The Virgin Cure Read Online Free PDF Page A

we were halfway up the stairs, nearly causing me to miss a step. “You’re awfully quiet back there.”
    “I’m fine, sir,” I answered, hoping he hadn’t seen me flinch.

In August of 1871, a man was caught attempting to drag a young girl away near her home on Delancy Street. He later confessed to murdering four other girls, including Eliza Adler.

    It was common knowledge that newly hired servant girls were often taken aside for personal indulgences—by the butler, or the footman, or even the master of the house. It was assumed it was their right to have the girl, a natural part of the domestic economy, but I hadn’t given up anything to anyone yet. I hadn’t had my first blood or my first kiss, wasn’t sure of how to meet a man’s expectations outside of Mama once explaining to me, “All you need to know about men is this—they have a great need to put their cock into whatever holes they find fitting. The more you’re grown, the less it’ll hurt. So, until you’re ready, stay out of their way.”
    I can trip him, push him down the stairs if I have to. I can run away .
    Mama would never forgive me.
    More and more, I’d felt men gazing at me, licking their lips when they thought they might get me alone. Mr. Goodwin, the grocer, made no secret of his fondness for little girls. Mr. Cowan insisted on calling me “princess” every time he came to collect the rent. Pensioner Peter Rutledge was kind and had a roaring laugh, but he was thirty-three and had no legs or prospects because of the war.
    Unsettling as their attentions were, I understood (as most girls in my circumstance did) that I could, if careful, get quite a lot from a man before having to give any of myself away. A look, a word, a nod was an invitation to a game. What’s in it for me? I’d learned to ask myself. How far can this go before it’s too late?
    I’d smiled at Mr. Goodwin, let him run the back of his rough hand across my cheek so he’d give me half-a-dozen eggs instead of the three or four Mama’s pennies would buy. A winning smile and a lingering nudge of my shoulder against his arm, had, on occasion, meant a new ribbon for my hair. There were dangers to such games of course—one false move and I might end up ruined, or worse, like poor Eliza—but the rewards that came when I moved cautiously and correctly were too tantalizing to resist.
    This was the sort of path Francine Grossman had taken all the way to London, and then to Paris, and then back again to New York. Now known as the Baroness de Battue, she’d once been a Chrystie Street girl herself. She’d played her cards right and become a courtesan rather than a whore, a woman of consequence rather than a corpse. All the girls from Five Points to Rag Pickers Row had, at one time or another, tied strands of oyster shells around their necks for jewels, waltzed in the dust with broomsticks for princes, and pretended to be her. Every tencent whore on the Lower East Side cursed her existence, insisting that should’ve been me . Eliza had planned to follow in Francine’s footsteps, but had somehow lost her way. I wasn’t about to let that happen to me.
    Nestor’s voice was gentle, and he’d struck me as a thoughtful man, somewhat like Reverend Osgood, the minister who came on Sunday afternoons to say prayers with troubled souls in the slums. I wondered if perhaps Nestor had been his own man in his youth, but somewhere along the way had fallen on hard times, leaving him to depend on serving others for his livelihood.
    His eyes had gone soft when he’d looked back at me, sympathy held like a pearl in the furrow of his brow. I hoped he was the kind of man whose heart could be touched by pleading. Please, sir, not now —I’d beg, if he approached me. I’m too young .
    Reaching the top of the stairs, he shone his lamp into the gloom of a small, dark room where it revealed the figure of a woman stretched out on a mattress in the middle of the floor. Her breathing was steady and