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months since they last met. A woman’s looks can crumble irreparably in that time, her skin eaten away by smallpox, her hair fallen out with rheumatic fever, her eyes blood-red, her lips healing crookedly from a knife wound. But neither Caroline nor Sugar is much the worse for wear. Life has been kind, or at least has been sparing with its cruelty.
    Shush’s lips, the older woman notes, are pale and dry and flaking, but weren’t they always? In Sugar’s poorer days, before the move to smarter premises, she and Caroline lived three doors apart in St Giles, and even then customers would occasionally knock on the wrong door and ask for ‘the girl with the dry lips’. Caroline knows, too, that underneath Sugar’s gloves there’s something wrong with her hands: nothing serious, but an unsightly skin ailment which, again, men have always seemed happy to forgive. Why men should tolerate such defects in Sugar was, and still is, mysterious to Caroline; indeed there’s not a single physical attribute of which she could honestly say that Sugar’s is better than hers.
    There must be more to her than meets the eye.
    ‘You’re lookin’ awful well,’ Caroline says.
    ‘I feel wretched,’ says Sugar quietly. ‘God damn God and all His horrible filthy Creation.’ Her face and voice are calm; she might be commenting on the weather. Her hazel eyes radiate – or appear to radiate – gentle good humour. ‘Bring on Armageddon, what do you think?’
    Caroline wonders if she’s missing a joke, the kind which Sugar shares with educated men now that she’s relocated to Silver Street. Sugar used to be good for a laugh, back in the Church Lane days. Her parlour piece – a great favourite with all the whores – still makes Caroline smile, remembering it. Not that she remembers it very well, mind; it involved not just play-acting but words, hundreds of ’em, and the words were the best part. Sugar pretending to seduce an invisible man, begging him in a voice almost hysterical with lust. ‘Oh, you must let me stroke your balls, they are so beautiful – like … like a dog turd. A dog turd nestling under your …’ Your what? Shush had such a good word for it. A word to make you wet yourself. But Caroline has forgotten the word, and now’s not the time to ask.
    The fact that Sugar should be so much more desired and sought-after a whore than herself has always puzzled her, but that’s the way it is and, judging by gossip in the trade, it’s more true lately than ever. Certainly there’s no doubt that the relocation of Mrs Castaway’s from St Giles to Silver Street – a hop, skip and jump from the widest, richest, grandest thoroughfare in London – was as much due to the demand for Sugar as to the madam’s ambition.
    Which raises the question: what’s Sugar doing here in a dingy Greek Street stationer’s, when she now lives so close to the splendid shops of the West End? Why risk dirtying the hems of that beautiful green dress on carriage-ways where no one’s in a hurry to sweep up the horse-shit? Indeed, why even bother to get out of bed (a bed Caroline imagines to be royally luxurious) before midday?
    But when Caroline asks, ‘What are you doin’ all the way down ’ere?’ Sugar just smiles, her whitish lips dry as moth’s wings.
    ‘I was … visiting a friend,’ she says. ‘All of last night.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ smirks Caroline.
    ‘No, really,’ says Sugar earnestly. ‘An old friend. A woman.’
    ‘So how is she, then?’ says Caroline, angling for a name.
    Sugar closes her eyes for a second. Her lashes, unusually for a red-haired person, are thick and lush.
    ‘She’s … gone away now. I was saying goodbye.’
    They make an odd pair, Caroline and Sugar, as they walk up the street together: the older woman small-boned, round-faced, swell-bosomed, so neat and shapely in comparison to her companion, a long, lithe creature wreathed in a peau-de-soie dress the colour of moss. Although she has no bosom to speak