Page 16 of The Baronet’s Bartered Bride

“Sure and you’d earn more coin in the Temple,” Mother said.

Inez shook her head. Dark Lane was more than just the service referred to by its patrons and workers as the Vestal Temple. The Dorter, the old house where the medieval nuns had lived, now sheltered women who hailed from all strata of society and needed a place of safety before they could brave the wide world. Orphans, mostly girls, were taught at the school, if teachers could be found, then apprenticed to trades. No one hungry was turned away, and most all of it was paid for by the work of the Vestals and the canny management of Mother Vesta.

Not for the first time, Inez wondered what had brought a woman of clear breeding and likely a gentlewoman’s status to be the madame of a brothel tucked into a corner of Spitalfields and kept a secret from the world, as much as could be. Inez didn’t know all the dialects of England, not like she could listen to Portuguese and know exactly where a speaker was from, but she thought Mother Vesta might have come from the north.

Mother nodded toward the building behind her, once part of the old medieval hospital, then redone as a rich merchant’s house, now home to the kind of activities that would have had the poor nuns crossing themselves and saying prayers for their souls. “I’ve a tom who likes the ones he thinks is exotic. We can tell him you’re Spanish. Or Chinese.”

“Portuguese,” Inez said, slightly offended. Her father was from Goa, a place many English had heard of but couldn’t locate on a map. Inez knew where it was, and her father’s island home was still a turn of the world away from the reaches of the Far Eastern Orient.

Mother waved a hand to invite Inez to walk her survey of the square with her. “He won’t know. Whisper to him in whatever language he likes, swat him on the arse with a stick, and he’ll give you an armload of guineas. He’s one of those,” she said with a knowing nod.

Inez was aware that the Vestals catered to all manner of tastes, and the stranger the request, the more the man paid. She had seen the same with her mother.

Bile rose in the back of her throat and she pushed back the memory of her mother’s men. So many men, knocking on the frame of their small house tucked into the alley, barely more than a lean-to, a shanty crouched in the shade of a larger house, a house where there were servants and rooms with rugs and where real people lived. Such a far cry was the life in that house from the miserable existence Inez had known, scrounging for scraps of firewood before daybreak, picking from the refuse that rich folk left outside for their animals to find food that might make part of a meal.

The men her mother took behind the worn curtain that served to divide her parents’ bed from the rest of the room that comprised their house. The way Inez would sit outside until it was over. She would have taken herself away at those times, but she’d learned that she was needed to help clean up after, sometimes the linen and sometimes her mother.

It wasn’t always that her mother entertained, and it wasn’t her regular trade. Only when her father had been gone too long on a sail, or when he had been home too long and not bringing home wages from other work. Inez’s mother had her baked goods to sell, but sometimes it wasn’t enough. But if the women at market knew of the men who came sometimes to the alley where they lived and stepped behind the curtain, then they wouldn’t buy anything. They’d sneer at her mother—Inez’s beautiful, dignified mother, who said her prayers to Santa Maria every morning, who made the most delicious broa, who had the softest hands and a low, musical voice and a smile like the sun setting over the sea.

If her mother had been a courtesan to the rich, she would have been fed the best sweetmeats, showered with jewels, shown off in a fancy carriage in silks and velvets and furs. She would have commanded respect, adoration. But because she was married to a poor sailor, not even a Portuguese sailor but a man from afar, and because what she sometimes sold was her embrace to men who paid for the chance to take their ease with her, she was dirt on the street to the merchants’ wives and daughters. It wasn’t a life either of them would have wished for.

Inez had hoped things would be better when they came to England to find her father. England was a rich land, wasn’t it? London was the biggest city in the world, so they said, bigger than Paris, if not as grand. There would be work. There would be a better home than the shanty and better life for her mother at a different market.

But it wasn’t a better life. For her mother, it was more of the same life, hard and wearing and hungry, only with different men who came to the door when her father was absent, and different women who turned up their noses when they passed their stall at market.

On her deathbed, when her beautiful mother had been worn to a shadow and then the shadow had worn down to nothing, Inez had promised her mother she’d only ever take respectable work. She’d never let herself be used. She would do better; she would have better.

If only her mother had made her promise never to hang her heart after an unsuitable man, Inez thought now. And what did it gain her to cling to virtue and respectability anyway? They mattered to the women who hired her but not the men of the house trying to pull Inez into dark halls and doorways. And no one would believe her claims of innocence if they knew she frequented Dark Lane.

“Go see Ceres,” Mother said. “I’m certain she will welcome you. We’ve missed your broa.”

Mother Ceres was the name given the cook, and Inez was relieved to see the Ceres presiding over the kitchens now was the one she’d known from before, a woman with skin darker than Inez and a round face that broke into a ready smile when Inez entered.

“Mother of mercy, it’s been an age since we’ve seen you hereabouts, Inanna. Come to stay with us again?”

“Come to work with you, Mother Ceres, if you’ll have me.”

“You know you’ll make more coin as a Vestal.”

“Certo, but I like to work in the daylight hours and sleep in my nights,” Inez said.

The cook chuckled. “You’ll find late hours when Mother wants to throw a banquet or the ladies are up late entertaining. But I could use a set of clever hands.” She nodded toward a battered brass pot perched on the huge black cookstove. “You can make the gravy for the fowl, then dress the turnips.”

Inez fetched a stew pot down from the shelf, then collected a scoop of butter from the ceramic dish kept cool in the scullery. She put the kettle to boil, then hunted up a knife to hack up bits of lean beef and mutton for a proper gravy. The kitchens of Dark Lane were a low set of rooms with thick oak beams bracing the ceiling and an ancient brick hearth, not like the sunny and high-ceilinged room at George Court. But the ladies of Dark Lane welcomed her back, and Joseph Illingworth never did.

Inez carved off a slice of bacon with more force than was strictly called for. Why had she been such a fool for that man, again and again and again?

“So did the lord ever find ye?” Mother Ceres inquired as she withdrew a pan of bread from the brick oven. “The one as was looking for ye a while afore.”

Inez’s heart stopped beating for a too-long moment, then did a slow flip in her chest.

“A man? Dark brown hair, deep set eyes, too handsome for his own good or anyone’s?” Her heart tripped trying to resume its beat, blast that worthless organ. Had he come looking for her before? Had he finally wanted her, and she’d been too dim to see it? “He’s not a lord,” she added.

The cook’s eyebrows rose to the lace border of her cap. “Well, he makes Bess call him his lordship, don’t he? One o’ the high and mighty ones, for certain.” Ceres sniggered. “Bess told us once as how his wig fell off during a lively moment, and he stopped and made her look away until he could get adjusted.”

Inez didn’t laugh along with Ceres’s hearty chuckle. “Large hooked nose, very thin lips? Wears a toupée with a pigtail in the back?”

“Aye, that’s the wig.” Ceres chortled. “How d’ye know him? He was particular keen to find ye.”