Page 30 of A Treacherous Trade
And so, a virgin I remained.
What was worse, everyone seemed to be able to tell.
Dear God, I was making a mistake, wasn’t I? Anyone could take a single look at me andknow, regardless of the mask across my features. I still felt so uncovered. Exposed.
Above all that, would I be spending my evening with a murderer? Did the Ripper know I was here?
As was my recent habit, I searched my vicinity for him, understanding how ridiculous it was to do so. I had no idea what he looked like. The only people who did were in the ground.
Sometimes I hunted for that man in the papers, the one with the shifty eyes and hawkish face, clad in a dark, tailored suit and top hat. A creation of the press, but an evocative one, nevertheless. The only visual representation that we as an empire possessed.
There were so many men who fit exactly that profile to be found here in London. It would be easy to find Jack in the eyes of any random gentleman.
However, the only other soul with me in Orchard Lane was, to my surprise, another woman. Dressed in a long overcoat, much like mine, she floated rather than walked down the narrow alley, almost like a disembodied torso in a cloud of frothy pink skirts.
Approaching me, she affixed a pleasant—if practiced—smile to her rouged lips and even performed an actual curtsy. “Hello there,” she said in a velveteen voice with just the slightest trace of Cockney peeking through the cultured affectation. Her hair was pulled back from her face so tightly that her eyebrows sat unnaturally high on her head. But for that, she was a lovely girl. Perhaps my age, I was pleased to note. “No need to fret, love—just tap on the door there and Butler will help you pick from the stock. It’s a lovely night for a warm cuddle, is it not?”
“Oh, erm…” Caught entirely off guard, I stepped away from the stoop, creating distance from the very idea. Remembering myself, I affected the cultured British accent I’d practiced with Amelia. “No, I’m sorry. I am one of the stock. That is… it’s my first day—er—evening. I’m Viola. Viola Montague.” I held out my hand as if we weren’t meeting for the first time in an alley in front of a brothel.
“Oh!” Eyes as blue and unburdened of intellect as little Teagan’s lit with warm welcome. “I’m Isabelle James. Pleasure to meet you, Viola.” Every elite thread unraveled from her accent as she shook my hand with great vigor for such a tiny creature. “I s’pose no one told you to come in through the entry at the back of the alley. It’s better the customers don’t see you arriving to work. Bea says it shatters the fantasy for them. Strange, innit?”
Threading her arm through mine, she gently tugged me deeper into the lane, the wisps of her skirts creating a lake of pink around us both.
“I mean, where do they think we go when we’re done with our shift? Do they imagine we’re stored in a cupboard until we’re needed again?” she continued, without waiting for any sort of response from me. “Indira says they don’t think of us at all once they’ve spent their load, and she’s right, of course, she’s always right. But I’ve never been like,Oi there, a doctor is unlocking his surgery, now I can’t imagine him healing me with his instruments because I watched him fiddle with his keys.” She giggled at the ridiculousness of it all.
“Well, I—”
“Where were you posted before this?” she asked, as if we might have been governesses or companions rather than whores. “I went to live with me aunt Belinda once me mother died. And she put me to work on the docks in Southwark when I was a girl. I moved to Wapping for three hellish months, until I found Bea. I used to think that these upper-crust houses were the dream, but these days I’d take a dirty dock worker over some of these fancy fucks, and no mistake. Don’t read me wrong!” She clutched at my arm with her other hand, as if she’d read the astonishment my mask was unable to hide. “Some of these young clerks and bookish boys are so sweet, but journalists and businessmen? Genteel lords with bleeding bank accounts and too much pride to work an honest day. They’re the most twisted of them all. Or worse,tourists.”
She sniffed and spat on the bricks at the end of an alley before tapping a staccato rhythm on an ancient brown door, a rhythm I committed to memory immediately.
“Are tourists particularly”—I searched for the word—“depraved?”
She looked at me askance. “No more than usual folks, I suppose. But you know”—she tipped her head toward mine, glancing up the alley as she did so—“foreigners.”
The word escaped her like a curse, and I wondered if she’d consider me such a tainted thing. An Irishwoman from the wrong side of the war.
Turning to me, she petted the fur on my collar and exclaimed, “This is real, innit? And you talk like you’ve an education. From further west, are you?”
I’d prepared an answer for this, though I was so overwhelmed by her vigor that I’d lost it in the chaos. “I—”
The door swung open, saving me from having to reply.
Isabelle shoved me toward whoever stood in the shadows beyond. “This is Viola Montague, a new girl Bea must have hired to replace poor Jane.” She commandeered the introductions, and I was all too happy to allow it, as she propelled me through a short entryway and into a large, disorganized dressing room nigh exploding with color.
“I’m replacing Alys, actually,” I blurted, instantly imagining that I might have just made my first mistake. A new employee might not know the particulars of the tragedies so recently experienced by the women here. “Wh-who is Jane?” I asked, clumsily doing my best to recover.
“She used to work here,” Isabelle said. “She—um. She died… quite recently.”
“How awful,” I said, not needing to portend my distress. “How did it happen?”
No one seemed in a hurry to answer as I scanned the room in front of me.
The dazzling array didn’t merely belong to the silks and petticoats and underthings exploding from every cupboard and trunk, but to the women themselves. It seemed someone from every corner of the Empire’s overreach paused to stare at me.
An astonishingly dark and lovely African woman rested her delicate bare foot on a chair and adjusted her garters under a pale green gown. She had a riot of ribbons threaded through a braid of full hair crowning her regal head. She might have been a princess rather than a prostitute.
Seeming to misread my enchantment as antipathy, she dismissed me with a roll of her eyes before resuming her ablutions.
