England's Mistress: The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton (12 page)

Brothels like Madam Kelly's were renowned for providing music, dancing, and lots of glamorous girls in states of undress.

St. James was the center of high-class prostitution and its brothels became known as "Les Bordéis du Roi" (the royal brothels) after the riotous Prince of Wales, who was in the process of moving out of his parents' home, Buckingham House, and into his own residence, Carlton House, on Pall Mall. Only three years older than Emma, the prince spent wildly in anticipation of an income of around £100,000 per year after his twenty-first birthday, and Mrs. Kelly and the other madams of St. James were the beneficiaries. Within five years of living at Carlton House, he had run up debts of nearly £300,000. The prince's sprees turned an already fashionable area into a playground for the rich. In the daytime, families roamed the waist-high grass of St. James's Park, queued up to buy fresh milk from one of the cows, and vied for a sight of the elephant from the royal menagerie on its daily promenade. At night, men looked for cheap prostitutes in the park and expensive girls in the nearby houses. St. James was a man's world, and no respectable woman, even if she were accompanied by an army of male chaperones, would venture into the streets near the park. By the 1830s, there were more than 900 brothels and 850 similar smaller establishments crammed into the half square mile of St. James. Gold showered through their doors—one declared that the money that dissipated in the brothels in a single night would maintain the whole of the Netherlands for six months. Emma had taken up employment in the most expensive sex resort in the world.

Kelly was fifty-five and at the top of her profession. She had no mercy for anyone: madams in debt, girls desperate to be set free, and groveling men begging not to be exposed to their colleagues or wives. She charged her guests eye-popping prices for food, drink, and medicaments, and kept her staff hopelessly in her debt. As soon as a new girl arrived, Kelly took her clothes and loaned her expensive jewels, dresses, and a gold watch. A timepiece was the crucial sign of a Georgian courtesan, since genteel ladies never wore watches but courtesans had to time their clients. Kelly rented dresses and watches to her staff so that if one escaped (in her finery, for she had nothing else), she would issue a warrant for the girl's arrest for theft. Kelly took a large cut of her employees' earnings and billed them for bed, board, and laundry, as well as obliging them to buy expensive silk underwear, costume jewelery, makeup, and contraceptives. She forbade them to buy from anybody else, tried to increase their indebtedness
to her by slyly offering them pastries, sweet wine, hairstyling, and trinkets, and forced them to hand over any gifts from clients. She punished attempts to freelance with clients outside the brothel and imposed fines for infringements of her complicated rules. Rather than renting out rooms for seductions (the authorities vigorously prosecuted any brothel involved in the seduction of an innocent girl), Kelly preferred to increase her profits by hiring out her staff to other brothels, social events, and country parties. She refused to take married women—husbands tended to demand big shares of their wives' wages, to which, legally, they had a right—but she boarded children for a fee.

Charlotte's establishment in Arlington Street had exquisite carriages, servants in livery, and furniture worthy of a palace. The girls received their customers in an opulently decorated parlor. No more than six to eight employees worked there at any one time, most between fourteen and twenty-four. Only the very beautiful or very skilled worked into their late twenties. Unlike the Covent Garden prostitutes, they didn't wear the same dress, and often changed their look or name, since clients loved novelty. Others sought to please by dressing as famous actresses such as Sarah Siddons and Mrs. Abington or society leaders including Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

"The ladies of pleasure in London," wrote one client, "give us an idea of the celebrated Grecian courtesans, who charmed the heroes of Athens." An Arlington Street training had some notable advantages over the typical education of a genteel fourteen-year-old-girl, who learned needlework and music from her governess and spoke to few men other than her father and servants. Kelly invited tutors to teach her employees music, dancing, and languages, and her girls learned other equally useful skills: to feign interest in men's complaints about their wives and monologues about hunting, and to please by being cheerful and willing to flatter.

A courtesan needed elaborate, high hair, so a new Kelly girl had to pay an early visit to a hairdresser. Hair salons were everywhere in London, and specialist stylists, such as David Ritchie, author
of Treatise of the Hair
in 1770, had waiting lists that were months long. The construction of such confections of coiffure took over three hours of skilled work with pins, braids, and curling tongs, and further hours to decorate. Pupils paid a shilling to practice on life-size models in the back of the shop, and at the front two hairdressers put pads made of horsehair on the client's head and then stacked the hair on top in a curving tower of three feet or higher. They looped hair in curls to ornament the style and then added a string of
fake pearls, a few long feathers dyed blue or pink or yellow (a style fit only for prostitutes, according to Queen Marie-Antoinette's mother), or even flowers, fruit, or models of houses or boats. The writer Hester Thrale jibed that two fashionable ladies whom she met had the equivalent of two gardens on their heads, "an acre and a half of shrubbery besides slopes, grass plants, tulip beds… and greenhouses." Such hairstyles made hats impossible, so the hair was usually wrapped in a length of gauze for outdoor excursions. The style would remain in place for about three months and was then reset; in order not to crush it in the interim, the woman had to sleep on a special head support. As hair could not be washed or brushed after styling, many coiffures were infested with insects and lice, sometimes even mice. The fashion for high hair began around 1765, and by the early 1780s it was at its most excessive (becoming less popular after a tax on powder was introduced in 1786 and virtually dying out after a law was passed in 1795 that hairdressers had to take out an expensive annual license for powdering). Although commentators mocked it, the style added height, slimmed the face, and emphasized a lovely neck.

Kelly girls were ornately styled and carefully groomed. Emma's dress was a highly fashionable imitation of French court dress: stiff wide skirts of embroidery and brocade worn over heavy corsets, finished off with a heavy train. At Kelly's, however, the bodices were cut much lower. Charlotte's girls looked like impressive brocaded ships and had to turn sideways to pass through doors. Courtesans usually wore pink—peach, coral, sugar pink, and rose—which suited Emma's creamy complexion perfectly. A tightly laced bodice opened over a piece of different-colored material called a stomacher, and a rigid skirt that resembled a jeweled lampshade was worn with a different colorful underskirt. Dresses were padded with false hips and bottoms made from cork, fake breasts were fashioned from porcelain or cloth, and sometimes even a fake stomach bulge was added. Magazines made ribald jokes about the cork rump, showing men finding that their lover was "corked." The overall impression was of an impossibly curvy woman squeezed into a silk dress two sizes too small. Stays were pointed and boned down the front in a way that prevented the wearer from bending forward and made crossing the legs while sitting impossibly uncomfortable. Anyone wearing them always had to sit very upright, and moving from a sitting to a standing position was usually rather painful.

Thick makeup was also very much in vogue, so much so that in 1770 the government passed a law allowing a man to divorce his wife if he could prove that she had fooled him into marrying her by using makeup to hide
her ugly looks or even her true age. Courtesans were the most heavily painted women of all. A Kelly girl first applied a base of cold cream and then smoothed a thick layer of white lead paint over her face. Her eyebrows were shaved off and replaced by false ones made from mouse skin and darkened with black lead. Cheeks were ornamented with beauty spots cut from silk and glued on. She coated her mouth with a dilution of red plaster of Paris, painted blue cream on her eyelids, rouged her cheeks brightly, and sometimes whitened her teeth with lead or chalk. Despite all this ornamentation, nail polish was not used, and we would find ladies' hands surprisingly bare, in contrast to their ornate makeup and hairstyles. Rose or orange water was used as a perfume. Under the light of flattering candles, sumptuously dressed, and loaded with jewelery, Emma was a beautiful piece of art.

In the morning, the Kelly girls had to don plain clothes to scrub the rooms (somewhat difficult with their three-foot hairdos) and wash the linen, an interminable task in a brothel. While most hygienic Londoners changed their sheets three times a year, one attraction of Kelly's was the cleanliness of both the sheets and the staff—one writer claimed that men went to prostitutes because they were cleaner than their wives. In the afternoon, Kelly girls retired to the parlor. No fire was lit until a client arrived, so they huddled with blankets over their opulent dresses, whiling away the hours gossiping and playing cards. Arguments broke out over men, clothes, and their positions in the hierarchy and sometimes descended into fights before the brothel bouncer or "bully man" broke it up. They all waited until the sound of a bell signaled the arrival of a gentleman.

Some clients were nervous first-timers escorted by friends, or drunken men on a spending spree. Others were jaded regulars or dissolute debauchees. St. James was still buzzing about the recent death of Mr. Damer, the privileged only son of Lord Milton. Damer visited a bagnio and commanded twelve of the most handsome women of the town to be brought to him, with "all manner of delicacies." He locked the door, "made them undress one another, and, when naked, requested them to amuse him with the most voluptuous attitudes. About an hour afterwards, he dismissed them, and then, drawing a pistol from his pocket, immediately put an end to his existence."
²

In the receiving room, Kelly discussed prices and requirements, and the gentleman either took a girl immediately or a servant led him through to the salon. Candles were lit, the fire quickly kindled, and the girls stuffed their blankets and cards under the sofas and arranged themselves beguilingly.
Buzzing with ideas borrowed from erotic novels such as John Cle-land's
Fanny Hill,
the men settled down as the girls served them wine and fine meats and took turns dancing or singing. Arlington Street also entertained rich, independent women who came to watch the show. The evening usually began with civilized chatter, music, and flirting, but it could turn rowdy: one army captain and his men broke china and mirrors there seven nights in a row.

Emma had a chance to refine her natural grace as she danced, sang, and perhaps played the guitar. "Lewd Posture," a form of erotic dance, was the most popular form of entertainment. The performer wore a light dance dress or less and drew shawls across herself as she performed twirls, extended her leg behind her, and bent and stretched while others played a guitar or sang. Sometimes the women danced in twos or in groups. The employees also staged impromptu plays or recited speeches, often tales of seduced women that filled the pages of bawdy contemporary books such as
Nocturnal Revels,
which allowed them to pretend to be ruined girls remembering their seduction while kneeling to beg for forgiveness. Other girls took men upstairs, sometimes up to three a night. One contemporary book instructed, "You must not forget to use the natural accents of dying persons…. You must add to these ejaculations, aspirations, sighs, intermissions of words, and such like gallantries, whereby you may give your Mate to believe you are melted, dissolved and wholly consumed in pleasure, though Ladies of large business are generally no more moved by an embrace, than if they were made of Wood or Stone."
³
The women had to stay awake and, as one visitor noted, "sit up every Morning until Five o'clock to drink with any straggling
Buck
who may reel in the early Morning and bear with whatever behaviour these drunken Visitants are pleased to use."

Sometimes Emma had only to be a pleasant companion for dinner, drinks, and cards, talking of horses and hunting with the aristocrats, stocks and shares with the businessmen, and politics with everybody, as it looked increasingly likely that England would lose the American war of independence. When attempting to take refuge in a brothel from the English obsession with politics, Lord Tyrconnel was so infuriated by the zeal of the "nymphs" for politics that he "left them in a passion and the next day returned to France."
⁴
Those who ruled the country came to Arlington Street, and many claimed that St. James courtesans bartered their favors for votes.

Kelly often paraded her staff around the Ranelagh and Vauxhall pleasure
gardens and took them to the theater or opera. As one commentator noted, the girls were often "superbly clothed at public places; and even those of the most expensive kind." Clients sometimes hired them simply as escorts for parties or days out. One rake, William Hickey, took three Kelly girls in a coach to Turnham Green, "to drink tea at the Pack Horse, and treat the misses to a swing." On fine days, Emma perhaps visited the tea gardens at Sadler's Wells and Highbury or concerts in Hanover Square.