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It hadn’t been difficult getting the job. Madge needed a girl, needed one quite desperately with the weekend coming up and the rush sure to be literally backbreaking for Dee and Terri and Joan. Madge’s experienced eye quickly knew what Honour Mercy Bane would look like in a dress and what she would look like out of a dress.

Madge had been a little put off at the girl’s lack of experience. The madam preferred to hire a girl who had worked at a house before, or at least one who had done a little hustling. This was not the case with Honour Mercy Bane. She had had one and only one lover and that was hardly enough.

But she was beautiful, which made a big difference.

“Crap,” Madge had said. “Fust thing we’ll have to do is change your name. Can’t have a whore named Honour and Mercy. It’d keep the customers from feeling right about the whole thing. Hell, you look too much like a virgin as it is. How do you go for the name Honey?”

Honey was all right with Honour Mercy Bane.

“Straight’s ten bucks, half-and-half is fifteen, French is twenty,” Madge informed her. “Anything special, you make your own price. You want to cut your rate it’s your business, but you pay me half of the asking price, no matter how much you get. And don’t think you can hold out on me. You might try to give me ten bucks for a French where you collected twenty and tell me you turned a straight trick. You’ll get away with it for a while, but the minute I catch on you go out on your fanny.”

“I wouldn’t cheat you,” said Honour Mercy Bane. And she was telling the truth because she never cheated anyone.

“You’ll live in the Casterbridge Hotel down the street,” Madge told her. “Gil Gluck runs it and he gives all my girls a straight deal. Ten bucks a week for a private room with private bath and it’s a good clean place.”

Honour nodded in agreement. She really didn’t care where she lived.

“I’m trying you on the night shift this week,” Madge went on. “It’s probably a mistake, what with you so inexperienced, but I rotate the girls every two weeks and I don’t want to mess up the schedule.” Honour nodded again.

“Dee’s just finishing up,” Madge said. “She’s been up there with a little pipsqueak of a guy for better’n fifteen minutes. Any second now she’ll be down and she’ll show you what’s what and get some clothes for you and all.”

A minute or two later a small man with a bald spot on the top of his head appeared with a huge smile on his face. In another minute a tall girl appeared with a smile on her own face and Madge introduced them. And up the stairs they went.

Dee taught her the ropes. The lesson was a time-consuming one but Dee didn’t seem to mind. She taught Honour how to dress, how to undress, how to make up her face, how much perfume to use and where to put it, what to say to the customers, what they would want her to do and how to do it, how to make them want special things and how to do the special things, how to excite an impotent man, and how to make a man get through fast.

Important things.

How to clean herself so that she wouldn’t get sick or pregnant. How to freshen up after finishing with one customer so that she would be ready for the next in a matter of seconds. How to be bright and friendly, how to look sexually desirable always.

Honour listened carefully. The tall brunette never had to repeat a word, and Honour remembered every word she was told. She concentrated and learned very quickly.

When the house closed, she went with Dee to the Casterbridge Hotel, a block away on Schwerner Boulevard and Fourth Street. There she was assigned a room on the second floor with a private bathroom and a comfortable bed and a nice rug on the floor. She took a restful bath, unpacked her ratty cardboard suitcase, and went to bed. She fell asleep at once.

The next morning she was awake by ten. It was Friday and she would start work that evening at eight o’clock. She had breakfast at a little restaurant on Fourth Street — Madge had advanced her fifty dollars against future earnings — and then went shopping. She followed Dee’s elaborate instructions and bought what clothing she would need for the job, plus what cosmetics and supplies would be necessary.

Now it was 8:30. Dee and Terri and Joan were all upstairs with their first customers of the evening; soon it would be her turn. She sat alone in a lounge chair in the parlor, waiting for her first customer, her hands in her lap and her whole body in perfect repose.

Perhaps you are wondering what she was doing there, getting ready to play the whore in a room above the Third Street Grill in Newport. This was precisely what she was thinking about just then...

Fifteen hundred people live in Coldwater, Kentucky. Abraham and Prudence Bane lived in a small white frame house on the outskirts of town. Abraham Bane was a foreman at a distillery which was the town’s sole industry; Prudence Bane was a housewife. They were good God-fearing Baptists, both of them, and their household was run according to the tenets of a frightening brand of Puritanism that started with Wycliffe and ran downhill via Cromwell and Cotton Mather until it lay half-buried in the Kentucky foothills.

Abraham and Prudence Bane lived by the Bible. Although Abraham Bane worked at the Kelmscott Sour Mash Distillery and served that distillery with a loyalty second only to the loyalty he bore to his strange and fearful God, not a drop of bourbon had ever passed his lips. He and his wife lived the clean life, the good life, and while their idea of an exciting evening was a hot game of checkers in front of the fireplace, the promise of heaven more than compensated for the relative boredom of their existence.

With this in mind, you may readily understand their violent reaction when they discovered their daughter, Honour Mercy Bane, with a man.

They were appalled.

The man who occupied the place of honor with Honour was a schoolteacher in the Coldwater high school, a thin and nervous man named Lester Balcolm. He had made love to Honour Mercy Bane many times before the two of them had been discovered in the act. He had told her that he loved her, and while she did not believe him, she did know several things. She knew the way her mouth tingled when he kissed her, the way her tongue felt deliciously alive when his tongue touched it and caressed it. And, finally, she knew what it was like to accept his manliness, to move with him and move with her own passion until it happened for both of them and they were bathed in the sweet sweat of love.

But they were discovered. Lester Balcolm left Coldwater with the marks of Abraham Bane’s belt on his thin back and the warning that he would be killed if he was ever found in Coldwater again. Honour Mercy Bane left Coldwater with a ratty cardboard suitcase in her hand and the advice never to return ringing in her ears.

“You’re no good,” they told her. “You’re not our daughter any longer.

And so she left.

“Go to Newport,” they told her. “Be a bad woman there. You’re not our daughter.” And so she did.

The man was huge. He had a shock of red hair that stood straight up on his cannonball head and eyes that looked like those of a recently slaughtered hog. He grinned at Honour Mercy Bane and she led him up the winding flight of stairs to the room that was hers for the evening.

They entered the room and she closed the door. She smiled as she had been taught to smile and the man grinned as he had grinned before.

“My name’s Honey,” she said.

“Good,” the man said.

Her smile widened. “How do you want it?”

“What’s on the menu?”

She told him the three standard varieties and the price of each. Then he smiled, reached out a hand and gave her breast a pinch. He didn’t hurt her but she realized that with his muscles he could probably rip her breast right off her.