The Wages of Sin

by Kaite Welsh

  “May. An orphan,” Miss Hartigan informed us, not bothering to lower her voice. “She was taken in by some distant cousins, but they were compelled to send her to me after she told scurrilous tales about her adoptive father. We are trying to instill honesty into her, but she persists in repeating the stories and frightening the other girls. She wears that sign to remind others not to heed her.”

  I shivered, both at the implication of her words and the bland harshness of her tone. How many other girls had been sent here to keep them quiet? As my aunt and Miss Hartigan moved on, I hung back. I touched the girl’s arm and she let out a little shriek that she muffled with her hand. In the gloom, I could see the whites of her eyes. She looked like a trapped animal.

  “I’m sorry to have frightened you,” I said as gently as possible. “I just wanted to tell you I believe you. And that what he did was wrong and it wasn’t your fault, no matter what he said. I know Miss Hartigan isn’t exactly kind, but at least you’re safe here.”

  She gave me a look that was older than her years. “Aye,” she said tonelessly. “That’s what Lucy said.”

  My heart hammered in my chest so loudly that I thought May must have been able to hear it.

  “Lucy?” I whispered.

  “She lived here for a while, but she ran away.” She bit her lip, looking frightened. “Miss Hartigan said she were a wicked girl, and we weren’t to talk about her again.”

  “I won’t tell her,” I promised. “What did Lucy look like?”

  “Dark hair,” May said, looking confused. “It was long, Miss Hartigan didn’t make her cut it like some of the others because she was nearly old enough to leave. And her eyes were a sort of grayish green. D’ye ken her, miss?”

  “I think I have seen her,” I said carefully, not wanting to tell May of the fate that had met her friend. I rummaged in my bag and withdraw her portrait. “Is this her?”

  It had become so creased that I had been forced to redraw it. Although this second version was as close to the original as I could make it, it seemed even further from Lucy’s true likeness, as if her memory was being eroded even as her flesh began to degrade in some unknown plot.

  The little girl nodded, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Aye, that’s Lucy.” She took the picture from me and turned it over thoughtfully. She pointed at the picture of Merchiston.

  “And that’s the man that took her away.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  If Aurora Greene was anything less than delighted to see me, she hid it very well. Dressed in a rich teal that brought out the blue of her eyes, as Aunt Emily effusively informed her, she was in sparkling form. I tried to imagine life as her daughter-in-law, forever in her shadow, and failed. Even sitting opposite her, in a pale green dress that had looked charmingly delicate in my looking glass that morning, I felt like a faded imitation, a pale watercolor of a girl next to Rossetti’s finest.

  She clasped my hands, and I wondered if she was imagining a ring on one.

  “Emily tells me that you got on famously at the reformatory yesterday! I’m sure you did Miss Hartigan’s girls a world of good.”

  “I hope so,” I said, shrinking under her effusiveness.

  “And it must make a pleasant change from all those sick people.” She shuddered. Half the girls there had rickets; most were malnourished to some degree that all the plain food in the world wasn’t going to cure, and from the unpleasant itching in my scalp, at least one of them had had lice.

  “Yes.” I smiled weakly. “Although that is rewarding too, in its own way.”

  “Hmm.” Aurora looked politely unconvinced, and I muffled a yelp when the heel of Aunt Emily’s shoe connected with my ankle.

  “Tell me,” I pressed, “where does Miss Hartigan find these girls? Are they all orphans or . . . um . . .” I trailed off, unable to find a euphemism for prostitute suitable for the parlor.

  She nodded sadly. “Most. Although some have families who simply despair of them and find that the unadorned environment of the reformatory calms their wild spirits.” Unadorned was one word for it, the place was practically a prison.

  “What an excellent idea,” Aunt Emily replied pointedly. “They say boys can be troublesome, but girls these days have all manner of strange ideas in their heads—and this fad for female emancipation is only making matters worse.”

  Aurora nodded sadly, and the two lapsed into discussion of the sad state of affairs that all this “political agitating and foolish nonsense about education—begging your pardon, Sarah” had led to.

  “And where do they go afterward?” I interrupted. “Miss Hartigan’s girls? Do they all go into service?”

  “Some stay on as teachers, like Miss Dawson. One or two get married immediately—I know of a curate who found a most submissive and obliging wife in one of the reformatory’s successes. He was pleased with her modesty and penitence. They now reside in Kirkcaldy, I believe.”

  I shuddered inwardly at the thought. I doubt the curate’s bride had been given much choice, and the thought of him picking out a suitable wife from the miserable girls I had met, as though he were choosing a new surplice, turned my stomach. But I knew better than to say so.

  “It just shows that even the most ungovernable girls can be made to turn their back on their former ways and accept a life of wifely servitude,” Aunt Emily agreed, her eyes hard and glittering as she looked at me for concurrence.

  “Do they all turn their backs on sin?” I questioned. “It would be a rare success indeed if they all went on to live a life of moral rectitude.”

  Aunt Emily glared at me. “I’m sure there are one or two incurable cases,” she said tartly. “Some girls are simply born wicked and don’t appreciate the help they’re given to become upstanding Christian women.”

  Subtlety, thy name is Emily Fitzherbert.

  I allowed the conversation to drift to more pressing matters, such as the weather and the health of Aurora’s new lady’s maid, but before we left, I expressed a carefully worded interest in her own visits to the reformatory—had she met any girls who had caught her attention particularly, did Miss Hartigan discuss their progress with her? To my disappointment, Aurora seemed to remember only the dullest girls, the remorseful, quiet ones who all blurred into one for her anyway.

  The thing that stood out most clearly in Aurora Greene’s mind was her own generosity of spirit and finances in helping these girls onto a better path. I wondered if she was doing the same for me, if I was simply another charity case to be redeemed. “This is my daughter-in-law,” I imagined her telling her friends in hushed tones. “Her family thought she was a hopeless case, with a ruined reputation and”—she would shudder—“a university education. But here she is, a wife and mother, the paragon of Christian virtue.” Aunt Emily would be delighted, my mother would forgive me, and I would die of boredom within a week.

  “She has taken a fancy to you,” my aunt gloated in the privacy of her carriage. “I think she is impressed by your good works, even in that dreadful place.”

  “Would she be as impressed with a doctor for a daughter-in-law?” I snapped. Aunt Emily was silent, her lips pinched and her face pale. We had never openly acknowledged where this whole business was leading, but now it was unavoidable.

  “You’ll find marriage needs your sharp mind just as much as medicine,” she warned.

  She sounded exactly like her sister. “Being a wife and mother is as hard as any university degree,” Mother had told me once when I had flown into yet another fury at the prospect of being forced into marriage and motherhood. “Save your brains for your husband.”

  My mother was clever, cultured, able to hold her own in any conversation. I should have liked to see her go up against any one of the professors at the university. But her cleverness was cloaked in yards of lace and hats with exotic plumage, and although she spoke French and German with fluency even I lacked, her preferred language was the language of conduct books and etiquette manuals. My father was lauded for his
brains, but he had never rescued a trading agreement simply by altering a seating arrangement.

  Men like Uncle Hugh and my father could pretend they wanted a dimwit for a wife all they liked, but when it came to running a household and a family what use was an imbecile with as many feathers in her head as on her Parisian-trimmed hat? If I submitted to the fate my family were plotting over dinner parties and social calls, I would be bored but I would never be idle.

  “For all men crow over their accomplishments, we wives work just as hard,” Aunt Emily coaxed. “Use your mathematics for balancing a household budget and then tell me you don’t have an occupation.”

  “And I suppose other duties are pure biology,” I suggested tartly.

  “Don’t be so vulgar, Sarah! Surely,” she added, a pleading note in her voice, “if you were offered the option of a better life, a normal life, you would take it? Under present circumstances I quite understand your need for a distraction—”

  “A profession,” I interrupted. “It isn’t a profanity, Aunt Emily, you can say the word.”

  “It’s no substitute for a husband, and you know it!” The words echoed in the air like a gunshot.

  “I don’t want a husband,” I replied through gritted teeth.

  “I can understand that you might be tentative about certain . . . aspects of marriage,” she said quietly. I stared at her in mute shock. “But the protection offered by a husband, a home . . . Surely you must see that all this gallivanting around, aping the men, is just throwing yourself in the path of similar trouble?”

  It was as good as admitting what had really happened to me that night. Of all the people to have listened to my protestations, had Aunt Emily been the one to believe me all this time?

  “You were so unwell,” she continued diffidently. I wondered just how much my mother had told her, if she had even the faintest inkling that any marriage she consigned me to would be barren even if I could suffer Miles’s clammy attentions. “All those hours you spend reading textbooks won’t get color back into your cheeks. I know you think me harsh, but, Sarah, you cannot want to become a pariah! If you would just unbend a little, you might find real happiness.”

  It was the kindest thing I could ever remember her saying to me, and unwanted tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I blinked them back sulkily and stared out the window. I couldn’t afford to dwell on this softening of my stern aunt. Despite all Merchiston’s warnings, I finally had new information about Lucy, and I knew just where to find more.

  Against all the odds, my acquaintance with the Greenes looked as though it would prove useful after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  As Mrs. Effie Muir, my aunt’s best friend, explained in minute detail the problems she was having with her new parlormaid, I smiled sympathetically and scanned the crowds for Griselda Hartigan. She was being paraded around the room by Aunt Emily, keen to show off the beneficiary of her generosity. Miss Hartigan recited her thanks again and again, while intimating to each new acquaintance just how welcome further donations to the refuge would be. Beneath her smile, she looked out of place, in what was clearly her best dress—a sober oyster-gray affair that did little for her complexion and made her look more like a governess who had temporarily mislaid her charges than the proprietress of a reformatory. By the time Aunt Emily approached us, the other woman was clearly flagging and after the rote introductions had been made, I turned to my aunt.

  “You must allow me to take over—you’ve barely sat down all night, and I know that Mrs. Muir wants to tell you all about the difficulties she’s having with her servants. Do take a seat and enjoy the party—I’ll introduce Miss Hartigan to the vicar.”

  For all her love of showing off, at the prospect of a chance to complain about the terrible standards in service these days, Aunt Emily handed Miss Hartigan over to me like a parcel. I quickly ushered her away, eager to get her on her own.

  “You must be thirsty,” I twittered, hoping to disarm her. “Please, let’s get you a drink.”

  She gave me a tight smile. “I’m afraid I never touch alcohol.” Of course—a more sanctimonious woman I had yet to meet, God forbid one drop of the demon drink should pass her lips. So much for my hope that she might become a little too relaxed and find herself saying more than she should.

  “Some lemonade, then,” I pressed, taking her by the arm. Once we were suitably refreshed—lemonade for her and something stronger for me—I steered her to a quiet corner of the room where we were unlikely to be interrupted.

  “Your aunt’s donation was most kind,” she began, repeating the sentiment she must have recited a dozen times already this evening. “The work we do couldn’t possibly continue without such generous benefactors.”

  I seized on the first area of common ground I had come across.

  “Why, the Saint Giles’s Infirmary has a similar problem!” I gushed. “But I must say, you have far better luck in securing funding. How on earth do you manage it?” Miss Hartigan’s eyes widened. “You know the infirmary?” I asked, rushing on before I could give her a chance to respond. “Of course—we must meet some of the same unfortunate women.”

  “I believe that some of the wretched souls we seek to guide onto a better path originate from the slums,” she concurred, unsure if I was leading her into some trap that would see this promise of funds dissolve before her eyes.

  “And do many return?” I asked, fighting to keep my tone light. “Only, I believe I know a girl who stayed at your establishment. Her name was Lucy and she left with a man named Gregory Merchiston.”

  Miss Hartigan swallowed convulsively, and she seemed even paler than before. Although her next words were spoken in a firm voice that brooked no disagreement, I knew I had hit my mark. “I’m afraid that some women appear to be past redemption,” she said pointedly.

  I fought the urge to slap her. “Not terribly Christian of you,” I replied coolly. “I know that my aunt was most impressed by your commitment to saving the souls of all the girls who entered your doors.” A note of warning crept into my voice. “In fact, I believe that was the deciding factor in choosing to bestow what I am certain is only the first of many generous gifts to your reformatory.”

  Understanding dawned in her eyes. “Of course, some of our girls have to be sent to us several times before God’s message finally sinks in. Perhaps your Lucy is one of them. Your aunt is presenting the donation in front of the whole refuge tomorrow—if you attend, I’ll look through my records and see if I recall anyone by that name.”

  I smiled at my first piece of good news in weeks. “I look forward to it, Miss Hartigan.”

  My triumph, although justified, was not without its consequences. If ever I had envied the male students their freedom, it was not the next morning. Getting up had never been harder, and it was only by the concerted efforts of Agnes—who had eventually resorted to pinching me awake—that I made it out of the door in time to catch my first lecture before it started. I had gulped down a cup of strong black coffee, and was luckily feeling the effects by the time Dr. Williamson called on me to dissect an arm. Disembodied limbs and what I was forced to admit was the mildest of headaches was hardly the most pleasant combination. I resolved firmly to take the pledge and never drink again, as I made a slightly shakier than normal incision in the firm, cool flesh. Focusing all my efforts on my work proved helpful, even if the smell turned my stomach, and I returned to my seat feeling almost thoroughly rejuvenated.

  Early that evening, Aunt Emily and I alighted from our carriage into the reformatory courtyard. Aunt Emily was dressed as every inch the lady bountiful in a plum coat and dramatically large hat trimmed with more feathers than I had ever seen in one place. Including on a bird. Next to her, the building looked even darker and dingier than before.

  “Well”—she tutted—“at least now they can afford to a few more gas lamps.” I cringed, wondering how much of the bequest Miss Hartigan would have to sacrifice to lighting. How unsurprising that my aunt was mor
e concerned with the building’s exterior than the lives of the girls locked inside. Doubtless they would soon be attired in smart new pinafores and neat little straw boaters that would be of no use when they left Miss Hartigan’s care with rickets and precious few skills that would allow them to survive in the harsh world outside.

  Rather than say any of this aloud, I meekly followed her across the yard, where five girls paused their game of hopscotch to stare at us. Their expressions were unreadable, schooled to impassiveness just as their wealthier counterparts across the city were. Society lady or scullery maid—no matter what our future held, we were expected to go about it looking as though we had never even conceived of having an opinion about anything.

  As we were led through the gloomy corridors, Aunt Emily expounding on her visions of architectural improvement all the while, I scoured the rooms we passed for a glimpse of May, the little girl I had spoken to before. As we neared Miss Hartigan’s study, I fought to calm the pounding of my heart. She could be at her lessons or working in the laundry. There were any number of reasons why I had not seen her, but the thought that she had run off in search of Lucy would not abandon me.

  Aunt Emily shifted impatiently from foot to foot as our guide’s hesitant knock was met with silence. When another rap on the door was similarly ignored, Aunt Emily pushed past her, muttering crossly under her breath about people who couldn’t show the common courtesy to open the door. She paused in the doorway, and I craned my neck to see what had stopped her midsentence.

  Griselda Hartigan lay slumped on the floor. Behind us, the girl started to scream.

  I winced as I heard the crack of my aunt’s palm against the girl’s cheek.

  “Hush, child,” she said firmly. “You’re hysterical. Go fetch the police. Sarah, what on earth are you doing?”