Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  She adores a hard rider, and is a connoisseuse of lusty young fellows.

  ‘What gammon!’ said Betsy-Ann when her friend had explained connoisseuse to her. ‘I’d gladly drown the lot of them.’

  ‘No favourite, then?’ Catharine lowered her voice, in case Kitty should happen to walk by. ‘You’re not looking for a protector?’

  ‘Spinks offered,’ said Betsy-Ann, ‘but I wouldn’t trust myself alone in a house with him.’

  ‘Nor I, to be sure. Got any Jews?’

  ‘One or two. Why?’

  ‘They’re kind keepers.’ Catharine nodded. ‘Try for one of them.’

  When she saw him he was sprawled on a sofa between two of the girls, whispering to each while one of them popped comfits into his mouth. Betsy-Ann, just returned from her fourth bout of the day, seated herself nearby so that she could watch the thing unfold. While she had no love for any of the male visitors, she approved the stranger’s manners. He seemed more refined than your usual cully; he was perhaps heir to some respectable merchant, or a lively sprig from a God-fearing family who had resolved to taste pleasure as his peers did. He might even be one of the agreeable Jewish keepers recommended by Catharine. She wanted to hear what he was saying but she could hardly cut in: by the rules of the establishment he was the rightful prey of her two colleagues. But then the young man rose, shook hands with the whores without having so much as fumbled them, and went away into Kitty’s private room. Betsy-Ann hurried at once to the sofa.

  ‘What’s wrong, is he poxed?’

  The girls hooted. ‘He’d be the first that ever bothered to tell us,’ said one.

  ‘Then what’s the matter, why’s he talking to the Mother?’

  ‘She’s his mother,’ said the girl. ‘His darling mama.’

  ‘You mean that’s the Corinthian?’

  Betsy-Ann had naturally heard the talk, passed on from woman to woman over the years. The Corinthian was Kitty’s only son, said to be the offspring of a nobleman though nobody knew for sure. As a young child he had wandered about the more decorous and public areas of the seraglio, but never when there was company; Kitty had made sure of that, by promising that any girl who broke the rule would have her head shaved and be turned naked into the street.

  The pretty, prattling little fellow had become everybody’s darling. When he was sent away to school, he departed laden with gilt gingerbread and wet from the tears of the more sentimental harlots. He came back with newly curious eyes, his schoolfellows having perhaps enlightened him as to the nature of his mother’s business, but he continued to chatter with her girls in an easy, sociable manner, possibly too sociable for his mother’s tastes. He was a gent by nature, said the whores, but that could not satisfy Kitty, who left nothing to chance. It was rumoured that she’d intrigued, caballed and blackmailed until she got him to the university, where he mixed with boys far above him socially, boys whose fathers’ money jingled in his pockets. It was there, perhaps, that he picked up his nickname. He rejoiced in it, and the whores rejoiced with him. The Age had spawned Corinthians in plenty, but theirs was the Corinthian, Corinthian double-dyed: a man of pleasure, born and bred in a Corinth.

  At the time of Betsy-Ann’s first sighting him, he was but lately returned from the Continent to find all the whores who had chucked his chin quite vanished away, worn out by what Kitty referred to, when the more refined culls were present, as the mysteries of Venus. Ned Hartry looked about and found himself a young man among young women.

  ‘He’s like quality,’ said Betsy-Ann.

  ‘He never pays,’ said the girl with the comfits. ‘It’s his mama’s house, what’s hers is his.’ She grinned. ‘Dimber cove, though, ain’t he?’

  ‘Except his hair,’ the other girl said. ‘I don’t care for this newfangled fashion, neither wig nor powder.’

  ‘But a fine colour,’ Betsy-Ann said, thinking it would be a pity to powder such hair: like dulling a raven’s wing.

  ‘True,’ the girl agreed. ‘I’d treat him anyway.’

  The dimber cove did not ask her to treat him, or Betsy-Ann either. His choice was Jeanne DuPont, an elegant green-eyed blonde who always dressed in watered grey silk. Betsy-Ann was forced to admit that it suited her delicate beauty and made her skin appear as if washed with silver: a very taking look. At least once a day Ned would come through the room where they sat to receive visitors, go straight to the girl and bow to her. She would curtsey and allow him to lead her upstairs to the mirrored boudoir on the first floor.

  His choice gave rise to furious gossip among the whores. Jeanne was wayward and wilful, so unbiddable at times that it was said Kitty would gladly have banished her. That she did not, was down to the custom Jeanne brought to the house. Of all the women there, Mademoiselle DuPont was most frequently asked for by name; she was something of a celebrity, with a number of loyal followers.

  Her secret lay in her history. Before coming under Kitty’s control she had worked for the famous Mrs Hayes, who supplied nuns to Sir Francis Dashwood at Medmenham. Gentlemen who had ‘made her acquaintance’ at Dashwood’s club still sought her out; though dwindling in number, they were highly profitable, being wealthier than most of the cullies that called on Mother Hartry. There were others, less distinguished but far more numerous, whose pride it flattered to ride where My Lord had ridden before them, a privilege for which they paid – O, they paid! And so Kitty held on to her, watching greedily for the day when Jeanne’s attractions would wane and she could be replaced with someone younger, fresher, of a more docile turn.

  ‘Weren’t you ever afraid?’ Betsy-Ann had once asked when talk had turned to the Hellfire Club.

  Jeanne gave a supercilious little laugh – ‘Afraid?’ – but Betsy-Ann was too curious to take the snub. ‘I heard they murder,’ she persisted. ‘And eat the bodies. And conjure up devils.’

  ‘It’s play, you bitch booby, nothing but play – Dashwood’s letch is to fuck in a monk’s habit and drink champagne from your quim, that’s all. These men! They can’t occupy themselves, they must always be playing.’

  ‘Not always,’ put in Catharine, who had been a governess and would read a newspaper whenever she could find one. ‘He’s a man of parts. He was Chancellor once, and he ―’

  ‘I’m surprised he could sober up long enough,’ Jeanne retorted. ‘And his friend Sandwich, he’s another – all sultans and slave girls.’ Here she glanced at Betsy-Ann, who, having never heard of Sandwich, feigned envy, since this seemed to be what was required. Jeanne giggled. ‘Harems, yes, but nobody wants to play eunuch! Though there was a creature at Medmenham dressed sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. It gave fencing lessons in petticoats. We had a wager: he or she?’

  ‘And which was it?’

  Jeanne shrugged. ‘We’ll have to wait till it dies.’

  Having made herself ill by constant fuddling in her Hellfire days, she had a disgust of drink and was the only one in the house never to touch it. With those culls who preferred the Sex drunk, she acted drunkenness to perfection. With others, her demure speech and gestures made her a favourite: the most pitiful and disgusting acts, calmly, steadily, smilingly performed, could be made to seem almost respectable. There was a certain duke, for example, who made use of her perhaps once a month. To nobody else in the house had he ever named his desires, but in her boudoir, lying outstretched on a leather sheet, he was able to whisper them, whereupon Jeanne promptly hiked up her robe, squatted over his face and pissed.

  The duke, murmuring ‘My cruel defiler’ as he pressed gold coins into the fanny of Mlle DuPont, perhaps thought he was paying her to keep his secret. But Jeanne preferred treachery to discretion and her sharp, sober memory was mercilessly clear.

  ‘How much does he put in?’

  ‘As much as I can take. He’s pissing it away.’

  The girls roared with laughter.

  Lately she had been bragging of Ned’s amorous nature – ‘It’s in the blood’ – and as the door closed behind the two of
them, some of her sisters smirked knowingly. They waited for Jeanne to reveal his particular letches, but in vain. This was Kitty’s son, after all.

  Betsy-Ann, who had cared nothing for any man alive, now began to suffer. In fancy she explored with her fingers, with lips and tongue, the gloss of his neck, the firmness of his belly, the silken skin of his prick. She tasted the sweat and oil of his flesh. She rode astride him and felt him arch up beneath her. At the end of each day she lay in darkness, hand jabbing between her legs, clenching her teeth for Dimber Ned.

  *

  The New Buildings have a fresh, clean look, a neat and squared-off air. No doubt about it, Romeville is a fine city, and also what she once heard it called by some drunken cully: the Great Beast. Under its elegant skin it swells like plague, burying entire fields in stone and brick, gobbling up the dreary little farms where girls claw in the earth with their bare hands. Here are shops with rings and bracelets, silk and china. Let the farms go, who cares for them? Not the girls!

  So Marylebone is the coming thing, and Marylebone’s New Buildings are rising in the world, rising on a tide of lust, for riches, for pleasure. Builders speculate and their houses are taken by women setting up in trade. Gold flows, molten, from street to street. Lina knows of a woman here who lives alone, keeps her own carriage and answers to no one. That’s the style in the New Buildings: not such a good place for anyone down on her luck, but Betsy-Ann sees them, as she sees them everywhere. Some signal their trade by the usual twitching up of the gown while others, bolder or more desperate, move towards any man who hesitates.

  She watches a kiddey trying to make his choice. He ignores a mannish girl who pulls him by the arm and instead sidles up to a well-dressed stroller, but it seems she is beyond his purse, for after a few words she continues on her way. At last he strikes the bargain with a plump, lecherous-looking blonde and the pair of them disappear down some steps.

  Along the same pavements trudge poor but respectable morts, shamming blind and deaf. Betsy-Ann watches these, too, and fears for them. Not a few of Kitty’s nuns started out like Betsy-Ann herself: innocent, until life knocked them into the mud and held them there.

  A girl comes to ask if she has hot pastries to sell and goes away with a bottle of lightning. Another does the same. A third arrives, buys half a biscuit and lingers.

  ‘How’s trade today, my darling?’ asks Betsy-Ann.

  The girl says there’s none to be had. Englishmen have gone limp in the prick. Betsy-Ann studies this girl: bloated face, pink, streaming eyes, no wonder the culls keep off. She says, ‘Bad times for honest whores.’

  ‘Isn’t that God’s truth?’ says the girl. ‘Every rag off my back is at Uncle’s.’

  ‘Then I hope you got plenty for it, sweetheart.’

  The girl snorts. ‘Sixpence for a shawl of French lace.’

  ‘They’re all the same, God rot them. But it only takes one honest friend to set a woman up, eh? Who knows, perhaps you’ll be lucky today.’

  ‘Not I. Been too long on the town.’ The whore gives a rueful smile. ‘Look at me,’ she spreads her arms like a bird about to take wing, ‘I cost five guineas a night, once.’

  You must’ve been a fine piece in those days, thinks Betsy-Ann. On impulse she pulls out a bottle and presses it into the whore’s hand. ‘Where’s your Uncle, sweetheart? It so happens an Uncle is what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Through the gardens along there, by the horse trough,’ says the girl, staring at the unexpected gift.

  The lane is partly swallowed up by the New Buildings, its walls already crumbling to brick dust. She’s at the right place: here are the brass balls, dusty and dented where someone has tried to knock them down.

  Nobody loves Uncle.

  The doorbell clangs as she enters and Betsy-Ann shivers: it’s colder inside the shop than outside. Before her is a counter and fixed to the counter-top a metal grille that stretches all the way to the ceiling. Through it she can see shelves holding dusty boxes, velvet bags and heaps of papers. In the far corner, away from these, crouches an unlit stove.

  The Uncle comes scurrying from his lair in the back room like a spider sensing a quiver in its web. His head is bound up in a turban, his face shrivelled, his jaws fallen in. If this is the man who gave sixpence for French lace, he should look fatter on his profits. Without a word of greeting, he mounts a stool behind the counter and unlatches a small window in the grille.

  ‘Pledge or redeem?’

  ‘To pledge, Sir, if you please.’ She slips a wedding ring off her finger, passes it over and watches him examine it. His hand, seen through the grille, appears divided off into tiny squares of veined, purplish skin.

  ‘Half a crown.’

  ‘I can’t take that, Sir. My man would kill me.’

  He glances up at her with the weariness of one who has heard it all. ‘Then go elsewhere.’

  ‘Say two-and-ninepence, Sir, and it’s yours.’

  ‘Half a crown.’

  ‘For a gold ring, Sir! It’ll sell for ―’

  ‘I’ve told you ―’

  ‘I can’t redeem it – it’ll be yours to keep.’

  The Uncle weighs the ring on a pair of scales. Betsy-Ann waits in silence. At last he slides it to one side before pushing some coins and a ticket towards her.

  ‘God bless you, Sir! And I’ve something else.’

  He has to get the best of a cough before he can say, ‘Well? Pass it over.’

  ‘It isn’t here, Sir, not now. But my mother. She’s poorly, Sir.’ The man stares, unsmiling. ‘I’ll have things of hers, only the property won’t come all at once, what with her will and her lodgings, see? I’ll be fetching it over weeks, could be months.’

  She can tell the exact moment he takes her meaning: his eyelids droop as if to mask the greed beneath.

  ‘Bring whatever you have,’ he says. ‘I’ll give you a price.’

  As she begins the walk home Betsy-Ann mulls over the Marylebone Uncle. There was a moment, there in the shop, when she thought he was about to refuse her dying mother’s property, but he’s fly to the game, that much was plain. Still, a queer cove and no mistake, to sit and shiver with his face bound up when he could buy himself a bucketful of coals.

  His price wasn’t so bad, considering. Her usual man might have raised her three shillings, but he’s too close to home: she’s not having her bits and pieces in his window for Sam to see, not likely! With the new Uncle, she’s not fouling her own nest. Fouling: that’s a laugh, when you think about it. The first thing she does with the bed, when Sam goes off for a few days, is strip the sheets – a mort that’s slept under sacking, on muddy ground, and still she can’t bear them.

  But now – she steps out faster – she’s made her first move, now! Shifted some stock, and more to come, and Sam doesn’t know, and won’t know. She could skip with glee. The day will come, she’s making it come. O the fine day that’ll be, singing Samuel Shiner, fare thee well.

  And what a to-do, to get away from him! When Sam got chivvied, his sharping brethren parted company with him as smoothly as Sam’s finger parted from his hand. No hard words, no reproaches, that’s how it is with men. Who’d be a woman? A woman’s tied up, every which way. She’s heard some Newgate jailers turn pimp: for a consideration, a visitor can enjoy any female in their wards. From time to time Betsy-Ann’s thoughts return to those poor bitches. She sees them lying in darkness, listening for the sound of the key.

  She strolls more slowly now, her toes rubbed raw. As a girl she tramped everywhere barefoot, with the result that her feet spread. Shoes pinch her cruelly but in Romeville you’re nobody without them: even the most wretched drabs try to show a neat shoe and stocking. At least shoes keep you dry. She remembers Mam, in a distracted moment, stepping backwards off the cart into a country road where cattle had gone by, churning the earth. She cursed and lifted her gown to reveal feet and ankles shod in shining, stinking boots of mud.

  She’s still thinking about Mam when she’s
startled by a warning cry from behind. She steps away as the horses rattle past and sees the carriage with its whip-happy driver come to a stop some yards ahead, outside a house with fashionable iron railings. A black boy jumps down and runs to the front door while the driver, dismounting, helps out a feeble-looking blonde piece who stands gazing about as if unsure whether she’s in England. The blonde taps her foot, waiting for someone still fussing in the carriage. At last her cull joins her on the pavement. She has just laid her fingers on his arm when the front door of the house opens. The cull turns for an instant in Betsy-Ann’s direction before speaking to someone inside.

  Betsy-Ann smothers a cry.

  He’s unhappy. That much can be seen at once: something beaten and angry in the way he holds himself. Even as she notices this, he straightens up and lifts his head. In that movement she sees something of the Corinthian that was.

  How can she pass the pair of them? She can neither walk towards him nor move away. She stares fascinated at her rival, often imagined, now right there on the pavement. And how does she earn her bread, Betsy-Ann marvels, when many a better one goes hungry?

  But now the mort seems to wake up. She looks about her, glancing at Betsy-Ann much as she might observe a scrap of rag blown about the road.

  Is it her stance that warns Betsy-Ann – the set of her narrow shoulders? Or is it something else: her air of dull satisfaction, the air of one who expects to be served? Betsy-Ann gasps. This is no Cyprian. She’s his autem mort. Ned, laughing Ned, spliced! And to this creature, pale and gluey as a gob of phlegm . . . that blank little phiz of hers, as if the midwife tried to scrub her out at birth. Yet there she stands, her fingers on his arm.

  It seems that Betsy-Ann is at last walking forwards. Either that, or the street is flowing past her like a river, bringing in its wake carriage, driver, horse, paving slabs and the elegant couple about to enter the house.