Items related to Trades of the Flesh
Preston, 1888: as the century draws to a close, the prostitute murders in London have made young Lydia Ketch’s ‘trade’ a political issue. Lydia, the tough but optimistic daughter of a former workhouse inmate, has spent a year working in the ‘introduction house’ of Kathleen Tanner, a job that has given her an income few others could match.
When Lydia meets Henry Shadwell, a young surgeon with a passionate interest in biology, the two develop an instant – and non-professional – bond. And Henry soon enlists Lydia’s help in his underground sidelines; first as a model for pornographic photography; then as an assistant in procuring corpses for medical experimentation.
With the dangers of her own line of work becoming clearer by the day, and her newfound delight in her own sexuality burgeoning, Lydia becomes disillusioned with her life as a prostitute. And it soon become clear that her trade – and Henry’s – are even more dangerous than either had imagined.
Trades of the Flesh is a gripping novel about the body and its desires, from a precocious voice in historical fiction.
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About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Faye L. Booth was born in Lancashire in 1980 and lives in the county. She shares her home with a menagerie of animals.
1
1888
Lydia awoke to the sound of falsetto protests from the room next door. She poked her nose out from under the thick winter bedsheets and grimaced at the cold of the November morning. Reaching an arm out to grasp the good wool shawl hung over the headboard, Lydia huddled into it, wrapping up as warmly as she could before forcing herself to throw the covers back. Padding across the room in bare feet, she flung open her dress box and dug out a clean red dress—a deep wine-red, not a gaudy cherry: Lydia knew that men with money liked to pretend that the girl they’d just paid a pound to fuck had some class about her. Next door, the creaking of the bed was becoming frantic, and Daisy’s breathless claims of innocence rose in pitch with it. She must have had enough of this one by now; he was certainly taking his time to finish.
Catching sight of herself in the full-length mirror facing her bed, Lydia reached for her hairbrush. Her last man had left late the previous night, and she couldn’t be bothered to yank the pillow tangles from her hair. She had slept in her corset; it was too much trouble for either Lydia or most of the chaps to fuss about with.
“Lydia?” Annabel’s voice, through the noises coming from Daisy’s room. “Lydia!” Annie was indignant about something. Probably just running late for school again. Pulling a handful of coloured underthings from her second clothes chest, Lydia dressed hurriedly. She tucked up a little of her skirt to expose her petticoat as a mark of her trade, pinned it with the gilt crown brooch she’d bought from a cheap-jack one night—it made a change from just tucking her hem up, as many of the other girls did—and set off downstairs, tugging leftover knots from her wild brown locks as she went.
Down in the kitchen, Annabel was pulling books out of her pack and complaining that she would miss the school bell. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair—a warm golden brown, rather than hazelnut like Lydia’s—clung to her forehead. Kathleen Tanner, the abbess and owner of the house, was shouting over her, asking if she’d done the washing.
“It’s in front of the fire, there, isn’t it?” Unlike the parlour and the girls’ bedrooms, which were luxuriously papered and furnished to imitate the picture Kathleen had in her head of quality homes, with fires burning in every grate, the kitchen was sparse and cold, with whitewashed walls, a grumbling old range cooker and a long butcher’s table of scrubbed wood in the middle of the stone floor, with two wooden benches for the girls to sit on and eat their meals at.
“Not that washing, clot—the sponges! Have you washed them and all?”
Annabel wrinkled her nose.
“Yes, they’re soaking in the bucket. Mary’s took ages to come clean.”
“That right?” Kathleen mused. “Wonder if we’ll get anyone coming through from out of town? We might be able to pass her off as a virgin.”
“Come off it,” Lydia scoffed. “Who’s going to believe Mary’s a virgin?”
At the sound of her voice, Annabel turned. “Lydia, have you got my exercise book?”
Lydia yawned. “Yes. I borrowed it last night; thought I’d practise my reading.”
“You might’ve told me! I do need it today, you know.”
Lydia shrugged. “I’ll fetch it now.”
“Hurry up,” Annie complained, “I’m late enough as it is.”
“Then why didn’t you get me up earlier?” Lydia yelled over her shoulder as she made her way back upstairs.
“As if I ever get a chance! I’m elbow-deep in a bucket of your dirty linens of a morning, and your linens are grubbier than most.”
“You know our deal.” Kathleen’s voice faded as Lydia stomped up the last few steps and back into her bedroom. “Your sister earns her keep in her bed and you earn yours in the rest of the house. I ain’t running a charity here.” The rest of her words were drowned out by the sound of heeled boots on the stairs. Annie’s racket must have got Mary up.
When Lydia flounced back into the kitchen, she flung out an arm in suitably theatrical manner and started reading from the lesson Annabel had copied into her exercise book.
“‘A foolish woman is clamorous; she is simple and knoweth nothing.’”
Sitting at the kitchen table eating her breakfast, the sleepy-eyed Mary Fallon giggled. Her golden tresses were immaculate, but then the ones who visited Mary rarely rode her roughly. Things tended to work the other way around in Mary’s room: she was known locally as Mistress Birch, thanks to her skill with a cane.
“How very true,” Annabel said petulantly. “Now give me back my book.”
“‘For she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in high places of the city.’” Lydia smirked back at Mary. “Hold on, this is my favourite bit: ‘... and as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”’” The girls laughed.
“Yes, yes, very funny,” Annabel said, snatching her book from Lydia and stuffing it into her pack.
Kathleen tutted. “I need you to pick us up some bread and some oil on your way back from school.” The abbess rummaged through her pockets and produced a shilling—she hated to put anything on the slate, however small.
“You don’t need to go to school to learn how to be a governess,” Mary gasped in mock horror. Her lilting accent—Armagh by way of Albert Dock—was deceptively light. “All governess work is is book-learning and knowing how to use a cane, and you’ve spent enough time reading books.” Pushing her breakfast plate away, she stood up and snatched a wooden spoon off the table, bringing it down fast through the air with a practised stroke that whipped past Annie’s arm by barely an inch. “I’ll make a governess of you.”
Annabel flicked the spoon out of Mary’s hand, and it clattered onto the stone kitchen floor. “And wouldn’t that be grand?” She dropped Kathleen’s shilling into her pocket and buttoned it closed. “I’m going to school. Miss Treadwell won’t just pretend to hit me if I’m late. I’ll be back this afternoon.”
“After you’ve picked up my shopping,” Kathleen reminded her. Annie nodded impatiently and made her way out into the hall.
“Your Miss Treadwell couldn’t hold a candle to me,” Mary called after her. “That’s why I get paid for floggings and she has to teach the likes of you.”
The front door creaked as Annabel opened it. There was a brief pause, then Annie’s clear, girlish voice drifted back into the kitchen.
“And I’m sure Miss Treadwell’s been crying herself to sleep, Mary. See you all after!”
Lydia grinned and sat down to her bacon and egg. Nobody could say that Kathleen Tanner didn’t give her girls enough to keep their strength up, and Annie was always careful to overcook Lydia’s bacon until it was brown and crispy, the only way she could eat it. Out in the hall, a heavy, male footfall was making its way to the front door. The kitchen door opened, and Daisy Carter joined Lydia and Mary at the breakfast table. The familiar smell of the trade hung freshly around her, and Kathleen bent her head over her coffee cup and inhaled the brew’s strong, rich scent.
“That one were early,” Lydia said through a mouthful of egg white.
“Just as well,” Daisy replied, gingerly reaching up and feeling the top of her blonde head for bruises from the headboard. “If I’d started any later, I’d have lost the best part of the day.”
Kathleen set Daisy’s plate down on the table in front of her.
“I thought your visitors just hiked your camisoles up, did the deed and went on their way?” Mary remarked.
“They do, usually. But this one had had a few glasses, I think.”
“So that’s what your ravished princess act was for, then,” Lydia said.
Daisy nodded. “Well, I ain’t got all day.”
* * *
As it turned out, the day was a quiet one. The rest of the morning and the early hours of the afternoon passed without a single visitor to the house. Kathleen, an enterprising Yorkshire woman in her late thirties, had invested a substantial sum in keeping the house presentable both inside and out, and in feeding and clothing her three girls carefully so that they could command the best prices.
Men wouldn’t pay to shag a bedraggled little gutter-rat, Kathleen had told Lydia on the night she and Annabel had shown up on her doorstep a year ago; they could get that sort of thing for free. Lydia’s shapeless smocks and torn linen had long since been burned, save for one particularly ugly grey dress that she’d hidden in the bottom of one of her clothes boxes. In the early days, after Lydia had finished with some bloated, ugly or foul-smelling man, she would snatch a moment to herself and pull out the raggy old dress to remind herself of the exchange she had made. In many ways, her life couldn’t be more different from that of most other seventeen-year-old girls with her background. She ate well, dressed in lovely clothes that the old Lydia Ketch would never have dreamed of wearing, and slept under a safe roof at night, and by now she did not expect to feel even the cheap, fleeting thrill she’d felt when she had Jem Holloway break her in. Nowadays, Lydia was well versed in ignoring the men on top of her, underneath her and inside her. The worst were those w...
1888
Lydia awoke to the sound of falsetto protests from the room next door. She poked her nose out from under the thick winter bedsheets and grimaced at the cold of the November morning. Reaching an arm out to grasp the good wool shawl hung over the headboard, Lydia huddled into it, wrapping up as warmly as she could before forcing herself to throw the covers back. Padding across the room in bare feet, she flung open her dress box and dug out a clean red dress—a deep wine-red, not a gaudy cherry: Lydia knew that men with money liked to pretend that the girl they’d just paid a pound to fuck had some class about her. Next door, the creaking of the bed was becoming frantic, and Daisy’s breathless claims of innocence rose in pitch with it. She must have had enough of this one by now; he was certainly taking his time to finish.
Catching sight of herself in the full-length mirror facing her bed, Lydia reached for her hairbrush. Her last man had left late the previous night, and she couldn’t be bothered to yank the pillow tangles from her hair. She had slept in her corset; it was too much trouble for either Lydia or most of the chaps to fuss about with.
“Lydia?” Annabel’s voice, through the noises coming from Daisy’s room. “Lydia!” Annie was indignant about something. Probably just running late for school again. Pulling a handful of coloured underthings from her second clothes chest, Lydia dressed hurriedly. She tucked up a little of her skirt to expose her petticoat as a mark of her trade, pinned it with the gilt crown brooch she’d bought from a cheap-jack one night—it made a change from just tucking her hem up, as many of the other girls did—and set off downstairs, tugging leftover knots from her wild brown locks as she went.
Down in the kitchen, Annabel was pulling books out of her pack and complaining that she would miss the school bell. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair—a warm golden brown, rather than hazelnut like Lydia’s—clung to her forehead. Kathleen Tanner, the abbess and owner of the house, was shouting over her, asking if she’d done the washing.
“It’s in front of the fire, there, isn’t it?” Unlike the parlour and the girls’ bedrooms, which were luxuriously papered and furnished to imitate the picture Kathleen had in her head of quality homes, with fires burning in every grate, the kitchen was sparse and cold, with whitewashed walls, a grumbling old range cooker and a long butcher’s table of scrubbed wood in the middle of the stone floor, with two wooden benches for the girls to sit on and eat their meals at.
“Not that washing, clot—the sponges! Have you washed them and all?”
Annabel wrinkled her nose.
“Yes, they’re soaking in the bucket. Mary’s took ages to come clean.”
“That right?” Kathleen mused. “Wonder if we’ll get anyone coming through from out of town? We might be able to pass her off as a virgin.”
“Come off it,” Lydia scoffed. “Who’s going to believe Mary’s a virgin?”
At the sound of her voice, Annabel turned. “Lydia, have you got my exercise book?”
Lydia yawned. “Yes. I borrowed it last night; thought I’d practise my reading.”
“You might’ve told me! I do need it today, you know.”
Lydia shrugged. “I’ll fetch it now.”
“Hurry up,” Annie complained, “I’m late enough as it is.”
“Then why didn’t you get me up earlier?” Lydia yelled over her shoulder as she made her way back upstairs.
“As if I ever get a chance! I’m elbow-deep in a bucket of your dirty linens of a morning, and your linens are grubbier than most.”
“You know our deal.” Kathleen’s voice faded as Lydia stomped up the last few steps and back into her bedroom. “Your sister earns her keep in her bed and you earn yours in the rest of the house. I ain’t running a charity here.” The rest of her words were drowned out by the sound of heeled boots on the stairs. Annie’s racket must have got Mary up.
When Lydia flounced back into the kitchen, she flung out an arm in suitably theatrical manner and started reading from the lesson Annabel had copied into her exercise book.
“‘A foolish woman is clamorous; she is simple and knoweth nothing.’”
Sitting at the kitchen table eating her breakfast, the sleepy-eyed Mary Fallon giggled. Her golden tresses were immaculate, but then the ones who visited Mary rarely rode her roughly. Things tended to work the other way around in Mary’s room: she was known locally as Mistress Birch, thanks to her skill with a cane.
“How very true,” Annabel said petulantly. “Now give me back my book.”
“‘For she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in high places of the city.’” Lydia smirked back at Mary. “Hold on, this is my favourite bit: ‘... and as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”’” The girls laughed.
“Yes, yes, very funny,” Annabel said, snatching her book from Lydia and stuffing it into her pack.
Kathleen tutted. “I need you to pick us up some bread and some oil on your way back from school.” The abbess rummaged through her pockets and produced a shilling—she hated to put anything on the slate, however small.
“You don’t need to go to school to learn how to be a governess,” Mary gasped in mock horror. Her lilting accent—Armagh by way of Albert Dock—was deceptively light. “All governess work is is book-learning and knowing how to use a cane, and you’ve spent enough time reading books.” Pushing her breakfast plate away, she stood up and snatched a wooden spoon off the table, bringing it down fast through the air with a practised stroke that whipped past Annie’s arm by barely an inch. “I’ll make a governess of you.”
Annabel flicked the spoon out of Mary’s hand, and it clattered onto the stone kitchen floor. “And wouldn’t that be grand?” She dropped Kathleen’s shilling into her pocket and buttoned it closed. “I’m going to school. Miss Treadwell won’t just pretend to hit me if I’m late. I’ll be back this afternoon.”
“After you’ve picked up my shopping,” Kathleen reminded her. Annie nodded impatiently and made her way out into the hall.
“Your Miss Treadwell couldn’t hold a candle to me,” Mary called after her. “That’s why I get paid for floggings and she has to teach the likes of you.”
The front door creaked as Annabel opened it. There was a brief pause, then Annie’s clear, girlish voice drifted back into the kitchen.
“And I’m sure Miss Treadwell’s been crying herself to sleep, Mary. See you all after!”
Lydia grinned and sat down to her bacon and egg. Nobody could say that Kathleen Tanner didn’t give her girls enough to keep their strength up, and Annie was always careful to overcook Lydia’s bacon until it was brown and crispy, the only way she could eat it. Out in the hall, a heavy, male footfall was making its way to the front door. The kitchen door opened, and Daisy Carter joined Lydia and Mary at the breakfast table. The familiar smell of the trade hung freshly around her, and Kathleen bent her head over her coffee cup and inhaled the brew’s strong, rich scent.
“That one were early,” Lydia said through a mouthful of egg white.
“Just as well,” Daisy replied, gingerly reaching up and feeling the top of her blonde head for bruises from the headboard. “If I’d started any later, I’d have lost the best part of the day.”
Kathleen set Daisy’s plate down on the table in front of her.
“I thought your visitors just hiked your camisoles up, did the deed and went on their way?” Mary remarked.
“They do, usually. But this one had had a few glasses, I think.”
“So that’s what your ravished princess act was for, then,” Lydia said.
Daisy nodded. “Well, I ain’t got all day.”
* * *
As it turned out, the day was a quiet one. The rest of the morning and the early hours of the afternoon passed without a single visitor to the house. Kathleen, an enterprising Yorkshire woman in her late thirties, had invested a substantial sum in keeping the house presentable both inside and out, and in feeding and clothing her three girls carefully so that they could command the best prices.
Men wouldn’t pay to shag a bedraggled little gutter-rat, Kathleen had told Lydia on the night she and Annabel had shown up on her doorstep a year ago; they could get that sort of thing for free. Lydia’s shapeless smocks and torn linen had long since been burned, save for one particularly ugly grey dress that she’d hidden in the bottom of one of her clothes boxes. In the early days, after Lydia had finished with some bloated, ugly or foul-smelling man, she would snatch a moment to herself and pull out the raggy old dress to remind herself of the exchange she had made. In many ways, her life couldn’t be more different from that of most other seventeen-year-old girls with her background. She ate well, dressed in lovely clothes that the old Lydia Ketch would never have dreamed of wearing, and slept under a safe roof at night, and by now she did not expect to feel even the cheap, fleeting thrill she’d felt when she had Jem Holloway break her in. Nowadays, Lydia was well versed in ignoring the men on top of her, underneath her and inside her. The worst were those w...
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- PublisherPalgrave Macmillan Ltd
- Publication date2009
- ISBN 10 0230743412
- ISBN 13 9780230743410
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages293
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