price should be triple what you asked.
The higher your price, the more respect you will command. ”
She looked down at her closed hand, turned, and walked away without another word.
The gentleman stood and looked broodingly after her before turning and striding toward more fashionable and more familiar streets.
ISABELLA FLEUR brADSHAW DID NOT leave her room the next day.
Indeed, she did not even leave her bed for much of it, but lay staring listlessly up at the water-stained ceiling or at the dull brown walls from which age-old paint gave evidence of its existence only in a few dirty flakes.
She wore only her chemise. Her silk dress, her only dress, was draped carefully over the broken back of the lone chair in the room.
For the first time in her life that day she touched despair and did not have either the will or the energy to pull herself free of it. She had been close before during the past month, but by sheer willpower she had clung to hope, to a dogged determination to survive.
Sally, the seamstress’s assistant who lived upstairs, knocked on her door at midday, as she often did. But Fleur did not answer. The girl would want to talk, and she would want to share her own meager meal. Fleur did not want either the company or the kind charity.
She had survived. She would survive—perhaps. But she had discovered that survival after all was not necessarily a triumphant thing, but could take one into the frightening depths of despair.
She bled intermittently through the day. She was so sore that sometimes she squirmed against the sharp pain of her torn virginity.
And that was not the end. It was merely the beginning.
Her first customer had paid her handsomely—three times the sum she had asked for in addition to the meal.
The money would pay her overdue rent and keep her in food for a few days besides.
But then she would have to go out again to pursue her new profession.
She was a whore. She shut out the sight of the ceiling, closing her eyes wearily. No longer was she contemplating becoming one with horror and the fading hope that she might somehow avoid the inevitable, believing in her heart of hearts that something would come along to save her.
She was a whore. She had agreed to be hired by a gentleman, walked to an inn with him, removed all her clothes at his command while he watched, lain naked on the bed at his bidding, watched him strip away all his clothes, and then allowed him to open her up and take his masculine pleasure in the most secret depths of her body.
She had given her body for his use and taken his money in payment.
She quite ruthlessly enumerated in her mind all the stages by which she had entered the profession that would be hers until she was too old and ugly and diseased to attract even the meanest customer. Or until something even worse happened.
She was a member of a profession the very thought of which had always horrified and disgusted her.
She was a whore. A prostitute. A streetwalker.
She swallowed repeatedly and determinedly until the urge to vomit receded.
Soon, within a week, she would be standing outside the theater again, hoping to attract another customer, dreading success.
He had not been rough with her, the dark and frightening gentleman who had been her first customer had told her the night before.
Heaven help her if any man ever did subject her to rough treatment.
She felt hot and clammy with terror again at the memory of his hands—long-fingered, well-manicured, beautiful hands—pushing her thighs apart, of his knees pinning them wide, of his thumbs touching her there, spreading her, and of the sight and feel of that other part of him huge and hard against the tender inner flesh and then ripping swiftly and deeply into her so that she had thought she would die of the shock and the pain—and had hoped she would.
The mental images came, unbidden and unwelcome: the terrible scarred and discolored and puckered wounds on his side and leg; the terrifyingly powerful muscles of his chest and shoulders and arms, the triangle of dark hair across the expanse of his chest and tapering to below his navel; his angular hawkish face with the direct and fierce dark eyes, the prominent nose, and the disfiguring scar; his hands, touching her, cupping her buttocks, holding her steady so that she could not shrink from the full force and depth of his thrusts.
She did not have either the energy or the will to shake off the memories.
And there was no point anyway in trying to relegate them to memory.
It was to be her profession to allow such men the use of her body in exchange for the means of survival.
She must deliberately remember, accustom herself to the memories, learn to accept the same and perhaps worse—if there could be worse—from other men.