A little excerp from Madam's diary- enjoy my little rats.[LittlEm]A pity how they all come to this. Well-mannered young ladies are in such short supply to begin with, but the rest - the rest spill over into these cells like an infestation of roaches. Little rats, all of them. If one of those creatures should ever discovery this diary, I expect they would wonder what constitutes "the rest". "The rest" are those girls from the streets, from the large houses, from no family and from well-bred backgrounds, the raped, the beaten, the lonesome and the heartbroken: all connected by one common factor. They are all mad.
Shackles, whips and medicine cannot save them, nor can their frantic little prayers to God in the cold, univiting chapel every morning in the grey dawn. They have been forsaken by all. All except myself and the fleas that sup the blood of ladies as if it were poor-quality rum.
I have been known to make a pet of a girl every so often; when one with rare red hair is thrown to my mercy, or rarer still, one whose eyes are not the same in colour, or occasionally the ones with real spirit, I keep the child at my side, allowing her drops of brandy in her tea and the choice of whether or not to pray when dawn crawls in over the windowsill. She nearly always chooses to stay behind.
No one questions me, for I am in charge. The only person more senior than I is the Doctor, yet what does he care for women? If he had sense he would take the prettiest back to his office at the end of the longest corridor for painful hours, but he isn't inclined to do that. He sees women as lice, and sometimes as good opportunities for medical experiments. Nothing more.
And so I continue to choose my pets from among the street girls, and I give them permission to tell their tales if they so wish it. It is fascinating indeed to hear the stories their broken minds can weave together from frayed strings of memory. The ones who claim to suffer incest are always thoroughly intriguing, and always from the families where their relatives wear dark scarlet velvet and smoke dark reeking tobacco, and so, sensibly, only ever choose to interbreed.
