Return to Kate Hamilton’s
Extract from Lawless and the Flowers of Sin, William Sutton’s second Victorian mystery, published @TitanBooks July 2016
Return to Kate Hamilton’s
Lawless delves deeper behind the velvet curtains
I follow the route, already so familiar, through the back alleys, skirting Leicester Square, until I spot the entranceway. The curtains hang crimson and lush between Appenbrodt’s Sausage Shop and Bennett’s Pies, where meat is dressed to your liking, lamb or mutton to taste, and nothing stales, with old beasts turned out for rots, bots and glanders.
“Watchman, my lover, business or pleasure?” Kate boomed. “Or might we commingle the two? Commingling being what we does best.” Laughter rippled through her; I looked away from her formidable bodice, putting from my mind the image of the hippopotamus at the Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens. “Scotch for the Scotchman of Scotland Yard. Cora, you minx, this official needs his officialdom-relieving, can’t you see? Working after midnight of a Friday eve, I ask you. His commissioner ought to be ashamed, as Almighty God is sitting on his throne – though he don’t shame easily, that one.”
Kate was a wonderful monster. What better solace could I wish from the frustration of my punishing round of duties? Now that Darlington was reassigned – a cushy number, censoring the erotic booktrade – and Jeffcoat had his own secretive enquiries, I was on my own.
“Cora, Cora, any news for me, Cora?”
Cora and I recommenced our companionable chess match. It was hard to persuade girls to talk to me. Ask a question in such a place, and they went silent. Draped in diaphanous silks, Cora lay quite still, pieces laid out on that remarkable stomach, indifferent to her languid desirability and occasionally called away mid-game to a private room.
Doubtless the same antics occurred across the city, across the world; but here in Kate Hamilton’s, there was a decorum, a sense of humour, that made it acceptable. I had a lot of time for Kate. They said she was once an art student, discovering she had a talent for tableaux vivants in the classical tradition; they said, not so many years ago, she was knocking around town, the winsomest girl in Mayfair; they said many things about her behaviours as a lass. Today, undisputed mistress of madams, she dominated this most orderly of houses, sipping bubbly from midnight to daylight, alive to each tug at the furthest corners of her intricate web. It was her pride that all felt safe here: gents were never recognised; in turn, her girls need fear no misuse.
A boy had been found dead in a queer house a stone’s throw away; nobody had paid any mind when he vanished over Christmas, until the body’s decomposition defeated the winter’s cold. How could such indignities come to pass? Because most night houses, unlike Kate’s, were itinerant brothels. Nobody to count in or out, no thought to stave off disease, no one to save you from harm, nobody to care or call the doctor at the last. It was shameful. And what was my task but political gerrymandering to placate certain elements of society, most of whom cared nothing for such people? Scandalous that it should be allowed to continue! Better if they died! This netherworld little affected their families, oh so fine and lovely. But they might be shocked to know how such contagion might spread. A disease inadvertently caught, a pox visited upon a wife by a young gentleman caller; and how little it takes to persuade a good girl to step out, and perhaps the hour is late, she accepts hospitality, a drink, more, until shamed and ruined, she can never return to her respectable home, despatched to the penumbrous half-world of bordellos, madhouses and work houses. Still, when did the state become responsible for nannying aristocratic boys out of their naughty habits?
“Hands off that bishop,” Cora protested. “You’re in check.”
