“I see,” Julia said. “We’ll keep her overnight. After that—”
“She can stop with me. I’ll let her have Margot’s old bedroom for as long as she wants.”
“That’s kind of you.”
“I got Kath the job with Wheatlands’. And didn’t I introduce her to that devil, Margot Miller?”
“Annie, what happened to Kathleen wasn’t your fault.”
“I wasn’t brought up to speak ill of the dead, but you can be certain of it. Margot brought the lass low.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She talked Kath into sitting for the artists—the men, I’m saying. And I know what that means. And wasn’t it Margot who put it ’round that she was homesick for Ireland? Lying was as natural as breathing to that one.”
“Lying about what, Annie?”
“All I know is what I was hearing. Whispering, they were, the shopgirls who worked around Wheatlands’, saying Margot got some of the models to do worse than sit and have their pictures painted.”
“I see.”
Annie looked at Julia gravely. “Can you help her, Doctor?”
“I’ll do what I can. Come back tomorrow, Annie. We’ll look after her tonight.”
Julia sat at Kathleen’s bedside at the end of a long afternoon. After telling her story, the girl slept. Julia pulled the blanket to Kathleen’s chin and thought about Lizzie Sullivan, her old nursery maid.
Nothing changes—a quarter century ago, today, or a hundred years hence.Girls were ever exploitable, with poverty on one side and selfishness, appetite, and money on the other.
* * *
That evening, Julia waited in the library for her grandfather’s return and Inspector Tennant’s arrival. She reached for the sherry, changed her mind, and poured herself a whiskey.
Hours earlier, the damaged girl had given her account slowly, haltingly, abashed. But the disgrace was not hers. It belonged to others. At first, her story trickled; then, the words spilled in a torrent.
Kathleen’s ordeal had shaken Julia in a way the narrative about her nursery maid had not. That girl’s tragedy was long past and involved someone Julia couldn’t recall. She hadn’tthought about Lizzie Sullivan once since the evening of the dinner party.
Two nights earlier, Julia had passed near Fenchurch Station. That was where they’d dumped Kathleen. Julia had rolled past St. Katharine’s Church, where the girl had huddled for the night. Julia saw—or rather hadn’t seen—the church as her coach rattled along. Why should she have noticed it? It wasn’t memorable. Its stubby stone tower was a nondescript landmark she passed nearly every day. Tired, late for dinner on a Saturday night, comfortable in her carriage, she’d rolled by the church on her way home, unseeing.
We walk past tragedies every day with our eyes on our shopping lists.
It wasn’t an original thought about the ocean-deep troubles all around her. But when needs stretched like pebbles on an endless strand, sometimes her services seemed nothing more than specks of sand. Julia wondered if policemen felt the same way as they walked the beats of their blighted neighborhoods, sifted the debris of blasted lives, and tried to sort the innocent from the guilty.As if most people are one or the other.
She heard the doorknocker and the voices of her grandfather and Inspector Tennant in the hallway. Julia had sent him a note promising links to his case.
After some commonplace conversation about the drive over, her grandfather poured two more whiskies. At Julia’s nod, he added a splash to her glass. Then they settled into chairs around the fireplace to hear Julia tell Kathleen’s story.
“I felt I was back in our drawing room the night of our dinner party,” she said. “Kathleen’s experience was the twin of my nursery maid’s ordeal twenty-five years ago.”
Haltingly, Kathleen had explained that Margot Miller had recruited her to pose “the way Annie did.” But unlike Annie, she had been tempted to remove her clothes for “life studies,” lured by the extra money Margot dangled.
“Then, on the last day of the sitting, Margot invited Kathleen to a party for the models. She would collect the girl that evening. Kathleen said she rolled up in a ‘great black coach dressed like a queen.’”
“Poor child,” Dr. Lewis muttered. “Swept away.”
“Margot gave her a drink in the carriage. The next thing Kathleen remembered was waking in the morning in a different room with Margot standing over her. Miller laughed and pointed at the tangled bed linen. ‘Those stains were worth the other half of twenty quid.’ Margot called her ‘ruined’ and told her to make the best of it.”
“Twenty pounds,” Tennant said. “That’s the rumored price for a girl without sexual experience. One guaranteed to be free of disease.”
