They glanced at a yawning fourteen-year-old who eyed Margo speculatively, appraising the young man” for Essential business even this early in the day. She switched er attention to Malcolm and smiled. “Tumble for a pie?”
Malcolm just shook his head, leaving the girl hurling curses at them.
Margo was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. She felt as though she’d stepped into a living play whose author had no real ending in mind. Study your part, study the background. That was what Kit and Malcolm had brought her here to learn.
”With so many women in the business,” Margo asked slowly, trying hard to understand, “isn’t competition fierce?”
”Ye-esss …in a manner of speaking. Officially, you understand, sex was considered extremely bad for one’s health. Led to a breakdown of one’s physical constitution and mental faculties. Privately, our straight laced Victorian gentleman considered sex his natural right and any woman born lower than his station was fair game. London had several million souls, recall, not to mention seafaring crews. Remind yourself to look up an eleven-volume-personal memoir called My Private Life when we return to the station library. It’s available on computer now You’ll find it …revealing of Victorian social attitudes.”
”What happens to all these women? When they’re too old or ill to work?”
”Some go to the Magdalen for help.”
”Magdalen?”
”South of the Thames,” Malcolm murmured as they trundled their cart along, “you will find four kinds of `charity’ institutions, if one can call them that. Bedlam, Bethlehem Hospital-is for mental patients. Old Bridewell was originally a school to train apprentices, but it turned into a brutal prison. Eventually a new school was attached to the prison grounds to house legitimate apprentices. Bridewell apprentices are notorious delinquents, the terror of the city. Then there are protected girls in the purple uniforms of the Lambeth Asylum for Female Orphans, and of course the grey of the Magdalen Hospital for seduced girls and prostitutes. A number of-the girls rescued by Magdalen go mad anyway from incurable syphilis.”