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By Root 1360 0

the dirty floorboards were worn down by boots, and the walls were permeated with the stench of beer from downstairs. Purse under her skirts to hide it from pickpockets, she grabbed some breakfast of a fatty meat pie or a piece of bread from a cookshop. Barmaids began their day of cleaning in the morning, and prostitutes started work in the afternoon, between two and four, earlier if the previous night had been quiet. A few tricks a day was usually enough, and in winter it was hard to find more, for even the drunks would not linger long on the streets. She had to work her patch: finding a man who looked neither diseased nor deranged, being careful not to stray too near other women, who might attack her, evading those she knew were rivals, potential thieves, or simply insane.

Prostitutes grabbed at men's sleeves or elbows and demanded they buy them wine, attempting to encourage them back to the snug at the rear of the tavern, where waitresses served them wine or "purl," hot beer mixed with gin, through a slit in the wall. A more flash sailor or a tourist afraid of being robbed in the girl's room might attempt to take her to a bagnio, a type of hotel where rooms were generally hired by the hour. The client first had to pay the man who sat at the bottom of the stairs for the use of the room, and then he was taken upstairs. Sex with prostitutes was often routine. Anal sex was considered to be a shocking crime, and threesomes, group sex, and flagellation were generally confined to the more expensive brothels. Men risked being robbed if they were attended by more than two women. Some customers at the tavern were high on new wages; others simply craved a moment's release from their dreary lives.

A client would often want to stay the night, as the room was nearly always more spacious than the overcrowded slum lodging that was his home, and the prostitute would have to hurry him away before rinsing herself, if she wasn't too drunk or tired, to stave off the pox. Most women had their own special preventative: some used urine, others whatever might be at hand, such as gin, brandy, beer, or punch. Warm water was thought to have greater disinfecting properties, so they warmed it by holding it in their mouths. If a woman had managed to persuade a client to use it, she washed out her condom—a reusable item made from sheep's gut tied with a ribbon. But condoms cost money. Most people trusted the folk belief that if a woman had been with many men, their sperm was mixed in her womb and so she would not conceive. The greater the number of clients, the safer she believed herself to be from venereal disease and pregnancy.

A common activity for the tavern prostitute or barmaid was striking lewd postures, performing a striptease while imitating the poses that could be bought in a cheap print from the nearby stalls. In the brothels of Covent Garden, Emma saw and perhaps performed an act she would later electrify the courts of Europe with.

The tavern customers were men from her own class: laborers, servants, apprentices, builders, and traders. They spent their winter wages on drink and then on girls who, if often no younger and no healthier than their wives, gave for ten minutes the appearance of being happy. The girls were fondest of sailors. With their tanned faces, tattoos, earrings, distinctive and often dandyish clothing, bellowing voices, rolling gait, incomprehensible nautical jargon, and strange stories about monsters, they were like a different species. The girls loved them for their presents of trinkets and because they tended to be kinder than soldiers or laborers. One sailor, Captain Jack Willet Payne, later a friend of the Prince of Wales, claimed to have had an affair with Emma when she was on the streets. A young Horatio Nelson might even have passed her as he wandered through Covent Garden with his fellow sailors. For a man just offshore after a dangerous voyage, flush with cash and lonely after months or even years of all-male company, the alehouse and the prostitute were the first ports of call. Tough, independent Emma would