Page 12 of Death of a Courtesan
‘Answer the question, if you please,’ Riley said calmly.
‘Well, it thinned out quickly after midnight. It always does. A lot of our gentlemen need to get home to their wives, or be up early to attend to their duties the following morning. Even so, all six of us were engaged upstairs until, oh I suppose it must have been about one-thirty. We come down and see our gentlemen off ourselves. And madam was here too, of course.’
‘You are referring to Mrs Sinclair or Adelaide?’ Riley asked.
‘Both of them. Adelaide came downstairs just after me.’ She tossed her raven mane. ‘I remember her smirking because a gent who usually asks for me was with her this time. She thought it was amusing to have stolen him.’
‘Are you aware if Adelaide had any interests outside this place?’ Riley asked, in the optimistic hope of receiving an informative answer.
‘We don’t get a lot of leisure time.’
‘Sundays, surely,’ Salter suggested.
‘Ha, Sunday nights are one of the busiest.’ She dealt Salter a cynical look. ‘Once sins have been atoned for, our gentlemen seem anxious to repeat the offence. Some of the clergy enjoy offending, too. Mondays and Tuesdays are quieter, but business picks up again mid-week. Anyway, to answer your question I have no idea what her highness got up to away from here.’
‘Was there a particular customer who was fixated on Adelaide?’ Riley asked.
‘They all liked her. She had a way with her, I’ll give her that. A natural…aloofness, I suppose, that made her all the more interesting. That sounds like an odd way of putting it, given her profession, but she was detached. Men wanted to own her mind as well as her body, but none of them ever got anywhere near doing it. She was better educated than the rest of us. Could talk intelligently on just about any subject and wasn’t slow to express her opinion about politics, religion…you name it. They found that fascinating, I think. A woman who would do just about anything they wanted her to but also had a brain in her head.’
‘No one was obsessive?’
Mirabelle shrugged, starting to get annoyed, Riley sensed, because the conversation still centred upon her rival, even in death. He thanked her, asking her to return to the salon with the others and send the next girl in.
They filed in, one by one, and all said more or less the same thing about Adelaide, albeit not as forcefully as Mirabelle. Only the final girl, Ruby, a fifteen-year-old already versed in the ways of the adult world yet clinging to an innocence that probably appealed to certain clients, had a good word to say for her.
‘She took me under her wing,’ she said, sniffing and looking genuinely upset. ‘Told me I was a natural. She promised to teach me how to survive by blocking things out. They can have your body, Ruby, she used to say to me, but they can’t own your mind and they never will. They’re the desperate ones, they’re the ones with the deviances, not us. Always remember that, she said. I do, and it helps.’
‘How did she help you to improve?’ Salter spoke kindly to Ruby, the first female in the house who had earned his compassion.
‘Oh, just a few little tricks. Ways to move, how to flirt. And she was teaching me how to…well, to do some of the things that she did.’
Riley and Salter exchanged a glance. Ruby was not in Mirabelle’s league when it came to looks and sophistication, but she was young and had to be considered a rival. Why would Adelaide behave so generously towards her when she had deliberately shunned the other women?
‘Do you know why she was being so helpful?’ Riley asked. ‘The other ladies have suggested that she wasn’t friendly towards any of them.’
Ruby shook her head. ‘I really couldn’t say. She did once remark that someone had mentored her when she had been my age, starting out, and she was returning the favour.’
‘It sounds as though she was a true friend,’ Salter said.
‘She was. I could ask her anything. She never minded.’ Ruby produced a handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘And she lent me books. Said it was a good idea to immerse myself in a fictional world to escape the realities of this one. She always had her nose in a book herself. All I’d ever read before was the bible. Novels were frowned upon in our house, so Adelaide’s books opened up a whole new world for me.’
‘Where’s home, love?’ Salter asked.
‘Oh, Streatham. My Pa’s a minister,’ she added casually.
‘In the church?’ Ruby nodded. ‘Does he know where you are and what you’re doing?’
‘No, and I don’t want him to.’ Ruby’s fresh features turned stony, giving Riley a glimpse of the hard woman this business would soon turn her into. ‘I’m never going back there, even if he does find me. I’m better off here, even without Adelaide.’
It didn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination for Riley to conclude what traumatic event caused her to prefer being a high-class whore to a parson’s daughter.
‘Adelaide was planning to leave here,’ Ruby said into the ensuing silence. Riley and Salter exchanged a look and sat a little straighter. ‘I think that’s why she wanted me to be able to replace her. Not that I ever could, of course. There’s more to it than you might think. A lot to learn. Anyway, Mirabelle wouldn’t have allowed it.’
‘Surely that would be Mrs Sinclair’s decision?’
Ruby lifted a slender shoulder. ‘Mirabelle is quite bossy and sulks if she doesn’t get her way. She has quite a temper on her, too.’
‘Does she indeed,’ Riley said in a speculative tone. ‘Did Adelaide tell you where she intended to go?’ he asked.
