The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  “And did that happen often?”

  She snorted. “Ye cannae afford to be picky in this job, hen. If Lucy wanted a roof over her head, she had to have customers.”

  “But was there a particular one?” I pressed. “Someone who visited her often.”

  Suspicion dawned in her rheumy eyes. “I’m no’ sure I like where this conversation is heading, lassie.”

  In desperation, I pushed a half crown across the table toward her.

  “Please, Mrs. McAllister.”

  She ran a grimy thumb across the shiny coin with an unreadable expression and then pushed it back to me firmly.

  “My gentlemen pay a lot for me to forget their names, Miss Gilchrist. I’m afraid I cannae be more help.”

  She gathered her shawl around her and stood up, nodding me a curt good-bye.

  “Not even a gentleman by the name of Merchiston?” I called after her. If Ruby McAllister stumbled a little as she heard that name, it could have been the gin. But somehow, I didn’t think so. I followed her, determined not to let her go before answering me. “Did he visit Lucy, Ruby? I swear—he’ll never find out that you told me.” I wasn’t entirely sure I could keep that promise, but I was desperate.

  She turned back, leaning in so close her breath was hot and fetid against my face. “Get out,” she spat. No mistaking her terror now. “This is no place for you. What concern is Lucy of yours, eh? She was nae but a body for you to poke and prod and cut up with your knives. What business is that for a woman? If I see you asking questions here again, I’ll no’ be the one responsible for what happens t’ye.”

  The door slammed behind her as she stormed into the street, and I sat there for a moment, unnerved by the force of her emotion.

  When I gathered my thoughts and stood to leave, I caught the eye of a man at a nearby table. He smiled, revealing fewer teeth than I would have expected in a man his age.

  “How much for a little company, hen?”

  I stared him down haughtily and swept out with all the dignity I could muster. It wasn’t much.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The rest of the day passed in a blur, and I found I took in little of the wisdom my teachers imparted. At four o’clock, when we were finally released, I made for the entrance.

  “Sarah!” Alison called. “It’s Elisabeth Chalmers’s at-home today. Aren’t you coming?”

  I groaned. I was hardly fit for company, especially not those of my peers and the illustrious Mrs. Randall Chalmers.

  Elisabeth Chalmers had accompanied her sister to Scotland three years before, when the older girl had arrived armed with her sizable Canadian fortune and looking for a gentleman willing to exchange it for a title. Within six months, she had announced her engagement to the Earl of Speyside. Elisabeth, on the other hand, had met Randall Chalmers, a short, hirsute epidemiologist ten years her senior, at a fund-raising gala for the university and announced her engagement so quickly after her sister’s that eyebrows were raised across two continents.

  She sat a couple of days a week at the back of the lecture hall, wrapped up against the draughts, either absorbed in a novel or watching the lecture with an expression of mild interest. She was something of a pet to the female students, thanks to her childlike size and physical fragility, and it was a fashion among the men to pay court to her in an exaggerated fashion. If their chivalry offended her husband he never let it show, and though the charming, wry gentleman who doted on a wife young enough to be his ward could easily have been seen as a figure of fun, they treated him with courtesy out of respect for Elisabeth. It was noted, however, that not once had the Chalmers invited one of the male students for tea.

  Although she hid her eyes at the more gruesome aspects of our education, she was broadly supportive of our ambitions, if concerned that we were all wasting our youth by spending it in silent contemplation of the practice of medicine. It was this concern that brought about her monthly “at-homes” for the medical students: although we spent nearly every waking minute of the day together, Elisabeth was keen for us to socialize as well as discuss our studies, and so, for two hours every second Tuesday of the month, we crowded into her drawing room and devoured tea and cake and never once mentioned anatomy, surgery, or disease. She could not have failed to notice the tension between our little group, but she never once acknowledged it, and for those couple of hours I could almost be seduced into believing that these women were indeed my closest friends.

  So I joined the gaggle of students in tramping across the tree-lined Meadows, the walk filled with autumn leaves rimed with frost. The green fields behind the university were popular with strollers and students taking a few gulps of air before being submerged back into the bowels of the lecture halls and tutors’ cramped rooms. With the gray and purple crags looming over the city visible, it was picturesque provided one forgot that the hill was a dormant volcano and the sloping dips of the Meadows were filled-in plague pits from centuries earlier, of course. Still, it felt like glorious freedom, although the company left a little to be desired.

  Julia lit a gasper with a flourish I had tried and failed to emulate and therefore dismissed as pretentious, and strolled ahead with Alison on one arm and a sulky Edith on the other.

  Refusing to be left out, I fell into step with Caroline Carstairs. The youngest of the group, she was gawky and painfully shy, self-conscious of her thick Glaswegian accent. She rarely smiled, and when she spoke seemed unable to discuss anything other than her studies.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I offered awkwardly. I had never been any good at small talk, and these days I so rarely gossiped that when I did my mouth felt rusty with neglect. She nodded wordlessly, chewing on a damp strand of red hair. Any further attempt at conversation was interrupted when a group of young men cycled past, shouting and calling names. One of them threw a stone that caught Edith sharply on the shoulder and she cried out, as much from alarm as pain.

  Town-and-gown riots were rarer than they used to be, but where the sons of the city were now largely left alone by their less-educated neighbors, the vitriol had spread to those of us belonging to the fairer sex.

  “How do you stand it?” asked Alison, exasperated and close to tears after one boy had dogged our steps for ten minutes.

  My breath huffed out in a cloud. “You get used to it. But I must say, one expects it from these brats a little more than from one’s own fellow students.”

  “Julia’s a beast,” Alison said with feeling that would have been more comforting had she not abandoned me in favor of said beast’s company. “Everyone knows it—they just don’t want to be the next target of her cattiness.”

  “Well then, she’s never going to learn,” I grumbled, wrapping my scarf more tightly around my neck as the breeze gusted around us. “She’ll always be the same, right up until the day we graduate.”

  “Was she always that way?” Alison asked. “I mean, you did know her in London.”

  I bit my lip. “We went to the same parties,” I said. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

  I changed the subject, not wanting to dwell on the past. Even here I still felt the aftereffects of that night, like ripples on a pond. When would they end?

  The thought that some whiff of the scandal that had sent me from London might have reached the Chalmers made me feel ill—it wasn’t above Julia to drop subtle hints about it, since she’d managed to alienate the majority of our peers from my company by just that tactic, but if she had said something to Elisabeth, then it would inevitably reach the university professors. We were required to have spotless reputations in order to be admitted, and I knew that although gossip and hearsay were hardly admissible in a court of law, it would be more than enough to see me excluded from the one place I had found refuge.

  It was with considerable relief that we arrived at the house in Warrender Park Crescent to a warm welcome—the fire burned in the grate, and tea and crumpets were already laid out in far greater quantities than I could manage. Elisabeth was pr
istine in a pale apricot dress that suited her fine coloring well—her hair was verging on red, and in the firelight its warm glow was heightened. She looked radiant and welcoming.

  “Girls! How good of you to come. I know how difficult it is for you to take time away from your studies.” She embraced me warmly, and I caught a hint of the powder and scent she used—like everything else about her, it was light and sweet with the slightest undertone of warm spices. It would be so easy to take her at face value, to see the pretty china doll and to miss the flash of spirit beneath.

  “We couldn’t resist the invitation, Elisabeth.” Julia dimpled charmingly. “You know how much we all adore Mrs. Flanders’s cooking!”

  Elisabeth had caused something of a scandal by importing her own cook into this fiercely Scottish household, but Mrs. Flanders was as popular in her own circle as her mistress was in hers, and her baking was a thing of wonder and joy for girls used to lodging houses and the university refectory.

  It was strange to see one another outside the confines of the university buildings. Women who were perennially hunched over a textbook, ink-stained and wrapped up in a shawl to keep out the cold, sat primly on overstuffed armchairs trying to make polite conversation instead of engaging in rigorous academic debate, or bantering with the male students in an effort to show that we weren’t intimidated by their hostility.

  I watched as Caroline, whom I had seen devour three hot buttered crumpets in as many minutes while rushing between the laboratory and dissection rooms, nibble daintily on a slice of caraway cake. She looked lost; her homemade dress well tailored and stylish but hopelessly frumpy next to Elisabeth’s restrained elegance. While most of us had come from comfortable—and, in the case of Julia and myself, rather more so—homes, she and Moira were both working-class, fish out of water among the moneyed second sons or doctors’ offspring that made up our male cohorts for more than just their sex. But while Caroline was overwhelmed, Moira wore her origins proudly. She might not have known which fork to use at a dinner party, but she could wield a scalpel with the best of them and no ladylike tea party was going to intimidate her.

  “What do you think about the vote, Mrs. Chalmers?” she asked boldly. I eyed her in reluctant admiration. While I was curious about our chaperone’s opinions, I would never have dared express it so openly.

  Elisabeth frowned. “It’s so hard to say,” she began. Yes, hard to say indeed, that half the country should be forced to abide by its laws yet have no say in its lawmakers. Hard to say that we should continue to be treated as appendages of our husbands and fathers, degree or not. “Now that women are permitted to study alongside men, now that we—well, you—can enter the professions, surely the franchise can’t be too far behind. And yet there is so much resistance—from ladies as much as gentlemen!”

  “Aye, ladies,” Moira snapped. “Easy to think you don’t need a voice when you’re protected by your husband’s money. But go down onto the streets and you won’t find such delicate dissembling then. It’s all very well being ladylike when you don’t have to fight to put a crust on the table. Women work, Mrs. Chalmers; women have always worked. We may not have been doctors or scientists or academics, but we’ve worked. And there’s nothing like seeing your mother and father work their fingers to the bone just as hard as each other to remind you that the sexes are equal, no matter what the newspapers try to tell us. But it’s the ladies of quality who’ll slow progress down. And why? Because they’ve been told they’re weak and silly so long that they believe it.”

  An awkward silence fell.

  Julia frowned. “But, Moira, it’s women like Emmeline Pankhurst who are fighting for women’s suffrage! They reject what they’ve been raised to believe and they’re the ones who can influence the fight for the vote. I don’t see how bringing class into it helps matters.”

  Julia’s mother, I remembered, was renowned for her radical views and used every dinner party and social gathering to air them in the hope of winning converts to the cause. She was a natural leader like her daughter, and it was true that she had won over several skeptical politicians merely by persuading their wives to join her for supper. But Moira’s eyes burned, and she was not one to take injustice lightly.

  “So we’re to stay silent and clean your houses while the likes of you and Gilchrist chum up with the men in power, is that it?”

  “That’s rot, and you know it is. We’re simply trying to focus our energies where they will be most successful. Although if we were, I’m sure Gilchrist could perform that duty admirably.”

  I jolted back as though she had hit me. Nausea coiled in my stomach, and even Julia had blanched slightly, as though she had forgotten where she was.

  Smoothly, Elisabeth glided in to calm the waters. “I don’t see why the vote shouldn’t be extended to washerwomen as well as heiresses. Even if our brains are weaker than a man’s, a lady and her maid are every bit as capable as each other.”

  “Except that the washerwoman is likely to be overworked, exhausted, and ill,” I pointed out. “And hardly in a frame of mind to make a decision beyond what to cook for dinner, between doing the duchess’s laundry, taking in mending, and trying to keep the wolf from the door. She might be perfectly capable, but when one is trying to stay off the streets, the workhouse is more important than Parliament.”

  “Sarah fancies herself a great philanthropist.” Edith smirked.

  “I make no such pretensions,” I said, fighting to keep my temper in check. “But I’m lucky enough to be allowed to assist at the Saint Giles’s Infirmary, and if you spent so much as a day there, then you’d understand.”

  With the ease of practice that came from years of playing the perfect hostess, Elisabeth turned the subject back to the vote. Her enthusiasm went beyond polite drawing-room conversation, and I was surprised. Most of the female students were agitating for it, of course, as well as the few female academics employed by the university. But aristocratic ladies in drawing rooms were supposed to purse their lips and frown in disapproval, not confess that they had donated fifty pounds to the Scottish League for Women’s Suffrage.

  “I shall join them in the long vacation,” Julia announced, to no one’s surprise. I wondered cynically how much her passions were inflamed by the thought of political equality and how much of it was the desire to shock.

  “I wish I could go to London and meet the Pankhurst sisters.” Elisabeth sighed. She turned to me, eyes glowing. “Sarah, you must attend a meeting when you go home for Christmas, and tell us all about it!”

  “I will be staying in Edinburgh over Christmas, with my aunt and uncle,” I said with a smile that didn’t reach my eyes.

  Elisabeth clapped her hands. “Well then, you must spend Hogmanay with us! It’s such a glorious party, an English New Year is nothing to it.”

  “And will your parents be joining you?” Julia asked me with syrupy sweetness.

  “Of course.” The lie slipped out before I could stop myself, and I relished the startled look in Julia’s eyes, before remembering that I would not be seeing my family for some time.

  The conversation continued in a similar vein over the afternoon, debating everything from politics to the latest fashions, until, having had their fill of tea and chat, the others drifted off across the darkening Meadows back to their lodgings. Soon I was the only one left, and I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, self-conscious about imposing on Elisabeth’s kindness until my uncle’s carriage arrived.

  “Please, Sarah, have some more tea. Or would you prefer coffee? You look so tired. You girls work so hard, I know, but you most of all.”

  “That isn’t true,” I said. “Why, Alison Thornhill spends far longer in the library than I do, and Edith is constantly badgering the tutors for extra sessions.”

  “In class, perhaps, but what about the infirmary? You do work that the nurses ought to be doing, and you don’t even get paid for the privilege!”

  “Fiona Leadbetter needs my help, and I give it gladly. They have so
little money. It would destroy her if they had to close.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should let it become your whole life.”

  “Oh, there’s no chance of that,” I said with grim humor. “Not while my aunt is trying to marry me off to Miles Greene.”

  At the mention of romance, her face lit up. It was almost comedic, but I had yet to meet anyone capable of resisting her imploring blue gaze.

  “I don’t like him, so there’s no need to look at me like that,” I said. “Oh, I’m sure he’s very sweet, but he’s younger than me, and, quite frankly, I’ve met cocker spaniels with more intellect.”

  “Is that so important?” Elisabeth asked. “Surely you’re clever enough for both of you!”

  I fought back the urge to laugh. It had been a long time since I had occasion to consider what I would want from a suitor. Although even the thought of it was discomfiting, I found myself confessing. “I want someone to discuss things with. Not just little things like household matters, but the state of the world, politics, and religion. I want someone who won’t talk down to me. And I want someone I don’t have to talk down to either. Is that really too much to ask?”

  She and I both knew the answer to that.

  “It sounds as though you want a debating society, not a husband!”

  I sighed. “Julia’s starting one, haven’t you heard? She says she’s sick of the Women’s Debating Society excluding us because they think women doctors are indecent, so she’s starting one for the medical students.”

  “That should be . . .” Elisabeth trailed off.

  “It will be Julia on whatever hobbyhorse is fashionable that week,” I said. “The vote, bloomers, the right to stay and smoke with the gentlemen after meals instead of retiring to the drawing room to discuss the problem of recruiting decent housemaids.” Seeing her expression, I explained, “Oh, it’s not that I don’t want those things, of course I do. But I know Julia well enough to know that I won’t be welcome there.”