Mabel had been known as La Tigresse at the height of her courtesan career. Later, she had become Madame Georgette, the presiding madam of the select Golden Lily brothel. But these days, almost ten years after her retirement, she preferred to use her rather more prosaic given name, and had adopted the persona of a respectable elderly widow.
Theirs was a strange relationship. Mabel had, after all, been the madam of the brothel where Kit had worked. She had procured patrons for his services. She had also left him to the not-so-tender mercies of Lionel Skelton, just because she had lost her temper with him for refusing to follow her advice about Henry Asquith. She had been hard-nosed and bad-tempered sometimes. But on other occasions, she had protected him fiercely, and she had nursed him when Skelton had beaten him, and looked after his money when he was being foolish. And when he wanted to get out of the game and build something of his own, she had given him endless help and advice.
She had never once in her life been soft with him, but she had looked after him, in her way.
She wouldn’t have done those things for just anyone. She did them for Kit because of Minnie.
Minnie, Kit’s mother, had died when he was not quite fifteen. She’d been a whore at the Golden Lily too. And she’d been something else to Mabel—even now, he wasn’t sure precisely what.
The illness that had killed Minnie had come on quick and ended painfully. Mabel had never shown her soft side with Minnie before then—not that Kit had ever seen, at least—but that changed when Minnie was dying. In those last few weeks, Mabel had often sat with her through the night, dabbing her fevered face and neck with cool cloths, murmuring soft, soothing words, and spooning powerful medicine from a small blue bottle between her lips when the pain got too much.
Kit, young and terrified, had been grateful for her presence. She wasn’t always there—sometimes Kit sat with his mother on his own—but she was there as often as she could be, and she was there when Kit had to eat or sleep.
She was there at the very end, on the night Minnie died.
It was late when it happened, in the early hours of the morning. Kit had been so weary, but he’d been afraid to leave his mother, feeling sure that if he did, she’d be gone when he woke.
He’d been curled up in an armchair, draped in a blanket and half asleep, while Mabel watched over his mother. There’d been almost no light in the chamber at all—only the dimmest glow from the fireplace—when his mother’s breathing had begun to rattle strangely. The sound had roused him.
At the very moment he'd opened his eyes, his mother had rasped, “You got to look out for Kit, Mabel. Promise me.”
“Course I will, Min,” Mabel had said roughly. Her voice hadn’t been like it normally was, all clipped and tight. Instead, it had been hoarse with emotion, and common as his mother’s.
She’d been leaning over Minnie. To this day, that picture was burned in Kit’s memory. It had been too dark to see her expression, but the defeated rounding of her shoulders in shadow had told its own story, as had her rumpled dress and disordered hair. He remembered her profile, hovering over Minnie’s slight, still form.
That stillness.
Kit had understood—profoundly understood—in that moment that his mother’s spirit had gone. He hadn’t seen any evidence of it leaving her body—he hadn’t been able to see anything of his mother at all in the shadowy room beyond the outline of her slender form. But he had known, somehow, the instant she was gone.
Mabel had made a sound, then, one that Kit had never heard before or since. It was a cracking, terrible sound that he felt sure was what a heart breaking sounded like.
She’d bent and kissed Minnie. Kissed her on the mouth. Kissed her with a passionate grief that Kit had never witnessed before. It had been so raw, so intimate, he’d had to look away.
Mabel had never explained to Kit why her grief had been so terrible or what Minnie had meant to her. Prior to his mother’s last days, he had never seen them share any particular physical affection. Even then, other than that final kiss, he had only ever seen them hold hands occasionally, as friends sometimes did.