by A. Wendeberg
He stopped again, knowing all too well that middle-aged, middle-class men — who couldn’t run when it came to it — had no business whatsoever in the slums of Whitechapel, and that he would likely get mugged if he didn’t leave at once. Or worse.
But he was tired. Tired of running and, he had to admit shamefully, tired of life.
He pressed his knuckles into his aching sides, looked up, and found a goddess gazing down upon him. There, right before him, printed on the tattered remains of a billboard was a woman of such beauty that Alexander believed it could only be the Holy Mother of Jesus herself.
“FIND BLISS IN MARY’S ARMS!” the bleached headline screamed.
Alexander sighed. Hope began to creep into his poor heart. Swiftly followed by panic. The address as to where this goddess could be found had been torn off.
❧
The pane crackled as she turned the handle. She pulled open the window and the joints produced a squeak. The vibration dislodged ice from the pane. The crystals dropped onto the rug, melted and disappeared into the coarse wool. The winter wind sneaked through the gap in the heavy curtains, hardening her nipples and pulling her skin tight. Blood rushed to her cheeks.
She waited for the knock. It couldn’t be long now.
She didn’t push aside the curtains, didn’t lean out to search the street below. There was no need for it and it wasn’t how this game was played.
When the knock finally came, she closed her eyes and placed her hands softly on the wall on either side of the window.
The door opened and closed. Four steps. The rustle of a coat being shed and draped over a chair. The clink of a belt being unbuckled, and another clink — that of a gold coin being placed on the table.
Two more steps. Hands found her hips and pulled her back against a crotch. Large and soft hands. The hands of a man who’d never had to work hard in his life.
‘Oh, no!’ she breathed, making her voice a little higher, younger. ‘What are you doing to me, sir?’
The anticipated result arrived at once: an erection stirred, hardened, and pressed against her thigh. He bent forward. The bristly tips of a moustache tickled her skin. Hot breath crept over her neck.
‘I will show you the pleasures of the bedroom,’ he hummed, excitement trembling in his voice.
‘But, sir, I am a maiden.’ This was far from the truth and they both knew it.
‘Tell me your age, dear.’
She produced another lie. In fact, most of the words Mary uttered were far from the truth. ‘I am but twelve years old. I beg you, sir, do not ruin me. What if my father finds out?’
This part of the game used to make her sick, but it had been awhile.
His hands groped her behind. The head of his penis pressed against her anus. He spat on it. ‘I am certain your father would not approve,’ he growled and pushed himself in. Once there, he stopped for a moment and reached toward the window. Satisfied that the window was wide open behind the drawn curtains, he began to thrust, whispering, ‘You may…call me…Mr Brazen…tonight.’
And so she did. ‘Oh, Mr Brazen! Have mercy! You are too big for me.’
That, too, was far-fetched.
The church bells struck ten, and every bang was accompanied by an, ‘Ah!’ from Mr Brazen’s mouth and a squeaked ‘Oh!’ from Mary’s.
He finished along with the bells, wiped himself off and said, ‘Now, look at me.’
She turned and gifted him a sweet smile, then reached out to tuck his flaccid cock back into his trousers. She stopped in her movement and breathed, ‘Allow me to clean this for you.’
She sank to her knees, and, tenderly caressing his bollocks, slipped him into her mouth. Mr Brazen wasn’t the youngest of men, and his time of virility was coming to a close. It took Mary considerable effort to make him stiff once more. Eventually, he was all clean and provided a wad of his seed so she might wash the taste of her own faeces down her throat.
‘Thank you, Mr Brazen,’ she said, licked her lips, and graced him with the smile he loved most on her face: that of a little and naïve girl who had been given the most delicious candy.
Then she frowned and sucked in her lower lip. ‘I will not be able to sit for days, Mr Brazen.’ But at once, her face lit up. ‘But I am glad I was seduced by such an experienced and talented man.’
Mr Brazen’s moustache twitched. He tried to control his expression, but the blush that rose up his throat and past his perfectly starched and pressed collar betrayed just how much he believed her.
Without speaking, he buckled his belt, shrugged into his coat, and nodded toward the guinea on the coffee table.
‘Wednesday,’ he said as he took his leave.
‘Wednesday,’ she whispered, and bit her tongue hard so that her eyes would begin to water and her face would appeared as if she could barely survive the long days without him.
After Mr Brazen had left, Mary rolled her burning tongue around in her mouth, swallowed foul taste, and shut the window. She squatted over the chamber pot and watched the swirl of piss, semen, and traces of diarrhoea cover the kinked enamel.
A soft knock announced Rose, a scrawny girl of eight, delivering a jug filled with steaming hot water. Unfazed by the woman’s nakedness — a frequent sight in this establishment — Rose waited until Mary had finished squeezing out the residues of her client, then she picked up the pot and said, ‘It’s meat pies tonight.’
‘Could you bring it up?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ With a wicked grin, Rose curtsied and left. A moment later, she delivered Mary’s supper. The girl was quick and serviceable. She would make a good whore in a few years.
Mary poured the hot water into her washbowl, brushed her teeth, and wiped her face, armpits, and crotch. She put on her nightgown and a robe, and climbed into her armchair to eat and read the papers. Her client was entirely forgotten until she stumbled over his name on page eleven: an article reporting on a new decree, ordered and signed by Chief Magistrate Linton Frost.
She tut-tutted and whispered. ‘Mr Brazen, you are such a bad boy.’
Mary knew that Mr Frost was a connoisseur of maidenheads. He paid five to twenty pounds sterling per maiden delivered to him. Sometimes, they needed to be held down. Other times, the seductress would put snuff into a girl’s beer to make her drowsy and pliable. When the girl awoke, she was in pain, ruined, and richer in experience as well as money. Although half of the latter was taken by the woman who had abducted her.
Mary assumed that she was the only experienced, if not to say, older, whore Mr Frost was visiting. But she couldn’t be sure. For a woman, she was not old, not by any measure. A man who didn’t know what she did for a living might well have asked permission to court her. She was sixteen now, a good, ripe age for being courted and married off. In a few years, she would be considered too old to find a good suitor.
Whatever others considered her to be, Mary thought of herself as an experienced businesswoman. Nothing more, nothing less. She’d been introduced to the trade at the tender age of nine. That was indeed a little illegal, although not by much. Seven years a whore. A long time to survive in this business.
Mary, though, did not merely survive. She thrived, owing much of her success to her wits — a truly unusual condition, for the main requirement in this profession was the ability to bounce a lot and moan a lot, not to think a lot.
Now, there was nothing special about cheerful up-and-down movements. Most women managed those. After all, only very few men fancied doing it with a corpse, let alone would admit to it.
It wasn’t only what Mary did with her attractive orifices that allowed her to ask for a high fee. It was what she said, how she timed her sighs, the parting of her lips, the trembling of her thighs, and the words she whispered in feigned ecstasy. Men believed her. Absolutely.
She knew how to convince them how very big they were, or — if that would have been quite obviously wrong — how very right that nub of a prick was to stroke the most sensitive spot of her privates in just the right
fashion. With a flick of her tongue and a flutter of her eyelids, she convinced them that she was their willing slave, not because of the money they paid, but because they were absolutely wonderful and the best thing that had ever happened to her. Oh, will you ravage me, please? her body asked them in the sweetest tones. And oh, they did. They did.
Only hours after she’d lost her virginity during a painful transaction with a middle-aged gentleman, she realised that no one would help her.
And then she’d calculated the amount of money she would need to set herself free.
It might appear laughable to dream about freedom when women, in general, were seen as property. Mary knew this. Hence the high fee. Rich women were free, all others had to prostitute themselves, one way or another. That’s how Mary saw the world: whores were paid, wives were kept. She had no wish at all to be a monogamous, child-bearing, house-keeping version of herself.
What she wanted was freedom. Freedom as wild and as independent as it was outrageous.
To Mary, being outrageous was an ideal.
❧
A knock woke her. She groaned. Pale yellow light seeped through the window. It made her think of John, the lamp lighter. The bawdy jokes he told her when he climbed up the ladder to light the lantern a mere three yards from her window.
‘You have a client,’ a deep male voice sounded from the other side of the door.
‘I’m not taking anyone else tonight.’
‘He asked for you and won’t be sent away. Make an exception, won’t you?’
‘One of those, eh?’ she called.
‘One of those.’
She pushed herself up. ‘Give me a few moments, Bobbie. And send Rose up with tea.’
‘Good girl. He’s in the parlour. The madam is filling him with wine.’
❧
When Alexander was finally allowed to ascend the stairs, he stuffed his hands into his pockets so as not to wring them. He also didn’t want to touch the banister. His palms felt like slugs, wet and slimy, and he pressed them against the inside of his pockets in an attempt to keep them comparatively dry until he had shaken her hand. Was he even supposed to shake her hand?
He had to let go of his right pocket for a moment to rap his knuckles against the door. When he heard soft footfalls he almost tumbled back down the stairwell. His heart was hammering so hard, he could barely think. The ache in his left elbow distracted him, but it was forgotten when the door opened.
She was slender and long-limbed. Alexander wondered if he could encompass her waist with both his hands. The thought was lost when he noticed her proud, graceful stance, her long lashes, the dark brown irises that seemed to swallow all light and, with it, himself. He felt his face flush. He felt too fat, too old, too…widowed.
Before he could shrink back into the dark stairwell, the dark corridor, the entrance hall, the streets and anonymity, she held out her hand. In a gentlemanly reflex so deeply ingrained in Alexander’s nature, he softly took the offered hand into his own and blew a kiss onto her knuckles. ‘My lady,’ he whispered. ‘I am… I…’
‘Did the madam tell you about my fee?’ she asked politely.
‘Oh yes, here.’ His fist shot out clumsily, his fingers unfurled, revealing a small, sweaty gold coin glued to his palm.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she enquired gently.
Tea? Confused, Alexander stumbled through the doorframe. ‘Oh, yes. Please. If you’d be so kind. I’m most…’
Her smile tied his tongue. She led him to a coffee table and offered him the larger of the two armchairs. He sat, placed the guinea on the polished surface, folded his hands in his lap, and stared at his fingernails. They do need a trim, he thought, and gnawed on his cheek.
Silently he watched her fill his cup, nodded when she asked, ‘Milk and sugar?’ and found himself unable to tear his eyes off her beautiful, long fingers, her unblemished skin, how she held the spoon, how she stirred his tea.
‘Am I so unbecoming?’ she whispered.
Alexander’s head snapped up. ‘Oh, no… I… Why would you think that? Um…my apologies.’ He pulled a hanky from his waistcoat pocket and dabbed at his brow. ‘It’s that I never before visited a lady of your…profession. I don’t know the customs. And I…I know I’m old and fat and you are the most beautiful woman I have ever met.’
The last sentence involuntarily burst from his lips together with a fleck of spittle, which landed unceremoniously on Alexander’s side of the table. He bent forward, wiped it off, and took a deep breath.
‘Isn’t kindness, and not a pretty face or body, the most beautiful to behold?’ She gifted him a smile of such sweetness that Alexander believed his heart might stop.
‘May I ask why you came to me, sir?’
He opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off as her hand settled on his knee. ‘Let me rephrase,’ she said. ‘Tell me what I can do for you.’
He swallowed, but his throat was too dry. He took a sip of his tea, and said, ‘I am a widower of six years. I know it sounds…out of sorts, but I still miss my wife so much. My heart hurts. I used to hold her, caress her when we fell asleep together. But now…my arms are empty. My house is empty.’ He looked at his hands as if, only moments ago, his wife had vanished from his embrace.
‘May I know your name?’ Mary asked.
‘Alexander Easy.’
She rose. Her dress seemed to whisper secrets to him. She took a step forward, knelt and wrapped her hands around his. ‘Alexander, my dear, shall we go to bed?’
He shut his eyes and sighed, ‘Thank you.’
She unpinned her hair and turned her back to him so he might help her undress. He asked her to keep her chemise on. For now.
When she lifted the blanket for him, he sat down on the mattress and thought of his wife. He shut his eyes, reached for her, and held her close to him. She did not feel like Agnes, did not smell like her, but he tucked her head upon his shoulder anyway, caressed her hair anyway, and felt a little long-missed peace sneak in anyway.
Alexander woke a bit later, strangely refreshed despite the shortness of his slumber. His left arm ached more now and he asked the woman (what was her name?) for a glass of wine.
‘I am Mary,’ she said, as she poured him the wine. She sat down on the bed, her knees touching his thigh.
How could he have forgotten her name?
Hail Mary, full of grace…
Alexander smiled at the sentiment. He was surprised that her closeness didn’t make him nervous. Tonight, I am a bold man, he told himself, emptied the glass in five hasty gulps, and reached out to Mary. His fingers touched her knee, her thigh, her hip. He didn’t even tremble when he pulled off her chemise.
Oh dear God, he thought when her breasts were revealed — perfectly shaped, like peaches, with perfect pink nipples. He appraised her skin that was the shade of new milk, her hair that shone in the candlelight like a sleek, black creature of the deep sea.
‘I want to touch these,’ he said.
She smiled again, and lowered her gaze, then took his wrist and placed his palm onto her breast.
Alexander sucked in air, as if his head had just broken the surface after a too-long dive.
‘I want to kiss them.’
She whispered, ‘It would be a pleasure.’
He leant in and took her nipple between his lips and then the other. He felt tears spill down his cheeks. He pulled Mary down, and pressed his face between her lovely tits, and sucked and kissed her there and down along her midriff, her navel, her sex. She smelled of roses and lavender, tasted of honey and cream and, faintly, of Agnes. Groaning, he pushed himself up and rolled onto his back, pulling Mary along. She straddled him, her sex hovering above his as if asking for permission.
‘Come to me,’ Alexander groaned, and she lowered herself onto him and rocked him into oblivion.
When he spilt his seed inside her, the pain in his left arm intensified to an unbearable stabbing, spread to his heart, which contracted one final time,
tittered, and fell silent.
A thin line of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth down along his cheek and onto the pillow, and Mary knew at once that this wasn’t the look of a satisfied client. It was the look of a dying man.
‘Help!’ she cried and stumbled off her client. His still-erect cock gave her hope that he might be alive, but she couldn’t find a pulse anywhere on his body, couldn’t hear him breathe or see his ribcage move.
When Alexander’s erection began to deflate, Mary threw her robe around herself, yanked open the door, and raced down the stairs and into the parlour.
—The Missing Mortician—
Gavriel Sévère set the tip of his cane hard against the floor. The knock echoed through Vestry Hall. To his right stood the jury: nineteen honest men of good social standing. His officer, Samuel Stripling, stood on Sévère’s left and began to read aloud the witness statements in chronological order. First, the housekeeper’s, a Mrs Erica Hopegood: how she had loosened the soil around the apple tree saplings, that she had used a small shovel in an attempt to dig in a ball or two of horse manure, and that she had then found the skull of an infant. How she had proceeded to scream, and — her wits failing her for a moment — had lifted the heavy pot but lost her grip on it and set it down too hard, so that the pot cracked, the soil spilt, and the sapling went lopsided.
A man from the jury interrupted. ‘Did you intend to throw the pot from the balcony, Mrs Hopegood?’
The so-addressed blushed and straightened the bonnet on her head. ‘I cannot recall what I intended, but I’m certain it was not that.’
The man nodded, and Stripling took up the reading where he had left off. Mrs Hopegood fidgeted in her chair; the old wood creaked.
‘Can you not recall the name of the vendor who sold your employer, Mr Bunting, the saplings?’ another man from the jury asked.
Mrs Hopegood grunted a nervous laugh. ‘Of course not. Do you ask all the shopkeepers their names and heritage? Mr Bunting purchased the pots at Covent Garden in summer, and I accompanied him, as I already said under oath. The flower seller was very forthcoming, but did not provide his name nor did we ask for it. He offered to send his boys to deliver the purchase to our address. And that is what happened. I gave descriptions of the man, the cart, and the boys to Inspector Walken and to the coroner.’ She pointed her chin to the inspector, who nodded confirmation at the jury. She avoided looking at Sévère.