Page 7 of A Treacherous Trade
ChapterThree
It had long been my opinion that places selling sex or alcohol seemed deeply melancholy in the light of day. They emanated a sort of desperation and loneliness I’d often ascribed to their customers.
I was intrigued to find out such was not the case with The Orchard, Amelia’s former place of nocturnal employment.
She had shocked me by instructing our hackney to turn onto Fleet Street, the city’s premier business thoroughfare, chiefly associated with publishing houses, the printing trade, and newspapers with mind-boggling circulations. Mounted signboards protruded in competition with one another, advertising the enterprises above stately doors.
Such frantic industry called for other supportive companies to be interspersed between the buildings and flourish even in the alleys and passageways off Fleet Street proper.
Indeed, we passed cafés, pubs, inns, solicitors, and clerks before we disembarked our hackney cab on the corner of Fleet Street and a narrow alley called Orchard Lane.
The office on the corner belonged to Beckett, Gallway & Sons, Full-Service Clerical. The façade was nothing but a wall of large leaded windows, framing rows of men in dark suits pecking away at typewriters.
I rudely gawked at them as we rounded the corner, appreciating the percussive sounds of the machinery. What caught my eye, though, was a lone woman sitting in the very back of the sea of men. But for her frizzy hair pulled into a tight knot, she was almost indiscernible from the rest, unless one looked beneath the uncomfortable-looking desks to see a skirt around her legs rather than trousers.
She had a dark jacket, high-necked white blouse, and commensurate black vest and tie. Her fingers, gloved against the winter chill, danced over the keys as swiftly as her compatriots’. Perhaps more so. Her pile of work, I noted, was taller than the rest.
A female clerk,I marveled.
I suddenly wanted to know everything about her. Did she go to school, or was she raised in the business? What battles had she fought for that seat behind the fifth row of Beckett, Gallway & Sons, Full-Service Clerical? Was she paid as much as her masculine counterparts?
“Here we are,” Amelia said loudly from down the narrow passageway between the clerk’s and a pub named the Nock and Quiver. She impatiently waited for me to cease dawdling and join her at an inconspicuous, but tastefully appointed door, above which a single sign advertised THE ORCHARD in elegant, decidedly feminine script.
One might miss it if they weren’t looking, as soft greens and golds were all but lost on a street where every sign was as large and loud as a crier peddling his wares in Piccadilly.
Such a business needn’t compete for attention, I supposed. The demand was—and ever would be—great. Meanwhile, the customers would pay extra tonotadvertise their patronage.
As nondescript as The Orchard might be, if one knew what trade was plied behind the door, they’d recognize it as an obvious reference to “getting Jack in The Orchard,” a common slang in London for sexual intercourse.
Clever.
Better still to attach such a business to one more socially acceptable, like a pub or an inn.
It reminded me of my sometimes-employer, colloquially known as the Hammer, who owned an establishment little more than a stone’s throw to the west, where Fleet Street morphed into the Strand, a more fashionable and upscale part of town. His gaming hell and brothel was famously christened The Velvet Glove, and was situated in a part of town where haberdasheries, tailors, and seamstresses indulged the wealthiest of customers.
The Velvet Glove, as one might imagine, was a rather tawdry synonym for the very female flesh for sale at said establishment. Somehow, the Hammer got away with being so cheeky. Perhaps because he catered to half of Parliament and most of the Queen’s High Court.
Amelia knocked on The Orchard’s door, the cadence a strange staccato of two sharp raps, and a long pause between three more.
The door swung inward to a long and purposely gloomy hallway, papered with a dull and faded arabesque design that peeled at the corners and above the wainscoting.
Amelia followed a large, stone-faced, pale man down the hall in silence, and I trailed them both with no small amount of apprehension.
“Why do you suppose there isn’t a police guard at the door if a murder victim is waiting to be taken away?” I whispered.
“Because the police think we are a waste of their resources,” Amelia answered, apparently not compelled, as I was, by the eerie, empty silence of the place to keep her voice low.
We,she’d said.
I understood she hadn’t worked in this capacity in a very long time… Did she still identify herself as a prostitute? Or was it perhaps that anyone who might have known what she did for a living would always define her thus?
A gasp escaped me as we stepped out of the hallway and into a room that might rival any great hall or coveted solarium in a mansion in Mayfair or Belgravia. Large, welcoming furniture covered in gemstone velvets and silks were strewn about with lively cushions. Lamps were placed high and turned low so their flickering would not only cast a flattering gold, but create concealing shadows as well. The room itself was four stories tall, and a chandelier that might have once belonged in Buckingham Palace shimmered so high above, I had to tilt my head all the way back like a gap-mouthed tourist to properly appreciate it.
Flights of spiraled staircases attached balconies to each of the four stories, from which the tenants of the chambers could step out and observe the goings-on of the great room. The walls all boasted either three or four doors, depending on the direction.
If one accounted for hallways or back stairs, I assumed, women gave the business in approximately sixteen rooms.
I hadn’t time to do the impressive maths of possible income potential as we were led through the open door, down a short passage, and past a modest flight of back stairs. The butler let us into a small sitting room, done in pastels that felt rather muted and uninteresting after the vivid jewel tones of the gathering room.
