Kevin Anderson - The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

One night three whores lay for her with clubs in an alley off the Strand. She pulled a knife — for she carried one — and held them at bay, and told them what she’d done to the Ghilzai tribesmen. They backed away, and fled. They spread the word that Milady was barking mad.

Lady Beatrice wasn’t at all mad. It was true that the snows of the Khyber Pass seemed to have settled around her heart and left it incapable of much emotion, but her mind was sharp and clear as ice. It was difficult even to feel contempt for her fellow whores, though she saw plainly enough that many were ignorant, that they drank too much, that they habitually fell in love with men who beat them, that they wallowed in self-pity and festering resentments.

Lady Beatrice never drank. She lived thriftily. She opened a bank account and saved the money she made, reserving out enough to remain well-dressed and buy a novel now and again. She calculated how much she would need to save in order to retire and live quietly, and she worked toward that goal. She kept a resolute barrier between her body and her mind, only nominally resident in the one, only truly living in the other.

One evening she was strolling the pavement outside the British Museum (an excellent place to do business, judging from all the wealthy clientele she picked up there) when a previous customer recognized her and engaged her services for a gentlemen’s party on the following night. Lady Beatrice dressed in her best evening scarlets for the occasion, and paid for a cab.

She recognized some of her better-dressed rivals at the party, at which some sporting victory was being celebrated, and they nodded to one another graciously. One by one, each portly financier or baronet paired off with a courtesan, and Lady Beatrice was just thinking that she could do with more of this sort of engagement when she heard her name called, in a low voice.

She turned and beheld an old friend of her father’s, whom she had once charmed with an hour’s sprightly conversation. Lady Beatrice stepped close to him, quickly.

“That is not the name I use now,” she said.

“But — my dear child — how could you come to this?”

“Do you truly wish to hear the answer?”

He cast a furtive look around and, taking her by the wrist, led her into an antechamber and shut the door after them, to general laughter from those not too preoccupied to notice.

Lady Beatrice told him her story, in a matter-of-fact way, seated on a divan as he paced and smoked. When she had finished he sank into a chair opposite, shaking his head.

“You deserved better in life, my dear.”

“No one deserves good or evil fortune,” said Lady Beatrice. “Things simply happen, and one survives them the best one can.”

“God! That’s true; your father used to say that. He never flinched at unpleasantness. You are very like him, in that sense. He always said you were as true as steel.”

Lady Beatrice heard the phrase with a sense of wonder, remembering that long-ago life. It seemed to her, now, as though it had happened to some other girl.

The old friend was regarding her with a strange mixture of compassion and a certain calculation. “For your father’s sake, and for your own, I should like to assist you. May I know where you live?”

Lady Beatrice gave him her address readily enough. “Though I do not advise you to visit,” she said. “And if you have any gallant ideas about rescuing me, think again. No lady in London would receive me, after what I endured, and you know that as well as I do.”

“I know, my dear.” He stood and bowed to her. “But women true as steel are found very rarely, after all. It would be shameful to waste your excellent qualities.”

“How kind,” said Lady Beatrice.

She expected nothing from the encounter, and so Lady Beatrice was rather surprised when someone knocked at the door of her lodging three days thereafter.

She was rather more surprised when, upon opening the door, she beheld a blind woman, who asked for her by her name.

“I am she,” admitted Lady Beatrice.

“May I come in for a moment, miss, and have a few words with you?”

“As many as you wish,” said Lady Beatrice. Swinging her cane before her, the blind woman entered the room. Seemingly quite by chance she encountered a chair and lowered herself into it. Despite her infirmity, she was not a beggar; indeed, she was well-dressed and well-groomed, resembling, if not a lady, certainly someone’s respectable mother. Her accents indicated that she had come from the lower classes, but she spoke quietly, with precise diction. She drew off her gloves and bonnet, and held them in her lap, with her cane crooked over one arm.

“Thank you. I’ll introduce myself, if I may: Mrs. Elizabeth Corvey. We have a friend in common.” She uttered the name of the gentleman who had known Lady Beatrice in her former life.

“Ah,” said Lady Beatrice. “And I expect you administer some sort of charity for fallen women?”

Mrs. Corvey chuckled. “I wouldn’t say that, miss, no.” She turned her goggled face toward Lady Beatrice. The smoked goggles were very black, and quite prominent. “None of the ladies in my establishment require charity. They’re quite able to get on in the world. As you seem to be. Your friend told me the sort of things you’ve seen and done. What’s done can’t be undone, more’s the pity, but there it is.

“That being the case, may I ask you whether you’d consider putting your charms to better use than streetwalking?”

“Do you keep a house of prostitution, madam?”

“I do and I don’t,” said Mrs. Corvey. “If it was a house of prostitution, you may be sure it would be of the very best sort, with girls as beautiful and clever as you, and some of them as well-bred. I am not, myself; I was born in the work house.

“When I was five years old they sold me to a pin factory. Little hands are needed for the making of pins, you see, and little keen eyes. Little girls are preferred for the work; so much more painstaking than little boys, you know. We worked at a long table, cutting up the lengths of wire and filing the points, and hammering the heads flat. We worked by candlelight when it grew dark, and the shop-mistress read to us from the Bible as we worked. I was blind by the age of twelve, but I knew my Scripture, I can tell you.

“And then, of course, there was only one work I was fit for, wasn’t there? So I was sold off into a sort of specialty house.

“You meet all kinds of odd ducks in a place like that. Sick fellows, and ugly fellows, and shy fellows. I was got with child twice, and poxed, too. I do hope I’m not shocking you, am I? Both of us being women of the world, you see. I lost track of the years, but I think I was seventeen when I got out of there. Should you like to know how I got out?”

“Yes, madam, I should.”

“There was this fellow came to see me. He paid specially to have me to himself a whole evening and I thought, oh, Lord, no , because you get so weary of it, and the gentlemen don’t generally like it if you seem as though you’re not paying proper attention, do they? But all this fellow wanted to do was talk.

“He asked me all sorts of questions about myself — how old I was, where had I come from, did I have any family, how did I come to be blind. He told me he belonged to a club of scientific gentlemen. He said they thought they might have a way to cure blindness. If I was willing to let this Gentlemen’s Speculative Society try it out on me, he’d buy me out of the house I was in and see that I was physicked for the pox as well, and found an honest living.

“He did warn me I’d lose my eyes. I said I didn’t care — they weren’t any use anyhow, were they? And he said I might find myself disfigured, and I said I didn’t mind that — what had my looks ever gotten me?