Paullina Simons - A Beggar’s Kingdom

Every single day, the Right Reverend Anselmo arrives before the evening rush and stands in the middle of the restaurant downstairs, loudly sermonizing their sins away. “Constable Parker says we must put up with him to stay open,” the Baroness tells Julian. “The reverend is sent from the deanery of Whitehall to maintain something called prima facie decorum.” The Baroness swears. “Royal prerogative and all that. We must be mindful of our hallowed location. If it was up to me, I’d have that eunuch Anselmo castrated again. He calls my beautiful home the shambles! Can you imagine!”

Julian doesn’t have to imagine. Nightly he hears the vicar’s clarion call.

“He says the devil slaughters the souls of Christian men in our humble tavern!” The Baroness spits like a man. “In infinite ways, the devil butchers men’s souls at the Silver Cross, he says. Ah, yes, that Anselmo is a British treasure. He’s a convert, you know. He used to be a Catholic. Now he’s a reformed Puritan. And you know what they say about reformed Puritans.”

“That there’s nothing worse than a reformed whore,” Julian says, and the Baroness howls with laughter and for weeks repeats the line to everyone she greets.

One afternoon, while eating and socializing with the girls, amusing them by garbling their names, Julian makes the mistake of calling the one who’s named Jeanne “Saint Joan of Arc.” Immediately the banter stops. The Baroness steps forward from her table in the back corner. She hears everything. “Why would you call the Maid of Orleans Saint Joan?” the Baroness asks. “She was no saint.”

“My mistake. Wasn’t she canonized?”

“Canonized?” The Baroness doesn’t laugh. “She’s a rebel burned for heresy, for slaughtering the English, for impersonating a man, for saying she heard the voice of God command her to raise an army against the Crown. She was burned at the stake as a witch, not a saint.”

“My mistake, Baroness.” Julian must be more careful. Sometimes he forgets that beheadings and burnings aren’t just facts in history, but are real blood and real hatred. But wasn’t Joan of Arc canonized, though? Why is it, no matter how much Julian thinks he knows, it’s never enough?

He tries remembering the names of the girls by height, but four of them are the same height, and he tries remembering them by age, but eight of them are under twenty, and he tries remembering them by hair color, but all ten of them are some shade between brown and black. Six of them are bosomy, eight of them are hippy, two of them have barely any breasts at all, and their clientele is limited and specific. The Baroness tells Julian that there’s only one way he must rank the girls, “And that’s by how much money they bring in. That’s your only yardstick as the keeper of this house.”

“That is not his only yardstick, Baroness,” Margrave says, and the girls titter.

“Hush, Margrave. Stop wearing him like a medal.”

The madam is right. Julian learns their names much faster using her method. Brynhilda, a large, buxom lass of Germanic origin, is first. The men wait hours for her. Mute Kitty is second because she’s quickest. Beatrix and Millicent are sisters, work in tandem, and are three and four. Brazen Margrave is five, Ru is peppy and six, and French Catholic Severine is seven. The girl who’d been calling herself Jeanne before Julian ruined it for her, and who now must refer to herself as plain Joan, is currently underworked and number eight, boyish Allie is nine, and Greta is last. Greta is skeletal and at almost thirty has outlasted her usefulness. But her great-grandfather is rumored to be Parson, the man who founded the Silver Cross, so she’s not going anywhere.

The ten bedrooms and ten girls mix and match depending on the workload. The rooms are strictly for pleasure, six on the second floor, four on the third. The girls sleep high up on the fourth floor, in the stifling attic rooms by the dormers, five ladies to a cubby. The three maids, including Mallory, are segregated down on the ground floor, in the back by the servants’ kitchen. They mix with no one.

Except for Mallory—who is the prettiest of all the girls at the Silver Cross—the cleaning girls are desperately unattractive. Carling is lame and Ivy is scarred. Carling and Ivy loathe Mallory, because she’s the Baroness’s niece and “not nearly ugly enough.” Though she’s not allowed to sit with Julian and the regulars while they have their dinner of spiced eel and fish pies, all the girls, the maids and the molls, resent Mallory for having too many privileges. The main complaint about her is that she never gets punished for the things she does wrong. Julian doesn’t dare ask what she does wrong, lest it reveal how he feels about her.

The girls don’t stop complaining about one thing or another. Nothing is so trivial that it won’t cause offense. Yes, on the one hand, Julian is surrounded by women. But on the other, Julian is surrounded by women. They’re soft and busty, flirtatious, voluptuous, and their erotic inclinations know no bounds. But when they’re not arguing with him over the house-set price of goods and services, they’re bad-mouthing each other. They’re also not above blatant mendacity. They ascribe to each other all manner of vice and malice, they saddle one another with the lies of the most hideous contagious diseases. They often accuse one another of attempted murder through poison and infection. It’s astonishing. They are beautiful but venal.

Fortunately, it’s the Baroness not Julian who deals with the bulk of their grievances. When he asks her how she sustains herself, she laughs. “Oh, dear boy,” she says. “Margrave is right about you. You’re too good a man. She says you may be of noble blood. Eventually you’ll learn how to handle the commoners .” A commoner is another name for prostitute. “Rule number one: You must stop being so respectful. Do like me and pay them absolutely no mind. I pretend to listen, for they need to complain. It’s about seniority. It’s about money. It’s only when they don’t complain that they worry me. And by the way, do you know who never complains? Mallory. And she’s the one who’s got the most to complain about, for the other girls are simply dreadful to her. But she never disparages them in return, she never whines about the cleaning, or being overworked, and she never says a bad word to or about anyone. Or a good word, for that matter. She’s my niece, and I love her like family, but frankly, she is too tame! She’s the one who vexes me the most with her unspeakable silence. Oh, how she vexes me!”

LATE ONE NIGHT JULIAN IS ASKED BY IVY THE MAID TO BRING some wine to Room Two, his favorite room. It’s an odd request, for Julian is not usually in the business of fetching and carrying. He doesn’t mind the chore; the evening has been passing without a crisis. He’s only had to throw one man out into the street. As is his custom, Julian is formally dressed, in black silk hose and pointed-toe black leather shoes. He wears a blue velvet waistcoat with dark red buttons. His long thick hair is shiny and down, slicked back behind his ears. And he has shaved his epic beard, because wouldn’t you know it—in 1666, no one has beards! He can’t keep up with men’s facial hair fashion. Considered most virile at the turn of the century—the longer, the better—beards are now deemed lawless and dirty.

Julian knocks. A male voice answers. The room is dim, lit by three candles and a low fire. In a chair by the unmade bed sits a big fat man in loosened silk robes. Across the room from him, by the row of candles, illuminated from the side, Mallory stands naked. The man in the chair motions Julian to bring the wine and place it on the table by his elbow. Julian sets down the decanter, takes the empty one and turns to leave. He tries not to look at Mallory.