I think that’s why I did what I did.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Sometime towards the end of my first week at the School-house, Mrs Slap had sent for me to meet her in the library. Yes, there was a library there, too. Full of books I’d never seen in any other. Boileau’s Histoire des Flagellants. A Treatise of the Use of Flogging. I found her writing up her ledgers. Any time I saw Mrs Slap she was holding the Bible or one of her ledgers. Ten thousand a year, in a good year, the other girls had told me.

She held up a finger for me to wait, and only when she was good and done did she set down her pen, give me a hard stare. Carrying on with her sums in her head, no doubt. Pounds of flesh, my weight in coins.

There was still that sour taste in my mouth, dregs of the drug and the vomit. I licked my lips, and said nothing.

‘Here’s the most important thing you need to know while you’re here. In this trade, and in this branch of the trade, there’s only one way for a girl to thrive. And that’s by learning to judge a man’s appetites. Now, some of it’s more than enough to turn your stomach, I grant you, but who are we to stop a man’s nastiness if it’s his own self he wants it done to? No. That’s not for you to judge. But! You give them just enough. Let them think they’re getting as much as they want. It’s up to you to see the line. Save them from their nastier appetites.’ She gave the quill feather a long stroke, same way you’d go about trying to raise a man’s flag. ‘However. It is for us to judge what is appetite and what is thirst. Appetite is what we cater to, here. Thirst? No. Thirst will make you claw out your own throat. Thirst will get my house shut down.’

I nodded, swaying, the shelves blurred. ‘Yes. I understand. His appetites are fair game, not his thirsts.’

‘His?’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘His? But . . . I wasn’t talking about his thirst, girl. I was talking about yours.’

The coves went by first names only. Henry was one of my regulars. Drooping jowls and a mouth as small as a mustard seed. For all I knew, he could have been the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I did know what he liked. Being birched, whipped, flogged, stung with nettles, swaddled, holly-brushed. Kissing my feet while I lay back on the chaise; being taken over my knee for doing his sums incorrectly; being paraded downstairs in nothing but a corset and kid slippers. Sal said he surely had to be a lawyer or a priest.

Men like him were the ones who wanted scarring, always happier to let themselves loose under the whip hand of a black. That put the white girls’ noses out of joint. But we’d already been in the bondage business, no matter that it had been at the other end.