orward, ready to drive a thick wooden phallus directly into the rounded bottom of her playmate.
The visitor’s lips curved upwards.
‘Lovely,’ she breathed.
The rooms above the shop had been used, over the years, for various purposes. They had been stock cupboards, brothels and family dwellings but never, until that late spring day in 1865, had they been used as a schoolroom.
On that afternoon, however, James Stratton had tidied away all the ink-stained papers from his well-worn desk and replaced them with a slate and chalk and an alphabet primer, with which he was doing his utmost to teach the buxom young woman beside him to read.
‘I do know me letters, though, Jem,’ she said, declining to place her fi nger beside his underneath the A. ‘I can tell that much. It’s just putting ’em together I ’as trouble with.’
‘So if I wrote a simple three letter word, such as this …’ He paused to write the word cat in as perfect a copperplate hand as the sliding chalk would allow. ‘You could tell me what it said?’
She leant closer to him, very close, so that he could smell that cheap musky perfume all the fallen girls wore, mixed in with sweat and last night’s gin and last night’s men and, way beneath it all, a faint whiff of soap. He knew why she was doing it. She wanted to distract him with her breasts, and very fine breasts they were too, but today he was fixed in his purpose and he intended to achieve it.
‘Why, that curly one’s a c, I think, and the middle is definitely an a. Yes, definitely. The one at the end, I don’t know, it might be an f or a … but caf don’t make sense, so it must be a t. Cat!’ She spoke the word triumphantly, beaming up at him with teeth that were still good, lips that were still soft and plump.
‘Very good, Annie. I’ll make a scholar of you yet.’
‘That you won’t. Who wants a whore what’s read the classics anyway?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, his lips twitching into a smile. Annie always had this uniquely cheering effect upon him for some reason, though what kind of a man this made him he didn’t dare explore. She’d made her living on her back since she was fifteen and now, at twenty-two, she was quite an old hand at the game, yet somehow she refreshed him.
‘Would you think better of me if I could quote yards of Latin while I rode your cock horse?’
‘Hush, Annie,’ he tutted, regarding his slate with resigned despair.It was clear she was not in the mood for concentration.
‘Besides, I’ve usually got my mouth full when you’re around,’ she continued cheerfully.
‘Now, I won’t hear this,’ he said sternly, jabbing a finger at the primer. ‘Eyes down, Annie, or I shall have to take measures.’
‘Ooh, “take measures”? Like in them stories you write? I’d far rather you read me one of those. Go on, Jem. It’s too hot for this, and I didn’t get much in the way of sleep last night and me head’s all stuffed with rags. Tell me one of your stories.’
He ran a hand through luxuriant dark hair, exasperated at how easy it was for her to tempt him off his virtuous path. Truly, the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and he drew ever closer to the fiery void. But she was right. It was too hot and the buzzing of a fly against the grimy window played his nerves like a fiddle.
Besides, he needed a fi nal read through of that latest story before he dispatched it. Annie made a splendid captive audience, always hanging on his every word. Perhaps she could be captive in more than one sense, if he bound her wrists to the bedstead … but no. Much as she pestered him for his latest chapters, she had never shown the slightest sign of sharing his darker proclivities. She was a girl of simple tastes, at heart.
‘Oh, all right,’ he said, closing up the ranks of upper and lower case letters with a thump. ‘But tomorrow we must study in earnest, Annie, and I will accept no excuses. Do you mind me?’
‘Of course, sir,’ she said, the sweet little word of deference stirring him more than he cared to admit.
‘Good. Well, then. Go and sit on the bed and I shall bring it to you.’
She scampered up, her gaudy skirts swishing, and climbed up on to the high bed that took up the greater part of the room, plumping up pillows behind her.
James opened a desk drawer and took out a sheaf of papers, all covered in his tightly packed script, tied with a scarlet ribbon.
‘Is it the one about the dairymaid who went to the bad?’ asked Annie, unlacing her much-patched boots and throwing them off the end of the bed. ‘That’s my favourite. Poor girl, though.’
‘My clients pay a premium for exquisite distress,’ said James, taking his place beside her. ‘This unfortunate dairymaid has kept me in shirt linen and port wine for upwards of a year now. Speaking of port wine, would you care for a drop?’
‘Oh … maybe afterwards. Come, I want to know what will happen to her. Had she not just been tied to a fence post and whipped by four swells on a spree in the country?’
‘Indeed she had.’ James released the papers from their ribbon and held them before his face.
Annie laid her head on his shoulder, settling into his chest with a comfortable sigh. He had to put one arm around her so as to have the freedom of its movement.
He cleared his throat and began to read.