Keeping Faith (Fair Cyprians of London 3)

Charity rose. “You’ll have to leave that to Mr Westaway. Make him desire you, encourage him with your shy but eager responses. You’ve learned how to do that during your apprenticeship here. And those other classes Lady Vernon took you off in your carriage to attend?”

“Philosophy, politics and art and classics with Professor Monk?”

“Professor Monk!” Charity let out a scream of laughter. “And was he? We girls used to speculate his reception of you was far from monkish.”

“Professor Monk is at least sixty, no, seventy! With hair growing out of his ears and nose and, obviously, no interest in women at all.” Faith considered the gentleman who’d opened her mind to the wonders of the wider world through the uncensored education he’d given her, teaching her the same curriculum he taught all the boys who came to him for similar instruction. “But he was always kind to me.”

“So he taught you nothing about the workings of the body? How to prevent conception, how to feign pleasure?” Charity gave a sly smile. “How to give and receive pleasure?”

Faith imagined her wizened old tutor being involved in any such instruction and laughed for the first time.

“Oh Faith, you are so pretty when you’re not so serious!” Charity exclaimed. “But, of course, Madame has taught you these things? She has, I know it, for all we girls must attend the instruction Madame conducts here.”

“I know the basics,” Faith admitted. “But for you girls, it’s all so real and necessary because it’s all about the things you do every day. For me, I never dreamed the day would come when I really had to…” she swallowed “…sell my body.”

Charity rose with a shrug as she headed towards the door. She had to leave, Faith knew, as she had a customer waiting for her. Daisy, the tweeny, had just called through the keyhole to tell her.

“It’s not so bad when you get used to it,” Charity said bolsteringly, as she let herself into the passage. “As long as you have a plan to escape. Even if that plan is just in your head.”

With quiet resolve, Faith said, “I plan to escape the moment I’ve done all the damage to Mr Westaway that Mrs Gedge wants me to. I’ve signed a contract giving me five hundred pounds if I can get from him an agreement to set me up as his mistress which I will decline. If he makes me an offer of marriage, then she’ll double that.”

“A marriage offer is worth a great deal more than a thousand pounds, Faith! What a strange contract. You surely didn’t sign that, did you? I mean, sign to say you’d reject him and break his heart in order to get yourself a thousand pounds?”

“I did sign it, because when I first came here, the alternative was that or be handed over to the magistrate.” Faith felt uncomfortable. “And then I just did my lessons, and I had a place to live, and I didn’t give it much thought. Now, though…”

“Well, if you can make him fall in love with you, maybe you can fall in love with him, Faith. Maybe, out of all of us, you can be the one to get your marriage offer and live happily ever after.”

Faith saw that although she smiled, she looked worried. “It’s a legal contract,” she said. “I know it is.”

Charity sighed. “I just worry that if Mrs Gedge is anything like Madame, you’ll never be free.”

“But if I can truly make Mr Westaway fall in love with me, then maybe I can be.”

Chapter 9

Faith hadn’t left London since she’d arrived a little over three years before as an innocent country girl from Dorset. Now her transformation was complete, and no one from her village or perhaps even her family, would recognise the poised young woman who swayed from side to side in the train carriage beside her chaperone.

Not that she felt poised. Faith was a jumble of nerves inside.

She and Lady Vernon had not spoken in two hours since their initial brittle greeting before being transported to the station.

Lady Vernon had immediately opened a book once the conductor had

led them to their seats and slammed the door on their compartment.

Faith had tried to read, but after an hour, the anger bubbling inside her could no longer be suppressed. Lady Vernon wasn’t some brutal dominator who could reduce Faith to a quivering mass of tearful powerlessness, and yet that’s what the frail old woman hunched in the corner had effectively done to the ‘goddaughter’ she was supposed to protect.

Finally, she could bear the silence no longer. “How much did Madame pay you to release me to the first high-paying customer who happened to fancy using strength and violence to break in a virgin?”

There! The words should have made the old woman turn from her usual grey parchment colour to a sickly off-white.

Lady Vernon put her book down. She swayed from side to side as the train rounded several bends. “Madame Chambon told me she arrived just in time.” But there was fear in her tone. Obviously, she trusted Madame to tell her the truth as little as Faith did.

Faith stared at her. “How long does it take for a big, strong, arrogant man to rip the clothes off a lady and have his way with her? I don’t suppose you know, Lady Vernon, though I see the thought is unpalatable to you. And yet you were willing for that to happen to me as long as you got enough gold coins in your pocket.”

Lady Vernon’s nostrils flared, and the lashes over her rheumy eyes fluttered. “You are…intact, Faith. Madame assured me you were.”

Faith banged her hand onto her book in frustration. “Do you ask because you’re filled with remorse and truly hope I am unscathed out of concern for me? Or because I’m worth more to you if I am… intact?”