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The compassion on Susan’s face when she opens the door almost cuts Nancy to the bone, and it takes all her willpower not to just turn and walk away. Anger, sadness, disinterest, all of those she can cope with, but not compassion.
“Oh love, again?” Susan asks gently.
Anyone else would be cowed into silence by her fierce expression, but not Susan. “Don’t-” Nancy says sharply, but Susan cuts her off.
“Ah ah. In my house, we play by my rules. Invite me to your house, and we can play by yours.”
“You’d spit to see my house.”
Susan doesn’t dignify the comment with a response. Nancy doesn’t come to unburden herself about her living conditions, and they both know it.
She steps back to allow Nancy into the house, and they don’t speak again until they’re safely ensconced in her office. It’s warm from the fire, but Nancy cannot feel it. There is only a bone-deep chill which feels like she may never be able to shake it off.
Alone, with a locked door between them and the rest of the world, Nancy feels both safe and trapped. And Susan is looking at her as if she might break.
She won’t, she can’t, but the words to say that won’t come. And she cannot be sure they’d be the truth anyway.
“Are you ready to let me in?” Susan asks, reaching out and laying her hand over Nancy’s atop her birch. She doesn’t answer, but lets her hand slide away.
They’ve done this so many times that her acquiescence doesn’t need to be in words to be understood. Susan takes the birch and lays it carefully on her desk.
Without it, Nancy feels stripped naked, defenceless. Only Susan does she trust to do this to her.
“What happened?”
“She…” Nancy begins, but the words fail her. She isn’t ready yet.
Susan steps closer, rising on her toes to reach up and remove Nancy’s hat. Once again, she lays it on her desk as though it deserves the utmost care.
“And now?” she prompts gently.
“She made…”
There’s no need to explain who ‘she’ is; Nancy only ever comes to talk about one thing. Susan may never have met Margaret Wells, but she knows more about her than most.
“Shh,” Susan murmurs, when the words choke off in Nancy’s mouth. “Not yet, then.” She is achingly gentle, tender, and Nancy hates the way it makes her feel, hates how secure and steadied Susan’s careful words and even more careful touches make her feel.
Closer still she comes, reaching around Nancy as if to embrace her, but instead untying the ribbon from her hair with practised ease and no need of sight. Dark waves fall around Nancy’s face, and she begins to feel less like herself. It’s a welcome feeling.
Susan remains motionless, waiting, frozen in the ghost of an embrace. It is a well-worn dance between them now. If Nancy remains silent, Susan will slowly, slowly, draw her in. If she speaks, or moves, Susan will back away.
“No,” Nancy rasps out, and Susan lets her arms drop, taking a step back.
“She’s hurt you badly this time, love,” Susan murmurs sadly, but her voice is without judgement, as always. Everyone has their own vice, their own addiction, and it is pointless trying to part them from it before they’re ready, even if it be poison.
It’s quiet enough for them to hear each other’s breath, and that feels more intimate than anything else, because Susan can hear the way Nancy’s is trembling, and that says much more than her words do. But her pale eyes are averted, and whatever she’s seeing is something Susan isn’t privy to.
Nancy shrugs out of her coat, letting it slide down her arms to pool around her feet on the floor. It’s as much as she can bring herself to give. But Susan speaks the language of Nancy’s heart, perhaps more fluently than Nancy herself does, and she understands the meaning. It is another acquiescence, consent to continue the dance.
With unhurried hands, she reaches for Nancy’s skirts. Her harlot’s skill could have them bunched around her ankles in a matter of seconds, but that isn’t the goal. She works the fastenings slowly, and with each one that comes undone, the tension builds, weighing on Nancy’s chest, filling her mouth and throat, until she must release it or expire right there against Susan’s desk.
“She makes fools of all those who love her!” she hisses. It isn’t what she wanted to say, but it is the truth nonetheless; it cannot damn her to speak it. “We’d be better without her, but-”
Slowly, Susan lets her skirts go, and Nancy cannot tell for sure whether it’s that or the thought of Mags which makes her sob. The sound is raw, lonely. It’s a long time since she’s lost herself completely before Susan, and she fears it as much as she needs it.
“Love…” Susan murmurs with achingly patient tenderness. It is not for her to judge or advise, simply to bear witness; an agreement negotiated between them many years ago.
Cool air caresses Nancy’s bare skin, and even that is almost more touch than she can bear. “She’ll drive everyone away, and she’ll deserve it,” she grinds out, “but I can’t… I can’t…”
She sobs again, her throat aching with the building emotion. No one can bring her low the way Mags can. No one else would ever be permitted enough space in her heart to do it. “I can’t leave her,” she chokes, “I-”
But that truth will damn her, no matter that Susan surely already knows. She has never spoken it aloud, and she never will. Especially not now.
Nancy tips back her head, but the tears gathering in her eyes will not be so easily encouraged away. They run down the sides of her face, and Susan says nothing. She scrubs at her eyes with her wrist, and Susan says nothing. “Touch me,” she demands, and finally Susan speaks.
“Is that what you want?”
The question confounds her as though spoken in a language she has no tongue for. The thing she wants, she cannot have, but it hasn’t stopped her wasting decades longing for it. And how can any want or desire compare to that eternal, all-encompassing need?
Nancy looks as though a strong breeze could shatter her, and Susan’s heart aches. She’s known her a long time, but never has she seen her this way. The pain could curdle into anger if she lets it, anger at Margaret for treating such a woman so carelessly, but it is not her place. She knows her own sins as well as Margaret Wells’, so she knows which of them is more deserving of the gallows.
“Will you tell me to stop?” she asks, reaching out but stopping before her fingers can graze Nancy’s skin. “Nancy,” she presses when no response comes.
“Yes,” Nancy answers tightly.
“Good girl,” Susan says, more from instinct than any belief that Nancy will respond well to being praised. She places her fingertips on a slender thigh. “Tell me what happened?”
She closes her eyes, but for once it isn’t Mags’ face she sees. It’s blood. Another fucking mess she was expected to clean up. And God help her, she did.
Susan’s fingers move higher on her thigh, and her breath catches slightly. “When I arrived, there was a man, dead, in one of her beds,” she says.
Her closed eyes hinder the tears, but do not prevent them entirely, and one runs down her cheek. Susan does not wipe it away. No part of her touches Nancy except the fingers which still edge higher.
“What could I have done?” she cries suddenly, but it’s not a question which needs an answer. Susan falters briefly but does not stop. “She looked so… She’ll hang for it if anyone finds out it was her, and I can’t, not… not my Mags…”
Susan nudges her legs a little further apart with the back of her hand. “What happened next?” she asks, finally reaching between Nancy’s thighs, finding her much wetter than she’d expected.
At the first gentle stroke, Nancy gasps and opens her eyes, unwittingly giving the dammed-up tears free rein to spill down her cheeks. “She begged me to fix it, so I did. And I would do it again. Damn it all to fucking hell!” she curses, the final words wavering from her in something between a moan and a sob as Susan rubs her firmly.
She doesn’t know what it says about her that she can only be honest and vulnerable when she’s being touched, yet she can only be touched when there is something to distract her. She has no intention of interrogating it, now or ever.
“What did you do?” Susan asks, and to her surprise, Nancy seizes her in an almost bruising grip, pulling her close. “There, love, I’ve got you,” she soothes, but Nancy doesn’t tell her to stop, so she doesn’t.
Nancy buries her face against Susan’s shoulder, unable to bear the idea of seeing her judgement. “It’ll disgust you,” she whispers, “I’m disgusted with myself.” But pleasure is beginning, slowly, hotly, to curl inside her, and she moves into Susan’s touch, edging on breathlessness.
“I…” she begins, but Susan’s finger slips and she sobs softly, losing her words. Perhaps it’s better that way. “Inside…” she whispers, as close to pleading as she’ll ever allow herself to get, even here in safety, and she moans as Susan obliges her.
“I- we dressed him and I contrived a plan that we make sure he’d be seen bein’ carried out the front door, looking like he was in his cups. We put him into a carriage and went off.”
Susan’s fingers curl inside her, the heel of her hand pressing firmly, and Nancy shudders. Pleasure and anguish are building, twining together inseparably, and she’s torn between moaning and weeping.
“We took the carriage to St. James’ and left the body in the lake and- and-”
She gasps against Susan’s shoulder, glad for the warmth and comfort of her closeness. What manner of person is she that she could be close to coming undone while describing such a thing? It does not bear thinking about.
Pleasure coils and twists inside her like a living thing which could tear her apart, just like the guilt. Susan’s fingers move faster, reach deeper, and she closes her eyes against the tears again. Though she feels lighter, she is still not completely unburdened.
Susan urges her on silently, both towards release and towards truthfulness. But she cannot find the words for exactly what she wants to say.
“You’re holding back, love. Come on,” Susan encourages softly.
Little wonder that she is! She does not want to admit it, either to Susan or to herself. But she will not know peace until she does.
“She only asked for help, she didn’t say what to do with the body. But if she’d have asked us to burn it or cut it or tie it naked to the gates of the palace, God help me I’d have done it.”
Susan’s sure touch doesn’t falter, and if Nancy was any less distracted, she’d have wondered what the madam could possibly have seen, or done, to make her so unflappable. But she is distracted, by thoughts of Mags and her lovely face, and even lovelier heart, though most - even her own daughters - would deny such a thing exists. But Nancy knows, Nancy remembers.
She’d learned at a young age that love is always bound up with hatred, inescapably entangled. Even her love for Mags cannot escape that blight, and even Susan’s fingers cannot completely ease the ache in her chest.
“That woman will lead me to ruin,” she whispers, voice quietly fierce yet shaking. She can no more stop the words now than she could stop herself following Mags to the ends of the earth. “She uses me like… like a man! She knows I’d do anything for her, and she makes sure to take full advantage. And I would, I will, until the day they lay me in the ground, because I-”
But that is a truth for another day, or perhaps never at all. Susan knows exactly how to bring Nancy over the edge, and does so swiftly, before she can say something she’ll later regret.
Nancy cries out, would fold at the waist if not for Susan’s steadying presence, and neither of them are sure whether she’s convulsing with pleasure or sobs.
Even when her breathing has calmed, and Susan has withdrawn her wet fingers and discreetly wiped them, Nancy does not let go of her. It is a comfort she cannot get anywhere else, they both know it, and Susan would never deny her.
“If you ever tell another soul…” Nancy mutters, striving for her usual low, rasping voice, instead of the soft, vulnerable thing in which she’d confessed her secrets. She feels Susan laugh, just a slight hitch of her chest.
“I never have before, why would I start now?” she asks.
But the question doesn’t need an answer; they both know why. The truths she has spilled would be a death sentence if whispered into the right ear, and a madam with less morals than Susan wouldn’t hesitate to extort a ‘fee’ for her silence.
Instead of answering - for Nancy wouldn’t be there if she didn’t trust her completely - Susan stoops to gather Nancy’s skirts from the floor and redresses her with the same care she used to disrobe her. Her coat follows next, and it’s as if she’s being slowly rebuilt, layer by layer, after everything came crashing down.
“Hair?” Susan asks, holding out the thin black ribbon.
Nancy takes it, tucks it into the pocket of her coat. “Nah,” she says, “it’s fine like this.”
“I would tie it for you.”
The smile Nancy offers is uncertain, watery. Now it’s over, Susan’s kindness is like sharp nails clawing at her skin. “I know you would,” she says, and doesn’t need to add that she doesn’t want to be touched any more, even by someone she trusts.
Instead, Susan picks up her hat and settles it on Nancy’s head at a jaunty angle, which makes Nancy exhale something almost like a laugh, before she reaches up to straighten it.
And finally, her birch. Its weight and sturdiness are more of a comfort to her than anything - anyone, even - could ever be. It is constant, predictable, obedient.
As Susan hands it to her, their fingertips brush, and Nancy instinctively pulls away as though she’s been burned. But it isn’t disgust she feels, it’s… it’s a sudden, aching desire to feel Susan’s lips on hers.
“Kiss me?” she asks, in a voice which she hopes doesn’t sound like she’ll fall apart if she’s denied.
In all the years they’ve been doing this, they’ve never kissed, never done anything beyond Susan touching her and keeping her secrets.
“Nancy…” Susan murmurs, and though her tone is doubtful, there’s a flicker of something very much like desire in her eyes. “Are you sure?”
Is she sure? Is there anything in her life she’s sure about, other than her love for Mags?
It is better not to speak at all than to lie, so she simply repeats, “kiss me?” And Susan does, hesitantly at first, but then more firmly, deeply.
Pleasure sparks through her, hot and shocking, and a part of her she’d thought dead longs to part her lips for Susan’s inquisitive tongue, but-
But.
It isn’t Mags.
She can accept Susan’s touch because she has nothing to compare it to, no way of knowing how it would feel if her beloved touched her. But a kiss, oh, she knows how that feels, and she keeps the memory clasped to her chest like a whore trying to hide a guinea from her bawd.
It feels wrong, kissing lips she hasn’t spent decades craving to taste again. She pulls away, and Susan’s look is knowing, if a little rueful.
“I’d take that as an insult if I knew you less well,” she says, with the edge of a smile.
Nancy almost manages a smile back. “Ain’t ever pretended I’m a good person.”
Susan briefly considers trying to contradict her, but decides against it. Instead she says, “there are many a tale of people brought to do terrible things because of love.”
It’s hardly the reassurance she was aiming for, but strangely, Nancy brightens a little at her words.
The silence stretches just a little too long to be comfortable, and Nancy knows it’s time to leave. She finds she has to look away from Susan’s beautiful, open face when she speaks. It’s always this part she finds most difficult. “Thank you,” she says quietly, “for this night and all the others.”
Susan smiles, reaches out as if to squeeze her shoulder, remembers, lets her hand fall away. “I know,” she says softly, “one day you’ll find a way to pay me back.”
They both know she’s not talking about money.
It’s a long walk back to Greek Street, but Nancy doesn’t mind. She needs the air. Sometimes it feels like she needs Mags to breathe, and sometimes it feels like their closeness is suffocating her.