A Beggar’s Kingdom. Paullina Simons

      “But since Gasper was married to my aunt, I’d say it’s not very likely. He’s come to collect.”

      “Your Aunt Tilly, the Baroness?”

      “No, my mother’s other sister. She’s dead.”

      “And your mother?”

      “She is also dead.”

      “Oh.” Julian can’t take his eyes off her pale, diffident, serious, beautiful face, with pursed lips and moist eyes. “Where are you from?”

      “Clerkenwell.”

      His expression must fall, because Mallory softens. “Did you perhaps know my mother, sire?” Almost imperceptibly, she smiles.

      “No.” Circling his arm around her waist, he brings her to him. “Oh, Mallory,” he whispers.

      She lets him embrace her, as if it’s her duty.

      “Mallory! Gasper is waiting!”

      Julian doesn’t want to let her go.

      “That’s my cue, sire,” she says, easing out of his arms, her breathy voice low. “Gasper’s waiting.”

      “What’s another minute? I’ve waited too, and longer than he has.”

      “Have you also come to collect, sire?”

      “What? No.” Julian raises her hand to his lips, kissing the inside of her wrist. “Come back tonight.”

      “I can’t. Aunt Tilly forbids it. Besides, I’m busy tonight. Perhaps Margrave …”

      “No,” Julian says. “Not Margrave. You.”

      “Believe me, I promise you, swear to you, I’m not the girl for you, sire …” She stands stiffly.

      “You are.” Their eyes lock. Pulling away, she hurries out, but the relieved and excited Julian is not put off by her daytime restraint. Her nighttime body is fresh in his memory and visceral in his loins. He has found her again, his garden of pomegranates, his orchard of new wine. He’s elated, not afraid.

      It is thus that Julian becomes the landlord of a brothel. It’s an excellent job, one of the best he’s had, better than substitute teaching, better than working for fucking Graham. If only Ashton could see him now. No one would appreciate the multi-layered delights and ironies of Julian’s new position better than Ashton. The job allows him to make money and be surrounded day and night by sexy, enthusiastic women. Nights are busy, but it’s quiet during the day, and he can catch up on his sleep or read or go out for a walk to buy flowers and candles. In the mornings, Julian sends Ilbert to the butcher and the coal boy. He supervises the maids and the girls himself (of course) and selects his own roses and lilies.

      Fresh flowers must be in vases in all the rooms, everything must be stripped and washed from the night before, the chamber pots emptied, the floors swept and mopped, beds made, windows opened, and rooms aired out. It’s like running a naughty bed and breakfast. Once a week Julian pays off the parish constable, a solid, likable chap named Parker.

      Every morning, the Baroness and Julian count the silver, mostly pennies and farthings, and a few shillings. He helps the madam separate the operational coin from the profit, and at noon leaves for King Street to deliver the bag of silver to Lord Waas, the owner of the Silver Cross.

      The London of 1666 isn’t quite what it was when Julian was last here in 1603. Yes, the roads have widened, and the trees have grown. But the city has been decimated by wholescale death and hasn’t had time to recover. The fear of the plague is apparent in the diminished bedlam on the streets and in the caution of the people who scurry past him, covering their mouths and faces. One afternoon, Julian takes a long aching walk all the way to Clerkenwell. The Fortune Theatre has been dismantled. The brothel quarter is shuttered. The Collins Manor with its stables and grounds is gone. Five new homes have been built in its place.

      But even with London thus reduced, the clatter and cry of every living thing remains unending. The blacksmiths are the loudest of all, for they make things everyone else uses in their trades, so the blacksmith’s trade never stops, even at night. There are a hundred parishes within the City gates and another thirty scattered without, and every parish has a church and the belfries ring on the hour and half-hour and quarter-hour to announce the time, and the blacksmith foundries make the bells, and to make them they must test them, and every time they test them, the bells toll, and there are a hundred foundries, a hundred churches, and a million bells, over spires and doors and horses’ necks, and the metal against metal rings and rings and rings, far away, nearby, nonstop, even when Julian sleeps.

      Aside from the relentless tolling of the bells, the job brings Julian happiness. Not only is he in the daily proximity of his beloved, but he is surrounded by other attractive women, more playful than she, women who defer to him and flirt with him. The visiting men seek no trouble except when they’re blind drunk and then a not so gentle shove from Julian into the street is enough for them to return sober and chastised the following evening.

      It’s boisterous at night—like Normandie, the street where Josephine used to live with Z—but with more sex and less hip hop. There’s plenty to drink, and if Julian wanted to have a social life on the side, he could. Margrave (though not Mallory) has bragged to the other girls about the unrestrained bounty that is Julian. “His blood boils with such excess!” Margrave tells the other girls. “Mal and I feared there wouldn’t be enough of him for the two of us, but it turns out there wasn’t enough of us for the one of him! There’s enough of him to board all ten of us, isn’t that right, sire?” Occasionally in the late evenings, especially if it’s slow, he hears the patter of their feet outside his door, their low whispers, seductive warbles, spicy pleas. One kiss, sire, one bob, sire, one bout in the bowl, sire. He’s grateful the girls are often too tired if not too proud to beg. Grateful yet regretful. Now that he is landlord, the Baroness has commanded him to keep away. “They need to be fresh for the next day, Master Julian, no sense tiring them out unnecessarily.”

      Every single day, the Right Reverend Anselmo arrives before the evening rush and stands in the middle of the restaurant downstairs, loudly sermonizing their sins away. “Constable Parker says we must put up with him to stay open,” the Baroness tells Julian. “The reverend is sent from the deanery of Whitehall to maintain something called prima facie decorum.” The Baroness swears. “Royal prerogative and all that. We must be mindful of our hallowed location. If it was up to me, I’d have that eunuch Anselmo castrated again. He calls my beautiful home the shambles! Can you imagine!”

      Julian doesn’t have to imagine. Nightly he hears the vicar’s clarion call.

      “He says the devil slaughters the souls of Christian men in our humble tavern!” The Baroness spits like a man. “In infinite ways, the devil butchers men’s souls at the Silver Cross, he says. Ah, yes, that Anselmo is a British treasure. He’s a convert, you know. He used to be a Catholic. Now he’s a reformed Puritan. And you know what they say about reformed Puritans.”

      “That there’s nothing worse than a reformed whore,” Julian says, and the Baroness howls with laughter and for weeks repeats the line to everyone she greets.

      One afternoon, while eating and socializing with the girls, amusing them by garbling their names, Julian makes the mistake of calling the one who’s named Jeanne “Saint Joan of Arc.” Immediately the banter stops. The Baroness steps forward from her table in the back corner. She hears everything. “Why would you call the Maid of Orleans Saint Joan?” the Baroness asks. “She was no saint.”

      “My mistake. Wasn’t she canonized?”

      “Canonized?” The Baroness doesn’t laugh. “She’s a rebel burned for heresy, for slaughtering the English,