Read Online William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger by Anne Perry - Free Book Online Page A

else?”
    Alice turned her head a little. “You can’t stop him. No one can.”
    “Anyone can be stopped, if you know how, and if enough of us try,” Hester said decisively. “If you help. Who is he?”
    Alice looked away again. “You can’t. It’s legal. I owe him money. I borrowed too much, then I couldn’t pay it back.”
    “Who? Your pimp?”
    Alice stared up at the ceiling. “You might as well know. There’s nothing more he can do to me now. But I don’t know his name, not his real name. I was respectable then, a governess! Can you imagine that? I used to teach gentlemen’s children. In Kensington. I fell in love.” There was immeasurable bitterness in her voice and it was so little above a whisper that Hester had to strain to hear her. “We got married. We had six months of happiness . . . then I realized he gambled. Couldn’t help it, he said. Maybe he was right. Anyway, he didn’t stop . . . he began to lose.” She took a deep breath and gasped with pain. It was a moment or two before she could continue.
    Hester waited.
    “I borrowed to get him out of debt . . . then he left me,” Alice said. “Only I still had to pay back the money. It was then that the moneylender told me he could get me looked after on the streets . . . especially . . . if I went into this brothel. It caters to men who like clean girls . . . ones who speak nicely and carry themselves like quality. Pay a lot more for it. That way I could pay off my debt and be free.”
    “And you went . . .” Hester said slowly. It was so easy to understand—the fear, the promises, the escape from despair. The price might not seem any worse than the alternative.
    “Not at first,” Alice replied. “Not for another three months. By then the debt was twice as high. That was two years ago.” She fell silent.
    Bessie came over with a cup of beef tea, her eyes questioning.
    Hester looked at Alice. “Try a little,” she offered.
    Alice did not bother to answer. Her thoughts were inward, remembering pain, defeat, perhaps humiliation more than she would ever forget.
    Hester put her arm around Alice’s shoulders and eased her up a few inches. The girl gasped with pain, but she did not resist. She lay as leaden weight against Hester, her splintered arms stiff, her body rigid.
    Bessie held the cup to her lips, her own face crumpled with concern, her hands so gentle her touch could hardly be felt as more than a warmth.
    It was a quarter of an hour before the tea was finished, and Hester had no idea whether it had helped or not, but she knew of nothing else to try.
    Alice sank into a restless sleep, and when Margaret came in at nearly nine o’clock her optimism over raising more funds vanished the moment Hester told her of the night’s happenings.
    “That’s monstrous!” she said furiously. “You mean someone out there is lending money to respectable women in financial trouble, and then demanding they pay it back by working in a brothel that caters to men who like to use women they think are decent . . . to . . . God knows what!”
    “And now with police all over the place they can’t get the trade to pay off, so they are getting beaten,” Hester finished for her. “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Fanny is probably another of them, only she’s too frightened to tell us.” She remembered Kitty, who had also spoken well and carried herself with pride. “Heaven knows how many more there are.”
    “What are we going to do?” Margaret demanded. There was no doubt in her that they would do something. She expected no less from Hester; it was written plainly in her face and in her brave, candid stare.
    Hester did not want to let her down, or any of these women who trusted her to be able to do what they could not. But those reasons were trivial. Above them all was the evil Hester so easily imagined could have happened to hundreds of women she knew—or to herself, had chance been only a little different.
    “I don’t know,” she admitted.