“—or come to the city and turned my hand to laundry or needlework—”
“Which wouldn’t pay thee enough to feed thyself, let alone thy daughters!”
“Perhaps Friend Cadwallader hasn’t found occasion to discover what the life of a laundress is like,” Silvia said. She finished her pie, and her bony shoulders slumped a little, relaxing in the late-afternoon sun. “I suppose we must look for the light within him and Friend Sharpless, mustn’t we?”
“Yes,” Rachel said reluctantly. “But I may require a few more apples and a bottle of beer before such a search might be effective.”
Silvia laughed, and Rachel’s heart rose to hear it. Silvia Hardman was battered, no doubt of it—but not yet broken.
“Still, it would have been good to be part of a meeting once again,” Silvia said wistfully. “I have not had such company or support in many years.”
Rachel swallowed her last bite and took hold of Silvia’s hand. It was slender, callused, and illused, bearing the burns and scars of unrelenting toil and many small household disasters.
“Wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name, there am I,” Rachel said, and pointed at Silvia, then herself. “One. Two.”
Silvia smiled, despite herself, and her true nature—kind and humorous—peeped out behind the wariness in her eyes.
“Then thee is my meeting, Rachel. I am blessed.”
IAN CAME BACK from his visit to Elfreth’s Alley in something of a brown study, oblivious to the shouts of dairymaids and beer sellers.
He’d thought he might have to expend considerable time and money in order to get the inhabitants of the brothel to talk, but the mere mention of Jane Pocock’s name had opened floodgates of gossip, and he felt as one might after being washed overboard from a ship and carried ashore in a flurry of foam and sharp debris.
Now he wished he had paid more attention to Fanny’s drawing of her sister.
The loudly stated opinion of Mrs. Abbott, the madam, was that Jane Pocock had been strange, plainly very strange, demented and probably a practitioner of Strange Arts, and how it was that neither she nor any of her girls had been murdered in their beds, she did not know. Ian wondered why a young woman with such skills would have been working as a whore, but didn’t say so, under the circumstances.
It took some time for the talk about the murder of Captain Harkness to die down, but Ian Murray did ken his way around a brothel, and when the flow diminished, he at once ordered two more extortionately priced bottles of champagne.
This altered the air of accommodation to something more focused but less vituperative, and within half an hour, Mrs. Abbott had retreated to her sanctum and the whores had reached their own silent accommodation amongst themselves. He found himself on the red velvet sofa common to such establishments, with Meg on one side and Trixabella on the other.
“Trix was friends with Arabella—Jane, I mean,” Meg explained. Trix nodded, doleful.
“Wish I hadn’t been,” she said. “That girl hadn’t any luck at all, and that kind of thing can brush off on you, you know. What are those things on your face?”
“Can it?” Ian touched his cheekbone. “It’s a Mohawk tattoo.”
“Ooh,” said Trix, with slightly more interest. “Was you captured by Indians?” She giggled at the thought.
“Nay, I went of my own accord,” he said equably.
“Well, me too,” Trix said, with an uptilted chin and a wave of the hand presumably meant to draw his attention to the relatively luxurious nature of her place of employment. “Not Arabella, though. Mrs. Abbott got her and her sister off a sea captain what didn’t have the scratch to pay his bill. Those girls were indentures.”
“Aye? And how long ago was that? Ye canna have been here more than a year or two yourself.” In fact, she looked to have been in the trade for a decade, at least, but minor gallantries were part of the expected pourparlers, and she laughed and batted her eyes at him in a practiced manner.
“Reckon it would have been six—maybe seven—years ago. Time flies when you’re havin’ fun, or so they say.”
“Tempus fugit.” Ian filled her glass and clinked his against it, smiling. She dimpled professionally, drank, and went on.
“Mind, I wasn’t but two years older than Jane …” Bat-bat. “Mrs. Abbott wouldn’t’ve bothered with them, save they were pretty, both of ’em, and Jane was just about old enough to … um … start.”