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By Root 1326 0

in the process of moving out of his parents' home, Buckingham House, and into his own residence, Carlton House, on Pall Mall. Only three years older than Emma, the prince spent wildly in anticipation of an income of around £100,000 per year after his twenty-first birthday, and Mrs. Kelly and the other madams of St. James were the beneficiaries. Within five years of living at Carlton House, he had run up debts of nearly £300,000. The prince's sprees turned an already fashionable area into a playground for the rich. In the daytime, families roamed the waist-high grass of St. James's Park, queued up to buy fresh milk from one of the cows, and vied for a sight of the elephant from the royal menagerie on its daily promenade. At night, men looked for cheap prostitutes in the park and expensive girls in the nearby houses. St. James was a man's world, and no respectable woman, even if she were accompanied by an army of male chaperones, would venture into the streets near the park. By the 1830s, there were more than 900 brothels and 850 similar smaller establishments crammed into the half square mile of St. James. Gold showered through their doors—one declared that the money that dissipated in the brothels in a single night would maintain the whole of the Netherlands for six months. Emma had taken up employment in the most expensive sex resort in the world.

Kelly was fifty-five and at the top of her profession. She had no mercy for anyone: madams in debt, girls desperate to be set free, and groveling men begging not to be exposed to their colleagues or wives. She charged her guests eye-popping prices for food, drink, and medicaments, and kept her staff hopelessly in her debt. As soon as a new girl arrived, Kelly took her clothes and loaned her expensive jewels, dresses, and a gold watch. A timepiece was the crucial sign of a Georgian courtesan, since genteel ladies never wore watches but courtesans had to time their clients. Kelly rented dresses and watches to her staff so that if one escaped (in her finery, for she had nothing else), she would issue a warrant for the girl's arrest for theft. Kelly took a large cut of her employees' earnings and billed them for bed, board, and laundry, as well as obliging them to buy expensive silk underwear, costume jewelery, makeup, and contraceptives. She forbade them to buy from anybody else, tried to increase their indebtedness to her by slyly offering them pastries, sweet wine, hairstyling, and trinkets, and forced them to hand over any gifts from clients. She punished attempts to freelance with clients outside the brothel and imposed fines for infringements of her complicated rules. Rather than renting out rooms for seductions (the authorities vigorously prosecuted any brothel involved in the seduction of an innocent girl), Kelly preferred to increase her profits by hiring out her staff to other brothels, social events, and country parties. She refused to take married women—husbands tended to demand big shares of their wives' wages, to which, legally, they had a right—but she boarded children for a fee.

Charlotte's establishment in Arlington Street had exquisite carriages, servants in livery, and furniture worthy of a palace. The girls received their customers in an opulently decorated parlor. No more than six to eight employees worked there at any one time, most between fourteen and twenty-four. Only the very beautiful or very skilled worked into their late twenties. Unlike the Covent Garden prostitutes, they didn't wear the same dress, and often changed their look or name, since clients loved novelty. Others sought to please by dressing as famous actresses such as Sarah Siddons and Mrs. Abington or society leaders including Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

"The ladies of pleasure in London," wrote one client, "give us an idea of the celebrated Grecian courtesans, who charmed the heroes of Athens." An Arlington Street training had some notable advantages over the typical education of a genteel fourteen-year-old-girl, who learned needlework and music from her governess and spoke to few