Hope - Lesley Pearse [101]
‘Yeah, I’ve bin in there a few times,’ he sighed. ‘I wanted a bit of book learning, but it ain’t fer me. The kids wot goes there are young. I can’t be doin’ wif goin’ every day neither.’
‘They give lessons at night, don’t they?’ Hope asked. ‘You could go then.’
Gussie shrugged. ‘I thought about that an’ all, but it would’ve meant leavin’ Betsy on her own. She ain’t safe wivout me, nor you neither.’
That explanation made a lump come up in Hope’s throat for she knew what Gussie was afraid of: what people called ‘White Slavers’, who forced young girls into prostitution.
There were countless men in Lewins Mead, Mole and Shanks included, who lived off their women’s earnings as prostitutes. Doubtless many of these women had been pushed or even forced into it by their men too. But they weren’t to be feared, Betsy knew them all and would not be taken in by any of them.
The White Slavers were very different. They were seemingly respectable, well-dressed and presumably charming, judging by the number of young girls who had just disappeared after being seen talking to a stranger. There was a woman working in the Drawbridge, an ale house on the quay frequented by sailors, who had been captured like this and taken to a brothel in London. Her story, and it was verified by the police who raided the brothel after she was thrown out because she was pregnant, was that a smart-looking man had bought her a drink which she thought must have been drugged. She came round to find herself gagged and tied up in a carriage.
The brothel she ended up in had a wealthy clientele who wanted unspeakable perversions, not a quick release in an alley. Unwilling girls were beaten or starved if they didn’t comply; some were dosed with laudanum. But willing or unwilling, the girls received none of the money they earned, and escape was impossible for they were never allowed out and the doors were kept locked.
The people who ran the brothel were caught and sent to prison, but it was thought there were hundreds of other places just like it in London and almost certainly in other big cities too. Every now and then there would be articles about it in the newspapers, a list of names of girls who had gone missing, but it was generally thought that the police didn’t strenuously investigate because the men who used these brothels were rich and powerful.
Betsy had had her fingers burned once already. She had told Hope about the ordeal she’d gone through with a ship’s captain who had offered her five pounds for her virginity. She had said with her customary bluntness that he was ‘hung like a donkey and he weren’t satisfied with taking me cherry, he buggered me an’ all’. She said she left the inn he’d taken her to bleeding and hardly able to walk, and vowed that even if someone was to offer her a hundred pounds she couldn’t go through that agony again.
Yet Hope felt Gussie was justified in worrying that Betsy might be snatched for she attracted a great deal of male attention. She had an engaging, lively personality that lit up a bar the moment she walked in, and she moved in a sensual manner and would talk to anyone. If Gussie wasn’t with her it would be easy enough for anyone to drug her and take her away.
‘You could ask Betsy not to go out while you were at lessons,’ Hope suggested.
Gussie chuckled. ‘I know what her answer to that would be!’ he said.
Hope did too. Betsy didn’t like to be ordered around and she’d laugh at Gussie’s fears for her. ‘Well, get her to go with you then,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’d like to be able to read too.’
He shook his head ruefully. ‘She don’t like people like Miss Carpenter.’
Hope hardly slept at all that night. She wasn’t tired because she’d been indoors all day, and her mind was churning over and over about where she could go to find work. Without a character and any clean clothes she had no chance of getting back into service or any other respectable kind of work. Wood collecting was the only thing she could do. But as Gussie had pointed out, without a cart she couldn