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∗ One commentator described it as an “abandon'd place” where “modesty must hide her face” in which “Damsels who use unnumber'd names” cruised the audience for customers. Many “cures” were dubious: Graham boasted that he recommended that a lonely middle-aged woman hire a beautiful young female prostitute.

CHAPTER 11

Santa Carlotta's Nunnery

All of London's powerful men knew the address of Madam Kelly's glamorous brothel on Arlington Street off Piccadilly, next to the modern-day Ritz hotel. Aspiring actresses competed for a place at Kelly's, since many stars of the eighteenth-century London stage, including Mrs. Abington and Clara Hayward, had learned posture and dance at Arlington Street. Kelly recruited girls such as Emma, who could sing and dance for the visiting aristocrats and royal princes. One tourist wrote, the “admission into these houses is so exorbitant, that, the mob are entirely excluded: there are only a few people who can aspire to the favours of such venal divinities.” Emma, however, did not plan to stay long. Dancing at Kelly's was her route to gaining a high-status protector.

Kelly's house was so notorious that she advertised the arrival of new staff. The Town and Country Magazine showed a picture of “Miss Lyon,” who looked identical to Emma, and reported that the beautiful Miss L—— had been recently set up in the finest brothel buildings by her “Martial Lover.” The magazine looked forward to seeing “Miss L—— flourish as one of the most celebrated demi-reps of the ton,” or the most fashionable London set.1 Kelly capitalized on Emma's celebrity as a Goddess of Health by parading her around St. James's Park. There, Henry Angelo caught a tantalizing glimpse of a girl now too expensive for his purse. After her brief stint as a walking advertisement, fourteen-year-old Emma settled to work in her new home.

Research by previous historians into Emma's life has failed to ascertain Madam Kelly's identity. However, if we follow the trail in letters, periodicals, and newspapers, it becomes clear that she was the celebrated Charlotte Hayes. Born in a London slum around 1725, Hayes became a prostitute at the age often or eleven. In about 1750, she was sent to jail for debt and met Dennis O'Kelly, an Irish con man. After she was released she continued to work, and in 1761 a client lent her the capital to open her own brothel in Berwick Street. By the early 1770s, she was running a string of "Nunneries" around the St. James area of Piccadilly. She married Dennis in 1770 and, like many attempting to seem genteel, called herself only Mrs. Kelly. By 1784, under the names of Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Kelly, she had a monopoly on the sex trade in the St. James area, and newspapers and caricaturists acknowledged her as being at the top of her profession. Famed for gratifying every possible "caprice which Flesh is heir to" for men such as the Due d'Orléans and the Duke of Cumberland, youngest brother of the king, Kelly achieved success by matching her clients' peculiar desires to the skills of her staff.

The Town and Country Magazine dubbed Kelly's brothel "Santa Car-lotta's Nunnery" and advertised how it "administers absolution in the most desperate Cases." The joke about the link between brothels and nunneries was an old one, but by the 1780s, the name was a skit on the notion that the girls were virgins when they arrived (so their keepers claimed) and then kept virtual prisoners. Kelly's employees struggled under the strict discipline. It was, as they discovered, impossible to leave until they became old and the madam sold them to a cheaper brothel, unless they were lucky enough to find a client who would buy them out.

Brothels like Madam Kelly's were renowned for providing music, dancing, and lots of glamorous girls in states of undress.

St. James was the center of high-class prostitution and its brothels became known as "Les Bordéis du Roi" (the royal brothels) after the riotous Prince of Wales, who was