Kerry paid a street sweeper a penny to take a note to the African Free School. In the note was a lie. It told John Teasman she was taken ill, and needed a day or two to recover.
It was less than a mile in a straight line from her home to the heart of Canvas Town, but there was no direct route, only a slow zig-zag through the crush of narrow lanes, and it took most of a half hour for Kerry to reach the fort. It was an old watchtower, built by the British after they took New York from the Continental Army in 1776. They had heaped earth on the already high ground a few hundred yards back from the shoreline, then built a palisade, first of wood, and later of quarried stone. Most of the stone was now gone, but the foundations remained, and when Canvas Town moved north and encompassed the old lookout point, an enterprising madam had commandeered the fort, built some rudimentary dwellings inside it, and turned it into a brothel.
There was only one point of entry, from the south, up a shallow earthen ramp that was paved with wooden planks. They squelched under Kerry’s feet as she walked up the slope, her skirts hitched up to keep them from dragging on the damp wood. The ramp was hemmed in by flimsy shacks made of whatever materials their builders had scavenged: worn sailcloth, scorched barrel staves, ripped bedsheets, burned window frames, discarded roof tiles, and waterlogged pallets. Women stood in the makeshift entrances, many with their breasts uncovered. Some were obese, others were emaciated, some were very young, and some looked very old, although Kerry knew they could not be. They all had the feverish look of the poorly nourished, and many bore the scars and pockmarks of disease. Some gave her blank looks as she passed. Others scowled. Either she was a busybody, come to lecture them on the evils of their way of life, or she was competition. Either way, she wasn’t welcome.
She reached the top of the ramp and found her way blocked by a large, pale woman dressed in a sleeveless purple ballgown. The woman had powdered her breasts liberally and forced them into a corset, making them look like two snow-covered drumlins. She had piled her graying hair high on her head in the old style, and she had two large, black beauty spots, one on the right side of her chin, the other under her left eye. Her lips were smeared with red wax; her eyelashes with lamp black, so that they looked like spider’s webs.
The effect was clownish, until Kerry looked into the woman’s eyes. They were iron gray, and as empty as a freshly dug grave.
“You’re Lew’s cousin.” The woman had a strong, Northern English accent.
“And you must be Miss Violet.”
“Aye.” The madam’s gaze was steady and unblinking. “Tanny’s in’t Rose Room. But she’s busy now, so you’ll have to wait.”
“Very well.”
Miss Violet turned on her heel and walked away across a small, roughly circular courtyard that was covered with sand. The space was ringed with a number of small huts. Opposite the entrance to the courtyard was a bigger building, made of brick, with a black door. Miss Violet disappeared through it, leaving Kerry alone.
Kerry counted eight individual huts. They looked old and weathered, but they were sturdily built, with proper roofs and doorways, each of which was painted a different color. The paint looked fresh, and expensive. Beside each of the huts there was a low bench and a covered wooden pail. Kerry went to the bench beside the pink door and sat down.
In the lanes and alleys around the fort, business in Canvas Town was in full swing. The cries of food sellers and stall holders mingled with the hum and buzz of people hurrying back and forth, buying and selling and passing the time of day. And business within the fort was in full swing, too, despite the early hour. It sounded as though every one of the huts was occupied, and the courtyard was full of the barely muffled sound of grunts and sighs and giggles and squeals.
A shuffling sound came from behind the pink door, then a click, and it swung open. A man strode into the courtyard, moving quickly, his shoes scuffing in the sand, his head down.
Tanny leaned in the doorway. She looked older in the daylight, her white dress a little grayer, her skin showing the faint marks of childhood smallpox. She gave Kerry a sour look. “You’re Lew’s cousin, then, are you? Come to learn the trade?”
“Something like that.”
Tanny folded her arms. “Lew said you’d pay me for the time.”
“Did he? And how much would that be?”
“Five bob.”
“Not bad for a day’s work.” Most working men made between six and fifteen dollars a week. Kerry made four.
Tanny snorted. “A day? That’s five for the hour.”
Kerry laughed. “This ain’t Cherry Street, hen, and just because I’m togged in buntings and a snicket don’t mean you can treat me like some judy hick.” She stood up to leave.
“Talk flash, then, do you?” Tanny’s grin made her look ten years younger.
“Have done since I was a titter. Which is how I know you’re looking to kimbaw me.”
Tanny shrugged. “I’m just trying to make a rag. If I spend the day nattering with you, I’ll have no chink to show for it, and Miss Violet’ll make me wear the bands.”
Kerry smiled. “Nice try, Antoinette. Lew told me he’s already agreed to pay you and Miss Violet, so you won’t have to worry about not getting your rations. In fact, do me right and I’ll take you to luncheon, too.”
A door banged open across the courtyard, and a man half-fell out of the sky-blue hut, clutching his breeches closed with one hand. With the other, he blew an extravagant kiss. And then he stopped dead in the center of the space. He looked around, as though he was lost, and then bent double and vomited into the sand.
Tanny watched, dead-eyed, as the man limped away. “Aye, well,” she said. “I could use a little time off anyway.”
She led the way to a small coffee house, ordered eggs and a soft loaf, and gave Kerry a refresher on the hierarchy of the New York demimonde. There were a handful of prostitutes in New York who could charge five dollars for an hour of their time. But none were dark-skinned, and none did business in Canvas Town. There was a strict hierarchy, and everyone in it knew their place. At the bottom of the heap were the bunters, desperate women who lived in the alleyways and middens of the growing city, begging or prostituting themselves and spending most or all of the proceeds on drink. Next came the buricks, also called cracks or drabs. These made enough to afford to put a roof over their heads, but were either too old or tired or diseased to do much more than subsist otherwise. They plied their trade where they could afford their lodgings: in the fetid, poorly constructed sinkholes of New George and Charlotte Streets, along Laycock Lane, just east of the Common, or in Canvas Town, like the women Kerry had encountered on her way into the fort.
Tanny was a member of the next, broadest band of prostitute, called a curtezan. These were women and men in their prime, and depending on their looks or skills or business savvy, either did business as an independent operator, or as a case-vrow, attached to a particular brothel or bawdy house. There were benefits to both arrangements, but downsides, too. Tanny told Kerry she had started as a case-vrow in the fort, and enjoyed protection, room, and board. But she was young and pretty and in demand, and she soon came to resent surrendering most of what she made to the house. She had left the fort the previous year and set up as a squirrel, as New Yorkers put it, in her own nest. She had to pay some money to one of Lew Owens’ pimps and maintain her own premises, which could be expensive. But she kept everything else that she made, and she kept her own hours. She was able to operate where she pleased, in her own place, or in certain taverns, or with the John Street vestals, women who did most of their business in the theater district. She was disappointed that Owens had ordered her back to the fort, but she accepted that her world was governed by rules, and that she had been caught breaking them. She was confident that within a year or so, she would be able to go back to operating independently.
She was equally sure that she would never ascend to the highest level of the prostitute’s universe, that of the gentry-mort. These men and women catered exclusively to New York’s upper classes. A handful even came from that class themselves, but had fallen on hard times and were forced to sell themselves from time to time, to maintain their lifestyles. These part-timers were called high-fliers or lady-birds. Most professional gentry-morts operated independently, with a handful of clients, but some preferred to work as case-vrows, in the most exclusive, highly discreet establishments on Cherry Street, or in the Holy Ground, the notorious district behind St. Paul’s chapel that was owned by the Episcopal Church, but was nonetheless home to several well-appointed mansions of ill repute.
Tanny had never worked Cherry Street or the Holy Ground herself, but she knew many of the gentry-morts who did. She mixed with them in the infamous third tiers of the Park Street and John Street theaters, or at a balum rancum, the lewd parties thrown by wealthy and dissolute New Yorkers, where prostitutes were hired to dance and mingle naked with the invitees. But while associating with them was one thing, joining their ranks was quite another. Not that Tanny wasn’t pretty, or popular or skilled enough, she assured Kerry. Just that she was too dark and too petite and a little too rough around the edges.
“Not like you,” she said. They were back in the Rose Room, which was a tiny space, with a wooden floor, lit by a single window. There was a wide bed with a thick mattress, a tired-looking armchair, and a small table. But it was clean and tidy and free of dust. The walls had been whitewashed, the floor scrubbed, and the window rinsed, so that the sunlight sparkled on it.
Tanny made Kerry turn in a circle. “You ain’t got much of a breech on you. And you don’t sport much of a dairy, neither. But that don’t mean much. Some of these gentry-morts are so spider-shanked and hatchet-faced you’d think they were coves. But some like it that way, I suppose.”
“What about my color? Could I pass for white?”
“You ain’t turnip-pated like the English or the Cloggies. But you might pass for Spanish. Them coolers got that dark hair and olive skin, and there’s plenty of coves like that well enough. Plus you simper nice, and you got a good set of grinders, and that helps. Lift up your skirt.”
Kerry did as she was told, bunching the folds of material at her waist.
Tanny raised an approving eyebrow. “That’s a rum set of games there. You want to show ’em off as much as you can. You got any buntings with a long slit in them? Or any other rig what’ll show some skin?”
“I’m a teacher, Tanny. I don’t have any togs like that.”
Tanny’s white, even teeth were like a light in the dim little room. “Just as I hoped. Time for us to do a bit of shopping.”