Page 4 of One Night with a Rake

“Nonsense. Better to fear for the women trapped here.” Georgette straightened her spine. She wasn’t about to let a little dinginess scare her away. “We’re here to find your friend, Mercy. I won’t leave until I’ve seen her and given her an opportunity to come with us.”

“As ye wish. It’s powerful kind of ye too, but it may be for naught.” Mercy shrugged and started to lead the way down the constricted lane. “Vesta’s been known to change her mind on things. Don’t ye be surprised if she don’t want to go.”

“Why ever not? I thought you said she wanted a different life.” Georgette waved her footman back when he made to follow them. “Oh, no, Mr. Darling, we’ll be fine. Wait here with the carriage. I’ve a feeling the horses are in more danger than we.”

In a neighborhood like this, meat in the stewpot was an unheard of luxury.

“If you’re sure, milady.”

“I’m sure. The day this Englishwoman fears to walk down a London street in broad daylight hasn’t dawned,” Georgette said with more bravado than she felt. She skittered after Mercy down the twisty alley named Lackaday Lane.

“Sing out if there’s trouble, then,” Reuben called after them.

The way Georgette’s heart thumped against her ribs, she was certain she could trill out a high C if necessary. She doubted the sun ever showed its face in this cramped lane. Even a slender beam of light would have to fight its way in, given the way the structures teetered toward each other. Eternal cold slid its icy fingers down her collar, slipped indecently under her hem, and up her silk-stockinged legs.

“Mind your skirts,” Mercy called over her shoulder.

Georgette’s nose crinkled at the whiff of an acrid odor. A rivulet of yellowish slime, the source of the stench, trickled down the center of the lane. She held her skirts bunched in one hand to avoid brushing them through it. Mercy was right to fear for her slippers. There’d be no hope for her kid soles after this.

Mercy looked back and shot her an encouraging grin.

“The chit is actually enjoying this,” Georgette muttered, feeling both anxious and foolish at the same time. Of course, Mercy had haunted holes like this one every day of her precarious life before she came to work for Georgette.

Her lady’s maid was Georgette’s first success, the first girl she’d managed to lift from a life of squalor in the burgeoning sex trade. It had taken several months of training, but Mercy learned the duties required of a lady’s maid.

She still wasn’t an ideal domestic servant in many respects. Her tongue was rather sharper than Georgette would have liked, and her speech was often peppered with mild vulgarities. Mercy was still secretive and standoffish with the rest of the help, and her needle skills were abysmal. But she was living proof that Georgette’s plan to help the working girls of London might bear fruit.

Albeit saucy, opinionated fruit.

“I don’t understand,” Georgette said. Even though she saw no one at any of the windows that looked down on the alley, she felt the pressure of eyes on her and lowered her voice. “Why wouldn’t your friend want to leave this place?”

“It ain’t the place so much she’d hate to leave, though you’ll see for yourself that looks can be deceiving. Inside, the house is much grander than it seems on the outside.”

Georgette was certain Mercy’s idea of what constituted “grand” was far different from hers.

“And the life here is lively,” Mercy went on. “There’s always food and drink aplenty, at least that’s how it were at Madam Bouchard’s house when I was there. She always says as gentlemen likes a girl with meat on her bones. And lying abed till noon is a grand way to pass the day.”

“I gather it’s the nights this Vesta will be anxious to leave.”

Georgette knew a few things about what passed between a man and woman, mostly from one summer at her father’s country estate when the mares were in season. She’d happened to be reading in the haymow, hiding with her book, because her mother discouraged her from spending too much time with her nose in one. When the grooms led in the wild-eyed stallion to cover a mare, Georgette peered down from her straw-covered perch and received an exciting, earthy education. Sometimes the stallion actually bit the mare till blood ran down her glossy withers and there was much whinnying and stamping involved.

If men were as violent as stallions in the act of procreation, she couldn’t understand why young women would submit to it for mere money. It was bad enough to have to do it once one was lawfully married.

“The nights ain’t so bad,” Mercy confided. “If a girl has regulars, they’re generally pretty good to her. Even brings her little presents sometimes.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think lifting me skirts was ever so much less trouble than being an honest woman.”

“Mercy!”

“I’m just speakin’ my mind, milady, just like ye tells me I should with ye. I’m not sayin’ as I wants to go back. But ye should know it weren’t the gentlemen what made me want to leave. Besides, being so poisonously good all the time is hard on a body,” Mercy said with a grimace. “I swear sometimes I get such an aching in me nethers…even that idiot Reuben starts lookin’ good to me.”

“Aching?” The way Mercy said the word made it seem like a pleasurable thing. Georgette had had a toothache once and it wasn’t at all pleasant. Certainly not what one would want to feel in one’s “nethers.”

“Sorry, milady. I keep forgettin’ they likes to keep your sort on the ignorant side of useful about such things.”

Ignorant? Georgette spoke three languages. Fluently. She could do sums as well as her brother. She’d read Augustine’s Confessions in the original Latin. And he’d had quite a bit to confess!

How could Mercy believe her ignorant?

A window opened overhead and a woman leaned out to empty the contents of her chamber pot onto the street below. Mercy grabbed Georgette’s hand and yanked her along out of the way of the putrid spray.