A Broken Vessel by Kate Ross Read Free Book Online Page B

she expressed certainly fit the character of a repentant Magdalene. And he understood why she might feel a need to keep her identity a secret: the insistence on confession and public abasement in this place could easily make a woman shrink from laying bare her true name and history. Especially if she came of a respectable family, as this woman apparently did, and did not want them to share in her disgrace.
    The question was, what should he do now? He had no means of identifying, much less speaking with, the woman who had written the letter. He could not hope to pass for a relative, since he did not know the writer’s name, how old she was, or what she looked like. He could show the letter to Mrs. Fiske, but he did not trust her not to browbeat the writer, force her to reveal the letter’s destination, perhaps even cast her out of the refuge. It was hard to see how leaving this place could be anything but a blessing, but perhaps the writer had nowhere else to go.
    If he could only speak to her for a few minutes, he could explain how he came by her letter, and offer to make sure it reached whomever it was meant for. He did not know why he wanted so much to help her. Sheer boredom, perhaps, or his confounded chivalry. And then again, it might be that Mrs. Fiske, with her narrow, crabbed religious views, reminded him of his mother’s family, with whom he had spent several wretched years as a boy after his father died.
    All at once he had an idea. When Mrs. Fiske returned with the pamphlet, he asked, “How many inmates do you have at present?”
    “Four-and-twenty.”
    “Are you accepting any more?”
    “Mr. Harcourt thinks we might accommodate as many as thirty. Of course, we’re careful whom we accept. No papists, no known felons. And if they’re diseased, we send them to hospital.”
    “How do you find them?”
    “They find us. They hear of our work and come to us here. We interview them, and if we’re satisfied they’re truly repentant, we take them in. Some don’t stay more than a few days. They’re too soft and self-indulgent. They think to find an easy life here. We soon set them right on that score!”
    “I’ve no doubt you do,” he said, with wry conviction. He thought for a moment. “Do they relapse very frequently?”
    “How do you mean, frequently?”
    “Well—have any left the refuge in the past few days?”
    “No.” She eyed him, puzzled and suspicious.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Fiske. You’ve been extraordinarily kind. Good afternoon.”
    “Good afternoon, Mr.—?”
    But Julian was already walking away.

    He read the pamphlet on his way home. It was not very enlightening. It consisted largely of rhetoric about prostitution—“the stain upon our national soul,” as Harcourt called it—rather than any practical information about the refuge or its inmates. Not that it was foolish or facile. Harcourt wrote with force and grace, and without the pomposity that made so many reformers seem comical just when they were most sincere. But was all this eloquence in earnest? Julian felt he would like to know more about the Reverend Gideon Harcourt.
    He let himself in at the street door of his lodging and went upstairs. As he was laying his hat and stick on the hall table, Sally came running out of the parlour. Her nut-brown hair hung damp and loose. Her bare feet made little wet marks on the floor. She was wearing his green silk dressing-gown (and nothing else, that he could perceive). The sash was loosely tied, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She kicked the hem from under her feet as she rushed toward him.
    “Did you find her? What did she say about the letter? What kind of place is she shut up in? Is it a knocking-house?”
    “Aren’t you afraid of catching cold?”
    “Pox on that! Who is she? What’s it all about?”
    “I don’t know who she is, but she seems to be an inmate of a refuge for fallen women. That’s what’s at Number 9, Stark Street.”
    “Oh, one of them places.” She