The Spoils of Sin Read Online Free Page A

were, after all, gentlemen, however unpolished their appearance. Even Carola’s beau was plainly working for his bread and not simply touring the west at his father’s expense.
    The drinks were dispensed, but before many sips had been taken, the atmosphere changed. The tall man had taken a seat next to Fanny, his hat on his lap and his colour high. He laid a hand on her leg, less gently than she might have liked. ‘Well then?’ he said. ‘I guess we should go up them there stairs.’ His accent was sing-song, suggesting the prairies of Ohio or Indiana. Fanny’s heart pounded. This was it, then. The first of a thousand such moments. She told herself the pounding heart was a precursor to a more sensual beat, lower down in her body. The man was clean enough. He looked healthy and in no way brutal. He would do. Besides, she realised with another painful thump in her chest, she had very little choice in the matter. From this time on, she must accede to whatever male demands might be made on her, short of actual physical damage. And even that could well turn out to be beyond her control.
    Carola’s gentleman was quick to follow. ‘Yes, indeedy,’ he said with a heartiness that was plainly artificial. He had placed his hat on a hook on the wall, and showed no signs of an uncomfortable engorgement. The piano player strummed softly and averted his eyes.
    â€˜The door on the left,’ Fanny told her client. ‘I must prepare myself. Three minutes.’ She held up three fingers. ‘Remove your boots, if you please.’
    He tilted his head at her. ‘Here or upstairs?’
    The image of a pair of stockinged feet climbing the stairs was sufficiently domestic to allay a handful of anxieties. ‘Here will do,’ she told him. Then she hurried out to the crude privy in the yard, lifted her skirts and inserted one of the vinegar-soaked sponges she and Carola had left in a glass jar inside a wooden box on the floor. They had both practised a dozen times, pushing the scrap of protective material as high as they could, and then desperately struggling to remove it again. Both procedures were vitally important – the removal to be done as soon as possible after the event, the sponge washed andresoaked with the acidic fluid that would deter all damaging invasions. ‘Infection too,’ Carola had told her. ‘There’s as big a chance of the clap as there is of a brat.’ Either one would be a disaster, spelling the end of their business. A further benefit came to mind, as well. The monthly courses might necessitate some days of idleness and loss of earnings, unless somehow concealed. The sponge, Carola suggested, could work to that purpose too.
    Fanny had sighed softly to herself. The prospect of a few days’ rest each month was already of some appeal, even before the work had begun.
    She had no idea whether her visit to the privy had taken more or less than three minutes. The arbitrary time span had been a homage to her father, who would promise to attend to whatever was demanded of him ‘in exactly three minutes’ when they had lived back in Rhode Island. Fanny’s brother Reuben had been known to time him by the mantel clock.
    A mistake, she realised too late. Thoughts of home, already aroused by the piano, were far from comfortable now. She was on the brink of becoming a loose woman - or worse. She was intending to earn her living by immoral means. The road ahead, once shining with promise, now looked stony and tawdry.
    Nonetheless, she mounted the stairs, holding up her rustling skirt and pinning on a winsome smile. The man was waiting, boots, belt and breeches already off. His impatience made it all far easier. He clasped her to him, his member urgent against the cotton of his underclothes. When he found his way through her garments, his plunging drove the sponge even deeper, until she could feel it bunched against some inner part of herself.
    He