The Spoils of Sin

By Rebecca Tope

Fanny Collins has arrived in Oregon after traversing the Oregon Trail in 1846 with her family. It is now 1848 and the Gold Rush is about to begin. Fanny has found a friend and partner in Carola Beaumont and together the two young girls set up in a 'boudoir' in Chemeketa (later named Salem) to provide sexual services for single men. There is a disarming innocence to their intentions, which is not entirely destroyed after a year and a half in the job. The great majority of their clients are pleasant and appreciative. There are, however, exceptions. As the Gold Rush escalates, fortunes change for almost everyone. With births and deaths as well as countless sexual encounters, this story embraces the whole of pioneer life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Praxis Books
• Release date: Jul 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780955851742

Rebecca Tope

Rebecca Tope is the author of three bestselling crime series, set in the Cotswolds, Lake District and West Country. She lives on a smallholding in rural Herefordshire, where she enjoys the silence and plants a lot of trees.

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works.

The Spoils of Sin

Chapter One

‘Ready at last!’ sighed Fanny. ‘Tell me I’m not dreaming.’

She was too tired to enjoy the moment properly. After nearly two years in preparation, with many bitter setbacks and losses of confidence, the result was a long way from her original vision, but it would serve well enough as a start. With pitifully few sources of advice and a woeful ignorance, she and Carola had been forced to invent every detail for themselves. Now she was about to throw open the doors of ‘The Misses Francesca and Carlotta’s Boudoir’ for the first time. The building still smelled of the fresh timber used for its construction, the street outside a mess of hoofprints and slops. She had to pick her way with lifted skirt to a dry spot where she could stand back and admire her handiwork. At her side was Carola, without whom she would have failed at the outset.

‘Never known a dream the likes of this,’ said the older girl with a laugh. ‘Here’s where the real work starts.’

‘And the real money-making,’ Fanny reminded her.

The idea had taken root far back at Fort John on the Laramie River in the early summer of 1846, when Fanny had been sixteen years old. She had taken note of the numerous single men travelling westwards on horseback; lonely men with little hope of finding a wife, or even a brief flirtation with a winsome young woman. With the active assistance of young Abel Tennant, in the same party on their wagon train, she had learned the basic sources of a man’s pleasure and the ease with which a healthy woman could provide them.

It had taken a while longer than anticipated to put these learnings into profitable practice. Abel had settled to the north of the Willamette Valley and she had not seen him again. As the hundreds of new settlers established themselves as growers, stockbreeders, fence-makers and traders, social conventions quickly followed. Young men in the neighbourhood were prohibited close intimacies with marriageable girls unless there was a clear and early intention to enter matrimony with them – and Fanny had no designs in that direction. But there were always opportunities for practice, throughout the year of 1847, albeit in small discreet ways.

The enormity of the permanent project she was now embarking on with Carola was still terrifying, giving her many sleepless nights and alarming dreams. Money had been needed for the building and its lush accoutrements, and she had no illusions that any bank would provide her with a loan. The first year after her family’s arrival in Oregon had revealed the existence of an entire class of opportunists and shysters who were ready and eager to acquire money in a multitude of different swindles. Wagon trains had continued to flow into the region, bringing thousands of families all claiming their acres from the government. Small trading posts developed into towns almost overnight. Strung along the rivers, where bigger and better vessels could bring lumber, clothes, implements and all the other necessities of civilisation, the new towns competed for supremacy. Oregon City was twenty years old, and the default choice of residence for those preferring to live close to others, rather than out in the virgin wilderness, where great forests and capricious rivers deterred many a nervous settler. Fanny had disliked the city from the first, the way it was split into two by the chasm created by the great river an irritation she feared she would never overcome. It was noisy and competitive, and – the final straw – she glimpsed a pair of young women sashaying down the street who were sure to be rivals for customers at some future point. The fact of so many families was also a deterrent. Girls as young as twelve were taken as wives, along with young Indian squaws, leaving fewer single men in need of Fanny and Carola’s services. Added to these considerations was a need to put distance between themselves and their families. The fiction was maintained that they were establishing an emporium for the sale of garments and other necessities for women. The hope was that Fanny’s parents and Carola’s brothers would be too much engaged with their own lives and work to ever bother making a visit upriver to the sawmills and old missions of Chemeketa. Mission Mills was the fitting name of the industrial area close by, although the Methodists had mostly abandoned their proselytising. The sawmills remained, employing innumerable men, many of them in want of a wife.

To the north of Oregon City was Portland, a place of self-confidence and ambition. To the south was the Willamette valley, with the Mission Mills and Chemeketa, on tamer land. The presence of missions, schools and orderly streets appealed particularly to those who had grown up in New England. Fanny and Carola had taken themselves there, following the Willamette river on a two-day journey of exploration. The settlement was clearly in a state of flux, with even its name a matter for debate. On that first visit, the girls heard it called ‘The Mill’ more often than the older Indian name.

‘A mite too respectable for our purposes,’ Carola demurred.

But Fanny could see through the veneer to the fact of the countless single men working in the giant sawmills or on construction of new homes and businesses, or plying their barges up and down the waterways. They came in great numbers, many of them fleeing unsatisfactory lives back east, expecting to find space and work and wealth in this new land. Everything in this little town appealed to her. The very trees were better behaved and more firmly rooted than those in Oregon City. The presence of churchmen, alarming to Carola, gave Fanny a sense of security. ‘We shall make ourselves respectable too,’ she told her friend. ‘When outdoors, we must dress plainly, and hold our heads high.’ An instinct that she had difficulty putting into words was telling her how to proceed. These men spent their days in hard work, their hands never touching softness, their skin never soothed by a warm caress. They lacked the finer elements of life, and would become coarse and corrupt without female influence. Fanny saw this and gave herself the task of softening, civilising, flattering and satisfying the potential brutes. She had a faint suspicion that the more insightful of the churchmen might understand this and accept the presence of two enterprising young females without too much protestation.

The building erected by Fanny and Carola was smaller than originally hoped. The ground floor comprised a single large room, with couches, carpets, curtains and cushions in the softest materials available. Velvet, brocade, fur - all designed with warmth and luxury in mind. It boasted a piano and a stove where coffee would be perpetually brewing. A large cupboard contained bottles of whisky and cigars, to be dispensed sparingly and at a substantial profit. The world outside was made invisible and inaudible by the thick window coverings and the sturdy door. Passers-by could not peer in at the scandalous goings-on. If they wanted to know what took place in a boudoir, they would have to walk in and see for themselves.

The upper floor was divided into three smaller rooms, two of them with a bed festooned with swags of satin and silk, covered with fine cotton sheets scented with musk and rose water. Here Carola had insisted on the finest quality, confounding many of Fanny’s early assumptions about her friend. At first, she had seemed only concerned with business and profit. Now, she had thrown herself into the broader conception that had been Fanny’s from the outset. The younger girl had lost her virginity in the open air, with prickly leaves and twigs beneath her and birds calling overhead. She had learned what men enjoyed, and how simple a matter it was to satisfy them. But she had quickly understood that men could use Indian squaws for relief of that sort, and indeed many of them did exactly that. But for deeper, warmer reminders of their early lives in the east, with familiar scents and language, they would have to seek out the boudoir. Carola developed ideas about creating a small lush haven for them amidst the sweat and stink of their daily lives that surprised Fanny at first, until she grasped how perfectly it fitted with her own plans. ‘Of course,’ she had quickly agreed. ‘I had thought no further than the touch of warm skin and perhaps a little of the music we played at home.’

‘They are not all from your cool New England states,’ Carola reminded her. ‘A good many come from the south.’ Carola was from South Carolina herself (which explained her name, Fanny had belatedly realised). ‘With all the trappings brought from Europe in their great houses. Their mothers wear perfume and follow the fashions. Out here it’s bare and charmless, with scarcely any female touches. We’ll draw them like iron filings to a magnet. Just the scent of the place will have them buzzing around.’

‘And where will they find the money to pay us?’ Fanny worried.

‘They’ll find it,’ said Carola with confidence. ‘What else do they have to spend it on?’

There were times when Fanny felt overtaken by the older girl’s brisk assurance. She had been so certain herself, back on the trail, that she had found a vocation that fitted her talents and would bring in her own personal income. But without a partner, she quickly lost most of her conviction that it was anything more than a dream. Her parents would never allow it. She would never manage to raise the finances needed. The homestead her family had been allocated demanded immense labours for clearance, fencing, planting before any livestock could be acquired. Her capable sister Charity had married in a tremendous rush and gone off to make her way on her own acres, with two, and then quickly three, small children. Charity knew what Fanny planned, and deplored it. Until they were separated, Fanny has not grasped just how close they had been, and just what a gaping wound was left by her sister’s disappearance.

Carola was like an angel sent by God. She had arrived on the first wagon train of 1847, travelling with her three brothers and their wives – the burdensome young sister whose only purpose in life was to find a husband and cease to depend on others. Fanny literally bumped into her outside the grocery store in Oregon City that had been erected some years previously and enjoyed business on a level that often seemed insane. Lines of people filled the street, their carts crammed into every corner, awaiting the essential sacks of seed, meal, rice, salt, sugar and anything else impossible or uneconomic to grow on the homesteads.

Fanny had been idly looking up at the sky, thinking about nothing in particular, when a warm body fell against her. ‘Mercy!’ gasped the stranger with a laugh. ‘Tripping over my bootlaces again.’

The boots looked old; the leather thin and the laces frayed. Fanny raised an eyebrow and smiled.

‘Carola Beaumont at your service,’ said the girl. ‘Come all the way from the Carolinas, to this new land of opportunity.’ She looked round with much the same expression as Fanny had given the boots. ‘And having some difficulty in persuading myself of its virtues,’ she added.

‘Fanny Collins, out of Providence last year.’

‘Providence, Rhode Island? A Northerner, Lord save us. Yet you appear to lack the puritan qualities one associates with your countrymen.’

Fanny had been wearing a good cotton skirt, with swirls of red and yellow, her bonnet adorned with feathers. Miss Beaumont sported crumpled silk in a peacock blue. Fanny recognised the effects of a lengthy journey on an overfull travelling trunk in the middle of a wagon. The creases would take months to completely disappear.

‘While you carry all the marks of a flirtatious Southern belle,’ she replied. Her own boldness pleased her; it had been in abeyance for far too long.

Afterwards, Fanny could not have said just how the two girls moved so quickly to a mutual understanding. Their talk was circumspect, but its meaning in no doubt. There were glances at solitary men riding down the street, a wiggle of Miss Beaumont’s hips and a shrill laugh from Fanny. They made arrangement to meet again, and within the month had formed their outrageous plan.

‘And where will we find the money?’ they asked each other, neither one in possession of more than a few dollars of her own. Fanny’s plan was to set up in a simple rough shack somewhere and work upwards to something more grand.

‘Oh, no,’ said Carola, with a firm shake of her head. ‘That way lies disease and disgrace. From there, we would find no way to go but down. Trust me, Fan. This is something I know. Appearance is all, and until we can provide cleanliness and quality, we must bide our time.’

So money had been made in the only way they knew. With infinite prudence and fierce insistence on secrecy, they passed the next half-year in fresh-built barns and lofts, in stables and woodsheds, giving carefully-rationed favours to the bachelor brothers and uncles on the homesteads in exchange for ready cash. Every man believed he was the only recipient of this service, so grateful that he settled for half measures, the touch of a hand or a mouth, the willing acceptance of his shameful functions. The girls mendaciously asserted their virginity, emphasising its value and guarding it jealously. A dollar a time, they charged, and by the spring of 1848 they had accumulated a hundred bucks apiece – more than enough for timber, furniture and one or two handsome rugs.

Passers-by eyed the new building curiously, unsure as to its purpose. The builders – quite reasonably - themselves had wanted to know exactly which room was intended for what purpose. If it were to be a store of some kind, then a large front window would be required to display wares. The girls discussed at length the tricky question of how to declare themselves in the face of these questions, whilst maintaining maximum respectability amongst the decent citizens. Not every store boasted a large display window. ‘It would reduce the space necessary for storage,’ said Carola to one of the builders, when she rejected the proposal. She and Fanny had concluded that they had no alternative to obfuscation, at this early stage. If the men knew the truth, they might refuse the business altogether. Only when it was too late did it become clear to everyone in town just what this building was.

The position of the new ‘boudoir’ was neither central nor tucked away, but modestly sited at the end of the main street, adjacent to a barber shop which had been erected only weeks before their own establishment. ‘He will bring us custom,’ said Carola, ‘if we treat him well.’

Fanny savoured the notion of freshly-shaven men, astringent from the lotion applied to their faces and free from infestations that went with long dirty hair. Some kinds of dirt were acceptable, but others were not. ‘We really need a bathtub,’ she said wistfully. ‘Where we could make them wash before they soil our sheets.’

Carola wrinkled her nose. ‘We’ll find a way,’ she promised. Piped water had been a given, back in the east. Here in Oregon, the niceties of indoor plumbing were still a long way in the future. But a steady stream of luxury goods was arriving by ship from China and Japan, delivered to the many small towns springing up all over Oregon. Women were rapidly returning to the fashions and fripperies they had known back east, admittedly in a reduced form. Even in San Francisco, the famous town many miles to the south, civilised living had yet to be properly established.

Questions and problems had multiplied through the months of preparation. What would they tell their families? Carola’s brothers might be glad to see the back of her, but Fanny was needed to work the land and tend the stock. Her parents and brother would resist any attempt to depart for a new life, unless it be with the official sanction of a wedding ring. How would they travel, either back to see their folks or to make purchases in other towns? They had no money for a horse and buggy.

Solutions came sporadically. The organisation of the living space fell easily into place. The third upstairs room was not yet needed for business since there were only two of them. In time, another girl might be found to take a share of the work and use that room, but meanwhile, it would serve as a joint bedroom for Fanny and Carola. They put a large bed in there, and admitted to liking the idea of dozing through the small hours and into the mornings, after the last customer had gone. ‘We might not rise before noon,’ said Carola. ‘Imagine that!’

Fanny rubbed her head, as if trying to stimulate her imagination. ‘Even in Providence, we never did that,’ she said.

‘Puritans! I knew it. Where I come from, the girls spend half their lives in bed.’

It would be a place of retreat and privacy with a stout lock on the door. ‘I fancy we shall need it,’ said Carola.

The precise details of the southern girl’s experience were slow to emerge. Fanny asked no direct questions, but it was clear there was a fund of knowledge to be drawn on, which Fanny herself lacked. Never once did either of them utter the word ‘prostitute’ or ‘brothel’ aloud. Eventually, part of the truth was disclosed.

‘I have an older cousin, by the name of Lilia Lamartine, in Charleston,’ Carola began one evening. They had walked together to a shady patch of old trees, spared the axes and bandsaws by some miracle. Birds murmured in the branches, and the air smelled of dust and sap and the faintest far tang of the ocean to the west. ‘She invited me for a visit when I was seventeen, and revealed to me how she spent her time. I discovered that she was part of a group of ladies devoted to the pleasuring of men. When I expressed alarm, she assured me it was the finest possible life, given certain provisos. I asked some blunt questions – for which we should be thankful now. I did not understand at first that she was inviting me to join them, and when I did, I ran home to my mother in horror.’

Fanny blinked in surprise. ‘Indeed?’ she said. ‘How greatly you must have changed since then.’

‘That was four long years since. Not a year later, my father urged me to marry a friend of his, widowed with five beastly children. The man pawed me when we were alone, his hands all over my chest and then my behind. He was a rich plantation owner, with fifty slaves or more. He had a squint and a dirty red beard.’

Fanny thought of her sister, who had married a man with two children and pox marks on his cheeks. Charity, to all appearances, was happy with her choice. ‘You refused?’ she suggested.

‘I most certainly did. But it led me to thinking. I began to understand what men want most in life. I played a few games, teasing and leading them into that madness I’m sure you know for yourself. I found myself in a position of unexpected power, simply by letting them come close for a few seconds. I put it together with the things Cousin Lilia had told me, and arrived at some solid conclusions.’

Fanny gave a look of encouragement, well aware that there was a good deal more to the story. After all, Carola was no more a virgin than she was herself.

‘There was a young man betrothed to a French girl who was away in Europe for a year. He was mad with frustration. His breeches gave him away, every time I saw him. You could say I took pity on him. The truth is, he taught me more about my own body than I could ever have dreamed, or discovered for myself.’

‘My own experience was very much the same,’ confided Fanny. ‘It was sheer good fortune that I found Abel Tennant. He was singularly accommodating.’ She recalled a time when she might have giggled at her own words, but they no longer elicited such a reaction. Giggles were strictly reserved for flirting and fluttering in the presence of men. With another girl, such self-consciousness and embarrassment need not be simulated. Each one knew the extent of the other’s knowledge and purpose, and already – before the true business had even begun – they felt the need to conserve an increasingly elusive effervescence.

There was another source of information that had fallen into Carola’s hands. This was a small book entitled The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk which gave a chilling account of the life young nuns were forced to lead in a Canadian nunnery. She had read it many times, scandalised by the ‘disclosures’ it contained. Priests would enter the building through a trapdoor and await the nun of their choice in her bed. Or they would commit all manner of sins with a nun during her confession. Many children had been conceived as a result, only to be strangled at birth and thrown into a lime pit in the cellar. Nuns who earned the disfavour of the priests and the mother superior were murdered. Obedience was enforced by various brutal tortures. Carola, a Catholic just as Fanny was, found the book both compelling and appalling. Neither doubted its truth for a moment. As Carola said, ‘How could such descriptions ever be invented?’

Fanny sat down one afternoon to peruse the book in its entirety. She emerged with a mass of complex feelings, the chief one being that she and her friend would be infinitely better off than these nuns. They would not be forced by any man; there would be no secrecy or shame; no disease if it could be avoided – and emphatically no babies.

Much of the girls’ enthusiasm for the project had been channelled into soft furnishings and discreet advertisement. Practical problems waylaid them almost every day. ‘Ought we to offer cigars?’ Carola wondered. ‘In the Carolinas, all the men smoked cigars as a way of relaxation.’

‘The smoke would taint the drapes,’ Fanny objected. ‘They would want more frequent laundering.’

‘And it would stain the ceiling,’ Carola agreed. ‘But we must keep a few for those who insist. Cigar smoke has a fragrance of its own which many associate with happy times.’ They had puzzled over how best to adorn the walls of their main room, finally selecting from shade cards in the newly-established emporium a rose-pink paint that spoke of feminine sensuality. Fanny had found a lad to apply it, laughing at the smudges on his skin at the end of the work.

They had taken weeks to arrive at the word Boudoir to describe their establishment. In Charleston the usual word had been Parlour, which Fanny quite liked. Carola had described the way it worked, with a senior lady in charge of the working girls, alternately protecting and controlling them. Her cousin had disclosed an ambition to become just such a madam in a few years’ time. ‘She was aiming to keep half of all the money they earn,’ she told Fanny, with a shake of her head.

‘No madam for us,’ said Fanny firmly. ‘We’re keeping all we earn.’

‘And we are not calling it a parlour,’ Carola insisted. ‘It will be familiar to everyone from the east, who will bring some undesirable expectations as a result. A boudoir will appeal to their curiosity. I wager very few will understand its meaning.’

‘I scarcely understand it myself,’ admitted Fanny. ‘And yet you trust they will find us?’

‘They will,’ said Carola with confidence.

There were difficulties inherent in the absence of a madam. Who would watch over the men waiting downstairs while the girls worked upstairs? Who would prevent them from stealing or damaging the items in the main room? Who would close the door when the line of waiting men grew too long? ‘In the stories of harems, there is always a eunuch for such tasks,’ noted Carola. ‘Perhaps we should make enquiries.’

For the hundredth time, Fanny felt disadvantaged, not just by her friend’s knowledge, but by her boldness and wit. On the trail westwards, she had felt herself to be the boldest woman alive, with her discovery of bodily pleasures and her willingness to explore it. But here was someone who outdid her on all fronts, and occasionally she resented it. Even more unsettling was the question of which of the two was the more attractive. Carola was of middle height, with a refined jawline that Fanny suspected was quite beautiful from certain angles. It gave a squareness to her face that hinted at a stubborn nature,