What if Matthew had come to London? And Cousin Caroline and Amelia had come there even before she came.
When Sally knocked on her door later in the evening and called her name through the lock, Fleur stared at the ceiling and made no reply.
ADAMKENT, DUKE OFRIDGEWAY, leaned one elbow on the marble mantel in the study of his town house on Hanover Square and tapped his teeth with one knuckle.
“Well?” His dark eyes narrowed on his secretary, who had just entered both the house and the room.
The man shook his head. “No luck, I’m afraid, your grace,” he said. “It is too little to go on, to know just a girl’s first name.”
“But it is an unusual name, Houghton,” the duke said. “You knocked on every door?”
“Along three streets and around three courts,” Peter Houghton said, making an effort to hide his exasperation. “Perhaps she gave you a false name, anyway, your grace.”
“Perhaps,” the duke agreed. He frowned in thought. Would she be outside the theater again that night? That employment agency—did she ever go there looking for work? And would she look for other work now that she had chosen and entered a new profession? Perhaps she did not live in that part of London at all. And perhaps shehadgiven a false name. She had not answered his question immediately.
“Life will be less arduous for you during the next few days,” he said with sudden decision. “You are going to hire a new servant for me. In any capacity you think suitable, Houghton. Perhaps as a governess. Yes, I think as a governess if you find her capable of filling the post. I have the feeling she might be suitable. There is an agency close to the streets you were combing today.”
“As a governess?” The secretary frowned at him.
“For my daughter,” the duke said. “She is five years old. It is time she had more than a nurse despite her grace’s reluctance to have her begin her schooling.”
Peter Houghton coughed. “Pardon me, your grace,” he said, “but I understood that the girl is a whore. Should she be allowed within ten miles of Lady Pamela?”
The duke did not reply, and the secretary, who understood the look on his employer’s face very well, was reminded thathe was merely a lowly employee in the service of one of the richest noblemen of the realm.
“You will sit at the agency for the next few days,” the duke said, “until I tell you you need no longer do so. In the meanwhile, I shall become a regular theatergoer.”
Houghton bowed and the duke pushed himself abruptly away from the mantel and left the room without another word. He took the stairs to his private apartments two at a time.
“Every whore was a virgin once.” The poet William Blake had written that somewhere, or words to that effect. There was no reason to feel any special guilt over being the deflowerer. Someone had to do it once the girl had chosen her course. If he had been her second customer instead of the first, he would not have known the difference and would have forgotten about her by that morning. She had had no skill, no allure, nothing that would make him wish to find her again.
He had not realized that a woman would bleed so much. And he had seen and felt her pain as he tore through her virginity.
If he had known, he could have done it differently. He could have readied her, gentled her, entered her slowly and carefully, nudging through the painful barrier. As it was, he had been angry with both her and himself. He had wanted to degrade them both, he supposed, standing over her, imposing his mastery on her.
But then, he owed her no consideration. She had been quite freely selling, he buying. She had been paid three times what she had asked. He had been left quite dissatisfied beyond the momentary relief that had come with the release of his seed. He had no reason to feel guilt.
Yet all night and all day he had been unable to shake his mind free of the girl—her thin body, her pale complexion, her dark-circled eyes and cracked lips, her calm courage. He had been unable to rid himself of the knowledge that poverty anddesperation had driven her to the life of the commonest of street prostitutes.
He could not help feeling responsible. He could not forget the calm acceptance, the blood.
He wondered if he would ever find her again. And he wondered for how long he would keep trying, the Duke of Ridgeway in search of a street whore with large calm eyes and refined manners and voice.
Fleur. Just Fleur, she had said.
MISS FLEMING, WHO OWNED AND RAN THE EMPLOYMENT agency close to where Fleur lived, had always treated Fleur with an air of hauteur and condescension. Her nasal voice had always drawled as if with boredom. What proof could Miss Hamilton give, she had always asked, that she would make a competent lady’s companion or shopgirl or scullery maid or anything else? Without someone to recommend her there was really no way Miss Fleming could be expected to put her own reputation on the line by sending her to be interviewed by a prospective employer.
“But how can I gain a recommendation until I have had some experience?” Fleur had asked her once. “And how can I gain experience unless someone will take a chance on me?”
“Do you know a physician who could speak for you?” Miss Fleming had asked. “A solicitor? A clergyman?”
Fleur had thought of Daniel and felt a stab of pain. Daniel would give her a recommendation. He had been willing for her to open a village school with his sister. He had been willing to marry her. But he was far away in Wiltshire. Besides, he would no longer be willing either to marry her or to employ her or recommend her for employment, not after what had happened there and after she had fled.
“No,” she had said.
It was only her despair that drove her back to the agency five days after she had become a whore. She felt no real hope as she opened the door and stepped inside. But she knew that that night she was going to have to return to the Drury Lane Theater or somewhere else where fashionable gentlemen congregated and would be in search of a night’s pleasure. Her money was gone.
The bleeding had stopped and the soreness had healed. But her disgust and terror at what had been done to her body had grown by leaps and bounds so that she felt almost constantly nauseated. She wondered if she would ever become accustomed to the life of a whore, if she would ever be able to treat her work as simply that. Probably, she thought, it would have been better if she had gone out the very night after that first, soreness and all, and not given the terror a chance to impose its grip on her.
