The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  “Is that why you never married?” I asked tentatively.

  She smiled tightly. “Even the kindest of men can disappoint you.”

  I voiced a thought that had been nagging at me since our unruly patient had been carted off. “That girl. Was there nowhere else that could help her? I know they exist. Doctors who help girls who are . . . in trouble, like she is. Like Lucy was.”

  Fiona paled. “Sarah, what are you trying to tell me?”

  I felt a hot wave of shame wash over me and shrank from her doctor’s gaze. I had nothing to worry about, but that sick feeling of guilt prickled at my skin all the same. This was how it would be from now on, the first conclusion anyone would jump to. Fiona didn’t know about my sordid history, but others did. Every time I looked tired or plump, every time I fought down a rising tide of vomit at the dissection table, the assumption would be the same—I had fallen back into my old ways and paid the price. It didn’t matter how impossible it was with my scarred stomach and butchered reproductive system, the accusation was as bad as the crime.

  “I’m not,” I managed to say. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean me. But these girls must go somewhere, surely?”

  “Old witches with gin and rusty knitting needles, you mean? That’s what it looks like, Sarah. I’ve treated women who gave themselves lead poisoning, or broken limbs from a fall. Women who contract septicemia because their fee only covered a sharp knife, not a clean one. Put any thought of kindly wisewomen with pennyroyal tea aside. You could be struck off for even talking about it in front of the wrong person. For God’s sake, we could lose the few benefactors we still have!”

  I thought back to a staircase and the bruises that followed, the sight of my mother watching immobile from a doorway, and I knew there were some things I could never share.

  She paused, hand hovering over the teapot. “If you do ever find yourself in a situation you can’t get out of, promise me you’ll let me know? That’s not something anyone should have to go through alone.”

  I wished I had known her in London. What it would have been to have her on my side when everyone from my parents to my doctors tried to scrub the events of that night from my body and my mind. Now the rawness was fading, but her presence was a balm.

  “Your patients are very lucky to have you,” I whispered.

  She was silent for a long moment before I asked the question that had been preying on my mind every time I saw her frowning over the accounts or trying to charm some new donor.

  “Is the infirmary really in so much trouble?”

  Fiona grimaced. “If it weren’t for your uncle’s good nature—”

  “You mean his money,” I interrupted.

  “Quite. Without that help, we’d be bankrupt by now. We’re going to have to raise our fees as it is, even if it means sending away the people who need us most. The problem is”—Fiona sighed, rubbing her eyes—“is that there’s so many of them.”

  “Like Lucy,” I said quietly.

  Fiona laughed. “Oh, if it weren’t for Ruby McAllister and women like her, we would have had to close our doors long ago. Whoremongers may cause as many problems as they solve, but at least they pay their bills.” She caught my shocked expression in the flickering firelight. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I’d forgotten that you aren’t quite as cynical as the rest of us.” She sipped her tea, eyeing me over the rim of the cup. “Don’t worry, you will be.”

  I couldn’t imagine seeing prostitution in such pragmatic terms.

  “Is there nothing we can do to help them?”

  “Help them? Do you really think that if you rescue a girl from that life she’ll vanish from our doorstep? At least with Ruby she had a roof over her head, decent food, and as much gin as she needed to forget how dreadful her life is. How many of our other patients can say the same?”

  “Is that really the best they’re supposed to hope for?” I burst out. “Trading their bodies for security? I suppose they should be grateful to women like Ruby. After all, it isn’t as though women like Lucy have feelings.”

  Fiona leaned forward and covered her hand in mine.

  “Don’t dwell on the fate of one girl, Sarah. We see women like her every day. Ruby will have found a replacement by now, some girl who was walking the streets or in another madam’s employ. She’ll take Lucy’s place in her bed, with her callers, and soon even Ruby will forget she ever existed. I suggest you do the same.”

  I snatched my hand away and pressed it to my mouth, trying to force back the sob that fought its way out of my throat. Fiona sighed.

  “For God’s sake, Sarah! Ruby sold her corpse to the university for dissection. She can’t afford finer feelings about another dead whore and neither can you.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Ruby sold her? But she told me—”

  Fiona blanched. “You went to speak to her? Alone? Sarah, you bloody little fool! Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? You’re lucky to have made it out of there alive. Women like Ruby wait all their wretched careers for women like you, silly untouched girls stumbling through their doors. A cup of tea laced with opium and you’d never have left. The perfect girl for men who like their whores with a little refinement.”

  I shuddered. I might not be as untarnished as Fiona assumed, but the thought that Ruby might have trapped me there had never occurred to me. I saw myself through Fiona’s world-weary tired eyes—a naïve young lady wandering the slums like a tourist along the streets of Paris, protected only by the false sense of invulnerability that wealth and privilege afforded.

  “Promise me that you won’t go back there,” she said. “Give me your word, Sarah. If anything happened to you there, I’d never forgive myself.”

  I swallowed and made a promise I didn’t know if I could keep.

  We returned to the clinic in time for my uncle’s carriage, and I gazed out the window lost in thought. Women whose gowns offered little protection against the elements and even less against passersby stood shivering in huddles, waiting for a man to like the look of them enough for a quick tumble. Unlikely in this freezing weather, but a few customers approached them and they disappeared in pairs to a more private location. I watched idly, numbed now to the shock of seeing this trade in flesh take place before my eyes. As the carriage drove through a puddle of yellow gaslight, I saw the glint of coins being exchanged, and a familiar set of features illuminated briefly in the artificial light.

  It was Randall Chalmers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I barely listened during Professor Chalmers’s epidemiology lecture. I didn’t want to hear a word the man said, to be forced to take him as a mentor, an exemplar of medical ability, not when I knew him for the hypocrite he was. My driver had not lingered, the horses briskly trotting out of the slums as Chalmers and the woman he had bought left to conclude their transaction, and I was glad of it. I didn’t want to see where he went next.

  I was tired, so tired, of following men through their endless maze of degradation—first Paul, then Merchiston, and now the husband of the closest thing I had to a friend. I was sick with anger and disappointment. How dare he? He was using some of the most fragile women in the city for his idle gratification, with no thought about his wife, whose heart this would break, and the diseases to which he was exposing a woman he had vowed to love and to cherish. I wondered if there was any honor in men anymore, if there ever had been.

  He called on me, and I answered mechanically, my thoughts not in the lecture hall with him but in the warm comfort of his wife’s drawing room.

  How would I tell Elisabeth? My heart ached at the thought of breaking hers, but she had a right to know, to refuse his entry to her bed unless he could prove he was healthy and faithful, unless he swore to cease these illicit visits to the most degraded of Edinburgh’s women. And yet the thought of tearing her world asunder, of dragging even more filth into her life, made me ill. What right had I to ruin her happiness? But I wasn’t ruining it, I reminded myself. Randall Chalmers was. And if he w
as too much of a coward and a hypocrite to let his wife know about his secret life, then I most certainly was not.

  I sat through the morning’s lectures, resolved to focus on my work. By the time the clock in the square tolled midday, I was thinking like a medical student again. It was a relief to break for luncheon—I hadn’t eaten much of the toast Agnes had given me, and I had gone directly to the library before the rest of the house had risen, so I had even been denied a decent breakfast. I caught Alison Thornhill’s eye as we left a particularly grueling chemistry lecture.

  “I’ll stand you a cup of coffee and a sticky bun if you’ll distract me from thinking about our Materia Medica essays,” I offered.

  She grimaced. “I think I need something stronger, if I don’t want to cry over it.”

  “Our reputations are in enough trouble as it is.” I laughed. “If we start drinking alcohol with luncheon, they might never recover.”

  Ten minutes later saw us at a cramped table in a tearoom on the South Bridge, where, just as Alison had promised, the coffee was strong and the food cheap.

  “The first month, I was so homesick I cried myself to sleep every night,” Alison confessed. “I even packed my bags twice. The last time, I made it halfway to Waverley station!”

  “What made you turn back?” I asked curiously.

  She was silent for a moment. “I imagined what my life would be like if I didn’t. If I got on the train and went home, tail between my legs, and settled down with the man Mamma picked out for me when I was still in pigtails. No university, no profession, just suffocating slowly for the rest of my life.”

  It was a grim image, and not one I was sure I had avoided.

  Alison looked at me expectantly. I pasted on a smile.

  “I don’t get homesick,” I lied.

  “At least you’re with family.”

  I snorted. “Aunt Emily and Uncle Hugh? I’ve had more fun at funerals. They’re desperate for me to give up my studies, but at least they haven’t tried to stop me.”

  We carefully avoided my strained relationship with our classmates and the reason for it. I could have told her the truth then and there—something in her countenance gave me the idea that she would be sympathetic—but words failed me, and I let her assume the stories were true. It was, I knew, very difficult not to listen when scurrilous rumors were being passed from student to student. Still, although I appreciated Alison’s disinterest, I didn’t entirely believe in it.

  The hour passed pleasantly, but soon it was time to return to the draughty lecture halls and await our collective fate. My stomach was in my boots, and the similarly grim expressions on the faces of my fellow students did little to reassure me. All they had to worry about was the quality of their work. I had made the error of turning the arbiter of my academic fate into an adversary.

  Never one to spare a student public humiliation, Merchiston chose to read out our marks and call us up to receive our dissected papers. It was a mixed bag, and for once I couldn’t even enjoy the schadenfreude of seeing Edith receive an appallingly low mark and an essay correspondingly scribbled all over in bloodred ink.

  “Miss Sarah Gilchrist,” he announced, his voice as free of any inflection as it had been when he had read out the names of my fellows. “Ninety-seven percent.” So I wasn’t to be punished for my investigations after all. Somehow I managed to make my way back to my seat, and I read the few comments scribbled in the margins: Overall a good attempt, but I get the distinct impression your mind was elsewhere when you wrote this. Don’t let it happen again.—G. M.

  It wasn’t an explicit threat. After our previous encounters, it didn’t have to be.

  I let the crowd of students surge past me, wanting to speak to the professor alone. As I passed him on my way out, I paused. He tensed, clearly expecting a row.

  “Thank you, sir.” I meant it. “I’ll do better next time.” I left it to him to decide if I meant my academic work or my investigation.

  His smile as I exited the room was tinged with something akin to amusement, but his eyes remained cold. I was not sorry to leave, but as I moved out into the corridor, I glanced back to see his gaze still fixed on me.

  I threw myself into my work that afternoon, desperate for a reprieve from the complications that had wormed their way into my life. I took notes until my hand cramped, my skin blotchy with ink, and even when we walked between classrooms, I worked to keep my mind off Lucy by reciting the periodic table to myself. My studies had always been my refuge, I didn’t know how I would cope if they were taken away from me. I barely spoke a word except to answer questions, and my arm ached with the amount of times I had raised it.

  My attempts at distraction didn’t stop at the lecture theater—I had hit upon the cleverest scheme in my attempts to win over Aunt Emily and Uncle Hugh, one that did not involve an eligible bachelor to redeem me. I had joined the Edinburgh University Women’s Christian Union and was to attend a dinner with Reverend Spinks with my peers tonight at the home of Aileen Ferguson, the history department’s only female lecturer.

  Reverend Spinks frowned. “But surely the medical lassies have their own society? Why, I spoke to them just last week.” I groaned inwardly. It was true that Jessie McBride, a daughter of the manse from Inverclyde studying mathematics, had set up just such a society a month earlier in protest at the “medical lassies’” exclusion from the EUWCU committee, but she had made it abundantly clear that I would not be welcome as a member. Although no great fan of Julia Latymer’s, finding her too radical for her more conservative liking, Jessie had nevertheless eaten up every detail of the tale Julia had spun of my disgrace and felt that my presence there imperiled all the other female students—and possibly some of the men as well.

  There was only one thing to do to avoid any reference to the scandal that tainted me. I pasted on the charming smile I had been using on Aunt Emily to little avail these past few months and lied through my teeth.

  “But it is such a small group, Reverend, and we are in each other’s pockets constantly as it is. I had hoped to extend my circle of Christian acquaintances here.”

  My remarks passed muster, for he simply shrugged and turned his attention to what was doubtless his keynote speech at the lecture last week.

  “If there was ever a group of young ladies more in need of guidance . . .” He sighed, shaking his head. “No good can come of this fad for lady doctors. Such intimate knowledge of . . . of the human form”—he was blushing madly, and I would have felt sorry for him if I hadn’t felt so angry—“is neither healthy nor moral. It can only end in disaster and ruin, I warn you now!”

  “But surely,” I argued, “it is far more proper for a lady to be administered to by one of her own sex?”

  “Nonsense.” Reverend Spinks frowned. “Why, medical men are above such things.”

  “Then the same must apply for medical women!” I pointed out.

  Seeing that I was not to be argued with, he reverted back to condescension as a means of silencing me.

  “My dear girl,” he informed me, blithely ignoring the way I bridled at the unwanted endearment, “you should consider it your duty to stay above the venal concerns of the human body and instead pay attention to improving the condition of the human soul.”

  “But we are not above the concerns of the body,” a redheaded girl argued, leaning on her elbows on the table to the thin-lipped horror of Reverend Spinks. “Why, if we must produce another generation of good Christian souls, we can hardly avoid it.”

  I thought that the good revered was about to faint with shock. I wondered idly in what his disgust of the human body was rooted. Mostly, I was grateful that his opprobrium was diverted from me, at least temporarily.

  When we retired to the drawing room, leaving the Reverend and Mr. Ferguson to their cigars and piety, conversation descended into a free-for-all. Although the majority of my companions seemed a trifle hazy, to say the least, about what went on in the marital bed, they were nonetheless opinionated on t
he matter to a degree that would have horrified the reverend.

  Although I hung back, not wanting to risk drawing attention to myself lest rumors of my history had circulated around the whole damn university, a historian by the name of Clara Hamilton dragged me into the debate with a determined expression, and I found myself explaining the damage that ignorance could do, the girls little more than children who arrived at the infirmary with no understanding of how they came to be pregnant.

  Cloistered as I was in the medical school, which had little to do with the rest of the university barring shared science lectures, my exposure to the other women newly admitted had been minimal. Away from the hothouse that I had discovered to be less than welcoming, I found a certain morbid fascination with my studies among even the more prim and proper members of the group. Mired in essay after lecture after experiment after dissection, I had developed an immunity to the work we were doing, although it thrilled me no less for that. I realized I was building up the mental calluses needed for my chosen path, and I felt a little surge of pride.

  The whole evening cheered me so much that, although I doubted that Reverend Spinks would have me back, I felt part of the fabric of the university, the way I had hoped I would before my past was raked up again. Guilt pricked me, as I realized that I hadn’t thought of Lucy all evening. Perhaps Merchiston was right: perhaps this was a matter best left alone.

  Drinking tea with Aunt Emily in her parlor, I was able to answer with total honesty her questions about the day’s activities. Without the fear that I would let something slip, we talked with relative ease. She pointedly ignored all explicit references to my studies, but at least she wasn’t criticizing them outright. I wondered how much that had to do with acceptance and how much it had to do with the fact that the Greenes had asked if we would accompany them to church on Sunday, an invitation that Aunt Emily issued like a military command over breakfast. I suspected that I would not like the answer. In any case, there was a hurdle to be overcome before I was reunited with my would-be suitor, one that would require holding my tongue on matters more delicate than fending off an unwanted proposal. The Chalmers had invited us to take a walk around the pleasure gardens on Saturday afternoon, and Aunt Emily had accepted with relish.