Authors: Maria McCann
Well. She did what she could. A new day awaits, there’s profit to be made. She goes to the Eye and unhooks a rope, lowering a closed basket. There they are, the little darlings: her measures for dispensing cheer to the needy. On the floor beneath them stands a covered bucket, brimful of England’s cheapest.
They say the poor have only two joys, fucking and drink, and in Betsy-Ann’s opinion drink is kinder comfort. Kitty Hartry might dispute that, but
her
dealings are with people who can pay for pleasure and want it stronger and stronger. What the poor want, mostly, is to be knocked senseless.
Betsy-Ann fills some bottles, takes another basket and lays the precious store within. She spreads a white cloth over them and arranges on the cloth some biscuits she purchased this morning from the pastrycook’s, cut in halves, then lays another cloth over the biscuits and closes the basket lid. Lastly she takes a plain gold ring from a nearby pot and slips it onto her wedding finger.
She gropes her way down the unlit stairwell, expecting to find Liz lying in wait – the old woman haunts these blasted stairs, she’ll get kicked down them one day – but Liz must have other business, for Betsy-Ann reaches the ground floor unmolested and steps out into the autumn day.
There’s a small, high, dirty sun that would do some good if it could only get through the smoke. Down here the air is thick, a clinging web of familiar scents: stale, yeasty gusts from the doors of public houses, hot bread, piss and worse drying beneath chamber windows, mould from dank basements, horse dung, folk lighting their fires, and on the pavement a sour, bright star of vomit.
Betsy-Ann is on her way to the New Buildings.
Even when you’re as partial to your own ken as she is to hers, and have plenty set by, it does no harm to stick your head out once in a while. You get a sense of how the world wags, how everything keeps bustling on. Today, however, she has business in hand. Lina told her of a pawnbroker near the New Buildings, a man of discretion. She intends, if she gets that far, to pay him a visit.
Coming through Covent Garden, she sells two half-biscuits and three bottles of lightning. In Long Acre a blowen approaches, strikes up talk and then pulls from the front of her stays a length of cream-coloured silk, for which she wants three shillings.
‘Say one,’ suggests Betsy-Ann.
The blowen shakes her head. ‘This sells at four shillings the yard. There’s two yards at least.’
‘Two then,’ Betsy-Ann wheedles. ‘As a favour to you.’
‘Look here, Mrs Betsy.’ The girl spreads out the stuff on the basket top, smoothing out the creases. ‘Not a hole or a mark.’
Betsy-Ann fingers its glossy surface. ‘Two.’
‘Three.’
Betsy-Ann shrugs. In a pet, the girl snatches up the silk and marches away.
‘Like your impudence,’ Betsy-Ann says under her breath. She waits to see if the girl will think better of it, but no, the striding figure turns into another street and is lost to view.
She forgets the silk directly she enters the piazza, a place which never fails to arouse in Betsy-Ann a bittersweet ache, joy and sadness mixed. From here she can see the windows –
her
windows, where she was first put into keeping by the Corinthian. Behind them lie three elegant rooms, so fondly remembered that whenever she passes the building she feels she might walk up there and take possession again.
Those rooms, like their mistress, were fitted out in style. Betsy-Ann, who not so long ago had been living in a wagon, eating potatoes and cowering whenever the farmer appeared, now had a maid of her own and a different gown for each day of the week. When it was too wet and dirty to go out, or when the Corinthian stayed night after night at the tables, she’d ask herself: should the farmer appear, wouldn’t he be struck dumb? What could his wife, that bullying bitch, find to say to her now? There were darker days still, when the weather might be fine but she was plagued with the memory of Kitty’s place, and of Keshlie, when the answer to those questions would come to her in Mam’s voice:
They’d know what to say, all right, and it’d be WHORE.
The only way to stifle that voice was to stand before one of Ned’s presents: a fine looking-glass from Venice, the edges bevelled so as to glitter like gems. There she would go and turn about, admiring herself in her new gowns.
*
He was an unexpected gift, so it was fitting that she first clapped eyes on him at Christmas.
The season of goodwill was always something of a lean time in Kitty’s establishment. Wives and mistresses alike demanded tributes, resulting in a general scarcity of the readies. Debauched students went home to be dull with Papa and Mama. Families had visits to make, hypocrisies to keep up, and there was also the occasional fit of repentance: a good few married men fell away each December, only to return, hammering on the door, by February.
Until they did, the inhabitants of the Cunt in the Wall might find themselves free for hours at a time. The least popular girls were put out to grass, the prettiest and the specialists kept on hand, for if a Person of Quality should arrive unexpectedly,
quel dommage
(as Kitty said) if he should find the house lacking in refinement. The girls would sit talking, curling their hair and trying out the new fashions in face-paint, wondering what the coming year would bring.
It was during this flat period that
Harris’s List
came into its own, providing the man of pleasure with reading matter to tickle his appetite until he could escape back into the sporting life. As soon as a girl was ‘finished’ in the tricks of her trade, Kitty had her entered in
Harris’s
, paying over the odds for a good account of her livestock. Betsy-Ann was listed along with the rest; when her report first came out, she asked another girl, Catharine, what was written of her.
‘A fine tall girl whose dark eyes languish sensual fire,’
read Catharine.
‘Miss Bl―re well knows how to render youth free and happy.’
‘Miss who?’
‘Miss – you, you ninny, they miss some of the letters out – O, never mind.
She is of the gypsy nation ―
’
At this Betsy-Ann laughed aloud. ‘No gypsy would think so.’
‘Now, Miss! You told me you had a cart and you were gypsies.’
Betsy-Ann shook her head. ‘We
knew
some gypsies. We worked the fairs ―’
‘Listen!
Trained up from girlhood in the amorous arts freely practised among that passionate and uninhibited race.
’
Here Betsy-Ann exclaimed, ‘He knows nothing of gypsies either,’ to which her companion replied, ‘That may be, my dear, but Mr Derrick thoroughly understands his trade.’
‘Derrick? I thought it was a Mr Harris?’
‘It’s named for Jack Harris, but it’s Derrick who writes it. You must’ve seen him, little carroty Irishman, comes and shuts himself away with Kitty. Now listen . . .
Newly finished and polished by Mrs H—try, so as to excel in the most exacting disciplines of pleasure. She has considerable natural advantages in that field, for in her case the path to bliss is indeed strait and narrow. The gate of life is firm and exquisitely deep and shaded by the most profuse vegetation. Fortunate indeed the eager lover who knocks and is admitted here.
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?’