Free Fall From Grace by David Ashton

this?’
    Hannah swivelled round.
    Rachel was already hanging up the sheet, back presented, the remark thrown over her shoulder.
    ‘I shall inform her myself, girlie,’ said Hannah.

    And she did.
    Jean had opened her eyes to find that, rather than a lover looming over her bed, the dumpy purposeful form of her second in command stood there like Banquo’s ghost.
    ‘I knocked. Ye didnae answer.’
    ‘I didnae hear,’ muttered Jean.
    ‘That’s not like you.’
    ‘I was sleeping.’
    ‘That’s not like you either.’
    ‘I’ll try to assemble myself into something you recognise.’
    This snippy rejoinder provoked a grunt of amusement from Hannah and then she related the incident of the razor.
    While she did so, Jean, for some reason, refused to move, and lay prone upon the bed much in the manner of her previously imagined wife under it.
    ‘Was that not a wee bit harsh?’ she pronounced, looking up at Hannah and the peach surroundings.
    ‘Ye have to keep order.’
    Both women were inclined to leave it there. Jean was aware that Hannah disapproved of her partiality for the tall figure of Rachel and it, to an extent, perplexed the mistress herself. Jean had experienced a few encounters with her own sex as she rose through the ranks, but she pinned her colours, for the most part, to the priapic mast.
    And yet something about Rachel Bryden weakened her resolve to keep a professional detachment. Not good, and it went straight against the grain of her experience. This was the third and best-equipped brothel she had ever owned, a well-oiled machine of sliding sheets and compliant limbs.
    But it had its own commandments. And one of them was that she never played favourites amongst the girls.
    In the first bawdy-hoose, the Happy Land, which she had part-owned with Henry Preger until he had obligingly died, she had witnessed a savage knife fight between two of the whores over his malign patronage. One of the magpies had her face cut to ribbons and it was a point well made to Hannah at the washing line. Don’t damage the merchandise.
    On her ownsome, once Preger had died in spite of himself, Jean had then managed the Holy Land, moving from tarry-breeks, stokers and dock workers, to randy young apprentices, the lower professional classes and the occasional man of the church. All denominations welcome.
    This present establishment was her pride and joy. The Just Land. It was set discreetly in a respectable district, upon the high reaches of Leith, and catered for the ruling classes, judges, bishops, heads of government and local council. Bastions of respectability. Linked by a lustful bent. And there was no depravity that Jean could not deliver.
    If, like a previous provost of the city, you desired to be dressed in swaddling clothes, then talcum-powdered, and pampered like a baby with three heavy-breasted milk nurses to hand, that could be magicked up directly.
    If, at the other end of the scale, you wished to be sprawled out upon the Berkley Horse and scourged like our Saviour, then Francine the Frenchwoman would lay it on with cold intent and no little artistry.
    If, however, you were a flagellomaniac, this was not the house for you.
    Pain supplied but not accepted; that was the motto.
    This was the Just Land. Run like a ship of state.
    But now, everything was sliding. This was Hannah’s observation as she looked down at her mistress. There was a man somewhere, gumming up the works. A sticky-fingered man, she could smell him on the breeze.
    Jean had taken to leaving of an evening, coming back late into the night, leaving for destinations unknown to Hannah and returning from same, driven in her coach by the giant Angus Dalrymple who was as close-mouthed as a healthy oyster.
    No use asking him and even less use asking Jean who regarded her personal life as a private affair. But in Hannah’s view there was no such thing as privacy. To be a bawdy-hoose keeper was to accept the twin requisitions of supply and demand.
    And the