The Secret Pearl(4)

“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 she would die of the shock and the pain—and had hoped she would.