19 May 1959
"Doctor Blake seems nice," Sarah said to Jean as she eased herself onto a stool at the bar. That small task was getting harder for her by the day and most of them time Jean brought the meals upstairs to her to spare her the discomfort, but Sarah complained of missing the company, and often chose to come down to join the other girls for their evening meal. Well, not evening, exactly; supper was served at 4:30 on the dot, wolfed down and cleaned away by 5:00, when the pub's doors opened and the first of the evening's customers began to arrive. Attending supper was by no means a formal requirement, but most of the girls seemed to prefer eating together over foraging for themselves, and once the men started to arrive there was no time for eating at all, and Jean liked to make sure her girls were fortified for whatever their night held in store.
"Nice to look at," Maureen said, shooting Jean a knowing sort of look that Jean liked not at all. At twenty-six Maureen was one of the oldest girls currently living beneath Jean's roof, and an old timer who'd been a fixture of the Lock and Key for nearly seven years. The work had made her cynical where the topics of men and romance were concerned, but she looked after the younger girls, and she and Jean understood one another. Perhaps too well; the expression on Maureen's face carried with a sort of insinuation, as if she had noticed Jean's interest in the man, and meant to tease her for it. It wasn't interest, Jean tried to tell herself, not exactly; he was interesting - and handsome - but he would not, could not, be anything more to Jean than a passing curiosity.
"He's old enough to be your father," Jean chided her gently, hoping that would be the end of it.
"So is every other man who walks through that door," Maureen said with a saucy toss of her auburn curls. "And none of them look as good in a suit as he does, do they, Mrs. Beazley?"
She was right about one thing at least; not a one of their regular customers was under the age of thirty. The Lock and Key had long been established as a respectable sort of business, and the rules that had been laid down well before Jean had ever crossed the doorstep served to keep the young and hungry away. The pub boasted a clientele of businessmen and politicians, and a few gentlemen whose families had been wealthy since the dawn of time and would continue to be for the foreseeable future regardless of how much money they frittered away on prostitutes. It was not uncommon for some men to make the trip from surrounding towns, Bendigo and Castlemaine, looking for a bit of fun well away from the prying eyes of their neighbors; there was even one very important gentleman indeed who came all the way from Melbourne once a month, just to see his regular girl. But they were all dreadfully boring, in their own way, painfully normal, and Jean supposed it was no surprise that the arrival of the dashing Doctor Blake should have turned the girls' heads.
"Still, Doctor's not a customer," Jean said, not knowing what else to say. He seemed to be, as his father had been, eager to help but not eager to partake. Though he had been nothing but polite within her hearing Jean had only just met the man, and two brief conversations were no enough for her to have formed a complete opinion of him. He was clever, and a great deal more relaxed than his father had been, and seemed an endlessly curious sort of soul, but beyond that Jean could not say. In time, perhaps, he would show more of himself to her, and then...well. What happened next remained to be seen.
"Yet," this from Lorraine, dark hair cut short and dark eyes that glittered with mirth. "That could change."
She said it like she wanted it to change, like she'd be interested in taking him on, and Jean liked that not one bit. Every girl approached their work differently, and harbored different hopes in their heart. Some of them tried to find some fun in the work where they could, tried to maintain some sense of optimism despite their circumstances, and Lorraine was one of the more cheerful ones.
"Taken a shine to him, have you, Raine?" Elizabeth teased her gently from further down the bar.
"What's not to like? He's handsome, and he's tall, and he's strong, and that's more than I can say for some of the fellas we see."
Things devolved rather quickly from there, as the girls began animatedly discussing their customers, the best and the worst, and how Doctor Blake might stack up in comparison. And for a few minutes Jean let them carry on, listened to their babble and kept her own counsel.
There was no reason, really, why Doctor Blake should not become a customer in time, if he wished. There were perhaps ethical implications involved - if he intended to carry on as the brothel's physician it would be most improper for him to also partake of its services - but in Jean's business the matter of ethics was murky, and prone to change at any given moment. After all, if she were truly concerned with the ethics of her work she would have closed the Lock and Key down the moment it passed into her care ten years before, or converted it into a proper pub, where the only things available for purchase were alcohol and her famous steak pies. She hadn't, of course, for a variety of reasons, and so she knew she could hardly stand in judgement of a man who purchased that which she provided. Still, though, Jean had her own sense of morality upon which she depended to guide her through the various twists and turns of her life, and the thought of Doctor Blake as a customer unsettled her.
Besides the issue of his role as their doctor, the thought of one of those girls taking his hand and leading him up the stairs left a bitter taste in her mouth for reasons she could not quite articulate, as if her distress was born not of logical thought but of some deeper, more primal understanding. She wanted to think he was a good man, too good to do such a thing, to take advantage of the services on offer. She wanted to think that he would not look at her girls, all half his age and lovely, and feel the same base lust that drove every other man who walked into that pub. She wanted to think that his interest in her was genuine, and not a means to bring him closer to his ultimate goal of shagging someone else.
And that was not a prospect which she was willing to ponder at length. It had been a long time, a very long time, since Jean had wanted a man, had wanted to listen to him talk, wanted him to touch her. Overexposure, that's how she liked to explain it to the girls who asked why she'd never settled down, gotten married again; after spending so many years beholden to them Jean did not want to devote a single moment of her time now to thoughts of men and how they might fit within her life. She was freer now than she had ever been before, and she would not let any man, however handsome, however kind, take away her independence. She was quite happy as she was, thank you very much, and had not taken on a customer in nearly a decade, nor would she ever again. Everything in Jean's life was just the way she wanted it.
Except now, this. Him. This niggling voice in the back of her mind, wondering when she'd seen him again, if he'd have a pocket full of shillings and a mouth full of questions just for her. He'd asked about her children, had indirectly tried to ask about her husband, and though those questions had made her wary they had also touched her heart, in a way, for Jean could not recall when last any man, paying or otherwise, had thought to ask about her family, or even acknowledged that she had any sort of personal life at all.
He is a very strange man, she thought. But it was not an unpleasant kind of strange; he was different in a refreshing kind of way, a bit of gentility in an ofttimes cruel world.
"All right, that's enough," Jean said, not unkindly, drawing an end to the girls' animated conversations. "It's almost time. You lot go and get ready, I'll see to the washing up."
"I'll help, Mrs. Beazley," Sarah said while all around her the other girls rose from their stools and drifted towards the stairs, still laughing and talking merrily together. "I'm going out of my mind just sitting."
"I'll be grateful for the company," Jean told her, smiling. And she would be, for it would give her a distraction from her own traitorous thoughts and the memory of Doctor Blake's gentle blue eyes.
"So what, you're their doctor now?" Matthew asked him as they sat down together to dig into the dinner Mrs. Penny had left for them. They had no formal arrangement, as regarded how often they took meals together or on what days, but they were each of them confirmed bachelors without any romantic prospects whatsoever, and Mrs. Penny was a fine cook. The thought of sharing a meal with a friend was always more appealing than eating alone, and Matthew found his way to the Blake house more often than not, for which Lucien was very grateful.
"Apparently, my father used to look after them," Lucien told him, laughing as Matthew's eyebrow lifted incredulously.
"Bloody hell," Matthew grumbled. "I'd no idea."
"No, no, nor did I," Lucien said. "But someone's got to. That young lady only has a few weeks to go until her baby's due, and she's not been seen by a doctor once. Apparently Doctor King won't go near them."
"He's a miserable old bastard," Matthew told him grimly.
"So I've gathered."
"It's a good thing you're doing, Lucien, but you do need to be careful. Someone sees you going in there, they might get the wrong idea, and everything could unravel."
"If anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer them. That pub is full of young women who need access to regular, reliable medical care, and it would be cruel not to help them when I can. It's not as if I'm...well. You know."
"Not a customer?" Matthew said. He did not quite laugh, but he came very close.
"No," Lucien answered. "Those girls, Matthew…they're...well. Do you know my daughter, my Li, she'll be twenty-three, if she's still living. And when I spoke to those girls last night I found myself wondering what she'd be like, now. If she'd be like them, friendly and happy. I wondered what I'd do, if I found out she was in a place like that. No, I'm not interested in becoming a customer."
"You're a good man, Blake," Matthew told him gruffly, around a bite of potatoes. "They don't get many of those, in there."
"I still don't understand why you haven't shut that place down, Matthew. I'm sure Mrs. Beazley takes perfectly good care of those girls but they shouldn't be there at all. And if everyone knows what they're up to-"
"I told you," Matthew shrugged. "She covers her tracks well. She learned from the best, and she knows exactly what to do, what to say. And honestly, I'd rather girls like that have a safe place to go than be stuck out on the street, or worse."
Lucien grunted. "Still, though. Is there something else? Some reason why you're so lenient with her in particular?"
For a long moment Matthew simply watched him, as if considering his answer. Belatedly Lucien realized the potential for disaster inherent in his question; what if Matthew was a customer? What if his relationship with Mrs. Beazley was more than Lucien had realized? What if Jean had purchased her pub's security through the only means available to her?
"I knew her husband," Matthew said finally, and shock crashed into Lucien with all the force of a train. It was the last thing he'd been expecting Matthew to say, and he felt a bit ashamed, now, for his unkind thoughts. He had known, of course, that Mrs. Beazley must have been married, but he had not expected to hear that her life and Matthew's could have been so closely linked. Matthew had referred to him in the past tense, and Lucien wondered then if he was dead, or gone. Wondered what sort of man he'd been, whether Jean missed him as Lucien missed his own wife, whether she lamented for what used to be, as he did in the still of the night.
"He was a good bloke," Matthew continued. "I liked him. And Jean's done the best she can, with him gone. And like I said, I'd rather her be in charge down there than leave all those girls to fend for themselves, or leave a hole for somebody worse to fill. Now, do you want to hear about our murder victim or not?"
"All right, all right," Lucien said, raising his hands in defeat. "What have you learned?"
