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disgrace.
    Centuries had passed since she had been a refined country gentlewoman of Kelmscot, visiting with her neighbors, teaching Sunday school to the peasant children after services, attending the occasional Assembly ball. She was another sort of creature now, as lost and degraded as the prostitutes who came to this place seeking food and shelter from the cold, and mercury treatments for their horrid diseases.
    She had nowhere to turn. Going to see Papa was out of the question. She couldn’t even inform against her attacker because, as keeper of a major London prison, the warden would doubtless have friends inside the justice offices at
Bow Street
. There was nothing even to stop him from trying it again.
    On the third day one of the streetwalkers who had taken shelter there tried to talk to her while she lay curled up, staring at the wall. Bel didn’t recall much of the conversation until the brash, aging harlot had leaned toward her and offered in a shrewd tone: “If I ‘ad yer looks and yer fine lady airs, I’d take me to Harriette Wilson’s house and find me a rich lord protector, I would. Then I’d live in style!”
    At that, Bel had looked up with her changed gaze.
    She had heard that name before, spoken only in whispers. The divine Harriette Wilson was the greatest demirep in London .
    She and her sisters were courtesans, Cyprians par excellence. They held infamous parties at their house on Saturday nights after the opera, which were said to be second only to White’s Club in the hearts of London ’s richest and most powerful males. Rumor had it the Regent, the rebel poet Lord Byron, and even the great Wellington could be found in the company of these most sought-after diamonds of the Fashionable Impure.
    Dolph moved in such circles. Why, she could become the mistress of his worst enemy, she thought as a faint, cold smile lit her face. How humiliated he would be, as she was now, how powerless and enraged, if he saw that she would rather become another man’s harlot instead of his wife. For this, ultimately, was Dolph’s fault.
    Protector
. Delicious word.
    Someone to help her, take all her fears away. Someone who was kind and would not harm her. The idea, wild, destructive, burned like a fever in her brain. And why not? She was already irrevocably ruined. Not even Mick Braden, wherever he was, would marry her in her state of shame.
    The thought of her childhood sweetheart filled her with disgust. How he had failed her. She could admit it now— he was probably right here in London somewhere, dallying with a tavern wench, getting his leisurely fill of bachelorhood before sallying forth to Kelmscot, where he no doubt thought that she was still waiting patiently for him.
    What a fool she was. If not for her fanciful hopes in him, she might have become another man’s wife and none of this need have happened, she thought bitterly. Harriette Wilson could teach her how to fend for herself.
    Her simmering anger grew potent, acrid, dangerous.
    She had too much pride to throw herself on the notorious Cyprian’s charity, but she could approach her as one businesswoman to another. If she promised Harriette Wilson a percentage of the proceeds from her future protector, she mused, the woman would surely agree to teach her the courtesan’s arts. What else did she have to lose?
    Moments later Bel was gathering up her few possessions, her hands shaking slightly with the brashness of her decision. She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly but was too coldly, deeply enraged to care. She thanked the good people who had looked after her for the past three days and asked the streetwise jade where Harriette Wilson lived.
    With her cloak wrapped tightly around her, she set out to find her fate on a day of mottled cloud and sun. It would be a long walk from the City to the clean, luxurious environs of Marylebone, north of Mayfair , where they were building roads and lavish terraces in the new Regent’s Park. Anger was balled up