Desire Lines

by Elizabeth Kingston

  Chapter Twelve

  That night in the small room, Nan sent one blade after another into a head of cabbage. She was careful to throw gently and aim precisely, so that it was not cut to pieces and ruined. The Welshman and his friend had watched her like she had some kind of wondrous magic at her fingertips, but there was no more to it than what they saw with their own eyes: endless practice and repetition.

  She was tempted to pull out the memory of his kiss, to hold it in her hand like a jewel and turn it this way and that so she might see every angle of it. In this house she was surrounded by lust, easy and comfortable, as ordinary as cabbage. It seemed to have nothing to do with her, until a stray sound of passion would drift to her in the night and she remembered his body pressing into hers, the stirring in her belly, the taste of his tongue.

  But that was too much to contemplate now, when there were so many other things crowding her mind. She turned her attention to the target, and threw. She used the short blades from her arm brace, as she always did when she must pick apart a complicated knot inside her head.

  A blade landed to one side of the jutting stem, and she considered her sister’s age. Bea was young enough; she might change. Another blade landed above the stem, and Nan thought of how she could not stand to stay in this house much longer, if men would think her body was for sale. Two more blades landed, two more doubts: she should have started looking for her sister sooner, she should not leave her here.

  She retrieved the blades, running her fingertips over the letter stamped into each. What would her lady advise her to do? What would she say of Bargate Bettie and the business she did? Nan snorted to herself at the thought, and threw again. No matter how wise and shrewd, great ladies did not know starvation, nor what it meant to have no name and no protection in an unforgiving world.

  When the stem had been cut out of the cabbage, she heard Fuss make a faint sound that was not quite a bark – his way of announcing a friend had arrived. She turned and saw the girl Cecilia just outside her door, obviously trying to hide in the shadows. Nan gestured her into the room, then slipped the blades back into the brace. The girl watched the flash of metal.

  “Can you teach me?” she asked.

  Nan began to nod, then stopped. What if she did not stay here? There was only so much that could be learned from a teacher. Most of it was just constant practice, and the girl had little time for that among all her duties. Still, there were things she should be taught – that every girl should be taught. Her mind flew back to the hours spent with Gwenllian, all the learning that came before the knives, lessons in how to escape a man’s hold.

  “Do the men grab for you?” she asked.

  Cecilia only looked at her with round eyes, as though afraid to answer. She stepped closer and whispered, “She says I must start earning my keep.” She had begun to weep, red face and wet cheeks. “I’m to let them grab me.”

  Nan knelt down to look her in the eye. “Who?” she asked. “Who is it says that?”

  “Bettie,” said the child.

  Nan found a mostly clean square of linen and gave it to the girl so she could dry her tears. “She only means to say you must keep the floors clean, and run to the cookshop.” She pushed the hair off Cecilia’s face. “Is true you must earn your keep, and so must we all. But you’re not to serve the men.” Yet, she might have said, but did not like to think of it.

  Cecilia just shook her head, her tears slowed but not stopped, and touched her fingers to the blades on Nan’s arm. They stayed that way for while in silence while Nan considered giving the girl a knife, just to help her feel safe. She must be taught a defense, if the men were grabbing for her.

  Fuss barked suddenly and loud, and she looked up to see one of the women at the door. It was the one with the red hair, Rosamund. They called her Rosy, and she was more girl than woman.

  “Come, Cissy, you cannot hide every night.” She said it kindly from her place at the door, casting a worried glance at Fuss. “He’s waiting now, best to get it over with quick.”

  Nan looked between the two girls, her breath speeding up. The little girl was gripping Nan’s skirt now, refusing to look up. A nervous impatience radiated off the older girl.

  “Who is it that waits,” Nan asked, “and what is it he wants from her?”

  There was an edge in her voice, and the girl named Rosy would not meet her eye as she stammered an answer. It was a jumble of words that seemed to say there was a man who visited the brothel regularly, well-known to be a good sort unless he drank too much. He had arrived not long ago and waited in her room for Cecilia. “Bettie said as I’m to take her to him straightaway when he visits,” she said. “But it’s four times now that he’s come asking for her only to find she’s hiding away.”

  So it was Rosy who had told the little girl she must let the men grab her. It could be she wanted to harm Cecilia out of spite, but Nan saw no obvious malice in her. It was more likely she had simply misunderstood.

  “Nay, you’ve heard it wrong.” Nan let her hand rest on Cecilia’s hair in a calming gesture. Both girls had that nervous look she knew well, afraid of the trouble that might come of neglecting their work. “Ye are both mistaken.”

  They had only to find Bea and let her say it outright, to end the confusion. She had to promise Cecilia she’d let no harm come to her before the girl took her hand and came along. Nan was watchful as they made their way, tensing at every sound, wary in this house full of lustful men. She realized she had no notion where she might find her sister at this time of night, but Rosy led the way to the room opposite the kitchen. The door to the street was there, and Bea leaned against the frame, looking out toward the tavern across the way.

  When she turned and saw them, she frowned in confusion.

  “What’s amiss? Rosy, one or the both of ye should be with him – or did he take to drinking?”

  Rosy cast an anxious glance at Nan before speaking. “Cissy don’t want to go to him.”

  Nan waited for her sister to show more confusion – to ask what she was on about, and wonder why Cecilia was anywhere but her own bed at this hour. Instead, Bea gave a sigh like she was working to control her temper, and rolled her eyes to the heavens as though asking for patience.

  “And so you leave him alone and disturb my sister with what ain’t her business?” She gave Nan an apologetic look before bending over little Cecilia and speaking with a tone of great forbearance. “Now, you cannot dodge forever, ungrateful girl, and so I have said to you for weeks now.”

  She went on like that, asking if Cecilia did not like to eat? And would she like to be on the street? And had not Bea given her time to ease into things, and chosen a pleasant man for the deed so she need not be so afraid?

  It seemed to take a very long time for before Nan’s mind could truly comprehend what was happening. It was impossible. She could not believe she was hearing it. She could not believe it was her sister saying it.

  “Beatrice.” It was their mother’s scolding voice that came out of Nan, startling them both. It hung in the air while she stared at her sister, bewildered. “She’s a child.”

  Bea lifted her brows at that. “Aye, a child that’s been fed every day for months, to say naught of the clothes on her back and the fire that warms her. There’s them that like em young, Nan, though few are decent enough to be let near a young girl.”

  “Decent?” Nan struggled to understand the words, to match them up with her sister’s nonchalance. Her hand tightened on the girl’s shoulder. “She’s but a child. And frightened. There’s naught decent in it.”

  Bea’s face closed up, that sour look that said she thought Nan was boasting. It confounded Nan even further – how was anything she had said boastful?

  “As bad as Aunt Mary, you are, sitting in judgement of me. You know naught of it,” she sneered. She set her hands on her hips and glared a moment before taking a calming breath and returning to a more reasoning tone. She barely contained her impatience as she explained. “Never wo
uld I do as other bawds are known to, Nan. No girl can say as I ever let a man force himself on her to steal her virtue, so that she must turn whore. I can name you ten girls now who come to this life that way, and their stories would fair break your heart. I wouldn’t never be as cruel as that. It’s her choice, and she’ll go freely to him without I force her.”

  When Nan found herself unable to muster her voice to respond, Rosy spoke. She was just at Nan’s elbow, but it seemed almost as though her words came from a great distance, in a tiny voice.

  “That much is true. If another bawd takes Cissy, it’s sure to happen just like that.”

  But Nan could only stare at Bea, who so clearly thought she was being reasonable. Did she truly not see?

  “You force her to choose between whoring and starving,” Nan said, measured and clear, willing her sister to comprehend. “It’s no kind of choice, and it’s all manner of cruel.”

  It was appalling, the way Bea scoffed and rolled her eyes. Like they were fighting over who had eaten all the butter and lied about it. Nan looked down at the girl’s bent head, felt her thin shoulder trembling under her hand.

  “Bea.” She waited for her sister to look her in the eye. “She’s no older than I was, when he sold me off.” Nan could still see the man she had almost been given to, so eager to have her that Aunt Mary had shamed their father for considering it. “Only think of it, if I had been forced so young.”

  “And what if you had? It’s only the way of things,” Bea shrugged.

  “Hear yourself! You cannot mean it.”

  “I do mean it,” she snapped. “You would have done your duty and been no worse for it.”

  The words hit Nan like a stinging slap to the face. It woke her just as a slap would, and she stared at her sister with clear eyes for the first time.

  Bargate Bettie was not just a mask that Bea put on when needed. This was who she truly was. This was what she truly believed. And it seemed to open a great chasm at Nan’s feet, a hole in the earth that threatened to swallow her.

  Nearly all of Nan’s life, over and over again, lecherous men had reached for her. And over and over again, good and kind people – women, always women – had protected her, or tried to. It was one of the few unambiguous truths she had learned: there were the kind of people who would sell a girl to a lecherous man, and there were those who would object to it. Everyone in the world was sorted to one side or the other of that great dividing line.

  She had never thought – not once, in all the time she had searched – that her sister would be on the wrong side of it.

  Love for her little Bea swelled up in her, filling her throat with a tenderness, and at the same moment she felt something crack within her. It was like a frozen branch in winter, splintering in her chest.

  When Bea reached to take the girl’s arm, Nan stepped forward to put herself between them.

  “She won’t be going to him tonight, Bea.”

  She said it calm, and then did not know what else to say. Words were useless. They only ever said what was already obvious, or confused everything more. Her mouth was weary with speaking. All of her was weary, and cold, and broken.

  Behind her, the child that her sister would make a whore huddled close to Nan’s back.

  “I’ll go to him,” came the placating voice of red-headed Rosy. “He’ll be getting impatient.”

  “And you’ve a business to run,” Nan said, her eyes never leaving her sister’s.

  Bea looked as if she would protest, but there were two men stumbling in the door now, happily drunk and asking Bargate Bettie which of the whores had time for them tonight. When she turned to greet them, Nan took Cecilia’s hand and went swiftly back up the stairs and to the little corner room.

  She barred the door and sat on the floor. She stared at the lamp flame until it blinded her, wishing it could blot out the knowledge of her sister’s treachery.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When asked if she had nowhere else to go, little Cecilia said she was orphaned. She came from a village not far from Lincoln, but there had been no one to take her in when her mother died. She had come to town to look for work, and found it here in the brothel. Nan sat silently through the child’s explanations that she knew she should be grateful, and was. Bettie kept a good house and never beat her, and she didn’t want to be disobedient. She was sorry, she said. Over and over again, she said she was sorry that she was too frightened to do her duty, until Nan could bear it no more.

  “Don’t you never be sorry for it.” She was surprised by the sob that almost escaped her. She felt scraped-out and hollow, incapable of so much feeling. “Don’t you never let no one say it’s your duty. Nor will I let it be your fate.”

  She bade the girl lie down and sleep now, and sent Fuss to curl up beside her. She had to look away from them, because the sight almost caused the sob inside her to come loose again. When asked if she wanted Nan to find her a new place, somewhere she might do hard but respectable work, Cecilia had readily agreed.

  Nan stared at the battered door of the room for hours, trying to think of a suitable place that would accept the child. Somewhere safe and protected. But every thought skittered away from her, impossible to hold on to. Her mind was a wasteland. There was only this door and the night. There was only waiting for the morn, when she must open the door to face her sister.

  A footfall made her heart jump. She drew her dagger and looked quickly to Fuss, who was so deep in sleep he did not even twitch when a soft voice called, “Do you wake?”

  She stretched out a staying hand in Fuss’ direction in case he should wake, and opened the door a crack. It was Rosy, her red hair reflecting the light from the candle she held.

  “Will you be staying with Cissy, then?” she whispered with a glance toward the pallet where the girl lay. “Only the tanner – him as has been wanting her – he went off to the tavern. He was cursing all the way and saying he will return for what he was promised.”

  Nan nodded, and wondered if she should say anything more about her plans, what little she had of them. It was so strange, to be looked at in this way by these girls – as though she knew what to do, or had any kind of authority.

  From her memory rose a vision of the woman who had put herself between Nan and that lustful lord so long ago, how she stood so proud and tall and unyielding. And then she thought of her lady, burning with conviction and radiating power as she carried Nan away to safety. They had seemed avenging angels to her, the women who had saved her. Had they felt this way, deep inside? Uncertain and fearful and small?

  “She’s a good girl,” said Rosy, her eyes on the sleeping child. “It’s not a bad place here, truly. But I do remember well how I had dreams of escaping this life once. It’s a hard thing for a girl to accustom herself to.”

  Nan looked at this young woman who looked no more than sixteen years old, who was already so jaded and yet still wistful. “Where did you dream you would go,” she asked, “if ever you escaped?”

  “To the sisters of the Magdalene,” she replied promptly. “I will go someday, if ever I find a way to manage it.”

  A convent. It might be a solution, if there were no other way.

  Nan pulled her inside the room so they could speak in the assurance that none would hear them. She questioned the girl, and learned how as a child Rosy had hoped to live with Benedictine sisters. But having no dowry to give the Church, she fell into working life instead, and then into a whore’s life a year ago. She had never intended to stray so far from decency, she said, but then no one did. There were few options when circumstances were dire.

  All the while she spoke, Nan looked between these two girls and thanked God, over and over again. Good fortune and unexpected kindness and unearned mercy, that’s all that had kept her from a place like this. She was painfully aware that the only real difference between her and her sister was their luck.

  That was what she had told herself these last few days. Now she knew there was something more than circum
stance, something fundamental in their natures. You are so different none would believe you were sisters, Aunt Mary had said. She had tried to warn her, but Nan had not wanted to believe it. She still did not want to believe it.

  But what she wanted did not matter. It did not matter at all.

  “If you would leave this house and this life,” she heard herself say, “I will see you safe away. But it must be now, when morning comes.”

  Rosy sat up straight from her slump against the wall, near to dozing off. “But...I’ve nowhere to go, nor coin to give the sisters to take me in. And there are the customers, Bettie won’t want me going off with no warn–”

  “I will see you safe away from here.” She looked the girl straight in the eye. She spoke it as an oath, a vow between them, certain and steady and true. “I will let no evil befall you.”

  As the words fell from her lips, she was suddenly sure of herself and her course again. If only just for a day, she would take these lives under her protection. The enormity of it pressed on her. This was the debt she owed, one that she would happily repay a thousand times over. But now she understood, as the girl stared at her with hopeful eyes, how heavy was the weight of a life, a soul. Two of them.

  She saw the moment when Rosy believed her, the threshold where doubt dissolved into certainty. The girl nodded and said, “I will take these hours to think on it, then.”

  They turned down the lamp and sat in silence, waiting for the dawn.

  Nan listened to the girls’ fragile breath in the dark, and took her time with her prayers. She asked God to bless and care for those who had protected her when she was vulnerable. She began, as she always did, with her Aunt Mary who had shouted that she’d not let Nan be sold to a filthy lecher. She ended with Gwenllian, her teacher and friend, who had given her the gift of knowing how to protect herself.

  She held the vision of Gwenllian in her mind, the first time she’d ever seen her with blade in hand – so beautiful and fierce – as daylight filtered into the little room. Fuss was looking at her, expectant, and little Cecilia opened her eyes.