The Secret Pearl

by Mary Balogh

  “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 s
he 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.

  It was a fair exchange, was it not? For it was not just the choice between survival and death that she must make, but the choice between survival and a slow and painful death through starvation. Never, even during this day of blackest despair, had she considered suicide as an escape from her predicament.

  It was no choice, then, that she had to make. She had to feed herself in the only way that was left to her. There was no other employment to be had. She had no experience and no references. Miss Fleming at the employment agency had told her that on numerous occasions. One did not need either in order to become a whore, only a reasonably young and well-formed woman’s body. And a strong stomach.

  She was a whore. She had sold her body once and would continue to do so over and over again until there were no more buyers. She must accustom herself to both the thought and the deed.

  And indeed she must count herself happy if she was allowed to live out her life as a whore. There was always the chance of something even worse and more terrifying if she were found. She had changed her name, and her earlier and constant terror had paled in comparison with the very real fear of a life lived in totally unfamiliar surroundings and on the brink of starvation. But she must not become complacent. There was always the chance of being found, especially if she must stand outside the Drury Lane Theater every night and be seen by all the fashionable people of London.

  What if Matthew had come to London? And Cousin Caroline and Amelia had come there even before she came.

  When Sally knocked on her door later in the evening and called her name through the lock, Fleur stared at the ceiling and made no reply.

  ADAM KENT, DUKE OF RIDGEWAY, leaned one elbow on the marble mantel in the study of his town house on Hanover Square and tapped his teeth with one knuckle.

  “Well?” His dark eyes narrowed on his secretary, who had just entered both the house and the room.

  The man shook his head. “No luck, I’m afraid, your grace,” he said. “It is too little to go on, to know just a girl’s first name.”

  “But it is an unusual name, Houghton,” the duke said. “You knocked on every door?”

  “Along three streets and around three courts,” Peter Houghton said, making an effort to hide his exasperation. “Perhaps she gave you a false name, anyway, your grace.”

  “Perhaps,” the duke agreed. He frowned in thought. Would she be outside the theater again that night? That employment agency—did she ever go there looking for work? And would she look for other work now that she had chosen and entered a new profession? Perhaps she did not live in that part of London at all. And perhaps she had given a false name. She had not answered his question immediately.

  “Life will be less arduous for you during the next few days,” he said with sudden decision. “You are going to hire a new servant for me. In any capacity you think suitable, Houghton. Perhaps as a governess. Yes, I think as a governess if you find her capable of filling the post. I have the feeling she might be suitable. There is an agency close to the streets you were combing today.”

  “As a governess?” The secretary frowned at him.

  “For my daughter,” the duke said. “She is five years old. It is time she had more than a nurse despite her grace’s reluctance to have her begin her schooling.”

  Peter Houghton coughed. “Pardon me, your grace,” he said, “but I understood that the girl is a whore. Should she be allowed within ten miles of Lady Pamela?”

  The duke did not reply, and the secretary, who understood the look on his employer’s face very well, was reminded that he was merely a lowly employee in the service of one of the richest noblemen of the realm.

  “You will sit at the agency for the next few days,” the duke said, “until I tell you you need no longer do so. In the meanwhile, I shall become a regular theatergoer.”

  Houghton bowed and the duke pushed himself abruptly away from the mantel and left the room without another word. He took the stairs to his private apartments two at a time.

  “Every whore was a virgin once.” The poet William Blake had written that somewhere, or words to that effect. There was no reason to feel any special guilt over being the deflowerer. Someone had to do it once the girl had chosen her course. If he had been her second customer instead of the first, he would not have known the difference and would have forgotten about her by that morning. She had had no skill, no allure, nothing that would make him wish to find her again.

  He had not realized that a woman would bleed so much. And he had seen and felt her pain as he tore through her virginity.

  If he had known, he could have done it differently. He could have readied her, gentled her, entered her slowly and carefully, nudging through the painful barrier. As it was, he had been angry with both her and himself. He had wanted to degrade them both, he supposed, standing over her, imposing his mastery on her.

  But then, he owed her no consideration. She had been quite freely selling, he buying. She had been paid three times what she had asked. He had been left quite dissatisfied beyond the momentary relief that had come with the release of his seed. He had no reason to feel guilt.

  Yet all night and all day he had been unable to shake his mind free of the girl—her thin body, her pale complexion, her dark-circled eyes and cracked lips, her calm courage. He had been unable to rid himself of the knowledge that poverty and desperation had driven her to the life of the commonest of street prostitutes.

  He could not help feeling responsible. He could not forget the calm acceptance, the blood.

  He wondered if he would ever find her again. And he wondered for how long he would keep trying, the Duke of Ridgeway in search of a street whore with large calm eyes and refined manners and voice.

  Fleur. Just Fleur, she had said.

  MISS FLEMING, WHO OWNED AND RAN THE EMPLOYMENT agency close to where Fleur lived, had always treated Fleur with an air of hauteur and condescension. Her nasal voice had always drawled as if with boredom. What proof could Miss Hamilton give, she had always asked, that she would make a competent lady’s companion or shopgirl or scullery maid or anything else? Without someone to recommend her there was really no way Miss Fleming could be expected to put her own reputation on the line by sending her to be interviewed by a prospective employer.

  “But how can I gain a recommendation until I have had some experience?” Fleur had asked her once. “And how can I gain experience unless someone will take a chance on me?”

  “Do you know a physician who could speak for you?” Miss Fleming had asked. “A solicitor? A clergyman?”

  Fleur had thought of Daniel and felt a stab of pain. Daniel would give her a recommendation. He had been willing for her to open a village school with his sister. He had been willing to marry her. But he was far away in Wiltshire. Besides, he would no longer be willing either to marry her or to employ her or recommend her for employment, not after what had happened there and after she had fled.

  “No,” she had said.

  It was only her despair that drove her back to the agency five days after she had become a whore. She felt no re
al hope as she opened the door and stepped inside. But she knew that that night she was going to have to return to the Drury Lane Theater or somewhere else where fashionable gentlemen congregated and would be in search of a night’s pleasure. Her money was gone.

  The bleeding had stopped and the soreness had healed. But her disgust and terror at what had been done to her body had grown by leaps and bounds so that she felt almost constantly nauseated. She wondered if she would ever become accustomed to the life of a whore, if she would ever be able to treat her work as simply that. Probably, she thought, it would have been better if she had gone out the very night after that first, soreness and all, and not given the terror a chance to impose its grip on her.

  “Do you have any employment suitable for me, ma’am?” she asked Miss Fleming, her voice quiet, her eyes steady and calm—she had trained herself through a difficult childhood and girlhood never to show any of the pain or degradation she might be feeling.

  Miss Fleming looked up at her impatiently and seemed about to make the usual retort. But her eyes sharpened and she frowned. Then she adjusted her spectacles on her nose and smiled condescendingly. “Well, there is a gentleman in the next room, Miss Hamilton, conducting interviews for the post of governess to his employer’s daughter. Perhaps he will be willing to ask you a few questions, even though you are a young lady who has no letters of recommendation and who knows no one with any influence. Wait here, if you please.”

  Fleur found herself clasping her hands painfully together, her nails digging into her palms. She felt breathless, as if she had run for a whole mile. A governess. Oh, no. She must not even begin to hope. The man would probably not consent even to see her.

  “Step this way, if you please, Miss Hamilton,” Miss Fleming said briskly from the doorway of the adjoining room. “Mr. Houghton will see you.”

  Fleur was very aware of her wrinkled silk dress and drab cloak and the absence of a bonnet. She was dressed in the clothes she had been wearing more than a month before when she had run away. She was aware of the plain style of her hair, of the shadows below her eyes, of her cracked lips. She swallowed and stepped through the door. Miss Fleming closed it quietly behind her, remaining on the other side of it.