Funeral in Blue - Anne Perry [51]
Mrs. Clark had taken her in and taught her a good deal about caring for herself and learning to play one admirer off against another in order to survive. Within a few months she had found a protector prepared to take her as his mistress and give her a very pleasant standard of living.
It lasted four years, until he grew bored and found another eighteen-year-old and began again. Sarah had come back to Risinghill Street, wiser and a good deal more careful. She found work in a public house, the Hare and Billet, about half a mile away, and it was there that a young artist had seen her and hired her to sit for him.
Over a space of a couple of years she had improved her skill as a model, and finally Argo Allardyce had persuaded her to leave Risinghill Street and go to Acton Street to be at his disposal any time he should wish. She kept a room nearby, when she could afford it, but more often than not she had to let it go.
“Was she in love with Allardyce?” Monk asked.
Mrs. Clark poured more tea. “ ’Course she was, poor creature,” she said tartly. “Wot do you think? Told ’er she were beautiful, an’ ’e meant it. So she was, too. But she were no lady, an’ she never imagined she were. Knew ’er limits. That were part of ’er trouble. Never thought she were more’n pretty. Never thought no one’d care for ’er once ’er skin and ’er figure went.”
In spite of himself, Monk was struck with a stab of sorrow for a woman who thought her only worth was her beauty. Had she really no sense of her value for her laughter or her courage, her ideas, just her gift to love? Was that what life had taught her? That no man could simply like her, rather than want to look at her, touch her, use her?
A vision of fear opened up in front of him. He saw her constant anxiety each time she looked in the mirror, saw a line or a blemish on her skin, an extra pound or two on the rich lines of her body, a slackness real or imagined, that signaled the decline at the end of which lay hunger, loneliness and eventually despair.
Mrs. Clark went on talking, describing a life in which beauty was caught on canvas and made immortal for the pleasure of artists and viewers, yet was strangely disconnected from the woman, as if her face, her hair, her body, were not really her. She could walk away unnoticed, leaving the image of herself, the part they valued, still in their possession.
The loneliness of it appalled him. He pressed her for more stories, more details, names, places, times.
He felt subdued and deeply thoughtful when he arrived to meet Runcorn nearly an hour late. Runcorn was sitting in the corner of a tavern nursing a mug of ale and getting steadily angrier as the minutes passed.
“Mislaid your watch, have you?” he said from between his clenched teeth.
Monk sat down. He had drunk so much tea he had no desire for ale or cider, and the good-natured babble of the crowd around him made it impossible to speak quietly. “Do you want to know about her or not?” he replied, ignoring the remark. He refused to explain himself. He already knew Runcorn’s views on the virtues of women, which consisted mostly of being hardworking, obedient and chaste, the last being the necessity which framed all else. He had been too long away from the streets and the reality of most women’s lives, perhaps too afraid of his own frailties to look at other people’s.
Runcorn glared at him. “So what did you find, then?” he demanded.
Monk relayed the facts of Sarah’s parentage and career up to the point of Allardyce’s seeing her and then shortly afterwards employing her exclusively. He also gave him the name of her onetime lover, Arthur Cutter.
Runcorn listened in silence, his face heavy with conflicting emotions. “Better see him, I suppose,” he said at the end. “Could be him, if he thought she’d betrayed him somehow, but doesn’t seem likely. Women like that move from one man to another