Page 15 of Never a Duke
“What’s worse than gin?” To Francine, raised among God-fearing country folk, all the wickedness in the world was epitomized by the drink so freely consumed in London. Gin palaces, in her limited experience, were as grand as any actual palace could possibly be. All gilt and polish, good cheer, and gaiety.
Her granny had described them as the gates of hell, and nobody with any sense argued with Granny Arbuckle. Francine hadn’t ventured beyond the front door of any gin palace, though, and had come to grief all the same.
“The guards will give the flighty ones opium,” Catherine said, tidying her half of the deck. “Puts them right to sleep.”
“And where do they wake up?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“You have your suspicions, Catherine.”
Catherine began placing cards facedown on the table. “The same ones you do. The same ones we all do, but meanwhile, we have enough to eat, a place to sleep, and nobody’s interfering with us.”
Francine started laying out the cards when she wanted to fling them to the floor. If a woman gave in to hysterics, the guards subdued her and she was taken away.
She did not return.
And Catherine had a point. The place they were kept was a combination rooming house and jail, large enough for perhaps a dozen women, and comfortable enough as long as Francine ignored boarded-over windows and locked doors. The only hint she had of the house’s location was the occasional whiff down the chimney of the river stink that pervaded much of London.
Who would have ever thought such a rank, damp smell could be a source of comfort?
“What’s it like?” Francine asked, placing her own cards facedown in no particular order. “To be with a man?” For surely she and Catherine were on their way to a brothel in Manchester or Portsmouth.
Catherine made a face and rearranged some of the cards on the table. “Depends on the man. Not much bother usually, unless you get a lively one or a bloke who can’t finish. We might not be headed for the brothels. They could have long since disposed of us that way, if that was the plan.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Haven’t a clue. Your turn to go first.”
Francine made herself focus on the cards, though fear and worry were tearing her to pieces. “I’ve been here a week already. How much longer can they keep us?”
“I’ve been here better than a month. They took all the other girls away when I’d only been here a few days.”
“You were spared because Hiram likes you.” Hiram, the youngest and largest of the guards, spoke in the soft accents of the north and looked upon Catherine with obvious yearning.
“Hiramwantsme,” Catherine said, very pointedly not glancing in the direction of said Hiram, who lounged at his usual post by the door. “Not the same thing as liking. Will you play this infernal game, or do we pretend to read Mrs. Radcliffe’s drivel?”
Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines would have been swooning by the hour to find themselves in Francine’s shoes.
“How have you not gone mad?” Francine asked, picking up two cards at random—a knave and a seven.
“You know what nearly drove me mad?” Catherine turned over the same knave Francine had, and one other. “That Magdalen house. They about send you to Bedlam with their sermonizing and bad food and endless laundry. We weren’t paid a quarter what a laundress is paid, we weren’t allowed out, we weren’t permitted visitors unless they were from some rubbishing charitable organization. I don’t fancy another turn on the street, but I won’t go back to that place either.”
“You cheated,” Francine said. “You peeked at the cards as you laid them down.”
Catherine smiled, a startlingly warm-hearted grin. “Of course I did. I peeked when I shuffled, too. If you’re going to play, play to win, me da always said.”
“Show me how to peek.” Granny Arbuckle would have disapproved, but Granny Arbuckle was in far-off Somerset, and Francine was unlikely to ever see her again.
She learned from Catherine how to cheat at Patience, and all the while, Hiram watched them from his place by the door.
***
One minute, Ned had been having a difficult, if necessary, discussion about the fates that could befall missing maids in merry olde Londontowne. The next, he was trying to come up with a polite answer to Lady Rosalind’s entirely irrelevant query regarding hisneeds.
Her question flummoxed him. As a boy, he could have answered her: He’d needed his family to be well and for his papa to bring in enough work. He’d needed food. He’d needed a safe place to sleep. As short as the list was, every item on it had been cast to the wind before he’d turned ten.
Ned had been careful that nothing and nobody had become aneedever since.
