Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/863164.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Underage
  Category:
      F/M, F/F
  Fandom:
      Sherlock_Holmes_&_Related_Fandoms, Sherlock_(TV), Historical_RPF
  Relationship:
      Irene_Adler/Various, Sidonie-Gabrielle_Colette/Mathilde_de_Morny
  Character:
      Irene_Adler, Sidonie-Gabrielle_Colette, Claudine_Holmès, Mathilde_de
      Morny, Georges_Wague
  Additional Tags:
      Consent_Issues, Alternate_Universe_-_Historical, Alternate_Universe_-
      Edwardian, bildungsroman, Mothers_and_Daughters, vaudeville, male
      impersonators, Gender_Presentation, Age_Presentation, All_kinds_of
      performative_self-presentation, Dominance, BDSM, Jealousy, Accidental
      Voyeurism, Humiliation, Angry_Sex, poor_communication, Down_and_out_in
      London_and_Le_Havre, growing_up_is_hard_to_do, Especially_when_you
      identify_marks_instead_of_making_friends
  Series:
      Part 3 of Unreal_Cities
  Collections:
      The_Antidiogenes_Club_Book, Femfanon—Canon_Female_Character_Clearinghouse
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-06-30 Words: 12924
****** Chez les bêtes ******
by breathedout
Summary
     Le Havre, 1908. The Child is mother of the Woman.
Notes
     Welcome to the unplanned Unreal Cities Irene Adler origin story! I am
     as surprised as you are.
     I told greywash, during editing, that this thing is "half gothic
     fiction tropes, half bodily fluids," and if that's inaccurate it's
     only because I'm forgetting some of the bodily fluids. Put less
     glibly: there are myriad things here that might potentially be
     triggering or squicking; tagging them all would give away the entire
     plot. If you have specific (or general!) concerns, feel free to email
     me or message_me_non-anonymously_on_Tumblr, and I would be glad to
     address them privately.
     There exist portraits of healthy, loving, mutually negotiated BDSM,
     but this story happens, at least in part, not to be one of them. None
     of my stuff is written as either a condemnation or a how-to manual;
     hopefully that comes across in the reading.
     In other news, this takes place in the Unreal_Cities universe, but
     you don't need to have read anything else in it to understand what's
     going on. If you're willing to accept the idea of "some version of
     Irene Adler coming of age in the Edwardian era," you will be fine.
     Also, there is a smattering of French dialogue throughout; it's not
     vital that you understand what's being said, but if you want to, you
     can hover over French phrases with your cursor for an English
     translation.
     Huge thanks to pennypaperbrain for the brit-pick and consultation on
     horse whips, and, as always, to greywash for the outstanding beta job
     as well as the ongoing conversation, cheerleading, and hand-holding
     as I was writing certain scenes through the cracks between my
     fingers. And thanks to the whole crowd at Antidiogenes, who cheered
     me through writing the first scenes of this (in May) and the last (in
     June).
**** Normandy, 1908 ****
Three hours after Irene came ashore at Le Havre there was a pantomime opening
at the theatre by the docks, and wasn’t that a piece of luck. A sign, her
mother would have said; but Irene, pressing tight her lips, caught herself in
time. 
Opening night, with the warmth of summer cooling into evening and the sea salt
from the boat’s deck still itching her skin, she strode backstage, trying for
weary, with purpose. And why not? She wasn't much younger, she thought, than
many of the gawky Normans rushing about, sandwiches and scrawled messages
clutched in their hands. They exchanged harried looks, so Irene put one on;
they raised their voices so she raised hers, while the musicians already in the
pit sniped at each other to the screech of strings. The whole place reeked of
plaster. Ammonia. Irene faked a drawl like Jean-Louis’s to cover her accent.
She delivered four messages and picked two pockets before the curtain rose. At
the interval she rushed backstage; unbuttoned tarts from their dancing dresses
vite, vite, as fast as her fingers would move. After final curtain the lead
actress, bare-breasted, called for Bordeaux; Irene stared too long and the
woman curled her lip and dug her nails into Irene’s arm. When the night was
over they paid Irene a franc, hard cash. She asked after the cheapest café and
they let her have the last of the fish stew, from which all the fish had
already been taken. 
Coins in her pocket, what a surprise. She came back the next night, and the
next.
The pantomime was the kind of thing that got the penny-gaffes shut down, back
home. The first time Irene snuck away after interval and hid herself among the
dusty curtains to watch, her whole skin felt hot. The smuggler, finding his
Yulka in the arms of her lover, tore her shift from shoulder to thigh. Irene
had to look away; had to look back. The mistress was the lithe actress with the
cropped hair—the one who had marked Irene with her nails. She stood there with
her chin up, bared from breast to hip. When her lord sank to his knees at her
feet she was pinned between two lovers, stood taller than either one: the
smuggler with his forehead to her stomach, and the intruder, the blonde
violinist done up like a man, clutching her hips from behind. Irene shut her
eyes. Something ached at the core of her. She was still looking away when the
smuggler, gone mad with grief, drove his knife into the table-top through his
own knuckles, and the blood ran down onto the floor and his mistress’s hands.
For three more performances Irene didn’t once look away. She might not even
have blinked. Her eyes at curtain felt sandy, and raw. 
A week after that the stage bored her; she kept to the wings, and the back
doors. If she watched the pantomime all she could think, when Wague stabbed
himself, was how he bragged backstage of his pupil Madame Colette to the page
girls who’d be scrubbing up the false blood from the stage-boards that night.
When he tore Colette’s shift Irene would curl her fingers against the ache of
needle-pricks; her eyes swimming with the trick stitching she'd done—she’d
do—she was doing, repairing it by gas-lamp; Colette’s scorn still beating in
her ears. That first night she’d crossed her legs, hard, to see Yulka’s shift
stained with her lover’s blood. Soon enough she was gritting her teeth over the
washboard at one in the morning when Colette dirtied the thing, and cast it
into her lap.
Still. Coins in her pocket. She came back for the first week of July, and the
second. 
On the night of the Bastille Day celebrations all of the audience and most of
the cast got drunk on Champagne. Irene drank nothing; cleared a hundred francs
in billfolds; gorged herself early on great hunks of fish from the stew; and
unbuttoned a tart from her dancing-dress, slowly now, slowly, in a white
changing-house by the waves, kissing her neck and her thighs and the tops of
her breasts by moonlight as fireworks burst over the sea. 
 
**** London, 1905 ****
Irene had left school the year before she started to bleed. There was no other
way: her brother was marrying and moving house. Besides, it had been
embarrassing, being the only one of her age in Blount Street who wasn’t trying
for work. Florence had wanted to keep Irene at home, sharing the window where
she hunched over her piecework. When Irene balked at that, Florence had said
she guessed Irene (chin up, lips pressed together) might get a place at the
match factory. Irene had nodded, once.
And she’d a shrewd eye, had Florence Maguire Adler, never missed a trick; but
still Irene had kept up the factory story for months while she scrubbed out the
grease-pans down at the Cahill Arms, bringing the dockhands and day-labourers
their midday fish and ale, listening to them talk about the world. By the time
Florence cottoned on, Irene was bringing home twice what she would have
sulphuring sticks all day—which became a convincing argument for staying, once
Irene agreed to hand over her whole pay, and not just half. 
Two years in the Arms and her Spanish was passable, her French and German
excellent so long as the company was rough. She even had a smattering of
Chinese. In September of that year Maria on the night shift got into trouble,
then married out of it; and Irene bullied her way into Maria’s place over the
protests of Florence Adler and Danny Cahill both. The money was three times as
good. The figure Florence heard was "twice." In the Arms Irene wore scraps of
lace, wore a silk stuff skirt once owned by a lady.
The marks on Florence’s wall said Irene grew eight inches that year. When she’d
started working nights she’d been the favourite of the other girls; a wide-eyed
child when she wanted, appearing by their sides with outlandish questions, and
imaginary requests, just as the men grew too many hands. In the pub’s back room
afterward Irene would stick out her own hand, and the girls would narrow their
eyes but more often than not they would put a coin in her palm. 
It was a handy side-line; she tried to make it last. Even when her body
lengthened so fast it hurt; even when her hips flared and her chest got tender
and swollen. She did herself up younger than she felt; made her eyes wide and
blank, like she'd done years before for the harpy from the London City Mission;
but soon it only made the men worse. They would turn their gazes to her, pull
her into their laps. Talk to her in baby-voices: blowsy wench, they would call
her; petite fillette. Careful, my girl, or you’ll show us your money, their
hands at her petticoats, their breath in her face. Sometimes she could feel
them hard in their trousers, through her too-young child’s skirt. 
The first few times she fumbled, shook. Once she was sick in the alley out
back, feverish, quiet as she could make it. After that—well. She sometimes
thought it was strange (doing the washing-up; mucking out the fry-pans; walking
home in the gas-lit drizzle with her shoulders hunched against the cold): how
something could be at once heady, and deadly, deadly dull. 
 
**** Normandy, 1908 ****
In the backstage kitchen, during the show, Irene imitated the three Parisians
for an audience of the cook, and the page boys, and the dancing girls.
Gabrielle-from-the-changing-house would yell out requests: Madame Colette, say,
before her morning coffee; so Irene would distort her mouth into a grotesquerie
of a yawn, menacing the boy nearest her with a curled-up biceps like a strong-
man in the circus, making him snort with laughter. The cook, her mouth quirking
up, would mumble for Monsieur Wague in bed of an evening: so Irene would droop,
doleful, her mouth stretching down at the corners, and would peer about,
mooning as if at the empty horizon through opera glasses. The whole room would
roar with approval. Somewhere deep in Irene's chest she would feel something
give, soften, like loosening a corset just a hair. 
('Monthieur Wague avec une belle therveuthe,' lisped Marie-Laure, in the back
of the room; and Irene made a special effort with her desperation and her mimed
pleading; having daydreamed for weeks, in an idle way, of getting the girl
alone under the boardwalk; of lifting up her petticoats, and kissing away her
stammering blushes. You should go to Paris yourself, Marie-Laure would tell her
then, sounding, in Irene’s imagination, like a Covent Garden flower-girl. You
really should. An actress like you.)
So the Normans laughed at the Parisians, and the Parisians affected not to
notice. Or maybe they really didn't. Irene was never completely sure. They were
wrapped up in themselves, no question; wearing themselves out. Threadbare
Wague, with the shiny jacket-elbows, who shaved twice a day and then spent
twenty minutes every evening drawing the smuggler’s stubble on his face with
grease-paint, looked forty-five if he was a day; but they said in the wings
that he was younger than either of the actresses.
('Mademoiselle Claudine à l’opéra!’ Jean-Pierre would shout, and the cook would
mutter Les amantes de Mademoiselle Claudine, à La Garçonnière, and Irene,
flushed and wondering over that hard t, would do it, would do it, unbuttoning
her top buttons over her slim boyish body to affect décolletage, beaming around
as if at a retinue. Turned sideways so her audience could see her hand behind
her back, flashing hidden signals at the imagined seats behind.)
Claudine...didn't, surely? She swaggered so on stage, with her horse whip and
her wooing violin; but then climbed out of her breeches every night, loosed a
fall of bright blonde hair, and scrubbed herself back into softness. Her cheeks
shone pink; her eyes were honest-to-God violet. If she hadn’t sworn and smoked
and caught Irene out twice picking pockets, she’d have seemed an angel of the
hearth. That first night, when Irene had seen Claudine pink-scoured and soft in
a white cotton dress, she’d wondered they’d cast her, and not Colette (who did
exercises; who had muscles underneath her shift; whose body was taut, and hard)
as the male intruder. Irene ought to have realised; she’d already got the marks
on her forearm.
('Madame Colette avec ses chats!' someone said, and Irene was still aping that
lady's overblown adoration of everything feline, when Claudine, cutting through
the kitchen on her way to her cue, walked in on them all. The cook hissed.
Marie-Laure's top lip trembled. Irene raised her chin, expecting to be sacked,
but Claudine only narrowed her eyes, regarding Irene for a space of seconds
before casually strolling on. Irene watched her go with that soft place in her
chest cinching back up, wondering: what would Madame Colette herself have done
to Irene, if she had come upon her?)
Colette of the vicious nails, and the bobbed hair. Whose Yulka stood so proudly
between her lovers. She told nobody her age, and stared down anyone who asked.
She could have been Irene’s older sister, the way she looked. But they said in
the wings that she’d been married in the gay 90s, and divorced just last year;
and that now she courted scandal hungrily; insatiably; like a drunkard
trembling for gin. Of herIrene could believe—.
In the wings before performances Irene watched the woman and rubbed her own
arm, her tongue between her teeth. 
 
**** London, 1907 ****
The first few times a dockhand pulled her into his lap in her baby clothes, she
expected—well. Something, from the other girls. She’d have paid them, even; if
there were no way around it. But by the end of that year she was no woman’s
favourite; they vanished when she appeared. Shot her nasty looks over the bar,
turning up their mouths, wagging their tongues. Even Laura Killian didn't wait
for her, anymore, by the back door at closing. It made her chest hurt. She ran
a finger under Jean-Louis’s dirty collar and flicked her tongue out to wet her
lips. 
He was dull, and bulky. She squirmed until his eyelids drooped, watching his
face.
Laura Killian took Irene out back after a shift; lit her cigarette for her and
said she’d make her listen to reason. Laura said the girls all saw where Irene
was headed. ‘You think fire won’t burn you?’ Laura asked her, so Irene leaned
close, made her mouth into the shape of an O with her tongue pulled back like
Amidio had taught her, and blew heavy rings of smoke, one through the other
through the other. Laura’s face got hard. Florence Adler deserved better than a
whore for a daughter, she said. But who, said Irene, ever gets what they bloody
deserve?
That night, though. 
Irene got home and Florence was up, with a deep crease between her brows. Irene
made tea by touch, in the dark; sat with her mother at the rickety little
table, inventing stories about her good friends Lottie and Emma, and all about
Muriel who swore up and down that she could make a fine ladies’ hat from a heap
of rummage sale leavings, and she would teach Irene to do it, too. The lines
softened in Florence’s face, after a time. She lay down on her pallet in her
corner of the room. Irene sat up until dawn, smoking stolen cigarettes, looking
out at the courtyard in the dark. 
The next week Benjamin Hewitt first came round the Arms, fresh from Liverpool
with his crossed eyes and his clerk’s salary. He must have taken a wrong
turning, Danny said, to end up here; but Irene walked out with him the next
night. 
Benjamin said she was grand. A girl who really listens, he said, though really
she’d been making up stories about him in her head, things to tell Laura the
next day, and he’d never noticed. For a month he came calling at the Arms on
Mondays, when Irene got off at five. Then he came to the Adlers’ on Thursdays,
where he was so earnest about his prospects (the most junior partner, he said,
was a distant cousin; fifteen years and he might be head clerk), and Florence’s
grip so soft as she poured his tea from their cracked old pot, that Irene
hardly had to work, to keep a smile on her face. 
He was amusing enough, any given day, and she took to wondering what else she
could convince him of, without him noticing. In the end there was quite a list.
She kept it hoarded away in her head where it couldn’t be seen: how she had him
offering up both their fares to Gravesend for a Sunday excursion on a lark; how
he had the idea to protect her, though he met her there near-daily, from
everything that went on in the Cahill Arms. How he swore it had been his idea,
nicking the cakes from the posh baker’s on Curzon Street. How he’d admit, red-
faced and bashful, to having persuaded her to drink wine one night in Regent’s
Park; how he thought (she reckoned he prayed for absolution; though she hadn’t
swallowed a drop) that he’d got her tipsy. How he would weep if you pressed
him; how he’d confess he had talked her, in October, into the back of a hansom
cab; how she’d regarded him with wide innocent empty eyes as he’d panted a
promise in her ear, and begged her, begged her, and the poor little darling, he
would say, she probably hadn’t understood what he’d wanted when he lifted up
her skirts and unfastened his trousers, brute that he was, and sunk into her
and spent himself, debased. ‘What have you done, dearest,’ Irene had said,
after. ‘I’m afraid my good underskirts are ruined.’ He’d given her a whole
pound. Sorry, so sorry, searching her eyes. Her good underskirts: as if she’d
more than one set! Later she’d laughed at the wash-lines, knickers and
petticoats mended and scoured and hung out to dry.
After that Irene felt there was little he wouldn’t believe.
In the end seven months passed while she totted up her list. She spat out her
wine. Widened her eyes. Kept her bundle of bank-notes tucked in her stays.
Florence was beaming. Irene had a full belly and a panting promise; and it
wasn’t so bad, was it? so long as she only thought of today.
For seven months, right on schedule, she bled. 
 
**** Normandy, 1908 ****
‘Irène, encore les points,’ Madame Colette had taken to snapping, if the
stitches didn’t tear correctly on stage. ‘Irène c'est foutu, le couteau de
Monsieur Wague. Irène,’ and she would grab Irene by the shirt or the hand or
the hair, her dark eyes sparking into Irene’s face—always Irene, though there
were a dozen others equally at fault, and Colette would sometimes search the
whole theatre before she found her quarry and shook her, nails in her neck,
mouth up next to her face, spitting about Mademoiselle Holmès’s hair coming
loose again, were you dreaming, girl? Were you dawdling? Were you drunk?
Irene seethed.
Why she didn’t flee on any given night, she couldn’t say. Le Havre was dull and
provincial; by late July even she could see the season had passed its peak. She
had enough cash now for the train to Paris, enough for months in a boarding
house while she talked her way into a pantomime at one of the boulevard
theatres. She watched the trains and the guests’ motor cars with a restless
jumping eye. But instead of buying her ticket she just kept on; kept prowling
round after the Parisians, kicking herself, like some cur on a string. 
Wague and Mademoiselle Claudine, on their nights off after the Tuesday matinée,
got themselves up in their finery and dropped into the Grand Hôtel; spent what
Irene thought must be their whole week’s take on oysters and Sancerre. Irene
stood with dew-damp feet in the flower bed outside the big bay window, whence
she could watch them at an angle without being seen. Wague, his evening shave
just complete, pressed his old tailcoat himself, and always sat on the dark
side of the table. Claudine favoured pale blues, pale violets; wore her hair in
a messy cloud on top of her head, with golden ringlets loose around her face.
She laughed, girlish; whispered at him behind her hand, teasing him with her
décolletage when she leaned forward from her tight-laced pastel waist. Wague
smiled; blushed; but never leaned forward in his turn, and Claudine would snake
her tongue out into the heart of an oyster, and look at him from under her
lashes, and then roar with laughter, slapping the table with her palm.
Irene, watching it week after week, imagined slapping them. She would do it
hard, she thought, right in their faces. Why hunt, Colette had written, in a
stolen letter painfully translated in the midnight kitchen, if you’ve no taste
for meat? Why make a show of your fine bow and arrow, if your arms don’t itch
to raise them to your shoulder; to draw back the string until you ache with the
holding of it; and then, on a measured breath, to loose your flint into a
beating heart?
Irene blew idle smoke rings, and picked the dregs of Wague’s pocket as he
stumbled home. 
She liked best to be in Madame Colette's rooms, the moment after Colette had
left. The latch would click and Irene would slink in from the side while
Colette's perfume still settled in the air. She would move amongst Colette's
things: touching, and tasting; using them in their master’s absence. Irene
smoked her cigarettes; hoarded them in her pockets. She stole Colette’s
notebooks. She climbed into Colette’s wardrobe; catalogued her waistcoats and
her ragged stage corsetry and her lacy Paris knickers. She hid behind the door
and listened to the sounds Colette made bathing, her body slopping about in the
porcelain tub. She even, wondering at herself, paid Colette’s maid not to throw
out the bathwater after, so that when Colette went on stage Irene could slip in
and soak. She made it a kind of ritual: opening her shirt to bare first her
left breast, then her right; stepping out of her stuff skirt like a warrior,
presenting himself for the laying-on of battle dress. She would sink into the
water with her eyes straight ahead, unflinching, regal. 
Standing by the tub on the first of August there were voices in the corridor
too early. Colette’s, and that of—whom?  Another woman, certainly, though
deeper. Older. And Madame Colette, whose voice always crackled and pulsed
around the name Irène, was giggling, was—was simpering, Irene thought, with a
sick cold reptile feeling at the back of her neck.
There was a thud as of bodies against the wall outside. Irene was still damp,
still naked. She backed on bare feet into the wardrobe with her heart beating
in her throat. Muffled laughter from outside; the knob rattled. Irene shut the
wardrobe doors about herself, as slowly as she could bear. They had been closed
when she’d come in, she was sure of it. They were closing now, closing…closed.
Breathing through her mouth in the dark, she could still see through the empty
keyhole when the door opened at last. 
Colette had roses, red roses in one arm, close to her chest. Their thorns must
prick; she hadn’t pinned up her shift. The other woman—stocky; suited; greying
at the temples; with a walking stick and a monocle—had her hands inside it, one
at Colette’s shoulder and one at the bottom of the rip. Stitched up for
strength, Irene thought, stupidly, staring at the woman’s hand where it
disappeared into the familiar rent. Stitched and stitched until Irene's first
finger was raw. Three kinds of waxed thread, and Irene had bled onto the knots,
imagining Colette standing over her, curling her lip. But now—now Colette was
blushing, with her eyes closed, and there was a fat tom with her hand so far
down the side of Colette's shift that her elbow was probably rubbing in Irene’s
dried blood.  
‘Chérie,’ the tom was saying, ‘mignonne fillette,’ but her accent was a
strange, fast drawl; odd in Irene’s ears, so that she could only catch every
third word, every fourth. 
Mignonne fillette. Colette was past thirty, she had to be.
‘—si longtemps, sans mère—,’ Irene caught, before Colette, dropping her
flowers, collapsed with giggles against the woman’s front. It muffled the tom’s
words, knocked her off-balance. She staggered back; sat abruptly in Colette’s
straight-backed chair; pulled Colette down onto her lap and kissed her mouth.
Colette made mewling sounds. Irene squirmed, her forehead pressed up against
the metal keyhole plate.
The tom moved her hands just—just everywhere: the right on Colette’s neck,
hair, shoulders, nape, cheekbones, the swell of her breast; her left moving
under the shift where Irene couldn’t see except for bulges in the cotton: arse,
waist, thigh, waist, the small of her back. The tom’s fingers were blunt but
soft; pale; covered in rings. Shocking that something so pampered could look so
hungry. And Colette, breaking away, crying out ‘Missy’ like she was famished
for it (all the air gone, sucked from the wardrobe), but Colette’sown hard
little hands weren’t touching. They were drawn up to her chest: fluttering,
wing-like, twitching toward the other woman; then, clenching, drawing back. The
tom—Missy—made an approving noise; slapped Colette’s arse with her free hand,
through the cotton. 
Irene, though half-blocked, could still see the rising flush on Colette's
cheeks. Colette turned her face toward Missy’s face, eyes open but butting
blindly, begging. Begging. Irene’s knees dug into wood through satin; organza;
crèpe de chine; her throat when she swallowed was like glasspaper. Missy had
her fingers tangled in Colette's dark curls; pulling back her head and her
imploring face. The cords in Colette’s neck stood out. She was straining
closer. She wanted, Irene thought, with her brain jamming gears, to be closer.
She wanted to be kissed. Missy was staring into her eyes, and Colette was
staring back, and Irene in her wardrobe saw a scrap of Colette’s pink tongue as
it came out to wet her lip. Missy smiled; didn’t kiss her. Pulled back her
head.
‘Tu me—tu me manques,’ Colette gasped at the ceiling. Word by word:you are
lacking from me; flexing her helpless hands. Colette’s voice like grinding
metal, like some void was scraping open inside her, needing to be filled. There
was no space in Irene’s chest. Colette, who had dug her nails into Irene’s arm.
But Missy just laughed; said something into Colette’s hair that Irene,
trembling, didn’t catch. Ici? Fui? She couldn’t hear properly with her eye
pressed to the keyhole; and with her ear pressed to it she couldn’t see. She
was dizzy; she needed to breathe. She needed to—to press her whole body, her
naked shoulders and her hands and her hard wide kneecaps, in impossible
contortions into the room, through wood and metal and air. 
‘—Je te touche déjà,’ Missy said, sing-song. I am already—. But Colette pushed
her head into Missy’s shoulder like a shy little waif, and mumbled something,
high-pitched, into the lapel of Missy’s suit. Not meeting her eyes.
And then Missy turned them both; and it was—impossible. Intolerable. They were
faced away from Irene, now; she couldn’t see their faces. She stared out at
Missy’s broad back; it blocked all of Colette but her legs, bent at the knees
and dangling, girlish, half-covered by the ripped shift, with Missy’s suited
arm snaked between her thighs. Irene clenched her jaw. Missy murmured.
Colette’s legs spread; her bare toes curled. Irene couldn't—
‘Je t’en prie,’ Colette gritted out, loud enough for Irene to hear, and her
voice was—the whimpering had been enough, but now she sounded ruined. Irene sat
back, fast, on her heels on the heap of silk underthings, shocked by the sound
of it. Shocked by the swimming sparks that shot up her own spine. Her quim
rubbed up against the mounded silk and she nearly moaned. 
It was horrible. She bit down on her own hand just as Missy laughed. She felt
sick, and hot all down her front.  With her teeth in one palm and the other
pressed flat against the wardrobe door, she listened to Colette whimpering and
ground herself down—angry, fevered, God, shaking—against the pile of silk
between her legs. 
‘Oui, fillette,’ came Missy’s voice, shockingly calm and—and close, now; so
that Irene, startled, turned her hot face back to the keyhole. They’d shifted
back. Back toward the wardrobe, and Missy had—had turned Colette over on her
lap, head toward Irene, arse toward the door. Over her knee like a child;
flushed up and panting—and Irene tasted salt (was she crying?)—with Colette’s
hands white-knuckled on the legs of Missy’s chair. Her shift hiked up now
around her waist; Missy with one hand on the nape of her neck and the other
disappearing behind her. Into her? Moving? Irene was moving—moving; could
hardly breathe. Colette was crying out. Lifting her splotchy face, gasping.
Colette, who had drawn Irene’s blood. 
‘Tu veux—,’ Missy said, and did something with her hand, so that Colette’s eyes
went tight-shut and desperate, and she dropped her head and hunched up her
body, helpless, over and over; fingers clutching at Missy’s legs. Irene needed
to—she could only see Colette’s shoulders, the back of her head; she needed to
see, she needed—that desperate pleading pushing of hips, she needed—
‘Je t’en prie,’ Colette was chanting, low, under her breath, as Missy smiled,
calm, almost proud; held Colette’s head down with one hand and (but Irene
couldn’t see) fucked into her with the other, ‘je t’en prie, je t’en prie,’
squirming and grunting while Irene bit her lip and touched herself and tried to
be perfectly silent and—
This was—. 
This was nothing like Benjamin. Nothing like Gabrielle in the changing-house on
Bastille Day. Irene’s eyes were wet, her face sweat-sticky and her thighs still
damp from the bath, and she was soaking the pile of silk underthings where they
rubbed between her legs. Je t’en prie. The inside of the wardrobe smelled of
Colette, and of Irene. Je t’en prie, je t’en prie, and Missy said ‘Oui, ma
petite, encore, oui,’ tangling one hand again in Colette’s hair and pressing in
with the other je t’en prie, and Colette shouted and bucked, curled her whole
body around Missy’s legs while she shuddered, ‘Quel sage enfant,’ Missy was
saying, hardly out of breath, and Irene’s teeth were all sharp, sharp in her
mouth, je t’en prie so she shoved three fingers halfway down her own throat;
grabbed great handfuls of silk in the other hand and pressed it against her,
inside her, je t’en prie, came hot and shaking with tears streaming down her
face. 
 
**** London, 1907 ****
‘Oh my dear,’ Florence had said, on the eighth month, her voice breaking. ‘Oh
my darling girl.’ 
Holding back Irene’s hair like she had when Irene was an infant, and a child,
and a grown-up girl, as Irene was sick into the chamber-pot.  ‘But you’re not
to blame,’ Florence said, stroking her back. ‘You consented under a promise.’
And Irene, tired to death, and sick with today collapsing all around her, could
only nod.
Under a promise. Florence said it over, and over, and Benjamin said it too,
that Thursday when he called and Irene told him what had happened. He blanched,
and trembled, and then, with tears in his eyes, he held out his hands to her,
smiling a watery smile. 
‘Don’t worry dearest,’ he said. Florence wiped away a tear. ‘We’ll publish the
banns. You’ll have nothing to worry about, nothing, nothing at all.’
Irene nodded, dumbly. I’ll have nothing to worry about, she repeated to
herself, thinking of the Hewitts’ house in Liverpool, of Benjamin’s respectable
rooms in Lambeth, with all their painstaking bachelor comforts. A woman’s
touch, he’d said, that’s all it needs: giving her a tentative smile. I’ll have
nothing to worry about. Nothing. Mrs. Hewitt had no daughters; she’d twenty
pounds saved up against the marriages of each of her sons. Florence took in
more piece-work, so as to do her bit; Irene went out dress-shopping alone.
Nothing to worry about, she thought. Green, blue, grey. Benjamin was a good
man. Sleeves; necklines. Her mother was happier than Irene had ever seen her. 
She walked the length of Cheapside and didn’t stop at a dressmaker out of the
lot. She went back the next day, and the next. Peering in the windows;
loitering by the doors. ’You take your time, dear,’ Florence said, hunched over
her needle. ‘It’s not every day a Maguire gets a new-made dress.’ 
Cheapside; Gracechurch; Aldgate. After a month, with Benjamin badgering her
every Thursday and Monday, she told the news to Danny and the girls at the
Arms. Bridget smirked, and whispered, but Danny stood them all a round after
closing that night, and Laura Killian, giggling and blushing, kissed Irene’s
mouth in the entryway as they all said their goodbyes. ‘I knew you’d be all
right,’ Laura said. ‘You’ll be all right, now.’ Nothing to worry about, Irene
thought. Nothing at all.
Gracechurch; Aldgate; Whitechapel. The jonquils came up, while she walked.
Irene was no longer working; no longer sick in the evenings. Florence started
fretting, though she never said; so Irene stopped in at the Arms and got the
name of Laura’s auntie, dressmaker in Queen Street. Pointed at bolts of fabric,
at pattern-books, without looking. Walked and walked. Thought of Benjamin’s
washing; Benjamin’s suppers. Benjamin’s flat. Benjamin’s law-clerk friends.
Nothing to worry about, now.
Whitechapel; Stepney. It was raining but her shoes were new; warm; gifts from
Mrs. Hewitt, they’d come with a note. It had called Irene ‘Beloved.’ Her hat
was dripping. She thought of grouse; turkeys; she was heavy, with a tight,
tight chest. Stepney Green, where the free clinic had been, when she was a
child. She thought of beef, and carrots boiled to pulp. Nothing to
worry—Christ, her chest. She had the dress. They’d set a date. She
couldn’t—couldn’t breathe. She sat down in the rain; her mother was happy. On
the wet concrete stoop, a man in a dark coat and an apron. Was she quite all
right? Was she feeling herself? ‘He said he would marry me,’ Irene said,
staring into the rain. ‘Please sir. He said he would, and I believed him.’
She swallowed the contents of the paper packet in the chemist’s toilets, and
walked the long way round, back to Limehouse. By the time she got there she was
soaked, and shivering. Pricking all down her hands, her arms. It was nothing to
worry about, she said. Florence was white as ice. Their one set of sheets on
her pallet; she was pouring sweat, burning up. Darkness. Florence held her
shoulders as she sat up, water tepid in the tiny moveable washtub. Daylight.
Dizzy; sick again. Rust taste in her mouth; she couldn’t feel her hands. She
was sick in the chamberpot. Darkness. Florence’s palm on her forehead as she
bled all over the sheets. She was going to die, surely. Daylight. She had no
position; no prospects. The pallet ruined. She’d bought a dress in Queen
Street; nothing to worry about. Blood all over. Sitting up in the washtub;
biting her mouth to stay awake. Florence holding her up. Her vision gone grey.
Darkness. The pallet, stripped. She wanted to peel off her own skin. Daylight.
She couldn’t go back to the Arms. To the Hewitts’. She couldn’t stay. Darkness.
Sick into the chamberpot. Sick into the washtub. She couldn’t remember food,
beer; walking in Gracechurch Street; buying a dress. Daylight. Staring at grey
light through the little window. Sweat on her face. Blood on her thighs. She
felt light, too light for purchase on the ground. 
And then: how much later? She could tell that Florence was snoring, curled up
on a pile of newspapers in the corner. What of the sheets, she’d asked, hours
and days ago, and her mother had said, like a dizzy chorus in Irene’s head:
Don’t worry about them, dear, not now. But Irene, filthy, unmoored in the
midsummer morning, slipping on her old blouse and her stuff skirt, seemed
unable to worry about anything else. Her mother's sheets: they dogged her all
down the stairs. On the train to Portsmouth; in the dockside boarding house
where she washed and washed and slept and got back her strength. On the channel
crossing. Right up until Le Havre, and the backstage chaos of a pantomime on
opening night.
On her second day in Paris—after the frantic scrubbing of hands; after the hot-
faced train ride, four hours to weigh high against horror and decide for the
former; after setting her jaw and knocking on an unsigned door down a narrow
Montmartre alley; after talking her way into a very particular breed of paying
work—she walked into the shining Alexandre Turpault storefront, and spent half
her pick-pocketed Le Havre francs on two full sets of linen at the top of their
line. She had them lace-trimmed and monogrammed, pressed and packaged. And when
she’d sent them off, sans name, sans note, to Limehouse, her feet were once
again solid under her, carrying her along.
 
**** Normandy, 1908 ****
Missy stayed a week; Irene kept to herself. She didn’t pick pockets, or steal
fish from the stew. She felt she was hardly there at all. She felt, indeed, she
might go mad. 
She’d collapsed on the pile of silk in the wardrobe, ready to be discovered.
But Colette hadn’t come over. Not for a night-dress, or a pair of stockings.
Judging from the sounds through the keyhole, she’d been oddly pliant. Perhaps,
Irene thought, she was now ashamed; and it made Irene cry harder: hard enough,
surely, that someone must overhear. But Missy had only put Colette to bed,
gentle, cooing jolie fille, and mignonne petite, in between the wet lazy sounds
of lips and skin, which slowed…and slowed. Missy had raised herself from the
bed, and tip-toed out the door and down the hall. And Irene, with an itching
face and an aching, knotted stomach, had pushed her way with agonising slowness
out of the wardrobe. Her clothes had been bunched-up and damp where she’d
shoved them behind the tub; she’d stood and shivered, putting them on, garment
by wrinkled garment, staring down at Colette’s dark curls, listening to her
snore to raise the dead. 
Then Irene had left. Sat on her pallet bed next door, trying to feel glad she
hadn’t been caught.
Nothing had happened, she thought, viciously, pinching the skin of her own
arms. Nothing had happened. But with everyone, just everyone she met, it was as
if—as if something boiled up under her very skin. The cook, passing her
backstage, said they missed her little shows in the kitchens; and Irene
clenched her fists. It must have showed on her face. The cook’s smile wavered.
Dropped. Irene, cheeks flaming, fled. 
Slipping down to the Bassin she passed Gabrielle, wringing her hands, babbling
to Mademoiselle Claudine. Something about a place in Paris. Something about all
girls I heard, no men allowed unless they’re ones like Missy, oh Mademoiselle
Holmès, can one live there and never leave? Simpering as Claudine laughed and
shook her head. Irene wanted to be sick. She sat on the docks and threw
Colette’s stolen cigarettes into the surf, one after the other after the other.
Marie-Laure, seeking her out there as the sun set, reached out a sweet soft
hand; patted Irene’s shoulder. Patted her waist, inviting. An actress like you.
‘Ça va?’Marie-Laure lisped, and Irene stood, and showed her teeth, and said
‘Tha va? Tha va?’ until tears welled up in the girl’s eyes, and rolled down her
cheeks.  
Why should it be so? Nothing had happened. Nothing. And now she was slipping.
Colette hardly said two words to her together. Missy was there, Missy was
there, and Colette let herself be led, and Irene couldn’t stop thinking
about—but nothing had happened. In the wings stood Wague, always Wague with his
turned-down mouth, staring at Missy’s hand on the small of Colette’s back, at
Missy’s hand on Colette’s bare shoulder, and Irene thought je t’en prie, and
stared daggers through his bloody back. 
She wanted to be gone, now; but she watched the trains leave for Paris, thought
of the boarding-houses and the boulevard theatres and felt ill. Watched the
boats back to London with a rising panic. She wanted to be gone but she was
still backstage in Le Havre, watching Wague watch Missy watch Colette take her
bows. If it hadn’t been for him, she thought (pathetic, swooning as he was,
always in her line of sight with his slumped back and the bald patch at the
crown of his head), she could have almost pretended—.
In a foul mood she prowled and kicked into their dressing rooms, on a night
when the other actors had gone. Scowled at all the flotsam of his trade, and
Claudine’s. Irene had been, that evening, down to the train station again, and
couldn’t make herself leave. He was always, always hanging round. He was
hideous; repellant; and indeed, here he came now: trailing in with bags under
his rheumy eyes and his pencilled-on stubble for the stage. She smiled with
teeth; and after all that, he didn’t even know her name. 
‘Mademoiselle…Ysolde?’ he said, just as she said, in English, ‘You think about
them, don’t you? Madame Colette and the Marquise, when you watch them from the
wings?’ 
Wague drew himself up. Clucked his tongue at her, the stupid little man. She
bit her mouth with her eyes wide open.
‘Madame Colette,’ he blustered, ‘is my student. It is only natural I sw—sweet
her acting.’
‘Follow,’ Irene said. His eyebrows furrowed. ‘The word you want’s
follow—though,' she added,  'Délicieux, is it? You taste it on your tongue when
you see them together? Want to eat them up, do you, you like to—’
'Mademoiselle,' he snapped, and she smiled, 'il faut absolument que tu me
quittes, je t'exige—' 
‘Sh, oh hush, hush, it’s all right,’ she cooed. And look, how he listened. Like
a dog, like a child struck dumb; falling back as she unfolded herself from the
chair before his glass. Oh he was hapless; hopeless. Her heart beat in her
throat. 
‘It's all right,' she said, swallowing. Advancing. 'I know how it must be. A
man like you. Your kind thinks, a beautiful woman you can’t have—’
‘It is not—you do not—’
‘—who you can’t have,’ she said again. ‘What do they do together, hmm? When
they’re alone?’
‘I—,’ he said, ‘—you have—sixteen? you—’ 
Forty-five he looked, but she knew those shaking hands. She watched them
tremble. He tried to stand tall, disapproving; but she narrowed her gaze,
straight into his shocked and wondering eyes. 
‘Shh,’ she said again. Walking toward him with her heart beating out of
control; her palms wet; herself between him and the closed door. 
‘Such a young, such a beautiful woman,’ Irene said. Sneering into Wague’s face.
(His twitching cheek. His tongue working drily in his mouth.) ‘A woman like
her,’ Irene murmured, ‘taking up with that sad old tom. Do you think
it’s—what?’ 
He made a noise. She brought her hand to his other cheek, harder than she
meant. Forcing him into stillness, and oh: wide, wide eyes. His face was
sweating under his greasepaint under her palm. Her fingers itched with it.
‘Disgusts you, does it?’ she hissed. Spat a bit in his face and her stomach
leapt when he flinched. ‘Makes you angry? You think: what does she have that
you don’t? You think: you’re ten times the actor that old bluestocking is. You
think: why couldn’t it be you? Buying her flowers? Feeding her oysters? You
with all your filthy parts,’ and Irene’s thumb caught, harsh, dragged down his
bottom lip as he shuddered, ‘up inside her, in the morning?’ 
His mouth, stretched. His gusting, panting breath across her thumb. 
He tried to say—something. Wrongfooted, searching for words, struggling to
speak with his lip trapped. Like a horse for inspection in the auction-yard;
the whites of his eyes. But after all, he’d brought it on himself. Looking like
a kicked dog; boring all the dancing girls with his boasting. Mooning about
after Colette when she never even noticed him; it was pathetic, she thought,
repulsive it was, and then she—
Christ.
Stumbling back. Wague shocked; frozen. She’d—with her free hand she’d reached
up and she must have—must have struck him. Struck his face. With an open hand,
her palm still stinging. And her arm aching; and her shoulder; white
greasepaint on her palms, what had she done? Backing up toward the door, she
had to get her breath, keep her head; had to run; and then he—
He moaned. Soft, quiet; but he did. It took the floor out from under her. 
She stood and stared and he swayed on the spot. Closed his eyes. Where she’d
smeared the greasepaint off his face she could see him flushed up a dull red.
His hand hovered in air, halfway up to his cheek. He wasn’t moving. He was
breathing so hard. 
And then at once she was—was a torch. A riot. Every fierce and burning thing. 
She shot across the little room at him; pushing him back toward the vanity, and
he went: stumbling, unresisting. A grin like panic coming up on her face, what
was she doing, she had to look round, she had to see. She swept a hand across
the top of the vanity: scattered paint tins; scraps of white, of black and
gold; a shrivelled rose, and a porcelain vase in shards on the floor as she
turned him, shoved him face-down across the desk. 
Tongues of fire; shaking fear. Christ, what was she—hitting a man her father’s
age, backstage in a foreign theatre. Breaking his things, thinking of—of
Missy’s roses, of Colette’s silk camisoles, and the way Wague bloody looked at
them both. She was sprawled halfway over his back and wanting to—to—
But Wague was grunting now, under her hands; his eyes open, head to the side
and a trail of drool from his mouth to the painted wood. He reached for her
behind him, struggling, and she didn’t want—had to get him still, swaying;
moaning like he’d been when—so she clambered up behind him. Pinned his hands at
his sides with her knees. Shoved his face into the wood and his whole body went
slack. His hips twitching just a bit, just a tiny bit; his prick trapped (must
be), like his face, against hard wood.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you poor child,’ the words spilling from her throat. Sitting
up, her weight on his hands. ‘You poor little brat,’ and reached behind herself
to spank his arse through his trousers. He made a slurping, gasping noise
against the wood; now she was steady. Pushed his head down hard and let it up
so he’d do it again, and he did. Christ. Again. Her breath, hard in her lungs. 
‘If you’re—,’ she started. Stopped for air, swallowing giggles, horror-struck.
She scrambled half-off the vanity, but still the words came; she couldn’t stop
them. She hit him with her hand and said, ‘If you’re very good, you know, I can
show you.’ 
Then held her breath. How Colette had moved, red-faced and gasping over Missy’s
knee. 
And had he even understood her? He was writhing, now. Trying to get his bony
arse back up against her thighs through his trousers and her stuff skirt. She
had his left knuckles pinned to the table with her bare knee hard on his palm,
her hips twisted back, not letting him touch. With her left hand on his right
forearm she made a claw. Dug in her rough-bitten nails.  
He moaned again. That quiet, that overwhelmed sound, Lord. 
He didn't answer, though, and it took the edge off her horror. He didn’t have
much English. Perhaps she could—if it wasn’t in French. Do whatever—. She hit
him hard through his trousers and he bucked his hips into the vanity, bloody
Christ. She was already hitting him, holding him down. She could say—
‘Will you be good for me, then?’ Slowing her breath, in her throat. Translating
in her head. Missy had—had barely been winded. ‘Darling girl, do you want—,’
looking around the room, searching, swift, with her kneecap grinding down into
his palm. Paint-pots; chemises. Face rags and hair-rollers. Claudine’s horse
whip. 
She laughed out. He made that slurping sound against the wood. Je te touche
déjà. 
‘You want me to touch you, darling?’ she said. She heard Limehouse in her
voice, thicker than she’d ever put on at home; no doubt he understood nothing.
He was shaking. Christ, she wanted him to—to beg; to cry. Tears and drool all
over the vanity when Claudine came in tomorrow.
‘But I am, little bob-tailed wench,’ she heard herself say. ‘I am, I’m
touching—touching you, already. You need me to, with your knickers down? You
need me to—?’ She laughed, wrong-pitched, wild; and hit him, hit him again with
her open hand. His knees gave out so his weight was all on his stomach, on the
vanity; his feet dangling like Colette’s had dangled, kicking useless against
the floor. She reached between his legs; made a guess and grabbed hold hard;
her fingers tightening into a fist. Wool-wrapped flesh in her palm, off-centre;
only one of them, but—
‘Dieu!’ he cried. He sounded like he was breaking. She laughed, and squeezed.
His breath. He had no breath. She let go and he made a sound that was
almost—almost, she thought, almost—
She ground her knee into his palm; pushed both his arms to the table: stay. He
nodded, nodded, nodded. His eyes wide and watering as she scrambled off and
leaned down to his ear: ‘Take up your skirt up for me, tart,’ pushing his hands
under his hips. Fasteners; flies. She was light-headed; he was fumbling;
whining. ‘Get your knickers down, little dear, little darling,’ and he shoved
his trousers to his knees.
Christ. She wanted to mark him. She kissed each trembling cheek, bringing up
gooseflesh with a teasing tongue—the sounds he made, they heated her face—and
then slapped them, neatly, like an afterthought, as she pulled away toward the
wall. 
Shook her head; flying. Drunk, she felt; and reeling with it. The whip against
the wall, with its frayed leather braid and its taped-up handle. Je t’en
prie.She snapped it against her own thigh; closed her eyes; breathed deep. 
She turned; opened her eyes again, and Wague was—was just where she’d left him.
It opened up her chest. His arms at his sides like she’d tied them there; legs
pinioned by trousers. Pale arse-cheeks bared to the room, gooseflesh raising
the greying hair onto its ends on his bottom and his back. And his mouth, open.
Panting softly; like he didn’t—didn’t want to make a fuss. 
‘Oh,’ said Irene. 
Skin loose on his bones, hairy, pale; and his wrinkled hanging bollocks. He was
ugly to her. And yet. 
‘Such a sweet little miss,’ said Irene, trying for steady breath. She made her
voice warm as she could; the fine edge of anger disguised. ‘Such a clever girl,
waiting here so long.’ 
She thought of Colette, convulsing; Colette, turned soft and pliant. She didn’t
believe she’d made a sound, thinking it; but as she did, Wague trembled. Almost
too quiet to hear, Wague whined.
Si longtemps—
‘So long,’ she said, standing to the side of him now, trailing the whip-end
along his half-bared back; along his crack and the insides of this thighs.
Mesmerised, as he struggled to hold himself still. 
‘So long,’ she said again, ‘without anyone to look after you. Such a pretty
little girl.’
He was panting harder, now, but still quiet, so much quieter than Colette had
been with Missy. With his face turned to the side against the vanity she could
only see one eye; but it was so wide there was a full circle of bloodshot white
around the watery blue. Her tongue felt huge in her mouth. She’d held him down;
slapped his face. She tapped his inside thigh with the whip and he gasped and
yes, that was—. More. More.
‘You like that, fillette?’ and she saw him start at the word in his own tongue,
so she hit him inside the other thigh, harder, as hard as she could. Which
wasn’t very. She grit her teeth. She couldn’t get leverage like this with his
legs just barely apart and trapped by his trousers. He made, still, a high-
pitched pleading noise. 
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do, don’t you? You like me to,’ and she pulled away,
brought the thing straight down on his back. Clumsy; clumsy; it flopped and
skittered; she wanted to feel it through her arm. And he wanted— ‘You like me
to take up your little skirts,’ she said, ‘in front of everyone,’ aiming the
whip across both buttocks now, ‘and show them your money?’ 
And she hit him twice with the thick middle of the thing, hard where his
quivering arse met his thighs. One after the next, no time for breath between,
so that he cried out, wordless, curling his body into the wood of the vanity.
Oui, she thought, unthinking; encore ma petite, and did it again; again; again.
‘You should be careful out at night,’ she said, ‘with a purse like that,’ and
he was crying and shuddering and not moving away, not moving away, and oh,
Christ, she thought, plus encore, encore.
She stopped at last, gasping for breath. Looked down at the mess of him. She’d
got her wish, exact: there he was, sobbing, forehead to the vanity-top, rope of
drool from his open mouth. Humping his hips against the side of the furniture.
A thick stripe was coming up angry pink across his arse, and in the middle of
it a thin arcing line of red. She reached out, mesmerised, with the whip;
touched it to his bleeding skin.
‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Hush, now.’ She smeared faint red trails down the backs of
his legs. And the insides, the—pushing the blood, gentle, with the leather,
into the sweat-damp clenched insides of his thighs. There was a knot in her
throat. 
‘Little dear, getting herself so excited,’ said Irene, and then: ‘don’t worry,
darling. Not now. There’s nothing to—.’ She swallowed. Wanted to hurt him
closer. With her hands.
So she drifted up behind him. His skin under her fingertips, hot and swollen;
he moaned. Twitched forward his hips, and she stroked him, soothing. She
thought of Benjamin: wet, when she’d reached a curious hand inside his smalls.
Wague was quieting now. She slapped him once, curious, and he hiccuped and
cried. 
‘Les petites fillettes,’ she said, ‘can make such a mess.’ She reach round him
on the side where she’d been standing; slid a palm down his leg and around, and
he hunched his hips, desperate, toward her hand—but she ran it down the side of
the vanity instead. That was wet, too. Slicked to dripping from where he’d
rubbed up against it with his prick. 
‘Such a mess,’ she said again, into his ear, her hand back on his hip. ‘So hard
to take care of them, the little angels.’ She slapped his arse again, bare-
handed. 
‘Can you help me, chérie?’ she said. ‘Can you use my hand if I just—,’ and she
moved one hand back in front of him, knuckles against the soiled wood, and
slapped him again, hard, on the arse with her other. He jerked forward. When
his bare flesh was pressed into hers his movements doubled, trebled; he was
making frantic crying grunting noises, rutting himself madly into her unmoving
palm. She slapped him again; and again; his whole arse was hot, now. There was
no space between his moans and she snatched her hand away. 
‘Supplie-moi,’ she said, beg me, and he could have obeyed any way, with any
words, but beautifully, magically, he said it, sobbing it out over and over as
she wrapped her fingers firm around his cock and he curled, immediate, around
her fist, pumping warm and wet all over her hand and her arm and the painted
wood vanity, sobbing: je t’en prie, je t’en prie, je t’en prie.
Afterward. Blazing lights, all shut off at once. Her arm filthy to the elbow
and her skirt stained with a strange man’s blood, she staggered back from him
under the weight of it. He looked around, dazed, his face tear-streaked and
blotchy. ‘Je…’ he mumbled, but couldn’t find more words. She stumbled back
another step. Another. He shifted; tried to get to his feet, but his legs
wouldn’t hold him. He fell on the floor with his trousers about his ankles and
his eyes all vacant and on his left hip—she hadn’t seen, she’d hadn’t—ugly and
open, was a scarlet gash, where the whip had wrapped around. Her stomach
dropped; she stared. ‘Je,’ he said again, but she didn’t want to hear, what had
she—
She turned tail, and ran.
  
**** London, 1902 ****
Irene, in plaits and a grubby pinafore in St. James's Park, had commandeered
Bess Hodge’s skip-rope; and was tying Bess to the railings with it, when Bess’s
brother Jack ran straight into her side.
Bess struggled, and squealed in her high, piping voice, though Jack, wide-eyed,
was already sprawled on his bottom on the pavement. They looked silly, Irene
thought. Shehadn’t said a thing, though it was her Jack had collided with, and
not Bess at all.
‘You following me, then?’ Bess said. Jack shook his head. He got up, sulky, and
tried to whisper in his sister’s ear, but she screwed up her face and squirmed
her face away. So Irene made Jack tell her, instead. 
He told her there were fine ladies, hiding in the arbour. Ladies? Here? Yes,
said Jack, two of them. All in black, he said. Writing in notebooks. With great
hats. 
Ladies, Irene repeated. Thinking: here was something more interesting than
having to give Bess back her skip-rope. So she made Jack stay with Bess while
she walked in a wide circle around the arbour; shimmied up a tree; scooted far
out on an overhanging branch and lowered herself down, slowly, slowly, onto the
roof of the thing, until she could make out a whispered word, the corner of a
feathered hat.
‘Isn’t it scandalous,’ Irene heard, from under one of the plumes. The other hat
shivered its feathers. 
‘Shameless, just shameless,' it said, 'parading around, naked as the morning,'
though when Irene, curious, squinted out to where the woman must be looking, it
was only Mary Macallister in her regular Sunday shift. Not naked at all. Irene
frowned, chewing a hangnail on her thumb. 
‘—no mystery why they marry so early,’ one hat was saying, while the other
clicked and clucked and Irene put her hand over her laughing mouth, ‘living all
crowded together as they do,’ with a little shudder, ‘like animals’ and then
lowered her voice too far for Irene to hear, however hard she pressed her ear
to the gaps between the wooden slats of the arbour. There was low murmuring
between the women; a rustling, a trembling of feathers; and then a low, half-
smothered gasp that Irene thought sounded like nothing so much as—
‘—with their own brothers?’ the listener choked. The speaker said ‘Oh! Oh,
Harriet, your salts,’ drawing back enough so that Irene could see, down between
the hats, that the woman’s hands, which rummaged and rummaged in a large
handbag and then drew out a bottle, were actually—Irene blinked—actually
shaking. 
The hats sniffed, and snorted. They rose toward Irene and she held her breath;
the one woman dusted off the other and chivvied her along, chatting into her
ear as they bustled toward the embankment, leaning on her shoulder, patting her
shaking hand.
Why were they shaking? Irene wondered, pulling herself back up to the branch
above her head. Old Mrs. Brown’s hands shook with palsy; and Mr. Hannigan’s
shook with drink; and when Florence had got the telegram about Irene’s father,
there had been a tremor in her hand until she’d hugged Irene hard enough to
make it stop. Irene, dropping from the tree, wandering off by the water, forgot
all about Bess Hodge, tied to the railings with her own skip-rope. Why would a
fine lady look at plain Mary Macallister in her Sunday shift, and make a sound
like drowning?
Irene couldn’t think.
But a month later, when the London City Mission sent a dour old lady with a
gold eyeglass perched on her beak, to harry Mrs. Hodge and Mrs. Franklin about
the mess their children made; and scold Mr. Harrison about taking a drink; and
to quiz Florence Adler on the last time Irene had been to school—to church—to
the clinic down Stepney Green, until Florence got a horrible reedy sound in her
voice; something rose up inside Irene. It stopped her thinking. She stepped out
from behind the changing-screen in just her chemise. Looked the old bat in the
eye and knew what it was made that lady’s hands shake, beneath the arbour in
St. James's. Irene could have laughed. 
‘You needn’t worry,’ Irene had said. ‘My brother goes to school.’
(Dylan Adler had gone into the glass-houses at thirteen, when the telegram had
come. Twelve-hour days, six-day weeks, and for a year and a half he’d done
nothing in the Adlers' house but fall half-clothed into a stuporous sleep. Then
his mate stumbled, right in front of him, burned off half his face in the
furnace, skin peeled back right down to the bone, and the only time Irene had
ever seen her brother’s hands shaking she was waking him from a night terror,
his eyes wide and horror-struck, and deathly, deathly afraid.) 
Irene yawned, scratching her bottom, looking into the staring eyes of the woman
from the London City Mission. ‘He teaches me everything he learns,’ she said.
‘At night, you know. After we put out the lights.’
 
**** Epilogue: Paris, 1911 ****
‘Oui oui, merci,’ murmured Claudine, absently, handing her francs to the
foreigner in the doorway as Eva said ‘What, aren’t you coming?’ lapsing into
frustrated English, and Natalie, in painful earnestness: ‘I feel, just—torn, in
my soul, coming to such places.’
‘Oh come on,’ Eva said. Natalie lingered in the alleyway; Claudine leaned
against the jamb. ‘Renée would never want you foregoing such an invert’s
paradise on her account,’ Eva said, tugging on Natalie’s white-robed arm. 
‘Elle l’adorait ici,’ Claudine put in. Natalie looked pained.
‘She could never let go of this—this idea of sapphic decadence,’ Natalie said.
‘Sapphic violence, when really it’s the most peaceful, the gentlest thing in
the—’
‘Oh tosh,’ Eva said. ‘I’ve danced in your faerie-circles. And you, my dear,
have never been able to let go of your absurd penchant for rescuing women from
their own folly with the power of your—parts,’ and she gestured, vaguely, to
Natalie’s hips under the voluminous white draperies. 
Claudine snorted. 
‘I thought you didn’t understand English,’ Natalie complained. But she let Eva
take her elbow and pay her entrance fee with the woman at the door. 
‘It’s only,’ Natalie sighed to Eva, as the crowd noise built along the narrow
passageway, ‘one feels, doesn’t one, that so much has changed, has passed,
irretrievably. Liane, married. You, married, and whisked off to Lord only
knows—’
‘It’s Athens, for Christ’s sake,’ Eva cut in. ‘You may have heard of it. The
cradle of Western civilisation.’
‘—and Renée,’ said Natalie, her voice still, after a year and a half, almost
breaking. ‘Dead.’
Eva pulled her chair close to Natalie’s chair; put her head with its burnished
upswept cloud on Natalie’s shoulder. She sighed.
‘I know,’ Eva said, and moved her head, and kissed Natalie’s shoulder before
resting her temple on it once again. ‘I know. But look, duckie, I’m back in
Paris for two days at the outside; Claudine’s been gone for a year; and this La
Fillette or whatever she calls herself—well, everyone, just everyone down to
the man-hungriest Newport housewife is saying she’s not to be missed, even if
you don’t follow her backstage. So let’s just—,’ and Natalie’s hand came up to
stroke absently over Eva’s hair, ‘—let’s order our drinks, and—mmm. Say, what
did you want to cure me of, anyway? Years ago?’
Claudine, smiling, lighting a cigarette, let her mind wander as Natalie said oh
we were childrenand you were perfect, darling, perfect and Eva said that wasn’t
how she remembered it, and pinched Natalie’s knee. They were charming, of
course; it wasn’t that Claudine wanted them gone; it was only…it was always
such a joy, such a visceral joy to be back in Paris, after she’d been away.
There was a familiar taste about it; a loosening of the muscles in her
shoulders and her face, that she could feel the moment she stepped off the
platform at the Gare de l’Est. 
She took a drag; breathed in. Around her the cadences of Paris rose and fell.
Sitting in cafés in the Alexanderplatz, or the Piazza Navona, she would start
in surprise, thinking she’d heard someone say—oh, la mère du fils de mon
cousin; some haphazard phrase; la femme la plus têtue—only to realise, a moment
later, that it had been a trick of the ear: that the words were German, or
Italian, and that her mind had shaped their sounds into a false resemblance. 
Here, though, as she smoked and smiled and Eva teased Natalie about leading
Paris in fashion—for indeed, Scheherazade had played at the Garnier in
Claudine’s absence and everyone was wearing tunics, now, just as Natalie had
done for years—this, tonight, was old Parisian French. Claudine, with her eyes
closed, could hear the Burgundy cottage of the woman behind her: two years
she’d spent in Paris at the outside, though she tried to appear urbane; but the
tom to her other side, who talked only of horses, had been born in the Marais. 
She knew these things without conscious effort. It was, she thought, casting
about lazily for a metaphor, like slipping into a warm bath; or like that first
day of real summer, when a woman could sit on her balcony in only a shift; or
lie in bed, naked, with all the windows open, and be caressed by the air like a
lover. It had always been so, coming back to Paris. She remembered returning
home after her first trip away from the city—with Natalie, as it happened.
They’d sipped Chinon and acted out Sappho in the Loire. She remembered her last
homecoming, three years ago, after that strange summer in Normandy when Colette
had been head over heels for the Marquise, and Wague had woken Claudine at two
o’clock in the morning, smarting from a beating by a fugitive stage hand. 
Claudine’s cigarette had burnt down to her fingers. She opened her eyes to see
Eva half in Natalie’s lap, sucking on her friend’s bottom lip. Well. No woman
was really married when she was sitting next to Natalie Barney in La
Garçonnière. From the orchestra pit a mediocre soprano in a block-print kimono
was singing one of Claudine’s mother’s old songs. ‘L’Opprimée,’ it was.
Claudine sipped her Bordeaux. Caught Natalie’s eye over the top of Eva’s head.
Grinned. 
The soprano dipped into a valley from a trembling high note, then stilled into
silence. Applause filtered up through the barroom chatter. The singer bowed,
and left the stage, and the orchestra struck up a sinister roll of drums. In
the seat next to Claudine, Eva detached herself from Natalie with an air of
palpable excitement. Even Natalie, though she bit her lip, directed her eyes
toward the curtains as they lurched apart.
A mocked-up park; a park-bench. Across the boards strolled a ‘man,’ an ageing
tom in a summer suit and a straw boater, whistling, with a cane. He looked this
way. He looked that. He ogled a group of white-clad schoolgirls, far in the
distance of the painted-on backdrop. He leaned against a tree; wiped his brow.
With broad comic gestures he glanced back at the school outing, and undid his
flies. 
Beside Claudine Eva giggled; Natalie pursed her lips.
From the wings on the other side emerged another young girl, clad in the same
short white dress as her painted contemporaries. She was watching the tom, but
he didn’t see her; she circled around him, curious, impish, with her back to
the audience, and her long dark hair curling down her back. She crouched behind
the bench. He was moving his hand, staring in the other direction. She slipped
behind his tree. He was writhing dramatically; contorting; speeding his
movements to climax. She laughed behind her hand, her face hidden by a bonnet.
And at the last moment, just as one thought he must burst—she reached around,
quick-quick, grabbed both his hands away from his flies, and pinned them in
front of her behind the tree.
Claudine snuck a look at Natalie, who had her fingers to her chin. Eva was
rapt.
On the stage, the tom’s captor did a full-body giggle, face still obscured by
her bonnet. His wooden prick stood out proud from his trousers. He squirmed and
kicked; the horns in the orchestra wailed his distress. The dark-haired
schoolgirl held his wrists with the hand away from the audience; groping,
comically, with the other over his bound breasts and his wide curved hips, and
then happening upon his cock as if by chance. She gave it a few experimental
pumps. He twisted his hips, trying for more. She drew back her hand, miming
scandal, one hand over her mouth. 
The tom managed, at last, to get a hand round the back of the tree; to tear the
girl’s bonnet from her head. She stilled, at once. She became stiff, all her
limbs clenched in fury. She stamped her foot; her long ringlets bounced.
Then she was moving round the other side of the tree, peeling a switch off the
side of its trunk. She shoved the tom toward the park bench, kicking him,
punching him. She got him there and took down his trousers; bent him over the
side of it, with his arse toward the audience. She sat astride his back,
holding him down, with the switch in her hand and her face to the room, and—
‘Lovely, isn’t she?’ Eva murmured, but that’s not why Claudine had gasped.
Claudine sat with her mouth open, almost laughing. The girl smiled thin and
slow at the audience. She looked up at the sun; down, with distaste, at her
squirming quarry, and unbuttoned her white dress all down the front with the
switch still in her hand. But that was, Claudine thought, that was—as the girl
shrugged off her frock and, with a curious, cruel expression, started whipping
the tom on his bare and flushing arse. 
At last Claudine didstart to laugh. Her stomach clenched, silent but mad, tears
running down her face in the smoky room. 
‘What is it?’ said Natalie, concerned, leaning over with her hand on Claudine’s
arm. ‘Are you all right? Do you—do you need to go?’
‘No,’ Claudine gasped. ‘I’m—fine, just. This girl. This is someone I once—,’
and was wracked again by laughter. To think of Wague’s mournful little face as
she’d daubed at his buttocks. After all this time.
At the front of the room the former stage hand whipped her quarry; showed her
teeth. Eva squirmed; her hand squeezing her own thigh in rhythm through the
fabric of her dress. Natalie pursed her lips and Claudine, at last, managed to
quiet herself. She leaned close to Natalie and whispered, in her ear:
‘My friend. I believe not so much passes, as you might sometimes believe.’
 
 
**** Notes ****
   1. The title is from Colette's short novel La paix chez les bêtes, or
      roughly Peace among the beasts. It's actually pretty funny the degree to
      which I could have appropriated almost any of Colette's titles for this
      story, to wit: The Vagabond, My Mother's House, The Pure and the Impure,
      The Tender Shoot, Retreat from Love, The Ripening Seed.
   2. The summary is an adaptation of William Wordsworth's famous line from "My
      Heart Leaps Up When I Behold": "The Child is father of the Man."
   3. Georges Wague and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette were both real people. Wague
      was Colette's acting teacher in the wake of her divorce from her first
      husband. She rapidly became much more famous than Wague, due not so much
      to her talent as a mime as to her daring and savvy sense for what is now
      called "publicity"; to her love affairs with people of both genders; and
      also, incidentally, to her writing talent. In 1908 her series of four
      Claudine novels were already famous--and had been made into a hit play,
      and even merchandised—although unfortunately for her, they had all been
      published under her ex-husband's name.
   4. Claudine Holmès was also technically a historical person, believe it or
      not. She is not just some crazy Doyle-Colette composite. Her role in this
      series, though, and basically her entire character, are invented. And
      that’s all I’m saying about her at the moment. ;-)
   5. What the characters here call a "pantomime" is a drama done in mime, not
      the contemporary UK usage of musical-comedy stage productions struck up
      at Christmas. The pantomime in the story (which was scandalous even by
      Parisian standards) was called La Chair (The Flesh). Colette and and
      Wague wrote it together, then toured with it very profitably for four
      years, on and off. It was largely as described, except that Christine
      Kerf played the role I gave Claudine. In the summer of 1908 the threesome
      were indeed performing it, and Missy did actually visit, although they
      were in Picardy rather than Normandy; I shifted them a few miles north in
      order to give Irene a handy port of arrival.
   6. Colette's extremely high-born stone-butch lesbian lover is historical as
      well: Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, who went by Missy, provoked
      a full-on theatre riot at the Moulin Rouge by appearing with Colette in a
      racy pantomime at which the de Morny coat of arms was displayed over the
      entrance. Missy was older than Colette, and their interpersonal dynamic
      was at least somewhat as described. From a letter Colette wrote to Missy
      early in their affair:
           If the rocking of your arms doesn't suffice to calm me, your
           mouth will become fiercer, your hands more amorous, and you
           will grant me sensual pleasure like a form of succour, like a
           sovereign exorcism of the demons within me: fever, rage,
           uncertainty...You will give me pleasure bending over me, your
           eyes full of maternal anxiety, you who seeks in your
           impassioned friend the child you don't have.
   7. A number of details in the flashbacks are taken from Françoise Barret-
      Ducrocq's Love in the Time of Victoria, which is a great resource on
      working-class sexual mores in 19th-century England. (Spoiler: they were
      not the same as those portrayed in Victorian novels by and for the middle
      class.) Barret-Ducrocq argues that among the poor of London, throughout
      the 1800s, sex before marriage was well within the bounds of
      respectability, even an expected part of the courtship ritual, as long as
      it was done "under a promise," meaning that the man had voiced his
      intention to marry the woman. Even then, the rationale seems to have been
      more pragmatic (she will be supported if she gets pregnant), than any
      belief that a woman would be "ruined" once she was no longer a
      virgin—that kind of thinking was more common in the middle and upper
      classes.
   8. At the turn of the century abortion was illegal in England, and
      punishable by penal servitude, but any any number of poisonous substances
      were discreetly advertised as abortifacients in the papers and at the
      chemist's. Barret-Ducrocq again:
           A study published in 1825 lists among other methods bleeding
           and taking emetics, cantharides (Spanish fly), mercury,
           powdered savin and juniper essence. In the mid nineteenth
           century colocynth, quinine and a concoction of gin and
           gunpowder were added to the list. Pills containing lead enjoyed
           a brief vogue around the turn of the century.
   9. The detail of the do-gooders hiding in the arbor to observe the
      debauchery of the working class is, hilariously, true, and also taken
      from Barret-Ducrocq:
           Another group of missionaries, doing similar research at the
           Red House near Vauxhall Bridge, testified after lurking in an
           arbour for a couple of hours: [There was] a company of young
           persons of both sexes: their conduct and conversation was
           disgusting.
      Unlike the conduct of spying on people from arbors, which is of course
      not disgusting at all.
  10. The lesbian-BDSM-brothel-fronting-as-vaudeville-theatre La Garçonnière is
      invented. But it's absolutely probable that such a place did exist, given
      the enormous breadth and luxuriance of the Parisian sex industry at the
      fin de siècle. Unrealistic middle- and upper-class expectations of
      decorousness within marriage, low pay and grueling hours for non-sexual
      women's work, and the general decadence of the city at the turn of the
      century, created a perfect storm of supply and demand. Thurman writes:
           At the fin de siècle, there were approximately a hundred
           thousand Parisian prostitutes serving a population of slightly
           under three million. The great bordellos, like The Sphinx, were
           pornographic theaters offering lavish spectacles to a
           heterogenous audience that sometimes included children. The
           morals of milliners,… or of herbalists, … were suspect because
           so many boutiques à surprise were in fact fronts for freelance
           sex work. Child prostitution wasn't outlawed until 1909, and
           girls as young as eight or ten circulated in the café-concerts
           and the brasseries, ostensibly selling flowers, but in fact
           offering themselves to men and women equally. Lesbian
           prostitutes cruised the Champs-Élysées. [...] Destitute
           provincials wrote desperately to Paris madams, begging for a
           situation.
      So Irene would have had stiff competition, talking herself into a job at
      such a place. But I think we can all believe she'd be up for it. (Also,
      regarding the name: androgynous women and lesbians at the time were often
      referred to as "garçonnes," a feminization of "garçon," or "boy.")
  11. Lastly, if you haven't read anything about the social circle surrounding
      the sexually voracious femme lesbian American heiress Natalie Barney in
      the years bracketing WWI, I would highly recommend it. Eva Palmer-
      Sikelianos was also a real person and one of Barney's first lovers.
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