A Beggar's Kingdom Page 6

  “That is not his only yardstick, Baroness,” Margrave says, and the girls titter.

  “Hush, Margrave. Stop wearing him like a medal.”

  The madam is right. Julian learns their names much faster using her method. Brynhilda, a large, buxom lass of Germanic origin, is first. The men wait hours for her. Mute Kitty is second because she’s quickest. Beatrix and Millicent are sisters, work in tandem, and are three and four. Brazen Margrave is five, Ru is peppy and six, and French Catholic Severine is seven. The girl who’d been calling herself Jeanne before Julian ruined it for her, and who now must refer to herself as plain Joan, is currently underworked and number eight, boyish Allie is nine, and Greta is last. Greta is skeletal and at almost thirty has outlasted her usefulness. But her great-grandfather is rumored to be Parson, the man who founded the Silver Cross, so she’s not going anywhere.

  The ten bedrooms and ten girls mix and match depending on the workload. The rooms are strictly for pleasure, six on the second floor, four on the third. The girls sleep high up on the fourth floor, in the stifling attic rooms by the dormers, five ladies to a cubby. The three maids, including Mallory, are segregated down on the ground floor, in the back by the servants’ kitchen. They mix with no one.

  Except for Mallory—who is the prettiest of all the girls at the Silver Cross—the cleaning girls are desperately unattractive. Carling is lame and Ivy is scarred. Carling and Ivy loathe Mallory, because she’s the Baroness’s niece and “not nearly ugly enough.” Though she’s not allowed to sit with Julian and the regulars while they have their dinner of spiced eel and fish pies, all the girls, the maids and the molls, resent Mallory for having too many privileges. The main complaint about her is that she never gets punished for the things she does wrong. Julian doesn’t dare ask what she does wrong, lest it reveal how he feels about her.

  The girls don’t stop complaining about one thing or another. Nothing is so trivial that it won’t cause offense. Yes, on the one hand, Julian is surrounded by women. But on the other, Julian is surrounded by women. They’re soft and busty, flirtatious, voluptuous, and their erotic inclinations know no bounds. But when they’re not arguing with him over the house-set price of goods and services, they’re bad-mouthing each other. They’re also not above blatant mendacity. They ascribe to each other all manner of vice and malice, they saddle one another with the lies of the most hideous contagious diseases. They often accuse one another of attempted murder through poison and infection. It’s astonishing. They are beautiful but venal.

  Fortunately, it’s the Baroness not Julian who deals with the bulk of their grievances. When he asks her how she sustains herself, she laughs. “Oh, dear boy,” she says. “Margrave is right about you. You’re too good a man. She says you may be of noble blood. Eventually you’ll learn how to handle the commoners.” A commoner is another name for prostitute. “Rule number one: You must stop being so respectful. Do like me and pay them absolutely no mind. I pretend to listen, for they need to complain. It’s about seniority. It’s about money. It’s only when they don’t complain that they worry me. And by the way, do you know who never complains? Mallory. And she’s the one who’s got the most to complain about, for the other girls are simply dreadful to her. But she never disparages them in return, she never whines about the cleaning, or being overworked, and she never says a bad word to or about anyone. Or a good word, for that matter. She’s my niece, and I love her like family, but frankly, she is too tame! She’s the one who vexes me the most with her unspeakable silence. Oh, how she vexes me!”

  5

  Lord Fabian

  LATE ONE NIGHT JULIAN IS ASKED BY IVY THE MAID TO BRING some wine to Room Two, his favorite room. It’s an odd request, for Julian is not usually in the business of fetching and carrying. He doesn’t mind the chore; the evening has been passing without a crisis. He’s only had to throw one man out into the street. As is his custom, Julian is formally dressed, in black silk hose and pointed-toe black leather shoes. He wears a blue velvet waistcoat with dark red buttons. His long thick hair is shiny and down, slicked back behind his ears. And he has shaved his epic beard, because wouldn’t you know it—in 1666, no one has beards! He can’t keep up with men’s facial hair fashion. Considered most virile at the turn of the century—the longer, the better—beards are now deemed lawless and dirty.

  Julian knocks. A male voice answers. The room is dim, lit by three candles and a low fire. In a chair by the unmade bed sits a big fat man in loosened silk robes. Across the room from him, by the row of candles, illuminated from the side, Mallory stands naked. The man in the chair motions Julian to bring the wine and place it on the table by his elbow. Julian sets down the decanter, takes the empty one and turns to leave. He tries not to look at Mallory.

  The man grabs his arm. “What do you think of our beauty, sir?” he says, chuffing like a horse.

  Julian still won’t look at her. Our? “Beautiful.” He yanks his arm away.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Nope.” Julian doesn’t bother faking politeness. He doesn’t need to. He’s in charge. His antenna is up, and so is his concern for Mallory.

  “This is Lord Fabian, sire,” Mallory says softly. “He is one of our most kind and generous patrons.”

  “I know who you are,” the fat man says to Julian. His puffy white shirt is open. His chest is hairy, he’s perspiring, sickly perfumed. “And you certainly know who the girl is.” He sniggers, winded even from speaking.

  “Lord Fabian watched us the other night, sire,” Mallory says. She points to a tapestried panel on the wall. “From a hidden enclosure.”

  That does not endear Julian to the man. He backs away to stand between Mallory and the lord, shielding her from the man’s lecherous gaze.

  “You put on quite a show, young man. Well done.” Fabian wipes his brow with a soiled handkerchief. “I’d like you to do it again.” He pauses. “But this time while I watch comfortably from a chair instead of peeping through a hole in a wall like a burglar.”

  “No,” Julian says.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You heard me. Mallory, get dressed, come with me. The Baroness is asking for you downstairs.”

  “No, sire,” Mallory says calmly. “The Baroness knows where I am. She allows me this indulgence from time to time—because it’s Lord Fabian.”

  “I should think she allows it,” Fabian says, bristling, “all the money she’s made off me.”

  “Yes, you have been very good to me, my lord.”

  “Come, Mallory,” Julian says, reaching for her.

  She pulls away from his hand. “No.”

  From me you pull away, Julian wants to say to her.

  “I demand you stay,” Fabian says to Julian, “or God help me, I’ll have your job. And possibly your head on a spike.”

  Julian walks out, leaving the door open behind him.

  He returns to his room and sits on the bed, contemplating his options. Before he has time to get more upset, there’s a knock. It’s Mallory, hastily dressed.

  “Sire, may I talk to you?” She shuts the door behind her. “Why won’t you help me?” She comes forward. “Is it because I refuse to come to you privately?”

  “No.”

  “If you help me, I will agree to see you from time to time.”

  “No.” He frowns. Is she trying to make him more upset? “I don’t want you to come to me because we made a bargain, Mallory. I want you to come to me because you want to.”

  “I’m too busy around here to want to do anything, sire. But you don’t seem as if you are too busy tonight to help me. So why are you saying no?”

  “I’m saying no because I don’t want to do it.”

  “You don’t want to be with me?” Her voice is soft, cajoling, her brown eyes large like a baby fawn’s.

  “Not like this.”

  “I know you must think him vile, but if you touch me, he won’t touch me. Don’t you want that? In some way, this is to protect me.”

/>   “There must be another way.”

  “There isn’t,” Mallory says. “Not at the moment. The lord wants to perform and can’t. This makes him angry, first with himself, and then with me. He says I judge him for his malady, and no matter what I try to do or say to let him know it’s not true is wrong. Unfortunately, the pressure of my willing body works on him in reverse. But then you appeared to us, sire, to me and Margrave! Afterward, the lord told me he hadn’t felt as aroused and happy in many years.”

  “Good for him. Nothing I enjoy more than hearing I make that man happy and aroused. But you’re not one of Tilly’s girls. You’re a maid.” Julian is trying to shut his heart to her. “Just do your job and stay away from him.”

  Mallory wrings her hands. “The Baroness allows me to be with him because he promised her he wouldn’t really touch me. He is my only customer. Mostly all he does is look, because that’s all he can do, and that’s the truth. I only do it to make a little money on the side.”

  “What’s it to me?”

  “The other girls get paid more, and I work so much harder.”

  “So complain, Mallory. Speak up. The Baroness says you never say a word.”

  “What’s there to say!” The girl takes a deep breath, and then lowers her deathless voice. “Listen to me, sire, please.”

  Julian closes his eyes, to avoid looking at her. He wants to put his hands over his ears to not hear her.

  “You’re an idling satyr,” she purrs, reaching for him, caressing him through his silk hose. “Why waste your unused pillar of gold? Put it to use, sire. Put it to good use.”

  “Don’t butter me up, I’m not toast. You know I don’t want to be idle,” Julian says after a beat. “I’m just not going up on his stage.”

  “It’s your life and your stage,” says Mallory. “As it is mine. Decide if you want to be in the center of it or in the wings.” She takes his hand. “In the center of it, with me.”

  “No.” He turns to the window. What is she doing to him?

  “Please, Julian.”

  She calls him by his name. Next to the things she did to him when they were together, it’s the ultimate seduction. Will the vixen stop at nothing?

  “The lord said he’ll give me a crown if you lie with me,” Mallory says. “A crown, sire! A quarter of a pound. A crown for a few minutes of your time. I make a shilling a week. I have to work five back-breaking weeks to make one crown. The other smuts, with all their experience, make three pennies a customer. Even Brynhilda’s tits fetch her barely six. And the lord is offering us a crown! Why can’t you help me? You did it the other night.”

  “The other night, I did it for free.” He pulls his hand away from her.

  “You may have done it for free,” Mallory returns cruelly. “But Marg and I knew he was watching us. We got paid for touching each other, and I got paid a bonus for touching you. Two extra shillings after you broke in.”

  “Did you split that with Margrave?”

  Mallory’s face is cold. “She makes plenty as it is.”

  Julian is astonished. “The other night…that was you performing for him?”

  “I beg pardon, sire, I hate to be impertinent, but…are you aware where you are? Where you and I both work?”

  “Quite aware, thank you. I just thought you had been performing for me. My mistake.” Julian stares into his hands. This is Josephine’s acting life. Mary Collins told her lady mother: all she wanted was to be up on a stage. Josephine told him she invented a stage everywhere she went. Well, here is what the stage looks like in 1666.

  Minutes pass. He pulls up his velvet sleeve, counts the ink dots. Seven. A week has passed since his first night here with her. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll do it. But tell your lord it’s a crown only if he leaves the room and spies through the hole.” Julian pauses. “It’s two crowns if he stays in the chair.”

  Mallory beams. Julian doesn’t beam.

  Without hesitation, Fabian agrees to two crowns. They should’ve asked for more, Julian thinks, as he pushes the heavy bed farther away from the man’s repugnant feet, and he and Mallory undress. Julian wishes he had money he could offer her instead of the toady watching them from three floorboards away.

  He and Mallory stand naked in front of each other.

  Julian really wants to touch her.

  Can he even perform in front of Lord Odious?

  Why, yes, it turns out he can.

  He does it by trying to forget that Fabian exists, though that’s less easy than it sounds, what with the barrage of winded wheezing commands spitting forth from the man’s foaming mouth as he sits in the nearby chair and directs Julian—as if Julian has no idea what to do on his own.

  Why are you standing there? Kiss her. You’re in a pantomime of love, Fabian says. So pantomime.

  They kneel on the bed. Julian cups Mallory’s face. It’s not a pantomime, he whispers to his maid and his princess, as he kisses her, kisses her until her nipples harden and he hardens and everything else on her softens.

  Fondle her.

  Pull on her nipples until she moans.

  Tug on her until she squirms.

  Lay her down, pour some wine on her.

  Open her, eat her pussy.

  I didn’t tell you to talk to her, what did you say to her?

  Do you like that, Mallory?

  Yes, sire.

  Do not ask her what she wants or what she likes, you do what I want, you do what I like. Turn her over. Get behind her. Grab her, so she stops moving. Pull out all the way, so I can see. Now thrust all the way in. Tell her to hold on to the headboard if she needs to.

  Hold on to the headboard, Mallory.

  The orders are barked only to Julian. But Julian knows, Fabian is not barking. He is begging. He’s beseeching Julian to be his proxy with the maiden. All things he cannot do himself, Fabian does through Julian. But Fabian’s shallow panting is so distressing that at one point, Julian lies flat on top of Mallory, even though his instructions were expressly not to. He stops moving and covers her body with his to shield her from the fat lord’s jealous gaze. Easing one arm under her, Julian slows between her hips and presses his face against her cheek, to cover her ear. It’s going to be okay. Are you okay?

  I’m fine. She pats his back. It’s not me he covets, sire. It’s you and your able-bodied youth. He’s not looking at me. He’s watching you. It’s your strong legs he desires, and your arms that hold your weight and hold mine. Your hard stomach. Your hard everything.

  They kiss in a prolonged moan as if they are real lovers.

  I’d like to kill him, Julian says.

  No, no, not until we separate the fool from his money, says Mallory.

  Julian laughs, Fabian shouts, Julian loses his rhythm, and rhythm is so important in love.

  Stand on the floor, have her kneel in front of you. Tell her to suck your cock, but do not discharge in her mouth. So what if the floor is hard. I want to see her on the hard floor. She is getting two crowns from me. She can take a little discomfort in her knees for two crowns, can’t she? Because you’re about to give her more discomfort than that. Tell her to get on her hands and knees. Yes, right on the floor.

  ∞

  Julian is in his own bed when he hears a soft tap. Mallory steps in, dressed in her morning clothes, gray apron, black skirt.

  “Am I disturbing you, sire?” Her voice is a whisper.

  “No.” He sits up.

  The candles have been blown out, the room is dark. Uncertainly she closes the door behind her.

  “I think the lord was pleased.”

  “And that is what I was aiming for. To please him.”

  Even in the night, he sees her blushing face. “I just wanted to say thank you for tonight.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m sorry to have put you in such a spot. He’s a peculiar man, I grant you, but he is generous, and very little is required of me.”

  “And thank you for that.”

  She stamm
ers. “I meant to say that usually not very much is required of me.”

  “What about the other night with Margrave?”

  “Yes, we do that sometimes if the lord wishes it, lie together. She is my friend.” Mallory bobs her head. “Well, a friend and an enemy.”

  “Where I come from, we call that a frenemy.”

  Mallory smiles. “What a good word. Is it Welsh? Frenemy. I’ll remember that.” She doesn’t leave. She takes a step to his bedside table. In her hands is a decanter and a plate. “I brought you a piece of pie. Margrave mentioned the other day that you liked apple pie and there was hardly any left after supper. I saved you a piece and some wine if you’re thirsty.”

  “It’s after four in the morning. Leave it. I’ll have it for breakfast.”

  She sets it by his bed.

  He waits.

  “I’m so tired, sire,” Mallory whispers.

  Julian swings open the covers.

  She takes off her clothes, folds them, stacks them neatly in the corner, and climbs into bed with him. He spoons her, draws the quilt over them, and covers her with his arm.

  “I’m worried about that man, Mallory,” Julian said. “I can’t help it. I don’t know if you are safe with him.”

  “Oh, sire,” she coos. “You are so kind-hearted. Trust me, you don’t have to worry about him.”

  She nestles against him, milling into him a little, murmuring something sexy and inaudible. Julian starts to say something, but she is already asleep. He lies awake cradling her, running his fingers up and down her arm, remembering how much Josephine had loved falling asleep like this back in L.A., in another life. They would deplete themselves there, too, and fall into a stupor at the break of dawn. What sweet days they were before the demon that lay in wait came for them. What warm days of syrupy, salty bliss, of ocean water, of lilies and superhighways. That wasn’t shadowboxing, that wasn’t a shadowlife. That was real.