Chapter Text
Madam Prudence was an ugly woman, with makeup caked in clumps across her face in a desperate, sad attempt to hide the fact that she was no longer beautiful. It was her hands that upset Violetta the most - hooked claws of sagging skin and yellowed nails, hands that she was sure had once been put to work in a place not too unlike the Cat but were now as desolate and sad as the rest of her, testimony to a decaying body and spirit. It was in Prudence’s hands that Violetta saw her future, if she had one, and that was what frightened her most of all.
She pitied Sabine, who had sought her out on Prudence’s behalf after whatever sort of unsavory questions had been posed of her during her meeting with the Madame. They had found each other in a quiet space, beneath the great wrought iron intricacies of one of the sitting areas. For a moment she seemed ready to embrace Violetta as she had minutes before, forgetting that anyone else could possibly exist, but all Sabine seemed able to muster was a small squeeze of her hand.
“She wants to talk with you.” Sabine’s voice was hardly a whisper. “Said it’s important.”
“Fine, but what did she say to you?” Anything that Prudence had to say to her would pale in comparison to whatever Sabine had just went through alone. The thought of Prudence looking hawkishly down at Sabine, who was promised a new life but was only given this semblance of one, who would sign whatever Prudence pushed in front of her with a shaky hand.
“I’ll tell you. Later, I mean.” Sabine was still hushed as she gripped at her hand tightly for one last, long moment. The flash of fear in those brown eyes made Violet’s chest tight. “Just go. She’s impatient.”
The sensation of replacing Sabine’s company with the Madame’s left a foul taste in Violet’s mouth.
“The Pendletons trusted me with a task like this for a reason,” Prudence droned, pacing around that tiny office of hers, toying with the power that she had over Violetta, perhaps savoring it. “They knew what sort of business I keep, and that I know how to keep quiet.”
A business that takes advantage of girls like Sabine, which you keep quiet enough about, a part of her echoed, though she dared not voice anything so openly brash. What use was there in criticizing the woman that could make her life worse with a few moments of pen to ledger, or in condemning the business that kept her alive?
The image of Sabine kept flickering before her, slumped shoulders trying to hide something not quite there, long auburn hair plastered down the back of a graceful neck. She kept feeling again Sabine’s hands back in the bath, slipping from the ends of her hair and down to her shoulder blades without prompting. There had been timid kindness in her hands, but something else, too, and -
“Violetta? Am I interrupting something?” Prudence’s voice, grating and impatient, broke off Violetta’s thoughts, perhaps for the better.
“No, of course not. I’m… Please continue.”
The wilting look she gained for that half-answer was worse than Violetta had expected, and it was all she could do to avoid visibly recoiling, or turning tail and running. Prudence was never anyone’s ally, it seemed, and though it was likely that she was in Violet’s position twenty years before, she never seemed to understand humility.
“Truly, Violet, I am trying to help you with this.” The Madame moved from behind her desk, drawing a hand against the windowsill as she approached Violetta with an appraising smile.
The cold contact of Prudence’s hand against her jaw was sudden, but both of them remained steady, unyielding. Prudence drew closer, and her breath carried words cooler than Violetta expected.
“Both of us know what sort of position you are in,” Prudence said, as if they were old friends. “Four - no, five years of work have yielded less than it should have. You’ve seen friends killed by sickness and this plague. You still work unsavory hours with unsavory guests.”
The shift in the set of Violetta’s jaw did not go unnoticed, she was sure.
“Do me a favor, and we’ll see what I can do,” Prudence promised, and for once she sounded sincere. Her hand dropped from Violetta’s face as she moved to page through the guest ledger casually. “Louila needs a break, and you know about dear Claire’s… indisposition.”
Indisposition was a difficult term, yielding too many thoughts of sad women and sad children. Violetta nodded slowly, still wary. “May I ask what the favor entails?”
Prudence nodded simply, as if she wasn’t taking pleasure in the entire exchange. “You may. It has to do with the child, locked in the attic beside your quarters.” A flash of rheumy eyes captured and held Violetta’s gaze. “What do you know of her?”
The question was loaded. Violet knew that she had raven-black hair and dark circles under her eyes from so many weeks of tears and no sleep. Betty had seen her escape, that day Morgan had argued with her and came strolling down the hall without his clothes to yell at Prudence, drunk and raving. She was like a wraith, she had claimed, with something like fear in what looked like the eyes of nobility. There were nightmares, no doubt of those who came to abduct her, and she screamed at someone to stop him or yelled for her mother. There was something else, too, when the girl sang snatches of song not too similar to the humming of runes, but not too different, either. Amy, or something. The lost child.
“Next to nothing,” Violetta said, shaking her head. “Is she some niece of the Pendletons?”
“Good,” Prudence said. “Better than if you thought you knew something. You’re smart enough, Violet, I’m certain you will figure it out soon enough.
“You’ll bring up her meals in the mornings and afternoons in lieu of myself. Do try to get her to like you - perhaps she won’t try to climb out windows if she decides you are her friend. Heaven knows I’m beyond hope with her.”
With a short sigh of finality, Prudence pressed a key into her palm.
“Her name is Emily.”
---
Holding the key at her side was like holding a secret as she watched the clock tick toward noontime.
The Cat was empty of any patrons besides the regulars, those who could come at any time of day or night and be assured of a clean room and whatever they desired - which most often came down to Betty, Louila, Claire, or Rosemarie. As evening came, it was the merchants and the captains and the occasional Watchman that came through the doors. It was like gambling, or party games with all but one pistol empty, but the elixir kept coming in little red phials and so did the patrons, and with them the rats.
It was easiest when they wanted her to be someone else. Empress Kaldwin, the drunk ones would joke, but she would pull her hair back and put on airs just barely enough to be ridiculous. But she became others, too - old lost sweethearts or ex-lovers that spurned them or cruel but familiar names of nobility.
She wasn’t herself again until she had to return to her attic room and crowd in between Marie and Tara in the early hours of morning. They saw to one another well enough, brushing tangles from hair and wiping smears off of reddened cheeks, and Violetta had to return to her identity again. Every night, she had to forgive herself, and tonight would be no different.
The tray waiting to be brought up from the attic was simple enough - Serkonan blood sausage, Tyvian pear, a Morley apple - and it was an uneventful walk up toward the attic level. There were voices drifting down the hall, and Violetta was certain that one was Sabine’s, but the task at hand outweighed whatever emotion it was that knotted in the pit of her stomach at the thought of her.
The room was darkened and musty from the lack of air and use, and the large cloth draped over where the window should have been showed off only dust in the warm pools of lantern light. Emily’s shadow caught Violetta’s eye first, thrown against the wall and distorted into something bigger and more sinister than what she was.
Moving forward, she spotted the girl herself. Wraith had been an appropriate descriptor, as the child was all angles and unbrushed wisps of dark hair in dirtied white playclothes. She was focused intensely on drawing, as if it was all that mattered in the world to her. Perhaps it was.
All movement in the shadows stopped as the door closed behind with an echoing click.
Violetta cleared her throat and forced a few meager steps forward. Dark eyes flickered, and the child was fixated upon her, looking her up and down yet somehow without hatred or complete understanding.
“I’ve come to bring your lunch,” Violetta offered, holding out the food. “You’d do best to eat.”
“You aren’t Madame Prudence. Tell me your name.” The command of her daintily-spoken words were enough indication of her status as any. Emily’s eyes seemed to narrow at Violetta’s gaze, unused to people looking her in the eyes.
“Violetta,” she answered. With another step forward, she knelt to place the tray before Emily and sat across from her. “Violet, if you like. And yours?”
The girl nodded pensively, as if her name meant a great deal. “My name’s Emily. But it used to be longer, and someone would yell it whenever I walked into a room.” For a moment, she looked back to her drawing - a yellow cat arched along a semblance of the scrolling wrought iron sign outside. “Why isn’t the Madame here? Where did she go?”
Violetta shifted, resting her weight half on a hand as she stretched her legs out to the side. “She’s a busy woman, working hard. I’ll be bringing your meals for the time being, aside from your dinner.” Emily’s brows scrunched upward in a quizzical look, and Violetta had to forcibly chase the blush from her cheeks. Why would anyone keep a child in a place like this? “I work evenings, you see.”
“The Madame told me what you do,” Emily said matter-of-factly, picking up the apple to examine it. Violetta’s breath caught in her throat.“She says the ladies here are like princesses, and men come to admire you.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Violetta answered, again shifting her weight under the child’s intense gaze. “But it isn’t always so glamorous.”
“I thought so,” Emily said, with a motion toward the still-fresh bruises along Violet’s collarbone. “Sometimes there are strange noises at night, but I’m not scared. How old are you? You’re younger than anyone else I’ve seen here.”
“Only nineteen,” she answered, worrying at her lip. “But I’m not the youngest. Sabine is sixteen, and Helena’s a year older than that. It’s been five years since I came.”
“You all live here, don’t you? You never leave, just like me, but I wish I could go downstairs like you. All of the plants are so pretty, and I want to draw the view out the windows.”
“Things aren’t safe now, but it used to be different,” Violetta said. “When I first came, we could leave when we wanted. The streets around here are dangerous in times like this. It’s better that both of us stay hidden here while we can.”
“What about your family? Don’t they miss you?”
Violetta shook her head. “I haven’t had a family for a long time, after I lost my mother. I never knew my father.”
“Me neither,” Emily answered, expression flashing with something like pity, though she kept from elaborating. She sniffed daintily, attempting to mask the wetness of her eyes. “I won’t be here long. Someone will come for me, and I won’t have to hide ever again, and things will be like they used to.”
Curiosity pricked at Violetta’s mind. “Why are you here, Emily? Did anyone tell you?”
No amount of dignified sniffles could mask Emily’s tears now, and when Violetta reached out toward her, the little girl’s cheek was resting against her palm in a moment.
“They killed my mother,” she whispered, eyes wavering with tears as she met Violetta’s gaze. “They took me here, the two twin men with dark hair. They say that he’s dead too, but I don’t believe them, because he promised that he would always keep me safe, and I believe him.”
“... Who promised? What’s his name?”
Emily rubbed at her eyes, the fear and timidity giving way to something red and angry.
“Corvo.”