@mettleborn
William had no business whatsoever being in Paris. The haute banque cordially loathed him and his reputation for temper had got round the hôtels so that currently none within the troisièmes arrondissements would take him. In his youth he had been angry and reckless, and in certain pockets of the continent that memory remained as alive as if William had never tried for all these years to force it to die. This particular cabaret club, Le Ciel, he had not crossed the threshold of. Yet when he marched inside amid the turbid scents of undiluted spirits and sulphurous tobacco, cavalry-backed and smelling of chill air, he was greeted by a pageant of blush-stained chorus girls like an old friend. Soon lost among the crowd of men who looked like him in their haggard faces, but not in their dress or their posture, or the state of their hair, he found himself seated with a bottle of Asti and a range of girls around him; their sequinned bodices and the sweat on their breasts glinting under the murky green light. They did not like the line of questioning he eased them into, and in turn he did not like their nacreous semitranslucent eyes with full-blown pupils, and the way they dwelled over every item of his appearance as if to cost his melt-weight. Everything about them made the pulse in his jaw twitch a little more insistently as he repressed the urge to take them by their hair and fuck the truth out of them.
‘You maintain, then, that you know nothing of the whereabouts of such a girl,’ he smiled charmingly, fingering a pendant that dangled close to his chest as its owner attempted to seat herself over his lap. She got close, the heat of her buttocks suspended over his knees, and as her inner thigh brushed against something hard, his eyes followed the path of the her own as they dropped to observe the outline of some kind of weapon in his pocket. Another whelp now pawed ineffectually at his shoulder, and a third was sniffing hopefully at his drink. Every second under their foul attentions disgusted William more than the last.He was beginning to suspect not one of them was a day over fifteen. ‘If I had a string,’ he began with feigned affection, ‘I would tie it around your neck and strangle you like the stray kitten you impersonate.’ His hand, dipping into his trouser pocket, played at searching for a moment to hold the girls in suspense, and then instead of string drew out a small black pistol, to lie subtly against his thigh. ‘Alas.’ His smile, lingering indulgently, faded off once the girls’ expressions became tiresome.
‘Where is she?’ In counterpoint to the petulant rising arsis of their pleas and promises, William’s voice remained unmoved, thrumming dully at the back of his throat, never to allow forth a note of emotion that might give away some clue to his wants they could latch onto like the piranhas they were. Scattering the girls, and upsetting the peace of this corner of the club, Lord Cavendish disappeared through the crowd to fling open the hidden door to the staircase they had motioned to, and, to the outcry of the gimlet-eyed proprietress, was lost to the maze of rooms which spread expansively into to the tenement next door. Another staircase bore him to a set of attic rooms, where only a single candle lit the figure of a girl lying prone upon the floorboards. Surrounding her was the scent of opium and other paraphernalia. But despite her situation, none of this place’s filth seemed to have been able to perforate her. At least, not nearly as much as he’d feared. Her mousy Scandinavian head of hair was soft, and the pale face that lolled into the crook of his elbow as he stooped to sit her up was the same one as he had always seen across country drawing rooms and carriage seats. But there was no consciousness in her. For all the world she might have been carved from marble. Only her tears moved. Had he obeyed the decrees of her family that forbade him from searching for their tainted daughter, she would soon have died one of those foul, disease-riddled kittens herself. His ill-temper, however, had left when he left them. In fact, in this silent moment alone, it would seem to any spirit that might from some gloomy corner happen to be watching them, that Lord Cavendish was not a cruel or vicious man at all, but a gentle one.
As he crossed the room once more with the girl in his arms, he noticed her flinch at the grip of his fingers on her arm. Drawing a breath into his nostrils, he resisted an urge to roll his eyes. ‘Are you very hurt by the use of my rough hands?’ he spoke as the light of the corridor roused her. Whether or not she had the wherewithal to appreciate his ironic tone, William could not help but barb his judgement of her new life into her consciousness somehow. He ignored the keens of discomfort as he sped up through the building and out, through the club again, to a waiting carriage on the street by which he was to convey to her to some ecclesiastical institution. But he was called back inside once he had laid her into it by the physical battering of his arm by the suet-faced Madam herself, and upon re-entry found himself confronted by what he assumed were hired toughs ready to stop him from stealing away her precious asset. ‘I don’t care who you are. You’re not taking her for all your English charm or your English silver; when I’ve paid a full wage for work she’s not laid a finger to since Monday last.’ Knowing full well what sloppy, unprincipled operations his English silver, should he bribe her with it, would fund, Cavendish looked back into the woman’s greasy brown eyes. ‘And what work, pray, would that be?’ ‘Changing the barrel would be the first thing,’ sneered the woman, clearly taking some misplaced joy in negating his insinuation. ‘And the rubbish needs dumping out.’ Stepping back apace, Cavendish made no hesitation to speak another word to the bitch, but turned to remove his elegant coat, hang it coolly on the balustrade and roll up the sleeves of his shirt.
