“THEY WANT YE NOW, Belle.” It was the tavern keeper’s voice calling from inside the tavern.
Bellebelle, standing on the tavern steps, felt her stomach plummet. Why was she so fearful? After all, she had always known what was going to happen, had often felt impatient for it to be over. But now that the moment was here …
She stared at the streaks of white cloud that swept across a gray-blue sky, the fading sunlight glinting on the White Tower across the river in London. The end of a brisk February day, but just the beginning for her. A salt wind whipped across her face, bringing with it the sickly smell of rotting fish and slops that always hung over the Bankside in Southwark. Above her head Bellebelle could hear the dirty tavern sign, The Bishop’s Hat, creak and sway on its leather hinges as usual, but this afternoon it had a scary groan as well.
“Belle! Gilbert be calling for ye and ye don’t want to cause no trouble. Not today.”
She pretended not to hear.
The tavern and adjoining brothel-house sat side by side on a small incline back from the street; from where she stood, over to the right, Bellebelle could just glimpse the priory roof of St. Mary Overie, where Morgaine had taken her to Easter service last year, and the tall spires of the parish churches of St. Mary Magdalene and St. Margaret soaring toward heaven. Over to her left was the wooden bridge that spanned the river, then the Strand where the herring boats were moored, and beyond it the tidal stream where vessels from foreign ports rode at anchor.
Whenever she walked on the bridge, Bellebelle always looked for the boy, Henry, she had met two years earlier. He was the only person with whom she had ever shared the secret of her magic fish. Month after month, when she was able to persuade her mother or one of the other whores to take her, she had searched all over the bridge for him. But, to her great disappointment, she had never seen the boy again. Of course she was almost fourteen years of age, too old for such things now. In truth, the last time she had gone to the bridge, six months ago at least, she hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of the fish.
“Come along now, Belle,” Arnolf, the tavern keeper, called again. “I know ye hear me. No use putting things off.”
With a shiver of fear, Bellebelle turned and reluctantly entered the tavern, lit as usual by smoking candles. At night it was a fearful place, filled with rough voices, screams, and wild laughter. Daytimes, however, the tavern was usually quiet, except for the rattle and call of the dicing players crouched in a far corner of the room. This afternoon Bellebelle barely noticed the trestle tables and wooden benches with their handful of drinking men. She ignored the invitations of two sailors, peg-tankards of ale in their fists, standing at the long wooden counter that ran half the length of the tavern, and brushed aside the half-drunk patron who reached out to grab her.
“I hope all goes well, lass,” said old Arnolf, as he knelt in front of a row of wine casks resting on low wooden racks.
“Surely I’ll draw a fine one,” Bellebelle said, forcing a brave smile. “Gilbert says they’ll all be gentlemen of means.”
“Gilbert! He’s a brothelmaster, lass. Only a fool would believe the likes o’ him.” He shook his head. “Eh, you’d see the good in the devil himself, Belle.” Arnolf lowered his voice. “Means or no, there be noblemen as rough and vicious as them sailors, make no mistake. That knave ought to be whipped raw, selling off your maidenhead like it were a catch of herring. Eh, I suppose ye were lucky Gilbert waited this long.”
She did not reply, for Old Arnolf had voiced Bellebelle’s deepest terror. From years of listening to the whores she knew that some customers could be rough and hurtful. Especially the big, hulking creatures from the docks. The whores dreaded such men, but Gilbert, the brothelmaster, forced them to accommodate all customers. Except on one rare occasion, which Bellebelle had never forgotten. Her mother, Gytha, had refused to service a man because of the size of his member, saying it would kill her. Gilbert had beaten Gytha for not doing as he bade her, but Gytha said she would rather suffer the beating than the member.
Bellebelle pushed the horrid incident from her mind, walked slowly out the back door of the tavern, and lingered in the small dirt yard that separated the tavern from the back entrance to the brothel-house. She dreaded the moment when she would have to enter the downstairs room of the brothel and face an unknown group of customers who were there for the sole purpose of bidding for her maidenhead.
All the whores assured Bellebelle that she was wondrous fair to look at. The glances of the men in the brothel and tavern tended to make her believe this. But the men assembled this afternoon were of a different class, wealthy and more particular—or so Gilbert had boasted. Such men did not usually visit the Bankside stews of Southwark. What if none of them liked how she looked, and refused to bid? She was anxious to please, and skilled enough with what the whores had taught her, she felt certain, to satisfy. But if no one wanted her, Gilbert would not keep her on. How would she survive? She desperately wanted to succeed. How else could she ever realize her dream of—
“What in God’s name be keeping ye?” Gilbert stood in the doorway to the brothel-house. With a menacing glare, he crooked an impatient finger. “Get in here now and be quick about it.”
Bellebelle scuttled across the yard and followed Gilbert into the back room of the brothel. Inside, his face now wreathed in smiles, Gilbert slid behind a table. Facing him stood a group of ten men.
“Here she be,” Gilbert said in the oily voice he reserved for the customers. “Take off ye clothes, girl, but keep ye chemise on.”
Her heart pounding, Bellebelle averted her eyes from the men. With shaking fingers she took off her worn black shoes and woolen stockings, aware of their lustful gaze watching every move. She forced herself to repeat silently her mother’s constant words of admonition: “Lust is naught to be feared, but used to ye own advantage. When ye don’t see it, then ye needs worry.”
“As ye can see, Bellebelle here be a vision of unsoiled loveliness, a virgin pure as a nun,” Gilbert was saying to the men. “But the lucky gentleman as wins her maidenhead won’t be disappointed, that I promise ye, for she be a virgin with a lifetime of experience. Her mam be me finest whore and the girl’s been in training, so to speak, since she been born.” He gave a lecherous wink. “Learned her trade with her mother’s milk.”
“You mean to say she’s known nothing but the brothel-house?” There was no mistaking the shock in the man’s voice. “What a terrible fate for the lass.”
“That’s right, nor never likely to know nothing else neither. As for a terrible fate, well now, I daresay that be a matter of opinion. She might be dead: I could’ve thrown her to the dogs to eat, or dumped her into the river, but I kept her out of the goodness of me heart.”
And for the coins ye be about to pocket, Bellebelle wanted to say as she slowly pulled the faded blue gown over her head. If Gilbert had a heart she had never seen hide nor hair of it.
Shivering in her faded chemise, Bellebelle paraded back and forth in front of the men.
“All right now, ye’ve all had yourselfs a good look,” Gilbert said. “Let’s see the money first and then we’ll open the bid.”
While the men, arguing among themselves, emptied their purses onto the table, Bellebelle crept to a corner of the room and sat on a stool. She did not want to hear herself being auctioned off like a catch of herring, so she forced herself to think of something else.
From as far back as Bellebelle could remember, she had always wanted to better herself: by which she meant, if anyone had asked, that she did not want to lead her life in the same manner as her mam had done. Her earliest memories were of Gytha sprawled half-naked across a wooden frame bed, reeking of ale and weeping, complaining of how bad her life was. On those rare occasions when Gytha lay alone, Bellebelle would creep into the bed under the dirty gray blanket of unwashed wool and wind her tiny arms around her mam’s neck in an effort to comfort her. More often, however, Gytha was joined by a succession of strangers, men who heaved and grunted over her unresisting body, then threw several coins onto the bed before putting on their clothes and leaving. They rarely paid attention to Bellebelle silently curled up on a straw pallet in the corner.
Her mother’s chamber was her place of business as well as their home. It contained a large frame bed, rickety oak table, two scratched wooden stools, and a chest, also of oak, which held their few belongings. In addition there was a charcoal brazier, an iron cauldron of water, and a heap of worn linen towels that always looked dirty.
One night that Bellebelle would never forget, a comely man clad in a black cloak fastened at one shoulder with a heavy silver clasp, noticed Bellebelle in her corner. He reached into the purse fastened to his jewel-studded black belt then bent to give her a silver coin.
“Here,” he said in a kindly voice, lifting the tangle of black curls from her dirt-streaked face as he stared into her large, dark-blue eyes.
She had never seen such a well-favored man before in the brothel.
“What a beautiful rose to bloom in such a dungheap. No lowborn country lad sired this gosling, I’ll warrant, nor foreign soldier either, if I’m any judge. Do you know the father, Gytha?”
“Oh, aye, a fine gentleman he were, my lord, a Norman like ye-self,” her mother said, a note of bitterness creeping into her voice. “She be his spitting image. Even he could see that. Promised he’d care for the babe, and for a while he come back regular to see her. Sent money for her keep when he couldn’t come hisself. Then he come no more. Never ’eard from him again.”
“The country’s been beset by civil strife these many years,” the man replied. “Did it never occur to you he might be dead?”
Gytha shrugged. “Either way he be gone. As for beauty, what’ll that get the lass, eh? A life in the stews is all, same as me. Better she were born dead, I say.”
“May God forgive you for that.” The man gave Bellebelle a sweet smile as he crossed himself. “Perhaps He has a different future in mind for her. What are you called, child?”
“Ykenai or Belle.”
“I gives her the old Saxon name of Ykenai, but she were born on the last bell of Matins, Michaelmas Eve,” said Gytha, “so’s the whores call her Belle.”
“Une belle Belle.” The man chucked her under the chin.
“Bellebelle.” She repeated it with a shy smile.
The name had stuck. Although she never saw the man again, the incident took on a particular significance in Bellebelle’s mind for two reasons: it was the first time she became aware that her father was a particular man her mother remembered, not a faceless, grunting stranger. This unknown father had come back to the brothel to see her, even sent money for her. In her own eyes she became a different person.
The second reason was that the man had said God might have a different life in mind for her. It was the first time such a possibility had occurred to Bellebelle, and she tucked it away deep in her heart where it comforted her like a charcoal fire on a frosty morning.
“The likes of him can preach of a different life,” Gytha started wailing the moment the man had gone. “But what else can a whore’s brat be but a whore—for as long as you be mistress of your looks.” She snatched up a steel mirror, the treasured gift of a regular patron, and carefully examined herself.
With her cloud of pale gold hair, violet-blue eyes, and milky skin, her mother was the most beautiful creature Bellebelle had ever seen. Pure Saxon, Gilbert said. Bellebelle passionately wished she looked more like her.
With a discontented sigh, Gytha threw down the mirror and reached for the wooden pitcher of ale that stood on the scarred oak table near the bed. Bellebelle, who had wanted to ask her mother about this unknown father, knew that her mother had, as usual, forgotten she was there. Soon Gytha would be too flown with ale to make any sense. The moment passed and Bellebelle never again found either the right time or the right words to ask her.
There were no other children in the brothel-house, which was unusually small as it held only five or six women. The larger houses often had as many as twenty whores. Gilbert, the brothelmaster, ran the house, controlled the women, arranged for their customers, and beat them for disobedience or not pleasing the men they serviced. On such occasions Bellebelle would stop up her ears so she would not hear their screams. When the whores were idle they spent their time gossiping among themselves, so she became well aware of what a hard life they led: on the street they were forced to wear striped cloaks so that their profession would be instantly recognized. This subjected them to cruel jeers and taunts, often worse. Their freedom to come and go as they pleased was restricted by the brothelmaster, to whom they were virtually slave-bound. They could not leave the brothel-house of their own accord, but Gilbert was at liberty to throw any one of them out at his whim when they grew too old or worn out to be of use, or when they were suspected of having the burning sickness in their female parts.
Belle knew that her mother was Gilbert’s most popular whore. He gave her only the better class of customers: city burghers, the few petty lords that sometimes came to Southwark, prosperous country farmers, knights from across the Channel, and the like. The rough dockside men, sailors, and other rogues of Southwark he kept for his less well-favored doxies.
Most of the time Gilbert ignored Bellebelle, until one day about two years ago. Gytha had sent her to the cookshop down the road, an outing she always dreaded. The cookshop lay in the center of a huge yard filled with treacherous potholes, mud puddles, and squawking chickens. Wreaths of black smoke curled upward into the sky and the air was always filled with the odor of baking bread and roasting meat. Skinny barefoot children played in the puddles; haggard women, fretting babies in their arms, gossiped among themselves. They always eyed her darkly, looking hungrily at her basket filled with hot eel pasties, a long wheaten loaf, and roast fowl.
“Slut’s brat,” they taunted. “Bastard. Who’s ye father, eh?”
Bellebelle did not understand why the women called her names or the other children refused to play with her, sometimes driving her off with stones and offal. She quickly ran through the yard, her basket swinging from her arm, and did not pause for breath until she was in sight of the brothel-house and tavern.
On this particular morning, Gilbert, a short man with a fat paunch and greasy hair, was standing by the door watching her. A look came into his little pig eyes that gave her a queasy feeling in the pit of her belly.
“Ye be growing up, little one,” Gilbert said, leering at her. “Come’ere.” Without waiting for her to comply, he ambled over to her and ran a dirty hand over her flat bony chest.
“What ye think ye be doing?” said a sing-song voice behind her. “Belle be too young for that, not yet come into her courses.”
Turning her head Bellebelle saw Morgaine, the Welsh whore, approaching the brothel-house. She was dressed in a clean but faded blue gown under her striped cloak. Her mane of shaggy brown hair fell in a thick braid down her back; around her neck glittered a silver crucifix and a necklace of shiny blue stones marked with a strange design.
“She be growed soon,” Gilbert said. “In a few years time she’ll be me prize, she will, a real beauty.” He paused. “Though there’s some would like her just as she be.” He ran a thick white-coated tongue over dry lips. “If this be the house down the road there,” he continued, jerking his thumb to the left, “she’d naught be virgin still. But I doesn’t hold with children fornicating. Spoils ’em when they starts too young.”
Morgaine fingered the bone-handled knife, its blade honed to a sharp edge, that she was never without. “It’d kill Gytha if ye tried to sell Belle before time. Just ye leave the lass be, look ye. Mayhap she’ll not want to follow in her mam’s footsteps.” She fixed Gilbert with a penetrating stare from her deep-set brown eyes.
Bellebelle watched Gilbert shift from one foot to the other. Even though Morgaine worked for him, she made him uncomfortable—as she did everyone.
“Don’t be daft. What else would the lass do? What else be she fit for?” He ran his eyes over Bellebelle and rubbed his hands together. “She’ll fetch a good price first man as has her. Virgins always does. Time she earned her keep.”
A hot wave of resentment clogged Bellebelle’s throat. She had been earning her keep in one form or another—emptying slops into the river, fetching and carrying, sweeping up—ever since she could walk.
Despite her dreams of bettering herself, Bellebelle had still not come up with any other means of earning her livelihood. Her mother had just begun to instruct her in the business of being a whore, telling her about men, how to arouse them if they were timid, for instance, or unable to perform. A customer who not be satisfied wanted his money back, Gytha warned, and would cause trouble. Therefore she must be mistress of all the tricks of her trade. Bellebelle was just now learning how to suck and rub on a customer’s private parts.
Morgaine tousled her dark curls. “Don’t mind the greedy old goat,” she said, as Gilbert shuffled off. “Just don’t let him catch ye alone, look ye.”
Bellebelle had already become adept at evading the lecherous fingers of men who tried to catch her alone, but she smiled her understanding. Morgaine was her favorite whore.
Stolen from her family in the Welsh mountains at fifteen, she’d been sold to the brothel two years ago. Bellebelle had heard her mother say that Morgaine possessed a secret remedy, known only to the women of her Welsh tribe, for shrinking and restoring muscle tone to her female parts. It was her boast that she could make a man spew in minutes. She was popular among the customers, but the other whores feared her for she supposedly cast spells and had the gift of healing and second sight. Behind her back, Gilbert referred to her as the Welsh witch.
“I just come from that fat pig of a priest at St. Mary’s,” said Morgaine. “Wouldn’t give me communion again. ‘Not unless ye gives up ye sinful, wicked life,’ he says, may St. David curse him.”
Unlike the other whores, Morgaine always attended Mass whenever Gilbert permitted her to leave the brothel. The priest always refused to give her communion but she kept returning anyway. It was from Morgaine that Bellebelle learned the few simple prayers she knew: the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer. In addition she had taught Bellebelle a few Welsh runes that sounded like gibberish but which she chanted on nights when the moon was full.
“If I not want to work in the brothel, Morgaine,” Bellebelle asked, “where else could I go?” She sat on the wooden steps and pulled her yellow smock over her knees.
The bawd gave her a startled look. “By St. David, I don’t know, lass. Can’t imagine what I were thinking of when I said that to Gil. Mayhap there’d be work for ye in London—selling herring or hawking other food on the streets.” She paused before adding doubtfully, “I suppose ye might marry one o’ the men round these parts.”
Bellebelle thought about this. She had seen the herring sellers and eel-wives trudging about the Bankside in all sorts of weather, their backs bent under the heavy wooden trays slung across their shoulders. They looked old and shriveled before their time, far worse than the whores. When she thought of the rough dockside men, coarse and vicious, the sailors who came to the brothel, she shuddered.
“Mayhap I’d rather be a whore,” she said slowly. “If ye gets a customer to like ye well enough to take ye away from the Bankside stews, then mayhap it be possible to save enough money and leave off early on, ’afore ye gets old.”
Morgaine gave her an indulgent smile. “And what would ye do then?”
“I don’t know.” Bellebelle knit her brow, trying to explain what she meant. “Lead an easy life where people be nice to ye. Not always be having to please.”
“That’s naught but a dream, Belle, best put it behind ye. No life be easy. No female’s life leastways. Hard work, not much joy, and ye looks don’t hardly last whether ye be a whore, herring-seller, or a fine gentlewoman dropping babies every year. Even the womenfolk in me tribe was old and worn out ’afore their time. For us, one life be much like another, I expects.” She snorted, her nostrils flaring. “And ye always be having to please, look ye. Some of us gets paid for it and some doesn’t, that’s all.”
Morgaine sighed. “Time ye understood these things proper, lass.”
Bellebelle chewed her lip. She’d rather be paid for it.
“Well, mustn’t grumble, eh, Belle? We got ourselfs a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. Just ye remember, lass, whatever ye does, do it proper. Don’t never get no wishbone where ye backbone ought be.”
Morgaine gave an embarrassed laugh and punched Bellebelle playfully in the ribs. “Listen at me, will ye? They’ll have me preaching the sermon at St. Mary’s next ’stead o’ that whoreson priest. Go on now, take ye basket upstairs.”
Although Bellebelle waited expectantly, the next two years brought no visible change to her life. The civil war between the Empress Maud and King Stephen of England continued to take a great toll on the country. Despite the conflict that raged outside, inside the narrow world of the brothel-house nothing ever changed. Except that she was growing up.
One day she noticed that she had begun to sprout breasts, her hips were rounder, and shortly thereafter she started her monthly flux. Her mother complained that she stank like a slops bucket, forced her into a wooden tub of water, scrubbed the filth off her face and body, and washed the lice out of her hair. When she had dried her off Gytha stepped back then stared as if she had never seen her before.
Bellebelle picked up her mother’s steel mirror and, somewhat fearfully, gazed into it. A stranger looked back at her. What had happened to the skinny runt, all eyes and tangled hair? Wonderingly, she touched the delicate oval of her face. Here was a young girl with soft ringlets, black as a moonless night, that fell well below her shoulders. Against her milky skin, now pink from the scrubbing, her eyes gleamed like dark blue stars. Gytha suddenly burst into tears. Bellebelle couldn’t imagine why, but she was so used to Gytha’s weeping and tantrums she no longer sought reasons for them.
As unlike her fretting, anxious mother as day from night, Bellebelle was grateful for her serene, cheerful disposition that, along with her looks, she decided must have come from the father who had been a fine Norman lord.
One morning Gilbert caught her alone in the chamber. Bellebelle had been tidying up Gytha’s usual mess of clothes strewn over the bed, wet linen towels hanging over the furniture, and half-filled wooden cups of ale lying across the floor. He had crept into the chamber, approached her from behind, and before she could stop him caught her around the waist. His stinking breath in her face made Bellebelle want to vomit and she struggled to free herself. When his hands clutched her small round breasts she began to scream and kick behind her at his legs. He let go just as Gytha and Morgaine rushed into the chamber and routed him out with curses and threats. He denied he had any intention of ravishing her—though he had every right to do so if he wished—he just wanted to find out if she were ready.
“And she be ready,” he announced. “A real beauty, she’s big enough now to earn her way proper. Fondlin’ and suckin’ on the customers don’t bring in enough for her keep.”
“She be too young,” Gytha said, sniffling. “Can’t be more’n eleven. Ten more like.”
“She do get younger each year to hear ye tell it. That lass be all of thirteen, close to fourteen more like, if she be a day,” Gilbert said. “I remembers when she be born even if ye lost what wits ye had in the ale jug. No more delays now, Gytha. She earns her keep like a proper doxy or I sells her down the road, I does.”
The threat silenced Gytha.
“I’ll get me best and richest customers together and put her maidenhead up for sale. Highest bidder wins her. She’ll make me rich, she will.”
“Sold!”
Gilbert banged a heavy fist down on the table. “To the gentleman from London. The goods to be delivered tomorrow night. Ye be a most fortunate man, Sir, most fortunate.”
Bellebelle, startled out of her memories, jumped. She had almost forgotten where she was or what was happening.
“C’mere, girl.” Gilbert beckoned her.
She walked over to the table, trying not to shrink from the look of disappointed lechery reflected in nine pairs of eyes. Steeling herself, she cast an anxious sideways glance at the man who had won the right to break her maidenhead.
Suddenly Bellebelle felt giddy with relief. He was youngish, plump, with a ruddy face. The fur-lined cloak, black velvet tunic, and gold chain around his neck indicated to Bellebelle that he was prosperous. He gave her a timid smile which she returned.
Quickly slipping on her clothes, she left the room, anxious to tell her mother that the gentleman who won her seemed the kind that would be easy to please. In truth, Bellebelle realized in surprise, she was now actually looking forward to tomorrow night when her life as a working whore would begin at last.